What I needed was to find a way to make sure last night didn’t repeat itself, to make sure that I didn’t find Adam on the brink of dying again—or worse—beyond saving.
I bit the nail on my pinkie finger down to the quick. The only way to do that was to find energy that would last.
On the opposite side of the parking lot, I watched Owen lope across the gravel, chin down and shoulders hunched. For a brief moment, he lifted his head and stared right at Bert. I wasn’t sure whether he could see me or if he could only see the fractured mess of my car that would remind him of that night. Whatever the case, he must have decided something, because he walked the rest of the distance to his Jeep. Soon his taillights were glowing red, and he was backing out of his spot.
The band of skin where I’d chewed away the nail was pink with blood, and I squeezed it in my fist. Maybe I was too hard on Owen. Maybe—
A shadow crossed behind my car, and the light was blocked momentarily through the back windshield. I jolted upright, gripping my hands tightly around the base of the steering wheel. What was that? My brain conjured the first words that came to mind: the Hunter. Only a few cars were left in the lot. I glanced around. I was being stupid. The place had been swarming with cops only hours earlier. This was probably the safest place in town now. Footsteps crunched in the gravel directly next to Bert’s passenger side, and, despite my internal monologue, the hairs on the backs of my arms stood on end.
But it was only Old Man McCardle. I tilted my chin up to the ceiling and shook my head. He appeared carrying a stick with a sharp point. He’d speared an aluminum Coke can and was now depositing it into his trash bag, which was exactly the sort of thing a school janitor should do. Not the Hunter of Hollow Pines. I exhaled. Apparently, the murders were getting to me, too. I slouched into my seat as the janitor crossed in front of the hood of my car, bending down to pick up a piece of garbage. Still, I had to admit, McCardle gave me his own brand of the creeps ever since he’d driven to school with a dead deer in the back of his truck last year and Principal Wiggins had insisted he return home.
I turned the key in the ignition and the headlights flared. He stood up, shielding his eyes. He stared at me with his watery blue eyes through the glass. Sorry, I mouthed without feeling all that sorry. I was eager to get away without having to talk to him. Even though I hated seeing the other students play stupid tricks on the old man, I couldn’t help having the same instinctual response to want to distance myself from him. The truth was, Old Man McCardle wasn’t even such an old man. Sun had been hard on his skin, thinning and wrinkling it like animal hide left to dry, and his hair was a silvery white with patches of a sun-spotted scalp peeking through. But he couldn’t have been much older than Mom.
The gear still in park, I gently pressed my foot on the accelerator, and the engine revved. His lips worked without making any noise that I could hear, and at last, he dropped his hand and shuffled out of the way, trash bag in tow.
Relieved, I eased Bert out of the back row and left McCardle behind without sparing another thought, just as the players began to trickle out of practice and climb into the remaining cars.
I made a wide arc with the wheels and pulled up next to the sidewalk.
“Nice ride, Torantula.” Knox shook his sweaty hair and flashed me a grin. Right as he was crossing in front of the hood, I laid my heel into the horn and let it blare in his ears. He jumped in surprise.
I smiled sweetly and folded my hands into my lap. Adam’s face showed up at the window. He knocked and I unlocked the door for him to come inside.
“You’re loud, Victoria,” he said, folding his legs like a lawn chair to fit in the seat. “Why are you making the car yell?”
I let the foot off the brake. “Sorry. Thought I saw a rodent.” I shrugged. “My bad. So how was practice?”
“You never ask how practice is,” he said, no hint of accusation in his voice. He buckled his seat belt.
“You’re awfully observant today, aren’t you?”
“Yes.” Adam smelled like mud and grass stains. I wrinkled my nose. I liked him better when he smelled clean, like rainwater.
I sighed and turned at the stop sign. The stadium faded from view. I hadn’t realized how good it’d feel to get away from the school and to distance myself from the lingering image of the boy with the missing eyes. When I asked Owen whether Adam was storing a set of legs and eyeballs in his locker, I’d meant it to be rhetorical, but what had he meant when he’d responded that he didn’t know? That Adam was dead.
I glanced sidelong at Adam. His face was serene. He seemed utterly incapable of harming anyone. But then there had been the mirror in the dressing room and the times just after his recharges that I could hardly recognize him. This, I realized, was further evidence of the need for a more permanent solution, something that didn’t change Adam into … something else. Something darker.
“So no one asked you anything today? No police officers, I mean. They didn’t come to talk to you?” I ventured while at a red light.
“No, no police officers. Was I supposed to talk to the policemen?”
“No,” I answered too fast. “I was just curious.” I slid my hands down to the bottom of the steering wheel and let my foot off the brake. If the Lie Detector’s forum kept finding an audience, it was only a matter of time until the authorities would want to speak to him. The question was, how much time?
We drove through the small town center of Hollow Pines, past the two-theater cinema and Walton’s Drugstore. The red cobblestone made the wheel axles rattle, and we bounced down Main Street until we got to Grimwood Drive and took a right where the cobblestone changed into dusty road and the buildings faded into miles of landscape that was no more hilly than a sheet of cardboard.
“Home, sweet home,” I said when, after ten minutes, we pulled up to my house. The weather vane screeched and howled in the breeze. I glanced up to see it pirouetting on the spot. Nails on a chalkboard. The wind blew an empty pail across the yard.
Adam put his hand to his stomach. “Can we have the tater tots?”
I laughed. This was the guy I was scared might be a monster? “I’ll see if we have some in the freezer.” I had already learned that Adam could consume an entire bag all by himself.
I was stepping out of the car when I noticed something different about the hatch. “No.” My eyes got big. I left the car door hanging wide open. “No, no, no, no, no.” I jogged over to the door of my laboratory. It was boarded shut. Plywood lay across the length of it, with bent nails sticking halfway out. “What?” I tugged on my hair. “No!” Everything was in there. All that I needed for a recharge. All my data. All my texts. What was it doing boarded up?
I spun back to Adam and held out my palm. “Stay inside,” I said. “Stay down.” He dropped back into his seat, and then when I motioned to him again, he lay down, disappearing from view but for the barely visible curve of his back. I looked back one more time at the spot where Adam was hiding and then at my laboratory. Einstein let out high-pitched barks from behind the screen door.
“Mom!” I yelled, stomping into the main house. “Mom!” I repeated. “Did you see someone boarding up my lab—the cellar? It’s all blocked. I can’t get in. Mom!” I tore through the kitchen, passing the piles of dishes and pushing a wicker chair out of my way.
I didn’t have to look far, because I found her waiting for me in the living room, twirling a glass of red Merlot like she was at a fancy dinner party instead of in the middle of our crummy living room.
“Mom!” I shouted again. “Somebody nailed boards to the cellar.” I pointed outside.
“I know,” she said, and took a long slurp from her wineglass. “Because it was me.” She grinned. The wine made her mouth look toothy.
“You?” The rest of the words lost their sound the moment they tried to leave my mouth. I stood dumbstruck. The fact that my mother conceived of this scheme and then succeeded in actually carrying it out was almost too much to comprehend. “What a
re you talking about? You can’t do that,” I shouted, panic climbing up my throat. “That was Dad’s cellar. He wanted me to have it. What were you thinking? All my equipment is down there. I’m doing my best work. Why would you do that?”
She pointed her finger at the ceiling, where, through the roof shingles, we could hear the metallic squeal of the weather vane. “I’ve been telling you to fix that racket, Victoria Frankenstein. I’ve been telling you more times than I have fingers or toes. But all you care about is your laboratory. And your cellar. And your science.” She said these words like a playground taunt, and I felt the skin around my neck flame. “You’re just like your father.”
“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 th
e 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.
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