XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (36 page)

“I’ll be damned…” he muttered, kneeling.

The metal hatch was almost the size of a manhole cover. It was solid with a thick hinge on one side and a crescent-shaped depression on the other for grasping. But even using both hands, Scott found he couldn’t budge it.
A twelve-hundred-pound holding force
, he guessed.
At least.
Embedded in the cement beside the hatch sat a basic keypad. Scott smiled around his labored breaths. That more than proved it: Janis’s abilities were the real deal. He couldn’t wait to tell her.

But now it was time to establish his own credentials.

He closed his eyes and focused on the hatch. He guessed there was a magnet mounted in the frame and an armature plate around the hatch itself, the two bound by an electromagnetic force. He just needed to locate the source.

He reached with the part of himself that hungered for distance and control, for power. His consciousness began twining in on itself, more tightly, more fiercely.

In the next moment, DC current stormed around him. He was in! Scott pushed against the stinging current, feeling his way toward whatever spoke to the relay. Two lines plunged underground, one leading to a battery backup, he guessed, the other to some sort of central command. But there had to be something more local, something associated with the keypad.

And there it was: a small circuit board.

From far away, Scott felt his fingers resting over the blocks on the keypad. His hacking instinct urged him to probe for the correct sequence of data, the code. But how long would that take? No, better to concentrate on the relay between keypad and hatch, to short it.

Scott pulled his energy in. As always, it was a struggle, as if the energy didn’t
want
to be harnessed, straining against him like a pack of mules. But at last, Scott contained it. He focused on the tiny relay that directed current to the solenoid—the generator of the magnetic field. A red point appeared in his mind’s eye and then grew, changing color, becoming hotter.

It’s not the concentration of energy so much as its release.

The thought came spontaneously, and with it, Scott understood what had happened the last time, with the tap. The strain to hold the energy in one place had overwhelmed his mind, rendering him unconscious. Free from his control, the energy had exploded outward in a mini–Big Bang.

The trick, then, was to build the energy up and release it consciously.

The orb in his mind’s eye swelled to orange. His head went swimmy.
Just a little bit longer…
The orb verged on white. Before his awareness could waver away, Scott let go.

He staggered from the flash and the sensation of being blown from the system. He had been kneeling at the hatch’s edge, but coming to, he found himself slumped to one side, the flashlight fallen from his grasp. Its beam shone across his shoes. Standing, he seized the hatch with both hands and pulled. It swung open. Scott fell onto his backside, rattling the shelves around him.

Where the hatch door had been, rebar rungs descended into darkness. Scott got to his feet and shone his light down. The cement cylinder ended in a room, maybe fifteen feet below.

He lowered one leg inside the cylinder and then the other. He hooked his fingers around the rim, then the top rung. As he climbed down, his breaths echoed off the smooth wall in front of him. With his next step, it felt as though his foot had broken into open space. He moved his leg back in a circle to be sure. Cool air stirred past him. Scott was too far down now to see the keypad above, too far down to notice that the bottom-right key had begun to pulse red.

He stepped from the ladder and cast his beam around.

* * *

“I said, what are you doing here?”

Janis’s voice had become trapped inside her constricting chest. She looked at Mrs. Leonard, whose face remained tense, then back to Mr. Leonard, who stood at the entrance to the front hall. He had come in just seconds before, a black bag hanging from the shoulder of his crumpled gray shirt, his long brow still collapsing into a bed of creases over those awful glasses.

“My cat.” It came out in the wrong key, like when you accidentally hit a minor note in a major chord. “My cat’s missing.”

Mr. Leonard looked to his wife. “When did she come?”

“Right after you left. She was just about to knock on the door.”

His gaze fell back on Janis. “Who called this morning?”

“What do you mean?” She tried to appear confused, but she was no actress. Her eyes felt too large, and she couldn’t stop blinking.

“Who called me this morning?”

Janis’s gut shrank beneath his raised voice. She edged back from the table.

“I-I don’t understand…”

“Don’t con me!” He charged into the kitchen, aiming his finger across the table at her like a weapon. “Don’t you
dare
con me! Someone wanted me out of the house. The schools don’t call me—we have that worked out. I parked one street over, waited, and came back. And now you’re here. Who put you up to this?”

Janis’s thoughts had been colliding into one another, but now they found common direction.

“I was up at the bus stop. I saw your car leave. And that’s what made me think to come over and… and ask your wife if she’d seen our cat. I swear I didn’t call you.”

It was as close to the truth as she could possibly come. Maybe that’s why her face felt more natural around the sounds her mouth made. She watched Mr. Leonard watching her. He wasn’t looking down and to one side, like he used to do when he subbed, wasn’t hiding behind his newspaper. Beyond his lenses, the whites of his eyes appeared fierce and jaundiced.

“Did anyone see you come?”

“See me?” Fresh alarms clanged in Janis’s head.
Yes! Yes! Say yes!

She opened her mouth, but Mrs. Leonard spoke first: “I didn’t see anyone.”

Mr. Leonard looked back at Janis.

“I told my sister I’d be asking some of the neighbors about Tiger, so she probably knows…”

Did his eye just tic at the mention of Margaret?

“And you say you came from the bus stop?” he asked.

Janis nodded, not knowing whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to be admitting. He turned and paced off into the front room.
He’s looking out the window. He’s checking to see if anyone else is at the stop.
When Mr. Leonard returned, he appeared less harried. He set his bag on the floor.

“Sit down,” he told her.

“I don’t want to miss my bus.”

“If you miss it, we can take you,” Mrs. Leonard said, resting a hand on her arm.

This coming from a woman who just faked being a mute.
Janis felt like a trapped mouse. Her gaze skittered between Mrs. Leonard, who blocked escape to her left, and Mr. Leonard, who stood ahead of her to the right.

“I-I really have to go.”

She jerked around to the sliding glass door and saw with relief that it was like the door at their house, the one between the kitchen and back patio. It had a slider lock.
Tall means locked, short means unlocked,
she used to recite as a little girl. The Leonards’ lock stood in the tall position. Janis jammed it down and yanked the handle.

The door opened an inch, then banged to a stop.

At the same instant Janis saw the broom handle in the door track, Mrs. Leonard was around her.

“Get off!” Janis screamed.

Mrs. Leonard pinned Janis’s arms to her sides with one arm and clapped a hand over her mouth with the other. She was not infirm. Her back was fine. The muscles that restrained Janis felt like steel cords. Janis wriggled and shoved against her, but Mrs. Leonard hardly budged.

Beyond the glass door, she could see the light on in her own kitchen, where her parents would be eating breakfast, her father reading the newspaper. When she kicked the door, it only shuddered. She tried to scream through her sealed mouth. “
Mmmfff!
”

Mr. Leonard moved in front of her, holding his hands out.

“We’re not going to hurt you,” he said.

His voice was calm, but his eyes jittered behind his lenses. Janis leaped up and got a heel into Mr. Leonard’s lean gut. With a low grunt, he stumbled backward. When Janis went to stomp her captor’s foot, Mrs. Leonard anticipated her. She stepped back and tightened her grip.

“Janis,” she said into her ear. “We just want to talk to you.”

Mr. Leonard recovered and drew something from his pocket. It was about the size and shape of an electric razor. When he cocked his wrist, the object hummed to life. Lights on either side of it blinked red.

“I don’t want to have to use this,” he said, recovering his breath.

Oh, god, what is that thing?

She tried to squint away as the blinking device drew nearer. It smelled like a hairdryer beginning to overheat. Then something sizzled, not a sound but a
sensation
—inside her head. When Janis tried to scream again, saliva spilled against Mrs. Leonard’s fingers and turned cold against her own lips. Gray lights began to flash around the periphery of her vision.

Don’t pass out,
she pleaded with herself.
Whatever you do, please don’t pass out.

She stopped struggling.

Mr. Leonard stared at her another moment, then withdrew the device and flicked his wrist. The smell and sensation faded with the red lights, and Janis blinked until her vision cleared.

“That’s better.” Mr. Leonard was just returning the device to his pocket and opening his mouth to say something more when the phone in the hallway rang. Janis’s gaze followed his, faint hope flickering inside her.
Maybe someone saw me walk into the house. Maybe they told my parents.
But Janis had never heard a ring like this before: half ring, full ring, half ring.

“Someone’s inside,” Mrs. Leonard said.

Janis watched Mr. Leonard’s eyes dart from the phone. The pale light through the glass door shrank his pupils to points. “Who is it?”

But he wasn’t asking his wife. He was looking at her.

Janis shook her head.

He dug his hand into the front pocket of her sweatshirt and pulled out the walkie-talkie. He held it up in front of her face.

“Who is it?”

She hadn’t stopped shaking her head.

“Goddammit!” Mr. Leonard wheeled and spiked the talkie against the floor. It burst apart. One of the batteries rolled toward the den. “You have no idea what you’ve done,” he whispered through bared teeth. “Put her in the bathroom.”

Janis writhed and tried to scream again, but Mrs. Leonard’s grip held firm. She felt herself being half carried, half dragged around the table. Mr. Leonard strode ahead of them and punched a code into the wall beneath the staircase. A door appeared, and Mr. Leonard pushed it open.

Scott!

Mrs. Leonard released her at the same time she shoved her through another doorway. Janis fell against a sink. By the time she turned, the door was slamming closed. A bolt
clunk
ed home, its sound solid and final.

* * *

Scott’s flashlight hung down by his side, still on but forgotten. Upon dropping from the ladder, he had found himself in a room with a row of locked cases. Scott considered picking them open, but the cold, flickering glow from a room down the corridor drew him forward instead.

“Ho-ly smokes,” he whispered.

The monitors stared down from the wall, like something you would see in the security room of a major department store: twelve of them, four across and three down, black and white screens. Some were still, and some oscillated, but all showed the same thing—the Graystones’ house.

“And I thought
I
was the voyeur.”

In the top left monitor, Scott found himself looking at the Graystones’ front porch. By the angle, Scott guessed the camera was mounted somewhere on the street light—perhaps in the light fixture itself, where it would be hard to see. The top-middle and right images showed the garage side of the house. In the rightmost image, the edge of a leaf fluttered in and out of view. The image was being fed by a camera in the woods.

All of those hours Janis practiced against the garage door…

Scott left the thought at that, coldness worming through his gut.

It wasn’t that he had distrusted Janis’s intuition about Mr. Leonard’s intentions. But to this point, that’s all it had been, her intuition. Now the truth was taking ghastly shape. Indeed, looking at those monitors was like peering into the mind of a meticulous sociopath. And if Mr. Leonard had gone this far, there was no question that he had plans to go further still.

Beneath the lowest monitors, showing the patio and windows at the back of the Graystones’ house, sat a control panel. Scott eased onto the chair, its caster wheels squeaking over a square of balding carpet. Dials lined the panel, numbered one through twelve on clumsy red label-maker strips. Each dial probably corresponded to a camera. A switch beneath each knob seemed to toggle between functions.
Focus? Zoom? Brightness?
Scott didn’t dare test them to find out.

His gaze moved from the controls to where the panel formed a desk. It was empty except for an olive-green military phone and a flat book.

Scott cannoned the book open. It appeared to be a ledger of some kind. He adjusted his glasses and flipped back a couple of pages until he saw writing. Frowning, he ran his middle finger down the columns.

No, not a ledger. A logbook.

The leftmost column held what appeared to be codes, several of them repeating. The middle and rightmost columns listed dates and times—military times, some with asterisks beside them. Scott started to flip to the beginning of the book when he heard the
chuff
of a distant door opening. He snapped his head toward the sound, a primal yell lodged in his brainstem.

Descending footsteps followed, wicked in their soft cadence.

Scott rose to his feet. He looked down the corridor where the sound of the footfalls continued to grow, masculine footfalls. Scott wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he did.
Mr. Leonard? No, too soon.
Unless he’d returned to the house for something he’d forgotten.

Scott eased the chair back in place. One of the casters squeaked thinly. The footfalls paused, then resumed, coming faster. Scott looked around. The military phone, the notes in the ledger, the bunker, the disturbing obsession with security. Was Mr. Leonard a Vietnam veteran? Someone who had killed in the field? Carried out assassinations?