“Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck! This is going to make things much harder.” Bellows grabbed Franklin by the shoulder and squeezed. “There are flashlights down the hall in the equipment locker. Go get some. And then find somebody who knows about electrical engineering. I’ll take anyone who knows how to fix a toaster. There are thirteen hundred women in the dorms; at least one of them must know how to change a goddamned light-bulb.”
Franklin ran out of the room. Perhaps annoyed by the shouts echoing down the hall, the warden closed the door behind him. “We had to go and kill the custodial staff. Malvern said they couldn’t be trusted. She was right, of course, but we could have kept at least one person who knew how this place worked. What are you—”
She didn’t get to finish her thought. Her words were interrupted by an incredibly loud high-pitched alarm. It was coming from Clara’s armband.
She was moving fast, and she knew exactly what was going to happen next. She had one second to stop moving, but she didn’t. Instead she rushed at the warden and grabbed her up in a very close bear hug.
Clara had time to see the warden’s lips curl up in a nasty sneer before every nerve in her body fired at once, jolted to life by a fifty-thousand-volt shock. The pain was beyond anything she’d felt in her life. She felt her teeth burning, felt her eyeballs dancing in her head and then—
33.
Spring came early to central Pennsylvania that year. At the university extension the students in forensic criminology were having trouble focusing during their morning physics class. Physics was probably the dullest of the subjects covered by the school—chemistry and genetics were a lot more exciting, because they had more practical applications for the work the students would eventually be doing. Too many of the students had been caught staring out the window. The trees around the quad were in bloom and more than one class was being conducted out on the grass, so the professor had relented and taken them all outside as well. They sat in a circle under a massive oak tree and held their notebooks at the ready. There had been a stiff breeze, but Clara just hugged her knees to her chest and watched as the professor took what looked like a normal metallic flashlight out of his bag and placed it in the middle of the circle.
“This one is worthy of James Bond,” he said, and got a few laughs. He was about fifty years old and handsome. The majority of the students in his class were female and he certainly didn’t lack for attention, though of course Clara didn’t swing that way. He handed the flashlight to Clara with a smile. “Turn it on,” he said.
She flipped its switch and a beam of light, barely visible under the shade of the tree, lit up the side of the classroom building. She waved it around for a second to show all the students it was on.
“Notice anything about it? Anything different from a normal flashlight?”
Clara studied it carefully. “This part is kind of strange,” she said, not sure what you called the front end of a flashlight. There was a thick ring of metal around the lens, which was divided into two pieces separated by a strip of rubber.
The professor nodded. “Very good. Now, touch it against my arm, here.” He rolled up his sleeve.
Clara raised one eyebrow, not sure where this was going, but she did as she was told, leaning over to tap it against his bare skin.
“Goddamn it!” the professor swore, jerking his arm away from the flashlight.
Some of the students laughed. Some gasped. Clara jerked the flashlight away from him and then dropped it on the grass.