Edison’s Alley (23 page)

O
n the day Nick Slate retrieved the twentieth object, and added the “stain remover” to Tesla’s Far Range Energy Emitter, two
hundred and thirty-one verifiable instances of ball lightning were reported to the National Weather Service.

Bizarre pictures were being posted by people on every social media platform, which was not unusual—except
these
bizarre pictures featured throbbing blobs of atmospheric energy.

Ball lightning is extremely rare. So rare that for many years science refused to accept that it existed. It’s no surprise that Nikola Tesla was the only scientist ever able to produce it
in his laboratory.

When ball lightning does appear naturally, it can take many forms. It can be a pulsating, sparking orb of light in the night sky. It can seem to be a blinding halo atop a flagpole or lightning
rod. It can look like an ethereal jellyfish with deadly high-voltage tentacles. Or it can shoot across the sky like a fireball. Small wonder, then, that its appearance has often been interpreted by
some as divine. And who’s to say it’s not?

Perhaps, as some thought in the wake of Armageddon’s near miss, a heavenly host had descended to observe these unprecedented happenings on planet Earth, and Gabriel the archangel was, at
that very moment, breathing deep so he could at long last blow into his horn, heralding the arrival of Judgment Day.

Or maybe it was just a whole lot of weird lightning.

Mitch Murló could not have cared less about the massive static charge that was building in Earth’s atmosphere. He did know that judgment was coming, though. It was
coming for the Accelerati, and he was the one passing judgment.

Mitch had been spending his time plotting. This was a curious thing, because Mitch never plotted. He usually just went with the flow of life. He was comfortable being a follower, especially when
it came to Nick, who always seemed to know exactly what he was doing, even when he didn’t. As furious as Mitch had been the day he stormed away from the summit meeting in the attic, deep down
he knew that Nick’s choice to use Mitch’s anger to get some answers was the right one.

The day that Nick was facing power-failure issues, Mitch, like Vince, stayed home sick, and he really was. He hadn’t slept, and he had a splitting headache from hating too hard—when
your mind is overwhelmed with the kind of caustic, concentrated contempt he felt for the Accelerati, your head begins to throb. His mom, who had to go to work, left him with Tylenol, canned chicken
soup, a game controller, and a kiss on the forehead. Once she was gone, Mitch called his father.

Getting through to a prison inmate was always an ordeal, and it was especially difficult when the call was not prearranged. In the end all he could do was leave a message, and then play the
latest version of
Grand Theft Psycho
to pass the time, running down pedestrians indiscriminately. No matter how many people he killed and maimed with his monster truck, though, he felt no
better.

Finally, at noon, a call came in with the familiar recorded voice announcing that “a prisoner at Colorado State Penitentiary is calling collect.”

“Dad, I found them,” he said once his father was connected. As calls from inmates were monitored and timed, he had to get to the point right away.

“Found who? Mitch, are you okay? You don’t sound right.”

“I found the creeps who did this to you. They’re a secret society called the Accelerati, they wear suits made from spiderwebs, and I’m going to take them down.”

There was complete silence on the line, and Mitch was afraid the call had dropped. Then he heard his father’s deep strangled gasp, like he’d been holding his breath in shock while
Mitch was talking.

“Mitch, don’t. Don’t even try,” his father said. “Just forget about them.”

“I can’t. I won’t.”

“Mitch, listen to me.” His father’s voice was stern, sharp. “Stay away from them. They’re dangerous.”

“I know. I don’t care.”

“There are things you don’t understand! You don’t know what these people are capable of,” his father warned.

“And they don’t know what
I’m
capable of,” Mitch told him.

The truth was, Mitch himself didn’t know what he was capable of. He was now officially a loose cannon, and he liked that idea just fine.

While Mitch planned vengeance, Caitlin became a news junkie. She found it amazing how much pointless drivel filled the airwaves and Internet when it came to current events. So
much so that important things vanished in the loud camouflage of celebrity sightings and car chases.

What Caitlin was able to tease out from the world soup offered glimpses of something very grim.

Entire flocks of geese were freezing to death, flying into the Arctic Circle instead of toward warmer climates. A record number of ships were getting marooned—not sinking, just lost at
sea, unable to get their bearings and find land before running out of fuel. Power plants were going off-line with no official explanation. Not enough of them to cause a panic, but enough to raise a
red flag for anyone who wasn’t focused on the latest high-speed chase.

Caitlin was too distracted in English that morning to write a coherent essay on
Brave New World
.
Cowardly New World
was more like it, considering how everyone seemed to be hiding
from a truth that was becoming clearer and clearer to Caitlin: it was only a matter of time before the billions of little shocks ignited the atmosphere or electrocuted every living thing on the
planet.

She caught up with Nick between first and second period. His eyes were bloodshot, his manner skittish. He was filled with nervous energy.
Just like the world,
thought Caitlin.
Sparking
with no way to release the charge
.

She had come to realize that he was right—it was his task to assemble the machine. But he had to hold himself together in the process.

“We can cross the washboard off the list,” Nick told her. “I got it back and added it to the rest.”

“That leaves twelve things to find,” Caitlin said.

“We just have to keep at it,” Nick said. “We’ll get them eventually, I know it.”

Nick treated each find like a victory in a game, but
eventually
wasn’t good enough anymore. He had directed Caitlin’s attention to the big picture, but now there was an even
bigger picture that he didn’t see. He was already obsessed with the machine—how much worse would he be if he knew they were running out of time?

“Maybe we can’t do this on our own,” Caitlin dared to suggest. “Maybe we need to turn this over to—”

“To who?” Nick stared at her as if she had just slapped him. “The Accelerati? The government? No! This landed in my hands for a reason. I was meant to do this, Caitlin.
We
were meant to do this.”

His manner was getting increasingly intense whenever he spoke of his place in the workings of the mysterious machine. Nick saw himself as not just the steward of Tesla’s dream, but as an
inheritor of it.

“I’m just saying we need help.”

The late bell rang, and Caitlin had the urge to race to class. How strange that mundane things like school schedules still held sway over her life when such larger things were brewing. She
resisted the desire to leave, and pressed Nick one more time.

“This is too much for us to do alone. Just promise you’ll think about it.”

“All right,” Nick said. “I promise.”

Nick resented the fact that Caitlin didn’t trust him to do this himself. But maybe she was right. He wasn’t all-knowing and all-powerful. When he stood close to the
machine, he felt like he knew things—but he wasn’t sure what those things were. It wasn’t that the machine spoke to him. It was more like listening to music. Even if you’ve
never heard the tune before, you can sense the next note. You can predict where it needs to go next. This instinctive sense inspired confidence. Maybe too much confidence. Perhaps he did need to
take Caitlin’s advice.

And so, during lunch, he lingered at the back of the line and approached the food counter after all the other kids had been served. He was a bit embarrassed to approach Ms. Planck after freaking
out in the cafeteria for no reason the other morning, but he had unfinished business with her.

“Ms. Planck?” he said, getting her attention. Then he slipped a folded piece of paper beneath the glass sneeze-protector. “Remember our conversation last week? Well, these are
things I’m still trying to find. Anything you can do to help would mean the world to me.”

Ms. Planck took the paper and carefully slipped it into her apron with a warm smile. “Of course, Nick. It’ll be my pleasure.” Then she gave him a double helping of lasagna.

Vince didn’t have Nick’s uncanny ability to figure out where things went in Tesla’s invention—but it was pretty obvious to him that the globe would fit
comfortably in the drum of the dryer. That would make it the centerpiece of the machine. Inconveniently, it was now at the bottom of an extremely deep, extremely murky Scottish lake. One that might
or might not have a monster in it. As unfortunate as that was for Nick, it was very fortunate for Vince, who had no desire to give up his life so the contraption could be completed.

He had no idea that Nick had just unknowingly handed the Accelerati a list of every missing item. But even if Vince
had
known, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. He doubted the
Accelerati were readers of the
Planetary Times
. And even if they were, he doubted they would have caught the small photo on page 17 of the previous week’s issue. As long as Vince kept
silent, no one would know where the globe was and no one would ever complete that machine.

Wayne Slate’s interest in the electrical anomaly besieging the planet was mostly limited to its effect on the photocopy machines at NORAD. He repaired the older, analog
variety, much more common than one might expect at such a high-tech, cutting-edge installation. These vintage copiers transferred toner through an electrostatic charge. Thanks to the atmospheric
interference, all the pages were coming out completely black.

What began to concern Wayne more than his additional workload, however, were the huge unmarked personnel carriers ferrying people into the massive stronghold under Cheyenne Mountain.

Of course, this was the government—they always knew things no one else did. But the commotion seemed eerily similar to when, only a few weeks earlier, important people had scurried beneath
the mountain to hide from the end of the world.

Danny had grown up in Florida, where unexpected thunderstorms were a way of life; thus he found nothing unusual in the increased electrical activity. He actually enjoyed
pranking his friends by shuffling his feet on the carpet, then sneaking up behind them and touching their earlobes, delivering a shock that would make them jump.

He knew his brother was probably involved in something he shouldn’t have been, but he idolized Nick; therefore, while he sensed that Nick was in over his head, he chose to believe that
Nick could handle it.

Sure, maybe there were creepy inventions doing creepy things in their creepy attic. But hadn’t Nick just taken him and his new friend Seth out for ice cream? He wouldn’t do that if
he were in any sort of
real
trouble, would he?

So Danny continued to shock his friends and watch the non-northern lights, convinced that everything was fine and that in his next game he would finally catch a ball for real.

Through all of this, some fifteen thousand miles away, Celestial Object Felicity Bonk was growing excited—in the electrical sense. And she couldn’t wait to share
some of that excitement with the planet below.

T
o say that the world was caught unawares would be untrue. There was more than enough evidence that Felicity Bonk was ready to go bonkers. But the
aurora was so beautiful, so heavenly, that most people had a hard time believing anything could be seriously wrong.

The grounding of all aircraft due to severe navigational issues drove the reality home. A world without flight was unthinkable—almost as terrifying as a world without
television—which seemed a possibility, too, because broadcasts were fading, and satellite dishes were searching for signals lost in the magnetic haze.

People had panicked when Felicity Bonk was on a life-ending collision course with Earth, but most didn’t have the energy to panic again. They just waited for whatever miserable thing was
coming next.

Petula Grabowski-Jones was that miserable thing.

On Sunday morning—when the first announcements were being made about the world’s grounded aircraft—Petula announced herself at Nick’s house with a door pounding that
could wake the dead.

The moment Nick opened the door, she grabbed him and shook him, until he knocked her arms away.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“It was coming eventually. I just wanted to get it over with.”

Danny, eating breakfast, peered out from the kitchen. “Is that the weird girl with the braids? I thought you hated her,” he shouted.

“Everything’s relative,” said Nick, which Petula seemed to take as a compliment.