XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (38 page)

“I only have a minute, so you need to listen to me.” He panted as he spoke. “You’re part of a program, a deadly program. It’s your abilities. I tried to reach your sister, to warn her, but there are too many eyes. Nothing is what it seems, and no one can be trusted. Do you understand me? No one. Not even the ones who will investigate what happened here. Especially not them. Do you understand me?”

She had no idea what he was talking about but tried to nod anyway.

“Your one chance is to hide your powers. Never use them. Never speak of them again.”

He seemed to notice the sharp length of ceramic she still clung to. Moving his hand from her mouth, he twisted her wrist in a way that didn’t hurt but made her fingers turn numb. He eased the shard from her grasp. Why she didn’t scream again, Janis couldn’t say. There had been a quality to his voice, his words, to the way he held her now that felt almost… paternal.

Tom wants to help you.

“You’ll understand this one day,” Mr. Leonard whispered and drove the shard into her side.

* * *

The faint scream echoed past Scott, like a specter. He stopped to listen, the hair bristling along his nape. He heard nothing more, but the sound, hoarse and high, had been unmistakable. It belonged to Janis.

Scott grabbed for the smooth cement ahead of him. The skateboard veered up the tunnel wall and he nearly tipped over. Scott jerked the board back on course. His legs pistoned at the darkness behind him. The wedge of falling light, still twenty yards away, didn’t seem to be getting any closer. A desperate heat broke over Scott’s body. He was trapped, entombed. He gasped for air.

The second scream to reach him was more of a grunt—a sheared-off beginning with no middle or ending.

Also Janis’s.

In a flurry of kicks and shoves, he pulled himself into the leaf-strewn cylinder beneath the storm drain. Cold air washed around him. He stood and peered from the opening out into the street. Mr. Leonard’s green Datsun sat parked in front of the house where Janis had gone. And then Mr. Leonard appeared, alone. He ran down the walkway. An army-green duffel bag bounced from his shoulder. Peering around, he jerked the driver’s-side door open.

Scott writhed through the storm drain, fingers grasping at asphalt. He heard the door bang closed and the Datsun shake to life. By the time Scott emerged, the car was halfway down the hill. Its engine droned into the distance. Scott jerked his gaze around to the Pattersons’ garage door.

In the thin morning light, the bush stood alone.

He couldn’t feel his legs as he sprinted toward the Leonards’ house, not even his bashed hip.

“Hey,” a man’s voice called from behind. “Is everything all right?”

Scott twisted his head to find the Watsons emerging from The Downs in their matching blue sweat suits. Mr. Watson’s hand made a visor above his eyes.

“Call the police!” Scott gasped, still sprinting. “The Leonards’ house!”

The Watsons looked at one another and back at Scott.

“Please!”

Maybe it was the way the
please
tore from his throat, but they began running toward The Meadows, Mr. Watson stripping his wrist weights, then hopping to do the same with his ankle weights.

Scott leaped the curb and hurdled a bush. Dew kicked up around him. Beneath the balcony, the yellow door stood ajar. Scott slowed. Was that a shoe he saw beyond, the heel of a white Keds? He pushed the door open.

No.

Janis was lying on her side, her back to him. Hair fell from her head and onto the dull carpet like a spilled drink. Her white T-shirt was eerily bloodless where a narrow shard stood from her ribs.

Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.

Please, no.

In two blinks, Scott’s eyes took in the ruined hallway and the slumped and bleeding woman beyond.

Then he was on the floor in front of Janis. He found her eyes open but empty, the soft rims of green around her pupils thin and hard to see. One hand held a small gold pendant at her neck.

“Stay awake,” he pled, stroking the side of her head. “Help’s coming.”

Her eyes shifted slightly at his voice. She was breathing, he saw, but each breath was so thin that her torso remained rigid. He took her hand in both of his, forgetting the injuries to his palms.

“Can you hear me?” His voice was starting to tremble, to come apart. “Stay awake.”

He kissed her hand and pressed it to his cheek.

“Please,” he said.

Her fingers curled around his and held tight. They remained like that, Scott and Janis, until the distant wail of sirens grew around them and a cadre of footsteps pounded up the walkway.

30

Eleven days later

Friday, December 14, 1984

2:51 p.m.

Scott stood in the street in front of the Graystones’ house, hands in his coat pockets, shoulders shrugged to his ears. The wind blew gray around him. Turning, he could see his own bedroom window up the hill. It appeared eye-like, set back behind the bushes, the half-raised blinds a hooded lid. And no wonder. It was the same place from which he’d looked out for three years, watching the very spot where he now stood, the spot that always seemed so far away.

Only someone else had been watching, too.

Scott raised his face to the street light at the end of the cul-de-sac. He’d come home from school one day the previous week to see a police technician standing inside a bucket lift, dismantling a camera. Scott assumed they’d done the same in the woods and around the Leonards’ house. For the entire week, yellow police tape had criss-crossed the Leonards’ front door and fluttered over the gate to their backyard, making the house look sinister from the street, too.

Scott exhaled through pursed lips, turned back to the Graystones’ house, and limped up the semi-circular driveway. The hip he’d landed on in the culvert remained sore. In front of the door, he hesitated. A Gobstopper-sized lump filled his throat. He tried to swallow, but it wouldn’t move.

Shoe on its side, violent spill of hair, jagged shard…

He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. This was proving harder than he’d anticipated. Replacing his glasses, he reached for the illuminated doorbell. But before he could press the button, the door opened.

Bundled in Thirteenth Street sweats, purple and white, her hair gathered in a loose ponytail, she looked stunning, a picture of divine resurrection. Scott recovered his legs in time to keep from staggering. As she stepped toward him, her pale lips leaned toward a smile.

“Hey, stranger,” Janis said hoarsely.

Scott tried to smile back. “Hey yourself. How are you?”

She winced as she raised her right arm overhead. “They took the stitches out yesterday, before my discharge. It’s still a little sore, and I still get short of breath, but every day’s better.” Her arm eased back to her side. “Thanks to you.”

Scott’s gaze fell to his shoes. “No, I just…” He tasted salt in the back of his throat and was afraid that if he tried to say more, the salt would climb into his tear ducts and spill out.

Janis closed the door behind her.

“I was wondering when I’d get a chance to talk to you,” she said. “My dad won’t let me go anywhere until I’m all healed. I would’ve called, but… well, what you told me about your phone.”

Scott shifted his weight. “When I went to the hospital, there were police outside your door.”

Janis shook his shoulder. “They weren’t there to keep you out, dummy.”

“Yeah, I know. I wasn’t sure.”

Both times Scott had tried to visit—a handwritten get-well card clutched behind his back—Blake had been at Janis’s bedside. Both times, Scott had continued past her room, slipped from the hospital, and biked home.

“I heard they found him,” he said.

“Yeah.” Janis sat on the top step and clasped her hands between her knees.

Scott sat beside her.

“They found his car at a rest stop in Georgia. A trucker remembered seeing someone fitting his description climbing into a semi bound for South Carolina. That’s where they found him, in an interstate motel outside of Florence. His body, anyway. And the rope around his neck.”

“So that’s it, I guess?”

“I gave a detailed statement while it was still fresh in my memory. They’ve linked him to some unsolved cases in the state. Kidnapping, abduction…” She hesitated. “…other things.”

“And his wife?”

“She confessed to acting as an accomplice. Prison after her arm heals.”

Scott peeked behind them and then lowered his voice. “Did your powers do that?”

Janis watched her clasped hands. She nodded.

“So what did you tell everyone?”

“I stuck to the story about Tiger. Said that I was worried when I didn’t see her outside in the morning. Thought maybe she’d wandered off, et cetera. I told the rest more or less how it happened, leaving certain parts out.”

Scott listened as Janis gave him the play-by-play, from the moment he dropped into the storm drain until he found her in the front hallway. Scott lined up her experiences aboveground with his experiences below. When she finished, Scott had a complete picture.

“How did you get your powers to work this time?” he asked.

“It was my emotions, I think—fear, anger, desperation—all swirling inside me. It triggered something, turned something on. I suddenly felt in control of my space, Scott, of the objects around me. I reached for the door, and I… I drove all of those emotions against it. Of course, I told everyone else that I’d battered it down with the lid to the toilet tank.”

For a second, Scott felt like they were inside the panels of one of his comic books.

“They believed you?”

“I think so.” She looked over. “What did you tell the police?”

“That I was at the bus stop when I heard you scream. Course, I was still making my way back up the tunnel.”

They both looked out into the street where the sweet gum leaves were skittering and piling into drifts. Janis leaned her head against his shoulder. Her ponytail fell between them, alighting on his thigh.

“You were down there when he went into the basement?”

“I got out before he saw me. But the sophistication of his security system, Janis, the cameras, the whole setup… I’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, it was beyond even what Bell does at their big central offices.” Scott’s next words tumbled out. “How in the hell could he have done all of that on a military pension and the little he gets substitute teaching?”

Janis unclasped her hands and looked at him.

Scott’s face flushed with heat. “Oh, but don’t listen to me. Curse of the nerd brain.” He knocked his knuckles against the side of his head. “It never stops working, I’m afraid.”

But Janis was nodding. “No, I’ve been wondering the same thing.”

“Really?”

“There was this small device he threatened me with. When he turned it on, it made my head buzz, and I felt like I was going to pass out. I’d never seen, much less heard, of anything like that, have you? We have our official versions of what happened—I was looking for Tiger, you were waiting at the bus stop. But what if the information we’ve been given about the Leonards is an official version, too? You know—who they are, what they did, their pasts. Their names, even.”

“What do you mean?”

“The special investigator, a woman named Agent Steel—cropped hair, chilly blue eyes, gave me the creeps.” Janis shivered. “Anyway, she kept referring to Mrs. Leonard as Susan. But in the house, I heard Mr. Leonard call his wife Colleen. He yelled it when he saw her injured in the kitchen.”

“Maybe that’s her middle name.”

“No, the forms I signed had her whole name: Susan Patricia Leonard. And the Leonards knew about our powers—mine and Margaret’s anyways. Then there were the things he said about a dangerous program and not letting them see our powers, not letting them know.”

“Who’s
them
?”

“He didn’t say.”

Scott started to open his mouth, then clamped it closed.

“‘Nothing is what it seems, and no one can be trusted.’ I kept thinking about that when Agent Steel was questioning me. And I kept thinking, too, about what he said after he helped me to the floor. Right before he left.”

“Mr. Leonard?”

“‘Lay low until I contact you.’ That’s what he said.”

“Well, I guess that won’t be happening anytime soon.”

Janis placed her hand against her side, over the place Scott had seen that awful length of shard protruding. “The wound… The doctors keep saying that it couldn’t have happened in a better place. A punctured liver still functions, still does what it’s supposed to do. And mine’s going to heal completely. I’ll just have a small scar between these two ribs.”

“You think he picked that spot on purpose?”

Janis fell silent. “I don’t know.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but…” Scott still wasn’t sure whether it was a good idea, but maybe there was a connection with what she was telling him. “Well, I’ve been probing the tap I told you about, exploring it.”

“And?”

“I don’t think it’s a tap, Janis.”

“You’re not being monitored?”

Scott fidgeted with the hem of his jacket. “Yes and no. It’s more like a switchboard, like the ones hotels have. Or very similar. You know, you call a hotel, a receptionist answers, you tell them the room number, and they connect you, right? With some hotels, you can dial the room number directly, but the call still passes through the hotel’s switchboard. The receptionist can still listen in.” Scott looked at her. “I don’t know how to explain this, Janis, other than to say that it feels like Oakwood has its own switchboard.”

The idea had begun with Jesse Hoag. The day Scott had given him the money, Jesse mentioned losing his phone service on a Sunday—Creed had lost his, too. Janis later confirmed hers had gone out as well. And while Scott hadn’t been able to follow up with Jesse for obvious reasons, Janis remembered that her outage had happened on the afternoon of October 14, the day after her first date with Blake—the same day Scott had shorted what he thought had been a personal wiretap.

Janis’s eyes widened.

Scott nodded. “Which would mean
all
of our phones are being monitored.”