“Do you think they’re going to arrest him right here?” Marcus said, keeping his voice low.
“No idea. I hope not. He’s probably armed, and, from reputation he doesn’t sound like he’d go easily.”
“Or she,” Marcus said.
“Or she.”
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 11
“Well,” I said, “it turned out that you could find uranium on Amazon, but they sold it in such small amounts that if you wanted to do anything interesting you’d have to buy a lot of it and I don’t think we really have the facilities for working with it anyway.”
I started to tell her exactly what sort of things I’d need to buy, but then I stopped, because sometimes I do notice when I’m telling people more than they’ll ever want to know.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 10
Christmas day. In any other year, getting out of the house would have been a challenge. When Grandpa Vander Sloot was alive, we always seemed to have one of Mom’s brothers’ families at our house for Christmas. This year everyone had done their own thing. I suppose we could have gone to visit Dad’s family, but we’d visited Grandpa and Grandma Klein in Wyoming last year.
Wyoming is a long drive from Michigan and it doesn’t get any better in the winter.
We stayed home.
On Christmas day it turned out to be just the four of us. After we’d opened presents, gone to church, had dinner, and hung around the house for a while, visiting Haley’s family cottage sounded like a good idea.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 9
Two police cars came roaring up the street soon after that. The FBI came with them. Two of them came in a nondescript white van followed by two more in a separate car.
The men in the van started collecting pieces of the destroyed robot.
The police and FBI agents started another round of questioning while Solar Flare stepped up to the counter and ordered a latte.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 5
So the first rule of pretending to be normal was “pretend you’re grateful for being saved” instead of being annoyed that some overly powerful idiot just blew up a machine you were hoping to reverse engineer.
The second rule probably went something like, “Don’t stuff your pockets full of burning debris.”
I narrowly managed to do the first and avoid the second.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 4
I couldn’t argue with her. Every injury that sent me to the emergency room before the age of ten happened while playing with Cassie — the broken arm, more than forty stitches worth of cuts, and the time she stapled my foot.
When push came to shove, I probably came out with less damage when we fought the Grey Giant than I did most times when we played together as kids.
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 3
Haley’s family’s cottage turned out to be half again the size of my parents’ house. Two stories tall, it extended down the Lake Michigan side of the dune.
Cassie and I waited on the wide wooden porch.
Marcus opened the door and let us in. “Come on in. So did you find him?”
Continue reading Rattling Cages: Part 2
“That would be bad,” Daniel said, straightening as much as he could in the cramped back seat. “But,” he continued, “you’d probably know if it were someone in your family were doing that kind of thing.”
Off to my right, Haley said, “I might not. You don’t really think he’d be there, do you?”
“I don’t know.” Daniel sounded thoughtful. “There’s got to be some reason he’s coming back every year and that’s as good a reason as any. What I think we ought to do is get together some night and I could try to find him.”
Continue reading The New Heroes League: Part 5
He really could have been here to go after us, but I hadn’t seen any hint of it. Of course, if he were good at his job, I wouldn’t.
“Then we have to get him,” Cassie said.
She tapped away at the keyboard. “The sightings all seem to be ten, twenty miles north of Grand Lake. I wonder if he’s staying at a cottage?”
“In December?” I said. “Can people use them in the winter? I always thought they were summer only.”
Continue reading The New Heroes League: Part 4
We drove home from Lansing on Saturday afternoon. “We” in this case turned out to be Daniel, Cassie, Haley and I. Night Wolf’s car could barely hold four people, much less nine. Even though it only looked like a corvette at this point, it still didn’t have much of a back seat. We swapped seats and drivers at the halfway mark of the two hour drive.
Touring the offices of the Michigan Heroes Alliance had turned out to be every bit as interesting as touring the offices of your average lobbying firm, chamber of commerce, or business.
I was bored out of my mind.
Continue reading The New Heroes League: Part 3