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

  Description

  XGeneration is a teen paranormal thriller series inspired by classic superhero comics and the 1980s. This box set contains the first three books: You Don’t Know Me, The Watchers, and Silent Generation.

  * * *

  ABOUT YOU DON'T KNOW ME

  In the fall of 1984, Cold War tensions between Washington and Moscow are close to breaking.

  But in sleepy Gainesville, Florida, fourteen-year-old Janis Graystone is mainly worried about starting high school, earning a spot on the varsity soccer team, and keeping her older sister from running her life.

  And then there are her paranormal experiences. Experiences where she awakens in her backyard — out of her body — with the disturbing sense that someone is watching her.

  For Scott Spruel, the start of high school means the chance to start over. And he’s willing to ditch everything — computer hacking, Dungeons & Dragons marathons, even his comic book collection (well, except for his X-Men) — if it means getting closer to Janis, the secret love of his life.

  But what about the eavesdropper on his telephone line, a presence he senses through powers he is only beginning to understand?

  As clocks tick down, Janis and Scott will need the other’s help. But first they’ll have to find one another, and that means traversing Thirteenth Street High’s caste system — a system that can be as brutal as it is unforgiving.

  XGeneration 1 - 3

  Box Set

  Brad Magnarella

  © 2015

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover by Damonza.com

  For the Brywood Gang

  XGeneration 1

  You Don’t Know Me

  Brad Magnarella

  © 2013

  1

  Gainesville, Florida

  Sunday, August 26, 1984

  8:05 a.m.

  Scott Spruel leaned nearer the window and parted his bedroom blinds a little more, not wanting to lose her. She had already set a canvas bag in her sister Margaret’s car and disappeared down her driveway, to the garage side of her house — the side he couldn’t see.

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he whispered.

  He stole a look back to the car, where Margaret was sorting through the trunk. A red cooler came out then went back in along with a tasseled blanket and a second canvas bag, this one with sandals poking out.

  Scott resumed his vigil over the distant driveway, the blinds trembling above his ink-stained fingers. He hoped to see her again — had to see her again — if only for a moment. Of course he told himself that every time, didn’t he? If only for a moment. But what did he ever do with those moments? He could never make his legs move toward her, could not even premeditate the words he would say or how he would say them. He’d once spent half a day in front of his mirror trying to practice his greeting: “Hi, Janis,” followed by an easygoing smile. He gave up when all he could manage was a Jokeresque parody of a grin.

  A hopeless sigh steamed the glass. It had been a long summer.

  Something flickered beyond the blur — a flame. Heart pounding, Scott wiped the window clean, wiped her into view.

  Janis Graystone.

  Her fiery-red ponytail swished over the straps of her white tank top as she jogged into view on lean, athletic legs. She bounced a soccer ball along the asphalt driveway, an act as natural for her as chewing gum. The sound reached Scott’s ears a split second after each impact. It was the distance, that impossible distance between his house and hers — one hundred fifty yards, give or take.

  He began to sigh again but clamped his breath off.

  Janis stopped where the driveway met the cul-de-sac and, before Margaret could prevent it, punted the ball. The ball disappeared into the car’s trunk. Margaret said something Scott couldn’t hear though it was apparent from the stern thrust of her body she was peeved. Janis ignored her, raising her arms at her feat.

  Silent laughter parted Scott’s lips from his braces. For a moment, it felt as though he and Janis were connected again, time and space snapping away. But then she was climbing into the passenger’s seat and closing the door. Margaret slammed the trunk closed and joined her on the driver’s side. To Scott’s ears, the faint start and rev of the engine signaled another opportunity slipping away.

  The Honda Prelude rounded the cul-de-sac and came straight toward Scott, whose house faced the short street on which the Graystones lived. He drew back into the darkness before stopping himself.

  “Who are you kidding?” he mumbled. “She’s not going to notice you.”

  After all, she hadn’t noticed him since the end of fifth grade, more than three years earlier. Why would she start now? He pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose and parted the plastic blinds once more.

  When the dark blue car arrived at the top of the street, morning light illuminated Janis’s face. A clean glow shone over the pull of her hair, her perfect brow, cheeks Scott could only imagine himself caressing, her full lower lip. The light caught the depth and pensiveness of her chestnut eyes as well, even as they squinted. It was the most clearly he had seen her in years.

  Then the car turned, and the square of sunlight slid from Janis, and only the street remained.

  Scott let the blinds snap closed. It took several seconds for the green glow of his computer to reclaim his bedroom, to redefine the heaps of clutter around him. He swiveled back to the blinking cursor on his TRS-80. With burning, sleep-deprived eyes, he scanned the lines of commands and responses that had delivered him to his present point, the same lines he had been staring at since late the night before. The modem clicked and hummed.

  “If you want true power,” Scott whispered to himself, “you have to finish this. You have to go back inside.”

  He hesitated before closing his eyes. Behind his sealed lids, he was startled to find an afterimage of Janis’s face, no less stunning for being a negative. But by then, his consciousness was already squeezing through the computer modem, being shot along the network. And though Scott struggled to hold on to her image, it was soon lost to a cold and bewildering storm of data and electrical current.

  2

  Crescent Beach, Florida

  Later that day

  “Do you ever think we’re being watched?” Janis asked.

  She lifted her head from her soccer ball and squinted past her toes, still slick with sunblock, to where the beach crowd thinned near the crash and rumble of the ocean. For the first time, she and Margaret had the beach blanket to themselves, and she knew it wouldn’t last. Beyond her feet and off to the right, her sister’s three friends squealed and pranced from the water’s edge in new bikinis. The bright pastel colors made them hard to miss. They would probably be running back this way any minute.

  “Well, we are at the beach,” Margaret said.

  Janis turned onto her elbow. In contrast to her airhead friends, her older sister lay in quiet repose, brunette hair tucked into a neat bun that cushioned her head and opened her lithe neck to the sun. Black Wayfarers hid her eyes. When the breeze stirred, the strings of her apple-red bikini fluttered against her hip.

  “Not here, I mean,” Janis said. “In the neighborhood. At home. I keep having this feeling that we’re—”

  “Being watched? Like the song?”

  Janis groaned. She had walked right into that one. “Somebody�
��s Watching Me” had played on the boom box a half hour before, the deejay at I-100 FM using a creepy ghoul’s voice when he recapped the song and artist.

  “Not funny,” she said.

  “Sorry, couldn’t resist. Go on.”

  “All right, but no more jokes. This is serious.”

  The corner of Margaret’s glossy lips tipped into a half-smile. She sat up and checked her stomach before dripping tanning oil into her hand and spreading it around her golden belly.

  Janis became aware of her own stomach starting to burn and reached for the sunblock. “There are just these… dreams I keep having,” she said, rubbing a dollop above then below her lime-green bottoms. She tested the fading bruise on the side of her thigh — softball casualty. “But they’re not dreams. Not exactly. They’re more like out-of-body experiences.”

  “Out-of-what?”

  “I think that’s what they’re called.”

  “If you say so.”

  Janis capped the sunblock and searched her sister’s face. She was wading into the paranormal, which wasn’t exactly her thing and was much less her sister’s. Margaret had given Twilight Zone: The Movie a thumbs-down last year, not because some parts were wet-your-pants scary but because it was “too implausible.” Ditto with Poltergeist the year before. But with the experiences happening almost nightly now, Janis needed to confide in someone, even if that someone was Margaret.

  “Anyways, in these dreams, these experiences, I’m suddenly awake, and I’m standing in the backyard. And there’s this strange energy all around me: whoosh-whoosh-whoosh. Like the wind’s blowing but deeper and… rougher, I guess.”

  Janis waved her hands around her head in demonstration, but Margaret was on her back again, the sun shining along her slender legs and glinting off toenails painted red to match her bikini.

  “How can you be awake if you’re asleep?”

  “That’s just it. When it happens, I’m as awake as I am now. But my body’s still in bed. I mean, I can’t feel my body, but I know I’m not actually standing out in the backyard.”

  “Maybe you’re sleepwalking. Mom says I used to sleepwalk.”

  “Wouldn’t I wake up in the morning with crud on my feet if—”

  “People do strange things when they sleepwalk. I read about this guy from California who mowed his entire lawn, front and back. And he didn’t remember a thing when he woke up.”

  “What does that have to do with—”

  “Only found out because his neighbors called the police. You know, the noise of the mower.”

  “Margaret!”

  “Oh,” she cut in again, “and he was buck naked.”

  Janis snort-laughed. Margaret joined her, her own laughter illuminating the backward tilt of her face. Disney couldn’t have animated a more perfect laugh. The only things missing were the little woodland creatures. But Janis only half begrudged Margaret her laugh, especially since her sister didn’t seem to let it out often enough.

  “All right.” Margaret cleared her throat and retucked her bun beneath her head. “I’ll give you that you’re somehow awake in the backyard while asleep in bed. But what does that have to do with being watched?”

  “I…” Janis began, then pressed a loose strand of hair to her nose. That’s where things got tricky.

  She didn’t always remember the out-of-body experiences — not in detail, anyway. A dream would often intrude then another and another, such that by morning, she could only dimly remember the experience. All that remained were whatever impressions still lingered in her memory, faint and ghostly. And that’s what Janis felt at that moment, what she had been feeling all day: a spine-needling impression that someone had been watching.

  And hadn’t there been a smell? Cigarette smoke?

  Or maybe she was confusing last night’s experience with the present. The approaching surfer took a final pull on his cigarette stub, then flicked it away, not looking where it landed. A blue tattoo stained his upper arm: a dagger piercing a heart. The surfer behind him was sharp faced and darkly freckled, his nose coated in silver zinc. Janis peeked toward Margaret and began drawing her legs in.

  The surfers swaggered toward the blanket as though meaning to trample over it. They stopped at the last moment, propping their boards on end. Tattoo glanced along Janis’s legs then turned his gaze back on Margaret. He tossed his slick, sandy hair to the side, his stubbly cheeks swelling around a pair of hard dimples.

  Margaret raised her Wayfarers a half inch, then lowered them.

  “Move along, boys,” she said.

  The surfers’ smiles faltered. It was the way she had said it: no nonsense, her tone sounding older than her seventeen years. Freckles whispered something near Tattoo’s ear, drawing a stupid leer.

  Janis suddenly felt naked in her two-piece and turned onto her side, pulling her knees in even more. The xylophonic beats of Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” popped from the boom box, but there was no fun in them. Janis peered toward the ocean, wishing Margaret’s friends were crowding the blanket again, giggles and all. It figured. Now that they were needed, they were nowhere to be found.

  “Whoa, babe,” Tattoo said. His ragged wetsuit was peeled below his navel, and the neoprene arms flopped around his thighs as he gave his hair another toss. “What’s that all about? Can’t a dude admire the scenery?”

  His friend sniggered, and the two of them edged closer. Tattoo could have been cute, Janis thought, but there was a crudeness in his manner, in the way they were both standing, hips thrust forward. She imagined it would only take a few beers for them to become dangerous. The tip of Tattoo’s board dripped water near Margaret’s feet as he staggered a step nearer.

  They’d probably already had a few.

  “Admire it somewhere else,” Margaret said, still on her back. Then added, “Dude.”

  “Or what? Gonna choke us with those fine legs?”

  Their laughter landed like blades in Janis’s stomach. Margaret rose onto her elbows. She raised her sunglasses again, propping them over her teased bangs. Her sea-green eyes studied the surfers like a school principal weighing the appropriate punishment.

  “Oooh,” Tattoo said, waggling his fingers in feigned fear. “A man-eater.”

  Freckles sniggered, the oily silver glistening along the blade of his nose.

  Margaret’s eyes didn’t flinch.

  “Oh, c’mon, baby. Don’t be like that.” Tattoo pushed his board toward Freckles and planted a sand-caked foot on the blanket. “I’m just trying to make some conversation.” It came out convershashum.

  When Janis looked up, Freckles was grinning down at her. The tip of his tongue emerged, worm-like, and ran across his mottled lips. Janis edged toward her sister. But now Tattoo was planting his hand like he meant to lower himself between them, the muscles bunching across his upper back. Margaret didn’t shrink from him. Neither did her gaze waver from his face.

  “I said move along.”

  Janis imagined herself lifting the red Igloo cooler behind them, using her knee to help boost it higher, the dozen-odd cans of Tab slish-sloshing in the melting ice. She imagined dropping — no, slamming — it on the side of Tattoo’s head.

  But as Janis tensed to move, the muscles across Tattoo’s back softened.

  “…the hell?” he muttered.

  Like a movie reel being played in reverse, he rose from his three-point stance to his knees, to his feet, and shuffled backward until he was beside Freckles again. His jaw hung to one side, as though he was uncertain of what he was doing.

  Freckles’s tongue crawled back into his mouth.

  Janis followed their squinting gazes toward Margaret. Her no-nonsense expression hadn’t changed… except for her eyes. A deeper shade of green grew inside them, seeming to hold Tattoo. Freckles, too.

  Ten seconds passed. Twenty. A dry click sounded from Tattoo’s throat. Freckles shivered. The two of them had diminished, their boards no longer penetrating the space above the blanket, their hard arms deflated.
Or maybe it only seemed that way because Janis could sense how badly they wanted to leave. They were just waiting for the excuse, waiting for Margaret to release them.

  Freckles glanced down at Janis, his expression the plea of a lost child.

  Janis looked around, the shouts from a volleyball game, the crash of the surf — Bananarama, even — sounding hard to her, raw. She hadn’t even wanted to come to the beach that day. She’d originally planned to spend the morning in goalie gloves and a practice jersey, beaming a soccer ball off the garage door. (“So bring your ball,” Margaret had told her. “Problem solved.”) Now, trapped between Margaret and the surfers, her stomach twisting into knots, Janis tried to imagine herself seventy miles inland, the driveway at her feet, the woods at her back, slinging the soccer ball toward the garage door, gathering the rebound…

  Margaret gave a small sigh and lowered her shades.

  “My sister and I were talking.” She pronounced every syllable as though explaining the concept to a pair of slow children. “You know, having a con-ver-sa-tion. And you interrupted us. May we finish now?”

  “Uh, yeah… whatever,” Tattoo said hoarsely, already turning. His board collided into Freckles’s as the two of them wheeled in opposite directions.

  A small part of Janis wanted to laugh. She cringed and curled her toes instead.

  The surfers straightened themselves out and made for the boardwalk, Freckles stammering an apology over his shoulder. Margaret adjusted her top and lay back down, frowning as though the whole episode had been nothing more than a minor irritation.

  “How do you do that?” Janis asked.

  “Do what?”

  “That. Getting people to do whatever you want?”

  Margaret shrugged. “I just tell them.”

  Janis watched the surfers disappear beyond the dunes separating the beach from the public restrooms. It was true. Margaret always told people what she wanted, and nine times out of ten, she seemed to get it: an A in the few cases where she’d earned a B+, a speeding warning instead of a hefty fine and points, another curfew extension from Dad. And her job. Even though she was the youngest salesperson at the JC Penney in the mall, she earned the fattest commissions by far, more than double anyone else’s. She’d already been promised a management position after graduation, a position she declined, thanks but no thanks. Pre-law called.