Rise of the Elgen
Authors: Richard Paul Evans
Tags: #Young Adult, #Science Fiction, #Fantasy, #Adventure, #Thriller
Chapter 6: Bronze Idaho and the Voice
Chapter 10: An Unplanned Visit
Chapter 11: The Ride to the Airport
Chapter 21: The Board’s Decision
Chapter 23: The Family Meeting
Chapter 27: Beware the Stranger
Chapter 32: Final Instructions
Chapter 42: The Weekend Express
Chapter 43: The End of the Pipe
Chapter 46: Nighttime in the Jungle
Chapter 52: Shadows and Nose Bones
To McKenna
You have brought light and warmth into the world
“T
his had better be important,” the man said. It was past two in the morning in the Tyrrhenian Sea and the man on the boat had been awoken for the call.
“There’s been a . . .
hitch
,” Hatch said, choosing the word carefully. He leaned back in the leather seat of his private jet. “The transition from our Pasadena facility didn’t go as smoothly as we planned.”
“What kind of ‘hitch’?”
“We had a revolt.”
“A revolt? By who?”
“Michael Vey. And the GPs.”
“Did any of them escape?”
“All of them.”
The voice exploded in a string of profanities. “How did that come about?”
“The Vey boy was more powerful than we thought.”
“The Vey boy escaped?”
Hatch hesitated. “Not just Vey. We lost seven of the Glows.”
The man unleashed another string of profanities. “This is a disaster!”
“It’s a setback,” Hatch said. “One that will quickly be remedied. We know exactly where they are, and we’re gathering up the GPs as we speak. We’ve already recaptured all but three of them.”
“What if they’ve talked?”
“No one would believe them if they did. After what we’ve put them through, most of them are babbling idiots.”
“We can’t take that chance. Find them all. Where are the electric children?”
“We’ve been tracking their movements. They’re still together and driving to Idaho. We have a team in place ready to take them.”
“Why should I believe you’ll be successful this time?”
“
This
time we know what we’re dealing with. And we have a few surprises they won’t be expecting.”
“I’ll have to report this to the board,” the voice said.
“Give it until morning,” Hatch said. “The picture will be different. Besides, everything else is on schedule.”
“And I expect you to keep it that way.” The voice paused, then said, “I think it’s time you released Vey’s mother.”
“That would be a mistake. She’s our only guarantee that Vey won’t just disappear again, and he may be the answer to our problems with the machine. Besides, in less than twenty-four hours Vey and the rest of the Glows will be back in our custody.”
“You had better be right,” the man said.
“You have my guarantee,” Hatch said. “Vey will be back in our hands before the day’s out.”
I
n fifth grade my English teacher, Ms. Berg, was teaching about autobiographies and had us each write our life story on a single page of lined paper. I’m not sure which is more pathetic:
(a) That Ms. Berg thought our lives could be summed up on one page, or
(b) I could fill only half the page.
Let’s face it, in fifth grade you’re still kind of waiting for life to begin. Yeah, some of the kids had done cool things, like one had gone skydiving; another had been to Japan; and one girl’s father was a plumber and she got to be in her dad’s TV commercial waving a plunger, so she’s kind of famous—but that’s about as cool as it got. All I remember is that my autobiography was super lame. It went something like:
My name is Michael Vey, and I’m from a town you’ve never heard of—Meridian, Idaho. My father died when I was eight, and my mother and I have moved around a lot since then. I like to play video games. Also, I have Tourette’s syndrome. I’m not trying to be funny, I really do.
You probably know that Tourette’s makes some of us swear a lot, which would have made my story more interesting, or maybe got it banned, but I don’t swear with my Tourette’s. In my case, Tourette’s just means I have a lot of tics, like I blink, gulp, make faces, stuff like that. That’s about it. As far as life stories go, no one’s called to buy the movie rights.
They might if they knew my secret—the secret I’ve hidden for most of my life and the reason my mom and I keep having to move.
I’m electric
. So are you, of course. That’s how your brain and muscles work. But the thing is, I have probably a thousand times more electricity than you. And it seems to be growing stronger. Have you ever rubbed your feet on a carpet, then shocked someone? Multiply that by a thousand and you’ll get an idea of what it’s like to be me. Or shocked by me. Fortunately, I’ve learned to control it.
I’m fifteen years old now and a lot has happened since the fifth grade. I kind of wish someone would ask me to write my life story now, because it would make a good movie. And it would take up
way
more than one page. This is how it would go:
My name is Michael Vey, and I’m more electric than an electric eel. I always thought I was the only one in the world like me, but I’m not. I just found out that there were originally seventeen of us. And the people who made us this way, the Elgen, are hunting us down. You might say we were an accident. The Elgen Corporation created a machine called the MEI (short for Magnetic Electron Induction), to be used for finding diseases and abnormalities in the body. Instead it
created
abnormalities—us.