Rebecca was quiet, understanding what Donna meant right away.
“Through it?” Spencer pondered. “You don’t mean … Oh!” He was silent for a second. “You do! You mean THROUGH it, as in, when that car went through you.”
Donna nodded. “I think so. I don’t really understand it. What I am, what I can do, I never wanted to understand it.”
“Your body turns into energy,” Rebecca answered for her. “Paul figured out that much. He had hacked into a similar report, but it didn’t say much. I didn’t know if I really believed it, even after that day, till I saw you turn in the kitchen. I mean, a human body living through that more than once is so unbelievable,” she said the last part with a scientific look on her face like she had when she wrote reports. The look of fascination …
“Like electricity right?” Spencer asked Rebecca as they all kept on walking. “That’s what she looked like anyway.”
“Yeah, just like that.”
This is so weird, Donna thought. Actually having people talk about whatever I am. Donna knew she had a better answer for that now. She was some kind of government soldier freak, oblivious to the government, somehow. She’d much rather just pretend whatever she was was still a mystery. For the new truth seemed much worse now than not knowing.
* * *
Paul
The hallway was long, seeming to circle around and around forever. The walls had gone from gray to white, and it smelled like a hospital to Paul. The ceiling seemed to get lower and lower. He figured he had to be walking through a basement hallway underneath the plant. Guards were everywhere, standing like soldiers protecting a castle. Most of the guards wore suits, but a few odd ones were dressed in army gear. All of them routinely ignored Paul and the husky man, as if they weren’t there at all.
Every couple of feet they passed doors on either side of them. Some of them were open, revealing a horde of people in lab coats. Others were closed with keypads over their handles for access. I bet I could hack those if given enough time, Paul fantasized. Not that he planned on escaping. No, it was foolish to give himself hope for that, but still his computer literate mind raced with the possibilities of taking this place down from the inside. He was weak and feeble physically, but his mind as always was his greatest tool, even when it was clouded with pain.
The husky man stopped abruptly at a door on the left. He punched in three different codes then slid his ID through a card panel. The door made a beeping sound as it opened. Paul followed him into a huge room. It was the size of two classrooms with a very tall ceiling.
The walls of the room were covered with computer screens from the floor to the top. Paul tried to take it all in. Walking around the room, busy like bees, were about twenty men, all in what looked like gray hospital scrubs. One or two he even recognized right away from town. Some looked at him, others ignored him like the guards had. It was obvious they had all been warned about Paul’s visit. The kidnapping of a teenage boy from their own neighborhood seemed like no big deal.
This room was warmer than all the others. Paul tried his best to ignore the smell of his own sweat; it seemed to be his voice at the moment, telling everyone how hopeless he was. I still have my mind. As long as I’m not dead, I still have my mind … As Paul looked now to the computer screens, he saw the horrific hypothesis he’d earlier predicted be affirmed. His stomach dropped.
* * *
Donna
“So how many times have you turned?” Rebecca asked Donna when they were about a mile away from the end of the forest.
“A lot of times now. I think I lost track after ten. Whenever I’m afraid, it happens,” Donna admitted. Her fear somehow had lessened, only to be replaced by an unsettling return of eeriness. She felt like she was in her creepy dream again. Only this time I’m really awake!
“And water, like when you were in the lake—”
“Makes me human again,” Donna finished for her.
“Is that the only way?”
“Well,” Donna paused.
“Well?” Spencer spoke up.
“Four times I’ve been able to turn back on my own.”
“That’s it? Four times?” Spencer asked her.
“So you can control your ability to make your body look normal then?” Rebecca seemed a little relieved, though Donna didn’t know why.
“Well I wouldn’t say that.”
“What would you say?” Spencer went on asking.
“Two of those times I turned back on my own were earlier today. I don’t think we should count on it helping us.”
“This is reassuring,” Spencer mumbled sarcastically.
Rebecca went to ask a question but then stopped herself.
“Well now that we are less then twenty minutes out of the woods do you think we should discuss fully what we are going to do? Before we go in head first with an electric girl about to take down a secret government! No offense,” he gestured toward Donna. “But will there be other electric things, or soldiers, I mean, waiting?”
Donna shivered. Others like me?
“I-I don’t think they’ll all be like Donna,” Rebecca offered. “Paul made it seem like there were other things they could do. I think the electric thing is rare.”
“Other things?” Spencer repeated.
* * *
Paul
Paul looked at each computer screen, hypnotized. The first twenty, maybe more, showed the outside of the power plant and everything inside it; people at the front door entrances, workers in safe suits near the main power source, and so much more.
Everything was monitored to such an extreme that it didn’t even seem real. Paul tried to take it all in the best he could. The outside screens showed it was still night, and the parking lot seemed empty. It must still be really late. Maybe I haven’t been here as long as it seems.
Then Paul looked past those monitors, and saw a group of screens committed to monitoring the Applegate’s mansion. Eight screens with different outside views, and another eight for the inside of the house. Further down past those sets of screens were screens monitoring different houses in Paul’s town. His school had four screens monitoring the outside of it. Another two screens showed different angles of the football field and the inside of the gym. Then he moved down further and saw a screen for his own house and one for Rebecca’s next to it. Paul’s world seemed to stop.
“Beautiful isn’t it?” an evil voice called from behind him.
* * *
Donna
“So what can you do?” Spencer asked Donna again.
“I … I don’t really know anything about me.”
“Yes you do,” Rebecca said gently. “You can turn into electricity and go through things, and maybe you can turn back to normal if you really try. We can use that, Donna.” Rebecca for a second sounded like Brook, strong, ready for anything. It made Donna feel better in a weird way. It was clear Rebecca’s determination to save Paul was giving her a new kind of strength. Paul, he was the key. I wish someone loved me like that.
“I think I can take it too. Electricity I mean,” Donna explained. “It kinda comes into me, it’s like I absorb it somehow from appliances.”
“That’s useful,” Rebecca muttered, almost tripping in the last bit of woods that was left.
“Don’t forget the most obvious thing,” Spencer spoke aloud, moving his hands.
Donna looked at him, not understanding what he meant. He tried to help her get it by touching one of his arms to the other, treating himself as if he had an open wound, making Donna remember the burned scars underneath his clothes. “Skin isn’t exactly electricity proof.”
Donna took a deep breath, new fears breaking into her mind. What if I have to do that to someone else? What if I have to hurt them? Reality seemed to hit Donna again, slamming her in the chest. She really could be dangerous to others. A soldier …
* * *
Spencer
Spencer slowed down, waiting for Rebecca. She was the slowest of all of them.
This is insane! he told himself for the hundredth time. For some reason it didn’t seem to make him feel any better. Rebecca and Donna shouldn’t have to do this! They’re … girls. Not just any girls, they were his best friends. Ok, well there is the small fact that one of them can turn into something that should only be able to exist in a comic book.
An abrupt noise, like an old dying radio, seemed to come out of Rebecca’s bag, scaring them all to death. A different feeling seemed to flood Rebecca’s being as she became frantic, throwing her bag down and tearing through it, searching for the noise as if it was her last link to life. She pulled out the cell phone Paul had turned into a backwards bug, or whatever Rebecca had called it before, trying to explain it to them. She turned one of the knobs on the side of it, making the noise it was projecting louder. “We must be close enough!” she said, getting teary. “Close enough to hear Paul.”
“Beau … isn’t … it.” The voice was static, hard to hear. They all got closer, huddling around to hear it.
And here it comes …
“Mr. Cohen.” The voice was clearer now, and it wasn’t Paul’s. It was an older, cocky voice, a voice of someone in charge. A voice Spencer knew he’d hear before it even came out.
* * *
Paul
Paul looked at him. The man behind the people who had taken him. The man who ran this town. Richard Applegate. He waved his hands toward the screens, showing them off. “East Applegate and all the treasures it contains, kept safe under our watchful eye.”
His manner made him stand out over all the others in the room, the way he walked around and pondered over things as if this was his own private great room, and he was stroking antiques instead of computer monitors. The way he seemed to truly be bathing in his own insane glory rather than actually having work to do.
Safe. Your definition of that word is truly an atrocious one. Paul wished he had the nerve to say that.
“Now take in mind, young man, we do not give private tours of our home here to just any pestering hackers. No, such trifling types usually go straight to this room here.” Mr. Applegate pointed to one screen in particular. It was on an angle making it hard for Paul to visibly see all of it, but he got the idea from what he could make out. A room that looked somewhat dark. With a man in a chair, a more dangerous looking chair than Paul had been sitting in earlier when he was being held. Another man, someone that looked like a doctor, was putting tools to the man’s head, causing him pain. Mr. Applegate let Paul fully take the thing he was being shown in before he finished his sentence. “Then they are shipped off to a very hospitable mental institution. All the trouble they went to hoping to find us out is undone, I’m afraid.
“But, fortunately, you proved to be more of an ambitious matter,” Mr. Applegate went on. “Not only by your ability to break the law through some impressive digital spying. You should also be proud to know that you put some of our friends in Japan, who’ve been trying to break into our systems for years now, to shame.”
Mr. Applegate wasn’t looking at Paul. His eyes seemed to be admiring a random screen. “Oh, no, there is no denying that you’re very talented, but, let’s be realistic. This is the age of computers we live in now, a grand time when a talent such as yours can be taught with time to any brilliant mind.” He turned his eyes back to Paul, seeming pleased.
“No, what makes you so special is the precious time it took to track you down. For two months, we were convinced you were a forty year old man living in Alaska, whom we’d run into problems with a few years back. A month after he was “taken care of,” we realized we had dispersed a load of effort into taking down the wrong hacker. You can’t imagine the frustration and the intrigue this caused me.
“When I found out you lived in my own town, under my own roof so to speak, I can’t say I wasn’t impressed. The cherry on top of the cake, though, was that our hacker was barely eighteen, an adult by merely a few months. Going to school with my own boys, as a matter of fact.” Mr. Applegate put his arm on Paul’s shoulder as if to give him a “job well done” speech. He then lowered his voice and came in closer to Paul. Like he was telling a private joke only he and Paul were literate enough to understand. “You remind me in some ways of myself when I was your age.
“And that—” He took a step back, to Paul’s relief, his attention now fixed on the screens. “—is why you are about to be given a choice, Mr. Cohen. A choice that is not to be taken lightly. But know that as we speak, your time is running out.”
* * *
Donna
Donna couldn’t stand, couldn’t breathe. All the shock, and the dreadful chicanery, and stunned confusion seemed to explode as Mr. Applegate’s identity was revealed. Then panic took over as they listened to his last words. Your time is running out. Donna was chilled to the core as her brain went into do or die panic mode. Something distant was calling to her. The words echoed in the back of her mind. It was a voice whose language she couldn’t understand. Yet it seemed to be warning her of something more disturbing up ahead. If only Donna had time to decipher what that could be.
TIME IS RUNNING OUT! Paul’s time is running out! P-A-U-L … The machine they were listening to died out. Then the three of them were running out of the forest toward the small houses that were all that stood between the field beyond and the power plant. Up until now, none of this had seemed completely real. Like maybe they’d get to this point and find out this was all really a sick joke, a prank with an explainable ending. Yet it wasn’t, and figuring out what to do next was what seemed impossible.
It really was Mr.Applegate, Ryan and Randy’s father, who had taken Paul! The man she had known her whole life … It really was him! Donna felt dreadful. And worse yet, how much deeply would she be connected to all this? Somehow, all her brain could shout at her was that everything was her fault. It was her fault Paul was taken.
“So what should Rebecca and I do? How do we get through the doors?” Spencer shouted while keeping up with them. Visions created by Donna’s own fear seemed to illustrate different ghastly scenarios awaiting them. She could walk through the wall, find Paul … but would she have enough time to get Rebecca and Spencer in somehow? No!
Then there was the question of how to get Paul out of the plant, and again what to do with Spencer and Rebecca? I can’t do this! She didn’t have time to think about a real plan. There couldn’t have ever of been a sane one anyway.
Time, time, time …
“I’m going in alone,” Donna said, her words making them all stop. If she was going to do this she had to do it now, before fear and all sense sunk in. There was no time to discuss anything. Her heart raced, her mind felt betrayed, her head craved water to calm her down while her body seemed to want nothing more than to turn, to become lighter than air, to run, and run, and run, and cease to be human. Already she felt her skin tingle and felt as if it was falling asleep.
“There is no way, Donna—”
“How could I get you two in? I can walk through walls but I can’t break them down. Once I’m in all I’m going to be able to do is find him, if that. I don’t have the strength to get three people in and out, I don’t even know if I can really do anything!”
“There’s gotta be a different way,” Spencer started.
“No, she’s right.” Rebecca’s appearance of brokenness returned to her features. Her strength diminished.
“I can’t just sit here and do nothing while one of my best friends—” Spencer was interrupted.
“You won’t,” Donna told him, her body screaming to turn, or to run, to do anything but stand still. “If he and I can get out, we’ll run this way. I’ll need you, both of you, once we get into the forest.” Donna hoped her words weren’t selfish ones, but they held her truth, truth that she wasn’t some mighty soldier. She was Donna Young, a lost little girl not knowing what to do, not able to make sense of anything, but willing to make a move.
“I-I … ” Spencer still reasoned with himself to come up with a better plan.
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“Here,” Rebecca went over to Donna, opening up her bag, and put a wig on top of Donna’s head. It was an old Rastafarian wig of Spencer’s that he’d worn two years ago as a Halloween gag. As Rebecca was trying to hastily adjust it, she abruptly pulled her hands away. Donna’s pre-electric body shocking her tiny hands. “No big deal,” Rebecca said, before Donna could apologize. She grabbed a big hair scrunchy, tying part of the wig back with Donna’s own hair to keep it strongly in place; then roughly threw on to Donna one of her dad’s old green camping jackets, lastly rubbing her hands in dirt and smearing a little on Donna’s face.
“I love you, Donna,” Rebecca told her, giving her a quick hug while probably being shocked by Donna’s skin again. Donna nodded, taking one last look at her while grabbing the chilled water bottle from her bag. Then Spencer was behind Donna, looking very old all of a sudden. He hugged Donna, hard.
“You’ll always be my friend,” he told her in a husky voice. “I’m sorry about everything. Make sure you come back. If anyone tries to hurt you, remember you’re electricity. Shock the hell out of them.”
Chapter Nine
Paul
The gruff bodyguard from before escorted Paul back down the long white hallway. The man’s dilatory manner of walking now annoyingly forced Paul to walk almost side by side with him. Paul concentrated on trying to figure out what exactly was off about this man. Yes, he was a brute. Yes, he seemed tough, adamant, and ready to kill Paul if only asked. All these characteristics were just what Paul would expect, but underneath them was a very subtle trace of something else.
The slightest twist of his arm revealed a small insignia tattooed on his wrist. It was meant to be covered by his watch, which wasn’t properly doing the trick. Paul pondered over this, searching his memory for a shred of information he had discovered in his hacking to at least give him a hypothesis.
The hallway ended at a staircase. Paul was made to follow his escort as the staircase twisted into darkness. Further underground they seemed to be going. This power plant had to have three times the basement levels it claimed to have. After the momentary darkness, which Paul guessed was meant to confuse someone who wasn’t meant to be there, the staircase brought them to yet another different looking hallway. This one was a giant room the size of his school, brightly colored, and made up of glass cubicles. It was like the entire place was fit to be in a city skyscraper rather than a power plant basement.