XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (37 page)

He turned and fled the way he had come. When he reached the room with the ladder, he killed his flashlight and listened back. The
whoosh-whumps
of his heart filled his ears. Scott pulled himself up the ladder. The column he entered was black, but he couldn’t risk a light.

His raw palms screamed around the rebar rungs. He swam his arm overhead, feeling for the opening, for the rim. At last his hand collided with the underside of the hatch, jamming his wrist.

He shoved the hatch, but it wouldn’t move.

The footfalls entered the room beneath him.

29

“Janis, we’re not trying to hurt you.”

The thick door muffled Mrs. Leonard’s voice. Janis had already tried the handle. That had rotated fine, but the door wouldn’t budge, and she could see no means by which to operate the bolt from the inside. A bathroom that only locked on the outside. Janis’s chest began to shudder.

“When Tom comes back, he’ll explain.”

When Tom comes back…

Janis felt the life leaving her legs. Every part of her wanted to collapse in the corner, to shrink between the sink and toilet and close her eyes, to not have to think about what would happen when Tom came back. A minute before, she could see the soft light through her kitchen window. Now she might never see her house again—Dad, Mom, Margaret, Tiger…

Stop it. Pull yourself together.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and studied the door again. The part where she’d heard the bolt close was at shoulder level, too high to kick out.

She backed herself to the sink, then turned to the wall. No mirror above the sink. She tried the cabinet doors underneath, but they were fake, adhered to the wooden frame. She trained her gaze on the toilet.

The ceramic lid came off the holding tank with a dull scrape, and Janis held it to her chest like her most fervent hope. The lid was oblong and heavy, maybe fifteen pounds. She turned back to the door and moved the lid to shoulder level, testing the weight again. Would fifteen pounds be enough? She gripped the edges until she felt the blood squeezing from her knuckles.

She’d know in a second.

In two lunging steps she heaved the end of the lid against the door’s lock like a battering ram. Something cracked, and the lid fell into two pieces at her feet, shattering against the tile.

She seized the handle. The door rattled in its frame but wouldn’t open. The lock had yielded to the blow but only a very little.

“Janis, please,” Mrs. Leonard called from the other side of the door. “You just need to—”

Janis backed up and kicked the door. She did it again and again, her heel aching to the bone. She switched legs. Every time she struck, the door vibrated, but it wouldn’t swing out, wouldn’t fall open. She imagined Mrs. Leonard on the other side, bracing it with her deceptively sturdy body.

“Janis, listen to me.”

“Shut up!” Janis yelled.

With her back to the sink, she reassessed the brown door. She needed to think. A crusty indentation showed where the lid had met wood. The floor was littered with the aftermath. Janis pulled off her sweatshirt and tossed it away. She picked out the sharpest length of ceramic and slid it into the back of her jeans beneath her shirt, the smooth side against her skin. For when Tom came back.

“Janis, you and your—”

“Stop it!” she yelled, covering her ears.

She could hear her breaths imploding and exploding in her lungs, like a runaway locomotive. She hoped Scott had escaped, that he wasn’t hurt. She would never forgive herself if anything happened to him. And in the midst of that thought came a sensation. It climbed from the back of her throat, the texture of foam, the taste of the sea. Soon it filled her nose.

Fed by her booming breaths, her body began thrumming with the energy of her nighttime experiences.

When she uncovered her ears, the air crackled around her. If Mrs. Leonard was still talking, Janis couldn’t hear her. And if she was still bracing the door, God help her.

Janis stood from the sink and raised her arm. This wasn’t going to be like the night at the swing sets. She puffed out her chest as the space around her pulsed with violent energy—energy she controlled. Though three feet separated her hand from the door, it felt like those three feet didn’t matter. Not anymore.

With everything she could summon, Janis
pushed
.

* * *

Footfalls echoed up into the cylinder where Scott clung to the rungs, the sounds narrowing, zeroing in. Scott imagined his pursuer moving past the cases.
Gun cases?
He suppressed the horrifying thought and concentrated. His mind twined and entered the locking system, finding the relay. It was open again, somehow, current flowing to the solenoid.

Once more, Scott drew his concentration around it.

Build it up, build it up…

And then he released.

Scott’s chin dipped, and his grip slipped from the rung. A sensation of falling, back scraping. A dull blow to the base of his head. Scott gasped and flailed his arms. His hands found a rung. With his feet still planted on the rungs below, he had fallen backward and become lodged in the cylinder.

Now he pulled himself upright and reoriented himself, pawing for the hatch overhead. He found it and shoved. The lid swung out, the hinge reaching its terminus with a dull
clank
.

“Hey!” The voice below was a throbbing echo.

Scott scrambled up into the shed and slammed the hatch door closed. Seeing the pulsing red button on the keypad, he understood: a passive detection field. That made him all the more terrified of his pursuer. The voice that had shouted up at him
had
been male, and Scott imagined Mr. Leonard racing up the metal rungs still slick with his sweat and blood.

Scott seized the plywood board that had covered the hatch and wedged it between the hatch and the metal brackets of the lowest shelf. A second later, another shout called out, this one from mere feet away. The hatch door jittered. The wedged board and shelves rattled, but held.

As he turned to flee, a paralyzing thought came to Scott:
The shed door is bolted again. It’s bolted, and you won’t be able to open it. You won’t be able to pick it. There won’t be time.
The thought carried such cold certainty that he could already feel himself bouncing off the solid frame and landing beside the board he’d just propped up. The board that, with the next jitter of the hatch, shifted another inch.

But the shed doors flew wide, and Scott blinked out into morning light. He reached with his first strides, covering precious ground, taking the straightest line to the fence.

He leaped for the chain linking, threw himself over, and tumbled down the side of the culvert.
Cripes, ouch, ouch, ouch!
His right hip bore the brunt of the landing. Seizing his skateboard by the trucks, Scott staggered to his feet. He hobble-ran toward the opening beneath Twenty-first Avenue. The fence rattled to stillness behind him.

You might make it yet.

Less than a yard from the adjoining lot, Scott heard the shelving inside the shed collapse.
Crap.
His brain crunched the numbers:

Three seconds for him to climb from the hatch, another second to emerge from the shed, three to four more to cross the lawn and see the entire culvert.

Scott had seven seconds to get out of sight. He leaned into the steep hill, the skateboard tucked to his side, his talkie, flashlight, and tools swinging in his pockets, their motion fighting his own. He considered ditching them, but there was no time. Besides, he didn’t want to leave any evidence of himself behind. Mr. Leonard hadn’t gotten a look at him, didn’t know who he was.

Behind him, the shed door clapped open.

Three seconds left.

Scott pressed his glasses to his face and moved the skateboard to his stomach. He took four more hobbled steps and heaved himself, headfirst, toward the opening beneath the street. He squinted his eyes, half expecting to crack his skull against the top of the cement tunnel. But the only thing to strike him was the sudden coolness of the space. Both sets of wheels landed inside—a nearly simultaneous
CLACKCLACK
. The momentum drove him toward the junction with the tunnel running parallel to Twenty-first Avenue.

Heaving for air, Scott turned.

It was like looking out from inside a straw, but what Scott could see of the cement culvert was empty. He imagined Mr. Leonard arriving against the fence, peering up and down the steep length of the culvert—and finding no one. Scott closed his eyes. Fireworks burst behind his lids.

I owe you, Bud Body.

Still gasping, he began pushing himself toward the bus stop. His hip was bashed, his palms raw, and he could feel the place where he’d scraped his back, hot and bleeding through his shirt. But his only thought was returning to Janis and telling her that her intuition had been true all along.

He paused to illuminate his watch face. If he hurried, they might still catch the bus. At school, they could call the police and tell them about the cameras and the monitoring room. Scott suspected that the locked cases held unlawful things as well. Mr. Leonard wouldn’t be able to dismantle and relocate everything in time. The secret he’d been keeping all these years, locked and concealed beneath his house, was as extensive as his evident sickness.

A sickness that can’t harm Janis’s sister now
, Scott thought as he rolled nearer the falling wedge of light.

Or Janis.

* * *

Janis lodged her back foot beneath the base of the cabinet. Aiming her arm toward the door again, she resummoned the energy. Her first attempt hadn’t moved the bolt, but she had heard, had
felt
, the wood fracture around it. She had also felt herself slipping backward, disrupting her focus.

“Whatever you’re doing, Janis, please stop.” Mrs. Leonard’s voice was clearer, less impeded, and Janis saw that her last attempt had opened a fissure along the frame. “Tom wants to
help
you. We both do.”

Sure you do.

A jaggedness scored Janis’s thoughts, a meanness that delighted in the fear she heard in Mrs. Leonard’s voice.

She
pushed
again.

The door groaned its protest and then crunched away. The top half collapsed down. The bottom half exploded out. Mrs. Leonard shrieked. Amid the flying wood, Janis caught a flash of her sallow gown and the flailing of her arms. Her body landed against the opposite wall and fell silent.

A scarlet joy flourished inside Janis. She kicked through the debris and out into the hallway.

Mrs. Leonard scooted backward on one hand and both bare feet toward the kitchen. A patch of blood grew inside the gray-brown hair above her temple. Janis stalked Mrs. Leonard, her lips drawing from her teeth.

“Please…” Mrs. Leonard said, her voice small and dazed. “Please, don’t…”

“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you,” Janis taunted. A small part of her recoiled. She’d never spoken to an adult like that. She drew the ceramic shard from the back of her jeans and pointed it toward Mrs. Leonard.

“Your powers…” Mrs. Leonard sagged against a kitchen chair. “Yours and… and your sister’s. Don’t let them see…”

Janis’s arm faltered. She knew about her and Margaret’s abilities?

“Don’t let
who
see?” she said.

“Don’t let them know…”

“Who?” Janis cried.

“Please…”

Mrs. Leonard’s face was ashen, her eyes round and spacey.

She’s in shock.
Janis had heard the phrase uttered in untold television dramas over the years—so-and-so’s “in shock”—the actor’s voice grave and knowing. Janis had always accepted the diagnosis, never quite understanding what it meant. But now she was seeing it for herself.

Her gaze fell to the woman’s left arm lying limply across her body, the palm turned up at an unnatural angle, the balls of her fingers purple and still. And then Janis understood that Mrs. Leonard’s shock came not only from the blow to her head; her shoulder was broken. Janis covered her mouth when she spotted a shard of bone poking the inside of her gown.

“Wait here.” Janis’s joy evaporated. The vibrations vanished. “I-I’ll go get help.”

“No, you can’t…” Tension creased Mrs. Leonard’s brow, but her eyes remained glassy. “You mustn’t…”

“You’re going to be all right.”

Janis wheeled and made for the front door on flimsy legs. A single thought repeated in her head like a skipping record:
You did that to her. You did that to her. You did that to her.

Through the dust of the demolished bathroom, she focused on the front door at the end of the hallway. She needed to get outside, needed to go to the neighbors’.
Call the police,
she would tell them. She couldn’t even think of the neighbors’ names.
Call an ambulance.

The knob turned inside Janis’s grasp, but not from her own power.

The surprise on Mr. Leonard’s pale, sweat-streaked face must have mirrored her own, but he recovered first. He pinned her arms to her sides, just as his wife had done. But he was larger, his strength more bracing.

Janis’s scream pierced the open doorway, echoing out into the neighborhood.

Swearing, Mr. Leonard kicked the door closed and spun with her. A hand clamped over her mouth, fingers and a thumb digging into the corners of her jaw. His leg wrapped around hers, and Janis pitched to one side. She tried to writhe free, but there was nothing to push against. He’d stolen her leverage.

“Colleen!” he called.

Janis twisted her gaze toward the ruined hallway. In the kitchen beyond, the slumped-over Mrs. Leonard looked like a garage-sale doll. The patch of blood had spread to her ear and now dripped from her lobe, staining her gown near the jut of bone. She raised her good arm and pushed it out.

“Go…” she mumbled.

Above her, Janis heard Mr. Leonard swallow.

“Go,” she repeated more urgently. “I’ll take care of myself, but you must go.”

Janis could feel Mr. Leonard’s breath inside her ear now. She squirmed and tried to scream against his hand. He shook her once.