XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation

by Brad Magnarella

  “You mean Tully? And he sold it to her?”

  Scott had tried for years to get him to part with the issue but only ever received a condescending smirk in response, no matter what he offered.

  “Margaret can be very persuasive.”

  Scott kept staring at the cover. Uncanny X-Men #137. “I-I don’t know what to say. I didn’t get you anything.”

  “Do you remember what you said when you found me?”

  Stay awake. Help’s coming.

  “I think so.”

  “Seeing you there, Scott. Hearing your voice. Knowing that you were all right.” Her eyes began to glimmer, even as she smiled. “That told me that I was going to be all right, too. That was your gift to me.”

  She rose onto her tiptoes and kissed his cheek.

  “Merry Christmas, Scott.”

  “Merry Christmas, Janis,” he whispered. For the first time, he noticed the fragrant evergreen trim around the Graystone’s front door, the red and white stockings hanging beneath the door’s small windows.

  “So…” Her hand lingered around his another moment. “See you in 1985?”

  He tried to think of something Scott Summers would say to Jean Grey, something special, something that would capture the dizzying enormity of what he felt for her in that moment.

  But all he could come up with was, “You bet.”

  When Scott reached the street, he flipped up his jacket collar. He’d have Jesse to face soon, a switchboard to figure out, and Mr. Leonard’s cryptic message to decipher — if it could even be believed. But for the moment, his thoughts were on one person.

  Halfway up the hill, he turned, surprised to find Janis still on the front porch, still looking after him. Scott raised the comic book, smiled as she waved back, and hunched his shoulders against the December wind, the touch of her lips still warm against his skin.

  End of Book 1

  XGeneration 2

  The Watchers

  Brad Magnarella

  © 2014

  Prologue

  “I’ve read your Orange Report, agent.”

  “Yes, sir. We had to shift a few pieces.”

  “And the subjects?”

  “The sisters are in Colorado, and the rest, we’ve been assured, will remain in town for the holidays.”

  “I don’t want a travel itinerary. Their potential. What are we seeing?”

  “All continue to demonstrate promise, sir. Three of them have developed abilities that we would deem tappable at this point. The oldest ones, as you might have guessed. We’re still monitoring the others.”

  “The Reds have a team ready.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “They almost took out our early detection system over the Arctic last month.”

  “Yes, I read that intelligence.”

  “Your agents have all been re-vetted, the report says.”

  “Yes, sir. Delta-one was… an unfortunate case. An isolated case.”

  “But you had your suspicions.”

  “We noticed some patterns. We were watching him.”

  “Not closely enough.”

  “No, sir. I suppose not. But there was no outside contact.”

  “Why did he want the girl terminated?”

  “We’re still trying to determine that, sir. Nothing in his most recent psych profile suggested delusional thoughts, schizophrenia — nothing of that nature. His partner claimed it happened suddenly, and, as his junior, she followed his orders. She’s the one we cleaned and had incarcerated. We’ll remove her in a few months when things quiet down.”

  “But this Delta-one is still unaccounted for?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Any leads?”

  “No, sir. But rest assured, we’re—”

  “What’s to stop him from returning?”

  “The second he emerges, we’ll find him.”

  “Have you considered that he simply went soft, that he lost his stomach, not his mind?”

  “Yes, sir, we’ve considered that.”

  “Which would make him immensely more dangerous to us.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “You say no outside contact was made, but we still don’t know what he told the girl — or anyone else inside, for that matter. Find out. The name of the game remains discretion, but I’m authorizing you to use all levels of force to fix this, even lethal. No preauthorization required.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A breach could quickly grow beyond our control, and our backs are to the goddamned wall as it is.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “The subject line on your next Orange Report will read ‘Contained.’ Are we clear, Agent Steel?”

  “You can count on it.”

  1

  Gainesville, Florida

  Monday, New Year’s Eve, 1984

  11:07 p.m.

  Tyler Bast watched the burgundy pool table through curls of smoke drifting up from a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, a pool cue over his shoulder. A country song stomped and twanged from the jukebox, the lyrics lost within the riot of drunken shouting and clacking balls. He had dibs on the next game, which wasn’t long in coming. Jesse Hoag had fudged what should have been an easy shot, and now Creed’s eyes glinted above his John Lennon shades as he stooped over his cue. Tyler knew that look well.

  “Two ball, side pocket,” Creed said.

  Clack. Dunk.

  “One in the corner.”

  Clack. Dunk.

  Catlike, Creed eased around the table, his bowler hat cocked back, his dark-blond hair sweeping along the scratched cushion. The tops of his eyes flicked between two of his solid balls. “Let’s make it interesting. Four, this corner — seven ball, that one.”

  Clack! Dunk. Dunk.

  “And black beauty in the side for the…”

  Clack. Dunk.

  “…easy win.”

  Creed stepped back and admired the table. Tyler followed his gaze to where all but two of Jesse’s stripes still sat. Jesse could break like nobody’s business, and sometimes he’d sink five or six balls at a smash. But when it came to judging space and distances, to finessing shots home, that was Creed’s game.

  “How you like them apples?” Creed grinned at Jesse.

  Jesse had been watching glumly, the end of his pool cue propped on his giant army boot. His hand disappeared into his green fatigue jacket and returned with a can of Natural Light. He peeled the tab away and finished the beer off in a single tilt. For the first time, Tyler caught a blue-black smudge along Jesse’s jawline. Courtesy of his dad, probably. Little wonder Jesse was acting so sullen.

  “Should of sank my shot,” he mumbled, balling up the empty can as if it was a Dixie Cup.

  “Yeah, well, tough tits.” Creed turned to Tyler. “You ready for some pain, embryo?”

  Tyler stepped forward and racked the balls. Above the smoke-clogged bar at the opposite end of the pool hall, the hands of the Budweiser clock crept toward 11:15.

  Just got to keep them here another hour. Long enough to forget about the business with Scott.

  Creed was probably a safe bet. He had his hot streak going, not to mention a steady forty-proof soak going on upstairs. Creed took another pull from a flask hidden inside his sleeveless jean jacket and began chalking his cue. Jesse was another matter. There was no telling what was going on behind those eyes — eyes that looked to Tyler like the quarry ponds they used to swim in off Tower Road, opaque and gray. And that’s what made Jesse dangerous. You never knew what he was thinking until it was too late. At least with his own brother, there was some warning.

  Creed placed the cue ball off center. “Watch and learn.”

  The balls scattered and two stripes sank. Creed’s eyes began to glint in their cunning way again.

  Tyler took a long drag off his cigarette, not caring. He had no plans to best Creed tonight, no plans to break his ten-win streak, which would only get his brother thinking about breaking other things — like
arms. Tyler still remembered the last time, two summers before. The dry-stick sound of Scott Spruel’s bone snapping inside Jesse’s grip. The way Scott had crumpled to the ground, his face white as ash.

  “Whatsa matter?” Creed said from across the table. “Don’t want to watch your scrawny ass get run?”

  Tyler opened his eyes, not realizing he’d closed them. Creed, who was stooped over his pool cue, grinned up at him. The table was naked of stripes.

  “Side pocket,” Creed called.

  He shot his stick forward at the same moment someone backed into him. The eight ball rattled above the pocket and rolled out. Creed straightened. The offender, a baby-faced redhead, continued to laugh and shout toward his own table, oblivious to what he’d done.

  Tyler groaned. Couldn’t they go one night without Creed blowing his top? Tyler had already sized up the group, with their shiny jackets, moussed hair, and pegged jeans: college boys. Their numbers had swelled in the last hour, as had the wreckage of beer pitchers around them. The pool hall wasn’t a college joint. The regulars tended to drive pickup trucks and work in the body shops along Main Street, but Fraternity Row was only a couple blocks away, so that crowd would stumble in sometimes.

  Through his blue-tinted glasses, Creed’s eyes shone bright. He wheeled and shoved the guy with both hands. Baby Face stumbled forward, the beer in his mug sloshing up. The brew was still dripping from his chubby jaw when he pushed himself up from his pool table and turned.

  “What’s your problem?” He passed his glass to the guy behind him, eyes locked on Creed’s.

  “You screwed up my shot,” Creed said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Baby Face dried his jaw with his shoulder. “Well, I’m about to screw up more than that. Starting with your weasel face.”

  The game at the other table had stopped, and six more guys joined Baby Face, three to each side. They could have manned the offensive line of a football team. Two of them wielded pool cues. They studied Creed, then turned their smirking attention to Tyler and Jesse. Tyler could tell these guys had brawled before, that they were confident their seven could handle the three misfits in front of them, even if one of them was the size of an industrial freezer.

  Tyler stubbed out his cigarette in a chipped ashtray and glanced toward the door, hoping Gus had taken notice. But the bouncer stood with his back to them, chatting up a pair of rough-looking women.

  “You fast?” Creed asked.

  Baby Face’s eyes flicked around as if suspecting some trick. “Fast enough for you.”

  Creed had slipped his right hand behind his back. Tyler didn’t have to look to know that blades were growing from his glove’s first finger and thumb. “Oh, really?” Creed grinned.

  Baby Face cocked his head around at his friends as if to say, Are you hearing what I’m hearing? He turned back to Creed, his balled fist drawn back. “You started this. Just remember that when—”

  Creed’s arm flashed. Buttons popped into the air.

  “Wha—?” Baby Face hollered, staggering backward.

  His silky shirt fell open in two flaps, like cheap drapery. A white line traced Baby Face’s torso from the top of his sternum down to his navel, where it became lost inside rust-colored coils of hair. Tyler let out his breath. Not a nick of blood. Creed’s blade had only scored his skin.

  “Now get outta my face before this weasel decides to bite,” Creed warned.

  Baby Face held the flaps of what had probably been an eighty-dollar shirt, still trying to comprehend what had happened. Creed struck a match and touched it to the cigarette he had snapped from behind his ear and placed between his lips. He turned through the plume of smoke and began resetting the cue ball and the eight ball, his point made.

  “Creed!” Tyler shouted.

  The blond varnish of a pool cue flashed under the hanging lamp. Jesse, who had been standing back, shot his arm out. The stick snapped inside his massive fist, the end nicking Creed’s bowler hat as it shot past.

  Creed adjusted his hat and continued lining up his final shot.

  The college guys looked at Jesse, then at one another. They backed away, the severed pool cue clanking to the ground. Baby Face remained, rouge patches breaking out over his cheeks. The flaps of his ruined shirt fell from his hands. “Oh, you’re gonna pay for that,” he said to the back of Creed’s head, his voice trembling. “Did you hear me, you son-of-a-whore?”

  Creed paused mid-stroke, his smile withering. He stood and turned slowly. “What’d you say about my mother?”

  Baby Face’s eyes brightened. He’d found Creed’s button.

  “You heard me.” His mouth curled into a leering grin. “I heard she does it for food stamps.”

  Tyler hurried around the table. He didn’t want to have to deal with the police again, didn’t want their mother to have to drive out to Alachua County holding in the middle of the night, the pouched skin beneath her eyes purple and damp. Barely fifteen, he already felt too old for that crap. He placed a hand on Creed’s shoulder and pulled. “C’mon, man, let’s go shoot somewhere else.”

  Creed shrugged Tyler away at the same instant Baby Face drove his fist into Creed’s gut.

  Creed dropped to one knee, grunting for air.

  Baby Face moved in. “Not so tough now, are ya?”

  Though the atmosphere of the pool hall was thick with exhaled smoke and beer spume, the air remained dry, thanks to the winter weather outside. Dry and charged. Tyler called that electricity to him until every hair on his body stiffened at the roots. Television static filled his ears.

  But before Tyler could unleash the charge, Jesse seized Baby Face’s throat and lifted him above the hanging light. Baby Face pried and pounded at Jesse’s fingers. His eyes swelled to the size of Ping-Pong balls.

  Jesse stared back, unblinking. He cocked his other fist.

  Tyler winced. A Jesse Hoag haymaker would send this guy the length of the pool hall and probably through the plate-glass window. No telling how many bones would be spared, if any.

  Gus stormed through the circle of onlookers, a vein throbbing beneath the black bandana that capped his baldness. “Drop him,” he ordered, his salt-and-pepper goatee bristling.

  Jesse’s dull eyes shifted toward the bouncer.

  “Now!” Gus said, aiming his finger downward.

  Jesse opened his fist.

  Baby Face collapsed to the ground. He backpedaled on hands and feet toward his buddies, who helped him up. “Freaks, man,” he gasped. “You’re all a bunch of… of lowlife freaks.” The group turned and made for the door. Tyler could see in their backward glances they wouldn’t be coming back here. Baby Face was propped up between them like a fighter tangled in the ropes after a TKO loss. “Freaks,” he mouthed, his eyes wide and spacey.

  Creed, who had recovered his air, screamed after him, “I could’ve gutted you!”

  Gus jerked his thumb toward the back door. “I want you out of here.”

  Tyler realized that the pool hall had gone quiet only when the murmurs and clacks of balls started up again.

  “What are you talking about?” Jesse said. “It’s us.”

  “Yeah, and you’re not even supposed to be in here, legally. But I know your pops, so I do it as a favor. Figure it helps keep you kids off the streets. He tells me the kind of trouble you get into. So I give you a pass, but on the condition you not cause friction. I say that every time, don’t I? No friction. What happened just now, that was friction. So take a hike.”

  Jesse grunted.

  Gus headed toward his stool beside the front door. “Come back in a month,” he called over his shoulder. “If you’re not in prison by then.”

  “Shit,” Creed muttered, snatching up his hat from the floor.

  Out in the parking lot, Jesse leaned against his car and appeared to contemplate the distant burn of stars. Creed finished off the last of his Jim Beam and threw the flask against the brick wall of the pool hall. The flask sparked and then crashed into a heap of beer cans near the dumps
ter. Tyler turned up the collar on his jean jacket and dug around his pockets for a cigarette before remembering he’d smoked the last one inside. Probably just as well. He blew warm air into his cupped hands and stamped his feet. Denim was crap insulation against the cold.

  “So you guys wanna go shoot somewhere else? Over at Silver Q, maybe?” He had managed to sneak a final look at the clock on their way out. Still thirty more minutes before Scott would be in the clear.

  “You’d think we’d get some respect by now,” Creed said to the ground, his hands shoved into the pockets of his too-tight imitation leathers. “But nothing. Not at school. Not from Gus. Not from those guys. I could’ve sliced that preppie reject ten ways. Don’t he know that? And what does he do? Waits for Tyler to distract me and then sucker punches me in the stomach.”

  Tyler thought of all the people Creed himself had sucker punched over the years.

  Creed’s lips wrinkled into a snarl as he yanked open the passenger’s side door. “C’mon, Jess. Let’s find those guys and finish the job.”

  Jesse sighed and opened the driver’s side door, but he was shaking his squat, grease-slicked head at the same time. “We’ve got other business.”

  Creed screwed up his face. “What other business?”

  “Scott Spruel. He owes us an arm.”

  Shit, thought Tyler.

  Understanding dawned on Creed’s face. “Oh, yeah… The smart-ass who screwed with our phones and gave me the finger.” He levered the seat forward for Tyler to get in back. “Well, what are we waiting for?”

  Tyler opened his mouth to protest, but he had seen in the rock-hard opacity of Jesse’s gaze that the matter was already settled. And if it was settled for Jesse, it was settled for Creed. By the time Tyler climbed into the backseat of the Chevelle, kicking past crumpled Whopper boxes, the engine was roaring to life. The stink of oil filled the car. Metallica’s Kill ’Em All screamed from the speakers. Creed giggled. A streetlight shone down through Tyler’s window. Through the crappy tint job, the light appeared brown and hopeless.