by Sechin Tower
“What egg?” Dean demanded. Even as he spoke, the other two bikers spread out slightly, ready to take up flanking positions. “Are you saying you killed her for an egg?”
“Brick,” said one of the others, a pot-bellied man with a weasel-face. “Brick, we ain’t got time for this. The Professor says we gotta—”
“What professor?” Dean turned on the weasel-faced guy. “Is that your boss? Take me to that murdering son of a—”
“Watch yer mouth,” Brick stepped in and placed his enormous, meaty hand on Dean’s chest, then shoved him backwards. “You ain’t got any business with the Professor. If your girlfriend had cooperated, the dumb skank might still be alive today.”
Brick shoved him again. Dean tried to hold his ground, but it was like getting hit by an avalanche, and he had to move so he wouldn’t fall. Brick’s two friends closed in around him, and it was clear that one of them would throw the first blow as soon as they had fully surrounded their prey.
“What did you say about her?” Dean said, his voice brimming with rage.
“I said, if your girlfriend—”
“Fiancé,” Dean said. This time, when the push came in, he sidestepped it and slammed a left hook into Brick’s jaw. Dean was gambling that he could knock him cold with a hard blow to what boxers called the “button” at the back of the jaw. If his aim was good, it would flatten almost anyone.
But Dean’s aim wasn’t that good. Maybe he was blinded by his own rage, or maybe he miscalculated how high he would have to reach to hit the giant’s jaw. It caught the big man by surprise, making his eyes lose focus for a second, but that was it. Brick pulled himself up to his full enormity, smiling.
Dean leapt after him, putting his full weight behind a flying knee to the behemoth’s side, but all he got for his effort was a grunt. Before he could regain his footing, he felt hands at his back, and then he was on the ground. As they closed in on him, he spun on his back lashed out with a kick. His foot connected solidly with a knee and he felt another body join him on the ground. Instantly, he rolled away and almost got back to his feet, but the grass was too slick to give him traction enough to fend off the rain of blows. He threw his arms over his head, but his world became a flashing gallery of bright red pain and heavy boots. Boots in his ribs. Boots in his arms and thighs. That big boot came down at his head and he wrenched himself to the side so that it mostly missed, but even a glancing blow from those steel-toed size sixteens flattened his nose and caused the world to spin around him like it was going down a whirlpool. His face splattered with blood, he tried to roll away again, but the boots seemed to come at him from all sides.
“The cops!” one of his attackers shouted. The kicks stopped. “The cops! C’mon, Brick, we gotta go!”
Dean struggled to clear his vision. He lifted his head, unable even to come up on his elbows, and watched the three bikers beat a hasty retreat. The weasel-faced man was limping severely, and Brick held his side and wheezed as he ran.
A mass of blinking red and white lights filled Dean’s vision. He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, and the blurred colors resolved themselves into lights on top of a police car. It was the campus police, but the real cops wouldn’t be far behind. There was a slamming of car doors and Dean was surrounded by three men again. This time it was two campus patrol officers and the university president.
“Arrest this man,” President Hart said to his security team. Then he stood over Dean, hands on his hips. “Well, Mr. Lazarchek, it looks like I’ll have even less trouble getting rid of you than I had surmised. I’m sure Professor McKenzie would be deeply saddened.”
Somehow, those words hurt more than the boots.
Chapter 11 ~ Soap
I wanted to take Rusty along because I thought the other students might want to see some proof that I was smart enough to fit in, but there was no time because it was already almost five by the time I dumped my stuff in my dorm room. Afraid of being late, I rushed out the door, but my haste didn’t end up making a difference because Topsy was way out on the far side of campus and I got seriously lost trying to find it.
When I took out my new phone to use the GPS, I found I had accidentally turned the ringer off so I hadn’t heard my Dad call. He had left a voice mail from me that he had received two bags full of cash from some guy in a motorcycle jacket, which kind of freaked him out. I decided I didn’t have time to call him back right then, but that I would tell him that he should go ahead and pay his bills and then buy himself some Knicks tickets.
Topsy wasn’t displayed on the GPS map, but I finally found it by visually homing in on the really tall clock tower that I could see above the trees. When I got there, it looked like some hot-shot had been spinning donuts in his car on the lawn out front. I kept walking towards the big white steps as fast as my feet could carry me. I was already out of breath, had a pain in my side, and was getting a bit sweaty and gross, but I was just hoping they wouldn’t kick me out of the Institute for being late on the first day.
Even though I was running so far behind schedule, I had to pause to take in what I was seeing. Topsy looked like a Victorian-era haunted house, only it was in good repair, with all the trim painted gleaming white and the ivy and roses manicured all tidy and nice around the cornerstones. Two stories above me, a spiked, wrought-iron fence ran the circumference of the flat roof, indicating that you could go stand up there in the shadow of the big brick obelisk of the clock tower. At each corner of the roof was a large, snarling black gargoyle.
On ground level, the huge front stairway was flanked by a pair of stone lions, but the building’s doors were more frightening still. For a long time all I could do was stare at those doors and try to get control of my breathing. They were each at least four feet wide, and their outer surface was armored with a braid of foot-wide strips of metal, alternating iron and steel. The hinges were carved to look like fists, only each fist was the size of my head. There were even spikes on the doors, pointing out, as if threatening to impale anyone who tried to get in.
Finally, I got up the courage to knock, but found that I couldn’t even budge the knockers because they were so heavy. Instead, I tapped at the door with my knuckles. It couldn’t possibly have been loud enough to be heard from the other side, but my tapping was immediately answered by the heavy clanking of a titanic lock. The doors, thick as those on bank vaults, began to silently glide open just far enough for someone to step through. Gory scenarios from a thousand horror movies replaying in my mind, I took a trembling step inside. For some reason, I held my breath as I went.
“Welcome,” said a voice. “You must be our new student.”
The voice startled me so badly that I jumped and collided with a picture on the wall. Recovering, I saw that we were in a short hallway with a crimson carpet, blue-flowered wallpaper, and row upon row of painted portraits. There was a pair of smaller doors at the far end just past a white marble bust on a pedestal, and a big statue in the center of the hallway.
“Sorry!” a woman said with a stifled laugh as she stepped forward. “I didn’t mean to spook you. My name’s Nikki.”
Nikki was young, not too much older than me. Her skin was the color of chocolate and her long, straight, ebony-black hair was dyed platinum blond at the tips, but everything else about her was pink. A pink skirt hugged her round hips, pink platform shoes boosted her an extra two inches, and a long pink coat hung from her shoulders. She was beautiful, but not like a runway model; she was curvier, like Marilyn Monroe.
I recovered myself enough to extend my hand to shake hers. BTW: she had pink nail polish, too.
“My name’s Soap,” I said. “Um, hey,” I said. “I think there was a typo on the invitation. It says ‘Mad Science Institute’ instead of ‘Mechanical Science Institute.’”
She tipped her head back and laughed, and when she spoke I could detect a mild Southern accent. “Well, bless your heart. That’s no typo. You might say it’s our school’s nickname.”
“Oh,�
� I said, not liking the nickname at all.
When she turned to lead me down the hall, I saw black embroidery on the back of her pink lab coat that said IT IS BETTER TO BE FEARED THAN LOVED. Below that was a skull-and-crossbones symbol inside a triangle.
“Whoa,” I said, studying the skull-and-crossbones. “Are you a pirate or something?”
“Pardon? Oh—no, that’s the hazard symbol for poison. Take the warning to heart,” she said sweetly. “I’ve got a mean streak a mile wide for people who cross me.”
“Oh,” I said again, making a mental note not to make her mad.
Then, as if it just occurred to her, she asked: “Soap, how old are you?”
I froze. Had I given myself away somehow? Did she know I was too young to be there? The silence stretched out awkwardly as I considered my answer. I didn’t think I could get away with a lie, so I finally admitted that I was sixteen.
“Cool,” Nikki turned and led me down the hall. “I was seventeen when I started last year. Victor was fourteen when he started two years before that. You fit right in.”
I tried to wrap my head around that information but it was almost too much to handle. It felt like someone had just popped the balloon of all my fears. Maybe this place really would work out for me.
Nikki had to take me by the hand to get me moving again. She guided me over to the big statue in the middle of the hallway as if to introduce me to an old friend. It was carved from white marble, slightly larger than life, and placed right in the center of everything so you had to walk around it as you made your way towards the inner doors. Its shape was that of a lanky, thoughtful-looking man sitting in a chair, his head tilted against his hand while he gazed off into space. This man had a narrow mustache, hair parted down the middle, and a deeply thoughtful look in his eyes. With a burst of excitement I realized who it was.
“Nikola Tesla!” I exclaimed. “Inventor of alternating current—not to mention radio, x-rays, robotics, and about a million other things.”
“You recognize him,” Nikki nodded with approval. “Hardly anybody knows about him these days, even though we all still use his inventions every single day. Soap, this here is our school’s founder.”
“F—founder?” I looked up at her to see if she was messing with me, but she looked serious. “I didn’t know he founded any schools.”
“It was founded in secret,” Nikki walked over to a wall to stand next to the only two pictures in the room that were not portraits of people. One was a photograph of a pigeon. The other was a picture of a tall broadcasting tower with a weird, bumpy cap at its top.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked, pointing to the tower.
“That’s Wardenclyffe Tower,” I said. Any Tesla fan (and there are a few of us out there) would recognize it as the inventor’s attempt to achieve his dream of broadcasting electricity everywhere in the world without using wires. “That tower is kind of what inspired my science experiment with Rusty, even though Wardenclyffe kind of ended in financial disaster… come to think of it, so did my experiment.”
Nikki nodded. “Tesla went broke trying to get that tower a-workin’. He spent the rest of his life in deep, deep debt. To be fair, he always had been terrible with money, even before that. But he could envision and design incredible machines all in his head, so all he needed was a laboratory with talented engineers to bring his designs into reality. Only problem was, they had to keep it secret so that Tesla’s creditors wouldn’t foreclose on it.”
“And that’s this place?” I asked, feeling suddenly light headed. “The Mechanical Science Institute got started as Tesla’s secret lab? Seriously?”
“Can you think of a more out-of-the-way place to go and hide a super-secret private research facility than Bugswallow, Minnesota?” Nikki winked at me before moving on to stand by the far door.
“But if he was broke and all, how did he get the money to build this place?”
“Ah, that’s where this gentleman comes in,” Nikki patted the white marble bust by the doorway. At first I thought it was Einstein because it depicted a man with bushy hair, a thick mustache, and a sly look in his eye. But when I read the name tag, I saw that it was someone else entirely.
“That’s Mark Twain?” I asked. “As in, the famous writer?”
“You bet,” Nikki said. “Twain loved new technology and he was a good friend of Tesla. Twain also spent his life either flat broke or filthy rich, and in one of his wealthy moments he donated the money to set up this school. Actually, he financed the whole town, way back in 1907 when there was nothing here but pine trees and swampland. He was also the one who came up with the name ‘Bugswallow.’”
Bugswallow. It did sound like the kind of thing Twain would think up. But the rest of what Nikki had told me was ricocheting around inside my skull. Nikola Tesla, my science idol. A secret school. Untold inventions. Tesla had lived almost forty years—nearly half his life—after the Wardenclyffe failure, and he often claimed to have developed amazing new tools, discoveries, and even weapons, but no one wanted to fund his work and so none of it came to light. A lot of people just decided he was a crazy old man, but was it really possible that he actually invented all the stuff he claimed, working like a real-life mad scientist and sending all his designs here, to a tiny school with a lame name in the middle of nowhere?
If it was true, the possibilities were staggering. While he was alive, Tesla was a hundred years ahead of the technology of his day. How far could his inventions have progressed since then if he’d had a group of scientists secretly working on them ever since?
Thinking about it made my head spin. Nikki had to lead me by the hand again through the inner door into a large warehouse filled with books, Bunsen burners, fume hoods, and cabinets of glassware. Off by the far wall was a spiral staircase that led up to the roof, but the rest was wide open, with the enormous wooden rafters clearly visible twenty feet overhead.
After stubbing my toe on a table leg, I brought my attention back down to ground level to study the shelves of equipment and supplies that ran in neat, orderly rows to sub-divide the huge space. There was a high-powered laser array, a six-foot tall model of a spiraling DNA strand, and computer stations every five feet. Still, something felt missing. It was too orderly and sedate, lacking the controlled chaos of an actual lab. Science should be messy, or at least cluttered, but this place was pristine.
“You guys don’t use this lab much, do you?” I asked, running my hand over one of the experimentation chambers and coming away with dust on my finger tips. I immediately dug hand sanitizer out of my pocket.
Nikki ignored my question. “There’s pizza over there,” she pointed to a side table with five pizza boxes and a rack of two-liter bottles of cola. “Victor didn’t know what you like, so he ordered one of everything.”
“That was nice of him.”
Nikki shrugged. “He can afford it. He inherited a ton of money from his parents—sad story. I’ll tell you some other time. Anyway, he’s always happy to spend the money if it means he can get more time with his special research project. He’s like that, you know.”
“What’s he researching?”
“Don’t know,” Nikki shrugged. “He never tells anyone.”
She led me deeper into the building, around a few pillars and cabinets, to where a young man was hunched over a set of x-ray pictures that he held under a desk-lamp. He looked like he was my age, but he was so serious as he stared at those prints that it made him seem like an adult. His body was lean, like a runner’s, as was his face, with high, handsome cheekbones, a strong jaw, and a chin that was just a little bit cleft. His sandy-blond hair was trimmed close on the side but was long enough on top to be gelled up a fraction of an inch in front. He grunted a hello at me when Nikki introduced us, and when he glanced up I caught a flash of ice-blue eyes.
Maybe it was the fact that he was ignoring me that made me a little more comfortable around him. Or maybe I was still reeling from what Nikki had told me in the entr
ance hall. Whatever it was, I decided I would give Hannah’s conversation matrix one more try, so I hopped up on a stool next to him and leaned in to see the printouts.
“You have a nice…” I almost told him that I liked his face. It would have been true, but I didn’t want to come off as too much of a creeper on my first day.
“You have a nice set of x-rays,” I managed. “What are you studying?”
He looked at me for a second as if he had to remember how to speak. He seemed a little awkward, actually, which had the weird effect of making me feel more comfortable. Maybe if we were both awkward in the same way we would cancel each other out. Maybe this counted as something we had in common.
“I’m working on accelerating dendrite regeneration in damaged nerve tissue,” he finally answered.
“Is that your secret research project?” I asked.
“No,” Victor said, giving Nikki a dirty look. “This is only somewhat related to my project.”
“Why did you go with x-rays?” I asked. “You know, synchrotrons can give you a much more accurate picture of small-scale structures like this.”
Yup, there it was. I had just done what I always do: say something stupid or patronizing that gets people annoyed.
Victor just looked at me for a minute with those gorgeous blue eyes, and then he shook his head. “C’mon, Nikki,” he said flatly. “I need to show you the video of what happened out on the front lawn earlier.”
Without a word of goodbye, he collected his printouts and walked off. As he went, I saw that his white lab coat was adorned with a warning triangle, just like Nikki’s. Except the one on the back of Victor’s coat had a biohazard symbol. Was everyone around here so dangerous they had to be labeled?
“Don’t worry about Victor,” Nikki said. “He’s like that with everyone who isn’t actively helping with his special research. Oh, and here, you’ll need this. It’s the key to the front door.”
