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

by Brad Magnarella

  The laser blinked again and died.

  Darkness blinded Scott. The afterimage of Tyler’s bleached hair and haunting blue eyes stained his retinas. Scott raised his good forearm and stumbled back, expecting a hail of blows.

  “I-I only wanted to talk to them,” Scott stuttered.

  “Just get out of here.”

  Scott didn’t need to be told twice. He stumbled past Tyler’s voice and then stopped, a memory surfacing. He pushed his helmet up onto his head. Tyler’s silhouette stood out against the moon-pale trees, still and watchful. “That day at the tennis courts,” Scott said. “That was you, wasn’t it? You sent a charge through the fence, but it was to get Jesse off me.”

  Down the bending path, Jesse snorted and sputtered against the ground.

  “Go on, man,” Tyler said. “Before he wakes up.”

  “Why? Why did you help me?”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “Well… thanks.”

  “Hey, were you serious about the cameras?”

  “Yeah, I was.”

  Tyler stood with his hands in his jacket pockets, shoulders shrugged against the midnight cold. He looked as though he was going to say something more but turned and sauntered back toward the clearing.

  Scott watched him disappear before crossing the field and heading home.

  5

  Denver, Colorado

  Tuesday, January 1, 1985

  1:33 a.m.

  The shard that penetrated Janis Graystone in her dreams was never the cruel detonation she had felt in waking life. No, in her dreams — as in this one — the stab was an icy pressure, one that turned her dream body rigid and insensate.

  Strong hands helped her to the carpeted floor. They held her shoulder for a moment. “Lay low until I contact you.” She could not see his eyes, just the top of his yellow-tinted glasses, moving with the words. He stood back. His footfalls fell off behind her. A car door opened and closed. An engine rumbled, and that sound, too, diminished and disappeared.

  Janis lay in the front hallway, alone. Her breaths slipped in and out of lungs that would no longer expand. She thinned her breaths and curled a finger beneath the cool chain at her neck, pulling until the small crucifix fell from her shirt collar. She closed her hand around her father’s gift. And to think that he and the rest of her family were just a backyard away.

  So close.

  She raised her gaze to the littered hallway, where she had blown the bathroom door to pieces — then raised it farther to where Mrs. Leonard was propped against a chair in the kitchen, the right breast of her gown black with blood, one arm twisted across her body.

  I’m sorry, Janis wanted to tell her, but she couldn’t inhale through the powder and must of the house. I’m so sorry.

  “Don’t let them see,” Mrs. Leonard said in a high, clear voice. “Don’t let them know.”

  Who? Janis mouthed.

  Mrs. Leonard raised her good arm and pointed beyond Janis. The yellowing sleeve of her gown shuddered. From behind Janis, footsteps approached. Relief welled inside her like an updraft of clean air.

  It’s all right, she wanted to tell Mrs. Leonard. It’s my friend. It’s Scott.

  Yes, he had come to find her. Soon, he would lie in front of her, and she wouldn’t have to see the ruin of the hallway or the terrible thing she had done to Mrs. Leonard. He would take her hand. He would tell her to stay awake, say that help was coming.

  He would—

  But Mrs. Leonard jerked her head side to side, her eyes growing wider, whiter. And Janis realized that the footsteps weren’t Scott’s. They were deliberate and heavy. And a smell pushed ahead of them, a smell from another dream. A toxic smell of death and incineration.

  “It’s them,” Mrs. Leonard said.

  The footfalls stopped. A burning shadow fell over Janis in the shape of a giant mushroom cloud.

  Janis’s eyes opened to darkness, terror ringing between her ears. She raised her head. The shadows around her resolved themselves into an antique dresser and lamp, a standing mirror, and a wooden trunk — all of them crowding the small downstairs bedroom in her grandmother’s house. The ringing in her ears faded.

  Janis lay back for several moments, breathing, talking her terror back down, back into the deeper places. At last, she drew her covers aside, cool air touching the perspiration over her bare legs, and sat on the edge of the bed. The old frame creaked around the mattress. Janis inhaled the smells of her Gram’s house — cedar balls, sepia-colored photographs, Oil of Olay — glad she hadn’t screamed this time.

  She contemplated her socked feet against the wooden floor as she tucked her hair behind her ears.

  What are we going to do?

  She got up and padded to the bathroom, past the room where her parents slept. Her mother, the lightest sleeper in the house, usually came running. A couple of times, her father had been the one to check on her. Janis always assured them she was all right, she couldn’t even remember the dream that had made her scream. But she could see in the deep lines of her mother’s face or in the dark cast of her father’s eyes that they weren’t convinced.

  Janis flipped the switch in the bathroom. Pink plastic curtains covered the small basement window on the far wall. A stack of Reader’s Digests rose from the toilet tank. The ceramic lid was about the same size and shape as the one she’d used against the Leonards’ bathroom door.

  Standing sideways before the mirror, she drew up her cotton nightshirt. Her ribcage looked like the slats of a beach fence. She touched the place, pale and puckered, where the ceramic shard had plunged into her. When she applied pressure, pain tightroped a line deep inside her, then bloomed like an aching molar. Janis drew a hiss through her teeth and blew it out slowly.

  She touched around the scar. The terror that seeded her nightmares came from Mr. Leonard, yes, but not from the stabbing. What no one in her family knew — what no one could guess — was that the terror came from his parting warning:

  You’re part of a program. A deadly program. It’s your abilities. I tried to reach your sister, to warn her, but there are too many eyes. Nothing is what it seems, and no one can be trusted. Do you understand me? No one. Not even the ones who’ll be investigating what happened here. Especially not them. Your one chance is to hide your powers. Never use them, never speak of them again.

  A fresh chill brushed Janis’s body, and she unfurled her shirt. Agent Steel, a no-nonsense woman with sheared platinum hair and unblinking blue eyes, had been put in charge of the investigation. A scar cut into one corner of her mouth. With her frostbitten stare and perpetual half frown, her questions to Janis had felt less like an interview and more like an interrogation. And there was something seriously off about her. At the end of the second meeting, Janis nailed it. She could usually pick up some sense of a person, some inexplicable “vibe” — much more since her out-of-body experiences had begun last summer — but it was as if Agent Steel’s vibe had been suffocated in the coldness of outer space. The four times Agent Steel had entered her hospital room, a part of Janis had shrunk, only returning to form when the middle-aged woman left again.

  Janis propped her arms against the sink and studied her face in the mirror.

  Not even a year before, she’d been a straight-A student, co-captain of her soccer and softball teams, looking ahead to high school. And now she was… what? Someone who left her body when she slept, who visited events from her past and anticipated the immediate future. Someone who influenced objects with her thoughts: soccer balls, bathroom doors…

  People.

  Janis shut her eyes, but the battered image of Mrs. Leonard only grew larger and clearer in her mind. Your powers… Mrs. Leonard had said. Never use them, never speak of them again.

  “Way ahead of you,” Janis mumbled.

  And it wasn’t just that her powers had hurt people. She’d also felt delight, as if some part of her was feeding off the other’s pain and fear. She hadn’t used her powers since that morning — hadn’t
even attempted to use them. And the powers hadn’t visited her, thank God, not even in the form of an out-of-body experience.

  Now she just had nightmares.

  She filled a Dixie cup with cold water and cut the light. Despite telling herself not to, she tiptoed across the bathroom and peeked between the curtains. Moonlight shone over patches of snow and cast long shadows against the yard. One shadow originated from a figure on the sidewalk. Janis recoiled, nearly dropping her cup. A long coat fluttered around the man’s legs as he took another sauntering step, a coldness coming off of him — a psychic coldness.

  (…there are too many eyes.)

  Janis followed the downward cant of the man’s head. A small dog appeared at his side, nosing the ground and then squatting onto its haunches.

  Janis eased the curtains closed, feeling foolish. If she wasn’t careful, everyone would start looking like a watcher.

  But had he been watching?

  She was almost back to her room when a muffled voice sounded beyond the closed door where her parents were staying. The stern texture of the voice — her father’s — made her stop. Her mother’s answering voice fluttered, verging on shrill. Janis studied the half-inch space beneath the door. Dark. She eased nearer, holding her breath.

  “…supposed to be safe,” her mother said.

  Her father’s response was too low to make out.

  “Well, that’s not what they told—” Their voices bled together momentarily, before her mother’s won out. “…all kinds of assurances.”

  “That’s why I’m stepping in.”

  “But how can we keep—”

  He shushed her back down.

  They’re fighting. The idea landed in the pit of Janis’s gut. My parents are fighting.

  Her mother cleared her throat. “Janis? Is that you, hon?”

  Janis started. Thanks to the nightlight behind her, her legs were casting faint shadows against the space beneath their door, shadows her parents were probably eyeing that very moment. She shuffled backward and tried to make her voice sound sleepy. “Just coming from the bathroom.”

  “Do you need anything?”

  “No, I’m fine. G’night.”

  Janis slid beneath the pile of covers and pulled them to her chin. She’d been away long enough that the sheets felt cold, almost damp. She rolled onto her side, away from her closed door, and tucked her knees to her chest. Her teeth chattered once.

  What could they have been fighting about?

  But she already knew. Ever since the stabbing, a tension had grown among the members of the family. Stiff silences entered rooms, occupied seats at the dining room table. Words came out at odd angles as if by some Doppler effect. Slanted looks replaced laughter. Even her Grams, with her orange-frosted hair and rollicking humor, didn’t seem herself.

  And now, arguments at two in the morning.

  Blinking back moisture, Janis drew the crucifix from her shirt and caressed it. The warming sheets unmoored her thoughts, setting them adrift toward dreaming. When her eyelids slid closed, Scott was lying in front of her, just as he had done at the Leonards’ house that morning.

  She whispered his name.

  “Help’s coming,” he said. He took her hand and pressed it to his lips.

  She watched his eyes. Soft brown eyes that reminded her of the woods, where the seeds of their imaginations had taken deep root, as had their trust for one another. Scott was the only person with whom she’d shared the truth — not only about the Leonards but about everything: her out-of-body experiences, her intuition, the progression of her powers. And he’d reciprocated that night on the swing set, telling her about his own powers.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” she whispered.

  She studied his eyes, their clarity and caring. But when she tried to squeeze his hand, she felt the pendent around her neck. His face and the woods around them began to dissolve.

  “No, not yet…” she murmured.

  Her eyes opened to the pillow beside her. She pressed her hand into the soft down and curled her fingers. The depth of Scott’s absence surprised her. She had thought about calling him from Denver. She’d even picked up her grandmother’s black rotary phone and dialed up to the last number but then hung up. He had warned her about the switchboard over the neighborhood and the possibility someone was listening.

  She heard herself asking Scott the question she had asked him on her front porch: Then who’s the receptionist?

  But she didn’t want to know the answer. Not here, lying alone in the dark with a strange man outside. Not with her parents arguing in the next room. Not without Scott near. Because she was afraid the answer would be the same as Mrs. Leonard’s, in her dreams: a frightened, whispered Them.

  6

  Spruel household

  Sunday, January 6, 1985

  7:41 p.m.

  Scott pumped his knees higher — slap! slap! slap! — into his sweat-soaked palms. He watched his profile in the closet mirror, his gray sweat pants pushed up over the knobs of his knees. But his knees weren’t reaching hip level anymore. Drawing a ragged breath, Scott told himself, To hell with hip level, just hold out for another thirty seconds. His burning thighs countered with Fifteen. After five seconds, he groaned and collapsed onto his bed.

  The room spun him around. Two weeks had passed since his last Bud Body session, and he was hopelessly out of shape.

  Not that he blamed himself. He’d been caught up in other things: investigating the neighborhood, observing traffic patterns, recuperating from his second broken arm in as many years. But with a new semester of school starting tomorrow, the time felt ripe. For inspiration, he’d snipped out an action shot of Cyclops from one of his duplicate X-Men and taped it to his mirror.

  Now, with Cyclops’s square jaw and ruby-quartz visor staring down at him, Scott pushed himself up and pawed across his bedside table for the exercise booklet he’d ordered last fall. In a series of black-and-white stills, Bud demonstrated the correct form for “Pogo Legs” (running in place, essentially). Scott flipped to the next exercise: “Heave-hos” (pushups). In the final still, a puffed up Bud faced the reader with a grin that said, I eat patsies like you for breakfast.

  The actual caption read: “Dream big, or don’t dream at all.”

  Scott tapped the booklet against his chin, then rose and limped toward the window. The streetlight shone over the intersection, but he wasn’t thinking about the camera embedded beside the sodium bulb. He was thinking about how Janis was due home that night. All the time he’d been exercising, he’d been listening for the Graystones’ station wagon — a low, even hum.

  Scott caught the brightness of his eyes in the window’s reflection as he sighed. The thought of seeing her for the first time in almost four weeks had been spiraling through him all day, making it hard to sit still for more than four seconds. He leaned his forehead against his arm. As recently as the previous summer, he’d stood at the same window, peeking through the blinds, waiting for her to appear.

  A lot had changed.

  He dropped to the floor and started a set of one-armed pushups, his casted forearm pressed to his low back. He and Janis were friends again, yes. Confidants, even. And that was wonderful — beyond wonderful. And yet… He managed two trembling presses before collapsing to the carpet. And yet, he ached to be something more to her. Every time he thought of her, the feeling would grow like a hunger that began in his chest instead of his stomach.

  Dream big, or don’t dream at all.

  “Thanks, Bud,” Scott said, “but I don’t think we’re there yet.”

  Screw that, came a tough voice through Scott’s thoughts. That’s patsy talk.

  “Huh?”

  You heard me, pal.

  Scott sat up and looked over at the exercise booklet, half expecting to find Bud standing from the pages like a Star Wars hologram, his oiled muscles shining copper-gold beneath the bedside lamp. Instead, he found the same series of black-and-white photos.

  I’m tir
ed of you pussyfooting around with this dame.

  “Pu-pussyfooting?” Heat scalded Scott’s neck until he realized he was talking to himself. He looked around, then lowered his voice. “I’m not pussyfooting, goddammit. I’m being systematic.”

  Call it what you want, pal. But if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

  “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

  Bud’s voice taunted: And I know what’s hidden in your top drawer.

  “How did you—” Scott began to sputter but then shook his head. Of course he knows, dummy. He’s a voice inside your frigging head.

  Scott stood and made his way to his dresser. He opened the top drawer and, reaching past random circuit boards, knotted wires, and a cluster of old Master locks, he retrieved the get-well card he had made for Janis while she was in the hospital. The same card he’d tried twice to deliver before losing his nerve. Scott had considered mailing it to Janis — had even hacked into the DMV for greater Denver and transcribed her grandmother’s address onto an envelope — but he couldn’t seem to make himself carry the card to the mailbox and hoist the metal flag.

  Maybe Bud had a point.

  Though no voice came, Scott imagined the exercise guru grinning smugly, thick arms crossed over his chest like Mr. Clean.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Scott muttered.

  At his desk, he pulled the card from the envelope and studied the hand-drawn illustration. He was no John Byrne, but his attempts to imitate Byrne over the years had transformed him into a decent enough artist. The illustration showed him and Janis venturing into the woods together, crossing a fallen tree. However, these woods were magical, with towering, vine-braided trees, flocks of fanciful birds within their boughs, some perched, some just taking flight. Deer and other woodland creatures looked upon Janis and him, who were holding hands.

  The inside read simply:

  Dear Janis,

  Get well soon. “Our world” will be waiting for you.

  Love,

  Scott

  Scott flushed. He closed the card quickly and shoved it back inside the envelope. Why in the world had he signed it that way — and in ink?