CHAPTER 19

HIGH VOLTAGE

Maurice's eyes widened when he saw who was taken inside the operating room by the doctors and would soon be sharing his cage.

"You!" He clenched his paws into fists; the rage welling up within him was beyond his control. As soon as the human had closed the cage door behind the three of them again and turned his back on them, Maurice began beating Clemson up with all the force he could muster. His fist came down with such force that it crushed a bone in Clemson's face.

"Who on earth do you think you are?! How can you ever do something so cruel, so senseless, so violent to an animal? There really isn't anyone sicker than you are! I was wrong to think there couldn't be anyone worse than Chainsaw Charlie in this place, but there is. It's you, Clemson. You're the only real monster in here. You worthless, skygoddamn bastard! Rico should have killed you! Killed you!" With each word from his lips he hit Clemson harder, and Mea lay next to them, barely able to move, and cried at the top of his damaged lungs for Maurice to stop. But the older lemur just kicked him in the flank so hard blue sparks flew and told him he wasn't afraid of him now.

Clemson started to bleed profusely when Maurice was punching his ribs and head and finally knocked him to the ground. In his wildest imagination he could never have believed the older lemur capable of such rage, such violence, and somehow he still believed he wouldn't be if this wasn't all about Julien.

"Don't…," he mumbled, but his voice was cold, as if the horror of it no longer touched him. He didn't even try to dodge Maurice. He didn't beg for him to stop. He didn't shed any tears.

Eventually it wasn't mercy that kept Maurice from beating him further, but the return of a human. "What the hell wrong with those beasts," the man asked as he noticed the two lemurs thrashing about in their cages. He then opened the door and took Maurice out of the cage, who kept on struggling in his grip and yelling curses at Clemson.

"I have no idea," Zookeeper Charles' voice answered from the other side of the room, "Anyway, we're ready over here, so please get me one of them at once."

"This one, Dr. Grady?" the doctor asked, holding up Maurice, who was still writhing wildly in his grip. Zookeeper Charles looked up from the operating table which he'd been preparing along with a physician and a nurse.

"No, this one's too wild. We need to go about this next experiment with the utmost of precision, so get me one of the calmer monkeys. Take the wild one to the animals in the next room instead; there should be another operating team working with them already."

Maurice shot Clemson a last threatening glare before the man locked him up in a separate cage and carried him away.

Clemson and Mea exchanged gazes. "This is between you and me then..." Clemson murmured, biting his lip.

Gathering the last of his strength, Mea pulled himself up, struggling to get back on his skates. "I'm going," he declared in a determined tone. Clemson frowned.

"I don't think that's such a good idea. You've been damaged already, and –."

"I said I'll do it! And this time I'm not going to argue with you about it." – Mea held a paw up to silence him, and there was something in his voice that kept Clemson from contradicting him. – "As long as there's just any unbroken screw left in my body, I won't let you become Charlie's slave ever again!"

Clemson blinked his eyes in surprise. He wouldn't have expected this after all they'd been fighting over before, but the moment the human's tall shadow fell over their cage, he couldn't help but feel grateful for it. Take care, he wanted to say but didn't get the time to.

"…They're actually lemurs, Dr. Grady," said the man as he opened the door and reached inside, and Mea willingly leapt in his hand.

"It doesn't really matter, does it," the zookeeper muttered while he strapped Mea down to the operating table which he then inserted into the same kind of machine Clemson had been tortured in before. The others had already turned it on; keeping the power low yet, they were waiting for the circuits to warm up and stabilize.

"I know we're close, so very close. But we still lack the fundamental theoretical breakthrough which we need so desperately," Charlie mumbled with gleaming eyes, more to himself than to his employees. "But this time, it's happening. I'm telling you, gentlemen, it's finally happening!"

Then Clemson heard the terrible, familiar sound of the round door of Charlie's electrocution machine when the lock clicked shut, and he closed his eyes and turned his head away. The humans' eyes were glued to the computer screens in front of them while the machine started up with an accelerating whine.

And then Mea's cries filled the room, muffled a little by the thick walls of the glass cylinder around him – still Clemson had never heard him scream like this. These were long, piercing screams of pure terror, and they were repeated over and over, and Clemson kept his eyes tightly closed and curled himself up behind his tail, his shoulders shaking, heaving.

"Look at these values!" Charlie enthusiastically called over the noise of the machine.

When Clemson dared to peek through his fingers again, he saw a big spot of oil flying up against the inside of the glass cylinder. Another followed. Some more splattered beside it. And then the dark brown liquid was spraying up like an obscene rain shower, striking the glass sides of the cylinder and running, obscuring what was going on inside, and flecked through the brown were tiny red and blue ribbons of wires, fragments of microchips and circuit boards.

And then Clemson couldn't see any of it anymore as scalding tears welled up in his eyes, and he clutched his tail so hard it hurt.

"Look at these incredible values," he heard Charlie call out again.

"Actually, Dr. Grady, I think there's something wrong with the computer," said the nurse, "No living animal has DNA samples like that…!"

"What?!" Charlie was just about to take a look at the monitor she pointed at – an image of a blue parabola, expanded to fit the full screen, curved up and down there in a series of blurry, ill-defined dots – when the screen suddenly went black. A moment later the overhead lights blinked, stuttered briefly, and died. For a moment everything around them was cast in blackness; the ember at the tip of his assistant's cigarette was the only light source in the operating room.

Mea's cries inside the electrocution machine subsided.

"What the hell is happening?!" Charlie cursed.

"Looks like we have a power outage," the physician muttered. Charlie furiously slapped the side of the computer when it refused to turn on again. "No! Not now!" He gave it a few kicks of current and tried again. "For Heaven's sake, not right now!"

Just then a sudden blaze of bright light illuminated the entire room for an instant, and a thick cloud of smoke rushed up from the machine to meet them.

Clemson watched the humans withdraw in terror. Mea's defects must have caused an electrical overload inside the machine. At the back of it an overheated cable had come loose; still charged as it was, it carried current along the line to the junction box in the wall, causing sufficient heat to ignite the wood and insulation there.

Acrid smells started to fill the room, and then the fire alarm went off. The wailing of the siren broke the darkness with a sound that instilled a feeling of dread in everyone present, and at least partly, there was light again; bands of red light began flickering around the room from the smoke detectors, glowing a red warning.

Maintaining a cool façade, Charlie ordered the emergency core cooling system of the electrocution machine activated.

"It's not possible, Sir!" the physician cried.

"Why the hell not?!"

"It has to be activated electrically by command from the computer."

– And the wires of the computer as well were plugged into the damaged junction box. So when the physician tried to reboot it in order to activate the cooling system, it only caused another, now-quite-impressive shower of sparks to spray from the junction box.

The electrocution machine began to hum, then to vibrate, then to hiss and spark and tremble so hard it was practically shaking the floor. More smoke erupted from somewhere beneath it, and then flames began licking the back side, and minutes later it was almost completely engulfed in fire. Columns of smoke shot into the air and gathered into thick clouds under the ceiling.

"Shouldn't we call the fire department?" asked the nurse. The other two men frantically looked around the room for a fire extinguisher, but there was none.

"No! Are you serious?!" Charlie shook his head with ferocious intensity. "Then they'll just start asking questions again! They mustn't see what we're doing here; none of the authorities must ever know! I say we finish that experiment now and finally find the answer we've been searching for so long, and then no one will ever ask us any stupid questions again – because we'll be damn rich and famous and most of all far away from here before anyone ever notices." He stumbled over to the junction box and, to everyone's horror, plugged the charred wires that had come loose from the shaking machine back in. "– There; it's damaged, but it'll last long enough in order to deliver the final result." With a wave of his hand he signaled his assistant to check the computer. "Now push the button to activate the cooling unit."

"But, Dr. Grady…"

"Push it!" he yelled at him; but the man turned on his heels and fled the smoke-filled room instead. "Coward!" Charlie hissed after him. The nurse took him by the shoulders, looking him straight in the eye.

"Charles, killing animals is one thing, but killing people is a completely different story! And if you risk blowing this thing up, it could easily kill us!"

"But the values…"

"Screw your values!" she cursed, coughing badly now from the smoke, "You became so obsessed with finding your damn answer that you didn't even read them properly! – Don't you see what this is?!" She pointed, finger trembling with rage, over to the electrocution machine. "We've had that one before and it gave us exactly the same values; that's not an animal! You've put a stupid robot inside there, and this is why the values are so strange! Don't you know what your predecessor Frances Alberta has done around this place?! This is one of her machines apparently still left from back then, nothing more! This isn't what you're looking for, so it sure as hell isn't worth risking our lives to continue that experiment any longer!"

At these words Zookeeper Charlie became very quiet. "A robot…?" He adjusted his glasses to hang below the bridge of his nose and then looked at the screen again. The smoke had become so thick in the meantime that it had become almost impossible to read any of the dials or instruments. "You may have a point there. But then these values… oh, you mean… hm."

The cooling system hummed into life after all. They dialed it up to hundred per cent power, hoping to hear water flush, which would start to bring down the core temperature – but this was not to be. In less than a minute the pumps to boost the water pressure stopped working again; the overheating had damaged them as well. Heat and pressure inside the machine's core began to rise… Finally the engine seized up with a grinding crunch, and the temperature gauge climbed into the red.

"It's going to blow," the nurse yelled, "It's going to blow!"

Now even Charlie appeared to be on the verge of panicking – a second later the rest of them ran out the door, ran for their lives, without thinking about the animals left behind in the operating room. However, the shaking of the machine had sent almost all the cages crashing to the floor, breaking the doors open.

Clemson hurried to Charlie's computer and tried to shut it down.

The other remaining victims, two apes and a duck – Clemson had seen them before in the Hoboken Zoo, but he didn't know their names –, looked for a way out instead.

"Of course those awful humans couldn't have left the damn door open!" one of the apes scolded, pulling and tugging the handle, rattling the door in its jambs, but it stayed fast. When they saw that it was no use, they turned over a table and ducked behind it for cover. From there they peeked back at the machine; it was spitting out loose nuts and bolts and crackling curlicues of electricity.

"Oh, dear," the other ape whispered, eyes wide with fear, "Oh, dear."

"Hey, lemur," the duck called over to Clemson, who was still busy with the computer displays, "Come over here and take cover! It's no use –."

But her last words turned into a shriek, a shriek that was swallowed in a shattering roar as the core of the electrocution machine exploded.

A wall of heat and a blinding sheet of fire shot at them, and their screams mingled before they were drowned out by the hiss of escaping steam and the screech of ripping metal. Even though they were covered by the table, the shockwave of the explosion knocked them onto their backs with the force of a heavyweight punch. They hugged the floor, curling up to expose as little of themselves to the wash of heat as possible. Debris flew off in every direction; unlike the rest of them Clemson was entirely without shelter, and he felt some of it scatter itself on his back like hot coals. He could smell the acrid scent of burning fur; then it became too painful to breathe through his nose. He sheltered his face with his paws and held his eyes tightly shut for what to him seemed like unending seconds.

The moment the explosion was over, he rolled over, extinguishing half a dozen small fires on his back fur. Next he frantically shook his tail, which was smoking, aching badly. He clutched it in his paws, and this caused the little flames to die out but did little to ease the pain. The other three animals seemed to be in the same state of health; however, apparently they were just so happy to be alive that they would never complain about their pain.

There they sat on the floor, a group of small animals caught in so much destruction. They embraced each other and laughed together, sharing the joy about their survival.

Clemson didn't join them.

"Look! Must be our lucky day," the duck called out, pointing a wing towards the nearest wall – the force of the explosion had blown a hole in it that several human men could easily walk through. They had found a way of escape after all. The three of them fled outside without wasting a second; there were still a lot of flames around them, and they all knew that if they didn't hurry now, they would never make it out of the building alive.

But Clemson didn't follow them. He stumbled over to the source of the heat and fire, the destroyed electrocution machine. Now it was nothing more than a hulking collection of pipes and tubes and snapped wires. Black smoke curled out of its collapsed sides.

The entire glass cylinder was splashed with oil. It had split down in the middle; the two halves of it had sloped separately. He felt his heart start to beat in full force when he pushed them fully apart.

Mea lay next to the broken operating table, motionless, with his legs bent at an unnatural angle and a crackling and spitting screen of blue haze all around him. His whole body was electrified, darting out sparks against every object around. Almost all his fuses were burned, except for a few vital ones. When Clemson removed the glass, he turned his head to see who was there; as he moved a little on doing so, he revealed a gaping hole, oozing oil and gray matter, in what was left of his chest. His palms and fingers, his feet, his tail – oil was oozing everywhere. His artificial internal organs throbbed as though they had been beaten with clubs. Every joint looked torn, every muscle.

Clemson stepped up to him as if in a trance. Everything seemed blurred and slowed down grotesquely. Red emergency lights washed across Mea's face as he bowed down to him, but he didn't hear the sirens. He reached down to take one of Mea's oily paws, but the android withdrew it before he could do so. Oil billowing from his chest, he ran his weakening gaze over his maker.

"Get out of here," he gasped, "Get away." He stirred a little to have a better look at Clemson, and oil was flowing out of his chest like a river, and Clemson knew it had to be filling his lungs, too. He shook his head.

"Not without you."

Mea licked his lips before he said in a thick-tongued response, "Don't be stupid. There's nothing you can do. If you touch me now, it'll kill you. I'm completely charged with the stuff they shot through me. Right now I carry more coulombs than a bolt of lightning."

"But…"

"Just get away. Hurry."

The words came out slurred; oil dripped from one corner of his mouth. Then he began coughing really badly; spewing and choking on oil while clawing at the ground, the android squeezed his eyes shut as scalding jolts of pain racked his malfunctioning body. Everything around him was lit up by showers of blue sparks.

Then Clemson watched his eyes flicker open again to meet his one more time; in a last clear moment he was looking at his maker again, his eyes filled with mortal agony and so great a sorrow Clemson's heart flamed in his chest at the sight.

"I love you. I love you with every impulse radiating from my electric heart," Mea whispered, "And all I ever hoped for was that you would love me back. I'm sorry if I wasn't the invention you hoped for… the friend you wanted, the lover you wished to have." His eyes were calm and fearless, his smile filled with warmth. There was no trace of either accusation or anger in his face. When their gazes met, a faint blush was tinting his cheeks.

"Thank you, Clemson, for having created me," he murmured, "For having given to me the most beautiful thing one can experience… life."

Then a red-hot flame shot up from his heart and when it died out, his chest stopped heaving and his eyes fell close.

"This whole place is going to collapse!" Private whimpered as they raced towards the nearest stairwell and ascended to the second floor in a mad rush. The sound of the banshee-like screaming of the fire siren hovered hauntingly over every corridor, sending shivers down their spines, chilling their blood. Every floor was in flames by now, and the roar of the fire around them had reached a deafening intensity. Worst of all, however, was the smoke: it was everywhere, and it made their lungs feel as if they were breathing hot needles.

"Kowalski, how long?" Skipper called over to his second-in-command, coughing badly.

"I would estimate total structural failure in –."

"Watch out!" Clover yelled – a huge splintered board came falling down from the ceiling. They dodged in time, and it hit a medicine cabinet instead. Something inflammable must've been in there – a flame shot up from it as if pure oxygen had been touched with a lit match. Their eyes wide with panic, they stood with their backs braced against the opposite wall – which came tumbling down on them a moment later. They recoiled with horror – Private and Mort, who were standing closest to the wall, would've gotten away too late, if not for Clover: she leapt forward and pushed them out of the way, taking the full bombardment of bricks on herself. When the stone blocks came falling down on her, she felt as if every bone in her body was being shattered. She fell to the ground – what must've been a ton of bricks landed on top of her. For a moment everything went pitch-black.

Yet somehow, among the dozens of bricks, air was making its way through, and she could breathe. She struggled to break free, pushing and forcing her way out of the pile of debris.

Her friends helped to pull her up.

"Are you alright?" When she opened her eyes, she found Skipper's worried face hovering over her. She hurried to get back to her feet, straightened herself, and saluted.

"Yes, Sir." And then the room around her turned upside down in front of her eyes, and she collapsed into Rico's flippers.

"Clover…!" Looking highly concerned for her, the two other lemurs bowed over her, trying to shake her awake.

"Don't worry, she'll come around," Skipper tried to calm them, carefully urging them on into the next corridor, where they arrived not a moment too soon – whole sections of the large granite block that was the west wing of the building began to sag behind them. The ceiling tumbled down board by board until the entire walls around them were ripped down right along, and they were left on the bare floor. There was no time to lose – a little longer, and the rest of this area would collapse, too.

Skipper peeked down over the damaged brick wall which had come down on Clover. The flames had crept up from the basement and caused the entire first floor to become rapidly involved in fire. Parts of it had collapsed inward and fallen from what remained standing down into the underground garage, where the doctors were fleeing in their cars.

"Shouldn't there be any firemen around here by now?" Private asked.

"Uhuh." Rico nodded, shrugging his shoulders to indicate that he had no idea why there weren't any. After all, the fire had grown to inferno proportions by now. Flames weren't only erupting in the basement; now that the entire hospital was so badly wrecked, they could look right up at the third floor from where they were, or at what was left of it. To their horror it was burned down almost entirely to its wooden framework, parts of it crashing down already, too, and landing on the levels below.

"There's fire everywhere! Coming from below… and on the third floor, too!" Skipper called to Kowalski over the noise as the tall penguin appeared at his side, "How could that happen?! How could it move up there from the generator in the basement?"

"I think it's something else. It looks like something exploded on the third floor... maybe a short circuit of some kind," Kowalski replied, coughing badly. Meanwhile the smoke made breathing so hard that it seemed as if they couldn't go on.

Skipper frowned, trying to shake off the worry nagging at him. "Yeah, but Maurice…"

Just then they saw the gray lemur's silhouette emerge from the shadows behind the flames on the floor above them.

"Maurice!" Julien called out his name in despair. He accidentally inhaled a large amount of smoke, causing him to cough uncontrollably. They were all calling for the older lemur now, but he didn't seem to hear them; the noises around were too loud. They could see that Maurice was trapped right where he was standing: the flames were close to him now, and they were the full height of the hallway, licking the ceiling as they advanced towards him from both sides.

They could see him gaze down at the moving cars in the underground garage again and again, and Skipper guessed what he was thinking: he could leap down onto one of them and use it as a means of escape. Despite his conscious efforts he felt a trace of panic gripping him as he became fully aware of his intention; Maurice was standing too high above to properly judge the speed of the cars, but Skipper clearly saw that he would never make it. They were moving too fast; even if he managed the jump and landed atop one of them successfully, he'd fall off at that speed, and then they'd run him over.

If he jumped now, without the shadow of a doubt he'd plunge right into his doom.

"Don't!" Skipper yelled up to him over the hot, rising mist, "Don't do it!"

But the older lemur was too far above; he couldn't hear him over the roar of flames and the screams of the humans echoing up from the garage.

"Rico, quickly!" Skipper ordered, "Give me a flipper here, boy…"

The rogue penguin hacked up a grappling hook for him. Skipper whirled it overhead in three wide revolutions, then hurled it up as far as he could. The hook hurtled up toward the target, sailing obediently towards the floor above and snagged on a handrail there.

Skipper grabbed the rope firmly with both flippers and pulled himself up from the ground. He braced his webbed feet on the wall and began to climb flipper over flipper, looking up at Maurice time and time again, praying he would stay where he was until he would come up to get him.

He glanced up, and Maurice was still standing there, looking desperately around, anywhere but in their direction.

He glanced up, and he was there, pulling his bushy tail over his mouth and nose to filter out the smoke before he called something back over his shoulder.

He glanced up, and the flames were so close to him now, so close… and then he jumped.

Not thinking ahead, Skipper pushed himself off the wall with all his strength and just as Maurice started to fall, he swung in towards him – and caught him right before he hit the ground. He felt Maurice cling to him, and for a moment relief suffused him, so sweet it hurt – and then they crashed right into a wall ahead of them. They had no time to brace themselves for the impact. They hit the wall with a bone-jarring thump, dropped to the floor where they rolled over a few times, and finally tumbled to a bruising halt at one of the first floor landings.

Skipper lay flat on his back, his flippers outflung, struggling to take in a breath; the air had been knocked out of his lungs. Next to him Maurice pushed himself up from the floor.

"Skipper…" His eyes were only as open as they needed to be in the stinging air, yet they showed obvious surprise when he recognized the penguin leader in front of him.

Skipper opened his beak and was finally able to drag in a sharp and painful breath. "Brave move, lemur," he panted, "But those cars are moving too fast. You wouldn't have made it."

Maurice leaned forward a little to gaze down at the underground garage again, but the cars were all gone by now. The only humans remaining in the hospital were those who hadn't made it fast enough or had fallen off something during their escape; on the ground below, Maurice could see them lying still, limbs twisted, black and burned. He quickly looked at Skipper again. "Guess you're right."

The leader got to his feet, feeling an immense sense of victory. His left foot was twisted at a horrible angle and badly swollen; his ankle hurt but worked. His left shoulder twinged whenever he moved it and so did several ribs, but he was alive. They were both alive, and that was all that mattered. He helped Maurice up, who was bruised from his knees upwards.

"Are you okay?"

The gray lemur nodded. "Yeah. Charlie didn't get me yet before this started." – He pointed around the burning room. – "Did you guys do that?"

"Sort of. We… didn't think it'd start to burn, though." Skipper blinked, trying hard to concentrate. The roar of the fire pounded in his head. "What happened up there?"

"I have no idea. I was in the room next to the one where Charlie was operating when suddenly all the lights went out and then a fire alarm went off. The floor was shaking like there was an earthquake when that happened, and this was when our cages got thrown open. I tried to flee but couldn't find my way out and ended up in that room again where Charlie and his team had been before, but they were already gone and so were the other animals… except Clemson."

"He was there, too?"

"Yeah. I asked him to leave, but no chance. He didn't want to." – Skipper raised his eyebrows, but Maurice just shrugged cluelessly in response. – "The bad thing about it is, he burned the floor plans we would've badly needed right now."

"That guy is killing us all!" Skipper slumped back against a wall and immediately regretted it as burning debris came falling down like hail. The smoke made him cough again, and he could smell some of his feathers burning.

"Never mind, we'll find a way without the plans. Let's go." He turned to leave but stopped when Maurice took him by the shoulder.

"Listen, I'm sorry… I didn't mean what I said to you before. We should've listened to you, and I…" His voice faltered, and he took a deep breath. "Thanks, Skipper."

The penguin leader gave him a weary but very honest smile.

"Never mind," he said, and he meant it, too. "Now let's hurry and join the others."