Teen Frankenstein (28 page)

“Good!” I screamed. As long as I was nothing like her. Fury clawed at me. I wanted to break something. A chair. A vase. Anything. I stuffed my hands in my pockets and seethed.

Her shoulders shook with laughter. “I told you, you think you're smarter than everybody, but I'm still your mom.”

Tears burned the back of my eyes. Tears that never came for my father but were now there in a white-hot rage. “You are the opposite of helpful! You are worse than Einstein!” I yelled, and stalked out of the room. I sounded like a teenage girl, which I absolutely, positively hated, but my mother was standing in the way of progress. What I was doing was important. It was maybe the most important work on the planet right now. Didn't she realize that Dad had been killed by a single shock, but I'd manage to create life from the same source?

Of course she didn't. She knew nothing. I knew when I'd been beat. Breathing hard, I retrieved the ladder from our garage, which acted more as a storage shed than a place for cars. I dragged the ends of the ladder across the dirt until I could prop the top of it against the roof. I put my foot on the bottom rung and shook it to make sure I wouldn't fall to my death. Mom would probably think that was my fault, too.

When it seemed secure enough, I scaled the rest of the rungs and pulled myself onto the roof, still wishing I had any mother but the one I had. The shingles were warm and gritty. Bits stuck in my hands and dimpled the heels. I couldn't believe she had the nerve to take a hammer and nails to my laboratory. It made me want to stomp through the roof and break the ceiling.

Instead, I pushed my way up from my knees, knowing that my mom had won this round. Her weather vane was going to get fixed or there'd be no peace for any of us. Up here the air conditioner hummed, and a mysterious substance was leaking from a spot near our chimney. Adam was afraid of heights, but they didn't bother me. My dad used to come up here and take notes on the cloud patterns. Sometimes I came with him and lay bellydown, reading my textbooks. That was why I didn't want Mom to take down his weather vane.

But as I crossed the ridges of our roof, I realized that his presence had disappeared. My dad was gone from this place. Barely his memory even lingered. It'd been years since I'd seen the weather vane up close. From here, I could see that the rooster ornament used to be painted red. By now, though, most of the paint had flaked off. The directions were each marked with elegant letters:
N
,
S
,
E
,
W
. It must have been an antique even when my dad got it.

I kneeled beside it, put my hands on the crossbars, and wriggled it off its post. The weather vane fell to the roof with a clatter, and I dropped backward on my rear end.

I wiped my hands together and stared out at the horizon. From here, I could see the whole of the town clearly. The lights cropped up from the town center, the factory, and the rest of the city limits, which faded into the Hollows, an evergreen forest that bordered our town. For a moment, I just sat there and stared out at the fuzzy green treetops that carpeted the horizon. They were beautiful. A peaceful stretch of countryside. It was strange seeing them this way again. The last time I'd been into the woods, my dad had been killed. Now, when I thought of the Hollows—if I ever thought of the Hollows—it was about how they hid the flashbacks from me, or, if I thought too hard, about how their branches reminded me of the scars left behind on my dad's chest, the angry rivers of red that charted the course of his death. I leaned forward, cupping my hand and staring harder out into the forest. Because I remembered now that they hid something else, too.

In a second, I was pushing myself to my feet. Why hadn't I thought of this before? In the Hollows was hidden my father's great masterpiece. His prized experiment. The thing that killed him. Three dormant behemoths rested in the woods, waiting. They had killed my dad, but electricity had killed my dad when it had saved Adam, and this just might be the same thing. My heart pounded in my chest. This was it. This was the answer. The solution I'd been looking for.

The generators would need to be reawakened.

 

TWENTY-EIGHT

The lightning generators work off a series of silk pulleys, a belt, wire combs, a metal dome, an electric motor, and a column. The design is similar to that of a Van de Graaff generator, though on a much larger scale. A similar endeavor was first attempted without the generators by German scientists in the Alps. The scientists used a two-thousand-foot iron cable and an adjustable spark gap across a valley, but the space between the mountains was too vast for harnessing and the experiment ultimately failed.

*   *   *

“Back up and tell me where we're going again. Am I being kidnapped? Because if I'm being kidnapped, I'd like to make some demands up front.” Owen scooted to the middle of the backseat, wedging his head between Adam and me. Outside, evening fell in stages. The darkest blue began at the top, where it stacked itself onto brighter hues that ended in a golden ribbon of light on the horizon. “First of all, I'll need a bathroom break every hour. Second, I have a sensitive stomach, so I'd like to suggest a bland diet of Pop-Tarts and Nutri-Grain bars. No sodas, or we'll need to up the bathroom-break quotient.”

My broken windshield fractured the sky, turning it into a giant puzzle as I edged my car up to the fringe of the Hollows. The forest bordered the western edge of Hollow Pines like a prickly petticoat made from pine trees and oak. Beside me, my dad's old map was sprawled over the center console.

I glanced in the rearview mirror, still annoyed with Owen. Only as annoyed as I was, I happened to need him more at the moment, so I'd have to play nice.

“We're going in there.” I nodded to the tree trunks now framed in the windshield like a photograph. Once off the rutted side road, I pushed the gear in park. We'd been driving for ten minutes. The headlight beams penetrated only a short distance into the woods' heart, where gnarled branches crossed arms as if in warning to keep out.

Owen ducked his head to peer through the glass. “Oh, great, that quells all of my worst fears. The creepy woods at night. Perfect,
just
perfect, Tor.”

“Victoria has a plan. She told me,” Adam said without turning in his seat. He stared after the high beams into the forest. Maybe it was stupid, maybe it should have been the complete opposite, but I somehow felt safer going out there with Adam nearby.

Owen patted Adam on the shoulder. “That, my friend, is exactly what I'm afraid of. Is part of that plan getting murdered by the Hunter?”

I lifted my eyebrows. “Oh, are you worried he's out there now?” I said. “Because I was under the impression…”

He pushed back into his seat. “I'm worried period, okay. It's easy for you. The Hunter seems to prefer boy legs, but Adam and I, we happen to like our appendages where they are—attached.” I tilted my head but tried to mask a smile. Owen was at least trying. He was trying to believe Adam wasn't the Hunter. He was trying to be on my side. “Okay, fine.” He tossed his hands up. “What's this plan?”

I unbuckled my seat belt and twisted to look back at him. “I've told you about my dad's death, right?”

“Oh sure, that was after we made friendship bracelets but before we held hands and sang ‘Kumbaya.' I can hardly get you to shut up about it.”

“Point taken.” I turned back and, across the steering wheel, unfurled the map. A red triangle with a circle around it marked the three matching points. I peered over the map's curling edges into the forest. “My dad left something in there. He was brilliant, you know. My grandparents, they were just regular people who worked at the plant, but not my dad. He could have never been happy doing just that. He wanted to know things. Bigger than Hollow Pines.”

I felt Owen inching closer behind me. I could feel the hot tickle of his breath on my arm. “What did he leave?” Owen asked.

“Was it treasure?” Adam said, and I remembered he'd been reading Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island
in English class.

“Not exactly.” I closed my eyes. I was trying to picture the generators, but time had worn away the edges of the memory, and now they only loomed like a legend in my mind. “My dad had figured out a way to harness atmospheric voltage.”

“What is that?” Adam asked.

“Electricity that's in the sky,” Owen said.

“Lightning,” I nearly whispered. “The theory goes that if someone could control the atmospheric voltage, then there would be enough energy to disintegrate the atom.”

Owen's intake of breath was sharp.

Adam's eyes widened. “You're going to disintegrate Adam?” He touched his finger to his chest and frowned.

I put my fist over my mouth to keep from laughing. “No! The
at-om
. Tiny little microscopic particles. Don't worry. No one is disintegrating you.”

“But if you could disintegrate the atom, you would have not just energy, but a supersource of energy. Enough to charge a whole city. Enough to charge—”

We both stopped and stared at Adam. On the outside, my creation appeared so normal, beyond recognition for what he really was. But hidden underneath was the tapestry of scars and organs sustained by a steady hum of current destined to fade like the passing tide.

“Yep,” I said. “That's pretty much the idea.”

The ink scratches of my dad's handwriting on the satellite picture were like whispers from the dead. Coiling the map, I retrieved the clunky GPS device from the glove compartment, then opened the door with a tinny pop.

From the trunk I pulled Owen's bag of tools, which I'd ordered him to bring. Metal clanked around in the canvas bag. I plopped it in the grass behind the trails of the car's exhaust.

“So I guess that means you're done being mad at me,” he said as he bent down for the handle. “Now that you need me.”

I slammed the trunk. The sound rang through the open air like a gunshot. I dusted my hands. “Yep. That's pretty much the idea.”

I doled out three flashlights, and we each snapped them on. The yellow beams trickled through the dying sunlight. We crossed the tree line just as the day took its final breath.

The ground was a soft bed of pine needles. A few steps into the forest and we found a world emptied of sound. No birds chirped or squirrels chattered. I hadn't set foot in the Hollows since my dad's death, and I felt like I might see him pass through the spaces between the trees at any moment.

Adam held up a low-hanging limb for me, and I ducked underneath and shuffled through the leaves scattered half decomposed over the mud. Soil clumped onto the soles of my shoes, making them heavier. I passed a snapped trunk. Shards of charred wood poked out from either side like a broken arm, and I smelled the remnants of smoke.

We trudged in silence. I noticed Owen snapping his head left and right, searching. It was easy to create the story in our heads of the Hunter lurking and for it to begin to feel true. But there was no reason the Hunter would be here in this spot with us right now, so I ignored the distant snaps of branches and rustling of leaves.

With the tip of my finger, I brushed the bark. My skin came away with a black smudge from where lightning must have split the tree some time ago. After a short distance, I handed my flashlight off to Owen and cradled the GPS in both hands. The numbers on the screen glowed green, changing as we tracked east and north in the direction of the Arkansas state line.

I studied the shifting digits harder now and tried to match them with a few recognizable landmarks from my memory. A fallen log with a gaping hole in the center like a howling mouth. A red rock, flat on the top with three points.

The numbers told me I was getting closer. “This way.” I adjusted our course to veer left. The digits scrolled up. Closer, closer.

My pulse quickened and, with it, my pace. We picked through strands of spiderwebs that formed invisible nets between the trees and broke twigs from their boughs. Then, as the numbers bled one into the next, the thicket cleared, and we stumbled into an open space ringed by the warped trunks of trees.
Here
, I thought.

“Jesus…,” Owen mumbled.

This was it. The three columns of my dad's lightning generators rose nearly twenty feet into the sky. Dormant gray orbs made a triangle in the secret circle. They stood like lost relics from a different era. A temple to the gods of science.

I separated from Adam and Owen and walked to the center of the triangle. Instinctively, I held my breath, feeling as though I was stepping onto hallowed ground. The carpet of pine needles was thick and undisturbed. I stared straight into the sky, where stars were beginning to prick holes into the navy blanket above. Thick white cables connected each of the generators. I traced their paths.
The lightning cage
, my dad had called it, and I missed the low-frequency buzz of electricity running through them.

I turned to see both Adam and Owen watching me. “You say you can fix anything,” I told Owen.

His eyes traveled up the length of the gargantuan generators. “You bet your ass.” He followed me and motioned for Adam. “Buddy, come here and hold the light,” he said.

Owen circled the first generator. Around and around he went, running his hands over the smooth cylinder from the base to as far up as he could reach. Then his canvas bag was on the ground, unzipped and puking out tools. Owen's front teeth dug into his tongue. Adam held the flashlight over Owen's shoulder while Owen kneeled in the dirt.

I could hardly see the tiny grooves, but Owen nestled the screwdriver tip into the screws and twisted two free until he was able to flip the lid. Inside, there were three switches, each pointed down and coated in thick rust. A beetle crawled up the side, and Owen flicked it off. For two years the monoliths had been in a coma. The outer build was cool to the touch.