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

by Brad Magnarella

  Escort of one.

  Scott pushed up his glasses and peeked over at the others. Jesse, who was almost as large as the mound he’d parked behind, regarded Tyler with solemn gray eyes. Creed was semi-reclined against the rear bumper, scowling.

  “So Jesse pulled up onto this road here and turned around,” Tyler said. “I thought he was going to let the other car pass, you know, maybe start following to see if we could tell who it was. But when it was about to there” — Tyler pointed out a distant streetlight — “Jesse gunned it. Pedal to the metal. We caught air at the curb. Hit the other car going sixty, easy.”

  “Good god,” Scott muttered.

  “Nobody follows me,” Jesse said, and for the first time, Scott noticed he was cradling his left arm.

  “At first that was all I remembered,” Tyler said, “the impact. I didn’t even remember some of the stuff that happened before, like driving out to the field or seeing the car parked. But then something happened last night.” He glanced over at Creed. “And it was like remembering part of a song lyric. Just a few words at first, but the more I went over it in my head, the more words I remembered. Gave me a damn migraine, but after sleeping on it and thinking it over some more this morning, I had the whole song. I didn’t trust it at first — some of it was strange — all right, a lot of it was strange — but when I told my brother he said, yeah, it sounded familiar. Jesse said the same thing. So don’t laugh or nothin.”

  Scott showed his palms. “No no, of course not.”

  “Well, first thing is, I saw the people we hit. Through the window. A man and woman. The car was a dark blue—”

  “Toyota Tercel,” Scott finished. The car had been flagged by his database program. It was one of the cars that had started following Jesse’s Chevelle back in January.

  “How’d you know?” Tyler asked.

  “I, ah…” The car belonged to the Niedermeyers, a middle-aged couple who lived on Oakwood’s main drag. Mr. Niedermeyer was often outside in shorts and a beige work shirt, fussing with his rose bushes.

  “I guessed,” Scott finished. “Tercels have rectangular headlights.”

  Tyler pulled a cigarette from a pack in his pocket and then, seeming to forget he’d done so, left it between his fingers. The cigarette shook a little. “Well, this wasn’t any old Tercel off the assembly line, I can tell you that.” He laughed dryly. “We hit the thing going close to sixty, like I said. The Chevelle practically landed on it. And…” He looked over at Jesse and Creed, eyebrows arching in a way that said, He’s never gonna believe this. “And the thing barely suffered a scratch.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you should have heard the sound of the collision. Metal crunching, glass shattering all around. I was thrown to the floor. But when we rocked to a stop and I pulled myself up, there was the Tercel. It’d been knocked into the opposite lane, spun halfway around, but there wasn’t a damned thing wrong with it. No dents, nothing broken or flat. Its headlights were still shooting straight, for Christ’s sake. The thing should’ve been caved in.”

  Scott caught himself thinking of the Leonards’ decrepit-looking shed and the way it had been reinforced on the inside.

  “And that’s when things really got twisted. Because next thing you know, their car’s turning around like it’s just gonna drive out of there, drive back to Gainesville. Only it doesn’t. I mean, it starts to, then it turns around again. Hits us with the brightest pair of beams I’ve ever seen. I remember Jesse throwing his arm up, his left one. That’s how I knew it wasn’t broken before… well, before what happened next. And my brother’s pushing his shades back on, and both lenses are lit up white. All I keep thinking is the car’s gonna hit us; it’s gonna plow right into us, like Jesse done them.”

  Scott, who hadn’t moved from his stance since Tyler began talking, realized his fists were balled tight inside his jacket pockets.

  “But then the car stops, maybe ten feet in front of us. A door opens and slams, and whoever’s walking toward us, the light just swallows him up ’til he looks like a stick figure. I hear Creed trying the car door. The frame’s bent around it, though, because it’s just rattling. It won’t open. Then two red lights appear outside the shattered windshield. At first I think they’re eyes.” He studied his unlit cigarette, as though noticing it for the first time, and then looked up at Scott. “I know how that sounds, but if you’d been there…” He turned back toward the road. “Well, that’s how they looked — like eyes, like something predatory.”

  Red lights… red eyes…

  “And then I realize that those eyes are on the end of something the person outside the car is holding, something he’s pointing at us. But I’m having a hard time seeing anything, even the high beams, because I’m blacking out. That’s when Creed got his door open, and he’s outside in a shot.”

  Scott could imagine. He’d been on the bad end of Creed’s speed in the past. But the red lights — the red lights that looked like eyes — he couldn’t stop wondering about them.

  “I hear my brother saying something, and I hear a man’s voice answer back — and they’re scuffling, I can hear that — but I’m just coming to my senses again, and I can’t make out what they’re saying. The red lights are waving around, not pointing inside the car anymore.”

  “Do you remember what he said?” Scott interrupted to ask Creed.

  Creed shook his head. “I don’t remember nothing, but a part of me’s nodding my head anyway. That should tell you something.” He snorted and spit off to his left. “All I know is I got busted up, and it didn’t happen from no accident.”

  “And then I heard a sound like—” Tyler gave the palm of his cupped hand a solid punch. “But louder, more compact. I hear my brother grunt, and then he’s bouncing off the side of the car like something knocked him clean off his feet. But I still can’t see anything because of the car’s brights.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Creed said, pushing himself from the rear bumper. His face had turned the color of wine again. He limped in a circle, no doubt imagining what he’d do if he ever got his hands — scratch that, his blades — on his attackers.

  “Jesse gets out, nearly throwing his door off the hinges,” Tyler continued. “But no sooner than he stands, there’s the same smacking sound. And Jesse slumps against the car door.”

  Jesse’s eyes held steady, but the muscles of his jaw had begun to tense.

  “And then it was just me in the car, and I’m…” Tyler’s gaze appeared to flicker between Jesse and Creed. “Well, I’m expecting to get mine, too, but I’m froze there. Then the red lights are back, except now they’re coming through the driver’s door, and I can’t seem to close my eyes or turn away. And then, that’s it.” He snapped his fingers. “I’m out.”

  Scott looked from Tyler’s insistent eyes to the scene of the accident. He imagined the Chevelle sailing off the curb into the Tercel, the awesome impact leaving one car fit for the scrap heap and the other without a scratch. Then one of the car’s occupants, Mr. Niedermeyer probably, approached with some sort of device — the one Janis described Mr. Leonard trying to use on her when he’d found her in his house. Something to render them unconscious and wipe their memories. After all, Tyler had gotten a look at their faces. But then Creed, maybe because of his shades (who would expect a kid to be wearing sunglasses at night?) resisted the effects of the red lights long enough to get his door open. He might even have gotten his blades into Mr. Niedermeyer. Come to think of it, Scott hadn’t seen him tending to his roses lately. Anyway, that’s when the missus would have taken action, shooting Creed with something blunt. She would have done the same to Jesse.

  But why hadn’t Tyler used his powers? Why hadn’t he hit them with a bolt of electricity or fried the device’s power supply like he’d done with Scott’s laser? Or maybe he had tried. Maybe the buildup of electrical energy had mitigated the effect of the device enough so that nearly a month later, he could reclaim those memories while Jesse’s and Cr
eed’s remained shrouded.

  He was preparing to pose the question to Tyler when Creed hobbled forward. “Who was it?” he asked, jabbing a finger at Scott’s chest.

  “I-I don’t know…”

  “New Year’s Eve,” Jesse said, plodding closer. “You said we were being watched.” His tone bore a dull weight of accusation, as if Scott was, if not to blame, then an accomplice.

  Scott shuffled a small retreat, his heart pounding the way it did when an ass kicking felt imminent. In fact, the circumstances felt uncomfortably similar to the night in the clearing. Only now he didn’t have his laser.

  “Back off, guys.” Tyler stepped between them. “Give him some space.”

  Jesse pulled up, then Creed.

  “We are being watched,” Scott said.

  “Then who’s watching?” Creed snarled.

  “If you give me a few minutes, I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Scott gave them the Cliff’s Notes version, explaining the brief history of the neighborhood and how, in the year it had been closed, it had been retrofitted for security and surveillance. He explained how their phones were being monitored, their homes watched, and each of them assigned a team. “Jesse’s car was being followed to school,” Scott said. “It’s all made to look incidental. You know, people just going to and from work, et cetera, but the patterns changed when school started.”

  “Wait a minute.” Creed straightened. “You’re saying the ones who did this live in Oakwood?”

  “Yeah, but hold on—” Scott held his hands up.

  “Screw hold on.” Creed pounded the side of the car with his fist. “C’mon, Jess. We’ve got a goddamned score to settle.”

  Scott had been afraid of that. He slipped ahead of Creed and splayed his back against the passenger door. “Listen to me; you do something to them, and you’re looking at jail time. No one’s gonna believe your story. The official story is that you were in a car accident, not attacked. And these people are like an ant colony. Take one or two out and others will just fill their roles. I mean, look what happened with the Leonards. They’re history, but the Graystones are still being watched.”

  He hadn’t mentioned that Mr. Leonard was bunkered out in their woods as they spoke. The information was far too sensitive. At that thought, his stomach gave a strange lurch.

  “Then we go door to door,” Creed said. “Waste the whole frigging lot of ’em.”

  “Who’s controlling them?” Jesse asked.

  Scott looked over to discover Jesse hadn’t budged, his gray eyes as still — and apparently deep — as ever. He possessed more sense than Scott had given him credit for. Jesse was thinking nerve center too.

  “Janis is looking into that,” Scott said. “She’s also going to learn why we’re being watched. I know it’s hard, especially after what Tyler’s remembered, but we’re going to need to take a deep breath and be patient. And I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but it’s not like you guys are in shape to do much of anything right now.” He eased from the door and away from Creed’s glare.

  “If we’re being followed,” Tyler said. “How come nobody followed us out here?”

  Scott scanned the length of empty road. Good question. Perhaps after the close call, the watchers had decided to exercise greater discretion, to use other means to monitor them.

  Closing his eyes, Scott focused toward the car. After several seconds, he sensed what he’d suspected he might.

  “Hey, Jesse,” he said. “Would you mind releasing the hood?”

  Jesse grunted and reached his arm into the driver’s side window. The hood clanked open. Scott thumbed the release and, propping up the hood, leaned inside. The others gathered around. Scott swam his hands around the engine. He found the device behind the engine block, beneath some tubes. Scott pried the magnetically-adhered device from the metal block with his fingernails and held it up for the others to see.

  “What is it?” Jesse asked.

  “It’s for tracking.” Scott turned it around in his hand, inspecting the matchbox-sized device from all sides: plain black, no markings, but he could feel it pulsing away. “Right now, it’s sending a signal that’s alerting a receiver to your whereabouts. Your engine was replaced after the wreck, right?”

  “Yeah, by Gus,” Jesse said.

  “You know the guy who did the work?”

  “Pretty well.” Jesse looked around at the others. “We all do. He works at an auto body shop during the day and bounces at a pool hall we shoot at. My dad knows him too.”

  Scott handed the tracking device to Jesse, who poked it around his meaty palm. He passed it to Tyler, who inspected it at arm’s length as though the thing might kick to life. Scott brought a knuckle to his lower lip. Either a watcher slipped into the body shop and slapped the device onto the new engine, or Gus put it there himself. (Nothing is what it seems, and no one can be trusted.) In almost the same thought, Scott saw Mr. Shine in his white suit leaning against the bleachers and grinning beneath his white hat.

  “I say we trash it.” Creed cocked his arm as though to spike the device against the ground.

  Scott surprised himself by seizing Creed’s wrist. “No!”

  Creed’s hair whipped around, and in the space of a second, Scott felt his arm twisted behind him and cranked up his back. He winced and leaned forward, pain knifing through his shoulder.

  “Getting a little bold, aren’t we?” Creed whispered, inching his arm higher.

  Scott grunted, and from the corner of his eye, saw Tyler rush forward. But it was Jesse who spoke.

  “Let him go,” he said.

  Creed hissed and shoved Scott, who caught himself against the car. His shoulder protested when he brought it around to his front, tendons snapping back into their proper positions.

  Scott winced and rotated his arm. “It’s just that we shouldn’t do anything rash. Destroy it now, and we might as well be announcing to them that the game’s up. And then any number of things could happen — some I don’t even want to think about. So let’s play along for now. It will give us time to discover who’s calling the shots, give you guys time to heal.”

  “So what do we do with it in the meantime?” Jesse took the device from Creed.

  “Put it back where we found it,” Scott replied.

  Creed continued to glare at Scott. “And you’ll tell us when you find out who’s gaming us?”

  “I… yeah, I’ll tell you.”

  They deserved to know. They were trapped inside Fort Oakwood too. Plus, it wouldn’t hurt having these guys on his and Janis’s side, for a change. He was going to have to find a way to manage their anger, though, their capacity for destruction — especially when they were back at full strength. He thought of the picture of Cyclops, his steely visor and square jaw looking out from the mirror, ready to lead. Scott tried to affect the same look.

  “I’ll communicate through Tyler,” he said. “There’s a bathroom on D Wing, downstairs. When it’s time to meet again, I’ll write out a message and slip it behind the final toilet, between the tank and wall. Can you check the bathroom every day around lunchtime?”

  Tyler nodded solemnly. “Yeah.”

  * * *

  The return trip was as silent as the ride out, Jesse and the others no doubt conscious of the alien device clinging to the engine block. Tyler had finally lit his cigarette, and through the smoke, Scott caught him taking peeks out the back window. Scott was thinking of Janis, though. He needed to arrange a time and place for their next info swap — their second date, if it could still be called that. Whatever the name, she’d have info from her meeting with Mr. Leonard—

  Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink.

  Scott stopped cold. His chest hitched, and a gray wave of guilt swirled, foaming around him. Cupping his closed eyes, Scott forced himself to continue visualizing the blinking bedside clock.

  That’s how they looked, he heard Tyler saying. Like eyes. Like something predatory. And then that’s it. I’m out.

  Sco
tt palpated his head as he had started to that morning. But all he felt was the normal bony contours of his cranium. No lumps or cuts.

  So not in a bike accident.

  Mr. Leonard had threatened Janis with a blinking device. The Niedermeyers had used one on Jesse and company. Had Agent Steel used one on him? The strain to remember threatened to split his brain in two. The gray wall of amnesia wouldn’t budge. All Scott could hear were Agent Steel’s questions, the ones he’d denied knowing the answers to.

  Why did you go into the shed? How did you open the hatch door? What did you see in the basement?

  Scott returned to the image of the blinking clock, and for an instant, he felt his jaw and tongue trying to move. He dabbed a dribble of saliva from his lower lip with his sleeve. Did the device just wipe memories, or did it do something more? The tide of guilt rose and washed around him again, foam hissing, an undercurrent sucking at his weak stomach.

  And then Agent Steel’s voice rocketed through his thoughts, as though she were standing in front of him, her cold eyes staring down.

  Where’s Mr. Leonard?

  Scott dropped his hand. “Oh, shit.”

  Tyler and Creed shifted around in their seats. Jesse’s pitted gray eyes appeared in the rearview mirror. “What?” he asked.

  29

  An hour earlier.

  “Where have you been?”

  Janis spun at her father’s voice, the front door clicking closed behind her. She sensed her pupils enlarging, adjusting to the dim interior of her house. Her father’s shadow stood in the entranceway to the den, a large book in his hand.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “It’s a simple question, Janis. Where have you been?”

  She recognized that tone. Thick, no nonsense, a tone that tended to presage punishment.

  Did he talk to Blake’s father?

  “We were on our way to, um, Cedar Key, but then I remembered my friend was speaking in Tallahassee.”

  “Which friend?”

  “Star.”

  Her father continued to stare at her. She didn’t have to see the features of his face to know that his brows were drawn together, the skin around his eyes deeply creased. Janis shifted her weight.