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

by Brad Magnarella

  “Hey, what do you guys know about scramblers?”

  Craig and Chun stared at him with blank faces, then went back to work on their chicken sandwiches. Jeez, thanks a lot. He hadn’t expected them to be fountains of information, but he had been counting on them to come up with something — the farther off target, the better so that Wayne would jump over himself to correct them. The alternative, putting the question directly to Wayne and expecting a straight answer, was about as much fun as extracting one’s own molars.

  Wayne’s eyes slanted toward Scott. His blue jacket, the kind that looked like a slicker but whose cotton lining took on rain like a sponge, was snapped up to his chin, the large collar swimming around his ears.

  “Who wants to know and why?” he asked.

  “I was just curious,” Scott said. “They were, um, talking about scramblers on Miami Vice.” It was the best he could come up with on short notice. He just hoped Wayne wasn’t a fan.

  Wayne took a long, loud slurp from his cherry-flavored Florida Frost, smacked his red lips, paused, and then took another slurp. “That all depends on what kind of scrambling you’re talking about,” he gurgled. “Do you mean simple inversion? Bandshift inversion? Cyclical bandshift inversion? Time division? Special time division? Frequency—”

  “All right, all right. I don’t know.”

  Wayne folded his napkin into a small square and dabbed the upturned corners of his lips. He had just heard his three favorite words coming from Scott’s mouth: an “I” and a “don’t” followed by a “know.”

  Scott spoke carefully. “But if I was in the market for one, where would I, you know, shop around?”

  Anyplace that sold scramblers would also sell descramblers, Scott reasoned. Then he could talk to a real expert — someone who wasn’t Wayne — and decide what kind of device he would need.

  “Nowhere around here, I can tell you that,” Wayne said. “You’re looking at mail order. I might know of a few companies.” He lifted his burger back to his mouth, took a bite, and chewed slowly.

  “Which ones?” Scott asked.

  Wayne peered over the top of his sesame bun. “Which ones, what?”

  “Which companies might you know of?”

  “Oh, probably none you’ve ever heard of.”

  Scott gritted his teeth. “Can you at least tell me their names?”

  Wayne dabbed his mouth again and inspected the napkin, suddenly interested in his cleanliness. “What’s it worth to you?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” Scott turned to Craig and Chun. “Do either of you know?”

  They shook their heads. A dollop of mustard landed on Chun’s green MIT Winter Camp sweatshirt, but he didn’t seem to notice or care.

  Still grinning, Wayne spread his finger and thumb the length of his mustache.

  “All right, what do you want?” Scott asked.

  “No, the question, my friend, is what do you want? I quote you a price; you pay me in cash; I contact the supplier; the supplier ships me the equipment; I deliver the equipment to you.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well there is my standard commission. Twenty percent.”

  “Twenty percent?”

  Wayne blinked. “Eighteen.”

  Scott ran his hand through his hair and looked around. Craig and Chun were still staring at him, jaws churning. If one of you two dimwits had just spoken up earlier… Scott sighed. “Fine. Eighteen percent.”

  Wayne grinned and rubbed his hands together. “What’s your item of interest?”

  “It’s a descrambler for a phone system. A military phone system. Well, that’s what Tubbs told Crockett, anyway. I’d just like to get my hands on one. You know, play around with it, see how it works.”

  Scott expected Wayne to laugh and say something cutting, but instead he squinted toward the ceiling. Now that they had come to business terms, Wayne’s mind had switched to problem-solving mode. “If we’re talking about phones, the scramble wouldn’t involve frequency inversion, unh-uh.” Wayne drummed his smallish fingers against his chin. “My guess is time division. That’s where the audio is sliced up and rearranged.”

  Right! Scott nearly blurted out. That’s exactly what the voices sounded like!

  “Yup, you want a device that puts the pieces back together. I’ll call Zeph this evening. He’s a supplier out in California.”

  “You’re on a first-name basis with these people?”

  “As far as price, I’ll go ahead and put it in the ballpark of sixty-two fifty… five bucks S and H… plus my standard eighteen percent… Let’s just say eighty even.”

  Scott pulled four twenties from his wallet, almost all of his Christmas money, and slid the bills across the table. Wayne’s eyes lit up. He tapped the bills into a stack, folded the stack in half, and pushed it into his jacket pocket.

  “So when can I expect the descrambler?” Scott asked.

  “Please allow six to eight weeks for delivery,” Wayne answered in monotone.

  “Six to…? I can’t wait that long!”

  Wayne shrugged. “I’m just a middleman.” He turned back to Chun. “Oh, and there’s another reason for a special police division. Let’s say a batch of runaways started reprogramming the phone system so that only they could communicate through it. Your average police officer…”

  Scott tuned him out. He thought about the cassette, which he’d moved from his closet to the workshop in the garage that morning, hiding it in the back of the workbench. The tape was the key to his growing pile of questions. But six to eight weeks? What was he going to do for six to eight weeks? Then he remembered what Mr. Shine had told him on the first day of school.

  “And that’s assuming their technology curriculum is current.” Wayne laughed sharply. “Which I highly doubt.”

  “Oh, cut the crap,” Scott said.

  Wayne’s head jerked as though he’d been slapped. “What did you say?”

  “You’re never going to start any ‘runaway division.’”

  Craig and Chun stopped chewing. Their wide gazes crept toward one another, then over at Wayne. Red smudges had already begun to anger Wayne’s cheeks.

  “Look, you’re obviously well connected. You’re helping me get a descrambler, and that’s great. I’m impressed. But you said it yourself: you’re a middle man. What do you know about investigative work? I mean that’s nine tenths of policing right there.” The nine tenths figure had come straight out of Scott’s butt, but Wayne didn’t need to know that. Anyway, his lips were too busy sputtering.

  Scott held up his palm. “Here’s an easy question. If someone needed you to find out about housing transactions, where would you look? Home purchases, sales — that sort of thing.”

  “The County Recorder.” Wayne said it all at once.

  “What’s that?”

  “A government office downtown. It’s where they keep copies of deeds, mortgages, birth certificates, death certificates, official stuff.” He was talking as though he was on The $10,000 Pyramid.

  “So anyone can go there and access that information?”

  “It’s public record.”

  “Really?”

  When Wayne saw that he had answered the question to Scott’s satisfaction, he crossed his arms and grinned as if to ask, What else have you got, dillweed?

  Scott gazed past him. Beyond the plate-glass window, the midday traffic was drying up on Thirteenth Street. The lunch hour was almost over. Scott wasn’t sure what a search of housing transactions in Oakwood would turn up, if anything, but the idea of the neighborhood being cordoned off for a year…

  “Do you think the office keeps a digital database of that information?” Scott asked.

  “If not, you can bet there’s one under development. Wake up, Scott-o, it’s the eighties.”

  “Probably hard to hack into, though.”

  “A government site? Ha!”

  Even Craig and Chun laughed at the idea. The notion of it as a challenging hack was ludicrous, but Scott
couldn’t afford to take chances. His phone line was still being monitored, which meant any hacking he attempted from either of his home lines would be monitored too. He would need to use someone else’s line.

  Or better yet, have someone else do the hacking for him.

  “I have a challenge for you,” Scott said.

  Wayne squinted in a way that suggested that whatever challenge Scott had in mind was already well beneath his skill level. Craig and Chun’s faces glowed with excitement. The shirt beneath Craig’s gray sweatshirt was on backward, Scott noticed, the frayed tag poking out beneath his Adam’s apple.

  “There’s about eighty houses in my neighborhood,” Scott said. “And I’m guessing there’s about the same number in yours.”

  “Eighty-two and seventy-nine,” Wayne corrected him.

  “Fine.” Scott didn’t bother asking how he knew. “The first one to access and print off the housing records for the other person’s neighborhood wins. And it has to be every house. I’ll even let you use Craig and Chun as assistants.”

  “What are we playing for?” Wayne asked.

  Scott could see in the way Wayne was sitting, his neck periscope-straight, shallow chest thrust forward, that Scott had him. Just the idea of Wayne getting to measure his hacking powers against Scott’s was incentive enough. But having spectators, even Craig and Chun — that sealed it. What Wayne didn’t know, of course, was that he had no intention of looking up a single house in Wayne’s neighborhood. Manipulative? Dirty? Cheap? Sure, all of those.

  “How about a Runaway movie poster?” Scott said. “Something to hang up in your office some day?”

  Wayne smirked, his stained lips twisting over one another. He reached across the table, wrapped his ice-cold hand around Scott’s, and gave it a hard pump. “Prepare to be humiliated.”

  * * *

  That afternoon, Scott went to his hidden workshop in the back of the garage. He didn’t own a descrambler yet, no, but he had almost two weeks’ worth of neighborhood traffic data to input into his database. He’d fallen behind on that chore, possibly because the data was about as interesting as the daily tide reports in the Gainesville Sun.

  As his TRS-80 booted up, Scott pulled out the folded piece of paper on which he’d logged cars and times and smoothed it out on the workbench. He loaded a floppy and for the next forty minutes punched the data into the respective fields for the roughly four hundred car trips in and out of Oakwood. Upon finishing, he entered a series of queries and scanned the results, his fist propping up his chin.

  Pretty much what he’d expected. People going to and from work, to and from daily errands. The predictability was actually a little haunting. But now Scott saw something that made his face dip toward the screen.

  “What do we have here?” he murmured.

  Beginning on January seventh, a new data pattern had begun to emerge. Cars he hadn’t observed on the earlier dates were leaving the neighborhood anywhere from seven o’clock to seven fifteen each weekday morning. January seventh, January seventh. What was going on January seventh?

  Of course! The start of school.

  But he knew some of the cars’ owners, and none of them had kids or were kids themselves. Besides himself, Jesse, the Basts, and the Graystones, there were no other kids in Oakwood. Could these be teachers? Possibly. But he was looking at data on five separate cars from five separate houses, and on any given day, only one was leaving the neighborhood during that early slot.

  Scott punched in a new query and studied the results. Even stranger. The cars weren’t departing the neighborhood on any particular morning. That, he could have understood: a Monday-morning class for the community college professor or a Tuesday-morning mall walk for the aging widower. No, nothing like that. The pattern looked about as random as the casting of dice.

  And why that time?

  Scott created a new database, exporting only the new batch of cars. He went date by date, picturing the cars he had inputted backing out of driveways, emerging from the Downs, descending from the Grove. He closed his eyes so he could see the cars more clearly. He watched them dwindle down the main street, toward the traffic on Sixteenth Avenue, their turn signals flashing.

  But the cars were never alone. Scott’s eyelids popped open.

  Every time, there had been another car ahead of them. A car he had never bothered inputting: Jesse’s black 1970 Chevelle.

  15

  Friday, February 22, 1985

  11:48 p.m.

  Metallica screamed from the Chevelle’s speakers as cold air battered through the open windows, slapping Tyler’s head. His shoulders were nearly touching in the front to keep the cold out of his jacket.

  “Where the hell are we?” he cried.

  They’d left Gainesville behind some ten minutes before, and from Tyler’s backseat vantage, peering past Jesse’s and his brother’s shoulders, it looked like they were hurtling into infinite night. No streetlights — just two lanes of gray road rolling out in front of the car’s beams, pastureland on either side. Squinting, Tyler took a final drag on his cigarette, then pitched it out the window behind Creed’s flapping hair. His brother had his bowler hat pinned between his knees and was nodding his head to the music.

  Tyler nudged his shoulder. “Where are we!”

  “Archer,” Creed yelled back.

  “What’s in Archer?”

  Jesse and Creed had apparently made their plans while Tyler was using the john at the pool hall.

  “Privacy.”

  “Privacy? What’s wrong with Gainesville?”

  Hair blew over Creed’s face as he shook his head. “Too many goddamned cruisers. City, county, university.” He wiped his face. “Just itching to shine their light into a parked car. Naw, ain’t nothing out here. Just clean, country air and good ol’ Mary Jane.”

  “Who’s Mary Jane?” Tyler shouted.

  Creed dug into his jacket pocket and came back with a rolled-up Ziploc bag. When he held it up, the baggie unfurled and rippled in the wind. Tyler saw clumps of marijuana strewn along the bottom. “Tyler, meet Mary Jane. Mary Jane, meet Tyler.” Creed grinned before stuffing the baggie away again. “You two are about to become well acquainted.”

  Tyler sat back in his seat. He’d been smoking cigarettes since he was twelve, but he’d never touched drugs. He couldn’t afford to lose control. Not after What Happened. He glanced around, feeling trapped. Through the rear window, a pair of headlights pricked through the darkness, maybe a half mile back. For some reason, the back of his neck began to prickle.

  “Hey, there’s someone behind us,” he called.

  Jesse turned the volume down on the stereo. His flat eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. “So?” he said.

  “It’s almost midnight, and we’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  Creed squinted above his small oval shades. “Probably just a farmer coming home after a few beers in town. He ain’t gonna mess with us. And if he does…” Creed held up his gloved hand and giggled. “Time to meet the butcher.”

  “Turnoff’s up ahead,” Jesse said.

  They rounded a bend, and the headlights behind them disappeared behind a bank of trees. Jesse slowed and swerved onto a dirt road — twin tracks of sand through the weeds — that ran past a leaning metal gate and into a plot of woods. The Chevelle’s headlights bounced up and down scrub oaks and pines, painting their trunks white, then shot out over a downsloping field. Jesse killed the lights and engine, and they all listened. Seconds later, the car that had been behind them hissed along the asphalt road, not slowing. The sound faded into the night.

  Creed laughed. “You haven’t taken your first hit yet, and already you’re paranoid.”

  “Yeah, well, after what Scott said…”

  “After what Scott said,” Creed mimicked. “Shit, he’d say he was Ozzie Ozborne’s love child if he thought it’d save his skin. And he’s not gonna be saying much of anything after I deal with him.”

  Tyler shook his head. “It’s histo
ry, man.”

  Creed spun and jabbed his finger over the seat. “Speak for yourself. That four-eyed twerp didn’t laser-blast you into the woods.”

  “C’mon.” Jesse pushed his door open. The car gave a seismic heave as he stood.

  Creed glared at Tyler another second, then turned and climbed out himself. Jesse yanked up a section of barbed wire fencing, uprooting three wooden fence posts, and held the strands for Creed and Tyler to walk under. Tyler waited for Jesse to duck underneath and then watched him and Creed stroll into the moonlit field. A large oak stood nearby, and Creed squatted beneath it, fishing the crinkling baggie from his pocket. Away down the hill, Tyler could make out a herd of cows standing around a pond.

  “Hey, I’m going to take a leak,” he called, not waiting for an answer.

  He walked along the fence back toward the road, stepping over the occasional cow pie. Tall grass whisked around his pant legs. He looked back at where Jesse and Creed moved as shadows and then up at the huge night sky, where stars swirled cloudlike around a half moon. It looked beautiful in an out-of-this-world way, like something from a Pink Floyd song.

  But when Tyler inhaled, a deep unease moved through him.

  The feeling didn’t just come from being in the middle of a random field with Jesse, Creed, and Mary Jane. And he couldn’t chalk it up to school, either, even though Thirteenth Street High had mailed his mother three failing slips in the last week (not that she’d read them or would’ve cared even if she had). No, the unease came from Scott’s warning to them about being watched. It came from the obsessive thoughts Tyler had been having ever since, thoughts about What Happened. The memories began with the headlights of his father’s truck shooting through the red curtains that New Year’s Eve night.

  And then Tyler was there, reliving the experience, moment by moment.

  * * *

  His mother gasped awake on the couch, as though she’d been plunged underwater and was just coming up for air. She blinked at Tyler and then at where the truck lights were dimming, the red cast falling from her face. Her fingers dug into his shoulder.

  “Go on, Mom.” Fear stripped Tyler’s voice to a naked whisper. “Get upstairs.”