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

by Brad Magnarella

  “Viper was awarded more than two hundred billion in contracts last year alone.”

  “Wait, you think the weapons industry is behind the killings?” Janis heard her father’s skepticism. She couldn’t help it. Granted, Star had lost her sister, but to blame a company as well known as Viper seemed so… conspiratorial.

  Star narrowed her eyes. “Either that or an outrageously elusive whacko.”

  “If it’s the weapons industry, why haven’t they been, I don’t know, investigated?”

  Star rubbed her thumb and fingers together again.

  Janis lowered her eyes. Her father would become apoplectic if he heard someone talking as Star was — and even more so if he knew his daughter was listening.

  Instead of saying something lame like “Justice will find the perpetrators,” Janis reached over to touch Star’s hand. But the instant their skin met, the octagonal room around them wavered away, and Janis was squinting into blue daylight.

  A crowd surrounded her, fists raised, some holding signs; in the sudden brightness, Janis couldn’t make them out. She turned in the direction they faced and found herself staring at a stage. A familiar figure leaned toward a microphone, her face contracting around shouted words. Her shirt read NUCLEAR FREEZE NOW!, the words out of alignment. Columns and the top of a capitol building appeared and disappeared behind her black spikes of hair.

  Thunder clapped, the capitol and crowd disappeared, and Janis was staring at a silent, seated Star.

  “You’re going to speak?” Janis asked.

  Star pulled her hand back from Janis’s and clutched her book. “What?”

  Janis closed then opened her eyes. “You’re going to speak to a crowd.” It was no longer a question.

  “Yeah… that was part of my training last week. The Florida chapter is hosting a rally in March, and I’m — how did you know?”

  “I… I can just see you doing it.”

  Star looked at Janis for several more seconds, eyebrows pinched together in suspicion, and then returned to the book she’d been reading. Janis lowered her own gaze to a stack of her notes.

  One face looking to the past, her English teacher, Mrs. Fern, had said last semester. The other peering ahead, to the future.

  It was happening again. Her powers, which had lain dormant for the past month, were beginning to stretch and stir back to life. Janis’s fingers shook as she sorted through pages she could no longer read. Would she be able to control her abilities this time, or would they control her?

  And if your premonition about Star just now was spot on, what about your dream last night about Scott?

  In the cracked clock above the study hall’s stage, Janis saw a shattered lens. She heard Agent Steel’s chilling voice: We know who he is. We found him. Janis curled her toes inside her shoes as the crooked red hand lurched out the seconds. Seventh period with Scott couldn’t come soon enough.

  * * *

  Scott had just completed another unsuccessful pass of Janis’s locker — his sixth of the day — and was wondering whether she was even at school, when he spotted someone familiar drawing a white sheet from a row of azalea bushes. Scott smiled. In place of his straw hat, the man wore a brown woolen cap, pulled to his earlobes. A thick blue jacket gave extra insulation to his coveralls, an edge of yellowing fleece peeking out from the collar.

  Scott cut across the strip of lawn between A and B Wings.

  “Mr. Shine,” he called.

  Mr. Shine turned up his dark face, his teeth showing like a row of white fencing. “Heh, heh.” Puffs of steaming air accompanied his pleasant laughter. “What do you say there, young blood? You and your folks had youselfs a nice Christmas?”

  “Yeah. How about you?”

  Mr. Shine moved his gloved hands to his stomach and leaned back. “Well, I ate enough to bust two pair of trousers, so it must’ve been good.” His laughter verged on coughing.

  Scott nodded toward the bushes. “What are you doing?”

  “Had to cover them last night on ’count of the freeze.” Mr. Shine folded the sheet lengthwise twice and drew it to his chest, folding it over in squares. “Was a bad freeze here some years ago, and come springtime, none of the azaleas flowered. Even the dogwoods suffered. And that’s the best part of springtime round here, ask me. Flowers and the fishing.” He stopped midchuckle, eyes glimmering with a new thought. “Say, you ever learn how to make that coin jump?”

  Scott laughed. “No, not quite, but…”

  Scott started to dig in his backpack for a quarter, but Mr. Shine stopped him. He tapped Scott’s cast at the wrist, his furrowed gaze studying the plaster of paris. “Whoa, there. Who’d you get sore at you this time?”

  “Oh, no… I fell off my bike.” It’s what he’d told his parents. He’d even kicked out a couple of wheel spokes to make the tale more believable. But standing there trying to deceive Mr. Shine felt worse, like they both knew he was lying. “Just a hairline fracture,” he said. “The cast should be off in a couple of weeks.”

  “Seems I seen you with a cast summer before.” Mr. Shine’s concerned gaze lingered on Scott’s wrist as he placed the folded sheet on his cart.

  “That was my other arm.” Scott pushed his hand back inside his pocket. “I’m a magnet for accidents, I guess.”

  “Well, you a magnet for something.”

  Scott became aware of the thinning shouts behind him. He could feel the warning bell trembling, on the verge of ringing. He was about to wish Mr. Shine a good rest of his day when a thought occurred to him.

  “Hey, um. How long have you been doing lawns in Oakwood?”

  “Oakwood? Let’s see…” Mr. Shine squinted past Scott’s shoulder. “Probably started in seventy-seven. Somewhere ’round there.”

  The year Scott and his family had moved there.

  “How many customers do you have?”

  “Including your folks, six or seven. Then there’s some that only call me for special jobs. Cleaning out gutters in the fall, spreading fertilizer in the spring, that sorta thing.” The skin around Mr. Shine’s eyes wrinkled above his smile. “You not planning to take my business, are you?”

  “No, I was just wondering. Hey, have you, um, ever seen anything out of the ordinary?”

  The warning bell clanged over the last part of Scott’s question.

  “Well…” Mr. Shine studied the row of azaleas and, apparently satisfied with whatever he saw, leaned into his cart. “Better let you get on to class. Else you gonna end up like me someday, up to your elbows in dirt.”

  Scott had no idea how to respond, so he raised his hand and turned to go.

  “But ’bout that ‘out of the ordinary…’” Mr. Shine stopped pushing his cart. Scott wheeled around. “Seems I remember a time when they had Oakwood closed up for about a year. Barricades across the entrance. Might’ve been seventy-three, seventy-four. Toward the end of that Vietnam, anyway. Something to do with the creek that runs both sides of the neighborhood. Flooding problems. I don’t know if it was the Army Corps or who, but they brought the big machines in, lots of ’em. Did some grading and put up a pair of levees.”

  Scott knew those levees — raised cement walls on the far side of the creek. Janis’s father had told her they were meant to prevent flooding into the adjacent neighborhoods. But Oakwood barricaded for a year?

  “What happened to the homeowners?”

  “The ones before?” Mr. Shine scratched his temple and resumed wheeling his cart off the grass. “Now that I don’t know.”

  Scott was still standing beside the azaleas, staring after him, when the bell to begin sixth period rang.

  * * *

  If the rest of study hall felt like a month to Janis, Spanish stretched into a year. The second it ended, she bolted from her seat and through the doorway. Out in the hallway, she dodged around gawkers and shot through whispers of “Look, look, it’s her!” imagining the words blowing apart in her wake.

  Janis had made it as far as B Wing when a fire alarm began
ringing throughout the campus.

  You’ve got to be kidding me.

  Coach “Two F’s” Coffer, who was acting as one of the monitors between periods, jumped into the hallway and, making an L with his arms, rerouted the current of students toward the practice fields. “This is not a drill!” he bellowed. “Get going! Move your asses!”

  Out in the practice field, Janis stood at one end as the school emptied toward her. She spotted Blake jogging down the steps across the field, near the tennis courts, but didn’t approach or wave at him. Instead, she stuffed her beacon-red hair up inside her wool hat and sidled toward one of the baseball dugouts, guilt rippling through her.

  Her gaze left Blake and swept over the tide of students. “Where are you?” she whispered.

  Her heart gave a hard thump. Like magic, Scott’s bespectacled head had appeared above the masses. Not taking her eyes from him, Janis circled the orange baseball diamond at a fast walk. Judging by his trajectory, he would end up somewhere in right field, where the mass of students thinned. They would be able to talk semiprivately. Maybe the fire alarm was a blessing after all.

  “Well, if it isn’t the heroine.”

  Janis turned to where three girls were stepping from the throngs of students eddying around her. They wore purple ski parkas, their dark-chocolate hair falling from designer wool hats and flowing over matching scarves. Amy Pavoni, her ex-best friend, no longer hobbled on crutches, but as she came nearer, flanked by Autumn and Alicia, Janis noticed her limping.

  Janis glanced distractedly to where Scott’s head was drifting away.

  The girls stopped in front of her. Autumn angled her face away from Janis, not deigning to look at her. Alicia rolled her Phoebe Cates eyes. But Amy remained glaring. She stepped closer and said, “I’m not afraid of you,” then flinched, as if expecting Janis to lunge at her.

  Janis hiked up her books. “No? Congratulations.” God, I don’t have time for this.

  Amy narrowed her eyes. “I don’t care what you can do.”

  Janis had begun to step around her, but now she stopped. Amy was talking about her powers.

  (Don’t let them see. Don’t let them know.)

  “Look,” Janis said, trying to control the muscles in her face. “I’ve been wanting to apologize for what happened at Dress-up Night. I… I didn’t mean for you to hurt yourself.”

  “But I didn’t hurt myself.” Amy raised an eyebrow. “Did I?”

  In a flash, Janis recalled the pulse leaving her outstretched arm, the sight of Amy somersaulting with her aluminum chair, the shriek, the stretch and rip of soft tissue… and her own furious joy.

  Janis stuffed the memory back down. “I’m sorry you were injured.”

  Autumn and Alicia pushed out dramatic sighs. When Amy continued to stare, Janis made her expression as sympathetic as she could and then edged past her. She felt Amy rotate toward her.

  “What about that Mrs. Leonard woman?” Amy called. “Did she hurt herself too?”

  Don’t respond. Don’t even acknowledge her. She can’t prove anything.

  “Well, did she?”

  A cold hand cinched Janis’s heart. She sped up, dodging around and between students. The alarm continued to clang, echoing through the chill air. Scott had ended up a stone’s throw from Blake, beyond the tennis courts, which meant she was going to have to circle around and approach him from the back of the field, keeping the thickest mass of students between herself and her boyfriend.

  How awful does that make me?

  When she reached Scott, he was standing with his hips forward, hands stuffed into his jacket pockets, surveying the two-thousand-strong student body. Stray licks of hair — whose carelessness Janis found more than a little cute — fluttered atop his head. She felt the urge to run up and throw her arms around him, press her cheek between his shoulder blades, and listen to the surprised sound his chest would make. She’d really missed him.

  But before she could do anything, Janis noticed a distant figure pacing along the sidewalk above the practice fields.

  Her throat caught.

  Here?

  She looked from the slate-blue-clad figure to Scott and back. She pulled a piece of notebook paper from one of her folders, scribbled across it, two lines, and folded it four times. As she walked in front of Scott, she let it fall at his feet.

  “Wait five seconds and then pick it up,” she said over her shoulder. “I’ll explain later.”

  She didn’t glance back to see Scott’s reaction — couldn’t risk it. Removing her hat so her hair spilled out, she made her way toward Blake. He spotted her, his face beaming around a smile, and waved her over. As she raised her hand with her new ring, she ventured a peek toward the sidewalk. Sure enough, Agent Steel’s lunar eyes were staring back at her.

  9

  Tyler Bast sauntered through the senior parking lot, hiking boots scuffing the asphalt, and stepped onto the sidewalk running along Thirteenth Street. He was almost to the corner gas station before the alarm bells at his back began to fade. He paused at the stoplight, cupped his hand around the tip of a fresh cigarette and a flame, and then, snapping his Zippo closed, crossed Sixteenth Avenue. Traffic zoomed past him but no police cars.

  He inhaled and blew out a jet of smoke. The first day back at school had been a drag, a mind-deadening drag, like being hit repeatedly over the head with a remedial textbook whose pages reeked of old cheese. Half of his classmates had slept, the teachers not even bothering to wake them. The teachers had given up too, apparently. Tyler kept the mental fog at bay by penning scraps of thought in the beat-up brown notebook he kept in his jean jacket. It was a journal, he supposed, but he didn’t think of it that way. The entries read more like song lyrics: “I can annihilate you, you can annihilate me, let’s never fight.” Stuff like that. Stuff to mull over.

  But by the end of sixth period, Tyler had been holding on by a thread. He was never going to make it through seventh period. So instead, he slipped into the auditorium and pulled the red lever on the fire alarm.

  Tyler took another drag, then dropped the cigarette, crushing it into the sidewalk with his next step. He felt hollowed out in a way that inhaled smoke wasn’t helping, probably because he’d skipped lunch to, well, inhale smoke on Titan Terrance. Now he felt like the winter light around him, faint. He squinted down the street, shoulders hunched, and headed for the only place that could cure him: Ducky’s Record Shop on University Avenue.

  Tyler’s only hesitation about leaving campus was that he wouldn’t be around if Jesse and Creed started any friction. Creed had wanted to jump Scott that morning at the bus stop until Tyler convinced him that Scott was carrying some sort of weapon. Creed, whose ribs were still black and blue from Scott’s blast, had hesitated, his hand gripping the door handle.

  “Why do you think he’s not running?” Tyler asked. “And anyway, look, his arm’s in a cast. It’s broken. We’re all even.”

  “The shit we are,” Creed said.

  From the backseat, Tyler prodded Jesse’s massive shoulder. “Tell him, Jess. We’re even.”

  Jesse grunted noncommittally. When Jesse had awakened that night in the clearing, sputtering through his leaf-coated lips, Tyler told him an exploding battery pack had knocked him unconscious — not a laser blast or whatever Scott had unleashed from that helmet of his. Jesse seemed to have accepted his version, but of course you could never tell for sure.

  At last Creed’s hand slipped from the door handle. “Well, what the hell are we hanging around here for?” he’d asked in irritation.

  Now, Tyler hawked into the street. A siren made him peer over his jacket collar. A pair of fire trucks was speeding the other way. He hastened along the sidewalk, farther from the school, hoping Scott would be safe on his own.

  Tyler reached the record store some twenty minutes later, pushing open the glass door. A small bell jingled, and he was met by the portentous smell of used record covers. The store wasn’t big: three aisles with cardboard boxes-cum-recor
d bins squeezed side by side over tables and along the floor. The far wall held racks of cassette tapes, with one rack dedicated to the latest in music technology, compact discs (which Tyler had no interest in — the players cost a fortune and he’d heard CDs scratched even more easily than records). Band posters covered the windows: Elvis Costello, Iggy Pop, Velvet Underground.

  He moved down the near aisle and began flipping through the stack of records in the D bin. The Damned, Depeche Mode… Dylan. Tyler had always thought of Bob Dylan as a folk musician until Chad lent him a copy of Highway 61 Revisited. What Tyler heard wasn’t folk. In fact, he’d never heard anything like it, the lyrics like an abstract painting you could see all sorts of faces inside if you tilted your head just right. And the faces changed every time he listened.

  On his next visit, Tyler had bought that album as well as another Chad suggested, Blood on the Tracks.

  As Tyler flipped through the Dylan albums, lifting one out occasionally to read its back cover, he could see Chad at the front counter. He was dickering with a long-haired dude over the value of his trade-ins. Otherwise, the store was as quiet as the suspension of dust in the weak shafts of sunlight. The store’s stereo had been busted since Thanksgiving.

  “I’m offering a one-dollar credit for this one,” Chad said, “and you’re lucky to get even that.”

  Chad was pencil thin with a trim, rust-colored goatee and a two-day growth on his shaved head. He raised his eyes toward Tyler and made a face that said, Can you believe this guy?

  “Four,” the customer said, a bulked-up biker in black leathers.

  “You want four bucks for a Billy Joel? What planet have you been living on?”

  “Listen, faggot,” the biker said, “I paid eight, and your ad says you give fifty percent for used.”

  Tyler’s ears pricked up.

  Chad pushed the records toward the biker and, placing his hand on his cocked hip, said, “I’m sorry, sir, but this store does not cater to potty-mouthed Neanderthals. Good day.”