Tesla's Attic

by Neal Shusterman

Nick couldn’t blame him, because he felt exactly the same way. Up in the attic, he pushed his bed back against the wall and lay down on it, choosing to avoid the center of the room. He twisted the Accelerati pin in his fingers, knowing he was in over his head, but also knowing that there was nothing he could do about it. His one consolation was that the rain of meteorites had stopped before it could do any real damage.

  Of course, he didn’t know that forty-three million miles away, an asteroid roughly the size of Rhode Island had changed its trajectory by a single degree while Danny’s glove was still held high in the air. A single degree—tiny in the grand scheme of things—but large enough to put it on a collision course with planet Earth.

  The meteor shower that hit the sports McComplex was all the talk at school the next day. Even though there was absolutely no news coverage, word of mouth had spread, quickly devolving into misinformation, until a few simple chunks of rock had become Aliens in the Outfield. Ralphy Sherman claimed to have actually seen one.

  “All three of its heads looked me in the eye, then it ripped off my wallet and escaped on a public bus.”

  But no one believed him, because everyone knew the buses didn’t run past nine.

  For Nick, the mundane workings of middle school were a pleasant, if somewhat numbing escape from issues of cosmic intrigue. Then Vince arrived with a set of croquet mallets.

  “Here,” he said, handing the whole set over to Nick. “I picked these up on the way to school. You owe me forty-three bucks.”

  They looked like ordinary croquet mallets. There was a reason for that. “These weren’t from my attic,” said Nick.

  “What? But I heard the guy telling people he got them at a garage sale.”

  Nick shrugged. “Not mine.”

  “So what am I gonna do with croquet mallets?”

  “Stop right there!” They turned to see Petula glowering at them with steely intensity. “Are those croquet mallets?”

  “Indeed they are,” said Vince.

  “No one plays croquet anymore,” Petula said. “Which means more scholarship money for me. How much do you want for them?”

  Ultimately Vince cut his losses by selling the mallets to Petula for twenty bucks.

  It was during the last period of the day that Nick was called in once more to Principal Watt’s office. He offered Nick his deepest condolences.

  “What do you mean?” asked Nick, gripping the arms of his chair. “What happened?”

  “It’s your mighty morphin’ permanent record,” the principal said. “I have good news and bad news. The good news is you are no longer from Denmark. You did, in fact, attend Tampa Heights Middle School.”

  “Okay, and…”

  “The bad news is you were labeled ‘deceased’ as of February twelfth.”

  The significance of that date was instantly clear to Nick. It was the date of the fire. The air-conditioning in the room suddenly felt very cold.

  “My brother, too?”

  “You’ll have to take that up with the elementary school.” Then, from a manila folder, he withdrew a sheet of paper and handed it to Nick. It was a death certificate. “I must say it disturbs me that you’re officially dead, Mr. Slate. This is not that kind of school.”

  Nick looked it over. Whoever created it had taken great pains to make it look real. But why? He found the answer at the bottom of the page, where there was a small, hand-printed A crossed by the symbol for infinity.

  It was a warning. A threat. The Accelerati, whatever they were, now knew that Nick knew. And if they had the power to mess with his school records, there was no telling what else they could mess with.

  “It’s someone’s idea of an April Fools’ joke,” Nick told Principal Watt. “That’s all.”

  “It’s a few weeks late for April Fools’.”

  “Not Chinese April Fools’. Keep watching my file,” he told the principal as he got up to leave. “I’m sure next week I’ll be alive, but from Mars.”

  The sound of clattering pots and pans when Nick arrived home meant that his dad was cooking again. Nick realized that the end of the world must be upon them, because his father preparing a home-cooked meal two nights in a row was surely a sign of the apocalypse.

  On his way toward the kitchen, Nick caught sight of Danny in the living room, sitting on the floor and wrestling with a video-game controller—which Danny often did these days, because of their lamentable lack of cable. On the screen, heads were exploding; the result of some supercharged weapon that might or might not have a real-life cousin from Nick’s attic.

  It was the first time Nick had seen his brother since last night’s flaming parade of heavenly bodies. He hesitated at the arched threshold of the living room, knowing that any move toward Danny would feel like walking on eggshells.

  “Hey,” he said softly.

  “I don’t want to talk about it!” snapped Danny.

  “That’s okay,” said Nick. “I wasn’t going to ask.”

  Danny paused the game and looked at Nick. His eyes were searching for something in his brother, but whatever Danny was searching for, Nick knew it wasn’t there.

  “I want to pretend it never happened, but I can’t,” Danny said. Then he gazed down at the faded carpet for a few moments before saying, “There’s something wrong with this place, isn’t there?”

  “Not wrong,” Nick answered. “Just weird.”

  “No,” Danny said, a little irritated. “My principal’s comb-over is weird. Our neighbor and her dog in matching sweaters are weird. But this?”

  “Good point,” said Nick, thinking back to Mitch’s appraisal. “Let’s just say, ‘It is what it is.’”

  Danny returned to his game, but his heart wasn’t in it, and his avatar accidentally blew up his own head.

  “So, was it just the baseball glove? Or all the stuff in the attic?” Danny asked.

  Nick thought about lying in order to shield his brother, but Danny had probably figured out the answer already.

  “I know this is scary, Danny,” he said, “but you know what? Everything in the world is scary until you understand it.”

  “Do you understand it?”

  “No,” Nick said. “So I’m scared, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah…but I think it would be easier if you let me be scared for both of us.”

  Danny considered the wisdom of that, and he nodded. “I can do that.” Then he restarted his game, content to let Nick bear the burden of all things beyond weird.

  Nick stepped into the kitchen, where his father was now singing. It sounded almost Italian, but it fell short with a lot of dum-de-dums where the Italian words were supposed to be. Pasta was obviously on the menu.

  “I found a meat-sauce recipe online. It got five out of five stars from four hundred and twelve people globally.”

  “Right…” said Nick. “You okay, Dad?”

  “More than okay.” Mr. Slate stirred the sauce so hard it splattered the wall behind the range. “The job that Jorgenson guy was talking about? Turns out it’s the real deal. Somehow they’d heard I’d been a technician in Tampa. Now I’m repairing copy machines at triple the salary for NORAD!”

  “NORAD?”

  Nick had heard of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and he knew it was somewhere near Colorado Springs, but he couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea of his father working there. It was as unlikely as…well, as Svedberg & Sons, Fine Jewelers, disappearing into thin air.

  “I started today. I actually get to go into the mountain!” Nick’s dad grinned like a kid. “I have security clearance and everything. At least to the places that have copy machines.”

  He drained the pasta while Nick tried to sift through his father’s big news. Jorgenson must have connections nosebleed high if he could put Nick’s father into a NORAD job.

  “Oh, the folks at NORAD explained to me what’s going on,” his father said. “The baseball mitt is part of some old experimental weapons system. The mitt has a
homing chip in it. And the meteorites were actually test missiles in disguise. I guess the idea was to attack an enemy but make it look like a random cosmic event! Very controversial. I guess that’s why it was scrapped.”

  Nick said nothing. They’re lying to you, Dad, he wanted to say. They’re lying to you to keep you from asking questions. But when the alternative was believing that your eight-year-old son was pulling real meteorites out of the sky, a lie—any lie—becomes a welcome relief. If his father hadn’t been so desperate for a simple explanation, he might have realized that if it were true, they never would have told him. Who gives classified military information to the copy-machine technician?

  “Don’t know how the thing ended up in our attic,” his father continued as he poured the meat sauce on the spaghetti. “Maybe your great-aunt Greta won it in a poker game from some general. I hear she was a wild one back in the day.”

  Nick sat with his father and brother, eating his five-star spaghetti in silence. Yes, his father now had a job, but slipping him into this job was not an act of generosity on the part of Jorgenson. It was a way of keeping an eye on the whole family. A way of telling Nick that if he didn’t get with the program, his father might pay the price.

  Nick had to face the fact that this was all too big for him. It would be wise for him to simply bow out now, before someone got hurt. Just give Jorgenson whatever he wanted, and never speak of the Accelerati again.

  Things might have gone that way, too, if Nick hadn’t picked up the sports pages after dinner. When he flipped over the section to check the baseball scores, he found himself looking at the obituary page instead.

  Nick never read obituaries. He had a funny superstition about it, fearing he might see his name, have a coronary, and fulfill the prophecy of his own death. He knew it was ridiculous, but still the thought of it was enough to keep him from looking. Except this time. And out of the various local dead folk staring back at him from the newspaper, one looked familiar.

  Nick excused himself and went upstairs to call Caitlin.

  “Uh…I found Svedberg,” he told her when she answered, the obituary page still in his hand.

  “That’s great! Where is he? Will he talk to us?”

  “That might be a problem,” Nick said. Then a thought occurred to him. “Then again, maybe not…”

  Vince’s house and his mother were just as cheerfully bright as ever. “Vincent!” she called down to the basement after greeting Nick and Caitlin at the door. “I’m sending your friends down. Please make sure you’re decent.”

  “Friends?” Nick heard Vince say, as if this were a foreign, and perhaps unwanted, concept. “Sure, send ’em down.”

  Vince was, in fact, not decent. He was wearing briefs in police-line colors, and the slogan read: CAUTION! THIS PACKAGE IS EXPLOSIVE!

  Caitlin immediately shielded her eyes. “Vince!”

  “Sorry!” He quickly stepped into a pair of torn jeans. “Better?”

  “Only partially,” Caitlin said. “Until you have some pectoral muscles, I insist you wear a shirt. Are we clear?”

  Vince sighed, and he slipped on a shirt. “Nobody appreciates malnutrition chic anymore.” The shirt slogan read: EAT YOUR HEART OUT…BEFORE I DO IT FOR YOU. Which was only slightly better than his underwear.

  Through all of this, Nick chuckled nervously, traumatized by the thought of Caitlin seeing Vince in his Skivvies, while simultaneously jealous of Vince for having such a level of optical intimacy with her—even though it was unwanted.

  “Where’s the wet cell?” Nick asked.

  “I knew you had an agenda,” Vince said. “I knew you wouldn’t visit unless you wanted something.”

  “We respect your privacy,” said Caitlin. “Don’t we, Nick?”

  “Yeah—I mean, we wouldn’t bother you unless we really had to.”

  Vince looked back and forth between them a few times and then said, “I haven’t used it for anything stupid. If you must know, I’ve been conducting experiments with it so I can understand exactly how it works.” He sat down on his bed and pulled out a notebook, which he began to flip through. “It can animate roadkill, but only the parts that haven’t been crushed.”

  Caitlin began to look mildly green. “Oh, yuck.”

  “That goes for possums, raccoons, squirrels…”

  “We get the idea,” said Nick. “What else did you find out?”

  Vince flipped the page. “I tried it on a steak. Cooked, no—but raw, yes. My specimen, a raw New York steak, twelve ounces, began to squirm when the electrodes were applied.”

  “Squirm?” said Caitlin.

  “Yeah, it started to crawl off the plate and…” Caitlin gave him another look, and he quickly turned the page. “I took it to the museum the other day, and when no one was looking, I attached it to a dinosaur skeleton.”

  “You what?!” Nick exclaimed.

  “Don’t worry, it had no effect on the bones.” He shook his head wistfully. “Yeah, that would’ve been sweet. So my theory is the battery can reanimate something when the tissue is in decent shape and still has some sort of muscular integrity.”

  “Like the freshly dead,” suggested Nick. Both he and Caitlin leaned in closer for the answer.

  Vince smiled broadly. “Where are we going with this, guys?”

  The fact that Vince knew the location and religious affiliation of every mortuary in town was one of those things he never thought would come in handy—unless, of course, he was ever lucky enough to witness a multicar pileup or a high-casualty natural disaster. Still, he couldn’t help but know. His mind was a spring-loaded, bloodstained steel trap when it came to tidbits of morbidity.

  Being that Svedberg was a Scandinavian name, and that all the Scandinavians he knew were Lutheran, Vince reasoned that Svedberg would be chilling at the Clausing & Corkery Mortuary, in preparation for a funeral later in the week.

  “Hey, Nick,” said Vince as they approached the quaint Victorian mortuary. “Looks kind of like your house, doesn’t it?” And noticing Nick’s discomfort at the suggestion, he said, “Don’t worry, I’m sure any bodies at your house are unintentional.”

  “Let’s just get in and get out,” Nick said.

  “So,” asked Caitlin, “how are we going to get in?”

  Vince handed the heavy wet cell to Nick. “The side door has a sticky lock when the weather’s been wet,” Vince said. “Sometimes it doesn’t fully engage and can be jimmied open with a credit card.”

  “How do you know this?” Caitlin asked, a slight tremor in her voice.

  “Well, sometimes when I can’t sleep—”

  “Stop right there.” Caitlin put up her hand. “My disturbing-image meter is already in the red with the first half of that sentence.”

  Vince shrugged, and he reminded himself that personal information should really only be shared on a need-to-know basis.

  The side door, not used by the general public, was neglected and weather worn. Vince put his hand on the doorknob to steady it, and just as he said, the door opened with a little credit-card tinkering.

  “Voilà,” Vince said, holding the door wide. The others hesitated, not yet ready to step into the dark space beyond the open door. “Don’t be such lightweights,” he said. “There’s nothing in there but death.” And he strode into the void, knowing they would follow if he led the way.

  Vince felt his way down the hall until he reached the alarm panel. From experience he knew he had thirty seconds to disarm the security system. He had once tripped it accidentally, and then he hid and watched the security guard enter the code.

  Vince heard the others enter the hallway behind him and the steel door creak closed as he punched in the numbers by the light of his iPhone.

  “They’ve got a rent-a-cop who comes by once an hour or so,” he explained.

  “There’s no security here now?” whispered Nick, looking around.

  “Nah,” Vince said. “It’s not like the guests here need hand-holding. We should be okay,
but keep your ears peeled in case anyone comes in.”

  “Eyes peeled; ears to the ground,” Caitlin corrected him, unnerved. “Keep your expressions straight.”

  “Just be listening,” Vince told them.

  He led them down a stairway and into the prep room. Various tools of the trade hung on the walls, and a sink table was set smack in the middle of a green tiled floor.

  Vince held out his hands. “This is where it happens, people. The Egyptians did it with sea salt and linen. But now it’s formaldehyde and stainless steel.”

  “Dude,” said Nick. “Enough.”

  “Right.” Vince noted that not everyone had as healthy a perspective on life and death as he did. “Let’s take a look in the chill drawers, shall we?”

  He led them across the room to a series of square refrigerator doors set into the wall. Nick and Caitlin kept a nervous distance.

  “Just tell us when you find him,” Nick said. Caitlin’s eyes were closed, and Nick was looking down at the oversize battery in his hands, clearly to avoid having to look anywhere else.

  Vince sighed. “I guess I’ll do this part.” Without hesitation, he opened the first of many doors holding the mortuary’s current clientele.

  The first two drawers held women. Vince could tell without even having to look at the toe tags.

  The third and fourth drawers were empty. And the fifth held the prize.

  Vince pulled the steel tray out all the way. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I give you the late Mr. Svedberg.” And he pulled off the sheet with the flourish of a magician.

  Nick and Caitlin cautiously approached as Vince inspected him. He had the standard look of death. Nothing remarkable about him or the disposition of his remains.

  “Sometimes,” Vince said, pointing to Svedberg’s face, “they’ve got one eye open and it’s like they’re winking at you.”

  Caitlin let out an audible shudder at the thought.

  “Just do it,” said Nick, holding out the battery.

  Vince fished in his pockets for the insulated wires, attached one end of each to the wet cell, and held the other ends over Svedberg’s chest. He took a deep breath, realizing this was nothing like a fish, or a frog, or a possum. Vince knew this would truly be a life-defining moment for him. Life-defining and death-defying, he thought, in a very literal way.