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

by Brad Magnarella

  “Here?” Margaret asked.

  “No, in a separate training facility. We’ll send instructions. In the meantime, I’ll have you go ahead and sign your contracts. All except for Janis and Scott. We’re going to need to amend yours.”

  Scott watched the others pull the multi-page contracts from their packets and flip through them. Before Scott’s face could prickle with shame, Janis leaned toward him. “Thanks for having my back.”

  “Anytime, partner,” he whispered.

  She leaned closer. “He’s hard to read, but he’s holding back about the last group. Something happened to them. I’d like to know what.”

  Though Scott nodded, he had only half-heard her. He was watching the others pen their signatures.

  “Well, I hope we can impress you two sufficiently to join the cause.” Without Scott realizing it, Director Kilmer had circled the table and come to a stop behind them. “Your country is going to need all of the talent we can assemble, and the two of you are especially gifted.”

  Scott glanced over at Janis, who remained silent. “Yes, sir,” he said for both of them.

  Kilmer squeezed his shoulder until it almost hurt. A reminder. This group’s going to need a leader.

  “Good,” he said and moved off.

  Janis stared after him. “Definitely hiding something,” she whispered.

  3

  Arlington, Virginia

  Thursday, January 5, 1961 — Twelve days until Eisenhower’s address

  11:02 a.m.

  “It gets worse,” Director Halstead said.

  Reginald wasn’t sure if he had come to hold Madelyn’s hand or she his. Probably the second. Her thumb pressed into the flesh of his palm: a call for restraint. Reginald looked from their clasped hands, yin and yang, then back up to Director Halstead, sitting behind his desk. He’d aged ten years since they had last spoken to him only ten days earlier. The skin beneath his eyes was gray and pouched, his cheeks jowly. Even his receding crew cut seemed to have turned a duller shade of brown.

  “Worse?” Reginald said, his voice breaking up. “A car crash, a heroin overdose. How in the hell could it get worse?”

  The skin beneath Director Halstead’s eyes hardened in a way that said, Watch it. I’m still your superior. Halstead’s gaze fell back to the cigarette between his knuckles, where smoke rose in tired curls. “The police recovered two bodies from the Potomac on Monday.”

  “Yeah, we heard,” Reginald said. “They think one might’ve been that missing wrestler.”

  Halstead’s gaze remained frank and glum.

  “Oh God,” Madelyn whispered, her fingers clamping Reginald’s.

  And then Reginald understood. He should have held Madelyn to him, should have comforted her, but he was about to lose his head.

  The story had been on the news, in the papers, even down in the Florida Keys, where he and Madelyn had spent their leave. Two bodies, beaten and bloated beyond recognition discovered on the river shore of the nation’s capital. The media had speculated one was Bud Body, a professional wrestler turned fitness guru who had been missing for two weeks. Now the truth: The bodies belonged to their closest friends and compatriots, the indestructible Harry Tillman, also known as Titan, and Shirley Syson, the witty Firebrand. Champions. Murdered and dumped into the river like sacks of garbage.

  “Can we assume the other two were acts of murder, too?” Madelyn asked.

  “That’s what we’re going on,” Hal said.

  The room seemed to lean for Reginald when he stood. “Who did it?”

  Halstead snubbed out his cigarette. “We’re working on that.”

  “Fine, I can work on it, too.” Reginald stood over him. “Names. I want names.”

  “You know it doesn’t work like that.”

  “Oh, right. I’m just the help.” Reginald wrung his hands as the molecules over his face shifted into a caricature of Uncle Tom, lips fleshing out, eyes growing rounder and whiter. “You gots water that need fetchin’, massa?”

  It was immature, he knew, but he had just learned that four members of his team — his family for the last eight years, for Christ’s sake — had been executed like dogs. And Hal was telling him to sit on it.

  Reginald shifted back to his natural form, his eyes challenging Halstead, but Halstead didn’t flinch. Madelyn’s hands wrapped the inside of his elbow. Reginald almost shrugged her off and swept everything from Hal’s desk — his phone, crowded file baskets, butt-heaped ashtray. Instead, he let Madelyn draw him back to his chair. She had that effect on him.

  Sighing, Halstead stood and plodded to a small table, where he picked up an empty coffee mug and a bottle of scotch. “Look, I’m angry too.” On the other side of his heavy body, glass clinked and liquid gurgled out. He screwed the cap back on. “But we have to be smart. Anger’s not going to find these guys. It’s not going to put us in a position to nail them.”

  “So what do we do in the meantime?” Reginald demanded. “Walk around with targets on our backs?” He was thinking of Madelyn and their future. For the first time, a bitter, biting fear stole into the flesh of his mouth, making him want to lash out even more.

  Hal took a gulp from his mug and plodded back to his desk. He straightened his narrow black tie with his other hand as he sat.

  “We’re putting you two in a safe house,” he said.

  Reginald pressed his lips together. A safe house would mean isolation, zero communication with the outside world. Even the thought of it made his mind strain like a caged tiger’s. It was too much like the state homes he’d grown up in. “And do what?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Halstead said bluntly. “That’s the point.”

  “You have the world’s most powerful psionic and a shape shifter sitting in front of you, and that’s your plan? Do nothing?” He could feel Madelyn in his mind, shushing his anger down, but it was growing beyond her influence. Reginald took a steadying breath. “Look, you want to protect us. I get that. So why not let us stay in Arlington, in our old training dorms? We can help.”

  Halstead shook his head. “The fewer people who know your location, the better.”

  “He wants to rule out an inside job,” Madelyn explained.

  Reginald looked from her to Halstead. His face gave no sign one way or the other, which meant Madelyn was right. It had been years since any of the staff could keep her from reading their thoughts.

  “Inside? Oh, come off it, Hal,” he said. “We all know it’s the Russians. They’re smuggling mercenaries in through their embassy and sheltering them in that compound in northwest D.C.”

  “We’re exploring that possibility as well.”

  “Ever since we took out their squad of Artificials in Berlin, they’ve been looking to even the score. And you wanna know what I think?” Reginald jabbed his finger past Hal. “I think President Ike and his stuffed suits across the river are so afraid of open confrontation with the Soviets that they’re gonna let them do it. Gonna let them pick us off one by one, then board a plane back to Moscow. All while you’re exploring the goddamned possibility.”

  Reginald was itching for a fight, but Hal wouldn’t chase the red cape. Instead, he took another swallow from his mug and wiped his lips with the back of a hand.

  “The safe house is in Montgomery County. We’ve got cover stories worked out for you two.” Hal’s gaze shifted to Madelyn. “Sorry, hon, but we’re going to have to do something about the hair. Cover it with a scarf, at the least. As for you, Reggie…” He looked Reginald up and down.

  “You want me to go whitey again.”

  “America’s not ready for an interracial couple. Lucy and Desi Arnaz, maybe…” Hal shrugged. “But you two are only going to draw attention, and that’s the last thing we want.”

  “Oh, so America would prefer something like this.” It had taken years of head-splitting practice, but Reginald could rearrange his features fairly well without the aid of a mirror. He morphed into a semblance of Mad magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman, foo
tball-shaped head and gapped front teeth.

  Without comment, Hal slid a file to each of them: new identities.

  “You’re a social sciences professor from U.C. Berkeley, late thirties,” Hal said after Reginald had melded back and begrudgingly begun flipping through the documents. “You’re on sabbatical leave, researching race relations in the nation’s capital. Anyone calls the university out west, it’ll check out. Your wife here’s photosensitive and stays indoors mostly.”

  Reginald wasn’t sure if the flinch he felt at the word “wife” was Madelyn’s or his own. They had discussed that possibility while curled up together in their ocean-side cabin the week before, a cool night breeze rumbling off the surf. She was all for marriage. He was reluctant. He said the same thing Hal had, in fact, about America not being ready. Madelyn had asked if he was afraid of America or afraid of her. That’s how a lot of their fights had been starting lately.

  “It sounds like you’re dropping us in the middle of the suburbs,” Madelyn said to Hal.

  “That’s right. Hiding you in plain sight.”

  “That’s your plan to keep us safe?” Reginald asked, sliding his arm around Madelyn’s waist. He could have cared less about himself. And then it occurred to him that if Hal was afraid of an inside job, then the plan made immense sense. After all, the fewer people who knew their whereabouts, the better.

  “We’ll have a service keeping an eye on you.” Hal must have seen something on their faces because he added, “Not our guys. These will be private contractors. They’ll have no idea who you are or why they’re protecting you. They do this kind of work all the time. Have a rock-solid reputation.”

  For the first time since walking into Hal’s office, Reginald relaxed a little. The rest of their team was gone, one made to look like an accident, one an overdose, and two bludgeoned to death and rolled into the Potomac. Six Champions reduced to two. Just like that. He’d get his revenge, but in the meantime Madelyn would be safe. That’s what mattered. And with the kind of arrangement Hal was talking about, Reginald might even have an opportunity to snoop around, start getting some answers on his own. Hal would never have to know.

  The intercom crackled, and the voice of Mrs. Nance, the office secretary, issued from the small desk speaker: “Director? You have a call holding from Assistant Director Kilmer.”

  Hal looked at his phone and then at the two of them. “Are we good on this for now?”

  “Yes,” Madelyn said, hands folded over her stomach. She turned toward Reginald.

  He sighed. “I guess so.”

  4

  Later that day

  Montgomery County, Maryland

  Windshield wipers slapped at a late afternoon rain as the taxi plunged deeper into a neighborhood that looked like something out of Father Knows Best. DeSotos and Studebakers lined the broad street. The taxi pulled up in front of a tree-shaded home that was almost identical to the others. Reginald and Madelyn stooped to peer out. A pair of white gables peered back. Underneath, fledgling bushes flanked a pleasant front porch. Reginald paid the cabbie, then opened the umbrella outside the car and helped Madelyn from the backseat.

  They hurried up the walkway, heels snapping over the wet cement.

  “Our first home,” Madelyn remarked, surveying a plot beside the porch where someone had begun a flowerbed.

  “Not exactly what I’d pictured, either.” Reginald unlocked the door. Under different circumstances, he might have swept Madelyn up and carried her over the threshold, both of them laughing. Instead, he held the door open for her. An alien scent swirled around him. Reginald removed Madelyn’s coat, then his own, and hung them on pegs beside the front door.

  Madelyn turned a slow circle in the living room. A stack of boxes sat against one wall. Hal had said they would contain scholarly books. The return addresses were for a social sciences department in California, complete with the university’s insignia. Hal had been thorough.

  Madelyn untied the scarf that bound her head and shook out her blond hair.

  “We should comb the place,” Reginald said. “Do a top-to-bottom.”

  She slipped her arms beneath Reginald’s and pressed her head against his chest. “In a minute.” The soft scent of her perfume climbed through the foreign smell of the house, evoking memories of happier times. “I need a moment to catch my breath.”

  Reginald felt a hitch.

  “Hey, now,” he whispered, stroking the back of her hair. “It’s gonna be all right. Everything’s gonna be all right.”

  Reginald rocked her. Gray rain streaked the living room windows. Madelyn inhaled, then raised her face, drawing a finger beneath each eye.

  “Even at eighteen, I understood that death came with the job,” she said. “A part of me might have even welcomed it back then, but that was before I came to know the others, to know you. All the campaigns, all the close calls — how many times did we face death, Reggie? And now, two-thirds of us are just … gone.”

  In the psychic rapport they shared, Madelyn’s sorrow felt like a yawning hole. Reginald took her by the shoulders and shook her once, firmly. She blinked up at him.

  “We can’t go there,” he said. “Not now. Look, whoever knocked off the others is looking for us. The only reason we’re still here is that we drove to Florida on a whim. Made ourselves hard to find without meaning to. But we can’t count on dumb luck anymore. We have to treat this like any other campaign, and that means starting with a thorough search of the house.” He pulled her close, her stomach warm against his. “I’m sorry, baby, but there’s too much at stake.”

  She nodded, sniffling away her sorrow. The hole in their rapport shrank. She straightened, a Champion again, and set off. The air around Reginald began to tingle as she reached throughout the house with her psychic gift.

  You’re right, he heard her whisper in his thoughts. I’m sorry.

  You’ve got nothing to be sorry for, he thought back. Not after everything she had done for him.

  Reginald went room to room, turning on lights, checking closets. In the back bedroom, he discovered a white man with a trim goatee and shag of light brown hair. Reginald instinctively flexed into a fighting stance only to have the man do the same, the eyes behind his oval glasses large and startled.

  “Shit,” Reginald whispered, straightening his black turtleneck from the waist. His reflection in the mirror did the same.

  “Everything all right?” Madelyn called from another room.

  “Yeah, just forgot what I was wearing.”

  He stepped closer to the mirror. Except for a wayward line here, the faintest color lapse there, his face had held up well in the two hours since he’d donned it in Arlington. He didn’t have to concentrate too much to hold a new form anymore, though he could feel the molecules straining toward their natural structure.

  Hal had suggested a learned, slightly “beatnik” look. The deep blue eyes that peered out from the mirror were the one feature Reginald hadn’t changed. He was the only black man he knew with eyes that color.

  Reginald tightened his face up and drew the mirrored door open on a closet. Half the rack was lined with slacks, turtlenecks, and corduroy jackets with elbow patches. The other half held women’s attire. He pushed his hand past them until he encountered the rear wall.

  The rest of the house looked equally secure, the attic large and empty.

  He planned to finish his search with the basement. By this time, Madelyn had returned to the living room and was hovering cross-legged above a Turkish rug, eyes closed, her flats on the carpet. The air around Reginald vibrated. He walked softly, not wanting to disturb her.

  Beyond the small door off the kitchen, he descended a narrow set of wooden steps to a cement basement. He pulled a string that dangled from a bulb and looked around the amber light. The basement featured a new washer and dryer, a barrel-sized water heater, pipes climbing up to the ceiling. Against one wall stood a large metal shelf for holding tools, but it was empty. The room smelled earthen, almo
st like body odor. The scent stirred something in the pit of Reginald’s stomach, but he disregarded it. The basement was empty.

  When Reginald returned upstairs, Madelyn was just opening her eyes. She lowered herself onto the couch.

  “Looks clean,” he said. “How does it feel?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re already being watched by Apex Security, or whoever they are. I’m picking up traces of them. Cross currents, like radio chatter. A few are in the house next door. Others are out on walks or cruising the neighborhood in cars, but they’re all focused on us.”

  Reginald looked out the window in time to see a man in a black trench coat and umbrella saunter along the sidewalk in front of the house. Reginald pulled the curtains closed and joined Madelyn on the couch. He palmed her stomach, caressing it in slow circles.

  “The good news is they don’t know who we are,” Madelyn said. “Don’t know we’re Champions. They’re professionals, like Hal said. And expert at what they do.”

  Let’s hope so, Reginald thought, and touched his lips to her neck. She murmured in protest even as she rolled toward him, her legs, clad in sheer stockings, whispering against one another.

  “Does it bother you, being kissed by a strange face?” he asked.

  “I don’t see, I feel.” Her fingers dug into his hair. “And what I feel is so, so beautiful.”

  He released his molecules and became Reginald. She pulled his turtleneck over his head and off his outstretched arms. That evening, he and Madelyn made love for what would be the last time.

  5

  Graystone household

  Saturday, June 15, 1985

  6:00 a.m.

  Janis was dreaming of a rotating yin-yang symbol, a fluid melding of black and white, when an alarm sounded, blowing the image apart. Her eyes flew open to a dark bedroom. She fumbled for the snooze button on her radio/alarm clock before understanding the sound was more annoying — more penetrating — than the one that customarily awakened her.