Fall of Hades (37 page)

I
hadn't considered whether or not I had the strength to make the climb, only that I needed to do it. My clothes were drenched and I was winded just a few hundred feet up, maybe just 10 percent of the way to the top. Usually when you climb a ladder, you're on an incline, leaning inward. A vertical climb is much more difficult, as you are moving straight up. It feels as if you're being pulled backward.

Within fifteen minutes my friends, who were still huddled around the base of the tower, looked like miniatures—like the plastic army men I used to play with when I was a child.

As I climbed higher, I could feel the change in the atmosphere. The air seemed more electric—more charged—and my body tingled with the added power. My clothes began to burn.

It wasn't hard to tell when the Elgen army had spotted me. I could see the fire from gun barrels pointed at me, popping like thousands of camera flashes at an NBA play-off. The bullets began whizzing by me like angry wasps. Then bigger things, projectiles, began flying toward me. I didn't mind that they were shooting at me. I hoped they would. It meant they weren't shooting at my friends, and I was so electric that I easily repelled everything the Elgen sent my way. At this point I think I could have repelled an airplane.

My biggest concern was that they might take out the tower. When I was halfway up, one of the shells exploded next to the tower about fifty feet below me, and the entire tower shook. My feet slipped, and for a moment I hung seven hundred feet up by just my hands. Had I not magnetized, I probably would have fallen. I wondered if they would cut the guy wires. I wondered if they would be willing to bring this whole tower down just to get to me.
Of course they would.

It took me more than a half hour to reach the top of the mast. Twenty feet before the top was a horizontal beam that hung out about thirty feet in each direction.

At the very top of the mast a red light flashed. I put my hand on the plastic shell of the light, pulsed, and blew it out, not that it helped my situation any, as I was now glowing brighter than the light, but the thing annoyed me.

Lightning flashed in a cloud a few miles off, and the accompanying thunder was louder than I had ever heard it before.

I leaned heavily against the tower's rungs, breathless and dripping with sweat and rain. I was mildly afraid of heights—most people are, I guess, but I was really high up and hanging on to thin wet bars by very little. People have BASE jumped from lower heights.

That's when I realized that, in the unlikely event that I somehow survived a lightning strike, I would never be able to hold on to the tower, and I would fall to my death. As I looked up at the churning, groaning sky, I hooked my arm over the highest rung, then undid my belt. Not only did my mother always buy belts bigger than I needed, since I was still growing, but I had lost weight over the last few months, so the extra length of the belt wrapped halfway around my waist. Taylor had once threatened to cut it in half. I had at least ten inches to work with.

I ran my belt over the rung, then buckled it back on so it would hold me, the same way the utility guys fixing power lines did back in Idaho. I noticed things like that. As a child, I was always looking for someone else who might be electric too.

That high up I could see the entire island. I could see all the way to one of the other islands. If I was Ian, I probably could have seen Fiji. There were more Elgen than I imagined. Thousands and thousands. Even as the prison fell, more were coming from boats, more were marching to finish us off. I now understood that we had never really had a chance.

Dozens of Elgen boats surrounded the entire island. I wondered where the
Risky Business
was. I wondered if they'd made it through. I wouldn't put it past Hatch to just kill J.D. and keep the million-dollar bounty he'd put on Welch. Maybe I should have just electrocuted J.D. back on the boat.

I looked straight down below me. My friends were gone. All of them. I felt relieved and sad at the same time. I was truly alone.

It was at that moment that I realized that I would never see any of them again. My eyes welled up, and my tears mingled with the driving rain that stung my face. Peculiar thoughts crossed my mind. Was I enough? Had I been the man I should have been? I wished that I hadn't caused my mother all the pain I did. I hoped she wouldn't miss me too much. I wondered what would happen to her.

Just then a bullet struck an iron rung below me. It rang like a bell, awakening me from my thoughts. I thought it was strange that it didn't concern me. I suppose accepting your death is liberating that way. All I thought was,
That was a good shot, dude. You almost got me
.

I've heard it said that your life flashes before you before you die. I don't know if that's true, I don't know whether this counts or not, but memories suddenly began flooding into my mind.

I remembered my mother and me eating at PizzaMax.

I remembered the first time Taylor invited me over to her house and gave me awful lemonade, and learning, for the first time in my life, that I wasn't really alone.

I remembered standing on Jack's doorstep asking him to drive me to California and the look on his face.

I remembered the party when I knocked Corky over.

I remembered the time at the academy when Zeus had blown a bullet out of the air that Hatch had fired at me. That was still pretty cool.

I remembered Taylor's dream about the crocodiles and lightning and the island of glass. I was sorry that I would never completely understand what it meant.

I remembered hundreds of hours with Ostin, video games and Shark Week, wasted time that now seemed anything but wasted. How grateful I felt to have him in my life. I regretted dragging him into this all, but I was glad that he had become someone powerful and that he had found McKenna's love.

I remembered my mother telling me about my father's death and then standing next to his grave. I wondered if I would see him soon.

So many memories. Most of them recent, it seemed. I suppose I had lived more life in the last year than most people live in eighty. That was good. Because I knew that mine was coming to an end.

Suddenly my body began tingling and I felt a wave of electricity pass through me, lifting the hair on my head. I took a deep breath, then held up my hand with my fist clenched.

“Come on!” I shouted to the clouds. To the gods of lightning. “Come on! Just do it! Strike me!”

D
uring accidents and other catastrophic events, time seems to slow down, sometimes even to freeze, like advancing one frame at a time on a DVD player.

When the lightning struck, everything froze. Time froze. I don't know how to explain this, but time became light. Light became time. My skin was impossibly bright. I remember thinking that if I weren't electric, the light would have burned the retinas from my eyes.

Next came the sound, like a hundred thousand freight trains running over me. Only this didn't go over me, it went into me, through me. It became
me
. I was lightning. I was pure energy. Maybe for a fraction of one second I felt what it feels like to be God. But I'm no god.

I
n 1945, at an army testing site in New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was tested. The explosion was enormous, its energy equivalent to that released by 40 million pounds of dynamite—equal to all the energy produced and consumed in the United States every thirty seconds: That's every car, lamp, diesel, dishwasher, jet airplane, diesel train, factory, everything. However, this bomb's energy was released in a few millionths of a second, and in a volume only a few inches wide.

The resulting explosion was terrible. The hundred-foot steel tower on which the bomb was mounted was completely vaporized. The ball of air formed by the explosion boiled up to a height of thirty-five thousand feet, higher than Mount Everest. For hundreds of yards around the blast site the surface of the desert sand turned to glass.

*  *  *

That isn't far from what happened that day on Hades. Hatch was still a mile out to sea when lightning struck the tower, or, more accurately, Michael Vey. No one had ever seen anything like it. It was like being a witness of that first atom bomb testing. The lightning hit but didn't dissipate. Instead, Michael absorbed it. Like the energy of that atom bomb released in a volume only a few inches wide, Michael held all billion volts in a five-foot-six-inch, 126-pound frame.

Michael Vey did something no one had ever done before. He held lightning. Not long, only for a thousandth of a second, but long enough to redirect and amplify the force of the energy. The pulse he created shot outward in a supersonic shockwave that destroyed everything above ground, turning the white, crystal sand of Hades to glass. The flash was so intense that it was seen as far away as Nike and by pilots in Australia and New Zealand.

The few Elgen guards at sea who survived the blast were blinded by the light, and had Hatch not been wearing his special sunglasses, he would have been also.

All of the Elgen boats engaged in the siege either caught fire or were capsized by the resultant waves.

Hatch, with twelve crew members and his personal guards, escaped in one of the
Faraday
's life pods, the only one that hadn't been damaged by the heat. Twelve hours later, he reached Nike broken and ranting. He still didn't know that the
Joule
had been stolen.