Edison’s Alley (8 page)

“Then how are we supposed to find it?”

“I’ll know it when I see it,” said Nick, his volume finally matching Vince’s. “In the meantime, look for something old and…Tesla-like.” Which was
actually a helpful suggestion. “Let’s fan out and check the whole house.”

“Technically, I don’t think two people can ‘fan,’” Vince pointed out.

“Fine. You take the ground floor and I’ll go upstairs.”

And although Vince didn’t like being told what to do, he agreed, since that would have been his plan anyway. Nick left, and Vince watched his light bob up the stairs. Vince’s first
stop was the laundry room just off the kitchen—which apparently was the cat’s panic room, because it stood on the dryer, back arched and fur on end like a Halloween decoration.

“Boo!” said Vince again, and it fled so quickly it appeared to have vaporized.

There was nothing Tesla-like in the laundry room. Just some liquid detergent, bleach, and a few other cleaning supplies.

In the living room he found a retro Lava lamp, but he wasn’t sure whether or not it was old enough to have belonged to Tesla.

Then he saw a tabloid newspaper lying open on the coffee table—the
Planetary Times
, one of those papers in which invading aliens and/or long-dead celebrities figured in every
headline and photo. But the photo that caught Vince’s eye was something very different.

“Nick!” he called. “Come look at this!”

But Nick, upstairs, must have been too far away to hear.

Just then a bright light began to arc across the room. Headlights! A car was pulling into the driveway.

Vince turned sharply and hurried to get Nick, but he didn’t notice the coatrack. The middle hook snagged the wires extending from his backpack, they were yanked off his neck, and, once
more, he became a demonstration of Newton’s famous theory.

This time, Vince didn’t even remember to close his eyes before he died.

Nick didn’t see the headlights or hear the car doors open. The only warning he had were their voices as they stepped out of the car.

“I’m gonna hurl!” Seth said.

“I told you not to eat all that pizza,” said his mother as they walked to the front door.

“I’m gonna hurl!” Seth said again.

“I’ll get you some Pepto-Bismol,” said his mother.

Nick bounded down the stairs. “Vince!” he whispered. “Vince—we gotta go now!”

But Vince wasn’t going anywhere. He was, in fact, cadaverously positioned in the absolute worst place at the absolute worst time. He was lying like a doormat just inside the front
door.

Which was now opening.

Dead bodies have been found in the strangest of places. Take the case of the Canadian tourist who, after hotel patrons complained of low water pressure, was found floating in a
rooftop water tank. Or the poor soul who left this life, but whose body showed up on Google Maps for the world to see. Then there was the case of a TV series about crime-scene
investigation—while shooting an episode about finding someone’s mummified remains in an apartment building, the crew found someone’s actual mummified remains in the apartment
building where they were filming.

Beverly Webb and her son, Seth, however, were not considering the prospect of finding a dead body in their foyer when they arrived home that night. Seth was beset by the kind of nausea that can
only come from eating thirteen pieces of Everything pizza, and Beverly was focused on getting him to the bathroom before he left a mess that she would have to clean.

She pushed the front door…only to find that it wouldn’t open. Something was in the way.

“I’m gonna hurl!” Seth wailed.

Beverly pushed the door again, with all her might. It wouldn’t budge. Did she really need this? What could possibly be worse than having a kid ready to puke and not being able to get in
the front door?

Well, perhaps opening the front door and watching your kid puke all over the dead body in your foyer—but luckily for everyone, she didn’t know about that particular dead body.

“It’s happening!” yelled Seth. “It’s happening now.” He turned to the side, but when he saw that he was about to empty the better part of his digestive tract
into the garden his mother had recently planted, he ran back to the car, opened a door, and barfed ten or eleven pieces of partially digested pizza all over the backseat, because he figured that
leather was easier to clean than flower petals.

Beverly observed him with the sort of numb wonder that one might have while watching a truly bad dance performance. In the realm of all things possible, why would the universe conspire to
deliver this?

She went to her son as a mother must, and patted him gently on the back. She tried not to think about the prospect of having her automotive interior cleaned and detailed, and then she remembered
that she did, after all, have a stain remover that worked wonders.

“Better now?” she asked.

“No,” Seth told her, but instead of an encore performance, he ran off toward the house and—wonder of wonders—this time the door opened like it had never been blocked.

Seth was not quite finished, but this time he felt he could make it to the bathroom, which was the preferred location for the tossing of tacos. Even when those tacos were pizza. But what he
encountered when he got inside the house was not at all what he expected. He saw one teen dragging another out the back door.

They made eye contact.

“Whoa! Who are you?” Seth said, his spasming stomach temporarily forgotten.

The teen hesitated like a raccoon at a trash can, but then he got on with his business. He was gone in an instant, but his face lingered in Seth’s mind. And before he could call out, his
stomach rumbled a demand that could not be ignored.

He turned and released the last of his pizza on the kitchen floor, where the family cat had chosen precisely the wrong moment to stand its ground.

Nick had never been happier to see someone be violently ill. Seth had given him the few additional seconds he needed. Nick had dragged Vince to the side yard, but in the dark,
even with the faint shimmering of the aurora up above, he couldn’t find where the wires attached, and he didn’t dare turn on the headlamp he was still wearing. But he did know that
water conducted electricity, so rather than mess with the tape on Vince’s back, he shoved the two wires right into Vince’s mouth and pushed his jaw closed.

Vince’s eyes, which were already open, instantly ignited with sentience.

“Don’t talk, don’t open your mouth,” Nick said. “Just bite down on those wires until we’re out of here.

Vince growled at him, but he did as he was told.

Nick could see Beverly inside, tending to her son, and from the sounds that were coming from the open kitchen window, it was clear that the kid was not yet in a state where he could tell her
what he’d seen. Nick could only hope that Seth wouldn’t be able to identify him.

Nick and Vince got on their bikes and pedaled away, their mission a failure on every level.

T
he patience of scientists is a well-documented fact. Many natural phenomena move at a glacial pace, not just glaciers. For instance, in order for
particle physicists to study atoms that would vaporize in a billionth of a second, they had to bide their time for over a decade as the Large Hadron Collider was built. And that was just a blink of
an eye compared to the pitch drop experiment, ongoing for nearly one hundred years, to measure the flow rate of room-temperature tar. That flow rate turns out to be about nine drops per century
(although the scientists monitoring the experiment somehow managed to miss the most recent drop).

The NASA scientists studying the newly orbiting copper asteroid were no exception. They were weighing the possibility of considering an examination of the factors involved in embarking on a
study about sending a probe.

In the meantime, an electromagnetic charge was building up in the atmosphere without a means for it to be released. What people noticed most were the little things. Random incidents of
magnetized paper clips standing on end on office desks. Cars starting for no apparent reason. Kids’ braces sending out sizzling arcs of electricity. Some of these small-scale events were mere
curiosities, others were nuisances, but the one thing that could be agreed upon by all is that they were becoming more and more frequent. The world’s leading scientists assured the public
that everything would work itself out. At least that’s what they said.

Like the scientific community, Mitch Murló had great patience and a very long fuse. In fact, no one in recent memory had seen it burn down to its devastating payload. There’s a
reason the most destructive explosives have such long fuses. This was the day Mitch reminded everyone of that reason.

Mitch didn’t know why he lost control. He had been teased about his father’s prison sentence many times before. He knew firsthand that kids were cruel, especially in groups. He had
always been able to take the nastiness of jerks in stride. Yes, their comments bothered him, angered him even, but they had never provoked him into a fight. Until now.

Perhaps it was his budding relationship with Petula. Maybe that gave him more confidence, or just enough anxiety to shorten his fuse. Or maybe it was the recent revelation by the Shut Up
’N Listen that his father would never be paroled. The information had left his mind in a whirlwind that was getting harder and harder to control.

“Hey, Murló,” taunted Steven Gray, just before lunch, when everyone in the world is at their most irritable. “Here. I think your dad forgot these.” And with that,
Gray hurled a handful of pennies at Mitch. They fell on him like shrapnel.

It was old news that Mitch’s dad had been convicted of robbing one cent from every bank account in the world. And although he claimed he had been framed for stealing 725 million dollars
entirely in pennies, no one but his family believed his story.

The coin toss was a tired gag as far as Mitch was concerned. But this time one of the pennies lodged in his shirt pocket. His fingers were stubby, the pocket was narrow, and he just
couldn’t fish it out. At that moment he realized he would never fish it out. He and his family would never be free of the stolen pennies for the rest of their lives.

That’s when Mitch detonated.

The fight that followed was a three-teacher battle. Meaning it took three teachers to pull Mitch off Gray. And one of those teachers wound up with a black eye.

And as they fought, in his anger, Mitch found himself turning back into a human Shut Up ’N Listen. The problem was, Steven Gray wouldn’t shut up.

“Murló, when I’m done with you—” started Gray.

And Mitch finished, “—you’re going to go home and play with your stuffed animals!”

Gray’s eyes went wide. “Shut up! You don’t know—”

“—the fifth answer on today’s science test.”

“That’s it! I’m gonna—”

“—drop out of high school and become a rodeo clown.”

Beyond that, Mitch didn’t remember any other specifics, except for the satisfying feeling of his fists connecting with various parts of Gray’s anatomy. And although Gray got in some
of his own shots, too, he was far bloodier than Mitch when all was said and done.

Needless to say, Mitch wound up in Principal Watt’s office, while Gray was sent to the school nurse. Mitch had calmed down by the time he got there, but not enough to regret what he had
done.

Already waiting for an audience with the principal was Theo Blankenship, not the last person Mitch wanted to see, but definitely among the bottom ten. By now Mitch had two tissues shoved up his
nostrils, which made Theo laugh.

Mitch took a deep mouth breath and held it to keep himself from losing his temper again.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Gray came to collect her boy from the nurse’s office and take him home—where he would most certainly play with his stuffed animals and wonder how Mitch had guessed
his secret dream of being a rodeo clown.

After Gray and his mother left, Theo said to Mitch, “Must have been some fight. Sorry I missed it.”

From Principal Watt’s office they could hear the muffled sounds of a girl crying.

“Sydney Van Hook,” Theo explained. “She wrote an inappropriate essay.”

“So why are you here?” mumbled Mitch.

Theo looked down. “You know how Galileo School is like our biggest rival?”

“Yeah.”

“Well…I barbecued their mascot.”

“What’s their mascot?” Mitch asked.

Theo shook his head. “You don’t want to know.”

While Mitch considered that, Theo leaned a little closer. “So, you’re really good friends with Nick Slate, huh?”

Mitch had known this was coming the second he saw Theo in the waiting room. “Hey, what goes on between Nick and Caitlin is none of my business, okay? So don’t ask me.”

“So there
is
something going on between them.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Theo glared at Mitch, and poked him in the chest to emphasize every word. “You tell your friend he’d better watch out…because jealousy is a green-eyed mobster—and if
he’s not careful, he’ll be sleeping with the fishes.”

“Uh…you mean you’re gonna put a fish in his bed?”