Join me on Saturday, April 14th, 2012, 2:00 to 5:00 pm!

Davenport Cellars is one of the finest wineries in Washington state and makers of the award-winning R.H.D and Continuity red blends. If you’ve never been for a tasting at Davenport Cellars, do yourself a favor and come hang out with me on 4/14/12.

While you’re there, you can pick up a book, get your book signed, or just come by to say HI!

Davenport Cellars 

19501 144th Ave NE

Suite B600

Woodinville, WA 98072

425.457.4957

I hope to see you there!

Mad Science Institute has now infiltrated the shelves of homes, science labs, and tech firms across the country. As you can see here, this reader keeps his copy among all the books necessary to design software for a doomsday machine.

Let’s celebrate with a photo contest! All you have to do is

1. take a picture of your copy of Mad Science Institute in a fitting, unusual, humorous, or science-y sort of place—perhaps on a shelf between hazardous waste clean-up manuals or while being read by a runaway robot.
2. Post it to Facebook.com/MadScienceInstitute

That’s all you need to do! On April 15th, I’ll randomly select one of the people who posted to recieve Mad Science Institute jelly beans. If I get 30+ pictures, I’ll also pick someone to recieve a free copy of Mad Science Institute!

“My research!” Dr. Scott made as if to push past Clem and run back to the house, but Reggie grabbed the sleeve of his lab coat and held him back.

Through the barn door, they could see thick black smoke rolling out through the broken windows of the ranch house.

“Must a’ been an incendiary shell,” Clem said as he slammed the barn door shut.

“But they weren’t firing incendiaries—” Dr. Scott’s words were interrupted by the  deafening drumbeat of machinegun fire. A line of bullet holes opened in the side of the barn just above their heads. One of the barn’s support pillars disintegrated into splinters, causing boards to drop from the ceiling. The roof sagged and the bright Tijuana sunlight streamed in through the new gap over their heads.

The three of them dove to the ground and crawled to the back of the barn, next to the line of buckets of offal destined to feed Dr. Scott’s mutant chickens. Nearby, those same creatures slashed their toothy beaks through the bars of their pen and howled in a manner fitting for the dinosaurs they had been reverse-evolved to resemble.

“Where’s the pilot?” Reggie demanded.

“Saw her runnin’ to the plane,” Clem moaned. “She’s probably gonna skedaddle and leave us here.”

A metallic fist burst through the wall of the barn. Its fingers opened and then the hand pulled back to rip gap even wider.

“We don’t have much time!” Dr. Scott wailed. “What can we do?”

Reggie lifted his fedora to wipe the sweat off his forehead. There were no doors on the ground level except the one that the bipedal panzer was battering down. They would have a better chance of flapping their arms and flying out through the gap in the roof than they would trying to run past that thing. They needed another option, and they needed it fast.

Suddenly, Reggie grabbed a bucket of slop, waved away the cloud of flies and peered inside. He curled up his nose as he smelled it, but when he looked at his companions he had a twinkle in his eyes.

“You got a plan?” Clem asked.

“I got a plan,” Reggie answered.

This is the last entry for Mad Science Institute I’ll put here for a while. Starting Tuesday, 12/20/2011, I’ll go back to more from the Hollow Earth Expedition serial!

“I’d like to ask you a question, if you don’t mind,” Agent Nash slid a series of photos out of a brown envelope. “Do any of these men look familiar to you?”

One by one, Agent Nash showed him mug shots of men with facial tattoos, missing teeth, and long, unkempt beards. Dean studied each one and shook his head—until the last photo. His hand froze as he held the image of a man who filled the picture in front of him.

“This one,” Dean said. “I saw him the day McKenzie came to find me. She looked at him… it was like she recognized him and she was afraid.”

The two agents exchanged a meaningful glance.

“We believe that the man you saw is Morton Hendrix, better known by any of a dozen aliases, including “Brick.” He is a member of a gang known as the Blitzkrieg Legion, AKA the Blitzkriegers. He is also a person of interest in a series of armed bank robberies.”

“A ‘person of interest,’” Dean repeated. “You mean he’s a suspect?”

“He is a person of interest,” Nash said flatly. “His associates are also of interest in the same crimes. Did Professor McKenzie ever speak of Brick? Or did she mention anything that might relate to the Blitzkriegers?”

Dean shook his head. None of it made sense. Why would she have had anything to do with a biker gang? And yet, she must have. For whatever reason, she had been running from that giant of a man and his friends. And it seemed she hadn’t run fast enough.

And yet a man as big as Brick could have just snapped McKenzie’s neck. Why go to the trouble of burning out electrical circuits? Then again, the courts might convict a man of inflicting a broken neck, but not for inflicting a heart attack. It meant there might not be justice for McKenzie. As he thought about it, Dean’s hands tightened into fists.

The FBI agents thanked Dean, collected their photos, and departed. He was free to return to his numbness, but now he found himself unable to do so. McKenzie had been murdered, he was certain of it. What was more, he had seen the face of her killer, or at least the face of someone involved in the killing.

Dean had no answers for who killed McKenzie but at least he was beginning to get an idea of what he needed to do. He took out the two pieces of paper she had left him, the note accepting his proposal and the sticky-note that indicated he could have her job.

He hated himself for failing to save her, but he still had a chance to do something to help the woman he had loved. Her last wish had been for him to protect her students. Maybe, while he was at this institute of hers, he could find out who did this to her and settle the score.

Chapter 6: Dean

When the knock came on his broken door, Dean was laying on the couch in the darkened front room, his left hand clutching the two slips of paper that McKenzie had left him. He wasn’t sure if he had been asleep or awake, which was how he had felt throughout the past two days as the police had crawled all over his house and grilled him with questions. When he had arrived for his next shift, the station chief took one look at him and sent him home on sick leave. That was probably best, because Dean was having trouble concentrating. He kept remembering McKenzie’s face at the moment he found her, with her wide-open eyes and the orange hair against her blue cheeks. The memory was tearing him up. “Whatever you’re selling,” Dean called to whoever was on his porch. “I’m not buying any.”

“Mr. Lazarcheck,” said his one of his visitors. “We’re with the FBI. I’m Agent Brian Nash and my partner is Agent O’Grady. May we come in? I’d like to ask you a few questions about Professor McKenzie.”

Dean rubbed his eyes and stood up. His limbs felt stiff and heavy as he went to let them in. One was a short black man with close-cropped hair, a pleasant smile, and a tired look in his eyes. The other was older, maybe in his fifties, with gray-white hair combed straight back and a hard, trim physique that made him look as if his body had been stamped from boiler-plate steel. Both wore matching black suits.

“Your door is broken,” Nash said.

Dean just nodded. Right then, he didn’t care if it ever got fixed, but he wasn’t ready to admit that to a stranger.

“And the room is dark,” Nash observed.

“Everything’s dark.” Dean meant it metaphorically, but it was also literally true of his house. Every light bulb, appliance, and electrical socket had burned out.

The older agent stood by the door while Nash pulled up a seat across from Dean.

“Mr. Lazarchek, I’m sorry for what happened to your girlfriend.”

“She was my fiancé,” Dean muttered. Somehow, calling her a girlfriend seemed to undervalue his history with McKenzie. A girlfriend might have been someone he knew for a day, but she had been so much more than that. He wanted to argue the point, but decided he didn’t have the strength. Besides, the note McKenzie had left wouldn’t prove anything to anyone other than himself. Nash cleared his throat and began again. “According to the autopsy, the cause of Professor McKenzie’s death was her pacemaker. It shorted out.”

Dean just nodded. Considering the state of his house, he had guessed that the same thing had happened to her. But medical implants like her pacemaker would never simply short out on their own. They were too carefully designed and too rigorously tested. What had happened to McKenzie had not been an accident. Someone had shorted out her heart along with his entire house and then kicked open his front door to make sure the job was complete.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

I let him take the eviction warning out of my hands. He folded it up neatly and placed it on the stack, then absent-mindedly picked at the spot of charcoal where my autogyro had burned through the table’s finish. I sat with my back against the wall and wrapped my arms around my knees.

“This seems like a good time for me to take the scholarship and move out,” I said slowly. “Then you wouldn’t have to keep paying for me and all my disasters.”

“Don’t go unless you want to,” he said, sliding down to sit next to me, then putting his arm around my shoulders and drawing me in close. “Believe me when I say I don’t want you to go if you’re not ready. Actually, I don’t want you to go ever. I’ve been dreading the day when you move out, you know. But, well, education is worth any sacrifice.”

It wasn’t until then that I realized my leaving would be as hard on him as it was on me. Then I imagined him having to live in his van for the rest of his life, which is what would happen if he had to keep paying for my housing, food, and collateral damage. It was only fair that I accept my exile to make up for my mistakes.

Look out, college—here I come.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

But I did have my reasons for not wanting to go. First, who ever heard of the Mechanical Science Institute? I was still hoping to get into some really well known science program like MIT or Stanford or Georgia Tech, even though I had no idea how I could afford one of those big-name places. But the real reason I didn’t want to go came down to this: I just didn’t want to leave my Dad.

For five years now, it had been just him and me and the occasional cockroach living happily in this little apartment. Sure, I was planning on leaving after I graduated high school, but that gave me two more years to adjust to the idea. And now this woman from this crazy school wanted me to pack up and leave my entire life to travel a third of the way across the country with less than two week’s notice. It sounded seriously mental. Thinking about it made me lose concentration on what I was doing and I accidentally cranked the power a bit too high. The autogyro’s motor emitted a loud POP as it erupted into orange flames and zinged upwards in one last burst of speed. Trailing a line of black smoke, it ricocheted off the ceiling and streaked down onto the stack of bills my Dad was trying to pay. What can I say—my experiments always explode.

My Dad knocked his chair over as he jumped up in surprise. I was already on top of the mess, smothering the flames before they could spread too much. The only problem was that I pushed the papers off the table and they fluttered all over the place.

“Sorry, sorry!” I yelled, stooping to gather up the bills.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said a bit shakily. “Better shuffled then burned, I suppose.”

I started reading the papers as I handed them to him. Water bill: first notice of overdue payment. Electricity: second notice. Rent: warning of eviction.

I unfolded the last one and started reading it.

“Soap, don’t—don’t read that,” he said, but it was too late. I had seen enough.

“We’re being evicted?”

My Dad was quiet a really long time. “Not until next month,” he finally said. “Then we have 30 days to move out. Don’t worry, we’ll work out something.”

“We’re getting evicted and you tell me not to worry? What part of working out ‘something’ is supposed to make me feel better?”

He put his hands up in a gesture that told me to calm down, but we both knew the electrician job market was in the toilet right then, plus there was the matter of repairing the gym and replacing all those cell phones. All because of me.

Chapter 5: Soap

“I think you should reconsider that scholarship,” my Dad said as he sat at the kitchen table paying bills. He was resting his forehead on his left palm like he always did when he balanced his checkbook.

I was zig zagging through the apartment with a hand-held version of the EMP broadcasting device. With one hand I adjusted the power level while with the other I kept the focusing dish aimed up at a miniature autogyro helicopter I had constructed from balsa wood pieces salvaged from a model airplane and the motor from an RC car. It flew pretty well, but whenever the autogyro got too high, it would lose its energy and begin to float down where it would come closer to my broadcaster. Then it would get its motor energized by the electromagnetic field I was broadcasting and would go zipping back up to the ceiling. Up and down, up and down in our tiny apartment. The challenge was that it would veer off in all sorts of directions, so I had to move constantly in order to keep the broadcaster directly beneath it. It was kind of like that old game with the rubber ball on the string that you’re supposed to get in the cup, except here the rubber ball flies away on its own.

“I know it’s short notice,” my Dad went on. “But I think it would be a really good experience for you to go to that college.”

“Seriously?” I asked, hopping to my right to stay beneath the autogyro. “I’m only sixteen. I’d never fit in at college. Plus, it doesn’t seem fair that the only reason I got the scholarship is because my cousin was all smoochy-smoochy with the Dean of Students there.”

“That’s not why you got this scholarship,” he said. “Soap, you have a gift—”

I couldn’t hear what he said next because the autogyro veered off and I had to lunge to keep up with it, which made me knock over a floor lamp.  The lamp fell with a cymbal-crash, and it made both of my Dad’s autographed basketballs fall off their shelf and bounce to the other side of the room.

“Soap,” I think my Dad tried to yell at me, but it came out more like a sigh of defeat. “Sorry, Dad!” I said. “I just have to calibrate the amplifier and then I’ll be done.”

“I just feel like you might be happier there,” he said. “This city is just too small for you.”

“Dad,” I scolded. “New York is as big as cities can get.”

“That’s not what I mean. This place is too confining. Too… closed-in. You need open air and empty fields where you can run around and play Frisbee and launch your rockets without raining fire back down on densely populated areas.”

I smacked my shoulder into a wall trying to keep up with the autogyro. Aside from knocking the wind out of me, it took away any argument I might have made about not needing more space.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

He made a sudden turn through a red light and then veered into a parking garage that he knew had an exit on the other side of the block. After he pulled through to the far street, he saw no more bikers behind him.

His impulse was drive directly home to be with McKenzie, but he didn’t want to risk it. Instead, he headed out towards the coastal highway, where the long narrow roads would expose any pursuers. Only after he was satisfied that he had lost his tail did he return home.

It was early evening by the time he pulled into his driveway, and he was relieved to see his big blue truck awaiting him. Dean hopped out of the car and rushed to the front door, intending to throw it open and announce his victory. But when his hand touched the doorknob, his excitement evaporated. The door frame had broken away from the lock. Someone had kicked it in.

In a flash, Dean was inside, but the house was dark and silent. When he flipped the switch, the lights didn’t come on.

“McKenzie,” he called. There was no answer. He called louder, but still there was no answer. He moved through the dining room hallway and found that the lights didn’t work here, either. In the kitchen, the microwave and stove clocks were blank. Power outage, he thought, but when he looked through the window he saw that the neighbors had their back porch light on.

At the small kitchen table, he found one of the chairs had been overturned. A black suitcase was stashed neatly beside the next chair, and a laptop set up on top of the table. These must be her things, which meant McKenzie had definitely been inside. The question was: where had she gone?

He righted the chair and put it back in its spot and jabbed a few of the laptop’s keys. The screen remained as dead as his lights, but he noticed a white pad of paper tucked underneath the computer. He pulled it out to find a note in her handwriting:

Dean,

They’re coming. They’re here. Whatever happens, I want you to know something.

My answer is yes. With all my heart, yes. I should have said it years ago.

McKenzie

Dean suddenly felt frantic. He must have failed to draw them away. They figured it out, and then they found her here, kicked in the front door, and cut the power somehow. But maybe it wasn’t too late—if McKenzie had gotten away, then he could still find her before they do.

He looked around, desperate to find some clue as to where she might have gone. Then he saw something black and shiny on the second step of his staircase. It was one of her shoes. He ran over it and up the stairway to find her there, on the landing, halfway to the second floor. She was laying face down, one hand underneath her and the other resting limply beside her.

Desperately, he rolled her over and brushed her hair from her face to find her eyes open and staring. There was no pulse. There was no breath.

Even as he began CPR, he knew, with the full weight of his professional experience, that it was too late. His futile rescue breaths would amount to nothing more than a goodbye kiss.

This continues an excerpt from Mad Science Institute, a novel of calamities, creatures, and college matriculation. The novel will be available 12/16/2011, but you can read the beginning here first!

Dean felt light-headed as he fumbled his fat key-ring out of his pocket while she shoved her electronic key-fob into his hand.

“Wait! What about this?” he lifted the box with the ring off the table and placed it in her hand.

“I—I’ll think about it. Let’s just get home first, okay?” She slid her hand around his neck and pulled him close for a hard, urgent kiss.

“One more thing,” she whispered in his ear. “What they want is in our founder’s head.”

“…The founder’s head? McKenzie, what’re you talking about—”

She was already out the door. He followed her, each ducking into the other’s car. They pulled out onto the three-lane arterial, she heading straight and he pulling a u-turn at the intersection.

Dean wanted to believe that the whole thing was crazy, but it wasn’t like McKenzie to act irrationally. Why would she be running from that big biker? For that matter, why would she want him, of all people, to cover for her job? And what was that business about the founder’s head?

He felt distracted and uncertain of what to do—until he glanced into his rear-view mirror and saw the huge man on the black motorcycle behind him. The danger, he could now see, was very real. He may not have understood why someone would be chasing McKenzie, but now all his worry and confusion fell away and in their place remained only clarity of purpose. He had to keep her safe, which meant he had to lead them away.

Dean slouched down in the seat to prevent his pursuer from recognizing that it was not McKenzie driving the car, and then he took a circuitous drive through the city streets. Before long, the big man peeled off and another black-clad biker picked up the pursuit in his place. The bikers, whoever they were, were taking turns shadowing him. They were pretty good at the tag-team pursuit, too. In other circumstances, Dean might not have noticed they were following him, even though they were not exactly inconspicuous individuals. He considered leading them to the police station, but he would have nothing to report—other than the big man’s lack of a helmet, they weren’t breaking any laws. As long as he had her car, he could make sure they didn’t find her, so he kept luring them on, making sure they didn’t lose him and yet not letting them get close enough to see his face.

Dean led his pursuers through the downtown streets for more than an hour. He had counted five different bikers by then, and the latest one was the most aggressive. Like the others, this biker rode a heavily customized but older-model motorcycle, but this one wore no shirt. He frequently navigated between cars at red lights to get closer and closer, until he was so near that Dean could see the large swastika tattoo over the left side of his chest.

Dean decided it was time to get a little more elusive.