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

by Brad Magnarella

  “Yeah… sure.”

  But Amy wouldn’t release him. “What Janis meant to say, I’m pretty sure, is, ‘I’m sorry to have bothered you. I’ll be leaving now.’” She narrowed her eyes. “Isn’t that right?”

  “It won’t take long,” Janis said to Blake.

  “It’s fine.” Blake tried to ease his arm from Amy’s hold.

  “Gosh, I wonder what we can talk about in your absence.” Amy looked straight at Janis. “So many interesting things. And unless I’m mistaken, I still have…” She released Blake’s arm, as though of her own volition, knelt daintily for a glittering hand purse on the chair beside her, and snapped it open. “Ah, yes, here it is.” She flourished Agent Steel’s contact card with a small laugh before dropping it back in her purse. “I keep meaning to call, to see if I can be of any assistance. Maybe tonight I’ll finally get around to it.”

  Janis balled up her fists. Do it or shut the hell up.

  She thought the words so aggressively that the whooshing of her out-of-body experiences filled her head at once. Pulsing meridian lines appeared between and around her and Amy, and Janis knew she only had to push to shove Amy to the ground — or hurl her the length of the gymnasium. And part of her wanted to hurt Amy, hungered for it. Badly.

  Instead, Janis examined the layers of her former friend because, for the first time, they were all laid out before her. She could see old birthday parties and sleepovers and summer days spent at Westside Pool, where they used to bike over together. And now a shadow — the one that had always lurked just out of Janis’s sight, like a floater in her vision. But the shadow couldn’t escape her sight. Exposed, the shadow took slow, horrifying shape.

  Oh god, Amy.

  Cold fingers enveloped her heart as Janis willed the vibrations away. They, along with the lines and layers, thinned and disappeared. In their place, Janis experienced a yawning sadness, like innocence lost.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Janis said.

  “Tell you what?”

  Janis leaned nearer and lowered her voice. “About your aunt.”

  Amy flinched.

  “The one who used to spend summers at your house when we were kids. She’d play softball with us in the street and rent R-rated movies when your parents went out. I always thought she was the coolest. I had no idea…”

  “Shut up,” Amy said, but with no force behind her words.

  “That’s why you put the note in my locker in sixth grade.”

  “Shut up, I said.” Amy shrank back, her eyes flicking around as though to see whether the others knew, too. Whether they knew what her aunt had done to her when she was ten.

  “You didn’t ask for it to happen,” Janis whispered. “You need to tell someone.”

  “I have to go.” Amy clutched her purse to her chest and pushed past Janis, mascara starting to smear beneath her eyes. She hobbled on her high heels like a girl trying on her mother’s shoes for the first time. Tugging down the back of her short sequined dress, she disappeared toward the bathrooms.

  “You’ve ruined everything,” Alicia hissed as she and Autumn, in matching silver sequins, went after their friend.

  The rest of the group shrugged and started talking football.

  “What was that about?” Blake came and stood next to Janis.

  “It’s… complicated.” She continued to look at the place where Amy had disappeared. But it explained everything: why Amy had ditched softball, ditched Janis (who, by her own admission, had been a proud tomboy), and taken up with the most aggressively feminine girls she could find. It explained why she batted her perfect lashes at any cute guy who gave her his passing attention. Amy hadn’t wanted to leave a scrap of doubt in anyone’s mind — not least of all, Janis guessed, in Amy’s own — that she was anything other than a well-adjusted heterosexual.

  “Did you still want to talk?”

  Janis’s thoughts returned to Star with the shock of a gun blast. She looked up at Blake, who must have seen the sudden change in her face. His brow creased with his old concern as he reached for her arm.

  “I need to ask a huge favor,” she said.

  24

  Nothing moved on Agent Steel’s dispassionate face. Scott shifted in his chair, sweat beading along his hairline. He started to hook a finger inside the knot of his tie before realizing the gesture made him look hot — a sure sign of guilt. The room in the front office was, in fact, cool. Cool and deathly quiet. The fluorescent bars didn’t even hum.

  Scott’s gaze flicked from Agent Steel’s eyes to her empty desktop, then back. Her eyes weren’t even saying, I’m waiting; her eyebrows would have to move for that to happen. They just stared, which was worse.

  Scott’s gaze fell to his squirming fingers. “There’s nothing more to tell you. I was at the bus stop, and I… I heard a scream.” His throat clicked when he swallowed. “I followed the sound to the Leonards’ house, and that’s where I found Janis.”

  “And where were you before?”

  “At the bus stop.”

  “Before that?”

  “My house.”

  “Between your house and the bus stop, Scott, were you anywhere else?”

  “Except for the street that runs between them?” He tried to smile in a way that said, I know you’re doing your job, but isn’t this getting just a little ridiculous? He drew courage from the thought of Janis’s lips against his. “No,” he lied.

  Agent Steel stared for another minute and then rose from behind her desk. Scott straightened in the hope that she was preparing to dismiss him, but instead, she began pacing the perimeter of the small room.

  “When you were in the fifth grade,” she said, “there was an officer at your school.”

  “Yeah, Officer Friendly.” He craned his neck as she paced around his left side.

  “What did this Officer Friendly do?”

  Where is this going?

  “She came to our class every once in a while.” Scott swallowed. “Talked to us about good behavior.” He craned his neck around to the right, but she had stopped behind him.

  The door to a filing cabinet rumbled open. Folders shifted. The door rumbled closed. From over Scott’s shoulder, something pale appeared. He flinched before realizing that it was a piece of paper — a piece of cardboard, actually, slightly larger than a four-by-six index card. He took it, turned it right-side up, and felt his entire world fracture.

  “She also had you fill out one of these,” Agent Steel said, “in the event that you or one of your classmates went missing. It’s been on file at the police department ever since. Do you remember doing this?”

  Scott continued to study the card, fingers over his lips. Across the top was his name in large block letters, along with his address and telephone number. The bottom half of the card consisted of ten squares, one for each of his ten-year-old fingers. The prints looked as fresh as the day Officer Friendly had ordered him to “press down.” He fought the impulse to smell the ink.

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “So you don’t deny the prints are yours.”

  “Why, uh, would I?”

  He had considered prevaricating. Well, I’m pretty sure we swapped them around. Lots of practical jokers in Mrs. Kiester’s class. Guess we thought we were being funny. Heh, heh. But what was to stop Agent Steel from demanding a fresh set of prints right then and there? For all he knew, she had a stack of cards and all the ink pads she needed in one of her desk drawers.

  Another piece of paper appeared over Scott’s shoulder.

  “These are copies of prints taken from the Leonards’ shed and basement. Blood makes almost as good a staining agent as ink.” Agent Steel’s silence drove the facts home like spikes.

  Scott looked from the piece of paper to the card he had set on his right thigh.

  “Our technicians say the patterns are a match,” she finished.

  “Hm. Strange.”

  He tried to hand them back, but Agent Steel’s hand didn’t reappear to accept
them. I get it; she wants them to stare me in the face for another few minutes, to unnerve me. And it worked. The card and sheet of paper, damp where he’d handled them, felt like a pair of telltale hearts. He wanted nothing more than to flip them face down. But that would look like guilt, too.

  “Is there anything you’d like to amend to your statement?”

  “I… don’t think so.” He tried to sound confused.

  A full minute passed. Agent Steel strode back to her desk, standing in front of it this time. She stared down at Scott, who had to lean his head back to see her face. Muscles began knotting where his neck met his shoulders. More sweat leapt from his hairline. Scott pictured the salty beads conjoining, growing fatter, threatening to trickle into his eyes and tickle his nose.

  He pushed the sweat up into his hair.

  “Lying to investigators is a grave offense,” she said.

  “I understand.”

  “Punishable by jail time.”

  “Well, I’m not lying…” He cleared his throat. “So what’s there to worry about?” He tried again for that you-and-I-both-know-this-is-ridiculous-right? smile, but the coldness in her eyes killed it. His mouth staggered. For the first time, he sensed the void around this woman that Janis had talked about. Like outer space.

  “How would you explain the matching prints?” she asked.

  “I thought that was your job.”

  He pushed his sweat through his hair again and felt it run down the back of his neck and into his shirt collar. If this went on much longer, he’d be able to wring out his blazer.

  She sat against her desk. “There’s a phenomenon known as missing time. It’s most commonly seen in subjects following highly stressful events. When asked to recall the event in question, a subject will believe himself to be recounting the event exactly as it happened when, in fact, there are gaping holes.”

  “Okay?”

  When Agent Steel’s hand dropped to her belt, Scott thought she was reaching for her holstered gun. Perhaps she meant to give him that impression. Instead, she unclasped the handcuffs. Agent Steel held the cuffs up at chest level and drew the chain taut. Then she brought the cuffs together until they were nearly touching and pinched the drooping length of chain at its neck.

  “There is still a beginning and an ending” — she indicated each cuff — “a kind of continuity. But notice how the chain went from a dozen links to four. That’s what a subject will do with the chain of events in question: truncate the links. We believe it’s the brain’s way of mitigating trauma to the subject’s psyche. Perhaps your brain is doing the same thing.”

  She set the cuffs gently on her desk.

  “Perhaps,” Scott said, then realized his mistake.

  For the last fifteen minutes, Agent Steel had been ratcheting up the pressure — the questions, the stares, the long silences, the standing behind him, the incontrovertible evidence, the hint of violence — all so she could back off and land him here: to conceding that, by golly, there just might be more to the story, after all. He could have punched himself in the mouth.

  “But I doubt it,” he added hastily. “My memory’s pretty clear on the, um, event in question.”

  “Then tell me why you went into the shed.”

  “I didn’t go into the—”

  “How did you open the hatch door?”

  “What hatch do—?”

  “What did you see in the basement?”

  “How could I see anything if I—”

  “Where’s Mr. Leonard?”

  Scott’s brain had been primed for another fastball, but she’d thrown a nasty, nasty curve. For a second, he could only stammer. His mind flashed involuntarily with what Janis had told him on the dance floor about meeting Mr. Leonard in the woods. He buried the knowledge, but it had already shone across his eyes. He’d felt it. And Agent Steel had seen it.

  For the first time, she squinted and leaned nearer.

  “Where’s Mr. Leonard?” she repeated, the scar twisting her lip sideways.

  “Mr. Leonard? Oh, I thought you said Mr. Ed. You know, the talking horse.” He could feel her studying his eyes for the least glimmer of falsehood. He managed an awkward laugh, as though he’d just made a fool of himself. “I was like, ‘Mr. Ed? What’s she talking about?’ I guess the answer’s the same, though. Buried, right?”

  He raised his eyes like he was being tested.

  Agent Steel made a move toward her belt. The small device was in her hand before Scott knew what was happening, its two red lights blinking on. The air hummed. Scott stared at the device cross-eyed, recalling but not quite grasping something Janis had told him in December about a device in the Leonards’ house. The high humming filled the room.

  “With your cooperation, we can locate those missing links,” Agent Steel said. “And more, perhaps.”

  Scott drew his head away but he couldn’t seem to avert his gaze from the lights. He seized his temples as the humming became a sizzling. Is that the sound of my brain overheating? His vision began to spot over. He went to push away the device, but his hand swept through empty air.

  “Unh,” he grunted.

  The sizzling rose in frequency. The right lens of his glasses shattered with the sound of a pick being driven into ice, then the left one. He felt his glasses being lifted from his face, but he could no longer see Agent Steel. Only the blinking lights. And the lights became a pair of red eyes watching him through a gray fog.

  “Let’s start over,” the eyes said. “Why did you go into the shed?”

  I didn’t go into the shed. But the slurring movement of his tongue and jaw didn’t match those words. They did more. They said more. What in the hell’s going on? Scott thought from a dim, dwindling corner.

  “Very good.” The eyes seemed to grow larger.

  Some infantile part of Scott’s mind was glad that whatever he’d said had pleased the eyes.

  “Now, how did you open the hatch door?”

  No, no, don’t…

  Scott felt drool trickle from his lower lip as his mouth smiled and his tongue and jaw lurched back into motion. More drool spilled with the words. And as the red eyes stared down on him, he hoped he was saying more of the right things.

  25

  The next morning

  Saturday, March 16, 1985

  8:22 a.m.

  The sun filled the back of Blake’s Toyota as he sped them west on I-10. Janis watched for the green road signs that counted down the miles to Tallahassee, a strand of hair pressed to her nose. She didn’t know what time Star was scheduled to speak, only that it would be mid to late morning, when the sky was bright blue and the air still cool enough to make mist of people’s breath.

  She peeked up through the front windshield. The sky stretched away, pale and cloudless.

  Janis had told her parents that Blake was taking her to Cedar Key, a quaint little town on the Gulf coast, for the day. Instead, she was having him drive two hours north and west. Janis didn’t know what Blake had told his own parents and didn’t ask. She hated the thought of him having to lie to them for her sake. She never wanted to be that girl. But this was life and death.

  She looked over at him. “I really do appreciate you doing this.”

  “I’m glad I can help, especially if your friend’s in as much trouble as you say.”

  Janis’s gaze latched onto the approaching green sign showing cities and distances: Tallahassee 46.

  “So what’s the plan once we get there?”

  “First, I’m going to call the police anonymously. Tell them that someone’s planning an assassination at the rally. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have to persuade Star to stay off stage.”

  “And if she says no?”

  “Then it’s on to Plan B, but I’m not ready to talk about that yet.” The Plan B Janis had worked out would be riskier — far riskier. If she was even a split second off… Janis drew her socked feet up onto the seat and hugged her knees.

  Blake watched her for a moment from behin
d Polo sunglasses, then returned his gaze to the road. “You know I have to ask…”

  “How I know all of this?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Janis set her chin on her knees. “That night you took me out for my birthday, I said there were things about myself I couldn’t explain. I didn’t think you’d understand. But maybe I was more afraid of what you’d think of me if you did understand.” Janis reflected on Amy and the horrible secret she’d kept locked away for all those years. She lowered her legs. “I guess the best way to sum it up is that I’m not normal. I’ve been having experiences — experiences I never asked for — that I can’t always explain.”

  “What kinds of experiences?”

  Start with a sample and see what happens. “Well, sometimes I have dreams. And when the dreams are especially vivid, when I’m practically awake inside of them, they sometimes come true.”

  Blake appeared to mull that over. “You had a dream that your friend was shot?”

  Janis nodded. “And it’s not as farfetched as it sounds. Her sister was assassinated at a similar rally a couple of years ago.”

  “And you don’t think the dream came from this knowledge? From you already knowing about her sister?” He passed a car and slid back into the right lane. “I’m not trying to sound skeptical. I just want to understand.”

  Janis recalled the sound of the gunshot in the experience, the way it clapped through her. “No,” she said.

  “Then I believe you.”

  She lifted her face. “Really?”

  “If you say this is happening to you, then it’s happening to you.” He found her hand and squeezed. “You’ve never given me any reason to doubt you. But now I have another question.”

  “What is it?”

  “Do you think less of me for not having these kinds of experiences? Is that why you gave the ring back?”

  “No, of course not.” She squeezed his hand, but hadn’t there been the slightest hesitation in her throat before answering him? “Of course not,” she said again. Then, releasing his hand, she went back to watching the side of the interstate for more mileage signs.

  * * *