Zap!

by Martha Freeman

  Did Maura feel it too?

  Luis did not want to ask. She would only make fun of him.

  One final step down, and then Luis saw it—a ghost for sure, floating, dancing by the door. Luis stopped; he gasped; he raised an arm to protect Maura. His imagination ran away; he could not apply the brakes. He wanted to be a hero, wanted to be brave, but brave was not what he was feeling.

  Then the voice of the ghost said, “Hello?” and Luis jumped. “Stay back, Maura!”

  “Carlos?” Maura said. “Finally. Where were you?”

  Luis’s chest felt empty, and he took a breath to fill it. Did Maura know he’d been so scared?

  Of course it was Carlos. Who else? The ghost was only the beam of a flashlight.

  “Where you been, man?” Luis managed to keep his voice from squeaking.

  “Here and there,” said Carlos. Was Luis imagining it, or was he shaking? It was tough to tell in the bad light. “I ran into some guys. No phone. Did I miss anything?”

  “You mean, like, literally ran into them?” Maura said. “You look upset.”

  “I’m fine,” Carlos insisted.

  “Did you bring the Advil?” Luis asked.

  “Yeah, and a toothbrush too,” Carlos said. “My mom keeps extras for tíos, you know.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Maura said.

  “Leave me alone. Of course I’m sure,” Carlos said. “Anyway, what do you care?”

  “Hey—” Luis objected.

  “I’m going upstairs,” Carlos said. “Hasta luego—see you later.”

  • • •

  It was dusk when Luis and Maura came out of 316 Larch. Luis took a deep breath of the sweet air and wondered if his body smelled like abandoned house. He was tempted to check his pits, but if Maura caught him she would never let him forget.

  “What was up with Carlos?” Maura asked.

  Luis shrugged. “Who knows? He’s kind of a girl sometimes.”

  Maura frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Never mind,” Luis said.

  “I do mind,” Maura said.

  “So, okay, fine. You know. Delicate. Moody.”

  “Am I delicate? Am I moody?” Maura asked.

  “Right now you’re grouchy,” Luis said.

  Maura glared, and Luis cracked up.

  “What?” Maura said.

  “Is that what my fierce face looks like?” Luis asked. “Because if it is, it is most definitely scary.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Luis and Maura didn’t have to discuss what they were going to do next. They both knew. They were going to jump on their bikes and head back to the hospital.

  “Do we need a plan?” Maura asked as they set out.

  “Save the day. Be the hero,” Luis said.

  “Not very specific,” Maura said.

  Luis stood up on the pedals. “I guess the plan is hope,” he said, “like hope your grandpa is awake. Hope he can talk to us. Hope your mom might tell us something if he can’t.”

  Anyway, they weren’t going to give up, not while the lights were still out.

  It was two miles to the hospital, a short ride on the level, empty streets. As he rode, Luis sensed something in the air, energy waiting to combust. He thought of the people behind the closed doors of their houses, people stuck in the dark and the cold. Were they getting ready to do something? Rise up and demand power the way Julia Girardo had said?

  As the sky faded to black, the big city across the river shone brighter. When another light appeared ahead of them, Luis thought it was Whitman Hospital. Soon he realized he was wrong. This glow was yellow-orange and flickering—fire!

  “It’s on Main Street.” Maura braked and slowed down. “It looks bad. Let’s go left and go around it.”

  “Aw, come on. I wanna see,” Luis said. “We won’t stop. We’ll just ride by.”

  Maura didn’t answer, but she didn’t turn either. A block away, Luis realized the building was the Rite Aid on the corner Fifth and Main. Sparks and flames shot through the roof, and ash swirled like dirty snowflakes in the air. In the parking lot, two cars and a Dumpster were also burning. The smoke stung Luis’s eyes.

  “Where are the fire engines?” Luis asked Maura.

  “Around the corner maybe,” she said. “Wait”—she looked around her—“what’s going on?”

  For an instant Luis didn’t know what she meant. . . . Then he saw them too: shadows everywhere, moving fast in the firelight. Luis felt a chill—I’m surrounded by ghosts! But one bumped his bike, and he saw they were people, neighbors maybe, pumped up and almost crazy on a spree—pushing full shopping carts and carrying armloads of stolen clothes and shoes. One man struggled hard to haul a TV.

  Luis felt fear but excitement too. Part of him wanted to join the fun. Who didn’t want a new phone? Who didn’t want new shoes? It was like Christmas only no one had to pay—you took whatever you wanted.

  In the chaos, Luis had to jump off his bike or be knocked off. So much for not stopping. Maura had been right. They should have gone around. And now he realized the roar echoing in his ears was not only the fire but also whooping and shouting, far-away sirens, and something closer, a metallic rat-a-tat-tat-tat. . . .

  Rocks? Bullets?

  Jee-zus!

  He called, “Keep your head down!” to Maura, whose head already was down. A few feet ahead of him, she was pushing forward behind her bike, staying low and aimed laser-like at the sidewalk on the far side of Main. If they just kept going, they would be okay, wouldn’t they? But where was the fire truck? Why were there so few police?

  In the flickering light, Luis’s view was kaleidoscopic—here, a noisy crew trying to overturn a parked car; there, a guy smashing a fire extinguisher into a shop window; in the street ahead, a woman on her knees, hands over her face as if she’d been hurt.

  Luis bent down. “Can I help—”

  But the woman shook her head. “I’m okay, I’m okay.” At the same time, someone tugged Luis’s bike; someone else socked his arm. With an effort, Luis stayed on his feet, kept his bike, and continued moving.

  This is a riot, he thought, a riot in my own town.

  He had seen riots on TV—like that time after a cop shot a kid dead and left him in the street. But that had been somewhere far away, and this was here. He had bought Skittles and gum in that Rite Aid before. He had walked this block a zillion times. Now all at once it was changed. Would Hampton ever be the same?

  Luis had almost made it to the far side of the street when—RAT-A-TAT-TAT—something hit his helmet, something hard that knocked his head to one side and hurt his face too—ow! What was it? Rocks? Gravel? He stayed on his feet, wiped his cheek with his fingers, realized his fingers were damp.

  “Luis!” Now Maura was behind him. He tried to turn around, but someone twisted the handlebars of his bike hard. Luis lost his balance and sat down on the pavement. How did that happen? Where was the bike? Never mind—his tailbone hurt, and any second he might be trampled or run over.

  “Are you okay? Get up!” Maura hooked an arm under his and yanked. Who knew she was that strong?

  “My bike!” Luis said.

  “Leave it—come on.”

  “Oh, no.” In the dark, Luis felt for the familiar shape, found it, lifted the bike, and pushed it ahead of him two-handed like a battering ram. He didn’t think a single thought till he was safely on the other side of the street, shoved up against a building and panting. Finally, he caught his breath and looked at Maura. “Thank you.”

  To his surprise, she shrieked. “What happened to your face? There’s blood all over you!”

  “Never mind my face,” Luis said. “My butt’s the problem. I won’t be sitting down for a while. Come on. Let’s go visit your grandpa.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Amazingly, both bikes were okay. Luis and Maura rode the last block to the hospital without speaking. Luis’s heart was still pounding, but the excitement faded along with the r
oar of the riot. Locking up his bike, Luis watched ambulances, red lights flashing, delivering injured people to the emergency room entrance at the other end of the parking lot. He hoped the lady on the street had gotten help.

  Thinking of what he and Maura still had to do, Luis suddenly felt discouraged. How was a person supposed to stay brave in a frightening, terrible world? He wanted to say this out loud but couldn’t think of the words.

  “So many people hurt,” Maura said, “including you, Luis. You should have somebody look at those cuts on your face.”

  “I’m fine,” Luis said, but in fact both ends—his face and his butt—hurt a lot.

  Inside by the TV, the crowd was bigger than usual. The news guys were saying that the riot in Main Street had started earlier in the day when someone at Julia Girardo’s rally threw a rock at a police car.

  Luis felt a pump of adrenaline: We were there, center of the action.

  A middle-aged black man wearing blue scrubs glanced down and saw Luis’s damaged face. “Ouch, son. What happened to you?”

  “Not sure. I’m okay.”

  The man told him to go wash up. “You don’t want an infection,” he said. Luis thought he was probably a doctor. Anyway, washing up was a good idea.

  Luis followed signs to a restroom on the ground floor. Only the emergency lighting was on, but when Luis looked in the mirror, he saw why Maura had squealed. There were dirt streaks and bloody pockmarks beginning to swell on his cheeks and chin. Luis couldn’t help it; he tried out his fierce face and liked the effect.

  There ought to be Halloween masks of me, he thought.

  The soap dispenser was empty, but a few paper towels remained. Scrubbing got rid of the dirt but made the pockmarks raw, pink, and shiny. When Odysseus was injured fighting the Trojans, he must have looked like this. Maybe you had to suffer to be a hero.

  Back in the lobby, Maura looked Luis over and winced. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “Let’s go see your grandpa,” Luis said.

  It turned out that climbing multiple flights of stairs with a damaged tailbone was no joke. By the time they reached the sixth floor, Luis was hobbling, and Maura was trying not to laugh.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just you’re usually so tough, and now—”

  “Can we stop discussing my health, please?” Luis said.

  “Right. Uh, Luis? Can we agree on one other thing?” Maura stopped in the corridor outside her grandpa’s room.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “If Mom knows about the riot, knows we were there—she’ll never let me out of the house again.”

  Luis shrugged. “So we don’t mention it. That’s cool.” Maura nodded, but at the same time she was staring at Luis’s battered cheek. Talk about self-conscious, Luis thought. This is worse than zits. “I’ll say I fell off my bike. It’s kind of true. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Maura said.

  A second later they crossed the threshold of room 602 and got a surprise: Mr. O’Hara was sitting up. On a tray in front of him was a cup, a sandwich, applesauce, and two cookies packaged in cellophane.

  “Grandpa!” Maura forgot Luis and hurried toward the bed.

  “Hello.” Maura’s mom was sitting in a chair to the left of the door. Standing beside her, leaning against the wall, was Uncle Nate.

  “Holy cripes, what happened to you, kiddo?” Uncle Nate asked.

  Luis realized he was going to be answering this question a lot. “Fell off my bike,” he said automatically.

  “Onto your face?” Uncle Nate asked.

  “I’m a klutz,” Luis said.

  Meanwhile, Maura was waiting patiently by the head of her grandfather’s bed. Finally, he seemed to notice her and turned his head to look. Luis had a sinking feeling that his eyes would be blank, that he would not recognize his own granddaughter. He thought it would kill Maura if that happened.

  But Mr. O’Hara did recognize her.

  “Hello, honey,” he said very quietly. Then he grimaced, which might have meant that talking hurt his throat, or might have been his attempt to smile.

  “Are you okay?” Maura asked him. “How do you feel? Do you want anything?”

  To Luis, Mr. O’Hara looked as bad sitting up in bed as he had lying down. Maura’s grandfather was always clean shaven. He got his hair cut every month. He wore neat, ironed clothes and shined shoes. Now there was a spot of soup or something on his hospital gown, his hair was uncombed, and there was gray stubble on his cheek. It was as if he’d been touched by an evil wizard’s wand.

  Maybe Maura was shocked too, but she hid it well and smiled. “You have to eat, Grandpa. Get your strength back.”

  “He wouldn’t take a thing from me,” Mrs. Brown said. “I hope you have better luck.”

  “How long have you been here?” Luis asked Maura’s mom. “What does the doctor say?”

  “Maybe an hour?” Mrs. Brown looked up at Uncle Nate, who nodded. “And the doctor came in for about fifteen seconds—long enough to say his alertness was certainly positive, but he’s not out of the woods and they’ll need to keep him another night.”

  Feeding Mr. O’Hara was a slow, messy process. It seemed obvious that he did want to please Maura, though, and he opened his mouth like a baby bird in a nature film.

  A phone rang. The sound seemed to come from a lost world. At first Luis wasn’t sure what it was. Then he realized the phone must be in Mrs. Brown’s purse—it must be Grandpa’s phone.

  “Emily?” Uncle Nate said.

  “Right. I forgot I had it.” She took out the phone and looked at the screen. “Probably selling insurance—ha ha.”

  “May I?” Uncle Nate said, and—abruptly—took the phone from her and answered it.

  The recorded voice was loud enough for Luis to hear: “This is card services . . . .” Luis had hung up on a hundred calls like it, but Uncle Nate didn’t—or not right away. Instead he moved the phone away from his ear and studied the screen.

  Mrs. Brown reached for the phone. “Nate?”

  “Oh—uh, sorry.” He hung up and handed it back. “Pops was always good with technology, way ahead of his time. I’m not surprised he’s more comfortable with his phone than a lot of guys his age.”

  Mrs. Brown put the phone in her purse and spoke to Luis. “My dad worked with technology his whole life, but he didn’t have the advantages you kids have. He never went to college.”

  Luis saw his opening. “What was his job at NJL?”

  “This and that over the years,” Mrs. Brown said. “Before he retired, his last big assignment was replacing meters.”

  Boring, thought Luis. But he wanted to keep the conversation going. “Why did they do that?”

  “The old ones were electromechanical, outdated technology,” Mrs. Brown said. “The new ones are digital—smart meters.”

  Uncle Nate jumped in. “Pretty boring stuff for a kid, huh? Tell me about that bike accident. Bike okay? How are you going to get around?”

  “Wait—what? Uh, sure. My bike’s fine,” Luis said. He was annoyed that Uncle Nate had interrupted, but he tried not to show it. He wanted to hear what Mrs. Brown had to say. “Uh, so sorry if this is dumb, but the electric meter—is that the thing with numbers on it on the wall in my basement? I never knew exactly what it was for.”

  “That’s it,” Mrs. Brown said. “Every customer has one, houses and businesses too. It used to be the meter had one simple job, keep track of how much electricity the customer uses every month. A meter reader came by to look at the dials and write down the numbers. Now it’s all automated. The meter tells the billing department directly.”

  “The machine on the wall talks to the billing department?” said Luis.

  “E-mails it more like,” Maura’s mom said. “The whole system’s interconnected; every meter is part of it.”

  “This is all very dull—,” Uncle Nate cut in again, but Mrs. Brown kept talking. Meanwhile, Maura encouraged her grandfather to eat. On the other side of the cur
tain in the shared hospital room, one member of the roommate’s family remained sitting in a chair. She might have been reading a book or dozing.

  “The smart meters are connected to one another and to NJL through the Internet,” Mrs. Brown continued. “These days they do more than add up usage. If there’s an imbalance of supply and demand—like when everybody’s running their AC at once—the meters help keep us dispatchers informed so we can shift the load. Worst case, we can even shut down a customer’s service—shedding load, it’s called—to prevent a worse problem.”

  Luis’s brain felt like a smart meter, one humming along at maximum speed, trying to process what it was hearing. Could this be a clue—the clue Computer Genius needed?

  “Earth to Luis?” Mrs. Brown was smiling.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said. “That’s cool—interesting, I mean.”

  “You’re a strange kid if you find that cool,” Uncle Nate said.

  Luis shrugged. “I like to know how things work.”

  “And you ask a lot of questions.” Uncle Nate straightened his bow tie. “You better take care. You already got in one accident today. I wouldn’t want all those questions to get you into trouble.” Uncle Nate’s expression was part grin, part something else.

  What’s he talking about? Luis wondered. That was almost like a threat.

  Meanwhile, with Maura’s patient prodding, Mr. O’Hara was eating more soup than he spilled. “Great job, Grandpa,” she said over and over. “I am proud of you.”

  The nurse who came in a few minutes later offered to take the tray. “We are totally short-staffed,” he said. “I’ll be back in a sec. Then I’ll need you visitors to clear out for a few minutes so I can check vitals and change that drip. How are you doing, Mr. O’Hara?”

  Maura’s grandpa turned his head slowly and looked the nurse in the eye. “I’m fine,” he said.

  “Me too,” the nurse said. “Now if we could just get this blackout over and done with. Mr. Bridgewater?” He looked at Uncle Nate. “Do you and the candidate have any kind of inside scoop?”