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

by Brad Magnarella

  White sunlight shone over the capitol’s tall columns and the broad lawn that fronted them. While a crew fussed with a sound system on the capitol’s steps, men and women — like the ones in Janis’s vision — milled on the lawn and beneath the oak trees in loose clusters, some of them kneeling to work on their protest signs.

  On the other side of Monroe Street, Janis made a visor with her hands and counted one, two police cars — hardly the “vigilant police presence” the 911 dispatcher had promised. Blake had pulled into a Shell station off the interstate fifteen minutes earlier, where Janis had placed her call.

  Janis threw her hands down.

  “It’s still early,” Blake said, massaging her shoulder.

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to leave anything to chance.” She squinted around, trying to think like a sniper. Apalachee Parkway, the street Blake had parked off of, ended across from the capitol building. On one corner of the street was a parking lot, on the other, a small park — both potential candidates for a sniper to set up. Two blocks away, a single building poked above the trees, the only one tall enough, it appeared, to offer a clear shot to the capitol steps.

  “How about we split up?” Janis said. “I’ll take this side of the street and the parking lot, you take that one. Check in the bushes, up in the trees. Everywhere. If you see anything that seems off, tell one of those policemen. I’m going to do a quick check of that building down there, too.”

  “You sound like you know what you’re doing.”

  “I don’t,” Janis said. “But I watched enough Charlie’s Angels growing up to fake it.”

  “Where should we meet?”

  “How about over there, under that tree.” Janis pointed out an oak on the edge of the capitol lawn. “If we haven’t found our shooter, we’ll need to look for Star and warn her.”

  As Blake nodded, his lips creased as though he’d tasted something sour.

  “What is it?” Janis asked.

  “You introduced me to Star after school that time, remember? I don’t think she liked me very much.”

  “Welcome to the club.”

  Janis checked the sky as Blake jogged across the street. The blue was growing but had yet to approach the level she’d seen in her vision. She crossed a narrow lawn toward the filled-to-capacity parking lot. She scanned the glinting glass and metal for creepy cargo vans, heavily tinted windows, or pickups with covered beds but spotted none of the usual suspects.

  Beginning on the near side, she snaked the length of the lot, peeking into every car and truck. She reached out with her thoughts as well, probing the air for murderous intentions. Occasionally, Janis turned back toward the capitol building, gauging angles. When she reached the final car, she was as certain as she could be that the lot was clean. She wondered how Blake was faring.

  Applause rose from the capitol lawn. Janis spun, her heart in her throat, but the woman standing before the podium was not Star. If anything, she was Star’s antithesis… and familiar looking.

  Janis squinted at the middle-aged woman in the swooping blond Mary Tyler Moore ’do and pink cardigan. “Barbara Collingsworth,” Janis whispered at the same moment the woman introduced herself to the crowd. Janis’s father muted the television whenever she appeared on the news. She was one of Florida’s two representatives to the U.S. Senate, a Democrat, and an evident supporter of the nuclear freeze movement.

  But if the speakers were already starting — Janis checked the sky again — she needed to get moving.

  The building whose highest floor peered above the surrounding treetops looked like something out of a Humphrey Bogart film. A long vertical sign threaded with neon bulbs (long burned out, no doubt) read HOTEL SINCLAIR. Janis’s rapid breaths fogged the air as she looked the whitewashed building up and down. She counted six floors. The windows along the ground level had been boarded over, several with notices warning against trespassing.

  Shielding her eyes, Janis studied the topmost floor: seven windows inset atop an ornate stone ledge. Janis ran her gaze across them, then locked on the middle one, the one that didn’t quite belong. Its horizontal pane stood higher than the other windows’. Someone had slid it open, not by much — a crack, maybe — but how much space did a rifle barrel require?

  Fear stole the moisture from her mouth.

  Do I run back and tell the police? Is there even time?

  She could no longer see the capitol lawn, but she could hear occasional bursts of applause. Star might be going on at that very moment, for all she knew. Janis assessed the sky — still paler than in her vision — then trained her gaze back on the middle window, top floor.

  You once told yourself that if you’d had the power to prevent Star’s sister’s death, you would have. Well, your powers have led you here. And now you have the chance to alter Star’s future.

  Put up or shut up.

  Janis crossed a patchwork of crabgrass and sand to the side of the hotel. She went window to window, pulling on boards, her heart pumping with a firm but steady rhythm, like a ritual drum. At the back corner of the hotel, behind an eruption of bushes, she found a loose board — or rather, the board covering the bottom half of the window had been completely removed and then wedged back in place, as though someone were trying to hide the entrance. A cinder block sat in the weeds beneath the window.

  Janis glanced around but didn’t see anyone, not even her “escort of one.” After what Scott had told her, she assumed someone had followed her and Blake from Gainesville though she hadn’t spotted any cars tailing them — no obvious ones, anyway. She tugged the board free, stepped up on the cinder block, and peered into a dark, cavernous room. A cold, stale draft brushed her face. The draft carried a smell of decades long gone and decomposition.

  “You’ve done some stupid things in your life, Janis Graystone,” she whispered, “but this…”

  She set one leg over the sill and then, ducking, pulled her other leg inside before anyone outside spotted her. She crouched beneath the window. When her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she made for the room’s faint entrance. The carpet squished softly beneath her shoes, the sensation more than the sound raising her hackles.

  She emerged from what she guessed had been the hotel’s dining room into a once-grand lobby. The boarded-over windows dimmed the marble floor, but some light fell in from the mezzanine, illuminating the empty space. Here and there lay empty beer cans, crumpled paper bags, and the scatter of smashed bottles. Janis kept near the wall as she crept. Cigarette burns dotted the yellowing wallpaper, with crushed butts hugging the baseboards. Above her, someone had scrawled FEAR TRIPS in dark red paint. Probably high schoolers, Janis told herself. They come in here at night to scare-slash-impress their girlfriends, crack beers, pass the bottle, tell ghost stories… And Janis could hardly imagine a better candidate for a haunting. Eyeing the front desk, she half expected a dusty skeleton to rise from behind the wooden counter, tip his hat, and ask, “May I help you?”

  Janis jumped when she heard something that sounded like a distant cough. Bracing against what had once been the lobby’s stone fireplace, she listened, eyes wide. When she didn’t hear the sound again, she decided it had come from the traffic outside, a truck backfiring, maybe.

  “Hold it together, girl,” she whispered.

  Beside the hotel’s elevator, she found a stairwell. The elevator itself was a classic make with an arc of wrought-iron numbers inset above the caged door. As though announcing Janis’s fate, the arrow pointed to 6.

  The stairwell door creaked open onto a flight of wooden steps. A mean stench of urine wrinkled Janis’s nose. The smell of decomposition, which had whispered around the lobby, was stronger in the stairwell, pushing up beneath the urine. Janis dragged a stone planter from beside the elevator and propped the stairwell door wide. It would spare her total darkness for a few flights, anyway.

  Heart drilling her sternum, Janis crossed the threshold and began her ascent.

  The darkness closed in by the third floor, and by
the fourth floor it enveloped her. So did the smell. Janis pulled the collar of her sweatshirt up over her nose and breathed through her mouth.

  Two more floors to go.

  Her hand sliding along the wooden rail, she counted her steps. She’d learned that each floor consisted of ten steps, a small landing with a 180-degree turn, and then ten more steps. The stink of decomposition approached her gag threshold. A fly buzzed past her head — a rapid zzzip — then the stairwell fell quiet, save for the thin creaks of wood beneath Janis’s shoes.

  One more.

  She began to wince with the certainty that at any moment she would hear the clap of a gunshot, she would be too late. She turned the corner that marked the midpoint of the final flight.

  Just let me get there in ti—

  Her foot thudded into something soft and heavy. From the floor came a sound like a weed whacker buzzing to life. Janis grunt-screamed and threw her hands to her face, her cheeks and brow stinging from what felt like hail pellets. Some landed, crawling, on the backs of her hand. Flies. Bristle-legged flies. She couldn’t see them, but she imagined their swollen bodies, black and bottle green, hundreds and hundreds of them, still swarming up her. One ricocheted around the inside of her ear before flying out. She shook her hands and batted at the air around her head. A putrid smell joined the insect swarm, one that reached through the fabric of her sweatshirt and squeezed the uvula in the back of her throat until she gagged.

  The flies had been burrowing inside a rotten carcass at her feet.

  She stumbled backward, nearly losing her grip on the rail, and beat a retreat. Back on the fifth floor, she found her legs again. She cupped a hand over her sweatshirt-covered nose and inhaled the scent of her mother’s fabric softener. Ten steps above her, the flies settled back over their breeding ground.

  Please don’t let that be a person.

  Janis clung to the end of the railing, her eyes feeling huge in the dark. Every instinct shrieked at her to flee down the staircase, across the lobby, through the window and back out into the sane sunlight and vigorous blue day. But the thought of the sky stopped Janis. It wouldn’t be long before it was a vigorous blue — if it wasn’t already.

  She swallowed and eased back up the steps. At the landing, she shuffled forward, her toe feeling for the slightest contact. A single buzz sang out. Janis stopped. Nearly underneath her, there rose a wet sound, like lips smacking.

  And those would be maggots.

  Pinching her eyes closed, Janis lifted her front foot to hip level, reached as far forward as she could, and lowered it. Slowly. When her foot met bare ground, she exhaled. But in lifting her rear foot, the toe of her shoe nudged the carcass. Flies erupted. Janis scrambled up the final steps — eight, nine, ten! — and began pawing the wall for the door to the sixth floor.

  She found a handle and pulled. Pale light met her eyes. She hesitated, then, holding the door open with her foot, peeked down the stairwell. The dog had belonged to a large breed. German shepherd, maybe, judging by the steep triangular ears. Bloated now and bald, it lay on its side like a mother offering up its milk — or in this case, its rot. Thousands of flies shimmered over it.

  How in the world did it get in the stairwell? From deeper down, another voice whispered, Who put it there?

  Janis grimaced and stepped into a carpeted hallway. Across it to her right, a couple of doors stood open, allowing in natural light. Janis stopped to orient herself. The side of the hotel facing the capitol building would be to her left, around the corner.

  She crept from the open doors and along the dimming hallway. If there was a shooter up here, he’d probably be in position by now, watching the capitol steps through his scope.

  But what if he heard me cry out in the stairwell? What if he can hear me now?

  Janis reached the corner and peeked around. Another hallway stretched away from her, empty except for a square of light illuminating the pale-ochre carpet halfway down. Releasing her breath in a slow exhale, Janis craned her neck to count the doors. The light was being cast from the middle of the seven rooms, the same room where the window pane stood a few inches higher than the others.

  Put up or shut up.

  Janis concentrated until the smell of salt filled her nose and the air began to crackle and hum. Threads of light grew around her, quivering in and out of focus. As in Amy’s presence the night before, the sensations came quickly — fed by fear this time rather than fury. But the fury was there, too, Janis realized, simmering just beneath the surface, like a pot of heated oil.

  Pushing up her sweatshirt sleeves, Janis passed the room numbered 608, its door sealed, then room 609. She studied the diffusion ahead of her. Was that a shadow bisecting the light or a trick of her mind?

  Make him fear you, a voice was already telling her. Make him feel pain.

  Janis’s heart was pounding too hard to question the voice. Besides, she sensed that without the voice, the sensations would disappear. She would become plain Janis Graystone again, a fine enough goalie but no match for someone wielding a high-powered rifle.

  Room 610 slid by to her right.

  Blood is good, the voice whispered.

  Janis stopped outside room 611, her shoulder to the door frame, and counted to three. With a whip of her head, she ventured a peek. Back behind the door frame, her mind assembled what she’d seen. A large room with refuse pressed up against one wall. A sniper’s nest? She shook her head. The window had been cracked open, yes — Janis could still envision the panes and the tops of trees and buildings in silhouette — but the floor in front of the window had been empty. No boxes, no crouching figure, no rifle.

  The air still crackling around her, Janis stepped into room 611.

  The room appeared as she had seen it at a glance. Save for the trash heap against one wall, the long suite was mostly barren. A sheet of newspaper skittered over stained carpet as a fresh breeze pushed through the cracked-open window. Whatever prestigious history the hotel had once boasted — regularly hosting this or that politician, dignitary, or film star — was just that: history.

  Janis approached the window and peered down toward the capitol building. The demonstrators now crowded the lawn all the way to the oak trees lining Monroe Street, where she was glad to see a couple more squad cars. Senator Collingsworth continued to address the crowd in her pink cardigan with finger points and small pumps of her fist.

  All right, a quick check of the other six rooms, then we’ll get out of here and see if Blake found anything.

  She was gauging the color of the sky, bluer now, certainly, when a roar of cheering reached her ears. She watched in horror as Senator Collingsworth yielded the podium to a rail-thin girl with a black shirt and spiked hair.

  “Shit!” Janis cried.

  At the same moment she spun from the window, the trash heap at the side of the room rattled to life. Janis froze. The man who emerged, newspapers and soiled sheets spilling from him, staggered to his feet. Janis spied the corner of the gray mattress where he’d been sleeping. He blinked at her from a whiskered, tobacco-stained face, a brown wool hat pulled almost to his ears. The left earlobe was split, Janis saw. She followed the pale scar down his neck.

  “I-I’m sorry,” Janis stammered. “I didn’t know anyone lived here.”

  On odd light grew in the bum’s eyes as his face slid toward a leer. Behind his nubs of teeth, his tongue rolled back and forth.

  “I’m leaving now.” She had to force the words from her constricting throat.

  He shambled to the middle of the room, cutting her off, the hems of his blue pant legs flapping around filthy socks. A toe poked through a hole in one of them, its nail orange and horny.

  “Oh, you’re not going anywhere.” He smiled that awful, wet smile again.

  You don’t make it out of here in the next minute, and Star’s a goner.

  The vibrations roared inside Janis. She raised her palm just as she had done that morning in the Leonards’ bathroom. Except this time she could see th
e lines joining subject with object, cause with effect. And as she eyed the ruin of a human being blocking her way, fury boiled through her fear.

  “Don’t make me hurt you,” she said.

  “Hurt me?” He clapped his thick hands. Then he began jumping up and down in a strange dance, making the room shudder, his eyes never leaving hers. The luminous threads flickered in and out with Janis’s concentration.

  “Wake up, wake up!” the bum’s voice boomed. “We’ve got a visitor!”

  When the bum stopped, his eyes shifted side to side on his grinning face, as though he were listening. Janis caught herself listening, too. The old walls of the hotel began to creak. A bump sounded. From the room below, a phlegmy bout of coughing erupted. Somewhere on the sixth floor, a door banged opened. And then another. Footsteps seeped into the hallway.

  Janis staggered back until her hands encountered the cold glass of the window.

  “Now what was that about hurting me?” the bum whispered, drawing a long, serrated knife from inside his coat. His oily face shone as he advanced. Behind him, the first shadows filled the doorway.

  26

  Scott opened his eyes to a pale blur and a pounding headache. He started to roll onto his side before groaning to a stop. No, calling it a headache would be putting it sweetly. His brain felt like it had been removed with ice tongs, the inside of his skull lined with sandpaper and metal wool, handfuls of tacks and screws thrown in — and, what the hell, a tumbler of Tabasco sauce — his brain dropped back into place, and the whole thing shaken like a Magic 8 Ball.

  Will Scott Spruel wish for death? Outlook good.

  He smacked his lips and ran a furry tongue over his braces. Even that bit of exertion hurt, and that was to say nothing of the demonic taste.

  “Saints alive,” he mumbled.

  He made it to the side of his bed and lowered his legs. He remained there, elbows on his knees, head in his hands, until the spinning stopped. Squinting toward his alarm clock, he found a blinking red blob. Power must have gone out last night. The sun was up, anyway, and bright against his closed blinds. He pawed over his bedside table for his glasses.