Now That You're Here (Duplexity, Part I) (20 page)

“What's wrong?”

Brent gets up from his chair, hoisting up his pants. “I want to talk to this girl.”

Unbelievable. “Um, Brent wants to talk to you.”

“Who?”

He takes the phone from me before I can answer. Or warn her.

“Is this Eve?” He looks at me like he's caught me in a lie, and then his face drops. “Oh. Well.” He winks at me. “Danny here tells me you've got the hots for him. Is that true?”

Breathe in. Breathe out. Keep cool.

“Aw, just friends. Sorry to hear that. He thinks you're a real piece. Says you're smart, too. Didn't know Danny liked the brainy type. Well, here's your Romeo. Nice talking to you. Don't bite any apples.”

He hands the phone to me like he's won some kind of victory, then he smacks both hands on the table so the plates rattle. “Clean this up,” he barks. Sooz and the twin boys jump out of their chairs and get to work.

Eevee yells in the receiver. “Danny?!”

I put the phone to my ear. “I'm here.”

“I don't think you should stay there.” She sounds panicky.

“I can't really leave yet,” I say low, watching Brent. I'm sure he's still listening. Gathering ammunition.

“He scares me. Be careful.”

“I will.” I make my voice cheery. “I'll see you tomorrow at school, okay?”

“Leave as soon as you can.”

“Okay,” I say. “See you later.”

I hang up the phone. Dodged that land mine. But how many more will Brent set? It's going to be a long night.

I take a stack of plates from Sooz and we walk into the kitchen. At the sink she whispers, “Is she nice?”

“Very.” I smile, but all I can think is, just friends?

“Honey?”

How long have I been standing here listening to dead air? I put my cell phone down on the counter.

“Everything okay?” Mom pulls a pan from the oven and closes the door with a one-two of her knee and elbow.

Is he in danger? Should I go over there and help him? Why did that Brent guy want to talk to
me
? This is Danny we're talking about, though. If anyone's a survivor, it's him. “Everything's fine.”

Mom dishes out lasagna onto two plates and hands them to me. “Anyway, the Carsons loved the house. They want to compare it with a couple others, but I think they're going to put in a bid. Isn't that great?”

It takes all my strength to sit through dinner. I eat my lasagna, pass the butter when asked, and listen to Mom talk about stuff I don't care about while my imagination runs wild with what might be happening to Danny. When we're finally finished and the dishes are clean, I head over to Warren's to work on the EMP device.

I find him high up on the ladder, attaching Darwin's Dog's fabric to the Faraday cage. Now, rather than a chicken coop, the thing looks like a contraption in a magician's set. A big box draped in shiny cloth with a little door, perfect for going in through and never coming back out.

“There you are, Solomon.” Warren's words are muddled by the nails he's holding with his lips. “Wondered if you were coming.”

“Sorry. Dinner took longer than I expected.” I see Danny's work gloves on the table and swallow down my nerves. “Tell me what to do.” Quickly, say anything to distract me.

Warren places the next nail and bangs the hammer, making me jump. “Instructions are on the worktable,” he says, preparing to strike again. “You should review them.”

I smooth the pages of the printout and read through the steps, identifying the parts Warren has arranged on the garage floor. Circuit board. Capacitor. Steel block. And more copper wire than I've ever seen in my life.

Warren sets the hammer and several unused finishing nails on the table. “Questions?”

Questions? Yeah, I've got questions. Like, what in the world have we gotten ourselves into here? “Directions are pretty straightfo
rward.”

“Okay. Let's get started.”

Warren switches on the overhead lights and closes the garage door. Before it's all the way down, I take a quick look, hoping to see Danny walking toward my house. He isn't.

“Here.” Warren hands me a spool of wire and the first two pages of the plans. “You do steps one through three. I'll go build the timer circuit.”

I check the instructions again, just to be sure. I can't believe we're doing this.

“What'd you say?” Warren asks.

“I said, I can't believe we're doing this.” I didn't realize I'd been thinking out loud.

“We'll keep it contained. Don't worry.”

I lift up one end of the steel block and begin wrapping the wire around it to create the copper coil. The block is like a heavy shoebox. If I drop it, my fingers are toast. I pull the wire around it, trying to make the coil as tight as possible. Soon my index finger begins to sting where the wire rubs, even with the work gloves. “I was thinking,” I say, taking off my glove and rubbing my finger, on which there's a painful red line. “After the test run, we should go see if Mac is home.”

Warren doesn't look up from his work. “Good idea.”

We continue on in silence for who knows how long. The coil done, I measure out the remaining wire. Three feet. Warren stands and brushes off the knees of his pants. He flips through the directions again. “Timer mechanism is done. Let's connect the coil.”

We carry our halves of the device to meet in the middle, then connect them into one dangerous unit.

“You know what's scary about this?” I ask.

“What?”

“How easy it is.”

We stand back and look at our work. Doesn't seem like much really—a bunch of wires, circuitry, and a simple switch to turn it on. Still, it should be enough to generate a substantial pulse.

“What if it doesn't work?” Warren asks.

I think about what Danny said last night, under the tree. About leaving. About me. “What if it does?”

“I guess we'll find out. Let's move it onto the platform and put it inside the cage.” He scoots a wooden flat over to our workspace. We assemble the parts on top first, then carry the whole thing over to the cage. The door is narrow, and we have to tilt the platform to squeeze it through. Then we're standing inside with our terrible creation and I'm trying not to imagine Danny in here.

“Can we at least put a chair in here, so he's comfortable?”

“You can hang curtains for all I care, as long as it still works.” He lifts up his goggles and gives a wicked grin. “Let's throw it out of the nest and see if it can fly.”

I follow him out of the cage—it's darker in there now that it's covered with cloth—and the garage light glares in my eyes. Warren pulls a scientific calculator out of a toolbox and walks back into the cage. He emerges again empty-handed, and secures the cage door. “The timer's set. We'll know it worked if the calculator's circuits are fried.”

We move to the far side of the garage. Warren holds up his stopwatch and we huddle to watch the seconds wind down.

“Is this how it will go tomorrow?” I'm not sure why I'm whispering.

“Yes.”

Except tomorrow there'll be a person inside the shiny magician's box.

A person I care about.

Ten seconds. Five. And then three, two…The alarm on the stopwatch sounds. Warren clicks the button to turn it off.

“What, that's it?” I ask. “No explosion?”

Warren walks toward the cage. “Nope. EMPs are silent. If they're attached to an incendiary device, then there'd be a boom.” He opens the door. “We didn't build a bomb, remember?”

Of course. Duh.

By the time I get through the door, he's already cheering, punching the buttons on the calculator.

He hands it to me. The screen is black. The circuits are dead.

“And…” He scoops up something from the platform. “Look.” He unfolds his cupped hands. On his palm sits a tiny, and likely scared, gecko. It flicks its ringed tail, and Warren laughs as it scurries up his sleeve.

I cross my arms. “You know I said no animals.”

He catches the lizard again and carries it out the side door. “We had to make sure it was safe.”

I watch, relieved, as it darts off into the shadows.

It's dark by the time we reach Mac's street. One by one, the streetlights flicker on.

“What if we're going about this the wrong way? What if blasting Danny with an EMP makes it worse?”

Warren walks with his hands in the pockets of his khakis. “What if it makes him better? What if it's like allergy shots? You inject more of the irritant into the system and the body learns to fight it off.”

“Or it causes shock and the person dies.” I stretch my neck side to side. Too much tension.

A nighthawk swoops overhead, its white-striped wings illuminated by the nearest streetlight. The nights are getting warmer. Soon the temps will climb and spending any time outside, even at night, will be unbearable. Will Danny still be here then? I fold my arms over the knot in my stomach. We walk up Mac's gravel drive. The lights are off, but that doesn't always mean anything. Warren rings the doorbell and we wait.

“What's that sound?” I look toward the shop, the house behind Mac's, across the street. It's hard to tell which direction it's coming from.

“Sounds like lawnmowers.” Warren knocks three times on the door.

“Who mows the lawn at night?”

We wait, but Mac doesn't answer. Warren walks toward the shop and I follow. The sound of the engines grows louder, but there's no sign of Mac. “Looks like we came here for nothing.”

The lights are off in the shop, too. I cup my hands around my eyes and peer through a dark window. It isn't that the lights are off; the windows are blacked out. What in the world?

I knock and put my ear to the shop door while Warren walks around the far end of the building. Just a moment later, he's back, tugging on my sleeve. “Look what I found.” I see his lips moving but can barely hear his voice.

“Something strange…” My voice trails off as I round the corner. The engine sound is so loud now, we both have to cover our ears. Tucked behind the bushes at the far side of the building, three generators rattle away. Thick power lines lead from the generators to a hole cut in the shop wall. In all our work with Mac, welding and stuff, we never had to use anything but the regular electricity. What could he be doing that would require that much juice?

We continue around the other side of the shop—it's a skinny space between the building and the fence—and walk the length back toward the sidewalk. The windows on this side are blacked out, too. When it isn't so loud anymore, I uncover my ears. “Do you think he's in there?”