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!”
During 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.
In 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.
It was a full hour after the blast that Jack, Ostin, Ian, and five of the natives dug themselves out of the tunnel. They emerged from a small hole, cautiously rising like prairie dogs in a vast wasteland.
Jack was the first to climb out, his hair and clothes dusted white with fine sand. The rain had stopped. The heat of the blast had evaporated or emptied the clouds, and Jack just stood there, dumbstruck, looking around the scorched island in awe. Only Ian, who had watched the transformation from below, wasn’t in complete shock. It was as if they had gone into the tunnel, only to have been transported to another planet.
Then the rest of the tunnel’s inhabitants, almost fifty in all, began to emerge into the surreal landscape. All were silent, speechless, walking around as if in a daze.
Then the natives began wailing in the Tuvaluan tongue. Many of them knelt down, touching their foreheads to the earth.
“Unbelievable,” Jack said softly.
“It looks like Hiroshima after the bomb,” Ostin said.
Jack turned to Ostin. “Was that Michael?”
Ostin just stood there gazing out into the horizon. “It’s possible.” He turned to look at the tower. Only the clawlike metal supports mounted to concrete pylons remained. All but the bottom five feet of the tower had been incinerated. A lump came to Ostin’s throat. “I think it was Michael.”
Just then Taylor and McKenna came up out of the tunnel. The sight of the melted world stopped them. “Where’s Michael?” Taylor asked. She turned to Ostin. “Where’s Michael?”
She looked over to where the tower had been and saw nothing but the ends of scorched and melted beams. “Where’s Michael?!” she screamed.
“He’s gone,” Ostin said. He turned to Taylor. “He’s gone.”
For a moment she froze. Then she ran to Ostin and shook him. “Don’t say it! Don’t say it!”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t say it,” she said again. She fell to her knees, then to her chest, overcome by the pain of loss. “Don’t say he’s gone.”
Ostin sat down next to her, tears falling down his cheeks. “He was my best friend.”
Taylor looked up at him. “He was my everything.”
The two of them fell into each other and cried.
* * *
“What do we do now?” Tessa said. “We’re stuck here.”
“What about the Joule?” McKenna said.
“I doubt they made it,” Zeus said.
Jack shook his head. “If they did, they’re probably halfway to Fiji by now.”
All was silent again when Ian, who had been quietly looking out into the distance for a while, said, “No, they’re not.”
Everyone turned. To the north, only about two hundred yards in the distance, the Joule was rising up out of the ocean.
“They did it,” Ostin said.
Jack looked at the boat in awe. “And they came back. They actually came back. Michael was right.”
A hatch opened on top of the Joule, and two figures emerged.
“It’s Welch and Quentin,” Ian said.
The Electroclan watched as a panel on the Joule folded down, with a small boat connected to it. The two figures climbed into the boat, and a mechanical arm lowered them into the sea. There was no sound as the boat headed toward the shore, crossing over the reef, and running up onto the glass beach.
As they stepped out, Welch and Quentin looked around at the devastation. “What happened?” Quentin asked. “It looks like a nuclear blast.”
“It wasn’t,” Ostin said.
Welch looked aroun
d for a moment, then at the surviving members of the Electroclan, and said, “Let’s get out of here. Is everyone here?”
“We lost some,” McKenna said. “Tanner and Gervaso.”
Welch’s head dropped. “I’m sorry. Anyone else?”
No one spoke. No one could. Welch looked around for a moment, then said, “Where’s Michael?”
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Book 7
Coming in Fall 2017
Author photo by Debra MacFarlane
RICHARD PAUL EVANS is the #1 bestselling author of the Michael Vey series, The Christmas Box, and the Walk series, as well as more than twenty other books. All his novels have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, and there are more than twenty million copies in print. His books have been translated into more than twenty-four languages and several have been international bestsellers. He is the winner of more than a dozen awards, including the American Mothers Book Award, and two first-place Storytelling World Awards for his children’s books.
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ALSO BY RICHARD PAUL EVANS
MICHAEL VEY
THE PRISONER OF CELL 25
MICHAEL VEY
RISE OF THE ELGEN
MICHAEL VEY
BATTLE OF THE AMPERE
MICHAEL VEY
HUNT FOR JADE DRAGON
MICHAEL VEY
STORM OF LIGHTNING
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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First Simon Pulse/Mercury Ink hardcover edition September 2016
Text copyright © 2016 by Richard Paul Evans
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The text of this book was set in Berling LT Std.
Library of Congress Control Number 2016943336
ISBN 978-1-4814-6982-1 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-4814-6984-5 (eBook)
Fall of Hades Page 25