“Thanks,” she said. “Sorry for conking out on you.”
He shrugged as if to say, No worries, then lifted an identical cup from between his legs and took a swallow. She still couldn’t get over how much he reminded her of an S.E. Hinton character. Ponyboy, maybe.
“How’s it looking behind us?” she asked.
Tyler raised his eyes to the rearview mirror. “I’ve sort of been altering my speed. No one tailing us, so far as I can tell.”
There had been no cover story this time. Janis had simply slipped from her house in the predawn and met Tyler at Oakwood’s main intersection. They navigated the quiet streets in the beam of a single headlight before turning south on Highway 441. At a gas station outside of town, Tyler pulled the tracker from his engine block — a small magnetic device — and placed it on the underside of another vehicle. Then he cut over to Interstate 75 and got on the northbound ramp.
Simple as that. Janis would worry about the consequences later.
She peeked over at Tyler, who was taking another swallow of coffee. He was wearing a blue work shirt over a white thermal. No pretense. No big deal. The rolled-up sleeves swam on his arms, and she wondered whether it had belonged to his father once. Her heart crumpled a little at the thought.
“I have a question,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“If you didn’t have your powers, what would you do? You know, with your life?”
“You first,” he said.
She lifted her cup to her lips. She wasn’t a regular coffee drinker, but with every sip, the taste seemed to improve. Frowning, she considered her own question.
“Physical therapy, maybe,” she said after a moment. “Though I’d also want to do something creative. I could see going into a writing program. I’m just not into this whole superhero thing. Not like Scott.”
Tyler nodded. “I’d probably do music.”
“I didn’t know you played an instrument.”
“I don’t,” he admitted. “But I like to write stuff out — sort of thoughts as lyrics. And when I write it, a lot of times I hear music in my head. Just a matter of learning to play something, I guess.”
“That’s really cool.”
Tyler appeared to blush. “Not that I’d ever expect to make money at it. It’s more the thought of playing to audiences here and there, connecting with a few people, maybe.”
A song writer? Janis was intrigued. “Any material you want to share?”
“It’s all still kind of … rough.”
“I don’t mind.”
He looked over as though to make sure she was serious, then said, “Well, there is this one thing I’ve been working on. It doesn’t have a name, and I don’t hear any music for it yet, but I wrote it out.”
He reached into the breast pocket of his work shirt and withdrew a small brown notebook.
“It’s at the end,” he said, handing it over to her.
Janis set her coffee back in the holder and flipped the battered notebook open, past pages and pages of writing, all of it in a small, slashing hand. She also saw entire pages crossed out.
“This one?” she asked, holding up the final page of writing.
When he nodded, Janis cupped the notebook in her palm and almost stopped breathing.
Like a nightmare being, like night
Rumbling, rising over a seraphim sea
He with hungry, hydrogen mouth
Toothless and voracious
Inhaling the ash of innocents
Exhaling gray ruin
While with trembling hands and pale lips
We pray for heroes who don't exist
And close our eyes to the naked truth
That he is in us, and we are all in him
“Where did you learn to write like this?” Janis asked.
Tyler shrugged. “When I listen to music, I like reading the lyric sheets. To see how the songs are put together.”
Janis ran her eyes over the words again, not quite believing the boy beside her could have composed them. But the evolution of the poem was right in front of her, words, phrases and whole lines crossed out, swapped for others, and all of them in Tyler’s handwriting.
“I could never write anything this powerful.”
“Of course you could,” he said, reaching for the notebook.
Janis twisted to keep it out of his reach. “‘Hungry, hydrogen mouth… Inhaling the ash of innocents…’ It’s about nuclear war, isn’t it? ‘We pray for heroes who don’t exist.’ That’s because it’s our own creation, right? And we can’t be saved from ourselves?”
“Just playing around with some ideas,” he said, managing to get a hold of the notebook and push it back into his pocket. “It’s what I do instead of studying, I guess. Or paying attention in class.”
It’s why I’m a dummy, he seemed to be implying.
“Well, it’s brilliant,” Janis said. “When we get back, I want a copy.”
Tyler gave her a doubtful look, but behind his eyes, Janis detected a glimmer, faint but hopeful: maybe his words had connected with someone. Janis smiled and took another sip of coffee.
He would have been right.
* * *
“It’s over here,” Janis said.
She peeked around as she led Tyler behind a ragged growth of bushes that concealed a boarded-over window on the hotel’s ground floor. The cinderblock was hidden in the weeds. She stood on it and pulled away the board that covered the window’s bottom half. A dark square appeared, and Hotel Sinclair exhaled its cool, rotten breath against her face. She winced away.
“Want me to go in first?” Tyler asked.
“No, it’s all right.” She was the one who’d brought him here; she was to be his guide into the maw of madness. As she pulled herself through the window, her heart accelerated in an uneven rhythm.
Tyler climbed in after her. She touched his arm: Wait a moment. She wanted to make certain they were alone. In the dimness, she spied a few upended tables and chairs, wallpaper hanging from the walls in torn sheathes, hilly carpet. She closed her eyes and reached out with her awareness. No one. She exhaled and tugged on Tyler’s sleeve: Come on.
Carpet squishing underfoot, she led him across the room.
In the lobby, stale slants of light fell from the mezzanine and landed on a familiar marble floor. The littered space was much as Janis had remembered. The large stone fireplace inset in one wall, the wooden reception desk beside the boarded-over entrance. She caught her eyes searching the walls for cockroaches. Not a scurrying one, thank God. Instead, she found a simple message scrawled in dark red, one she had glazed over on her last visit:
FEAR TRIPS
She hugged her arms.
“You all right?” Tyler whispered.
“Yeah,” she said. But was she? Trips had gotten into her head the last time, his powers wriggling into her gray matter like slimy maggots. The horror of that experience had abated with time, but now, being back here, Janis felt it seeping back, sucking the moisture from her mouth, pumping her heart ever faster. Could she face him again?
“Yeah,” she repeated, as much to reassure herself as Tyler. “Just getting my bearings.”
“So do we head up?” he asked, no hint of trepidation in his voice.
She shook her head. “Too easy to get trapped upstairs — I learned that lesson. We’re safer down here, near the exits. Plus, the open space gives us some advantages.” Janis recoiled at the extent to which she was borrowing from Agent Steel’s playbook. “They’re coming to us this time.”
Near the fireplace, a stone planter lay on its side. Janis extended an arm, concentrating along the lines connecting her to the planter. Gotcha. The planter rose with a scrape, spilling cans and bottles from its large mouth. The tinny sounds echoed throughout the lobby. She guided the planter skyward until it was nearly touching the dangling remains of a glass chandelier.
“You ready?” she asked, her voice shaking with effort.
Tyler nodded, not
taking his eyes from the suspended planter.
She let go and plugged her ears.
The planter plummeted thirty feet. A sledgehammer-like crack resounded through the hotel, rattling the boards over the windows. Bits of the planter skipped and skittered past Janis and Tyler’s shoes. Janis uncovered her ears, the explosion of stone on stone continuing to ring in the air.
She ran a tongue over her teeth and listened.
Several levels above, floors began to creak, doors to slam. Footsteps congregated, then pounded down stairs.
Janis looked over at Tyler, who had straightened. Electrical energy crackled around his fists. He nodded toward her. She sidestepped until fifteen feet separated them, another Steel strategy, and joined his watch on the far corridor that led to the stairwell.
A door opened onto the mezzanine. Vagrants seeped around the upper rail, rags draping their limbs, eyes bright in their skull-like faces. A giggle floated down. Amid the soiled mass, a deranged grin flashed: Wild Smile. The one who had wrenched Janis to the ground and clenched her throat. Her skin crawled as she remembered the foul smell of his breath.
I prefer cutting to the chase.
Janis and Tyler backed toward the dining room. She cut her eyes behind Tyler as though to say, Be ready to run for it.
Another door banged open. At the far end of the lobby, a second tattered group appeared. They inched forward en masse, like the undead in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, though wary of Tyler’s crackling fists. Janis flicked her gaze over their faces. Some she recognized, as though from a fevered nightmare, many she did not. No Trips, though.
“We didn’t come to make trouble,” Janis called, the acoustics of the room taking the tremors in her voice and amplifying them. “We came to talk to somebody.”
She was preparing to ask for Trips by name, when a commotion erupted at the far end of the lobby. Someone was pushing his way to the front of that group. Janis concentrated into the throbbing lines connecting them, vigilant of the least manipulation of her brain matter.
Center yourself.
But the man who emerged was not Trips. And when his tobacco-brown face fell slack, she recognized it. She recognized his coat and wool hat, too. She’d worn them, after all.
“You!” Split Lobe cried. “You — you…” His jaw jimmied up and down, not knowing how to complete the thought. He peered around the mezzanine before returning his startled gaze to the girl who had trashed him.
Whispers proliferated through the groups on both levels as recognition of her spread: “…threw him against the wall without touching…” “…summoned a damn cyclone…” “…bitch be possessed…”
Then, like in her regression exercises, Janis watched Split Lobe reach into his coat and draw the serrated knife. More blades clicked and flashed into view. Janis’s stomach clenched until she realized Split Lobe was holding the knife out defensively. Most of them were.
“What d’ya want?” Split Lobe called.
“We’re here to talk to Trips,” she called back.
“Trips?” Split Lobe appeared ready to say more when an insane scream rent the air above her. Wild Smile had leaped over the rail. Long hair and a slick black coat streamed behind him. He was plummeting toward Tyler.
“Look out!” Janis screamed.
Tyler twisted from Wild Smile’s trajectory, but not quickly enough. Wild Smile lashed an arm out. The blades of his fingernails disappeared behind Tyler’s collar, jerking him backward. Janis watched her friend’s head crack against the marble floor. Twin pops sounded as the energy from his hands discharged into empty air.
Janis raised her arm.
Make him fear you. Make him feel pain.
Wild Smile hauled Tyler to his feet and pressed a long, twisted fingernail to his throat. He stared at Janis with lecherous blue eyes, his smile growing even broader above Tyler’s sagging head.
“I can feel the pulse of his jugular,” Wild Smile said.
“Let him go.”
Emboldened by Wild Smile’s advantage, the vagrants at the far end of the lobby rustled forward in their tatters. Several disappeared from the railing above — to descend, Janis guessed.
If she didn’t do something, she and Tyler would soon be overwhelmed.
“How about a swap?” Wild Smile leered. “Him for you. I’ve always been more of a ladies’ man.”
Janis felt her control slipping, felt the other her taking hold of the lines that crisscrossed the room, joining her with Wild Smile. In training, Janis had been working to take that control back. But after so much give and take, the other her would simply disappear — along with her powers. Janis recalled the sensation of Split Lobe’s knife sawing into her stomach.
At that thought, blood welled from the depression of Wild Smile’s nail against Tyler’s neck.
“Stop it!” Janis screamed.
Wild Smile giggled. The vagrants pressed forward, Split Lobe and his knife in the lead.
Blood is good.
Janis drew her thoughts around the pulsing threads, preparing to will them back under her control. But this wasn’t a regression exercise. This was the real deal. If her powers abandoned her now, she and Tyler were history.
“They’re all yours,” she whispered to her other self, and let go.
The lurid threads looped Wild Smile’s wrist and snapped it from Tyler’s neck. Wild Smile’s grin froze in confusion. His gaze shot from Janis to his hand, which had risen cobra-like to hover in front of his face. Two of his fingers extended, the nail of one still red with Tyler’s blood.
Wild Smile had time to scream before they plunged into his own jugulars.
Janis extended an arm and pulled Tyler from where Wild Smile had sunk to his knees, blood jetting from his cord-popping neck. Tyler came to a rest behind her. Though his eyes were closed, his face winced as though he was trying to awaken from a bad dream.
Hang in there, buddy.
Something whizzed past Janis’s head and cracked against the wall. She wheeled as another stone streaked by. The vagrant crowd had reached the middle of the lobby and some were stooping for pieces of the smashed planter.
Grunting, Janis pushed with both arms. The vagrants were thrown back in a startled wave, as though lassoed around their middles and yanked. Several backpedaled, shoddy shoes scrambling to keep up with their momentum, but they lost their footing and fell into rear tumbles, trailing screams.
Janis heaped the men against the far wall two and three deep, a part of her luxuriating in their fright and pain. The ones who’d remained on the mezzanine retreated from the rail.
All right, Janis thought, trying to ease back into herself. You can stop. You’re safe.
But something pushed back. The part of herself she’d conceded to — her “wild child,” according to Mrs. Fern — wasn’t ready to relinquish control. She hadn’t gotten her fill yet. She eyed the groaning man pile lustily.
Please, Janis tried again. We came here to—
CRACK!
Janis thudded to her knees, the lobby reeling gray around her. A slender man with a huge mound of hair loomed over her, the broken end of a board in his grasp. He wavered in and out of focus as a cold numbness spread against one side of her head. The man’s lips pulled back from a row of glinting gold teeth.
Afro… Janis thought dimly. Struck me … Must have come in the back window…
She lifted a forearm as he cocked the board back.
Something sizzled. The man hesitated, his afro canting downward. In the next moment his pants burst into flames.
“Whoa!” he sang, breaking into a high-stepped dance. “Whoa, mama! Whoa, mama!”
He skipped in a circle, slapping at his pants with the broken board, before dashing down a corridor where he must have decided there was water. Orange flames licked the air behind him.
Janis felt Tyler’s hands beneath her arms, helping her to her feet.
“You okay?” he asked, steadying her against him. “Took a pretty good shot there.”<
br />
She touched the spot on her head which had begun to ache, and was glad to find it dry. “I’m all right,” she said. “What about you?” She turned him around. He hadn’t been so fortunate. A patch of blood matted his hair in the back. Claw marks rent the skin beneath his torn collar.
“Room’s still spinning a little,” he replied, “but I’m good.”
She followed his gaze to where Wild Smile was curled on his side. His coat and dirty jeans were blood sopped, his throat a red smear. But the bleeding had stopped. Or maybe there was no blood left inside him. Janis began to shake. What had she done? What had she allowed herself to become? He was an evil, disgusting man … but slashing his throat?
“No, no, no,” Tyler whispered, shaking her gently, seeming to understand. “I burned the wounds closed.”
Janis looked from Wild Smile to Tyler. “You … cauterized him?”
“Yeah, while you were dealing with the others. That’s how I missed that guy coming up behind you.”
Relief overwhelmed her. She wrapped her arms around Tyler’s back, careful not to squeeze too hard. “Now let’s get back to the truck. We’ve got to get your injuries taken care of.”
“What about Trips?”
Janis searched around. The mezzanine level was vacant. In the lobby, those who could stand were hobbling away. Janis studied the downed men, none of whom were Trips. For some reason, he hadn’t appeared. She spotted Split Lobe on his stomach, his filthy coat trailing from one arm. He was throwing his other arm forward, using the hilt of the serrated knife like a peg to drag himself forward.
He groaned when she wrapped several threads around his trailing leg and pulled him back.
“He might have some answers,” Janis explained to Tyler.
When he arrived, Janis willed the threads skyward, inverting Split Lobe until he was suspended in front of them. His coat brushed the floor like a cape. Split Lobe swiped feebly with his knife, his hat falling from his scabby head.
“Le-lemme down!” he said.
“I will,” Janis replied, struggling to control her emotions. “We just need you to answer a question first. Where’s the man you call Trips?”
XGeneration, Books 1-3: You Don't Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation Page 79