Mad Science Institute

by Sechin Tower

  Next he searched the residence upstairs, tapping on the walls in hopes of eliciting a response from inside the air ducts. Still no luck.

  Suddenly, Dean heard a clank through the wall that connected the residence to the oddly-located shower room. It was muffled, but when he pressed his ear to the wall, he heard it again.

  In a flash he was at the shower room door. Listening for a moment, he heard more clicks and a scraping noise that he was certain must be the sound of claws on shower-stall tiles. Dean allowed himself one deep breath before bursting in with a roar, ax held high.

  He was greeted by the screams of three very startled students.

  “Sorry! Sorry!” Dean quickly lowered the ax and held out his hand in a gesture of peace.

  The three teenagers before him had to be the three members of the Institute, and he was able to recognize them from the information in his orientation packet. The boy in the white lab coat was Victor von Stommel, the girl in pink was named Nicole Du Bois, and, of course, there was his cousin, Sophia. All three of them looked sweaty and disheveled.

  “Dean…?” Soap stared at him with wide eyes. “What are you doing here?”

  It was a fair question and one that he had asked himself often in the past few days.

  “I work here now,” he announced. “Sorry for the surprise. I probably should have called.”

  She looked blankly at him. She must have been amazed to find him here, but he was almost as amazed to see how she had grown. The last time they had met had been at a family Christmas when she had been no more than ten years old. He remembered how she had re-wired another child’s remote control car so that it could go faster, and how she had zoomed it around the house until the motor overheated and the car rolled to a stop, a trail of burning plastic droplets marking its final run across the white carpet. Now, six years later, she still wore all black with her dark hair pulled back into the same shoulder-length pony tail, but she was growing into her long arms and her high cheekbones. That little girl Dean had once known was becoming quite a beauty.

  “He’s your cousin?” Victor asked. “That’s so weird.”

  “Hang on a second,” said Nikki. Dean saw that she had the body of a pinup model and the wardrobe of Science Lab Barbie. “Your name’s Dean?” she said. “And you’re the Dean of Students? …That makes you Dean Dean?”

  “Just call me Dean.”

  “Double Dean? Dean Squared?”

  “Listen,” he raised his voice. “You guys have to go home. There’s something dangerous in this place. I can’t explain right now, but you have to get out.”

  “You mean the chupacabra?” asked Victor. “We caught it.”

  This stopped Dean cold. “You… you what?”

  Victor held his hands up to indicate the height and width of the creature. “You’re talking about a five-foot tall reptilian thing with sharp claws and red eyes, right? Yeah, we caught it. We’ve got it in a cage down in the… never mind.”

  Dean looked at the three of them and they all nodded. They seemed so sure of themselves, as if scaly monsters were a daily occurrence in the lab.

  “I have to go,” Soap announced suddenly. “I’m late.”

  Dean looked at his watch and saw that it was almost nine pm.

  “Hold it for a second,” Dean said. “I need to ask you guys some questions. I want to know everything you can tell me about Professor McKenzie, particularly about why a gang of motorcycling bank robbers was chasing her.”

  “Beats me. I’m new,” Soap said, her voice strained. “Can I go now? Please?”

  “No, this is serious,” Dean said. She looked like she was about to cry, but he was standing in the doorway so she had no easy escape. “Those guys who came in here earlier—did you see them?—they’re dangerous. Hey, speaking of that—do any of you know how they could blow out the power for an entire building? And I don’t mean cutting the wires. I mean frying all the electronics in an area, even… even medical devices inside a person.”

  “Are you talking about my experiment?” Soap asked distractedly. “I keep telling everyone that I didn’t mean to blow up all those phones, but now my Dad has money for—oh. Uh oh.”

  She pulled a phone from her pocket and swiped the face, but the screen remained black.

  “I really have to go,” she said, and this time she pushed past Dean to get out of the room. He made a half-hearted attempt to stop her, but there were tears in her eyes and she seemed genuinely upset about something, so he let her go.

  “What was that about?” Dean asked. The other two just shrugged. “Okay, then,” Dean went on. “Do either of you know what she was talking about? With the science experiment, I mean? Nicole?”

  “Call me Nikki. And Soap was probably talking about an EMP-bomb, which is a thing that uses an electromagnetic pulse like a weapon to wipe out anything with circuitry.”

  “You think those bikers could have made one of these EMP-bomb things?” Dean asked.

  “No way,” Nikki shook her head. “Not without some big-time help. You would need a special power source. If you’re just using the standard batteries or wall plugs, the best you could do is create a short-range annoyance. If you want to use it against a whole building, you would need military hardware or—”

  She stopped herself and looked over at Victor, who shook his head.

  “Why do you think they didn’t use it today?” Dean asked. “When they charged in here, they could have fried the school first.”

  “It wouldn’t work on us,” Victor said. “This building has some, er, special wiring. They must have known.”

  “Okay, tell me about Professor McKenzie,” Dean propped the ax on his shoulder and paced back and forth beneath the shower heads. “What happened that made her come find me? One of you must have been around to see something.”

  “I know she started getting threatening emails during the summer,” Victor said. “She wouldn’t let me see any of them, but she said that some professor-guy wanted something and she was afraid of what he would do with it. She thought she was being spied on, too, so she packed up and left. That was in late August. I think she wanted to make those people chase her so they wouldn’t bother us. It’s the kind of thing she would do.” Victor cleared his throat and wiped his sweaty brow with the back of his white sleeve. “So now it’s your turn, Dean—I mean, Dean. Sorry, I don’t know what to call you. But can you tell us what those bikers wanted?”

  Dean thought about it for a second. He pulled open the door and gestured for them to get out.

  “You’re safer not knowing,” he said. He could read in their faces that this was not a popular answer. “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to take care of these guys and then I’ll quit so you can get someone with a college degree to run this place again.”

  “You’re not a professor?” Nikki said as if Dean had just confessed to tax evasion. “Then what are you doing workin’ here?”

  Instead of answering, he just jerked his thumb at the open door again. Nikki led the way, but as Victor approached the door, Dean dropped his arm to block the exit. Victor looked up at him as Dean leaned in close until the boy was almost entirely enveloped in his broad-shouldered shadow.

  “Three sweaty teenagers in a shower,” Dean hissed. “I may not be very smart, but I was 18 once. Stay away from my cousin with that stuff. Got it?”

  Victor opened his mouth to respond, but Dean tightened his grip on the ax so that his fist made an audible squeaking sound against the handle. Victor nodded and hurried out of the room.

  “Kids!” Dean said, shaking his head.

  September 14th

  (Doomsday minus 3 days)

  Chapter 22 ~ Soap

  After I left Topsy, I ran to my room to call my Dad. I needed to tell him that something bad might happen if he didn’t leave home and hide. Even if he didn’t believe me, I might still be able to convince him to take the money and go on vacation. Maybe he could come to Bugswallow and we could keep each other safe.

&nbs
p; When I got back to Smiley, I found that my long-distance telephone account hadn’t been activated so I couldn’t call New York. Hannah wasn’t around, so I ran to the library, but Brett was long gone, too, and the library was closing up. I drifted around for a while, desperately trying to figure out what to do. Finally, I ended up at the student union, where I found a group of kids smoking out on the front benches and convinced one of them to loan me her phone. There was no answer at the apartment, and no answer on my Dad’s cell. All I could do was leave messages, and I couldn’t even give him a call-back number.

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I headed back to Topsy. It was past midnight, and a cold wind whipped me in the face as I walked, telling me a storm was coming. To make matters worse, when I got to the top step of Topsy and held out my key, the big double doors didn’t open for me. I moved the key all around in the air, pressing it against the wall in different places in hopes of tripping the sensor, but the doors didn’t budge. I also tried knocking, but nobody answered. Finally I ended up walking around the entire building, peering through windows in hopes of spotting someone, but the building was dark and empty.

  I found the Professor’s phone in my pocket. It was still dead and blank, so I threw it as far as I could and I heard it smack into a tree somewhere in the darkness. But that didn’t help my situation. I still couldn’t get in touch with my Dad and I couldn’t find any of my friends. I felt so isolated that I might as well have been at the bottom of a well in Outer Mongolia.

  Then I heard the clang of Topsy’s door behind me. Someone was coming out, which meant I was saved.

  I pelted back up the path to the base of the stairs to see Nikki, her pink lab coat draped over her arm as she stood above me.

  “Nikki!” I said. “I’m so glad to see you. I really need your help—”

  “Shut up,” she said. Her face twisted in a snarl as she spoke and her eyes sliced into me like lasers.

  I stopped cold, not knowing what to say or do.

  “I checked the security logs for the break-in,” Nikki said. “They used your key code. Your key code let them in. I don’t know if you knowingly betrayed us or if you’re just so stupid that they tricked you, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “But I—”

  “No,” she cut me off. “There is no excuse. I told Victor about it. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t belong here anymore.”

  She pushed past me and strode to the parking lot without looking back.

  I stood there for a long time, just staring up at Topsy House. Soon, the rain came. It soaked my clothes and drenched my hair, and I didn’t even care.

  Chapter 23 ~ Dean

  Dean slid his fingers across his scalp, made a fist, and tried to yank his hair out by the roots. No good: his black hair was not nearly as close-cropped as it had been two weeks ago, but it was still too short to pull out in his moment of frustration. He would just need to find a more productive way to torture himself while he wrestled with the most difficult aspect of the new job that he had encountered so far: logging on to his email.

  On his first day as Dean of Students, he had been thrown into jail. On his second day, he allowed a giant lizard into the building, and then, after failing to find it, he discovered his cousin frolicking in a shower with two other students. Dean had been so tormented by thoughts of murderous professors and bikers with EMP-bombs that he had been unable to sleep, so he arose early on his third day in the hopes of actually getting something done. Maybe in the grand scheme of things, email wasn’t as important as the other stuff, but it was proving to him that he was way, way out of his depth here.

  He had the instructions that the nice lady in human resources had given him, but none of it covered the very first question the computer asked him when he logged on, which was whether he wanted access to the local directory or to the server. Dean wouldn’t have known the difference between a local directory and a server if they had both been handed to him on a silver platter with a side of French fries, so he had clicked a button at random. This resulted in a ten-minute wild goose chase of error messages, which only ended when Dean gave up and started over from the beginning. Then he wasn’t sure which button he had pressed the first time around, so he ended up repeating the goose-chase. Now, after his third try, the thing said it was loading files, but the little green bar that indicated the progress looked like it hadn’t budged as long as he had been watching it.

  In the brightly lit study of his apartment, he could see the ghostly reflection of his face superimposed above each and every error message on the computer screen. He looked into his own dark-ringed eyes and wondered how McKenzie could have possibly expected him, a blue-collar meat-head, to run a school for junior techno-geniuses. He found himself longing for the good-old-days when he ran into burning buildings.

  “How long do you think you can keep fooling people?” he asked the faint outline of his reflection. The only response he got was a slight tick in the green bar that indicated progress on his mailbox configuration.

  He sighed and dug into his pocket for the piece of paper which he had discovered inside the Nikola Tesla statue. Here, at least, he thought he had something good, although it was difficult to know for sure. The paper was a pink invoice form, the not-quite-darkened letters in the boxes indicating that it was a duplicate copy. A decorative logo at the top read “Detroit Museum of Natural History. Detroit, MI.” It was dated two years ago and described the donated item as an “Egg-shaped geological specimen of indeterminate origin.”

  It was now clear that he wasn’t hunting an actual egg, just an egg-shaped rock. He could also guess that McKenzie had donated this “geological specimen of indeterminate origin” to the museum long before the Professor came calling. She probably hadn’t known it was worth anything, but when he started threatening her she must have figured it was safer where it was, so she put the invoice in a secure spot to ensure there would be nothing to lead him to it. It was nice to have an answer to some questions, but too much still remained unknown. For starters, what was this egg-rock-thing and why was the Professor ready to kill for it? And how was Dean supposed to get his hands on it? He doubted he could just walk into the museum with the receipt and get it back. Worse, if the Professor got wind of what he was trying to do, then the Blitzkriegers would just roll into the museum and take the egg while Dean was still filling out paperwork.

  Dean looked back up at the mailbox progress. It was almost fifty-percent done now, which was encouraging. In a strange way, this gave him hope that maybe his mad quest would also work out, if he gave it enough time. But time was something he didn’t have. Shipping the egg would take too long, not to mention that it could provide the Professor’s goons plenty of chances to snatch the package while it was in transit. No, he needed to pick it up personally, but Detroit was a twelve hour drive each way, and Dean was loath to leave the school unguarded for that amount of time. By air, he could be there and back in a single day, but that cost money, and Dean had already maxed out his credit cards to repair the wiring in his house back in Santa Monica. Until he got a paycheck or sold that house, he couldn’t afford a movie ticket, much less an airplane ticket.

  Suddenly, he had a thought. He might not have any money, but the Institute did, and he was now in possession of an official Mechanical Science Institute credit card. He didn’t know how much he could draw, but he knew the school had ample resources. Millions of dollars, President Hart had said. The President had also threatened jail time for misuse of those funds, but this was an emergency.

  While the green progress bar crept closer to its destination, Dean surfed over to an airline site to make his travel arrangements. By the time Dean had booked a flight and a rental car, his email finished loading and his inbox came up on screen. He found he already had two messages. The first was from human resources and contained a document with the instructions he could have used when setting up his email account.

  “Thanks for that,” Dean muttered as he deleted the email. />
  The second message said “Congratulations, Dean.” Considering that he had never used this account before, it seemed a little early to be receiving spam, so he clicked on the message.

  Salutations and congratulations on your new appointment as Dean of Students at the Mechanical Science Institute. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Doctor Bill Helmholtz, and I was the Dean of Students prior to Professor McKenzie.

  I would like to offer my services to you. Should you have any questions about the school or your job, or if you simply need a sympathetic ear, please click below to contact me. I seldom have reason to stray far from my computer, so I will await your reply.

  Yours, William Helmholtz, Ph.D.

  Dean rubbed his chin as he stared at this note. William Helmholtz was the dean prior to McKenzie—the dean who had been convicted of embezzlement. Hadn’t President Hart indicated he was still in prison? Maybe that was why the guy said he rarely went far from his computer. Still, Dean couldn’t see how it would hurt, so he clicked the link. It opened up another window, this one obviously a video feed from a webcam. It displayed a slightly pudgy, middle-aged gentleman who wore a bright orange prison jumpsuit. The man hummed to himself as he watched his fingers clicking away on his keyboard. Evidently, he had not noticed that the video link had opened

  “Hello?” Dean said. “Are you Dr. Helmholtz?”

  “Oh!” The man looked up, startled by Dean’s voice. “Please forgive my inattentiveness. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

  “I’m Dean Lazarchek. The new Dean of Students of…” Dean trailed off, suddenly unsure of what he was supposed to say. He had been expecting a website or an email link, not a video chat.