Edison's Alley

by Neal Shusterman

  He looked to the objects strung on their belts, but even with all of them, plus the harp, there were still too many missing parts. In spite of their victory against the Accelerati, in spite of all he had achieved, Nick felt useless—

  —as much of a failure as when he had emerged from his burning house and realized that his mother was not behind him. He felt as helpless as when he’d seen the windows explode and the porch collapse and he knew there was no way to change what was happening. He had failed then.

  And he had failed now.

  For Mitch, just a glimpse of the big picture was enough. He found it easier to deal with the more immediate problem of the Accelerati.

  Freezing The Gates of Hell had barely even slowed them down. Three pearlescent SUVs were now in hot pursuit.

  Everyone was in the pickup bed except for Petula, who was sitting comfortably in the cab with her cousin. Mitch pounded desperately on the rear window of the cab. “Can’t he go any faster?” he yelled.

  But Petula gave him the universal hand gesture for “I can’t hear you,” because the car radio was blasting death metal. As for her cousin, he was the definition of oblivious.

  Nick was still staring at the sky; Caitlin was still watching Nick. Neither had even noticed that the Accelerati were gaining. And Mitch saw this as his opportunity to make up for all the times his actions had created more problems than they had solved.

  He took the bellows, aimed it in the direction of the approaching vehicles, and began pumping the handles together, expelling wind at break-force velocity.

  Wind—even at high speeds—behaves in very predictable ways. Hurricanes always turn in the same direction. Warm fronts meeting cold fronts form thunderstorms. And supercell storm clouds filled with violently shifting warm and cold air lead to tornadoes. One might not be able to predict how strong a force of nature will be, or on which path it will wreak its particular brand of havoc—but its basic behavior is as predictable as rain.

  Not so for man-made wind. The bellows, which had not had millions of years of field-testing like the earth’s standard weather patterns, was a loose air cannon, so to speak. There was no telling what it would do.

  Its effect was cumulative, building with each pump of its bladder. A single blast could create a stiff wind capable of blowing people down a hallway, as Mitch had already witnessed. Two blasts could create a gale that would capsize a sailboat. Not even Tesla himself knew what three blasts could do. But Mitch Murló was about to find out.

  The first blast did little more than blow a Smart car off the road, clearing the way for the Accelerati. The second blast made a dust devil that the Accelerati handily circumnavigated.

  The next blast was the charm. The closest SUV flipped into the second one, the third one was blown into the plate-glass window of a furniture shop—and now, in the middle of the street, there swirled an angry orphan tornado. Unlike a real tornado, it did not connect to the troubled clouds above; it was self-contained and self-sustaining, sucking in everything around it until its churning wind was dark with debris.

  Pedestrians scattered, cars ran off the road to avoid it, and to his chagrin, Mitch realized that once again his actions had created more problems than they had solved.

  Meanwhile, in a seemingly unrelated incident, a house filled with 437 miniaturized cats was struck by one of the many stray lightning bolts from the problematic sky. The energy from the strike did not electrocute anyone, but it was precisely the amount needed to destabilize the miniaturization process. Instantly, each cat expanded to its original size. The effect was not unlike a bag of microwave popcorn, if every single kernel popped at exactly the same instant. And if every single kernel was a cat.

  Windows blew out, doors flew off their hinges, and cats exploded outward, filling the street like a plague.

  As luck would have it, a freestanding tornado just happened to be sashaying down that particular street at that particular moment.

  Of the 437 cats, 436 were drawn up into the tornado.

  The last one remained in the crazy cat lady’s arms. She watched the tornado pass, decided enough was enough, and promptly returned to the kitchen to open a single can of cat food for her only kitty.

  Charles Fort, the man who, among other things, had coined the term “teleportation” in the early 1900s, kept a catalog of bizarre true events. Among the strange phenomena he recorded were reports of salmon and frogs raining from the skies in otherwise normal, peaceful towns. The theory was that these poor creatures were in the wrong place at the wrong time when a tornado or waterspout visited their particular body of water, sucked them up as if through a straw, and spit them out. Witnesses were torn as to whether this was a sign of judgment upon them, a gift from heaven, or simply one of God’s many practical jokes.

  As Charles Fort was a contemporary of Nikola Tesla, it wouldn’t be farfetched to speculate that some of the odd events were caused by the inventor.

  If Mitch had given a fourth blast, the tornado might have developed enough muscle to do major damage. In its current form, without a massive supercell to feed the funnel, it was more a curiosity than a disaster.

  Had Charles Fort been alive today, he would have had plenty to write about.

  Through no small coincidence, Theo Blankenship was out on the street at the time, trying to capture some freaky lightning pictures to share on Krapchat, when he witnessed and video-recorded the unexpected feline Rapture.

  Now the disconnected tornado was a swirling, yowling mass of fur, throwing cats left and right at panicking citizens—which thrilled Theo, because this was bound to get him tons of likes and spice up his social media presence.

  He recalled seeing a TV movie like this once, in which a tornado became infested with sharks. But that, of course, was ridiculous.

  Also through no small coincidence, Ms. Planck was on the rooftop of her town house, sent there by the Accelerati when they realized that the kids who took the harp were heading in her direction.

  In her hands was a significantly modified sniper rifle. She silently cursed Petula, for this was surely a betrayal, and she silently cursed Jorgenson for being absent when he was needed most.

  Now she was the last line of defense, and as the pickup with the kids and the harp roared closer, she looked through her scope and leveled her aim.

  Anyone else might have targeted the driver, but Ms. Planck knew that he was unimportant. It was the ringleader who needed to be taken out. And so she took aim at Nick, waited until she had a clear shot, and pulled the trigger.

  At that very moment, however, a rogue tornado hurled a very disoriented calico at her. It dug its claws into her shoulder, forcing her arm to jerk just as she fired, which caused the bullet to miss Nick and strike an innocent bystander instead.

  Theo was that bystander. Much like the aforementioned salmon and frogs, he had a particular talent for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Fortunately for him, the projectile was of Accelerati design. It was not intended to kill, only to alter the target in a very specific way.

  The shell was an antidimensional round, which effectively removed the z-axis from any object or individual it struck. In other words, it rendered three-dimensional objects two-dimensional. To any observer, Theo now appeared to be little more than a projection on the concrete wall behind him.

  Theo found this perplexing, but not entirely unpleasant. While others might have considered it a major inconvenience, Theo could adapt. Because, when it came right down to it, depth had never been one of his personal strengths anyway.

  By now, Harley Grabowski had finally noticed the state of affairs outside of his limited worldview. He panicked, careening in and out of traffic to avoid the tornado, which was coughing up extremely miffed cats in all directions and showed no signs of stopping. Petula tried to keep him focused on getting to Nick’s house, while in the truck bed, Nick and Caitlin clutched the harp tightly, attempting to keep it—and themselves—from being flung out of the pickup.

  At the very b
ack of the truck, Mitch kept his eyes locked on the twister. This was his fault. He had set the winds in motion—he had to be the one to stop them. So he climbed over the swerving tailgate just as Harley abandoned the road, jumping the curb, driving into Memorial Park, and mowing down Tesla’s lonely memorial marker in the process.

  “Mitch! What are you doing?” shouted Nick.

  “Fixing my own mess!”

  Bellows in hand, he leaped.

  At that same moment, around the world, the effects of the building electromagnetic charge were reaching what could only be described as biblical proportions. In San Antonio, Texas, the bats of Braken Cave, which was supposedly the largest bat cave in the world, took to the air at noon, thinking it was twilight. They were even more disoriented than birds, and so, instead of flying out of the cave in their normal swarm, they flitted around San Antonio in frustration and began biting the population.

  In Sydney, Australia, a hailstorm began to pelt the streets. It might not have been so bad, except that the hailstones were coated in magnetically charged atmospheric particles, which discharged as they hit the ground. The effect could most accurately be described as “burning hail.”

  In Greenwich, England, where the world clock kept global time down to the millisecond, the official keepers of time were baffled, and more than a little bit frightened—for time had very literally stopped, or at least was on an extended vacation.

  And in Colorado Springs, residents were trying to wrap their minds around a plague of cats.

  The doomsayers who saw everything as a sign insisted that judgment was upon them—but if this was indeed Judgment Day, then Nick, Caitlin, Petula, and Mitch were the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And a fifth was waiting at Nick’s house.

  Vince had gone home to mull the state of his “life,” but he soon returned to Nick’s house and was waiting on the doorstep. He watched the skies with the same simmering dread as the rest of the world. Usually he loved electrical storms, but that kind of storm comes and goes. This one just came and promised to keep on coming.

  He wondered if he should stand out in a field and attempt to be struck by the strange sizzling lightning. Maybe it would supercharge his battery. On the other hand, it could make it explode. He decided it was best not to try that particular experiment.

  No one bothered him as he sat there. Nick’s father, in spite of the weird weather, was out back, gardening, and Nick’s little brother was nowhere to be seen. So Vince was where and how he liked to be: alone with his thoughts.

  Today, though, his thoughts were poor company.

  While he was not a team player, he could not deny that he had begun to feel like a part of Team Nick, which really ticked Vince off. It was hard to be a lone wolf when the pack kept drawing him in.

  Vince rationalized that if Nick and the others didn’t return, his presence wouldn’t have made a difference anyway. But he had a hard time making himself believe that. Therefore, when he saw the rusty pickup truck turning into the driveway, he was so relieved he did something he rarely did. He actually smiled.

  He didn’t apologize when Nick saw him. Instead Vince just said, “C’mon, I’ll help you with the harp.”

  There was an awkward moment when Vince actually thought Nick might refuse his offer. Then Nick said, “You were right, Vince. It’s over. We risked our lives for this thing, and it doesn’t even matter.”

  Under different circumstances, Vince might have offered a morose “I-told-ya-so,” but the moment called for something else. Something equally depressing, but more helpful.

  “So what?” Vince said.

  Nick looked at him for a moment, not sure what to make of it. “Didn’t you hear what I said? The sky is about to explode, and the only person who can do something about it went nuts and died, like, seventy-five years ago. Tesla isn’t going to save us, and his machine will never be finished.”

  “Yeah, it’s a lost cause,” Vince said, “but everything in the world is a lost cause when you think about it, right? We all die, the sun eventually goes supernova, and the Milky Way collides with Andromeda. And don’t forget that all of the stars in the billion billion galaxies will wink out of existence one day.”

  “Vince,” said Caitlin, “you ever think about writing greeting cards?”

  “I’m just saying that if we stopped fighting for lost causes, where would we be?”

  Nick took a deep breath and nodded. “We’d be worse than lost,” he said. “Let’s get the harp up to the attic.”

  Petula, meanwhile, had concluded that making the future happen was a royal pain.

  Precisely twenty-four hours earlier she had looked through the time-bending periscope and had seen herself—along with Nick, Vince, and Caitlin—dragging the harp toward Nick’s front door. The lens did not lie, so the harp’s arrival here was inevitable.

  Mitch was not present in the image, which meant that if he didn’t leave of his own accord, Petula would have to find a way to make him leave to fulfill the future that she knew would happen. Or that she knows will have happened. Or that she had known was going to be happening.

  Grrrrr! She hated seeing through that lens. The tenses alone were enough to make her want to kick out someone’s spleen.

  But when she exited the truck at Nick’s house, she was delighted to see that, somewhere along the route, Mitch had apparently fallen out, solving the problem for her. It was nice that the universe had, for once, taken care of the future without making her do all the heavy lifting.

  Meanwhile, in a sketchy part of town that was getting sketchier by the minute, Mitch stalked an irascible twister. It appeared to have a life of its own, getting neither stronger nor weaker. It was its own perpetual motion machine.

  At one point, it began to double back and approach Mitch; then it seemed to stall, spinning in place, as if inviting a standoff. Mitch was ready. He raised the bellows.

  A bellows, Mitch knew, didn’t just expel air. It took in air as well, albeit much more slowly—and he guessed that if he pulled the handles of the bellows apart with the same force he had used to push them together, maybe, just maybe, he could reverse the process.

  He stood in the middle of the road, amid panicking drivers and pedestrians who were barely able to comprehend the rain of cats and were probably expecting dogs to follow.

  As he looked at the swirling wind, he was struck by a thought. In a sense he was looking at himself—not that he was filled with angry flying cats—but he knew what it was like to have all of his thoughts and feelings spinning out of control.

  And that’s when he realized this tornado wasn’t just a random churning of wind. The bellows—like so many of Tesla’s devices—tapped into something inside of the user. The bellows had reached into his soul and pulled out the cyclone that churned within him. Perhaps, he thought, if he could wrangle the one, he could wrangle the other.

  As the tornado neared him, he took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. He put aside thoughts of the Accelerati and his father. He put aside thoughts of all the times he had fouled things up. Then he began pulling the handles of the bellows apart, filling the bladder with the tempestuous wind.

  Once. Twice. Three times.

  Like before, the third time was the charm. The tornado collapsed into a lazy eddy, and Mitch found himself buried beneath a veritable dog pile of cats.

  As the wind stopped, the roiling turmoil inside him became still. The cats, dizzy and more than ready for a warm windowsill, staggered away. With all the other noise cleared from his mind, Mitch could hear the ring of truth. And it explained everything.

  There are things you don’t understand, his father had said of the Accelerati. Well, not anymore.

  Nick, Vince, and Caitlin struggled to get the harp up the walk to Nick’s front door, while Petula seemed more than happy to supervise without actually lifting a finger. To Nick the harp felt increasingly heavy as they maneuvered it. It was probably just because his arms were tired after having carried it out from the Accelerati he
adquarters—but at this point he wouldn’t put it past Tesla to imbue the thing with some sort of variable density that changed inversely to the exhaustion of the people schlepping it. It wobbled in their arms as they moved it toward the front door and began to tip. Caitlin reached up to balance it.

  “Careful!” yelled Petula.

  But Caitlin’s hand accidentally brushed the strings, and Nick felt the vibration deep within himself. The feeling was both pleasant and unpleasant at once. Like a sudden chill up his spine, but warm. As it reverberated he could feel more than see a deeper perspective, a larger picture.

  What happened today would be important. And it could go either way. There was no predetermination to Tesla’s plan—just a series of probable outcomes. And today’s probability was simple. It was no more complex than the flipping of a coin. Fifty-fifty. Reality, as they knew it, was going to change. Things could turn out very well, or horribly wrong. To see it in such simple terms was sobering—and heartening, because it meant he hadn’t lost. Not yet!

  “Never lose hope until the last pitch is thrown,” his father often said, for with him, it was always about baseball.

  His father!

  Vince had told Nick that he was out in the backyard—and in that moment of clarity, Nick knew he needed to protect him, once more, from a reality he was not prepared to accept.

  “Caitlin,” Nick said, “can you go out back and check on my dad? Make sure he doesn’t come into the house right now…and just make sure that he’s okay.”

  He thought she might ask him what he meant, but she didn’t. Instead she unclipped the flour sifter/force-field generator and handed it to him. “For lost causes,” she said.

  In spite of their dire circumstances, Nick found himself smiling. “Thanks, Caitlin. For everything.”

  Then he did something that not even he was expecting. He kissed her. It was just a quick peck on the cheek, but it carried with it a spark that was more than just static buildup.