Struck

by Jennifer Bosworth

  “No,” I said.

  “Why can’t we try? We could take her to one of Prophet’s revivals and see.”

  I shook my head at him. I felt vaguely angry, somewhere down deep. But mostly I felt exhausted.

  “You really want to take Mom to see Prophet?” I asked him. “You think we should encourage her belief in a televangelist cult leader who claims the world is going to end in three days?”

  I watched the enthusiasm drain slowly from his eyes. “I want her to get better.”

  “She will,” I said, forcing myself to sound certain when I wasn’t. “It just takes time.”

  “What about the earthquake survivors’ group, then?” Parker asked.

  “What about it?” I brushed past him, heading for the stairs that led up to my bedroom.

  “You said we could talk to Mom about going, see if she’s willing to try it.”

  I didn’t want to tell Parker the real reason I was reluctant. I doubted he remembered the room number listed on the flyer.

  Room 317.

  Mr. Kale’s room.

  I was certain that if Parker realized this, he’d be even more determined to go.

  I made a show of dragging myself up the stairs. “I’m tired, Parker. We can talk to Mom about it tomorrow.” I closed my door behind me, letting Parker know the conversation was over.

  I flopped onto my bed, exhausted. I wished I could take a nap, shut down for a while. If I didn’t already know Mom’s sleeping pills wouldn’t do a thing for me—if she had any left—I would have popped one or five. But I’d tried every sleeping pill on the market. Nothing worked.

  I grabbed my laptop off the nightstand and opened a browser, did a silent cheer when the Web page loaded. The Internet was slow, but at least it was working.

  Out of curiosity more than interest, I’d looked at Schiz’s blog a few times. But that was before the quake. Before the Seekers.

  The home page was simple, no photos or graphics or ads. Just a white background and black type. There were dozens of posts, too many for me to read them all, so I scrolled through the headlines. It took me about twenty seconds to come to the conclusion that the posts revolved around two subjects: Rance Ridley Prophet and the coming apocalypse.

  Rance Ridley … Prophet?

  Signs of the End Times (plague, war, famine, all that good stuff)

  Why Is the Church of Light Buying Property in the Waste?

  Rance Ridley Prophet Wants YOU for His Army of God!

  The Sky Is Falling, For Realz Bitches!

  Where Is Prophet’s Twelfth Apostle?

  Who IS Rance Ridley Prophet Really?

  I started reading that one. The time stamp said it had been posted only five minutes ago.

  Who IS Rance Ridley Prophet Really?

  He’s the man of the hour. The man who predicted the Puente Hills Earthquake on live television minutes before it hit. Who turned Los Angeles into the Bible Belt’s long-lost buckle; who’s converting people to the Church of Light faster than an army of Mormon missionaries hopped up on Mountain Dew. The man Followers can’t shut up about. He’s Rance Ridley Prophet, and he wants YOU to surrender your soul! Doesn’t that sound fun? A nice religious lobotomy at one of his famous midnight revivals?

  But aside from what everybody knows about him, who is Rance Ridley Prophet really? Where did he come from, and what road did he take to get here? I’ll tell you what, I’m pretty good at the whole Internet research thing, but I didn’t turn up much about our friend Rance. I even ventured outside my command station and went to ye olde library trying to find out who this bag of douche, self-proclaimed prophet is. Here’s what I learned. It ain’t much, folks, but it’s all I got for ya.

  First, Prophet is not the surname he was born with. He’s Rance Ridley, son of a guy named Ram Ridley, who just so happened to be the prophet of the Church of Light before Rance took control at the green age of thirteen.

  There’s fact number two. Rance Ridley became prophet at AGE THIRTEEN! That’s insane! But then, we’re talking about a religious cult here, and cult followers aren’t renowned for their rationality. The Church of Light went through a dozen prophets before they came to good ol’ Rance. Each of his predecessors claimed God spoke to him directly, and that the Big Boss told them the date of the end of the world. And each of them was wrong, so each of them was tossed out of the church on his ass. A piece of advice: if you want to remain in control of a doomsday cult, don’t give a date for the end of the world unless you’re really, really sure it’s going to happen. Being wrong tends to undermine your authority.

  Okay, so little Rance Ridley takes control of the Church of Light right after he wakes up in the hospital. He was in a coma for three days, but I can’t find any record of what put him in said coma. Anyway, he says he saw God while he was near death, and God told him Daddy Ram was to be deposed and Rance instated as prophet. Ram wasn’t down with this, but a few days later he dies mysteriously. Convenient, right??

  After that, Rance makes Ridley his middle name and changes his surname to Prophet. Then comes a big old time gap where I can’t find any information about him. He and his Followers keep to themselves, doing their own thing. He doesn’t resurface until he starts adopting all those kids and calling them his Apostles. (Side note: I can’t find any adoption or orphanage records on any of these kids. If those records existed once, Rance must have made them disappear. Why? I ask. Why destroy their records? What is he hiding?)

  Oh, and while Rance was flying below the radar, his hair turned white and he developed cataracts, which he refuses to have removed, because he claims God put them there. Whatever you say, man.

  A year ago, Rance makes his debut as a televangelist on The Hour of Light. And if you’re even slightly conscious of what’s going on in the world around you, you know the rest of Rance Ridley Prophet’s story. And you know that today he finally announced the date of the end of the world.

  April 17. Doomsday. The End.

  Let’s hope Rance is no different from his predecessors.

  I closed my laptop. I had read enough—enough to make me feel sick to my stomach. A lot of the stuff Schiz wrote about struck me as your typical conspiracy theorist paranoid babble. The thing that bothered me was that Schiz openly admitted he didn’t know that much about Prophet. Normally he would have speculated to the point of complete fantasy. But what Schiz said here … it must be true if he hadn’t tried to fill in the blanks.

  I checked the clock on my nightstand. It had been one of the longest days of my life, and it was only five-thirty.

  I laid my head down on my arms, closed my eyes, and then a miracle happened.

  I fell asleep.

  And I dreamed.

  Or I remembered.

  12

  ARIZONA. LAKE HAVASU City. One year ago.

  Here’s the thing about thunderstorms in Arizona: they sometimes appear out of nowhere. Shifting winds bring the tropical moisture from the Gulf of Mexico to collide with the Arizona desert heat. One minute the sky is clear. The next a huge anvil of a cloud has formed overhead. So I had to be careful when I left the house, lest I be caught in the open with a black cloud hanging over me.

  But those kinds of storms … they can catch even someone like me off guard.

  So here’s what happened.

  There was this girl, a couple years younger than me. Her name was Janna, and she wasn’t all there. I won’t go into specifics, but she’d been hit by a car. The car broke her arm, but the pavement, when she hit it, cracked her skull and messed up her brain. She wasn’t the same after that. She smiled a lot but didn’t talk. She tended to wander around town without direction. She made other kids uncomfortable. They called her retarded, but she mostly just seemed lost.

  Janna took a liking to me for whatever reason. Maybe she sensed my outcast status and felt like I’d accept her. And I did. People in Lake Havasu City were familiar with my little problem, and they steered clear of me. Anyone who knows anything about lightning is awar
e that you don’t want to be standing next to a tree when it’s struck, and the same principle applies to me.

  But the damage Janna’s brain had sustained must have wiped out her sense of self-preservation. Her parents warned her to stay away from me, but she kept showing up on my doorstep.

  The day of my last strike, the sky was perfectly clear. It was Saturday. I’d checked the weather report and confirmed that the chance of rain was almost nonexistent, so I should have been safe leaving the house.

  When I stepped outside, Janna was sitting on the front porch staring off into space, smiling pleasantly at nothing in particular. I asked her if she wanted to go for a walk, and she nodded. Janna loved to walk, more than anything else. Some days she would walk from one end of town to the other, back and forth without stopping, not saying a word.

  So we set out. We decided to walk to London Bridge, which had actually been constructed in London and then bought by some rich American. He had it dismantled and each brick shipped to Lake Havasu City to serve as a tourist attraction. It was one of my favorite places in town, this big old hunk of London dropped into Arizona.

  Janna and I were on the bridge, peering over the side and watching boats pass by underneath, when I felt an intense prickling on my skin. I looked up, and saw it: a heavy gray cloud forming right over the bridge, spreading like a drop of ink diving into a glass of water.

  It happened fast.

  So fast.

  Every hair on my body stood up. I tasted metal, like I was sucking on a bullet.

  “Get back!” I shouted at Janna, but she just stood there, blinking at me.

  So I pushed her. All I wanted was to get her away from me.

  Lightning struck at that precise moment. It entered through my back, and it was like being stabbed with a sword fresh off the smelting iron. It was pain, but it was more than that. The pain was so enormous that it became something else. It was life. The very essence of everything. And it was filling me. Charging me.

  I was too full of lightning to realize what I had done until it was over. Until my hair was falling from my head like black snow.

  That was when I saw Janna, lying in the middle of the bridge fifteen feet away. Traffic was stopped. People were pointing. Shouting. Running to her.

  I couldn’t move.

  Janna’s clothes were mostly burned away. Her tennis shoes had exploded, leaving her feet bare, the soles bright red. Blistered. Swollen. Her arms and legs were raw, as though the naked skin had been scraped away with a scalpel, revealing raw tissue beneath. Her hair, like mine, was singed to ash. Her scalp was capped in blisters.

  And on her chest, near her shoulders … two red handprints had been seared into her flesh.

  “You!” I heard someone in the crowd shout. “You did this!”

  People started turning from Janna to me.

  Many people who had been running toward her started running at me.

  Terror grabbed my heart and threatened to crush it. My back was against the edge of London Bridge.

  The heat of the lightning was still burning inside me, making it impossible to think clearly. A man walked toward me with purpose … a man big enough to pick me up and toss me over the edge of the bridge. And he wasn’t alone. The mob pressed in around me, hate in their eyes. Hate and fear.

  “You’re evil,” the big man said when he was a few feet away from me. “You killed that girl. You’re evil.” He said it plainly, not as an accusation, but as fact. Everyone knew it. I was evil. I was a murderer.

  A monster.

  The big man reached for me. I didn’t know what he intended to do, whether he would have thrown me over the edge of the bridge, or strangled me, or hit me. The only thing I did know was that he wanted to hurt me. I had to protect myself. I raised my hands, my palms pointed toward him. I was wearing my fingerless gloves, as always, but there was so much heat surging in my hands my gloves were smoking, falling apart, turning to ash and sprinkling the ground. One second my hands were smoking, and the next, red veins of light jumped from my fingertips and connected to the man. He froze. And then he began to convulse on his feet.

  The crowd backed up. There was more shouting, but now it was uncertain. More afraid than angry.

  The man’s skin started to smoke, and a scent came off him, like burning wires and cooking meat.

  Stop! a voice pleaded in my mind. Stop it! You’re killing him!

  It was strange. Until that voice spoke up, I hadn’t realized it was me hurting the man. I saw the red veins sprouting from my fingertips, attaching me to him like jumper cables, but I didn’t make the connection. Nothing like this had ever happened before.

  But it was happening.

  I was electrocuting this man. Frying him.

  There was lightning in me, and I was striking him with it.

  I was killing him.

  Stop!

  I felt something snap, like taut wires being cut. The red veins of light sucked back into my hands, and the man crumpled in a smoking heap.

  I looked at the crowd, waited for them to rush at me, shove me over the side of the bridge. And this time I would let them. I wouldn’t try to protect myself. I deserved whatever punishment they had to give. The man was right. I must be evil.

  My eyes went to Janna. I saw her moving, trying to sit up, and relief washed through me. She was alive.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” I told the crowd.

  Silence was all I got from them, but their accusation was as loud as a dozen sirens.

  Or were those actual sirens?

  Flashing lights.

  Police.

  My instinct for self-preservation came roaring back.

  No one tried to stop me as I ran from London Bridge. And by the time the mob came to drive the Price family from Lake Havasu City, we were already gone.

  A week later we arrived in Los Angeles, where Mom said we should have moved right away after her mother died. Los Angeles, where it never rained, according to the song.

  Mom had our last name changed in case anyone decided to look for us.

  I wore a wig to hide my baldness. The lightning didn’t always turn my hair to ash as it had done this time. I almost preferred the times the lightning stopped my heart to when it took my hair.

  Parker and I enrolled at Skyline High. I tried to distract myself from what I had done to Janna and the man on the bridge, and from what I learned when I called the hospital on the way to Los Angeles.

  I dialed 411 and had an operator connect me to the hospital in Lake Havasu City. I asked for Janna Scott’s room. Janna answered. I didn’t recognize her voice, because until that moment I’d never heard it.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. Tears streamed down my face.

  “Mia,” she said. “Is that you?”

  It hit me then … she was talking. But now I was the one who couldn’t form words.

  “I’m okay now,” she said.

  “No, you’re not.” I choked on a sob. “I saw what I did to you.”

  “The burns?” she said, sounding surprised. “The doctors say those will heal. I need some skin grafts, but after that I’ll be fine. Better than fine. I don’t know what you did, but … you fixed me. I’m better now.”

  I shook my head, not quite understanding. “What about the man on the bridge?”

  She was quiet for a long moment. “He’ll live,” she said finally, her voice barely audible. “Someone’s coming. I have to go now.” She covered the phone and I heard her muffled voice talking to someone else. Then she said, “Thank you, Mia.” And she hung up.

  13

  I WOKE BURNING, pouring sweat. My damp clothes clung to my fevered skin like wet paper. I peeled them off as I stumbled into the bathroom, praying the water was still on. When I cranked the bathtub valve, water rushed from the faucet. I plugged the drain, climbed into the tub and lay down in the bottom, letting ice-cold water run onto my feet. I had to cool down before I melted. I winced as steam hissed off my skin, but the fever in my bloo
d began to lessen by slow degrees.

  I closed my eyes, trying not to think about the dream. But in my mind I kept seeing Janna’s scorched body lying crumpled in the center of the bridge; kept hearing her voice say, I don’t know what you did, but you fixed me.

  It made no sense. But it was true. I’d read about Janna’s miraculous recovery in the online edition of Havasu News. My involvement was not mentioned. It seemed like Lake Havasu City wanted to forget I’d ever existed. That was fine. There were things I wanted to forget, too, like what I had done to the man on the bridge.

  He lived, but it might have been better for him if he hadn’t.

  I thought of what Rachel said to me that morning in the lounge.

  Redemption. That’s what you seek, isn’t it? Redemption and forgiveness for the wrong you’ve done.

  Maybe she was right. Maybe I did need redemption. But I wasn’t going to seek it out in Rance Ridley Prophet’s White Tent. If there was any way to redeem myself, it was by getting my family through the next days or weeks or months or whatever it took. To get Mom better. To keep Parker out of trouble. To steer us back toward stability and sanity and all that was normal. How I was supposed to accomplish that little feat, I didn’t know, so I decided not to think about that either.

  I thought of Jeremy instead.

  Jeremy, who touched me and made me see lightning. Made me burn.

  I invited him into my mind, and then put myself in front of him and watched what happened.