F U T U R E B A R R I E R
( The 2nd Novel )
Secret Technology, Unrequited Love, Absolute Vengeance
© September 2015 Written by David Wicker
Please do not reprint without permission
CHAPTER 53 - "Power Failure"
[ CHOOSE A DIFFERENT CHAPTER TO READ ]
* * *
This chapter is Rated: EVERYONE
Sharon was the nice girl
that held my hand for comfort as her other friends, bullies, flushed my
face in the toilet every Wednesday since I was 7-years old. There was no
polite way to tell this to Lilly who walked beside me.
We
re-entered the door to the gym and saw some people were still fallen
over. Others were attempting to rouse them from the bleachers but they
were still unconscious. Suddenly I felt fear. This wasn't just a normal
power outage.
"What happened ?" I said as one official rushed
past me. He ignored me and kept running. Another one did, I got right in
his path.
"Hey !" I said and held my hands up to stop him.
"What ?" he asked in an agitate tone.
"What's going on ?" I asked and pointed to the people still unconscious in the bleachers.
He
nodded, knowing he would undoubtedly be telling more than one person
this story before the day was done, "Hokay. It seems a charge of
electricity went throughout the complex. As near as we can tell, it hit
everyone whether they were grounded or not. We haven't been able to get
everyone back up yet. We think they're in shock, if you'll pardon the
expression."
Then he walked around me and talked back to me as he
hurried away, "We've already called a hospital for ambulance
assistance. The shock affected about half of everyone in here. The other
half said they just saw a bright light, heard a loud noise, and then
felt like a buzzing in their head. We don't know anymore than that !"
I
went over to one table where a fellow, probably a parent was placed. He
was clearly snoring. Looking around and seeing no-one really cared, I
tapped to wake him up. He didn't budge.
"C'mon, rise and shine !" I said and shook him roughly by his shoulders.
He
moved uncomfortably, waking up for a second, then yawned and grumbled
to himself, "Lemme alone." and then went back to sleep immediately.
I
felt a pinprick in the back of my brain, this wasn't normal.
Electricity didn't do this to people. No electricity would voluntarily
make people tired or sleepy.
I realized who I needed to speak to and finally called out loud, "Mr. Gershwin !"
I heard a voice at the other end of the gym, "Yes ? Who's calling me ?"
I
looked to see he was down on his hands and knees and examining a
rupture in the floor from something. "Can you come here a second ?" I
implored.
Then he ran over to talk to me, "Who are you ? Oh. I'm kind of busy right now. What can I do for you ?"
I
pointed to the man on the table, apparently asleep, "Electricity can't
do this to people, Mr. Gershwin. What's really going on here."
He
looked intently at me for a second, surprised that story would get
questioned by someone as young as myself. He knew that I knew he was the
science teacher there. He leaned in close for a better look at me.
He
returned a grimace, "I thought I recognized your face there. You're the
real hotshot student here. Dev, you're going to get everyone panicked
if you can't keep this to yourself." and then he stepped back and
motioned for both me and Lilly to follow him to the rupture.
* * *
We
followed him back and looked down at what he was showing us. In front of
us pushed through the wooden floor was a water pipe, like it had burst
through but there was a strange green corrosion on it.
I reached my finger down curiously to touch it.
"Don't
do that." he warned me. Then he opened up a little metal box in his
pocket full of toothpicks and holding the the tip of it, touched it to
the corrosion. The toothpick suddenly fizzled and bubbled angrily. He
dropped it hurriedly and it dissolved in seconds against the corrosive
surface.
Then he leaned in to talk to me closer, oblivious to the fact that Lilly was right behind me listening intently.
"What does this have to do with everyone sleeping ?" I asked.
Mr.
Gershwin shook his head confused, "Nothing. Everything. Look, Dev, I
don't know." and he looked down to the corroded metal, "All I do know is
electricity doesn't effect metal this way, even if it still had a
current in it, which it doesn't. And I checked with the janitor whose
got the floor plans to see if there were any dangerous chemicals that
would cause this."
And then we went to a rolling table beside the
corrosive pipe and saw that they had already pinned and mapped what was
underneath the gym floor at this exact location. "There's nothing there
that would create this effect. It's just clean, if you can call them
that, sewage pipes from the bathrooms, nothing else."
Lilly suddenly gripped my hand hard from behind. I knew what she was telling me. SIM did this !
I
was in the bathroom with those damned girls, my head in the pot, when I
shrieked in anguish that had to have been where this energy came from,
swirling down the hole, through the pipes to blow into the gym and
release a strange electrical charge that drained people's energy in
their brains.
Mr. Gershwin saw the change of expression in my
face and peered hard into my face to see if I would betray anything,
"Dev, do you know something about this ? Please don't lie to me."
"Nossir." I lied.
"Hokay,"
he said continuing to look at me, "Well it =IS= electricity that is
causing the sleep. It's somehow effected the electrical pattern in their
brains. I don't know how that can happen. The best scientists on Earth
couldn't recreate a controlled experiment of this size even if they
tried. It affected the entire school. Half the people, near as we can tell."
He held his hands up expansively, "We're going to have to call it a chance-in-a-million electrical fluke."
"The
good news is about what happened, the electrical balance in everyone's
brains will recover within 24-hours. "It APPEARS to be sleep, but it's
actually the brain drained of its own natural electricity, incapable of
being able to wake up or find enough energy to do so. They're fine,
fortunately."
Then he stood up to regard me seriously, "As
bizarre as this situation is, we're all lucky to be alive and not fried
to a crisp from electrical burns as that had a considerably higher
chance of happening to us with the amount of electricity involved,
rather than what did.
He scratched the back of his head worried at the thought, "You keep that to yourself too."
"I need to get back to examining this." he said distracted at the findings,
and he pointed back to the corrosion. I followed his footsteps for a
bit and saw him pull out a test tube to tap to the side of the
corrosion, seeing that it didn't effect it apparently.
He then
used a glass wand from his briefcase nearby to scrape some of it in the
test tube and then stepped around me and Lilly to exit the gym and
apparently go to the science lab as the pair of us looked at the floor
plans.
We realized for certain now, it WAS SIM that caused this
strange effect, and ultimately, did save me from asphyxiating
completely, as likely Lemonie would've had too much fun to let me go in
"just a minute" as she promised earlier.
END OF CHAPTER 53
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