Tesla's Attic (9781423155126) (13 page)

How could he have forgotten his mother's birthday? What kind of person was he? He could almost see her shaking her head at him. “Nicky, Nicky, Nicky, where is your head?” She was the only one he had allowed to call him Nicky. Now no one was allowed to call him that, and no one ever would be.

He left his room, practically falling down the attic ladder, which retreated back into the ceiling, its springs activated by his final bound.

Down in the living room, his father had hooked up a video recorder to the TV. He was watching an old baseball game. Although the figures on the field were too far away for Nick to be able to see their faces, he could tell by the number on the pitcher's jersey, and the way he moved, that it was a younger version of his father.

Mr. Slate took a quick look at him, and then his eyes went back to the TV. “This was one game before I blew out my elbow. Almost a no-hitter.”

Nick watched his father throw a perfect pitch. It was ten years ago, but it felt like it could have been a hundred.

“Dad, I'm sorry—”

“Shhhh,” his father said. Then he added, “Nothing to be sorry about.”

Nick sat beside him on the sofa. It was only a few minutes in when Nick realized why his Dad was watching the video. His father had always been the one to man the camera—but this time he was on the field. Which meant someone else was holding it.

“Nicky, stop squirming!” he heard his mother say. The image jostled and went momentarily skyward before refocusing. He heard his younger self complaining about being thirsty and cold, and wanting a hot dog. He must have been what, four? Danny hadn't even been born yet.

“Nicky, watch Daddy.”

“I'm watching, but he's not watching me.”

“That's because he's watching the batter.”

“But he just looked away.”

“Because he's checking the runner.”

“So he doesn't steal?”

“That's right!”

Then his father struck out the batter, and the fielders came running in to thunderous applause.

Nick knew there were plenty of videos of his mother, but he also knew why his father had chosen this one. If he saw her—if he watched her smile at the camera, and do the casual, everyday things a person does, it would be too much to bear. But hearing her, that was something he could handle.

“She would be happy you were out with your friends today,” Nick's father told him. “She'd be glad to know you're getting along so well in a new—” He choked up before he could finish.

Nick could feel his own tears threatening to become volcanic, but he couldn't let it happen. When one of them cried, the other two remained strong. That's the way they kept one another afloat. So Nick leaned into his father as he had when he was little. “Can you start it over, Dad?” he asked. “I want to see the whole game.”

“Sure thing, Nick.”

His father rewound the tape to the beginning, and together they listened to Nick's mother try to keep little Nicky content for the better part of two hours.

It wasn't until after the video had ended that they realized Danny had vanished from the house.

N
ick's first thought was that Jorgenson had taken Danny. That he had figured out the glove was a fake and he'd come back for vengeance. But if that were the case, Nick would have heard something. Plus, Danny's jacket was gone, which meant he had left the house on his own. Where he had gone, and why, was anyone's guess.

“Your brother barely knows this town!” his father raved. The man was already an emotional wreck tonight; he didn't need this. “Where could he possibly go?”

“It's good that he doesn't know the area—that means there aren't many places he knows to go,” Nick told his father.

They drove to his school and walked the perimeter, looking for signs of Danny. They went to the ice cream shop they had already been to twice since moving in. It was just as Mr. Slate was getting ready to dial 911 that a bright flash in the sky caught their attention.

“Was that—” But before Nick could finish the thought, something else streaked brightly down from the heavens, landing somewhere nearby. By the time the third one came, they were back in the car, speeding toward the sports complex.

They arrived in time to see yet another shooting star rocket down and smack into Danny's glove, giving off a sound like a tiny sonic boom. He was thrown back and dragged through the dirt, leaving a trench, just as he had the first time. Only this time there were multiple trenches around him.

“Danny!” called their father, sprinting across the field toward him. Danny was already up again, raising his mitt, assuming a ready position.

“Go away!” he yelled, keeping his eyes fixed on the sky. “I gotta do this! I gotta do this.”

Before their father could get to him, another meteorite came plunging out of nowhere, drawn toward Danny's glove.

“Dad!” yelled Nick.

His father turned just in time to see it and dive out of the way. A flaming meteorite dragged Danny even farther than before. And yet, in an instant, Danny dropped the smoking wad of iron to the ground and got up again.

“For the love of God, what's going on?” their dad yelled.

Nick reached Danny before he could put the mitt up once more, but Danny struggled against him as if his life depended on catching just one more flaming fly ball.

“There's got to be something to it, Nick,” Danny said desperately. “There's got to be.”

“What are you talking about?”

Danny's eyes, wide and pleading, glistened with tears. “Wishing on falling stars. They're falling for a reason, and I know why.” Fighting Nick, he thrust his gloved hand into the air again. “To make the wish come true. To bring Mom back.”

Suddenly the night sky looked brighter than daytime. When Nick turned, he saw a huge fireball roughly the size of a washing machine hurtling toward them. Nick ripped the glove from his brother's hand, hurled it into the air, and threw himself and his brother into one of the ditches to get out of the way.

With the roar of a bullet train bearing down on them, the huge meteor hit the glove and just kept on going, shaking the earth around them.

When the thunder subsided and Nick looked up, he saw a trench at least ten feet deep. It had torn a huge hole in the right-field fence and taken down several trees. He could see the angry piece of sky lying at the end of the ditch, white-hot, slowly smoldering to red as it cooled. The glove had somehow protected his brother from the other meteorites, but he doubted it would have saved him from this one.

And there, lying in the ditch with him, his eyes closed tightly, Danny muttered, “I wish she was back. I wish she was back,” pleading with a field full of shooting stars to grant him his heart's desire.

Then his words faded into gentle sobs.

“It's all right, Danny. It's all going to be all right.”

Nick turned to see their father coming up to them, his eyes filled with a kind of numb disbelief, but it didn't stop him from reaching down, grabbing Danny in his strong arms, and carrying him off the field with Nick close behind.

Danny fell asleep even before they reached the car, going limp in his father's arms, and Nick and his father were silent on the way home, for what was there to be said? His father knew that the questions he would ask Nick couldn't be answered.

It was only after Danny was tucked in that Nick's father, leaning against the door frame of Danny's room as if he needed it to hold him up, looked at Nick and said, “I think your brother's through with baseball.”

Nick thought he might say more, but instead he just gave Nick a hug, told him he had school tomorrow, and went off to bed himself, apparently preferring the madness of dreams to the current madness of reality.

Nick couldn't blame him, because he felt exactly the same way. Up in the attic, he pushed his bed back against the wall and lay down on it, choosing to avoid the center of the room. He twisted the Accelerati pin in his fingers, knowing he was in over his head, but also knowing that there was nothing he could do about it. His one consolation was that the rain of meteorites had stopped before it could do any real damage.

Of course, he didn't know that forty-three million miles away, an asteroid roughly the size of Rhode Island had changed its trajectory by a single degree while Danny's glove was still held high in the air. A single degree—tiny in the grand scheme of things—but large enough to put it on a collision course with planet Earth.

T
he meteor shower that hit the sports McComplex was all the talk at school the next day. Even though there was absolutely no news coverage, word of mouth had spread, quickly devolving into misinformation, until a few simple chunks of rock had become Aliens in the Outfield. Ralphy Sherman claimed to have actually seen one.

“All three of its heads looked me in the eye, then it ripped off my wallet and escaped on a public bus.”

But no one believed him, because everyone knew the buses didn't run past nine.

For Nick, the mundane workings of middle school were a pleasant, if somewhat numbing escape from issues of cosmic intrigue. Then Vince arrived with a set of croquet mallets.

“Here,” he said, handing the whole set over to Nick. “I picked these up on the way to school. You owe me forty-three bucks.”

They looked like ordinary croquet mallets. There was a reason for that. “These weren't from my attic,” said Nick.

“What? But I heard the guy telling people he got them at a garage sale.”

Nick shrugged. “Not mine.”

“So what am I gonna do with croquet mallets?”

“Stop right there!” They turned to see Petula glowering at them with steely intensity. “Are those croquet mallets?”

“Indeed they are,” said Vince.

“No one plays croquet anymore,” Petula said. “Which means more scholarship money for me. How much do you want for them?”

Ultimately Vince cut his losses by selling the mallets to Petula for twenty bucks.

It was during the last period of the day that Nick was called in once more to Principal Watt's office. He offered Nick his deepest condolences.

“What do you mean?” asked Nick, gripping the arms of his chair. “What happened?”

“It's your mighty morphin' permanent record,” the principal said. “I have good news and bad news. The good news is you are no longer from Denmark. You did, in fact, attend Tampa Heights Middle School.”

“Okay, and…”

“The bad news is you were labeled ‘deceased' as of February twelfth.”

The significance of that date was instantly clear to Nick. It was the date of the fire. The air-conditioning in the room suddenly felt very cold.

“My brother, too?”

“You'll have to take that up with the elementary school.” Then, from a manila folder, he withdrew a sheet of paper and handed it to Nick. It was a death certificate. “I must say it disturbs me that you're officially dead, Mr. Slate. This is not that kind of school.”

Nick looked it over. Whoever created it had taken great pains to make it look real. But why? He found the answer at the bottom of the page, where there was a small, hand-printed
A
crossed by the symbol for infinity.

It was a warning. A threat. The Accelerati, whatever they were, now knew that Nick knew. And if they had the power to mess with his school records, there was no telling what else they could mess with.

“It's someone's idea of an April Fools' joke,” Nick told Principal Watt. “That's all.”

“It's a few weeks late for April Fools'.”

“Not Chinese April Fools'. Keep watching my file,” he told the principal as he got up to leave. “I'm sure next week I'll be alive, but from Mars.”

The sound of clattering pots and pans when Nick arrived home meant that his dad was cooking again. Nick realized that the end of the world must be upon them, because his father preparing a home-cooked meal two nights in a row was surely a sign of the apocalypse.

On his way toward the kitchen, Nick caught sight of Danny in the living room, sitting on the floor and wrestling with a video-game controller—which Danny often did these days, because of their lamentable lack of cable. On the screen, heads were exploding; the result of some supercharged weapon that might or might not have a real-life cousin from Nick's attic.

It was the first time Nick had seen his brother since last night's flaming parade of heavenly bodies. He hesitated at the arched threshold of the living room, knowing that any move toward Danny would feel like walking on eggshells.

“Hey,” he said softly.

“I don't want to talk about it!” snapped Danny.

“That's okay,” said Nick. “I wasn't going to ask.”

Danny paused the game and looked at Nick. His eyes were searching for something in his brother, but whatever Danny was searching for, Nick knew it wasn't there.

“I want to pretend it never happened, but I can't,” Danny said. Then he gazed down at the faded carpet for a few moments before saying, “There's something wrong with this place, isn't there?”

“Not wrong,” Nick answered. “Just weird.”

“No,” Danny said, a little irritated. “My principal's comb-over is weird. Our neighbor and her dog in matching sweaters are weird. But this?”

“Good point,” said Nick, thinking back to Mitch's appraisal. “Let's just say, ‘It is what it is.'”

Danny returned to his game, but his heart wasn't in it, and his avatar accidentally blew up his own head.

“So, was it just the baseball glove? Or all the stuff in the attic?” Danny asked.

Nick thought about lying in order to shield his brother, but Danny had probably figured out the answer already.

“I know this is scary, Danny,” he said, “but you know what? Everything in the world is scary until you understand it.”

“Do you understand it?”

“No,” Nick said. “So I'm scared, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah…but I think it would be easier if you let me be scared for both of us.”

Danny considered the wisdom of that, and he nodded. “I can do that.” Then he restarted his game, content to let Nick bear the burden of all things beyond weird.

Nick stepped into the kitchen, where his father was now singing. It sounded almost Italian, but it fell short with a lot of dum-de-dums where the Italian words were supposed to be. Pasta was obviously on the menu.

“I found a meat-sauce recipe online. It got five out of five stars from four hundred and twelve people globally.”

“Right…” said Nick. “You okay, Dad?”

“More than okay.” Mr. Slate stirred the sauce so hard it splattered the wall behind the range. “The job that Jorgenson guy was talking about? Turns out it's the real deal. Somehow they'd heard I'd been a technician in Tampa. Now I'm repairing copy machines at triple the salary for NORAD!”

“NORAD?”

Nick had heard of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and he knew it was somewhere near Colorado Springs, but he couldn't wrap his mind around the idea of his father working there. It was as unlikely as…well, as Svedberg & Sons, Fine Jewelers, disappearing into thin air.

“I started today. I actually get to go into the mountain!” Nick's dad grinned like a kid. “I have security clearance and everything. At least to the places that have copy machines.”

He drained the pasta while Nick tried to sift through his father's big news. Jorgenson must have connections nosebleed high if he could put Nick's father into a NORAD job.

“Oh, the folks at NORAD explained to me what's going on,” his father said. “The baseball mitt is part of some old experimental weapons system. The mitt has a homing chip in it. And the meteorites were actually test missiles in disguise. I guess the idea was to attack an enemy but make it look like a random cosmic event! Very controversial. I guess that's why it was scrapped.”

Nick said nothing.
They're lying to you, Dad
, he wanted to say.
They're lying to you to keep you from asking questions.
But when the alternative was believing that your eight-year-old son was pulling real meteorites out of the sky, a lie—any lie—becomes a welcome relief. If his father hadn't been so desperate for a simple explanation, he might have realized that if it
were
true, they never would have told him. Who gives classified military information to the copy-machine technician?

“Don't know how the thing ended up in our attic,” his father continued as he poured the meat sauce on the spaghetti. “Maybe your great-aunt Greta won it in a poker game from some general. I hear she was a wild one back in the day.”

Nick sat with his father and brother, eating his five-star spaghetti in silence. Yes, his father now had a job, but slipping him into this job was not an act of generosity on the part of Jorgenson. It was a way of keeping an eye on the whole family. A way of telling Nick that if he didn't get with the program, his father might pay the price.

Nick had to face the fact that this was all too big for him. It would be wise for him to simply bow out now, before someone got hurt. Just give Jorgenson whatever he wanted, and never speak of the Accelerati again.

Things might have gone that way, too, if Nick hadn't picked up the sports pages after dinner. When he flipped over the section to check the baseball scores, he found himself looking at the obituary page instead.

Nick never read obituaries. He had a funny superstition about it, fearing he might see his name, have a coronary, and fulfill the prophecy of his own death. He knew it was ridiculous, but still the thought of it was enough to keep him from looking. Except this time. And out of the various local dead folk staring back at him from the newspaper, one looked familiar.

Nick excused himself and went upstairs to call Caitlin.

“Uh…I found Svedberg,” he told her when she answered, the obituary page still in his hand.

“That's great! Where is he? Will he talk to us?”

“That might be a problem,” Nick said. Then a thought occurred to him. “Then again, maybe not…”

Vince's house and his mother were just as cheerfully bright as ever. “Vincent!” she called down to the basement after greeting Nick and Caitlin at the door. “I'm sending your friends down. Please make sure you're decent.”

“Friends?” Nick heard Vince say, as if this were a foreign, and perhaps unwanted, concept. “Sure, send 'em down.”

Vince was, in fact, not decent. He was wearing briefs in police-line colors, and the slogan read:
CAUTION! THIS PACKAGE IS EXPLOSIVE!

Caitlin immediately shielded her eyes. “Vince!”

“Sorry!” He quickly stepped into a pair of torn jeans. “Better?”

“Only partially,” Caitlin said. “Until you have some pectoral muscles, I insist you wear a shirt. Are we clear?”

Vince sighed, and he slipped on a shirt. “Nobody appreciates malnutrition chic anymore.” The shirt slogan read:
EAT YOUR HEART OUT…BEFORE I DO IT FOR YOU.
Which was only slightly better than his underwear.

Through all of this, Nick chuckled nervously, traumatized by the thought of Caitlin seeing Vince in his Skivvies, while simultaneously jealous of Vince for having such a level of optical intimacy with her—even though it was unwanted.

“Where's the wet cell?” Nick asked.

“I knew you had an agenda,” Vince said. “I knew you wouldn't visit unless you wanted something.”

“We respect your privacy,” said Caitlin. “Don't we, Nick?”

“Yeah—I mean, we wouldn't bother you unless we really had to.”

Vince looked back and forth between them a few times and then said, “I haven't used it for anything stupid. If you must know, I've been conducting experiments with it so I can understand exactly how it works.” He sat down on his bed and pulled out a notebook, which he began to flip through. “It can animate roadkill, but only the parts that haven't been crushed.”

Caitlin began to look mildly green. “Oh, yuck.”

“That goes for possums, raccoons, squirrels…”

“We get the idea,” said Nick. “What else did you find out?”

Vince flipped the page. “I tried it on a steak. Cooked, no—but raw, yes. My specimen, a raw New York steak, twelve ounces, began to squirm when the electrodes were applied.”

“Squirm?” said Caitlin.

“Yeah, it started to crawl off the plate and…” Caitlin gave him another look, and he quickly turned the page. “I took it to the museum the other day, and when no one was looking, I attached it to a dinosaur skeleton.”

“You what?!” Nick exclaimed.

“Don't worry, it had no effect on the bones.” He shook his head wistfully. “Yeah, that would've been sweet. So my theory is the battery can reanimate something when the tissue is in decent shape and still has some sort of muscular integrity.”

“Like the freshly dead,” suggested Nick. Both he and Caitlin leaned in closer for the answer.

Vince smiled broadly. “Where are we going with this, guys?”