Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Natalie tried, and even succeeded for a solid mile or so, before she could no longer hold it inside and blurted out, “I’m worried.”
With only one hand on the steering wheel in a relaxed pose Natalie couldn’t comprehend at a time like this, Liam glanced casually across the Jeep. “Why?”
“Why? This plan…” She shook her head. So many things could go wrong. Too many to list.
“The plan is perfect,” he countered.
Perfect wasn’t a word Natalie would use to describe anything about this situation. Obviously she was going to have to be more specific about all the ways this plan could go wrong.
“What if Dean thinks there are ashes in the vessel and opens it to like, you know, scatter them in the ocean? That’s what people do with ashes.”
“I’ll seal it with tape and put DO NOT OPEN on it.”
The cell phone, unplugged now but still sitting in the Jeep’s console, caught her gaze and her eyes widened as it raised another concern.
“The cell phone batteries… Liam, we know it’s gathering energy.
It drained all of our batteries at the meeting.
What if the brain ghost is strong enough now to attack Dean or one of the other sailors on the ship? Or you, in the car on the drive down.”
Liam drew in a breath. “That is a valid concern. I agree. But I had an idea for that too.”
“Which is?”
“We have to weaken it.”
She nodded. “Good idea. I love it. And how do we do that?”
“We starve it of its energy source.”
Liam continued to be the master of understatement. Like this was going to be easy. Simple. No problem. She knew firsthand from her own life-changing encounter with this thing that it wouldn’t be any of those things. But if Liam could act flippant about this situation, so could she.
“All right. Sounds good. How?” she asked.
“We just make sure it has no more batteries to feed on.”
She didn’t want to repeat herself, but she did anyway. “Okay. How?”
There were batteries everywhere. With so many things being portable nowadays, from computers to phones to Alice’s trike, the modern world ran on rechargeable batteries.
“We go analog.”
“Meaning?” How could every one of his answers just create new questions?
“We leave our cell phone batteries dead and use landlines. Same for laptops and tablets. No more charging anything that we’ve seen it can drain.”
“But we think it draws power from the electrical lines too. What do we do about that?” she asked remembering the flickering of the lights, not-so-coincidentally right before her attack.
He cringed a bit. “Yeah. About that. Do you think the people of Mudville would go for letting us cut the main power for a day? Just twenty-four hours or so.”
She lifted her brows in surprise at the extreme idea coming out of her usually conservative boyfriend. “I don’t know. But you can be the one to ask them.”
She wasn’t going to be the one to suggest it. This was clearly a job for Liam. His idea. He could take the heat for it. And she imagined there was going to be heat.