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

by Brad Magnarella

  He flinched at her voice. “Oh yeah, sure. Have a seat.”

  Janis set down her tray and slid her jumpsuit-clad legs over the metal bench. Janis noticed that rather than eating, Tyler had been pushing chunks of protein loaf around with a fork. His other three portions hadn’t been touched. A Dixie cup of colorful vitamins sat at his elbow, which reminded Janis that she’d forgotten to grab hers. She glanced again at his gaunt cheeks.

  “Tough morning?” she asked.

  “Every morning’s tough.”

  “Why? What’s Chad having you do?”

  “Oh, you know, zap this, zap that. The usual crap. I think I liked him better when he worked at the record store.”

  Janis was relieved to see his cracked lips thin into a smile. He looked that awful.

  “Well, nothing like a gourmet meal to turn your day around,” she said dryly. “Make you a deal. I’ll eat everything off my tray, if you promise to eat at least half of every portion off yours.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re scrawnier than Mick Jagger.”

  His lips cracked into another smile. “You sound like my moth…” His voice trailed off. He placed the piece of protein loaf he’d been pushing around into his mouth, chewed slowly, and swallowed.

  “Happy?” he asked, fixing her with a look that was surprisingly soft.

  “Very,” she said, and forked a bite into her own mouth.

  The protein loaf was nutty but otherwise bland. They ate in silence. Janis used the opportunity to feel around him. Something didn’t add up. Tyler had been the first to decide to commit to the Program, and yet all month long he’d been acting like he’d rather be anywhere else.

  Janis tried to wade deeper into his layers, but it was like pawing through a pea-soup fog. She couldn’t pick up anything save a bunch of blah.

  “So what made you decide to become a Champion?” she asked.

  “Honor and duty,” he said flatly.

  “No, really.”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes you do what you have to.”

  “Why do you have to?”

  Tyler appeared to think for a moment. “My family, I guess.”

  With that word, a brief opening appeared in the fog, and Janis saw Tyler as a scrawny twelve year old. Body bruised, eyes large and scared, foul smoke drifting around him, and the sense that something unspeakable had just happened. When she tried to peer closer, the fifteen-year-old version was sitting beside her again, watching her with heavy eyes.

  He gestured toward her plate with his fork. “Better get to work if you’re gonna keep up your end of the deal.”

  She smiled grimly and took another bite. They have something on him. The words coalesced into a hard certainty in her chest. Her thoughts went to Scott and Gabriella laughing together, then back to Tyler.

  Carrots and sticks, indeed.

  11

  That night

  Tyler Bast stood at his bedroom window, moths beating the screen in front of him, aiming for the moon’s reflection in the glass. He gazed past the moths to the rear fence where azalea bushes grew wild against the leaning slats. The ground beneath the bushes was dark and weed choked.

  How far down had he dug that night? Three feet? Four? Couldn’t remember. Some part of him — probably the part involved in self-preservation — had shut down.

  Or rather, floated up. From a safe, almost ethereal vantage, he had watched himself bury the wrapped body, pat the earth flat, and then scatter leaves and sticks over the site until it looked natural. For the hour it had taken him to perform the burial, he might as well have been someone else: hair wild, body bruised and sweat-soaked, eyes shocked.

  Tyler had only returned to himself in the shower. He remembered hearing the rush and tinkling of water and looking down to find soil and thin suds sliding from his toes into the rusty ring of a bathtub drain. He remembered how the smell of rancid smoke had mingled with the water vapor.

  With a final look past the moths, Tyler sighed. He hadn’t been the only one watching himself that night.

  And now the watchers owned him.

  He heard Chad’s voice from the first month of training driving him, demanding more and more of his ability to harness and unleash atmospheric electricity: “You’re holding back, damn it! You’re not giving me everything!” Chad remained as colorful as Tyler had known him from the record store, but there was an edge in his voice now. Hints of a debt owed. And Tyler knew the debt in question wasn’t from records loaned him. Not anymore.

  A thought came to Tyler.

  Erase the body, erase the debt.

  He listened toward the wall to his left, which separated his room from his brother’s. To everyone’s surprise, Creed had embraced training. Getting paid to “slice and dice” while receiving heaps of praise from Gus — it was all new for him. Creed, who up to that point had been hit with more detentions, expulsions, court dates, and threats of juvie than Tyler could count was being told he was doing something right for a change. And now Creed was sleeping like a contented child, the rise and fall of his nasal snores piercing the thin wall.

  Tyler listened toward the opposite wall. His mother had been stirring earlier, but now her room was silent.

  Stepping into a pair of engineer boots, Tyler slipped from his bedroom and stole down the stairs. The living room was just as he had rearranged it three years before, the pulled-back couch covering a man-sized patch of melted, blackened napping. He crept through the kitchen. In the garage, he pulled on a pair of work gloves and selected a shovel from the gang of long-handled tools leaning in one corner.

  At the door to the backyard, he closed his eyes. Something he had been working on — or rather something Chad had been having him work on — was shaping electrical energy into spheres. “They’ll weaken with size, but they can be used for disrupting whatever circuits happen to be in an area,” Chad had told him. “That could include computers, missile detectors…”

  Cameras, Tyler thought now.

  He grew a crackling sphere in the center of the backyard, feeding it energy until it was almost the size of the yard itself. The sound of television static filled Tyler’s ears. Raising the sphere, he guided it along the eaves of the roof, sensing the pops of two tiny circuits. From there, he floated the sphere through the surrounding trees. He swept every place that had an angle on his backyard, especially on where the azaleas grew wild.

  Four more circuits popped.

  Following a final, uneventful sweep, Tyler dispersed the sphere and pushed open the backdoor.

  The first scrape of the shovel into the earth seemed to cut through the entire neighborhood. Tyler paused, eyeing the top floor windows of his house. They remained dark. The neighborhood remained silent. He resumed digging, his shovel blade plunging through a layer of leaf fall and rotten petals, severing thin roots, clanking off an occasional stone.

  Find him first, then excavate around him, he thought.

  And then what?

  He would figure that out when the time came, but he already had a crude plan. Bag the remains — bones, clothes, the surrounding dirt, everything. Carry them to his dad’s old truck, which Creed and Jesse had restored earlier that summer. Then drive somewhere. Lake Wauberg, maybe. Drop the bag from the boardwalk where the alligators would devour it. Be rid of the evidence.

  But what if they follow you?

  The Program had placed a tracker on the truck’s engine block, like the one they’d stuck to Jesse’s Chevelle — Tyler had checked. They would depend on the tracker to keep tabs on him. He’d head north, ditch the device, then double back toward the lake. By the time the Program figured out they’d lost him, the deed would be done.

  Tyler heaved out another shovelful of earth from the expanding hole. The pile had grown waist high. He leaned forward. Shouldn’t there be a smell by now? When the hole reached the length of the shovel handle, Tyler knew something was wrong. No way he’d gone deeper than that three years before. He poked through the dirt pile. No bones, n
o bits of clothing. He returned to the hole, spending another ten minutes opening it in each direction.

  Still nothing.

  Queasiness seized Tyler’s stomach. He parked the shovel in the dirt pile and propped his hands on his knees, heart thudding. When the queasiness passed, he stared around the dark yard.

  Those sons of bitches beat me to it. Got him out first.

  Which meant he was still indebted to them.

  Grunting, Tyler levered the shovel from the pile and dropped a heap of dirt back into the hole. He had a glimpse of his younger self doing the same thing. And for an instant, he was his twelve-year-old self, body aching, thin arms trembling with fatigue.

  Only he had stopped after two shovelfuls. Tyler remembered that now.

  He had stopped to hold his breath — not because the mold of the car cover smelled like rot, but because he’d heard something. When the sound rose again, he recognized it as fabric being scratched. Tyler recalled the fear that clutched his heart, the way he’d recoiled from the hole, tripping and landing on his backside.

  But that hadn’t been the only ghastly sound he’d heard. He adjusted his slick grip on the shovel handle, trying to think back. A second sound had followed the first, one that had pushed up beneath the scratching and emerged from the hole to challenge whatever sanity he’d had left.

  Tyler heard it in his mind with horrifying clarity now: the sound of a muffled voice.

  12

  Montgomery County, Maryland

  Friday, January 6, 1961 — Eleven days until Eisenhower’s address

  10:12 a.m.

  As the minutes passed and the taxi trundled north and west, the line between Reginald remaining in the back seat and climbing into the front and commandeering the cab became tissue paper-thin. He tried again to contact Madelyn through the rapport, but it was like stepping into a zero-gravity chamber. All of the thoughts and images they’d placed there for one another, all of the memories, were adrift. Without anchor. He shouted into the confusion, shouted her name, but there was nothing to carry the sound, and no answer came.

  He didn’t want to think about what that meant.

  In the eight years he had known Madelyn, Reginald had heard her scream exactly twice — and never like that. Whatever she had seen, whatever had happened, had horrified her.

  And then the scream had broken off.

  “Think you could speed it up some more?” Reginald said.

  When the black cabbie peeked over his shoulder, he saw a distressed Caucasian professor. “Hey, man, I’m already ten over the limit.”

  “Make it thirty and I’ll pay triple the fare.” Reginald held some bills over the seat. The cabbie studied them a moment, then took the bills and pushed them into the front pocket of his checkered shirt. The sound of the engine rose an octave, and the cars in the next lane began to fall away. Reginald glanced at his watch.

  Madelyn, baby, can you hear me?

  Still nothing.

  He jumped out in front of the house before the cab had rolled to a stop. Something was wrong. Bad wrong. Two men stood on the front porch, their solid bodies flanking the door, sunglasses and square jaws facing the street. They were dressed in standard business suits, but Reginald observed the telltale swell of firearms in their coats.

  “Where is she?” Reginald shouted.

  One man began to reach for his weapon, but the larger one, his hair damp with BrylCreem, signaled for him to desist. The husband, he mouthed. They were members of the private security team. Probably safe, but Reginald couldn’t know for sure. They stared impassively as he ran toward the house.

  “There’s been an incident,” the smaller one said, holding up a hand.

  Reginald hit the steps, taking them in two bounds, and went for the front door. The men stepped in, the larger one taking his shoulders. “Mr. Reuben, we need to explain some things to you.”

  The man’s grip was firm but sympathetic. That might have been the only thing stopping Reginald from dislocating his shoulder. Instead, Reginald seized his arm and flipped him over the porch rail. The man gave a surprised yell as bushes snapped beneath him. A scuff sounded from behind. Reginald shot out his leg without looking, catching the second man beneath the chest just hard enough to knock the wind out of him. He fell flat on his back.

  Professionals or not, they were no Champions.

  As Reginald seized the doorknob, he remembered that morning. Remembered that last glimpse of Madelyn’s eyes. And now, as he turned the knob, he felt a part of himself trying to steal those intervening hours back, to have this be the instant after he had closed the door that morning and he was changing his mind and deciding that, yes, Madelyn was right, going to the Soviet Embassy was a fool’s errand, not to mention impetuous, and they needed to remain together. And when he opened the door again, Madelyn’s lovely eyes would be there to receive his.

  But they weren’t.

  Instead, he found a security agent curled around a patch of blood-soaked rug. Voices murmured from the back of the house.

  Reginald couldn’t feel his legs as he ran. They’d gone cold. He couldn’t feel anything except the dull thuds in his chest. The men’s bodies blocked the bed, but he caught a sliver of Madelyn’s calf, the color of porcelain, peeking from beneath the cover, not moving.

  “Get away from her.”

  He pushed his way through.

  “Give him a moment,” one of the men said.

  The group filed quietly from the room, the door clicking closed behind them. Reginald stared down at her. She was on her right side, facing away, just as he’d awoken to her that morning. But what remained of their psychic rapport was dissolving, shrinking in on itself like a collapsing star.

  Oh God, Maddie…

  Reginald climbed onto the bed, pressed his face to her stiff, blood-matted hair, and sobbed deep, goring sobs.

  * * *

  Four days later

  Outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  A biting, gray wind buffeted the sedan as Reginald steered it along a winding lane. He parked a quarter of a mile from the plot, at the rear of a line of parked cars, and wandered across the rolling cemetery lawn.

  The crowd that rose into view could have filled a small stadium. Most were flatterers and hangers-on, no doubt. Madelyn’s father was a big shot in the steel world. Reginald joined the crowd as a tall, dignified man with a long, gray face. Someone who could pass for a steel magnate himself.

  The disguise wasn’t for his protection, but for the sake of Madelyn’s family. They had only ever seen him as a black man, a black stain on their reputation. The family couldn’t accept that they and Reginald had the same love for their daughter in common.

  He spotted Madelyn’s parents seated in front of the paneled mahogany coffin. Mr. Graves’s thick brows and mustache frowned steeply. He had his arm set stonily around Mrs. Graves, a small woman who wept behind a shaking veil. More family, brothers and sisters, none of whom Reginald had ever gotten to know, extended to either side, their patriarchy absent one member.

  A chink of pity opened toward them, and Reginald sealed it. In rejecting him, the family had rejected Madelyn, too.

  He was too far away to hear the Catholic priest or the various men and women who stood forward to eulogize. What could they say about this woman none of them had known? Who wielded powers beyond their wildest dreams? Who had spared them from nuclear annihilation more than once? To them, Madelyn was her father’s rebel daughter and nothing more.

  Reginald’s gaze remained on the coffin. He considered the solidity of it. The finality.

  Her throat had been cut with a wire. Someone had slipped it around her neck, presumably while she slept, and then yanked with such force that it had severed her windpipe. Her dying scream was probably soundless, though it had rocketed through the rapport and found Reginald more than ten miles away.

  According to the Pittsburgh Post, investigators had discovered skin beneath her fingernails. Madelyn Graves, ever the fighter. She also
managed to hurl the bedside lamp through a window, prompting a security agent to enter the house — the one Reginald had seen on the Turkish rug in the living room, stabbed through the aorta.

  And the murderer? Gone. Like a breath on the wind.

  Where he had appeared from, though, was less of a mystery. In the basement, behind the metal shelving that covered one wall, investigators had discovered a hidden space, just large enough for someone to crouch inside. On the afternoon Reginald and Madelyn had arrived and searched the house, Reginald had stood within two feet of him. He had smelled him, even, attributing the odor to the earth beyond the cement walls of the basement.

  Reginald’s eyes began to sting. If only I’d been more damned thorough…

  But that wasn’t the worst realization. No, the worst was that, despite Madelyn’s pleas, he had left the house without her that morning.

  He had left her alone with a killer.

  Reginald swallowed and scanned the crowd. Had the killer come on the chance Reginald would attend? Had he come to finish the job, to bag the final Champion? Reginald’s gaze went from face to face, aware of the weight of the two guns inside his coat.

  I sure as hell hope so.

  But no one seemed to be keeping vigil on the crowd. Not overtly, anyway. He didn’t even spot anyone from the Program, which wasn’t a surprise. On the afternoon of Madelyn’s murder, he had received an encoded message from Director Halstead:

  Disappear. Get far from the east coast and do not resurface until I’ve contacted you. You’re not safe. In addition to the enclosed, there’s an account at Humboldt Bank in the same name. I’ll send wire communications through them.

  I’m so sorry.

  At the nearest Humboldt Bank, Reginald had cleaned out the account and headed north in a rental car. At a motel on the state line, he switched license plates with a Bel Air with Pennsylvania plates. He trashed the identification Hal had sent him. After all, someone on the inside was collaborating with the Soviets. How else would they have known about the safe house? He changed his appearance to the industrialist look he wore now, altering his eyes to a dark granite color — a look nobody would dare question. Finally, he had acquired weapons.