XGeneration (Book 6): Greatest Good

by Brad Magnarella

  “You’re not climbing up there, are you?”

  Scott eyed the ladder bolted to the triangular cross-sections of steel. He lost sight of the dwindling ladder halfway up. “If he did wire a repeater up there, then yeah, I’ll have to.”

  Janis frowned but said nothing.

  “But let’s first see if it’s even there,” Scott said.

  A part of him hoped it wasn’t. Not only so that he wouldn’t have to climb the tower, but it might also mean that his counterpart was close to Oakwood, within a few miles. Using his abilities as a homing device, Scott could drive around, feeling for the transceiver’s signature. A signature that should be similar, if not identical, to the transceiver in his own Walkman.

  But he was getting ahead of himself.

  He closed his eyes and focused on the tower. A moment later, he was inside, giant waves of electromagnetic energy surging through him, trying to broadcast him across great distances.

  The guy wouldn’t have wasted time with a battery for his repeater, Scott thought, anchoring himself. He can hijack whatever power he needs from the tower.

  With that in mind, Scott searched for evidence of a siphon. Near the top of the tower, he hit on something.

  Hey, turn that Walkman on, he thought toward Janis. Give the microphone a couple of taps.

  From a distance, Scott heard the click of a switch followed by tapping. The encoded sounds were broadcast from the Walkman, pulled into the device Scott had detected on the tower, and blasted off into the atmosphere.

  Houston, he thought, we have a repeater, and immediately felt like a dork.

  He opened his eyes as the last of his consciousness rushed back to his body. Before Janis could say anything, he held up a hand and signaled for her to turn off the Walkman. “When the power’s on so is the microphone,” he explained after she had switched it off. “I don’t want him knowing any more about what we’re doing than I want him to, if that makes sense.”

  Janis made the O.K. sign with a hand. “Now what?”

  “Now this.” Scott pulled the device he’d designed that day from his jacket pocket.

  “It’s a calculator.”

  “A directional indicator, actually.” He turned it over to show her the exposed back with its redesigned circuit board. “Once I wire it to the repeater, it will tell us from which direction his signal is coming. That gives us a hundred mile search line versus a thirty thousand mile search area.”

  “Still sounds like a needle in a haystack.”

  “Not quite,” Scott said. “There’s a repeater on my end, right? Without one on his end, he can only receive transmissions from a distance, not send them. So we’re not looking for his transceiver just yet…”

  “We’re looking for another tower,” Janis said, her eyes beaming with new hope.

  “Which narrows the search considerably. And once we find the tower with the other repeater, his transceiver should be within a small radius. It shouldn’t be too hard to key in on, especially once we know the signal direction.”

  Concern clouded Janis’s face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “How do we know there are only two repeaters? How do we know he hasn’t strung them clear across the country?”

  “We don’t,” Scott answered honestly. “But that would have taken time to set up, not to mention a lot of risk. From the way Kilmer describes them, the Scale like to operate below radar. And I think they’re close. They had Mr. Shine living across town. Their early contact with Jesse turned out to be local, too. And if they are targeting the rest of us, they’re not going to do it from a dozen states away.”

  Janis nodded as though his explanation resonated with something inside her.

  “Kiss for good luck?” he asked, pocketing the directional indicator.

  She smirked as she rose onto her toes.

  Back in the parked car, Scott let out his breath. With Janis cloaking him from view and giving him a telekinetic spot as he ascended and descended the rungs, the mission had been a snap. He’d found the repeater, attached his own device, and run a battery of tests to make sure it would work as designed.

  Even so, Scott was glad to be eighteen inches above the ground again versus eight hundred feet. He pulled the cuff of his sweatshirt over a hand and used it to blot his brow.

  “Welcome back,” Janis said.

  “Thanks for your help. Now what say we grab our friend’s direction?”

  “Oh, so now he’s my friend, too?”

  “He can probably use all he can get. You’ll see why in a minute.”

  Scott lifted the Walkman from the dashboard. While he placed the orange-foam headphones over his ears, Janis opened the glove box and produced the message he had prepared.

  “Ready?” he asked, finger against the mode switch. When Janis nodded, he pushed the switch to FM. The soft hiss of white noise filled the headphones. Scott tapped out the code for the receiver to expect transmission. A double tap informed him that his counterpart was waiting.

  Scott’s heartbeats whumped in his chest as he tapped out his message:

  WHAT DO JOE AND THE CARD YOU INSTALLED IN THE WALKMAN HAVE IN COMMON?

  He wrote down and translated the quick response:

  WHO THE HELL IS JOE?

  Scott chuckled. He had this jerk right where he wanted him.

  THEY’RE BOTH SLOPPY.

  He snapped the Walkman off and pulled the headphones from his ears. Janis looked quizzically from him to the scrawled messages and back.

  “That’s it?”

  “I just needed him to transmit,” he explained. “Send a signal up to the repeater. Figured I’d needle him while I was at it.”

  She sighed as though to say, you boys. “Time to go back up, then?”

  “I should be able to access the information from here.” Scott leaned against the seat’s headrest, his consciousness already twining on itself. “Back in a sec.”

  He burst into the television tower. Amid the huge swells of energy, Scott found the repeater and from there slid into his calculator device. He read the information it had collected and stored in its memory feature. One signal had come from the direction of the parked station wagon—his own message. The other had come from six degrees north of true northwest.

  Back in the car, Scott turned to Janis. “We’ve got a trail.”

  But Janis was shaking her head, eyes locked on her watch face. “No, Scott. We have to go back.”

  “What’s up?” He checked his own watch, which was flashing with an alert. From the tower, he hadn’t heard the signal. Probably a call to meet. But as he read the message, the blood fell from his face.

  “Jesse,” Janis said. “He’s back in Oakwood.”

  15

  Tyler sprinted toward the popping sounds, the tails of his flannel shirt trailing behind him, Vans slapping the asphalt. There’d been no time to change into his Champions uniform. At the same moment he received the alert, he’d heard the shattering impact of a car crashing.

  Or being crashed into.

  A breeze blew against Tyler, and he picked up the chemical odor of knock-out gas. Steel’s team was deploying the same canisters they’d used against him, Scott, and Janis last spring. Another car crash sounded. The canisters weren’t having the same effect on Jesse, apparently.

  Tyler rounded a corner and pulled to a stop.

  Down the street, Steel’s team had set up a barricade of police cruisers. A number of agents in black armor were firing from behind the barricade: lasers and rubber bullets, the second pop-pop-popping.

  “His chin,” someone called. “Aim for his chin.”

  Through a drift of smoke and green gas, Jesse plodded toward the barricade. One arm was protecting the lower half of his face. His other dragged the tail end of a car over the asphalt. Smashed vehicles and a toppled utility pole lay in his wake, the power lines writhing and spitting sparks. Judging by their modest numbers, Jesse had already put several of Steel’s team out of action.

 
; Fear dried Tyler’s mouth. At Creed’s prodding, he had promised that, yeah, he accepted the new reality, he would be prepared to face Jesse. But now he wasn’t so sure. And Creed, with all his tough talk, was nowhere to be seen. Neither were the other Champions.

  But was this Jesse?

  Tyler squinted forward. If so, his hair had been shorn off, exposing a dull, knotted scalp. Above the ear Tyler could see, the puckered line of a scar arced to the base of his skull.

  “Raise your hands and stop where you are,” one of Steel’s men shouted.

  With a roar, the giant drew back the rear of the car and hurled it side-armed. Men scattered as the wreckage banged into the center of the barricade. Glass shattered. Police cars skidded outward. The black duster the giant was wearing flapped open, revealing a dingy Champions uniform.

  Yeah, its Jesse, Tyler thought in despair. But what in the hell did they do to him?

  When a sudden breeze dispersed the remaining gas, Tyler jogged up to where the agents had pulled back from the barricade. An agent carrying a huge carbine turned and noticed him. When the face shield retracted, Tyler found himself staring into Agent Steel’s cold eyes.

  “Where are the others?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know. What’s he doing back here?”

  Steel ignored his question, instead speaking into her mouthpiece. “Lateral formation. We’re going to open up his defenses.” Her eyes cut back to Tyler. “Why aren’t you in uniform?”

  “There wasn’t time.”

  “We need a clear shot at his chin, like we practiced.”

  Tyler nodded, a charge already building up in his body. The space between his ears roared with static. With the air this dry, Tyler could summon the equivalent of a lighting bolt, hit him with thousands of degrees of energy. Cook him where he stood.

  But did he have to?

  He looked from Agent Steel, who was moving away, to Jesse, who was almost to the police-cruiser barricade. While two men remained beyond the barricade, peppering Jesse with cover fire, the rest of Steel’s team spread into front yards. Jesse didn’t appear concerned with them. He continued his advance, rubber bullets thumping from his forearm and head. When his eyes met Tyler’s, nothing stirred in their gray pits.

  He’s not himself, Tyler thought. Might not even know what he’s doing.

  Tyler emptied his charge into the ground and started over, shaping the charge into low-energy electromagnetic spheres. He was thinking of the exercises with Chad where he’d made the computer circuits blink out. Maybe he could do the same with the synapses in Jesse’s head.

  Jesse got a hand under the police car closest to him and flipped it. The car landed lights-side down on the cruiser behind it, rolled over, and crashed to the pavement where the firing men had been crouched. But while those men moved back, Tyler moved in. He skirted the right side of the barricade, glass crunching beneath his shoes, and shot the spheres from his outstretched arms. They slammed into the side of Jesse’s head, one after the other.

  For the first time since Tyler had arrived, Jesse hesitated, his protection arm falling lower before jerking back up.

  That did something, Tyler thought.

  He hit Jesse with two more spheres, the energy breaking over him, but Jesse seemed to shrug those off. Additional charges had no more effect, even when Tyler amped up the wattage.

  Crap.

  Jesse was knee-deep in the cruisers now, parting them with the strength of his strides. Amid the hiss of laser fire, Tyler heard the careen of a bullet. Steel’s team had switched to lethal rounds.

  But even those weren’t penetrating Jesse’s skin.

  Or slowing him.

  Jesse jammed his fingers beneath a car hood, pried it off, and slung it at the retreating agents. The spinning hood nicked one in the shoulder and shattered the helmet of the second, dropping him to the asphalt.

  Tyler moved behind Jesse’s peripheral vision. Was it time for him to use lethal force?

  He searched around, desperate to find the other Champions arriving. Janis would be able to telekinetically force his arm down, expose his weakness. Margaret’s powers might persuade him to do the same.

  But there were no other Champions. Just him.

  Tyler’s gaze landed back on Jesse, then fell to the swill of oil and gasoline spilling from the wrecked cruisers.

  He checked to make sure Steel’s men were safely back before directing a current at Jesse’s boots. A burst of red-orange fire roared from the street. The explosive heat washed past Tyler’s face, making him wince away. When the heat receded, Jesse and the cruisers were engulfed in flames.

  Agent Steel gave a hand signal, and her men circled ahead of the barricade, carbines and rifles aimed. Tyler ran around the flaming wreckage to join them. That Jesse would emerge was a no brainer. His armor-like skin coupled with his protective suit assured it. Tyler, along with Steel’s team, were waiting to see how he emerged. Would it be with both arms groping forward, chin exposed? Or would he still have that beef slab of a forearm held up?

  Tyler’s shoulders slumped. It was the second.

  The popping of gunfire resumed. Jesse used his free hand to tear the flaming coat from his body. Smoke rose from his Champions suit. Apart from his blackened head, he appeared no worse for the wear. If anything, his strides were growing stronger, more purposeful.

  “No more holding back, Tyler.”

  He turned toward Agent Steel, who had come up beside him. She wasn’t asking, she was ordering.

  As Tyler gathered atmospheric energy into him, an image appeared of his father’s charred legs sticking out from behind the couch. I can’t stop, he heard his twelve-year-old voice crying. I can’t stop, I swear! The smell of that night, a noxious stench of burning flesh, hit the back of his throat.

  “He’s the enemy,” Steel reminded him.

  Tyler trembled once before nodding. He switched off the memory. Electrical energy surged into his outstretched arms. He struggled to hold it there, to gather enough to do the job.

  Please, Jesse. Don’t make me do this.

  But Jesse wasn’t stopping, and Tyler had made a promise.

  He staggered backward as bursts of lightening shot from his arms—and hit a wall.

  A second force knocked Tyler from his stance. His remaining energy discharged into the air, a double-bang that knifed his eardrums and left them ringing. His heels caught the curb and he landed seat down on grass.

  Gathering hot energy into his fists, he twisted toward his attacker.

  Instead he found Janis and Scott running toward him. Beyond them, a dumpy-looking station wagon was angled in the middle of the road, twin skid marks stretched out behind it.

  Let him pass, came Janis’s voice in his head. Tyler understood that she was talking to all of them, Steel and her men, too. They’ve done something to his brain. I can’t tell what exactly, but I can sense his immediate objective, and it’s not to hurt anyone. He’s just trying to get home.

  Steel gave another hand signal, and the firing petered to silence. Guns still aimed, Steel’s team pulled to the sides of the street in twin columns, paralleling Jesse as he lumbered toward his address.

  Let’s clear his parents out of the house, Janis added, just in case.

  Several men left their columns and sprinted ahead. Sounds began taking shape in Tyler’s ringing ears as Janis and Scott arrived before him. Scott extended an arm and helped Tyler to his feet.

  “Sorry about that,” he said.

  “No, no, I’m glad you stopped me,” Tyler replied.

  God, was he glad.

  The three of them ran to catch up to Steel’s men. Tyler could now see a matching scar on the other side of Jesse’s head, starting at the temple and wrapping behind his misshapen ear. Tyler burned at the thought that the Scale had gone into his friend’s brain, done who knew what.

  Up ahead, Butch and Lily Hoag were being escorted from their house. Butch shouted and waved his stout arms as Steel’s men helped him and his wife i
nto an arriving police cruiser.

  “Why would the Scale release him?” Tyler asked.

  “He could have escaped,” Janis said, but with too little conviction.

  Moments later, the three of them watched Jesse lumber up his walkway and duck through the front door, which Steel’s men had wisely left open. The columns of men merged into a single file and followed him inside. Tyler, Janis, and Scott slowed to a walk. They arrived at the front porch just as two of Steel’s men reemerged.

  “What’s going on in there?” Scott asked.

  “He went to his room,” one of the men said.

  “Climbed right into bed,” the other chimed in.

  “Was out the second his head hit the pillow.”

  “Snoring like a walrus now.”

  Tyler looked from Scott to Janis, their puzzled expressions no doubt matching his own.

  Just what had the Scale done to Jesse—and why?

  16

  Christmas Eve

  Tuesday, December 24

  8:24 a.m.

  Through the glass-laminate window, Director Kilmer watched the gargantuan mound that was Jesse Hoag’s stomach rise and fall beneath the hospital sheets that draped him. The mound hid the head of Jesse’s bed, above which a collection of digital monitors and IV pumps had been assembled. Save for a single clinician, the containment cell-turned-hospital room was empty. Kilmer held up a sheet of x-ray film to the window. He studied it, pinching his lower lip in thought.

  “Still sleeping?”

  Kilmer turned to find Agent Steel closing the door to the small observation room. He lowered the film from the light. “Two days and counting.”

  Steel gazed past him. “Coma?”

  “You would think so, but according to the medical team, his brain waves are saying deep sleep. Something to do with what they found.” He held up the film again so she could see the metallic implant in Jesse’s skull from six different views. The implant looked to Kilmer like a pair of paper-thin hands, thumbs touching in the back, fingers wrapping the brain from the sides. It also looked alien and evil, but Steel’s face remained impassive as she studied the film.