The Prisoner of Cell 25 (26 page)

“Shock him,” Ostin said.

I took a step forward, then the screeching dropped me to my knees. Everyone else screamed.

Hatch turned to Ostin. “Ostin, isn’t it? I thought you were supposed to be smart.” He looked down at me. “What do you call yourself? The Electrokids? The Electroclub?”

“The Electroclan,” Ostin said.

“Right.” Hatch smiled darkly. “You don’t belong here, Ostin. But here you are.”

“I belong wherever Michael is,” Ostin said.

Hatch smirked. “Loyalty. I like that. Even when it’s misplaced, there’s something endearing about it. Unfortunately, this is where your relationship ends. Michael, if you’ll follow me, we’ll let Ostin stay here with the others.”

Ostin looked at me.

“I’m not leaving them,” I said.

An even higher-pitched screeching poured through my head, followed by an increasing tightness, as if a metal band had been put around my head and slowly cinched up. It was the same thing I hadfelt when my mother was taken—as if life itself were being drawn out of me through a straw.

 “Aargh.” I fell to the ground, grabbing my temples.

“Stop it!” Taylor shouted. “Leave him alone.”

“Mike knows how to stop it,” Hatch said.

“Okay,” I shouted. “I’ll go.”

Hatch nodded at Nichelle and the sound and pain stopped. “Come along, Mike. I’m a busy man.”

I staggered to my feet. “My name is Michael.”

“A Glow by any other name is just as electric, but as you wish.”

I looked over at Ostin and Taylor. They both had fear in their eyes. “I’ll be back,” I said. I staggered out and the door automatically closed behind me. Halfway down the hall Hatch turned to me and said, “I sincerely hope you won’t be back to that place.”

“I belong with my friends.”

“Then the question is, will your friends still be there? And that is completely up to you.” The elevator door opened. “After you.”

“Where are we going?”

Hatch pushed a button on the elevator. “I want to talk. But first, there are tests to be run.”

PART FOUR

39. Initial Findings

Later that afternoon, Hatch was in his office talking to Quentin when Dr. Parker knocked on his door.

“Come in,” he said gruffly.

She opened the door. “Good evening, Dr. Hatch. Quentin.”

“Quentin was just leaving,” Hatch said.

Quentin immediately stood. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

He walked out of the office and Hatch motioned to the same chair Quentin had occupied. “Take a seat.” Before she could speak atch asked, “How’s our boy?”

“I’ve never seen anyone like him.”

“Explain.”

“I’ve confirmed your initial findings. His el-waves are extremely high. Except they’ve grown since your first encounter.”

“So he
is
becoming more powerful,” Hatch said.

“So it would appear. But even more curious is that he seems to handle electricity differently than the others.”

Hatch slightly leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

“His electricity seems to be circulating within his body, either through his bone marrow or central nervous system, which may account for some rather surprising phenomena. I administered a mild shock to him to see how he’d respond and his el-waves actually increased by one percent. I was so intrigued by this result that I upped the power to nearly five hundred joules. At that level I thought he’d probably jump out of his seat, but instead he just sat there. His body told a different story, however. His el-waves spiked fifty percent, then dropped and maintained at an increased seventeen percent and held there until the end of our examination. He still might be elevated.”

Hatch leaned forward in his chair. “You’re saying he can absorb electricity from other sources?”

“It would appear so.”

“Like Nichelle?”

“Except that Nichelle doesn’t retain power; she’s simply a conduit to its dissemination. Vey seems to capture it.”

Hatch rubbed his chin in fascination. “How is hoarding all that electricity affecting his health?”

“If it’s hurting him, it’s not manifesting. He’s perfectly healthy.  With the exception of his Tourette’s syndrome.”

“He has Tourette’s?”

“Yes. That’s why he has the facial tics.”

“I thought he was just anxious.” Hatch rubbed his palms together the way he always did when he was excited. “Could his Tourette’s have something to do with why he’s different than the other children?”

“I don’t know. We don’t even know enough about Tourette’s to know what causes it. We know it’s a neurological disorder, but not a whole lot more than that.”

“But it’s possible?”

“It’s possible.”

“I want this information kept in strictest confidentiality.”

“Of course. All research is confidential.”

“I don’t even want your assistants to know. This is between you and me.”

“Very well.”

“If he’ll cooperate, Mr. Vey could be the model of the Glows 2.0.”

“And if he won’t?”

“Then we’ll have to fix that. How was his attitude?”

“He was quite defiant.”

“Of that I’m sure. But there’s one thing I’m equally certain of.”

“What’s that?”

“The boy loves his mother.” 

40. A Talk

The guards all looked the

same to me. They were all nearly the same height and build and wore the same uniform: a black beret, dark glasses, and black jumpsuits that appeared to have been made from a rubberized material. They all had communication radios hanging from their ears and jaws and they carried an array of weapons on a utility belt—a knife, a canister of Mace, two different types of revolvers, resin handcuffs, a smoke grenade, a concussion grenade, and a long wooden truncheon.

I was sitting on the floor looking through a shelf of books when I heard the lock slide, then the door open. I was ticking but I didn’t care.

“Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Vey,” a guard said politely. “But Dr. Hatch is ready to meet with you.”

I thought he sounded unusually polite for a prison guard. Of course prisoners aren’t usually given rooms with a plasma TV with surround sound audio, and Monet prints on the wall. At first glance, someone might think it’s more of a luxury suite than a prison, but if there’s no doorknob on the inside, you’re still a prisoner.

“All right.” I stood as the door opened fully. There was a second guard standing a few feet behind him in the hall. The second guard didn’t say a word. I noticed that they both had their hands on their Mace. I guessed they had been ordered to be pleasant.

“This way, sir,” the guard said. It was odd being called “sir” by someone who was easily twice my age. We took the elevator down one level to the second floor.

They led me down a marble-floored corridor to the end of the hall and into a large reception area, where a secretary sat at a large wooden desk with several monitors. Directly behind her was a glass wall, partially obstructing another door. In front of the receptionist desk was another guard sitting behind a tall, circular podium with a Plexiglas shield.

The receptionist, a thin woman about my mother’s age and wearing narrow reading glasses, looked up as we entered.

“We have Michael Vey,” the first guard said, though it was evident she was expecting us.

“I’ll inform Dr. Hatch,” she said. She pushed a button, then spoke into her phone. She nodded, then hung up the phone and pushed a button beneath her desk. There was a loud buzz and the door slid open. “Dr. Hatch would like you to go on in.”

The second guard motioned for me to go first so I walked ahead of them through the open door. I stepped inside while they stopped at the door’s threshold. I was ticking like crazy.

Hatch’s office reminded me of the ones I had seen on the TV lawyer shows, with bronze statues and busts and cases of books I wondered if anyone ever read. Television screens took up an entire wall. Hatch was sitting at his desk. He wasn’t wearing his sunglasses.

Nichelle sat in a chair at the side of the room. I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t stand her. 

Hatch motioned to a leather chair in front of his desk. “Hello, Michael,” he said. “Please, take a seat.”

I walked up to the chair and sat down, looking around the office.

On the wall behind Hatch was a picture of Dr. Hatch shaking hands with the president of the United States. He noticed that I was looking at the picture.

“It’s not hard to get to the President,” Hatch said. “If you have money.”

“Where’s my mother?” I asked.

His eyes narrowed into thin slits. “To the point. I like that. After all, that’s why you made this futile little trip, isn’t it?”

“Where are you keeping my mother?”

“We’ll get to that. But first, there’s something you need to understand. More important than where
she
is, is where
you
are. And who you are.” His voice dropped. “Do you even know?”

“Of course I know who I am.”

“Yes, I know you think you do. But you don’t really know.” His gaze softened. “Who are you? You’re a victim, Michael. A victim of your environment. You have been brainwashed, your thoughts contaminated by the human Petri dish your mind has been cultured in.  “For instance, you’ve been told that all men are created equal, but anyone who isn’t blind or ignorant can see that that just isn’t true. Some are rich, some are poor. Some are smart and some are fools. No, no one is born equal. Especially you. “You’re not even equal to the other electric children. You handle electricity in a different way. And you seem to be getting more powerful. I compared your el-waves from now to when I first met you in Idaho. They’ve risen. It’s very impressive.” He leaned forward. “Do you know what we do here, Michael?”

“Kill babies and kidnap teenagers?”

He leaned back with a dark grin. “We’ll get to that,” Hatch said.

“But let me first explain to you what it is that we’re really doing.”

“I know what you’re really doing,” I said. “You’re trying to cover your tracks because your machine failed.”

Hatch chuckled. “What an interesting take you have on this.

That’s the one think I’ve learned about working with youth—if you think you know what they’re thinking, you’re mistaken.” He straightened his tie. “You’re right, you know, at least partially. It is about the machine. The MEI we call it. The MEI may have been a failure as an imaging device, but it led to the discovery of something more important. Much more important.

“If you think about it, Michael, there’s a marvelous fate to all this. Many of the world’s greatest discoveries are results of accidents. The MEI was one of those happy accidents. We set out to take pictures of the human body and instead we improved the human body. We invented superhumans. We invented the electric children.

“We’ve spent the last dozen years tracking them down. There were seventeen of you who survived. Seventeen very special children. Sadly, there are only thirteen of you left—four of you died before the age of seven.”

“Died of what?”

“Cancer. No doubt attributable to the excessive electricity coursing through your cells. We can’t be certain, of course, but there’s a chance that unless we find a cure for your condition, that may be all of your fates.”

I sat back in my chair. I had never considered that what I had was a disease.

“But I digress. I was saying that we had found all of the survivors except two: you and Miss Ridley. Miss Ridley was adopted out-of-state and you know how inefficient government bureaucracy is. Her records got lost in the process. And you, well, we tracked you for a while, all throughout California.

“You don’t know it but we’ve been more a part of your life than you realize. If you look through your family picture album, say on that trip you took to Disneyland when you were seven, you’re likely to find a picture of one of our agents in the background. Then, right after your father’s death, your mother pulled a fast one and disappeared. We lost you.

“Actually, it’s quite impressive how she eluded us, seeing that you didn’t even know you were being followed. So we set some traps and hoped that one of you would someday come looking for us. And you did. Actually, it was Miss Ridley who did. But we never dreamed that we’d be so fortunate that she’d lead us to you. In this matter, fate was truly generous.”

Fate sucks
, I thought. “What do you want from us?”

Hatch stood and walked around to the front of his desk, leaning back against it. “We’re scientists, Michael. We want what all scientists want. Truth. The truth about you. The truth about how you do what you do. We want to know why you lived when so many others died.”

“No matter what you call yourself, you’re just a bunch of murderers,” I said.

“So much anger in you, Michael,” Hatch said coolly. “But boys in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, should they?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play stupid, Michael. We know all about it.”

I looked at him blankly. “About what?”

“Are you telling me that you really don’t know why you left California?”

The way he asked the question frightened me. “We left because my mother was trying to protect me.”

He laughed. “Protect you from what?”

I couldn’t answer. He walked closer to my chair. “So you really don’t know.” Hatch rubbed his chin. “I think, deep inside, you do. You must. No child, not even an eight-year-old, could forget something that traumatic. Your mother wasn’t protecting you, Michael. She was protecting others from you.” His eyes leveled on me in a piercing gaze. I was ticking like crazy, both blinking and gulping.

Hatch leaned back against his desk. “I knew your father. I knew him well. Maybe even better than you did.”

My chest constricted.

“Do you even know where your father worked?” Hatched asked.

“He worked at a hospital,” I blurted out angrily.

Hatch just looked at me for a moment, then the corners of his mouth rose in a subtle smile. “Good. So your mother didn’t hide everything from you. He did indeed work at a hospital. Your father was the head of radiology at Pasadena General.” Hatch slightly leaned forward. “He helped us test the MEI.”