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

by Brad Magnarella

  Just like everything else.

  2

  Spruel household

  One hour earlier

  10:46 p.m.

  A final burst of sparks splattered against Scott’s face shield. He set down the acetylene torch and pushed the welder’s mask onto the top of his sweat-soaked head. Squinting past coils of smoke, he regarded his work. It isn’t pretty. He turned the helmet one way and then the other. But prototypes rarely are.

  He set it down on the workbench and lifted the piece he had finished that afternoon — The Backpack. But this wasn’t his JanSport. Scott examined the metal box and harness, the fastening system fashioned from the straps of a life preserver he’d found among his father’s junk. In one of her softer moments, his mother had given his dad an extension on cleaning out the garage — which was a reprieve for Scott, as well. The same junk concealed his workshop.

  Not that he had to worry about being found back here tonight. His parents were attending the Habscombs’ New Year’s Eve party, his mother in a weird Mondrian-inspired dress, his father stuffed inside the ruffled brown tuxedo he’d worn at their wedding some twenty years before. His mother had carped about the tux’s odor all the way to the car, but if New Year’s Eve parties past were anything to go by, they’d be giggling in each other’s arms when they stumbled through the front door sometime after one in the morning.

  Scott just hoped they wouldn’t be stumbling home to a son in need of an orthopedic surgeon.

  He lifted the pack over his shoulders and fastened the yellowing straps across his chest. The homemade pack felt snug, the metal harness helping to distribute the weight of the car battery, where a pair of wires dangled. He would attach the wires to the most critical component when — and if — Wayne decided to show.

  Scott held up his digital wristwatch. “Where are you?”

  Frowning, he removed the welder’s mask. Counting on his best friend (and frequent rival) was always a dicey proposition. But the choice was Wayne or no one. And it was his own fault for waiting so long to get started. He’d only begun sketching out the suit’s plans the night before.

  It seemed incredible, but since school had let out more than a week before, his date with Jesse Hoag had not been foremost on his mind. No, he’d taken the big questions regarding the Leonards’ warning (don’t let them see; don’t let them know) and the switchboard controlling Oakwood’s phone system and turned detective. He thought about how he’d started small, observing traffic patterns in and out of the neighborhood, looking for anything out of the ordinar—

  Scott froze.

  Inside the house, J.R. had begun to bark. The storm door to the garage scuffed closed. Scott set the backpack aside and cut the light. He stood with one hand against the door jamb and listened into the floor-to-ceiling junk heap. A footstep sounded and then the slither of something being dragged. The card table. Someone was moving the card table that hid his tunnel entrance.

  Wayne?

  No, he had specifically told Wayne to call out when he got here and not to touch anything. Scott tiptoed toward the bend in the tunnel. The diffusion of light and shadow indicated that whoever it was had moved the card table out of the way. Scott imagined the intruder stooping to contemplate the low space. Scott had modified the tunnel so a person had to crawl a couple of feet before being able to stand. The arrangement was inconvenient, but that was the point. Better to hide his workshop by.

  Hands and knees whispered over the smooth cement floor. The thought of calling out a “Hello?” crossed Scott’s mind, but what if the person didn’t answer? Could he cope with that kind of horror? At the same moment his mouth went dry, his mind went to the acetylene torch in the workshop. It wouldn’t throw much of a flame, but it would make a decent enough weapon.

  A weapon? You’re already thinking weapons?

  After everything that had happened in the last month, yeah, why not? After all, there had been the disaster at the Leonards’, when Mr. Leonard had nearly caught Scott in his basement and then stabbed Janis; the switchboard over Oakwood’s phone system, which still created a delay on all inbound and outbound calls; and, of course, the cameras. Several had pointed at the Graystones’ house before the police dismantled them, but Scott wasn’t thinking about those. He was thinking about the ones he had found aimed at his own house.

  The whispering stopped. Thud!

  “Crapola!” came a voice.

  Scott exhaled, rolling his eyes. He found Wayne in the half light, wincing and rubbing the back of his head. He’d cracked it on the end of the French door that propped up the low tunnel.

  “Son of a succubus,” Wayne muttered.

  “You were supposed to holler when you got here.”

  “You said that was hard to find.” Wayne jerked his thumb back toward the opening. “That was child’s play. Helen Keller could have found it in her sleep. In fact, I’m surprised she hasn’t yet.”

  So that was it. Wayne wanted to prove he could find the secret tunnel.

  “Did you bring it?” Scott eyed the forest-green backpack hanging from Wayne’s shoulder.

  Wayne stroked his frayed mustache and chuckled.

  “C’mon,” Scott sighed. “I’ll show you what I’ve got back here.”

  When they reached the metal shop, Wayne made a show of appearing unimpressed. He wandered around naming the equipment in a tired voice, suggesting he had spent more time than he’d cared to in metal shops and had since moved on to other things. He laughed as he looked over the two pieces of the suit. At the backpack, he held up the wires dangling from the car battery.

  “Do you have a baby brother?” he asked. “Cause it looks like he’s been playing around back here.”

  Scott touched the helmet, making sure it was cool, then held it out so Wayne could see the inside. “It’s bulky, but I built the receptacle to the dimensions you gave me over the phone.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  From his backpack, Wayne pulled out his science fair project from the year before, a “tube laser.” It looked like a sawed-off fluorescent bulb, but when powered, it emitted a bright beam along its length. Wayne had shot the laser through some gases to prove something or other, impressing the judges sufficiently to send him to the regional and state levels of competition. All well and commendable, but what mattered most to Scott was the laser itself. He had to restrain himself from reaching, knowing Wayne would either pull the laser away or, more likely, slap his hand. In an hour, Scott would be standing face to face with Jesse Hoag, and he still wasn’t sure the laser would fit, much less work. That the tube would emit a laser, he had little doubt. It was Wayne’s baby, after all. But all by its lonesome, the beam wasn’t much good to him. He had something else in mind.

  Wayne edged himself between Scott and the workbench. “Stand aside, numb nuts.”

  Scott could only watch as his friend fit the tube into the helmet, inserted the box-shaped power supply beside it, and twisting the wire filaments, attached the power supply to the car battery. The components fit snugly inside the receptacles, which eased Scott’s breathing. Retrofitting the design would have cost him in time and nerves — and he was equally low on both.

  “Never doubt my genius,” Wayne proclaimed, as if reading his thoughts. Wayne stood back from the pack and wiggled his fingers. “Now, if you could kindly help me don the suit.”

  Scott clenched and relaxed his fists. It was the price for Wayne’s help, he supposed — first dibs on wearing it. That and half his Avengers collection, even though the laser was just a loaner.

  “Yeah, but only for a second, all right?”

  The harness swam over Wayne’s narrow torso, but Wayne didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy pulling the helmet with the newly installed laser over his face and securing the chin strap. The helmet bobbled on Wayne’s head as he peered around, making him look less like the X-Men’s Cyclops, which Scott had been shooting for, naturally, and more like a bug-eyed creature from the planet Dorkus.

  W
ayne’s small, smudged-in eyes peeked from the slitted opening below the tube laser. He held his finger over a hole at the right temple, where the power switch was seated.

  “Ready…” Wayne said, “set…” The laser crackled white, then hummed to life. A moment later, a red beam, paper-thin, shot from the visor and landed against the aluminum wall above the workbench. “Beeyow!” he cried.

  The bright line followed Wayne’s gaze as he turned this way and that.

  Scott stood back. “Just don’t aim it at my”—

  Wayne snapped the beam around to Scott’s — “face,” Scott finished, throwing up his forearm.

  “Wicked!” Wayne said, forgetting his tired conceit. “Beeyow!” He whipped the beam at a cabinet, then he knelt and shot it at the lathe.

  “Careful, you’re jiggling the battery.”

  “Beeyow!” He shot the beam at Scott’s face again.

  The beam didn’t hurt and wasn’t even warm. In fact, Scott wouldn’t have known it was on him except for the red glare beyond his clenched eyelids. He groped for Wayne. “All right, that’s enough. Give it back.”

  Wayne giggled and slipped beneath Scott’s reach. Scott opened his eyes to find him shooting the beam into the wood shop. Ten minutes later, and only after Scott had given up his pursuit, Wayne clicked off the laser and lifted the helmet from his sweating head. Excitement dilated his pupils.

  “So that’s it?” he asked, panting. “That’s the emergency? You needed my laser so you could run around pretending to be a superhero?”

  “I’m going to tinker with it a little,” Scott answered carefully. He waited for Wayne to unbuckle the harness before lifting the pack from his narrow shoulders and setting the contraption out of reach. “See if I can’t give it a little punch.”

  Wayne shook his head. “Can’t be done. Not with anything you’ve got in here.”

  Not with anything you know about, Scott wanted to shoot back. But he had learned his lesson last summer when he’d bragged about his hack into Army Information Systems Command. Wayne had refused to talk to him for more than a month, placing Craig and Chun, Scott’s other best friends, under gag orders. Scott wanted to avoid a repeat if he could help it.

  “But go ahead, knock yourself out. If nothing else, your attempts will amuse… me, that is. Just remember” — Wayne tapped the tube laser — “your lease is up at the end of January. If you need an extension, we’ll talk more comics. Now, speaking of said comics, I believe you owe me a certain cache of a certain series.”

  He was back to stroking his mustache.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Scott said, but he was more than glad to lead Wayne inside the house and away from the laser. He checked his watch again. 11:22. Which meant he would have about twenty minutes to test his theory.

  * * *

  Scott’s breath made mist of the cold air as he ran from his subdivision. He switched the helmet with the newly installed laser to his other arm, the battery pack bouncing on his back. He was almost to Oakwood’s main intersection when the first isolated pops of firecrackers echoed from the adjacent neighborhoods.

  Damn.

  It had taken him longer to get rid of Wayne than he’d planned. Wayne had tried to negotiate up for more comics, and Scott had finally thrown in a couple of Fantastic Fours. By the time Wayne had headed home, it was nearly quarter till — not enough time to test anything.

  You’ll just have to trust that your idea is going to fly.

  He considered the implications of ducking out, but Jesse’s warning brought him back to his senses: You don’t show, and it’s gonna be both arms when we catch you. And a leg.

  But there was also the pact he’d made with himself at the beginning of the school year. The promise to evolve from Stiletto the slinking thief to someone like the X-Men’s Scott Summers, a leader. Changes had followed: new clothes, new look, healthy physique. But more importantly, a healthier persona. Someone who would no longer hide behind a computer in a dark bedroom.

  Scott paused at the intersection of Oakwood’s three subdivisions, the last place he’d seen Janis before the stabbing. And now he saw the heel of her Ked beyond a doorway, her hair spread over the pale carpet, like spilled tomato juice, the ceramic shard buried deep in her rib cage.

  He had collapsed to her side with the numb certainty that she was gone, that he’d lost her. But her glassy eyes shifted at his voice. And when he squeezed her hand, she squeezed back. The grasp of her fingers had been the most special feeling in the world. Even more so, somehow, than the kiss she would plant on his cheek eleven days later before leaving for Denver.

  So, see you in 1985?

  The two weeks since she’d spoken those words felt like two years. Scott would die before telling anyone, but each night in bed, he had stared at the comic book she’d given him, Uncanny X-Men #137, the cover depicting Scott Summers and Jean Grey fighting side by side. He would pretend he and Janis occupied those characters, and before snapping out his light, he would touch his lips to her image, close his eyes, and press the issue to his chest, imagining her head rested there.

  At the top of the hill, he passed the sign that marked the entrance to the Grove. The field with the giant oak tree and playground spread out to his right, illuminated by a three-quarter moon. He slowed to a walk, thighs burning, lungs heaving for air. No Chevelle, not yet. Maybe they wouldn’t show.

  Yeah, dream on.

  He cut across the field, toward the swings he and Janis had sat on the night they’d walked there and talked about their powers. The night they’d discovered they weren’t alone after all. Grass gave way to mulch beneath his shoes. He hitched the helmet under his arm and fingered the thick chains of the swings, hoping to draw some courage from whatever lingered of that night.

  He left the playground, aiming for the dark sweep of woods below. A sustained burst of fireworks flashed and punctured the sky over the neighborhood behind Oakwood, the sound like the hollow thuds of a firing squad.

  So long, 1984.

  At the edge of the trees, Scott stopped to listen into the Grove. No approaching cars.

  He donned his helmet anyway and secured the chin strap, his view shrinking to a sliver of night. He held out his hands like a kid playing blind man’s bluff. The path fell and wound a short distance and then opened into a kidney-shaped clearing. Scott walked through the same spot where Creed had grabbed the back of his shirt two summers before and hauled him to a stop. He had tried to plead, his words becoming strangulated gasps as Creed placed him in a chokehold, giggling.

  Bring him over here, Jesse had said as he plodded into the clearing. Let’s see how well he pulls his bullshit phone pranks with one arm.

  Now, as the final pops of firecrackers faded, giggles drifted through the clearing again, like a leak from Scott’s memory. He peered behind him, a tomb opening in the pit of his stomach. Another path dropped into the woods, Scott remembered. Were he to follow that path out of the woods, up to the far side of the Grove, he suspected he would find the black Chevelle parked on the dark end of the street, its engine knocking as it cooled.

  More giggles floated past him.

  Scott fumbled for the laser’s power switch. A branch snapped, and two slender shadows separated from the trees into the clearing’s two paths. He couldn’t make out their faces, but he didn’t have to. The shadows belonged to Creed and Tyler Bast. They advanced, steering Scott toward the center of the clearing.

  “You came,” said a bass voice.

  Scott wheeled around. From the clearing’s opposite end, a giant shadow lumbered toward him.

  The giggles behind Scott assumed a voice: “Go on, Jess, break his fucking arm.”

  Scott ordered his quivering legs to stand their ground. He wasn’t the hapless boy of two summers before. He reached up to his helmet and punched the laser’s power switch. The laser crackled white, playing over the thick folds of Jesse’s face like a strobe light, and then died.

  3

  Five minutes earlier

&nbs
p; Firecrackers thudded, dull and cold, through the trees. Tyler clenched his chattering jaw, wishing again he had a cigarette or at least a warmer jacket. But what he wished for most was to be home in front of their black-and-white television, watching the ball drop in Times Square. Growing up, he’d always heard other kids talking about watching “the ball drop” but had only seen it for the first time three years before, when he had been twelve — too young to be out with Creed and Jesse but too old to be in bed.

  His mother had been sitting on the couch beside him, a half-smoked cigarette between her fingers, an old brown afghan covering their legs. This is what families do, he thought as the ball touched down and a smiling Dick Clark wished them a happy new year. Of course his father still hadn’t come home yet, which helped.

  “Yeah, and a happy new year to you, Dick,” his mother said back to the television and cackled smoke.

  Tyler laughed with her.

  His mother turned, her straw-colored hair up in a messy ponytail. “I’m only allowed to say it because that’s his name, you understand?” She squeezed Tyler’s cheeks until his mouth squished, fishlike, and they both laughed some more. It was the liveliest she’d been in months, light sparkling in her brown eyes. He could see that she’d been pretty once.

  He play-wrestled with her hand until she let go. She set her smoldering cigarette in an ashtray on the stained end table and lifted a McDonald’s glass, one featuring Officer Big Mac in pursuit of the Hamburgler. She swirled what remained of her brown liquor as she looked into it, gravity pouching the skin of her cheeks, the light leaving her eyes. When she caught Tyler watching her, she seemed to think for a moment and then held the glass out for him.

  “I guess a little nip couldn’t hurt,” she said. “What the hell.”

  The television backlit the rim of the glass, revealing pink lip smudges. When Tyler took it, a sweet, sickly draft came off its mouth. He tilted the glass to his own mouth and pretended to swallow before handing it back to his mother.