“Oh, you little…” Frank muttered as he raced up the steps and began banging on the door. “I am giving you five seconds to open this—”
Vwwwwooomp!
A pulse of light fired from the door, hitting Frank square in the chest. Just as it had done to Casey, the pulse sent him flying backward, and he landed with a thud a dozen yards away from the house. To add insult to injury, the rain, which had let up earlier, began again in earnest. In seconds, Frank was not only humiliated, he was also soaked.
“I’m not leaving!” Casey shouted from behind the door. “Either tell me how to get there or kill me!”
Inside the house, Casey smiled to herself. She knew it was just a matter of time before Frank came around—if only because he probably hated the idea of her being alone in his house, where she could touch things and mess with his mess. Turning around, Casey took her first real look at the house. Everywhere she looked, there was clutter. Newspapers and books were piled up on the floor, and odd gadgets—some finished, some in pieces—were scattered on shelves, chairs, and random side tables.
Making her way into the living room, Casey continued to explore. On the mantel above the fireplace, several framed photos were lined up. Frank’s baby face peered out of one, while another was of a serious-looking man leaning against a tractor. In between the frames was an odd gizmo. It had what looked like one large bug eye, and a bouquet of fiber-optic wires extended out of the back.
Casey reached out a hand, curious. True, Frank would probably kill her if he saw her touching his precious gadgets, but he was outside and she was inside, so his loss. The moment her fingers brushed the large eye, a holographic image popped up in midair. Casey let out a gasp.
There, in bright, vivid color, was Tomorrowland! Excited, Casey moved her finger, and the image slid away, replaced by another picture of the city. The gadget was some sort of slide projector. Over and over again, Casey swiped her hand and over and over again, images of Tomorrowland popped up in front of her. And then the pictures changed. Now Frank Walker appeared before her at various ages. She saw him flying in a jetpack, the city skyline behind him. He was in a park surrounded by people as fireworks exploded in the sky above. In each picture, Frank looked blissfully happy.
Casey continued to slide her finger over the gadget until, with a little gasp, she stopped on a particular image. It was a hologram of Frank. And he had his arm wrapped around Athena. They were friends, Casey thought, oddly sad. No wonder Frank had been so bothered when she mentioned Athena.
As Casey looked at the image, her finger brushed a button on the side of the projector gadget. Instantly, the image faded and was replaced by a new one. But this one moved. It was a video! With wide eyes, Casey watched as a young Frank tried to get Athena to laugh. But try as he might, she wouldn’t. He tickled her. He told her a joke. Yet she never laughed. Not once. “You should laugh,” young Frank said. “Every human alive laughs.”
Standing in the living room, Casey felt her heart break for the young Frank on the hologram. Clearly, he hadn’t known what Athena was. Which raised the question, when had he found out, and how? Despite that the man outside was cranky and mean, Casey couldn’t help feeling sorry for the boy he had been.
As the video came to an end, Casey put down the device and left the living room. It was time to let Frank back into his house. But as she made her way to the front of the house, her attention was caught by flickering lights coming from underneath a door. She moved closer. Frank had been out there for a while; a few more minutes wouldn’t do him any harm.
Pushing open the door, Casey found herself in the dining room. Or rather, what had been the dining room. Now it was filled with TVs—dozens of them in all shapes and sizes. There were huge old box sets and brand-new plasma flat screens. But while the televisions themselves were different from each other, what they showed on their screens was the same—catastrophic destruction.
Why was Frank watching this? Casey wondered as she stared at the monitors. Why did he want to see abandoned cities crumbling and floods washing away homes?
Tick, tick, tick.
Suddenly, Casey heard the distinct ticking of a clock. Turning, she saw that a large digital clock was mounted on the opposite wall. Giant red numbers flashed across it, counting down: 0000:059:09:23:36. Then 35, 34, 33…
What the heck is going on in this freaky farm? Casey thought, taking a nervous step back. TVs with horrible news. Clocks that are counting down to God knows what and, Casey added as she stumbled on a giant wire running the length of the room, a really weird wire that leads to…Her eyes followed the wire, and she saw that there wasn’t just one. There were dozens of them! Some ran into the TVs, others ran out, but they all seemed to feed through a panel in the wall. Glancing through the window above the panel, Casey saw that the wires continued to run along the ground and into an array of antennas placed around the backyard.
He’s stealing cable? Casey thought. That guy was one weird duck.
And then she heard a noise from the foyer. Whipping around, she saw Frank emerging from a trapdoor beneath the stairs. He pulled himself up and then locked eyes with Casey. “Get out,” he said, his jaw clenched.
Casey held up her hand. “Wait! What’s that clock? Is that a countdown—”
“Out. Now.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Casey said, shaking her head stubbornly. “I deserve answers. I know you were there.”
“You don’t know anything,” Frank said, his tone icy.
“How could you ever leave a place like—”
Before she could finish, Frank erupted. “Because they threw me out!” His words bounced off the walls, full of pain. He lowered his eyes, and when he spoke again, his voice was quiet, but angry. “They threw me out and they locked every door back in.”
Casey stared at Frank. She couldn’t understand what the sweet boy she had seen in the video could have done that was so terrible he would get kicked out of paradise. And then she remembered something Athena—or maybe it was the hippie robots; she couldn’t remember—had said. “Was it because of a thing you built that you shouldn’t have?”
Surprise flickered across his face. Then he sighed. If Casey was so determined to get answers, he would give her answers. But she wasn’t going to like them. He nodded at the countdown clock. “What if I could tell you the date, the exact date, you were going to die?”
Casey couldn’t help herself. “Are you a psychic?” she asked.
“What?” he asked. Then he realized she was being sarcastic. “It’s a hypothetical.”
“Well, it’s a stupid hypothetical,” Casey countered.
Frank took a deep breath and held it for a moment, trying to remain calm in the face of Casey’s attitude. Letting it out, he continued. “Just accept there’s a world where I actually know the exact time of your death. Would you want me to tell you or not?”
“Of course I would want to know,” Casey answered. “And if you did tell me when I’m going to die, I would have to accept it.” She paused, a thought forming. “But what if me accepting it is what causes it? So the answer is yes, I’d want you to tell me. But I wouldn’t believe you.”
“You have to believe me!” Frank shouted, exasperated.
“But why? Don’t we make our own destiny?” Casey replied. She was having fun messing with Frank.
Frank opened his mouth to try to explain again, but before he could, something strange happened. Behind Casey, the monitors all flickered. Just for a moment, barely more than a second, but it was long enough to shock Frank. On the screens, in that second, all the apocalyptic images were replaced by blue skies, happy people, and scenes of idyllic countrysides. And then they disappeared. Frank’s eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.
Casey turned and followed Frank’s gaze. All she saw were the TVs full of horror. “What?” she asked, confused.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he moved into the dining/television room and zeroed in on one particular monitor. It wasn’t showin
g doomsday images. Instead, it simply had a digital readout on it—the number 100. But right then, as Frank watched, the number changed. It now read 99.9994.
Slowly, Frank looked over at Casey, feeling the stirrings of hope for the first time in a long while. “Who are you, kid?”
But before she could answer, an alarm began to blare. Someone else was there.
FRANK WAS freaking out. He could count on his fingers the number of visitors he had had in the past twenty-odd years. Now, in one day, he had two. It didn’t make sense. He ran into the kitchen, which also served as his surveillance area and stared down at a monitor in front of him. He watched nine suited men, all armed, get out of a black van. And suddenly it did make sense. The men must have followed Casey….
“John Francis Walker, you are harboring a fugitive element,” their leader called out, confirming Frank’s suspicions. “Release her to our custody or be extinguished. You have one minute to comply.”
A part of Frank wanted to just hand Casey over and be done with the whole mess. But another part, the part that longed to find answers and change the future, knew Casey was important somehow. Sighing, he pressed a button on a keyboard, and instantly, reinforced steel doors began slamming down over all the windows, sealing them safely inside.
“Thanks,” Casey said, relieved. She knew she had given Frank no reason to help her and had half expected him to turn her in to the men like a sheep to slaughter.
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “C’mo—”
At that moment, the last of the doors began to slam down. But before it could go all the way to the floor, a foot shot under it. A moment later, two hands slid under the opening and began to lift the door—the extremely heavy metal door. One of the suited men appeared. Casey gasped. There was no way a human could lift that door. Did that mean those guys were robots, like Athena and the crazy hippies?
As if he had heard her, Frank grabbed what looked like a meat thermometer from the nearest drawer and shoved Casey aside before slamming it into the guy’s chest. There was a loud zap as a blast of electricity shot out of the thermometer, shorting out what Casey now knew with certainty was a robot.
Not sticking around to wait for more robots to make their way inside, Frank grabbed Casey by the arm and pulled her out of the kitchen and into the pantry. Behind them, cabinets exploded as one of the robots fired a pulse rifle at them.
“They’re trying to kill us!” Casey shouted as she watched Frank grab a backpack and start filling it with random gadgets. The whole pantry was stocked with equipment rather than canned goods and cookie mix. Was no room in this house used appropriately? Casey wondered, noticing that Frank was carefully putting an odd cylindrical box with the word Edison written on it into the backpack. Then he threw the bag at her.
“Put this on,” Frank said. Behind him, there was a loud whir, and then the room filled with an odd blue light as a laser began to burn through the door.
On a monitor mounted behind what might have been a spice rack at one time, Frank and Casey saw two robots huddled in front of the door. While Casey was in full panic mode, Frank seemed much calmer. Probably because he knew that with the touch of a key, two trapdoors would open beneath the robots, dumping them into an electric pit. He hit the button. On the other side of the door there was a shout as the robots fell. Acting fast, Frank and Casey opened the door and snuck through the kitchen, eyes peeled for more intruders.
Lucky for them, Frank was paranoid. He had booby-trapped the whole house in case something like that were to happen. In the living room, a ring on the wall was actually a teleportation device. When a robot went after Frank, Casey managed to slam the thing over the top half of the robot’s body, sending half of him to who knew where. In the hallway upstairs, two more robots were decommissioned when a web of high-intensity lasers cut them into hundreds of tiny metal cubes. Farther down the hall, Frank flipped a light switch, turning one whole wall into a giant magnet. The robot after them then was instantly pulled against the wall, unable to move.
It seemed, Casey thought as they ran, that they might just make it. But then Frank and Casey raced into another room and ran into the robot leader. More accurately, Frank’s face ran into the leader’s fist.
Grabbing Frank by the throat, the leader lifted him into the air and aimed his gun at Frank’s face. “By the authority of Governor Nix,” the robot said, “this unit is authorized to extinguish your li—”
A baseball bat slammed down, caving in the robot’s head. The fingers around Frank’s neck loosened and he fell to the floor. Looking up, he watched as Casey, holding the bat like a practiced ballplayer, began to hit the robot leader over and over again.
“That should probably do it,” Frank said when Casey finally stopped. Getting to his feet, he gave her a grateful smile.
Casey nodded. She hadn’t expected a thank-you. She also hadn’t expected that the next thing Frank would do was drag her into the bathroom and shove her into the egg-shaped bathtub. But that was exactly what he did. Then he got in next to her. She was about to point out just how inappropriate that was when he pulled a remote out of the backpack. He tapped in a series of numbers, starting a countdown.
“Are you blowing up the house?” Casey screeched. “What is it with you people and the self-destructing?”
“Watch your head,” Frank said in response as the floor in front of the tub opened up.
Then the tub’s front began to lift and tilt back. A moment later, a metal lid began to slide over the top.
Casey glanced up, finally realizing what they were in. Somehow, Frank had turned an ordinary bathtub into a miniature space pod!
Bam!
Before the lid could fully close, a baseball bat slammed down, stopping it. Poking his head out, Frank saw the robot leader. His arms were wrapped around the tub and his head was caved in like a busted soda can. Still, he kept coming, his programming giving him no other choice.
Frank shrugged. While not ideal to have someone hanging on during liftoff, his tub pod would still work. He hit the remote one more time. Above them, the ceiling exploded, and a moment later, the tub launched through the opening and into the dawn sky. Below, the farmhouse exploded with a giant boom, destroying all the robots inside.
Casey had always wanted to be launched into space; she just hadn’t expected the first time that happened to be inside a modified bathtub. Still, when the pod finally splashed down in a lake about a mile away from the destroyed farmhouse, she got out smiling. That had been amazing.
She didn’t have much time to revel in her early-morning flight, though. As soon as they had gotten themselves out of the tub and onto shore, Frank disappeared into the woods around the lake. Casey lay on the ground, catching her breath, until she sat up, watching as Frank returned pushing a motorcycle.
“Get on,” he said, hopping on himself.
Casey nodded and slipped onto the seat behind him. He had helped her get that far; she didn’t see a reason to abandon him now. Dropping his heel, Frank attempted to kick-start the engine. But nothing happened.
He did it again. Still nothing happened.
“The battery’s dead,” Casey said after the fifth attempt didn’t work.
“No, it’s not,” Frank snapped, sounding like a petulant schoolchild as he dismounted and began looking through his backpack.
Casey shrugged. She wasn’t going to argue with the guy. She would just get off the bike and wait for him to figure out he needed her help—which he would, eventually. But just as she got both feet on the ground, there was a loud roar and the shoreline was bathed in light. A moment later, a pickup truck burst into the clearing and skidded to a stop a few feet away from them.
“Get down!” Frank shouted, pulling out what looked like a shocking device and aiming it at the truck.
“No! Wait!” Casey shouted back. She knew that truck. She also knew who would be driving that truck. Things, she thought, are about to get a little more interesting.
Sure enough, the doo
r opened and Athena stepped out of the cab. “Hello, Frank,” she said.
Casey looked at Frank and watched a number of emotions cross his face. She had seen the video and the photos. She knew how much Athena had meant to him once and how much a part of his time in Tomorrowland she had been, however long he had been there. Staring at her now, Frank looked more vulnerable than Casey had ever seen him, as if he was caught up in a memory both wonderful and horrible.
“You gonna shoot me?” Athena asked, jarring them back to the here and now.
Frank narrowed his eyes and Casey saw that his expression had grown cold. “I’m deciding,” he snarled.
“Well, could you decide in the truck?” Athena asked, turning and getting into the cab without bothering to wait for an answer. A moment later, Casey began to walk over.
Still, Frank wasn’t having it. “Hold on,” he said, finally lowering his weapon. “Wait.”
“Why?” Casey said over her shoulder. “So more robots can show up?”
Frank pointed at Athena. “But she’s one of them!”
“I know,” Casey said, hopping into the truck and turning to look back at Frank. “So…you coming or not?”
Casey was beginning to regret asking Frank to get into the truck. Ever since they had left the clearing, things in the cab had been downright icy between him and Athena. And as soon as they were on the highway, they began bickering.
Wedged between the pair, Casey momentarily wished for the fire and brimstone radio station so she could drown out the other two. Frank couldn’t believe that Athena had dragged Casey into everything. Athena couldn’t believe Frank could believe she would drag anyone into anything. She had simply given Casey the pin. Back and forth it went, accusations flying.
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