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

by Brad Magnarella

  Janis collapsed to her knees, smoke rising from her suit — the suit that had just spared her life. Tyler stepped toward her, his face wincing with pain. His right shoulder looked raw, chewed up.

  Have to keep him from Scott, Janis thought groggily.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt him. You’re not taking me anywhere.”

  “Tyler, listen to me. I’m Janis Graystone.” Beyond the door she could see one of Jesse’s giant boots, its sole angled toward her. Tyler must have tagged him from behind. She wondered if Tyler had done the same upstairs to Creed and her sister.

  He took another step forward. “You’re not going to control me anymore.”

  “I’m not one of Them, Tyler. I’m a friend of yours. I live in your neighborhood. When we were kids, we built a fort together in the woods, remember? You cut palmetto fronds, and we used them for the roof.”

  She needed to get inside his head, but her own head felt like it had been walloped by a sack of bricks. Hurt to think. She had to keep talking, though, keep him away from Scott.

  “This morning we drove to Tallahassee. You told me about your dream of writing music. You showed me that song you’ve been working on, about nuclear ruin and heroes who don’t exist. Tyler, we are those heroes.”

  But Janis could tell he wasn’t hearing her, wasn’t even seeing her.

  “I didn’t mean to,” he repeated, his voice regressing in years, becoming smaller.

  The blown speaker inside Janis’s earpiece crackled. A voice, barely audible, fizzled beside her ear. “…consider him extremely dangerous,” Agent Steel was saying. “Shoot to kill.”

  She’s talking to her team. She’s talking about Tyler!

  Janis activated her microphone to warn them away, but that component of her communication system was fried. She disconnected her helmet from the battery pack and released the valves. Cool air slipped in. Removing her protective helmet would be a huge risk, but she wasn’t going to get through to Tyler otherwise. Not with the capsule’s overhead lights dimming her visor, making it nearly opaque. She needed to see into his eyes and for him to see into hers.

  Electricity crackled from Tyler’s hands.

  Janis took another breath, then pulled off her helmet.

  * * *

  Missile number one, I presume.

  Gabriella had warned him not to waste precious time with inner dialogue, but Scott was too hopped up to silence himself. He slipped into the umbilical cord that connected the stub cable with the head of a ballistic missile. The computer seated inside was small but humming away, cycling through the launch and navigation instructions just uploaded from the control center. The same control center where Scott’s body was slumped at a console.

  No time to deprogram it, he thought, not without my helmet.

  He found the computer’s box-shaped power supply and focused into it. A red point appeared behind his closed eyes. The point grew to an orb, transitioning to orange then white, becoming hotter. A familiar fuzziness began to spot over his thoughts. He released his hold.

  The blast blew him back into the umbilical cord.

  Gathering himself, Scott slipped into the computer again to make sure it was out of commission. It was. He replicated the feat at the other onsite missiles, ticking off the second and third subtasks in his mind.

  But he didn’t celebrate.

  With half the time gone by his estimation, he had disabled less than a third of the missiles. Which meant that if he proceeded at the same pace, he would succeed in knocking out six while leaving four active for launch.

  Going to have to spread myself more thinly.

  He backtracked down the cable until he reached the junction where the cable split, the backbone returning to the control center, four smaller cables stubbing off to the various missile sites, miles apart. Scott sped down the second of the four runs. At the new missile site, he allowed his awareness to split to the three missile heads. As he accessed the missile computers through their umbilical cords, a diffusion of information bombarded him. It was like trying to watch three different television stations at once, but Scott had no choice.

  He felt his focus wavering. Concentrate, damn it.

  Finding the computers’ respective power supplies, he gathered his energy. The red point took longer to appear in his mind’s eye, longer to grow, longer to shift colors. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!

  The shock of the simultaneous blasts nearly blew Scott from the entire system.

  He clawed frantically for a hold, for anything, as the system blinked from his awareness. For an instant, he felt himself rematerializing back in the launch control center, the metal desk cold under his arms, his head prickling with returning consciousness. But then he was in the system again. He reoriented himself before speeding back to the backbone cable.

  By Scott’s estimation, he had disabled those rockets in half the time it had taken him to disable the first three. That might have been cause for celebration, but four rockets still remained.

  At two separate sites.

  Mentally, Scott took a tremulous breath.

  It was going to be close.

  * * *

  Janis waded through a fog, her arms outstretched. Only it wasn’t a fog. She was immersed in a whispering static, like a black and white television with no reception. And she couldn’t see where she was going.

  One moment I’m staring into Tyler’s eyes, and the next, I’m … here.

  Wherever here was. The disorientation and mounting fear she felt reminded her of her first out of body experiences. She asked herself the same question: Am I dead?

  Had Tyler electrocuted her?

  She thought about that morning on the tailgate of his truck, the way he had inspected her knot, and she shook her head. No matter what Trips had done, Janis wouldn’t allow herself to believe Tyler capable of murder. His rough exterior sheltered a gentle soul. But maybe she just didn’t want to believe because she knew that if he had electrocuted her, Scott would be next. Scott, who was sitting defenseless at the console, the fate of millions of lives in his hands.

  At that thought, Janis stopped wandering and centered herself, just as Mrs. Fern had taught her. In her mind, she visualized Tyler’s blue eyes, living mandalas. She pictured his eyes as they had looked when she’d asked him for a copy of his poem. Reticent and glancing but bolstered by a certain passion.

  The whispering thinned around her. The fog of static parted, revealing a wedge of night.

  She stepped into Tyler’s backyard.

  “Janis!” a boy cried.

  She could see by the patterns in the loose earth that he had been backpedaling from a hole near a row of what looked like azalea bushes. Beside the hole, a shovel stood plunged in a large dirt pile. She recognized the boy, of course. Recognized the grave, if only from Tyler’s account. But she was not prepared for the nightmare rising from the oblong hole.

  “Keep him away from me,” Tyler said. “I didn’t mean to.”

  Janis tried to block out the image of Tyler’s father, how his skin had burned away from his cheeks and shoulders to reveal meaty striations of charred muscle; how the tissue had broken away from his teeth, creating a permanent grin.

  Trips was playing on Tyler’s greatest fear, convincing him that his father had survived that night, that he had climbed from the grave Tyler had dug for him.

  Janis rushed to the twelve-year-old boy and knelt beside him.

  “This isn’t real,” she said. “None of this ever happened, and it’s not happening now.”

  But even as she spoke, she could feel the damp earth beneath her knees. Could feel the chill of the night air. Gooseflesh sprouted over her bony arms, and only then did she realize she was twelve too, wearing knee-high socks and her old purple Jordache tennis shirt.

  Tyler stared past her shoulder. “Tell him, Janis. Tell him I didn’t mean to.”

  “Tyler, look at me. None of this is real. You’re not twelve. You’re not at your ho
use. You’re fifteen years old, and you’re in Missouri. We were sent here to prevent a missile launch. Trips is making you see and experience things that aren’t real.”

  Tyler’s gaze wandered across her eyes before darting past her shoulder again. Something shuffled over the loose earth. Tyler shoved himself backward, boyish muscles leaping from his bruised torso and thighs. A whimper crept from his lips.

  She took the sides of his face in her hands. “Ignore him, Tyler. Look at me. Focus on me. Just me.”

  His tear-brimmed eyes strained, trying to see past her.

  “Right here, Tyler.”

  He whimpered again.

  I’m not reaching him this time.

  Not only had his fear regressed him to his twelve-year-old psyche, it had stripped away his defenses. In a flash, Janis saw everything. Experienced everything. The gut-pounding fear the nights his father came home intoxicated. The heavy footfalls on the stairs. The wall-rattling shouting and pounding. The fear for his mother’s safety, for her life. The beatings he and his brother suffered. And now this: the terror of what he had done to that same man.

  Janis choked on a sob. “Tyler, look at me.”

  But he wouldn’t.

  How much more of this can he take before his mind snaps, like the guards’ upstairs?

  She wasn’t going to wait to find out. In a moment of intuition, she pulled his face to hers and kissed his mouth. Amid the horror, she had picked up something else — a small and guarded thought that uplifted Tyler in his darkest moments and delivered him from the inescapable walls surrounding him. She had picked up his crush on a certain redheaded girl.

  Tyler’s lips relaxed beneath hers.

  “Are you with me?” she asked when they separated.

  A certain intelligence and self-possession took hold of Tyler’s young face. He nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “We’re leaving this place. We’re going back to the present.”

  He nodded again, but when she went to help him to his feet, his body stiffened.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What is it?”

  “Behind you,” he whispered.

  “Tyler, it’s not real.”

  “No, Janis, he’s behind you.”

  A rotten morgue-like stench filled Janis’s nostrils. At the same moment she saw that they were back in the launch control center, both of them fifteen years old and in their Champions-issued jumpsuits, two sets of cold, slick fingers wrapped around her throat.

  Grasping the clenching hands, Janis craned her eyes to the right, but her assailant remained beyond her vision. A phlegmy cough erupted behind her. And now roaches flapped past her face, gathering in a thickening swarm. In her suffocating panic, Janis’s eyes shot everywhere, at last freezing on the red countdown above the commanders’ consoles.

  Less than ten seconds until launch.

  39

  Scott recovered from the blast of three more missile computers.

  One left.

  Head clearing, he raced down the stub to the backbone, performing a sharp eighty-degree maneuver. The final stub lead to the most remote site, seven miles from the control center. It featured one rocket, but it was the largest: a Viper III, holding eight warheads. Scott didn’t know which city it had been reprogrammed to hit. But with that kind of payload, the missile would decimate the city and all but the remotest suburbs. Millions dead. Millions more maimed.

  You were the one who wanted to be a superhero, he told himself, faint with the thought. Well, here ya go.

  And here was the umbilical cord to the missile.

  He shot through the cord to the missile’s computer. The configuration was slightly different than the others, and it required an extra second for him to locate the power supply — an extra second he couldn’t spare. But he had the power supply now. He was around it, gathering his energy into the computer’s life force.

  Blow this one, and you’re done.

  The orb in his mind’s eye shifted from red to orange. His head felt thick, his thoughts less distinct. Just another second and he would complete his final subtask. He would incinerate this baby, and they could all go home. At that thought, a tremulous joy — no, elation — rose inside him.

  The orange orb verged on white. And then…

  Scott was back in the umbilical cord.

  What?

  He hadn’t released his energy, hadn’t blown the power supply. He tried to dart back into the computer, but there was no computer. The stub just ended. Which could only mean one thing.

  Oh shit.

  * * *

  Through the flapping and chattering of roaches, another burst of coughing broke out. A ropey string of phlegm landed across Janis’s cheek. Grimacing, she tried to work her fingers beneath the ones strangling her. But Trips’s grip was soulless, unrelenting.

  Must have been hiding up in the escape hatch, she thought. Manipulating the guards, the commanders, Tyler. Doing it all from the shadows. Like the cockroaches he’s spawning in my mind.

  Tucking her chin to her faltering windpipe, Janis made a fist with one hand. Her punch was blind, and its angle — up and behind her — deprived the punch of force, but it landed. Her knuckles slammed into a soft layer of skin, stopping cold against what felt like metal.

  An Artificial, she remembered. The plate’s guarding his circuitry, what gives him his powers.

  She punched again, her knuckles smarting from the impact. And a third time. And a fourth. By the fifth punch, she could feel the skin splitting over her knuckles. She imagined a red smear on Trips’s right temple. But her blows were losing force, slipping more than impacting.

  And his grip was becoming stronger.

  Tyler… she thought dimly, tears leaking from her eyes. One of his blasts could short Trips’s circuitry. Put him out of commission.

  But Trips was probably back in her friend’s amygdalae, paralyzing him with images of his father. Janis managed a final, futile punch before hooking her fingers above Trips’s.

  A roach landed beneath her right eye and scurried down her face.

  Janis no longer cared. A warm, almost pleasant fuzziness was filling her head. It reminded her of the time when she was eight and being anesthetized to have her tonsils removed. But she wasn’t inhaling sevoflurane now, and she wouldn’t be waking up to a cup of chocolate ice cream when it was over.

  Fight, she urged herself from a dimming distance. Fight, damn it!

  But the hands that pried at the grip around her throat no longer felt like they belonged to her. Neither did her throat. Or the strangulated tears streaming down the sides of her face. She was drifting, disassociating. Even the roaches were fading from her vision, turning to gray motes.

  She felt her hands drop to her sides.

  From her passive vantage, she watched the gray motes combine, assuming the shape of a person. She squinted the shape into focus. Tyler was struggling to his feet, one hand glowing with electrical energy.

  Please, Tyler…

  Voices burst into the capsule.

  “There he is.” Agent Steel said.

  A new panic rose in Janis as she remembered Agent Steel’s orders from earlier: Shoot to kill. Janis’s will rushed back into her. The muscles of her throat contracted. No! she tried to shout. Tyler’s himself again. He’s not trying to hurt me! But she only gargled.

  Two reports slammed through the confined space. Tyler fell away, and suddenly Janis was coughing, her lungs heaving for air. And oh God, did it ever hurt. Her chest felt as though it had been battered by a medieval weapon. With her next cough, blood speckled the legs of her jumpsuit.

  Agent Steel appeared above her, rifle in her hands, lunar eyes staring down. It reminded Janis of the day in the woods Agent Steel had executed Mr. Leonard. The same despair she had felt then threatened to drown her now. Janis’s coughing deepened and took on the rhythm of sobbing.

  “You’re safe now,” Agent Steel said.

  “You … didn’t…” Janis managed, but the rest was lost
inside her.

  “Help her up,” Agent Steel ordered.

  Hands lifted her from behind until she was standing. The person turned her, and a pair of blue eyes searched hers, their concern intense and total. The person dabbed her bloody lips with his sleeve, then wiped Trips’s phlegm from her cheek. She had to fight the urge to embrace him.

  Instead, she held Tyler’s arms until she had her footing. “I’m all right,” she whispered.

  Clearing her throat, she looked down to where Trips lay, circuitry and wiring blown from his head, his bulging red eye staring at nothing. Both of Agent Steel’s shots had found their mark. They had driven Trips’s influence from hers and Tyler’s minds, and his hands from her throat. Agent Steel had saved her life.

  Janis turned and found Agent Steel staring up at the countdown display:

  00.00.00

  Scott gasped upright from his console. He stared around, the color gone from his cheeks.

  “Scott?” Janis said.

  “I didn’t get to all of them.” He seemed to be choking on the words. “I ran out of time.”

  At that moment, the capsule around them began to rattle. Binders and thick operating manuals wiggled from shelves and spilled to the floor. A light above one of the switches flashed red. The commanders, who remained absorbed in their consoles, held to the sides of their desks. Seizing the back of Scott’s chair, Janis looked from Agent Steel to Tyler, then back to Scott.

  “How many?” Agent Steel shouted above the noise of the launch.

  “One,” Scott said. “The biggest.”

  The commander stooped over his console. “And its destination appears to be … Denver, Colorado.” He swiveled sharply toward his deputy. “How in the hell did that happen?”

  “Denver?” Janis repeated.

  Grams.

  * * *

  All day, and at the oddest times, Scott had been having flashes of issue #119 of the Uncanny X-Men. Probably because the scenario was similar to their own. Now, from Scott’s seat at the backup console, with the full horror of his failure sinking in — and reflected on the pale faces around him — his mind fled there once more.