Fortunately, Vince stayed home from school that day, so he did not have to face a lethal failure of his electrical life-support system. He was still reeling from the revelation that Nick would eventually need the battery back, and the fact that Nick had known this for weeks and hadn’t told him.

To date, Vince had collected several items for Nick, never knowing that each one was bringing Vince closer to his own doom. And now there was one item in particular he had to find out about, in spite of himself; one that occupied all of his thoughts—but he couldn’t share that with his mother.

“You can’t stay home from school without a reason,” his mom said that morning.

“How about death?” he said flatly as he ate his raw vegan breakfast consisting of freshly juiced vegetables and seed cheese, a diet that delighted his mother. He had found, to his absolute horror, that his undead intestinal tract digested animal protein far too slowly. Although he still had intense cravings for hamburgers and pepperoni pizza, he had to admit it could have been worse. If he had been embalmed, he would have been left with an insatiable desire for iron-rich foods, such as liver and human brains. Knowing his mother, she would’ve made him eat spinach instead.

“You can’t use the ‘D-word’ as an excuse for everything,” his mother said. She crossed her arms defiantly. “If you’re not feeling well enough for school, you should see a doctor.”

Vince exhaled a long, heavy sigh. “There is no doctor for this, Mom. There’s only one cure, and I’m plugged into it.”

“We don’t even know what it is,” she pointed out.

“Which is why,” Vince whispered to her, “we don’t want anyone else to know, do we?”

Though she was frustrated, she couldn’t disagree. So she picked up her purse and went off to work in a huff.

“I have houses to show, but I’ll be back by five,” she said on her way out the door. “Please don’t leave me any messes.”

Vince knew there was one house his mother could never show, however, for the simple reason that it was no longer there. And that particular missing house was the real reason Vince stayed home.

After downing what could have been a life-threatening dose of carrot/beet/kale juice, he left to visit the curiously vacant lot upon which had once stood an unremarkable residence. Unbeknownst to Nick, Vince had seen a picture of what could very well be the missing house. That’s what had caught his attention in the tabloid newspaper during his and Nick’s botched break-in—just before he was rendered inconveniently dead.

The house in question was an ordinary two-story tract home, perhaps with the same floor plan as Vince’s, since it was in the same development. Its absence was hard to miss in the middle of a street of identical homes. There had been police tape around the property for a while, but the police had never arrived to investigate. The only investigation was conducted by a group of men and women in vaguely luminescent pastel-colored suits.

In the few weeks since the house had vanished into thin air, nothing much about the property had changed. Vince walked up the front path, which ended abruptly at a pit that went down about ten feet. The remains of electrical conduits, pipes, and a sewer line poked out of the ground, sheared off cleanly. Even the foundation was gone, as if the house was a tooth that had been extracted, roots and all.

In the backyard, things got even more interesting. Behind where the house used to stand was a detached garage. It was still there, but only partially.

Vince knew that Nick was on the premises when the house disappeared. He’d been standing right at the front door. The woman inside had possessed one of Tesla’s devices, although Nick hadn’t known which one.

Vince made his way around the crater to the garage. The front half of the structure had been sheared clean away, and inside he could see half of an old refrigerator, half of a lawn mower, and half of a bunch of other things you’d find in a garage. Lucky for Nick, thought Vince, that the Teslanoid Object had been positioned toward the back of the house so its field extended only to the front door. Had it been any closer, half of Nick might have been taken instead of half the garage.

Vince knocked on the doors of a few surrounding homes.

At the first few houses, no one answered. Either the owners weren’t home, or they didn’t want to deal with the creepy dude on their front step.

Finally one door opened for him. The woman at the threshold looked somewhat like a dried apple, with big hair the color of faded cotton candy.

“Wha’cha sellin’?” she asked, and before Vince could answer, she added, “Whatever it is, I don’t need it anyway, but I’ve got a couple bagels in the toaster, so you might as well come in.” She led him to her kitchen. “The only visitors I get,” she noted, “are people who want my money.”

“Is that so?” Vince asked politely.

“Including my relatives,” she added as she served him the bagel with a dollop of whipped cream cheese. Vince wondered fleetingly how well he would digest it before he decided his undead intestines would just have to deal.

“Okay, give me your pitch,” the old woman said, “and it better be good.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not selling anything and I don’t want your money. I just want to pick your brain.”

“Not much left to pick, sorry to say,” she told him with a laugh. “That field’s gone to seed.”

Vince suspected she had more up there than she gave herself credit for. “I’d love to know about the person who owned the house,” he said. “The one that disappeared.”

The old woman took a bite of her bagel and chewed it slowly. “That would be Sheila McNee,” she said finally. “Used to play bridge with her until she got too high-and-mighty for the rest of us.”

“So you’re not in touch?” Vince asked.

The old woman shook her head. “I haven’t heard hide nor hair from her since…the incident. These strange G-men in funny suits came by asking questions. Told us her house went up in a freak quantum event.” Then she leaned a little closer. “But there was nothing freak about it. It was the globe.”

Vince’s ears perked up. Immediately he remembered a globe at the garage sale. Metallic, with the landmasses engraved into it. He might have considered buying it himself, had the battery not been calling out to him, for what turned out to be obvious reasons.

“The globe…” he repeated, prompting her to continue.

“I never told them about it, if that’s what you’re asking. But something tells me you’re the one who needs to know.” She took another thoughtful bite. “She said it took her places.”

“Where?” Vince asked.

“Anywhere,” the old woman said, “everywhere. I thought she was nuts. Right until the day she vanished along with that dust trap of a house.”

“Do you know where she might have gone?” Vince asked.

“Well,” said the old woman, “she was always threatening to go back to Scotland, where she grew up. Said we Americans had grown ‘a wee bit tiresome.’”

Vince took the last bite of his bagel, thanked her, and left. There was no doubt in his mind that what the woman had told him was true. And if he did have any doubts, all he had to do was take out his own copy of the Planetary Times and turn to page 17. Next to the article about the new alien Mafia was a grainy, blurry photograph of a suburban house, much like the other houses on this block, that had been spotted by scuba-diving monster hunters at the very bottom of Loch Ness.

Vince returned home with an uncharacteristic bounce in his step. Just because he knew where the globe was didn’t mean Nick had to know. And as long as it remained lost at the bottom of a lake a continent away, Nick could never complete Tesla’s machine.

Which meant he’d never come to Vince for the battery.