“This should be the last time we see each other for a while.”
The words landed against Scott’s chest like an axe. He opened his mouth, but his voice had died.
“The talkie can be ditched,” she went on, “the blood evidence can be denied. But someone still believes we collaborated that morning. And it’s not just that we collaborated, but how we collaborated. How you got in, how I got out. And I don’t mean your lock-picking skills.” She tugged at the fingertip of one of her gloves. “Staying away from one another makes the most sense right now. I mean, if you and I aren’t seen together, aren’t talking, then…” She sniffled and wiped her nose.
“What about coming here,” Scott asked, “to compare notes?”
“I… no, Scott.” She looked around them. “Here might even be dangerous.”
“Are you still worried about a Them?”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been watching the neighborhood while you were away — the people, the traffic in and out, that sort of thing. I even set up a database to detect anomalies. And guess what? Oakwood’s a pretty boring place. At least my computer thinks so.”
“What about the switchboard?”
“There was a military phone in Mr. Leonard’s basement I never told you about.”
“You think he was behind it?”
“Well, he did scale at least one streetlight, not to mention several trees, to rig up his surveillance on your house. I don’t see why he couldn’t have done the same with a telephone pole.” Telling her about the cameras on his house would only complicate the point he was trying to make.
“But why would he have said those things?” Janis asked. “About our abilities and not letting anyone know?”
“All the hours he watched you and Margaret, who knows what he might’ve seen? But that other stuff, about a dangerous program…” Scott dragged a hand through his hair. “If you ask me, he made it up. His attempt to nab you fell to pieces and so, hey, suddenly he’s your guardian angel. And by turning your suspicion on the investigators, he thought he’d buy himself some time to get away. Of course he couldn’t be sure, so he… stabbed you.”
Janis’s gaze fell back to her gloved hands. Scott thought she would have been relieved to hear she was no longer in danger, but the skin over her brow remained taut and worried.
“When you have two competing explanations for the same phenomenon,” he went on, “the simpler one is usually, well, the better one. And the Leonard Explanation accounts for everything.”
“Occam’s razor,” Janis said softly.
“You know about Occam’s razor?” He could have proposed to her right there, but even Bud would have told him to, whoa, slow it down.
“Look, I appreciate what you’re saying,” she said. “And it does seem logical. Maybe it is the better explanation, but I’ve had dreams, Scott. Awful dreams about a Them. And when I wake up, the dread stays with me. Here.” She tapped her stomach with her fist. “I felt the same dread when Agent Steel came to our house last night. I felt it when I saw her at school today. I feel it now.”
“But they’re dreams.” Scott almost said just dreams but caught himself.
“Yeah, and I told myself the same thing about Mr. Leonard at first.”
Scott rubbed the back of his neck. She had a point. But not to be able to sit with her like this for who knew how long… The pain would be worse than her being in Denver. Then, two thousand miles had separated them. Now, it was only two hundred yards between their houses — and much less than that in seventh-period English. He would see her every day, ache for her, but not be able to so much as wave? Great. Middle school all over again.
She placed a hand on his knee and leaned nearer, “Have you used them? Your powers?”
Only to blast Creed and Jesse. “Not exactly. Not through the phone lines.”
“Good.”
“You?”
Her brows drew together for a moment. “No.”
The light around them was fading, the shadows growing. He hesitated over what he was about to say, fearing she would move her hand. “I bought a military phone this weekend. At the army surplus store.”
“Okaaay?”
“If I can get back into the Leonards’ basement, I can test—”
“Get back into the Leonards’ basement? Forget it, Scott. No!” Her eyes turned bright with alarm.
“What? Everything’s been cleared out. The passive detection field—”
“We don’t know that.”
“Hear me out. A delay still exists on our lines. I’m pretty sure the police disconnected the phone without disabling whatever eavesdropping system he set up over Oakwood. They’re probably not even aware of it. With the military phone, I should be able to connect to his system and check it out. If it runs to a hidden switchboard cabinet, then we’ll know it was a him not a Them. No more worrying. No more hiding.” He lowered his head to look at her. “No more nightmares.”
“I can’t let you.”
“I have to.”
“Listen to me, Scott. Agent Steel is watching, and she’s dangerous. I know you want to help but just… believe in my abilities. Lay low until she backs off. That’s all I’m asking.”
Scott searched her eyes. How? he wanted to ask. How can I lay low, how can I do nothing, when you’re in danger? He blinked back the threat of tears. Janis must have noticed because she leaned closer, her eyes full green now.
* * *
When Scott blinked again, he was facing a tangle of woods where light poured through the green leaves. He tasted a mix of sweat and bug repellent on his lips, felt his hair damp against his brow. Mosquitoes hovered around his head like spindles of ash suspended in the humidity. His glistening arms were drawn back, about to heave away a rotten log in his hands.
“Hey! The discard pile’s over there.”
Scott turned his head. A lean, freckle-faced Janis was standing in front of their half-built fort, pointing toward a mound of debris. Her orange T-shirt read YMCA Soccer. Even as amazed present-day thoughts echoed through Scott’s awareness — We’ve gone back again! — he felt his nine-year-old shoulders sag with disappointment, and he trudged the log over to the pile. He had wanted to watch the log smash into the trees and brambles.
He dropped the log, wiped his hands on his shorts, and joined Janis, who had resumed work on their fort. They’d chosen a site where four trees grew close together in a nearly perfect square. With a hammer and a bag of nails borrowed from Janis’s garage, they had attached pairs of branches horizontally between each tree, all the way around. Now their work consisted of standing tall branches against the frame and tying them in place. A cone-shaped spool of string lay on the ground nearby. They had been at the project all week, a few hours here, a few hours there. It had become their life that June. It was all they talked about.
“We’ll leave this part open for the door,” Janis said, kicking toward the unfinished wall.
“What about the other side?”
Janis frowned. “It’s too exposed over there. Anyone would be able to see inside.”
Scott pushed up his plastic glasses. He was about to point out that no one came into the woods besides them when he heard something whisking along the trail. Through the green brush, he caught flashes of a boy on a dirt bike. Scott recognized him.
Janis must have too. “Down here,” she whispered, pulling Scott into a hunker beside her.
As the biker came nearer, he slowed. Where the trail began to veer away from their fort, the brush thinned. The biker stopped and faced them, the bangs of his thick bowl cut hanging to his eyes.
Janis stood from behind the fort. “What are you looking at?” she yelled.
“Are you crazy?” Scott whispered. He’d had no personal experience with Tyler Bast — they’d been in different classrooms that school year — but he knew Tyler’s reputation for getting into fights. He’d bloodied Craig’s nose during track-and-field day two months earlier, just because
Craig told him he looked like the kid on Eight Is Enough.
Tyler dropped his bike on its side and strode toward them, his too-large jeans scraping through the brush. Janis picked up a thick branch, and after a second, Scott did the same, standing beside her.
“Lay one finger on our fort and you’re in big trouble,” Janis said.
Scott swallowed. “Yeah.”
Tyler looked from their truncheons up to the fort. He jerked his head to clear the hair from his eyes and then reached into his pocket. Something oblong and red emerged.
“Um, that’s a Swiss Army knife,” Scott whispered to Janis. “Race you to your house?”
But Janis didn’t budge. She continued to glare at Tyler, her lips screwed together so tightly they were nearly white. Tyler pried a blade from the knife. He took two more steps toward them and then knelt beside a cluster of saw palmettos. His hair shook as he cut at the base of one of the fan-shaped fronds. When he finished, he rose and jerked his hair from his eyes again.
“These are waterproof.” He held up the frond. “They’d be good for the roof.”
Scott and Janis looked at one another.
For the next half hour, while Scott and Janis finished the walls, Tyler collected a sizeable stack of palmetto fronds. The three of them joined forces on the roof, first finding a bow-shaped branch for a ridge, then tying smaller branches between the ridge and the walls. They used logs from the discard pile to stand on. “See, that’s why we don’t chuck them off into the woods,” Janis made a point of telling Scott. Finally, they layered the palmetto fronds over the trusses of the roof until the inside of the fort was a solid box of shade.
They stood back from the fort and surveyed their work.
“It actually looks habitable,” Scott said, waving away a mosquito. He peeked over at Tyler, who nodded in agreement, his face ruddy with labor, arms crossed over his dirty white T-shirt.
“Next time it rains, we’ll all come and sit inside,” Janis decided aloud. “We’ll bring some cards and cans of soda.”
Scott didn’t want to spoil the moment by mentioning that his mother wouldn’t let him outside in a drizzle, much less a summer storm. He sidled toward Tyler and pointed shyly. “Hey, um, can I see your knife for a sec?”
Tyler held it out to him. “Just be careful. It’s my dad’s.”
Scott took it and admired its gloss. The dark-red knife was old, its Swiss cross nearly rubbed away. He unfolded each implement from one end: two blades, a saw, and a pair of scissors. From the other end, he pulled out a file and small can opener. The concept amazed him. He’d asked for a Swiss Army knife for his birthday the year before but got a switchblade comb instead. Scott folded everything back in except for the longest blade. He knelt and, for lack of anything else he could think to do, pressed it into the earth. When it was almost to its red hilt, the blade stopped cold. A rock? Scott drew the blade toward him, listening to it scrape over whatever was just below ground.
He used the knife to scoop out a blade full of earth, then dug with his fingers. Before long, he’d cleared away a section of smooth cement. “Hey, come look at this,” he called.
Janis and Tyler arrived from the fort and stood over him. “What is it?” Janis asked.
Scott blew dirt from it. “Some kind of foundation, I think.”
“For what? There’s nothing out here.”
Scott peered around. Janis was right. They were pretty far back in the woods, almost to the creek. “Maybe it has something to do with the levee system,” he offered lamely. He squinted up at Janis and Tyler, seeing the same inquisitiveness in their eyes that he felt in his own.
“How far does it go, you think?” Tyler heel-kicked the earth around the cement to clear away more dirt.
“I can grab a shovel from the garage,” Janis said. “Dad has one of the ones with a flat head.” She took two running steps from them and then stopped as if she’d hit a wall. Her hands went to her chest.
Scott turned and saw them too. They were throwing their bikes down next to Tyler’s. Creed’s dirty blond hair flapped around a face already sharpening into a grin. Jesse plodded behind in a black-and-yellow football jersey that, despite riding up his stomach, looked adult sized. Scott stood from the cement slab and moved beside Janis, his bronchial tubes already beginning to constrict. He patted his pocket before remembering he’d left his inhaler on his bedroom dresser.
“Well, if it ain’t Little Orphan Annie and her boyfriend, Four Eyes McQueer.” Creed stopped in front of them. The brown remnants of a bruise circled his right eye, making him appear dangerous. “Oh, and look at this.” He shifted his gaze to the fort. “Is this where you’re planning to make your babies?”
Scott felt his face go molten with embarrassment.
Janis trailed Creed as he circled the fort. “Don’t even think about it,” she warned him while keeping her distance. Creed went on grinning. He was in control, and he knew it.
Scott considered joining Janis — he feared what might happen on the far side of the fort — but his lungs were being milked by a farmer’s fists. He needed to sit, to drop his head between his legs. “In an emergency, it opens your airways,” his pediatrician had told him. But Scott couldn’t think of a worse time to be caught sitting like that.
Tyler, Scott thought with hope. He’s on our side. We’ve got numbers.
He looked around and found Tyler standing beside Jesse, who was heaving his arms at the gathering cloud of mosquitoes. “What are you doing playing with these sissies, anyway?” Jesse muttered.
Tyler toed the ground. “Who said I was playing with them?”
Well, crap.
Creed completed his tour of the fort, Janis still at his heels. “We’ve got ourselves a bit of a problem,” Creed announced. “Little Orphan Annie here says she don’t have a building permit.” Creed turned to Scott. “What about you, lover boy? Got any paperwork on you?”
“N-no,” he gasped.
“Yeah, that’s a problem,” Creed said. “A big problem. These woods belong to me and Jesse, and you’re building on it without our permission. There are penalties for that. Ain’t that right, Jess?”
Jesse grunted, though whether it was in agreement with what Creed had just said or in frustration at the swelling ranks of the mosquito flotilla, Scott wasn’t sure.
“Where’s your paperwork?” Janis bowed up to Creed, chin thrust forward.
“What do I need paperwork for? Shit. I just told you, I own these woods.”
“Then you’d have a title of ownership.”
“The only title I need is right here.” Creed smacked his fist into his palm, close to Janis’s face.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Janis replied, refusing to flinch.
Irritation and a deeper frustration flashed across Creed’s eyes. Back off, Scott thought toward Janis. He knew about Creed’s temper, and Janis was right in his firing line. Scott stepped toward Creed on willowy legs. “I don’t have any paperwork, b-but is there something else I can give you?”
Creed spun toward him. “Yeah, McQueer, there is. Got any paper bills on you? I’d settle for those.”
Before Scott could process Creed’s meaning, Creed darted in. Scott gasped and stumbled backward. A tree caught him, its bark grating the length of his spine. Creed’s hands knifed into Scott’s pockets, yanking them inside out. Two pink cubes of Hubba Bubba gum fell to the ground along with a crumpled dollar bill, which Creed knelt for and stuffed into his pocket. Scott felt his bladder threatening to void that morning’s Sunny Delight.
“Leave him alone!”
Hair flashed red-orange over Creed’s shoulder. In the next instant, the collar of Creed’s T-shirt cinched his throat. His face assumed a frightened, strangled expression, and he gargled once. Jesse and Tyler looked on in dumb surprise as Janis, her lips wrinkling back from gritting teeth, balled up the back of Creed’s shirt and tugged again. Creed shrieked with rage.
Scott lunged for Creed’s wheeling arm, but he was too slo
w. Creed’s fist met Janis’s stomach with the speed and force of a baseball smacking a leather glove. She sank to her scabbed knees.
“Janis!” Scott cried, shouldering past Creed.
He forgot his asthma, he forgot the fort, he forgot the fact that they were outnumbered by older kids. Scott forgot everything except the crumpling of Janis’s face the instant before she doubled over. With his arm around her, he felt her lean body struggling for air.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Creed stood over them, panting. “Your girlfriend pulls another stunt like that, and she’s fucking dead. Do you hear me?”
Crouched over Janis, Scott braced for the punch or kick that never landed. Instead, he heard a loud crack. A second one followed. Then came raw, punishing laughter. When Scott raised his head, half the fort was already kicked in. Branches dangled from strings. With Creed’s next kick, a fresh cascade of palmettos spilled around him. He seized a branch and began bludgeoning the far wall while Jesse tore away the rest of the roof with a giant hand.
“C’mon!” Creed called to his brother.
Tyler faced Scott and Janis, his hair forming a screen over his eyes. Then he trudged to the fort. Hiking up his jeans by the belt loops, he put his foot through the section of wall they’d completed that day.
Scott heard a sniffle and found tears dripping from the tip of Janis’s nose. He’d never seen her cry before.
“We’ll build another one,” he whispered. “Somewhere secret.”
He glanced back toward where Creed and Jesse were stomping the branches into pieces, ensuring they couldn’t be reused. Creed was positively dancing, his spindly legs pistoning up and down.
Scott clenched a fist and silently swore his revenge.
Then, from far away: Janis!
* * *
Scott came to, his forehead touching Janis’s, one hand holding her cheek. Their space pulsed with strange warmth. But then the wind shook the stems around them, and Janis shivered and leaned back. In the winter dusk, her eyes appeared dark green and distant. She drew a breath, then glanced around and back at Scott. The fog of their breath mingled.
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 38
