Zap!

by Martha Freeman

  For my smart, generous, and fast friend,

  Anthony H. LoCicero III,

  who brought up the electric grid

  one day over coffee.

  We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.

  —CARL SAGAN

  PROLOGUE

  In a motel room somewhere in South Jersey, a skinny white guy known online as “plague-PJ” lay in a bed, his laptop propped against his knees. On the nightstand beside him were a liter bottle of Mountain Dew and an open bag of nacho-cheese-flavored Doritos. The skinny guy licked orange dust off his fingertips, added a period to the e-mail he was writing, and then, without hesitation, hit send.

  It was two fifteen in the afternoon. At New Jersey Light’s offices in Hampton, New Jersey, a payroll technician sat at his desk. He was bored, struggling to stay awake, when an e-mail landed in his in-box. The sender appeared to be a friend he hadn’t heard from in a long time, someone he knew from high school.

  Time for the reunion? he wondered, and opened the e-mail: Hey, how u doing? You heard I got puppy? Here are some pix.

  The payroll technician remembered, or thought he did, that his friend always did love dogs. Without thinking further, he clicked on the link. It would be a nice break from spreadsheets.

  The puppy was a black Lab—adorable.

  Meanwhile, back in his motel room, the skinny guy, who had been monitoring New Jersey Light’s network, took a swig of Mountain Dew and smiled. The RAT had been dropped. Lights out, Hampton, he thought. Zap.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Luis hit the button again, hit it hard. Still, the bulb stayed unlit. This close to throwing the whole thing across the room, he stopped himself. If the noise woke his mom, she’d be mad. She was back on nights.

  What Luis did instead was grab his phone and call the only other person he knew who had entered the science fair—Maura Brown.

  “Did you follow the directions?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I did. There’s gremlins in the wires or something.”

  Luis Cardenal was eleven and in sixth grade. He was average height. His shoulders were beginning to broaden, but he still looked more skinny than strong. Luis had a mane of black hair and eyes that were almost as dark. His mom said he’d be a good-looking kid—guapísimo—if only he’d get a haircut and maybe smile once in a while.

  When his mom said that, Luis pulled his lips back from those teeth and made what Maura called his fierce face. This was a joke between them but not entirely a joke. Luis wasn’t really angry the way he looked. More like he was determined, and the smile his mom wished for did not fit with determined.

  Maura was Luis’s best friend. Ex–best friend. Ex-best but still friend. Her hair was red-blond and thick. She had pale skin with freckles, and her eyes were blue. Her nose was so small that Luis had asked her once how she even breathed out of it.

  She had socked him in reply, and he’d never asked again.

  Now she said, “There are no gremlins.”

  “Maybe not in your science fair project,” Luis said.

  “It’s a science fair project?” Maura said. “How lame is that—a lightbulb?”

  “A lightbulb that won’t light,” Luis clarified. “So what’s yours that’s so great?”

  “It’s a replica of the first kidney dialysis machine,” Maura said. “This Dutch doctor invented it right before the Nazi invasion. I mean, mine’s going to be smaller and you can’t hook it to a live body, or anything, but it turns out to be not that hard to build. You get plastic wrap and orange juice cans—”

  Luis stopped listening. The Nazi part had sounded interesting, but he didn’t know what a di-whatzit machine was, and he sure as heck wasn’t going to ask. Maura had a lot to say about her project, so while not listening he fiddled with the faulty circuit that lay in front of him on the floor of his blue bedroom—dark blue for Blue Lu.

  It had taken a lot of talking, but finally last spring Luis had convinced his parents to let him claim the big bedroom that used to belong to his older brother, Reynaldo. Then he had hung up some posters scrounged from here and there—LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, Steph Curry. On his desk was a chessboard set up for a game. Reynaldo had promised Luis he would teach him to play; Luis was still waiting. The carpet on which he sat now was brown and threadbare, flattened by the soles of countless shoes.

  There was a one-hundred-dollar prize if you won the science fair. It was definitely worth a try. To get what he needed for the project, Luis had braved the basement. Most of it was junk down there, but if you were determined, you could find almost anything—in this case electrical wire from the cord of a busted lamp, a nine-volt battery, a switch, and a bulb from an old flashlight. Luis had followed directions looked up online to create a circuit—battery connected to wire connected to switch connected to bulb, then back to wire and battery.

  Maybe the battery was dead? But it looked brand-new.

  Now Maura was talking about kidneys. Luis had heard somewhere that you could test a battery with your tongue. It sounded weird, but—“Ow!”

  “Luis! Are you okay?” Maura’s voice came from the floor.

  “Thorry,” Luis said, his tongue not working right, then, “Thorry,” again when he had picked the phone up. “Don’t evuh wick a battewy, Mauwa. It huwts—and it tastes tewwibuh.”

  “Why would I do anything that dumb?” Maura asked.

  “No reason.” The terrible taste was still there, but his tongue was recovering.

  “Do you want me to come over and take a look at your project? Is that why you called?” Maura asked.

  “You sound like a mom on TV, Maura: ‘Don’t make me come down there!’ ” said Luis.

  There was a pause. Was she insulted?

  Anyway, the fact was he did want Maura to come over. Who else was going to help him? Reynaldo would have, but he’d be at work at the garage. He worked all the time. Luis’s parents were working, too, and anyway what did they know about science fair projects? They had gone to school in a Nicaraguan village. According to them, the school had dirt floors and one beat-up science book the whole class had to share.

  “Forget it,” he told Maura. “I’ll figure it out, or I won’t. You’re right. It’s a stupid project anyway.”

  “I’ve got my bike,” Maura said. “I’ll be there soon.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Maura fixed the circuit.

  “There was gunk in the switch, see?” Maura showed Luis. “So it wasn’t making contact, and the circuit wasn’t complete. You get it how it works, right?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Luis said. “The negatively charged particles—electrons, right?—they move from one battery poll through the wire toward the positively charged particles in the other poll. On the way, they heat the filament in the bulb to make light.”

  “If you break the circuit, the electrons stop, and the light goes off,” Maura said.

  Luis nodded, and then he had a fine idea. “You know something, Maura? I am really impressed with how clearly you understand this and how clearly you can explain it.”

  “You want something, don’t you?” Maura said.

  “What? No! Of course not,” Luis said, “only, uh . . . you could help me write my summary. With your outstanding skills, it’ll turn out great. Maybe I’ll even win.”

  Luis Cardenal could not remember a time he hadn’t known Maura Brown. He was born two weeks before her at the same hospital. They had gone to the same day care, preschool, and now elementary school. In a year they would move to St. Ignatius together—provided his grades were good enough. You had to be smart to go to St. Ignatius.

  Maura used to live in Hampton, too, but the spring before, her family—h
er mom, her big sister, Beth, and her grandpa—had moved to a subdivision just outside the city limits.

  “Maura’s grandpa must be getting a nice pension from the power company,” Luis’s mom guessed when Luis told her. “That’s how they could afford it.”

  “Can I go visit?” Luis had asked.

  “¿Por qué no?—why not, if she invites you,” his mom had said.

  When Maura did invite him, he reported back, “The house is gigantic, new paint and fluffy carpets. They have a yard with grass and even a huge old tree. There are three bathrooms. I wish we could move there.”

  “Maybe you will someday,” his mom had said, “when you grow up and go to college and get a good job—a clean job at a desk.”

  Now Maura told Luis she didn’t have time to help him write his summary.

  “Mom’s at work,” she explained, “and my grandpa’s got a headache. I told him I’d come home and make him something to eat.”

  Luis couldn’t think of a way to argue with that.

  “Hasta luego, in that case,” he said. “But maybe later in the week? The summary’s not due yet, right?”

  “Friday,” Maura said. “And maybe you could help me out too.”

  “Sure!” Luis hoped his enthusiasm didn’t sound too fake. “I always wanted to know more about kidneys.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Luis Cardenal was seven years old, he had set a house on fire.

  It was his first time on his own exploring one of the abandoned houses in his neighborhood. The houses were off-limits, of course, but that didn’t stop Luis or his brother or their friends either. That day he was going to try roasting marshmallows the way the kids did in a story his teacher had read at school.

  He had been careful—for real. He had mounded twigs and newspaper on a double sheet of foil in what used to be a living room. He had lit the wannabe campfire with a match and grinned when it burst into flame.

  But he was just a little kid. How was he supposed to know the fire would burn through the foil and ignite what was left of the rug?

  Luis had torn off his T-shirt to smother the flames, but the shirt caught fire too. When that happened, he did the first smart thing he’d done all day, he ran—but not before grabbing the marshmallows.

  A neighbor had seen the smoke and called 911. Fire trucks had come and put down the flames before they got out of control. Months later wreckers came and demolished what was left of the house.

  Luis told only one person what had happened, his brother, Reynaldo, and Reynaldo had kept the secret—on two conditions.

  First, he wanted the rest of the marshmallows. Luis hadn’t minded handing them over that much. They were beginning to get stale.

  Second, Reynaldo made Luis promise he would never play with matches again. “I will kill you if you do,” Reynaldo said, “¿Entiendes? Now promise!”

  “I promise,” Luis had said. It was a promise he had kept.

  • • •

  On Monday morning Luis awoke with his alarm, batted the clock to turn it off, counted three-two-one, bent knees to chest, and kicked—vaulting himself out of bed.

  The way Luis saw it, fate hadn’t given him the advantages it gave other kids—the ones in the shows he watched, the ones his teachers made him read about, the ones who lived in houses like Maura’s—so he would take those advantages for himself. Every day he got up planning to beat the day before it could beat him.

  At Dudley School the first bell was at 8:10. The walk from home was four blocks, and Luis had the timing down to a science: It took ten minutes to get there if he didn’t stop for an extra breakfast of gummi worms at Señora Álvaro’s bodega, thirteen minutes if he did.

  At 7:35 Luis headed for the kitchen. He was clean and dressed and more or less combed. Luis’s dad would already have been through by this time. Luis’s dad left the house before six because construction work started early. Luis’s mom, having worked overnight, would still be in bed.

  Luis opened the cupboard by the sink and made a happy discovery, a new box of Pop-Tarts—and not just Kellogg’s either, the expensive organic kind. Luis’s brother, Reynaldo, must have dropped them off. Only his brother would be so extravagant. Luis’s mom believed off-brand corn flakes were fine. “They’re the same thing,” she said. “If you want to be fancy, add sugar.”

  “Thank you, Jesus, for Reynaldo,” Luis mumbled. Then he put two Pop-Tarts in the toaster and a mug of water in the microwave for instant coffee. It was 7:42—Luis would always remember that. He had just pressed the start button when the clock blinked twice and went black. At the same time the toaster popped and the fridge’s hum went silent.

  When he looked back later, Luis realized he should’ve known right away that the power was out. Instead he felt baffled. The world was acting screwy. What the heck?

  Then his brain kicked in. Had he tripped the circuit breaker when he turned on the microwave? After yesterday, he actually understood this. The electricity in his house was organized into circuits like the one he had built. There was one for the bathroom, one for the bedrooms, one for the kitchen, and so on. If there was more electricity flowing than the circuit could carry, like in the bathroom when the hair dryer and space heater were on at the same time, a switch flipped to break the circuit and stop the flow. Otherwise, overloaded wires might get so hot they melted.

  Luis didn’t go to the basement to check the panel. His mom could do it when she got up. Instead, he drank grainy, lukewarm coffee and ate a half-raw Pop-Tart. Then he tugged on his camo-print backpack and headed out the front door, down two steps to the sidewalk, and turned left—away from the river—toward Dudley School.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was late October. The morning was cool, the sky brightening to brilliant daytime blue. Luis walked without paying much attention to the neighborhood around him. What was there to see? Brick or vinyl-sided row houses like his own—many of them vacant and boarded up, cracked sidewalks, dog waste nobody bothered to pick up, weeds sprouting in the gutters.

  Besides the usual fast-food wrappers and beer cans, the litter that morning included red-white-and-blue campaign flyers: JULIA GIRARDO FOR MAYOR, SHE’S GOT ALL THE ANSWERS!

  From social studies, Luis knew the election was coming up in November. He wondered if Julia Girardo really expected anyone around here to read the flyers. A lot of the adults were sin papeles—undocumented immigrants—and they weren’t allowed to vote. Most of the rest were probably like Reynaldo and their parents. They didn’t see what politics had to do with them.

  Señora Álvaro’s bodega was the halfway point on Luis’s walk. When it came into view, he realized something was truly wrong. Usually the open sign in the window was a colorful beacon, but not today. Today it was dark—and come to think of it, why were so many drivers honking their horns?

  So the power outage hadn’t been only in Luis’s own kitchen, or only in his own house either. It seemed to be all over the neighborhood, maybe all over town.

  Luis checked the time on his phone. If he hurried, he could check in with Señora Álvaro—get the news and maybe some gummi worms too. Señora Álvaro always knew what was going on.

  “Buenos días, buenas noches—good morning, good night,” she greeted him. She had a candle lit beside the dead cash register. The only other light was daylight streaming through cloudy windows. “How long do you think this is going to last, anyway?”

  “That’s what I came in to ask you,” Luis said.

  “I got some news off the phone,” said the señora. “They say it’s only part of the city now, but it’s getting bigger—cascading, they said. Is there a hurricane nobody told me about?”

  Luis shrugged. “It’s sort of like a mystery, I guess.”

  “Yeah, okay, so I got a favor to ask,” said Señora Álvaro. “I need a big strong kid to take something to the genius. I don’t have a big strong kid, so you will have to do.”

  Luis was used to the señora’s sense of humor. “I got school,” he said. �
��I can’t be late. I’m never late.”

  “One time you can be. It’s an emergency,” Señora Álvaro said.

  Luis made a quick decision. Arguing would only waste time and make him later. “What is it I’m delivering?”

  “Get a quart of chocolate milk from the case there.” Señora Álvaro handed him a bag. “He needs milk to keep him alive.”

  Luis couldn’t believe it. “Are you kidding me? I’m gonna be late to school for the first time in my life because—”

  Señora Álvaro shut him down with a look. She was old, an abuela many times over, but her hair was jet black and pulled tight in a bun. Luis was an average-height kid, and she was half a head shorter. That made her tiny, Luis guessed, only no one thought of her that way. Everyone counted on her and her bodega.

  “Go find him,” Señora Álvaro said. “What are you good for if you can’t? Maybe I’ll give you some gummi worms when you get back. How would you like that?”

  “I’m not coming back. I’m going to school. Where is the genius anyway?”

  “¿Quién sabe?—who knows?” she said. “Aren’t you supposed to be smart? Go out and find him.”

  Luis unzipped his backpack, put the quart of milk inside, and ran. Why did I stop, anyway? he asked himself.

  Unlike most legends, the genius—aka Computer Genius—actually existed. The story went that he was a bad little kid who ran away from home and turned up eventually in one of the abandoned houses.

  He had gotten hold of a laptop—how? He had taught himself to program—how? It was true that even in poor neighborhoods, Wi-Fi signals bounced everywhere. He had learned the secret of intercepting them and spent his days and nights online. Sometimes he did jobs for people like Señora Álvaro. Maybe she paid him in chocolate milk.

  You could call the genius homeless or many-homed. Either way, he migrated. There were half a dozen likely prospects near the señora’s bodega, and Luis checked them all in a hurry. He was looking for telltale signs of the genius in residence, fast-food cups outside, candy wrappers, a window cleaned off so you could see out of it. If the genius was feeling good, he might tack some old tablecloth up to serve as a curtain.