Edison’s Alley (18 page)

Nick caught up with him in the foyer and grabbed him.

“We can beat the Accelerati—” Nick prompted.

“—with a club, a pole, or a stick,”
Mitch finished.

Okay,
Nick thought,
less than helpful. I’ve got to be more specific.
“The Accelerati’s next attack will be—”

“—entirely underfoot,” Mitch blurted.

Interesting, thought Nick. But what did it mean?

“Please,” said Mitch, “don’t make me do this!”

“Don’t you see, Mitch? You could be the key to everything—if I can come up with the right words. Whatever made you so angry, hold on to it, just until we get the
answer.”

But Mitch’s anger was shooting out in many directions; right then it hurled itself at Nick. He burned Nick a gaze and tried to pull out of his grip, telling him, “No, I won’t
do it!”

“The Accelerati want to kill us, but we can save our lives by—”

And out of Mitch’s mouth came the words
“—shaking hands with Dr. Jorgenson.”

Once more he covered his mouth. Nick stared at him, like somehow Mitch had betrayed him, and he let go of his friend’s arm. “What?” Nick asked. “What did you
say?”

“It wasn’t my fault!” yelled Mitch. “You made me say it!”

Mitch turned and stormed out before he could say anything else, and this time Nick didn’t follow him.

Vince lingered in the attic after the others had left. He glared at the collection of objects before him, all aligning for a single purpose.

What Nick felt as compulsion, Vince was beginning to feel as repulsion.

When Nick returned to the attic, he seemed surprised that Vince was still there.

“Pretty cool how you figured out that it all fits together,” Vince said. “But even if you get every single item back, including the harp, you’re still going to be one
item short. You know that, don’t you?” He shifted his backpack on his shoulders. The backpack holding the battery.

Vince couldn’t read Nick’s expression. He might have been wary, or scared, or sad. Or maybe a little of all three. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,
Vince.”

“Yeah,” said Vince. “I guess we will.” And he left without another word.

W
orldwide, lightning usually causes about eighty deaths and three hundred injuries per year. But the steadily increasing number of electrical
storms in the past few weeks had laid waste to all previous statistics. Folks on all continents were getting fried like flies in a bug zapper. But of course, unless it happened to you or someone
you knew, it registered as little more than distant thunder. Something to be filed away under “Stuff Happens.”

So far, the only major entity affected by the electromagnetic weirdness was the airline industry, which experienced random navigation and telemetry issues. More than one airplane had landed at
the wrong airport. In one instance, vacationers in plaid shorts and mouse ears en route to Orlando found themselves landing, with no explanation, in Honduras, where the resident rodents were more
likely to give rabies than rides.

Meanwhile, the Slate household was dealing with its own electromagnetic woes: a sudden and inexplicable
lack
of power.

“Nick, get up! We’re late!”

It was his dad’s voice. Nick opened his eyes and reflexively looked at his alarm clock. The screen was dark.

“Power failure!” his father shouted up the ladder to him.

“How late are we?” he called down.

“No clue!”

Nick grabbed his phone, but it was dead, even though he’d left it charging. The power must have been out all night.

He quickly pulled on some pants and a shirt, hurrying downstairs with his shoes untied.

Danny ate Cheerios in the unlit kitchen. “I don’t like eating in the dark. I can’t see if there are bugs in my cereal.”

“It’s not dark,” Nick pointed out. “Just dim.”

“I don’t like eating in the dim either.”

As it turned out, no one’s phone was working, so they were forced to consult Great-Aunt Greta’s grandfather clock, which was always off by ten minutes—fast or slow—and
thus was only slightly better than nothing.

“We needed to be in school either three or twenty-three minutes ago,” Danny griped. “Can any of Tesla’s stuff help with that?”

Nick shrugged. “Not any of the things we have.”

“Figures.”

Nick’s father was running up and down the stairs and cursing as he kept remembering things he had to bring to work.

Apparently their bad luck was nowhere near an end, because when they went out to the car, it didn’t start.

Mr. Slate pounded the steering wheel in frustration. “I can’t even call to let them know I’ll be late,” he complained.

“Maybe the whole grid is down,” Nick suggested, “and NORAD is out, too.”

“NORAD doesn’t lose power,” their dad said flatly. “Even when the world was ending it didn’t.”

Nick could see, through the dreary, morning haze, that the lights were on in the house across the street. So their father went to use their neighbor’s phone while Nick and Danny rode their
bikes to their respective schools, which were in opposite directions.

Nick was usually observant, but he was so preoccupied with thoughts of the Accelerati that he didn’t notice how cars stalled when he pedaled next to them. He wasn’t aware of the
neighborhood lights flickering off as he approached and flickering back on after he had passed, or that traffic lights were winking out, causing near collisions.

Instead, his mind was filled with the very unpleasant prospect of having to shake Jorgenson’s hand.

Mitch’s prophetic blurts were never wrong. So did this mean that, to save their lives, they would have to enter a truce with the Accelerati—or worse, join them?

Nick locked up his bike, and as he walked into school, the hallway light flickered out. Then, when he went to hand his tardy slip to the Attendance Czar, all the lights turned off in the main
office.

“Don’t panic,” he heard one of the secretaries say. And then: “That’s funny, the flashlight on my phone isn’t working.”

That’s when Nick knew. He quickly left the office. When he was farther down the hall, the lights in the office came back on, but the fluorescents above his head went out.

Deep in his head Nick could hear Dr. Alan Jorgenson’s mocking laughter.

For the entire day it felt like there was a storm cloud over his head. Wherever he went, anything nearby lost power. The calculators in his math class, the SMART Board in English, all laptops
and tablets and phones were entirely drained of juice.

“I don’t know what they did to me,” he told Caitlin during lunch, in a dim half of the cafeteria, sounding more desperate than he meant to. Here he could see exactly how far
the nullifying field extended. It had a twenty-foot radius all around him.

“Don’t panic,” Caitlin said. “It’s not like it’s going to kill you.”

“No,” Nick admitted. “But once people figure out I’m the one causing their hardware to crash,
they
might kill me.”

“The Accelerati are trying to keep you off balance, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s working.”

Caitlin took a deep breath. “You have to figure out what’s doing it. There must be some sort of device or…ray or…something.”

Nick looked down at his clothes. He’d already checked his pockets. He’d even gone so far as to brush his hair, on the off chance the mechanism was disguised as a fleck of
dandruff.

“For all I know,” Nick said, “they could have replaced my deodorant with energy-suck spray.”

Caitlin smirked. “Well, it’s good to know you use deodorant.” Which made Nick blush only slightly.

Then she reached over and gently took Nick’s hand. She didn’t even hide the gesture—it was in full view of everyone. The fact that no one was looking didn’t matter; it
was daring in that anyone could have seen it.

“Well,” she said, “whatever it is, it doesn’t wipe out all electricity.”

And although Nick blushed a little bit more, he didn’t mind at all.

Rumors about Nick’s involvement in the strange energy drain began to circulate, and before lunch was over, he was summoned by the principal. Suspicions were further
verified when he entered the main office and the lights went out again.

When he opened the door to Principal Watt’s office, the man looked up, smiled at Nick, and then his head promptly flopped down into the plate of Chinese food he was eating.

Having seen Vince die on multiple occasions, Nick quickly put two and two together and realized that the man must have a pacemaker. So he promptly left the way he came in.

Principal Watt soon regained consciousness, only slightly suffocated by the egg foo yung in his nostrils, but no worse for the wear.

Nick decided it was time for him to make an early exit from school.

F
ortunately, Vince stayed home from school that day, so he did not have to face a lethal failure of his electrical life-support system. He was
still reeling from the revelation that Nick would eventually need the battery back, and the fact that Nick had known this for weeks and hadn’t told him.

To date, Vince had collected several items for Nick, never knowing that each one was bringing Vince closer to his own doom. And now there was one item in particular he had to find out about, in
spite of himself; one that occupied all of his thoughts—but he couldn’t share that with his mother.

“You can’t stay home from school without a reason,” his mom said that morning.

“How about death?” he said flatly as he ate his raw vegan breakfast consisting of freshly juiced vegetables and seed cheese, a diet that delighted his mother. He had found, to his
absolute horror, that his undead intestinal tract digested animal protein far too slowly. Although he still had intense cravings for hamburgers and pepperoni pizza, he had to admit it could have
been worse. If he had been embalmed, he would have been left with an insatiable desire for iron-rich foods, such as liver and human brains. Knowing his mother, she would’ve made him eat
spinach instead.

“You can’t use the ‘D-word’ as an excuse for everything,” his mother said. She crossed her arms defiantly. “If you’re not feeling well enough for
school, you should see a doctor.”

Vince exhaled a long, heavy sigh. “There is no doctor for this, Mom. There’s only one cure, and I’m plugged into it.”

“We don’t even know what
it
is,” she pointed out.

“Which is why,” Vince whispered to her, “we don’t want anyone else to know, do we?”

Though she was frustrated, she couldn’t disagree. So she picked up her purse and went off to work in a huff.

“I have houses to show, but I’ll be back by five,” she said on her way out the door. “Please don’t leave me any messes.”

Vince knew there was one house his mother could never show, however, for the simple reason that it was no longer there. And that particular missing house was the real reason Vince stayed
home.

After downing what could have been a life-threatening dose of carrot/beet/kale juice, he left to visit the curiously vacant lot upon which had once stood an unremarkable residence. Unbeknownst
to Nick, Vince had seen a picture of what could very well be the missing house.
That’s
what had caught his attention in the tabloid newspaper during his and Nick’s botched
break-in—just before he was rendered inconveniently dead.

The house in question was an ordinary two-story tract home, perhaps with the same floor plan as Vince’s, since it was in the same development. Its absence was hard to miss in the middle of
a street of identical homes. There had been police tape around the property for a while, but the police had never arrived to investigate. The only investigation was conducted by a group of men and
women in vaguely luminescent pastel-colored suits.

In the few weeks since the house had vanished into thin air, nothing much about the property had changed. Vince walked up the front path, which ended abruptly at a pit that went down about ten
feet. The remains of electrical conduits, pipes, and a sewer line poked out of the ground, sheared off cleanly. Even the foundation was gone, as if the house was a tooth that had been extracted,
roots and all.