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

by Brad Magnarella

  “‘Mrs. Montgomery,’” she read. “And look, she just won ten million dollars.” She held up an ad for Publisher’s Clearing House.

  “Do you know her?” Scott asked.

  Janis shook her head and set the mail down. Tyler stepped up beside them.

  “Mrs. Montgomery?” Scott called.

  Janis cupped her hand to the side of her mouth. “It’s Janis, Scott, and Tyler from the neighborhood. We’ve come to talk to you.”

  They stared at one another, eyes dark, listening into the unseen rooms. Outside, the insect choir rose and fell in a lilting rhythm.

  Scott lowered his head toward the other two. “All right, we need to be thorough but quick,” he whispered. “We’re going to go room to room. We’re searching for whoever Janis saw in the window, but we’re also looking for anything out of the ordinary. Keypads, for example. Anything to suggest a hidden room or staircase. Because I think we all know that this Bob Barker showcase” — he gestured to the room — “is a bunch of bull crap.”

  He turned to Tyler. “Could you set the table in front of the door?”

  As Tyler hefted the wood-carved hall table by its ends, Scott went to the china cabinet and removed the most prominent plate and stand. He returned and stood the cream-colored plate on the table near the edge. “A warning system,” he explained. “In case anyone comes through the door. This way.”

  They entered a kitchen with an avocado-colored counter and padded high chairs along the den side. Scott was surprised to find someone’s breakfast dishes in the sink, an egg yolk curdling beside a half-eaten triangle of wheat toast. Beside them sat a glass with a swill of orange pulp in the bottom. Someone is here… but who? In the den, a faded leather L-couch faced a fireplace and a large-screen television. A sliding glass door opened onto a back deck with a turquoise-tiled swimming pool. While Scott checked out a small bathroom off the kitchen, Tyler and Janis opened cupboards. Tyler even opened the refrigerator, remarking about a cache of diet ginger ale.

  “Hold on a sec,” Scott said, emerging from the bathroom.

  He’d felt a brief constricting of his consciousness. He leaned toward the refrigerator and concentrated. Yes, there was a circuit board inside. But when he opened his eyes again, he saw the board belonged to a digital thermostat housed between the refrigerator and freezer.

  Nothing to see here, folks.

  They circled back into the living room/dining room, checking the garage en route. The garage housed a station wagon that Scott couldn’t remember ever seeing, lawn care equipment, and a ladder. Back at the front door, he canted the helmet back on his head, hoping his frustration wasn’t etched on his face.

  “It’s weird,” Janis whispered. “I have this strange feeling people are here, only I can’t actually feel them.”

  “And I sense we’re being monitored somehow,” Scott said. “But every time I concentrate for devices, all I’m picking up is a low hum, like interference from a power station.”

  Tyler raised his gaze. “There’s still the upstairs.”

  They ascended in a line, Scott leading. The stairs went up five steps, turned left, and continued up another ten steps. “Isn’t this where you’d find the family photos?” Tyler asked, tapping his knuckle against the wall above the honey-blond wainscoting.

  “Mrs. Montgomery would have to be a real person first,” Scott answered.

  The three of them emerged onto the end of a hallway. Ahead of them, two doorways opened on either side. The hallway ended at a fifth doorway that Scott guessed opened onto a master bedroom.

  “Shades of Hotel Sinclair,” Janis whispered.

  “Only they forgot the dog,” Scott whispered back, and was glad to feel a punch land on his arm. He shouldn’t have snapped at her earlier, especially since some answers would inevitably point back to her father. Scott hadn’t had the heart to tell her yet that he was one of Them.

  “Mrs. Montgomery?” Janis called.

  Silence.

  The first two doorways opened onto kid-sized bedrooms. But rather than a scatter of children’s toys and drawings, the rooms were neat and plain, the coverlets on the full-sized beds tucked tightly around the mattresses. And except for sets of folded sheets, the closets and dressers were empty. In a bathroom beyond the third doorway, plush towels hung from racks; new bars of soap sat in clean dishes.

  The final doorway on the left side of the hall opened onto a bedroom like the first two. While Janis and Tyler searched it, Scott walked to the window. Tyler’s bike lay against the cul-de-sac’s curb below. A mower droned in the distance. Something about the lack of response, the lack of anything, gnawed at his gut.

  “One more to go,” Tyler said.

  They opened the doorway at the end of the hallway and peeked into a master bedroom — a room that appeared lived in, for a change, the covers of a queen bed untucked and thrown back. A smell of hand lotion pervaded the room. Scott rolled open a mirrored door on the near wall.

  The clothes hanging inside the closet belonged to a woman: blouses, slacks, dresses, some coats. Women’s shoes stood in a neat line along the closet wall while shelves above held rows of boxes. Janis and Tyler opened the doors of a horizontal dresser and pushed their hands through tan bras, pantyhose, and a tangle of jewelry. A small television stood on the dresser’s top, facing the bed.

  Scott peeked down the hallway, then walked to the window that looked over the backyard and pool. Beyond the brick wall enclosing the yard stood the shed Janis had described from her experience, though he couldn’t see the secret road. The woods of their childhood had grown up around it. He scratched the glass with a fingernail. Was there a secret road? He’d learned better than to question Janis’s abilities, but might she have erred this time?

  Scott studied the door to his left. Probably the master bathroom. He seized the knob and then recoiled as though he’d been scalded. Janis closed the final dresser drawer and was parting her lips when she saw Scott’s face. What? she mouthed.

  He pointed to the locked door and pressed his ear to it. At first, he only heard his heartbeats. But rising beneath them was the dull and unmistakable sound of water running.

  “There’s someone in there,” he whispered.

  A tap squeaked and the water cut off. Scott backed away from the door until he was standing between Janis and Tyler.

  “Should we leave?” Tyler whispered.

  Scott could see the same doubt growing in Tyler’s eyes that he felt in his own.

  “This is the house,” Janis whispered firmly. “It’s at the end of the street we were forbidden to come down. It has a hidden road to the outside. Any number of strange cars can come and go without anyone ever noticing. There’s a special gate built into the levee, for crying out loud.”

  Scott nodded, shame climbing his neck. He lowered his helmet until his eyes lined up with the slit, buckled the chin strap, and watched the door.

  The lock popped open. The knob rattled, then turned.

  A cloud of water vapor pushed out, followed by a woman in a lavender robe and plastic shower cap. She bent her head to one side, as though trying to coax water from her ear. She pushed the door closed behind her, tottered in a quarter circle, and froze. The three of them were probably as indistinct to her through the dispersing steam as she was to them.

  But the fearful scream she emitted was clear enough — an old woman’s scream, piercing and wavering, that drove straight to Scott’s heart.

  Janis was stepping toward her when the china plate downstairs shattered.

  33

  Janis froze, her arm extended toward the old woman in a calming gesture while her brain continued to ring with the recent splat of porcelain. Someone had triggered their makeshift alarm downstairs. She stared dumbly as the old woman pawed at the bathroom door, trying to get it back open.

  “Don’t let her get away,” Scott said. “I’m going to take a look.”

  “But…” Janis was going to finish with …what about not separating? That was o
ne thought. Another, and perhaps the more pressing, was …I can feel the woman’s fear. It’s real. She’s not acting.

  But she didn’t have time to utter either because Scott was already taking off, his backpack banging against the door frame. Janis moved nearer the woman, both hands held out.

  “It’s okay,” Janis whispered.

  The woman jumped when Janis touched her arm. Her screams fell to sobbing wails, and she sank against the doorknob. Delicate orange curls showed through the woman’s damp shower cap. They reminded Janis of her grandmother.

  “We’re not here to hurt you,” she said.

  Tyler came up beside Janis, which Janis thought a bad idea — he was only going to freak her out more — until he began to speak. His voice had a rough but surprisingly honest quality to it. “That’s right,” he said. “We came here hoping to talk to the owner of the house. When no one answered, we got worried, that’s all. It looked like the door had been busted, and we wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  The woman gawked up at him, her mouth open on one side, her baggy eyes teetering between trust and distrust.

  “Here, let me help you up,” Janis said.

  This time, the woman didn’t recoil. Janis supported her under an arm and slipped a hand around her waist. A clean, floral scent haloed the woman. Tyler stood back a little as Janis walked the woman to a wooden chair beside the bed. In her peripheral vision, Janis could see Tyler buttoning up his outer shirt, trying to appear more presentable — or at least less threatening.

  When Scott reappeared, his face was as white as typing paper. He peeked back into the hallway and closed and locked the door. Mrs. Montgomery flinched in Janis’s embrace.

  “This is bad,” Scott said.

  “What’s going on?” Janis asked.

  “I just looked out the window, out into the street, and…” His words seemed to be sticking in his chest. “They didn’t call Agent Steel, they called the frigging police. There are four or five cars out there. Lights going off and everything. That was their plan. Avoid a confrontation by tossing us to the justice system. That’s their new psychological fence: the law.”

  A cold horror stole into Janis. He was right. As far as the local police department knew, Oakwood was a humdrum middle-class neighborhood. And nothing the three of them could say would change that perception. If anything, the truth would get them drug tested.

  She glanced at Scott, wires running from his pack to his helmet, and then Tyler, who, despite tucking his shirt inside his slashed and bleach-spattered jeans, looked like a common hood. The police would book them on breaking and entering. And unless they reopened the bedroom door in, like, two seconds, they’d be charged with holding this woman hostage to boot.

  A masculine voice called up the staircase: “Mrs. Montgomery?”

  Too late.

  Janis looked at the woman still hugged to her side — and who was hugging Janis in return now — then back at Scott. “Let’s just concede this one,” she said, imagining the look on her parents’ faces when they came to retrieve her from the county pen. “Before we make it worse for ourselves.”

  Scott’s eyes seemed to stagger a little, but he set his jaw and shook his head. “Unh-uh. No way.”

  “Scott, what’s the alternative?”

  He dug into the small pocket of his backpack and pulled out the device Janis had given him, the one he called the neural scrambler. “This,” he whispered. “This is the alternative.”

  “So, what, you’re going to use it on every one of them?” Janis asked.

  “No, not them.” He leveled his gaze at Mrs. Montgomery. “Her. We need answers.”

  Janis hugged the woman with both arms. “Forget it, Scott. She’s not hiding anything.”

  “That’s what you thought about Nut’s wife, Mrs. Deaf and Dumb, remember?” Scott snapped his wrist and two red lights began to blink at the head of the device. A distant note of resonance sounded, like feedback, and then the device fell into a hum. Scott held it to his side, but it still made Janis’s stomach slosh. She could see by the gray color seeping into Scott’s cheeks that he was reacting to it, too.

  “Listen, Scott. I couldn’t read people then like I can now. She’s not one of them.”

  “Then what’s she doing here?”

  Janis looked down at Mrs. Montgomery, whose gaze was moving between her and Scott. Her confusion appeared genuine. A tear from earlier had trickled down the side of her face and become lost in the wattled skin at her throat. Janis concentrated toward her layers again. They appeared disorganized, like someone who’s dressed herself in the dark, but not dishonest.

  “I think she’s a little senile,” Janis whispered.

  “Really.” Scott sounded unconvinced.

  Janis peered deeper into the woman’s layers. She was being cared for, but Janis couldn’t see by whom. And she kept hearing the word routines. Was this woman being held in Oakwood, too?

  “Wait,” she said, “all this time, we’ve assumed the Project was only interested in us, the kids. But what if they’re interested in adults, too? What if this woman possesses an ability they want?”

  Mrs. Montgomery lifted a trembling finger toward Scott. “Are — are you Walter?”

  Scott regarded the woman a long moment. Janis watched his eyes, which in the last minute had begun to appear uncompromising, almost cruel — nothing like the Scott she knew.

  At last he flicked the device off and sagged against the side of the bed.

  “Aw, god, I’m sorry.” The hardness in his eyes melted, and some pink flowed back into his cheeks. “I just… I had all these chess moves worked out in my head, and the one move I failed to anticipate was the first move they executed — sweeping their arm across the board.” He held on to a brass bedpost. “Let me go down there. I’ll tell the police I’m the one who broke open the front door, that I convinced you two to come along even though you didn’t want to. I’ll say I thought the house was uninhabited. I mean, I don’t ever remember seeing this woman around Oakwood. Do you?”

  Janis hadn’t. Neither had Tyler, apparently, who shook his head.

  “Mrs. Montgomery?”

  They all turned toward the man’s voice, which sounded closer now, probably at the top of the stairs. Janis imagined the police officer eyeing the shut door at the end of the hallway, hand resting on the butt of his holstered gun. She closed her eyes and felt toward him. She followed the threads that connected them. She wanted to know what kind of a person they would be dealing with.

  She opened her eyes. “Scott, turn that device on again.”

  He held up the neural scrambler and raised his eyebrows. She nodded emphatically. Scott flicked his wrist, and they all watched the red lights blink on, even Mrs. Montgomery. The same note of feedback sounded, but this time it was much nearer. Almost right outside the door.

  Scott shot upright from the bed. “The dresser,” he said to Tyler.

  While he and Tyler sprang into action, Janis drew Mrs. Montgomery closer to the wall. When Janis had reached for the police officer, she’d felt a cold, outer-spacey void. And the feedback just now hadn’t come from a talkie. The police-officer-who-wasn’t-a-police-officer was carrying the same device as Scott.

  Fortunately, Scott realized it too.

  She watched him and Tyler drag the solid-wood dresser against the door just as the knob began to rattle.

  “Mrs. Montgomery? Are you in there?”

  Janis brought her finger to her lips and looked down at the old woman. “Walter wants us to be quiet,” she whispered, nodding, her eyes widened for emphasis.

  Mrs. Montgomery — or whoever she was — nodded back and said, “Ohhh,” as though everything were starting to make sense.

  Knocks shook the door, and the man’s voice called for Mrs. Montgomery again. This time, the old woman brought her knobby finger to her own lips. Scott stepped past Janis and peeked out the back window.

  “They’re circling the house,” he said. “They’re arme
d, but not with rifles. The barrels are too big, more like shotguns. Let’s just hope they’re loaded with soft projectiles. That’s probably what put Creed and Jesse down on Archer Road the night of the crash.”

  Tyler peeked past Scott’s shoulder. “What’s their plan for us?” he asked.

  As Scott turned, the light fell from his face. “Probably bust in, pull out their devices. They’ll find out what we know about the Project and the surveillance features of the neighborhood, then rub away every last memory. That’s what these devices were designed to do — make us defenseless against suggestion.” When his gaze fell on Janis, his voice became almost too faint to hear. “It will be like most of the last year never happened.”

  Something trembled through Janis. “Then we won’t let them.”

  “Is that the consensus here?” Scott asked as the door shook with more pounding. “That we stay and fight?”

  Janis didn’t want to contemplate the alternative. “Yes,” she said.

  Tyler studied his hands. “Yeah. I’m in.”

  As Scott lowered the helmet back over his eyes and secured the strap, Janis caught herself staring at him. Maybe it was the way his resolve hardened the angles of his jaw, but for the first time, the helmet didn’t look clunky on him. No, the contraption made him look… handsome.

  “You take care of the neural scramblers,” Scott said to Tyler. “Short them, fry them, put them out of commission.” He turned to Janis. “Do you think you can handle the guns? I know that’s asking a lot…”

  Janis remembered the way she’d bent the lines of space in Hotel Sinclair and nodded.

  “I’ll knock them around,” Scott said, tapping the laser, “keep them off balance.”

  “What about Mrs. Montgomery?” Janis asked.

  The woman had released Janis’s arm and was raising her chin to peer out the window, fingers clutching the sill. “I saw the most beautiful pair of chickadees the other morning,” she croaked.