Free Joshua Dread by Lee Bacon Page A

she asked, shuffling through a drawer.
    “Okay. I guess.”
    “And how was your day at”—she paused, pushing one drawer closed and opening another—“your day at—uh …”
    “School?” I suggested.
    “Exactly. School. How was your day at school?”
    “Not great. A couple of guys threw me into the girls’ bathroom—”
    “That’s marvelous, sweetheart!” she said in the too-loud voice of someone whose mind was a hundred miles away. “You haven’t seen a pair of pliers around here, have you?”
    “No,” I said, without making any effort to hide the annoyance in my voice. “So what are you working on?”
    Mom hesitated. “Oh … the usual. Tinkering. Experimenting. Theorizing.”
    She was hiding something from me. That much was obvious. But what?
    “Ah, there you are, Emily,” Dad said, walking in. “Did you find those pliers?”
    “Not yet, honey.”
    “Hmm. Maybe they’re in the garage. I’ll go ch—” Dad noticed me. “Oh, didn’t see you there, buddy.”
    “I’ve been standing here the entire time,” I said.
    “Right. Of course.” Dad ran a hand through his tousled hair. It looked like he hadn’t shaved in a week.
    “What’s going on with you guys?” I asked.
    Dad stared blankly into space. “What do you mean?”
    “You’ve been spending all your time in your lab. When you
do
come out, you don’t pay any attention to what’s going on. Nobody’s cooked or cleaned or gone shopping in days.”
    Mom started to speak, but then shook her head. Dad’s eyes fell to the ground.
    “What?” I said. “What’s going on?”
    My parents exchanged a long look. When Dad turned back to me, he said, “Maybe it’s better if you come up to the lab with us. We have something to show you.”
    They led me up the stairs with heavy footsteps and slouched shoulders. Dad cast a weary-eyed glance back at me, then pushed open the lab door.
    My last visit to the lab had been six months before, and that hadn’t gone so well. One of my mom’s zombies had mistaken me for its afternoon snack, and I’d barely made it out alive. Ever since, I’d avoided the lab entirely.
    Fortunately, Mom had moved the zombies down to the basement a few months back. There were a few suspicious-looking houseplants growing under a sun-lamp in one corner, but they didn’t seem to have thesame grudge against me that Micus did. At least, not yet.
    The lab always seemed to be in a state of well-organized chaos. To my left was a bookshelf, stacked with instruction manuals, textbooks on particle physics and biology, sealed glass jars containing toxic chemicals, VexaCorp catalogs. A pair of my dad’s old goggles acted as a bookend. A steel table stretched across the center of the room. Its surface was scattered with glass test tubes half full of green and blue liquid. Against the wall to my right was a chalkboard, covered with obscure markings and dense equations.
    I followed my parents past all this toward a glass case that was perched on top of a drafting table at the far end of the room.
    “You might want to stand back,” Dad said as he peered through the glass.
    I wasn’t sure what I had to worry about. The case was about the size of a shoe box and looked empty. But I didn’t want to take any chances. I’d spent enough time around my parents to know that just because you couldn’t see something didn’t mean it couldn’t hurt you.
    I stepped away from the case. “Is this far enough?”
    Dad looked back at me. “Probably.”
    Just to be safe, I took another step backward.
    Dad opened the top drawer of a filing cabinet, reachedinside, and removed a small black device that fit into the palm of his hand.
    “I invented this little gadget here to render a magnified image of objects far too small to be seen with average eyesight,” he said.
    “This way your father can show me the things that normally only he can see,” Mom added.
    “So it’s a microscope?”
    “It’s
much
more than a microscope,” Dad said,