Five at Night Part II: Electricity

10:22 PM

Heat lightning rips through the air and briefly illuminates the dark farmland, casting shadows that could be easily mistaken as ghosts lumbering through the wheat. These figures aren’t ghosts, however; they are Victoria Anders, Duncan Gladstone, and Marcus White– three sixteen-year-old kids who had snuck out earlier this evening and were caught unawares when the lightning made first contact with the earth just mere yards away from where they had been smoking.

“Did you see that?” Duncan is yelling as the trio trample his father’s crops. “Summbitch hit right in front of us! Jesus please-us, if we were any closer, we’d be a cooked goose! Geese! Ha!” He laughs so hard that he fears he may vomit.

Victoria is sweating through her t-shirt and blood is oozing from the spot where she’s banged her elbow after hitting-the-deck when the lightning first touched. She’s panting too hard to say anything.

Marcus stumbles, falls, rolls, and is up again, laughing and running. “Can’t get me!” he yells back to the lightning, to God, to whomever. “Can’t get me, asshole! Nossir! No way!” The lightning responds by cracking again, this time hitting a lone tree about three hundred feet away. It more or less explodes.

They’re still quite a ways away from the house, but can just see it in the distance, dark and empty. Maybe Duncan’s father is on his way home– it’s only ten-twenty, and he’s back before midnight most nights. Duncan has to make sure Victoria and Marcus get the hell off the farm before his father makes it to the house. He’s already on thin ice with his old man; if Parker Gladstone knew that Duncan had gone behind his back and brought over the two friends that his old man hated most to smoke reefer in his fields, there’d be more trouble than just a bit of heat lighting.

But Duncan can’t ruminate on this. He’s just running and wondering how the hell it keeps touching down on them so frequently. It’s almost like it’s chasing them. But that can’t be–

The thought is broken as Duncan’s foot collides with a large rock (why there's a rock in his dad’s wheat field, he has no idea) and his ankle shatters with a sickening crunch on impact. He goes flying ass-over-teakettle and lands in a heap near some tilled soil. He’s looking up at the stars through the clouds. There’s so many of them tonight.

Marcus goes on running, laughing, unaware that his friend is seriously hurt. Victoria skids to a halt and tries to pull Duncan to his feet, who screams in pain.

“We got to go, Duncan, get up,” she says quickly, throwing glances behind them at the angry sky. Clouds are thickening overhead, eating up the stars.

“Can’t,” Duncan murmurs. “Broken.” He tries to lift his leg, and excruciating pain rips through him. Victoria glances down at his ankle just as the lightning flashes again. She sees the red of blood, the white of bone. Her stomach does a somersault.

She tries to pull him to his feet. “We need to go, it’s– I don’t know, some kind of freak storm, the lightning is setting fires, Duncan. It’s not safe.”

“Run to the house, just leave me here, Vicky.”

“What? You’ll get… fucking… electrocuted, no way–”

“Lightning never strikes the same place twice.”

The stars are gone now. Swallowed by the clouds.

“What does that even fucking mean?”

He feels himself smiling. The air is hot, heavy, alive. He looks up into her full-moon face, freckled and fair. He starts to laugh.

Victoria stares at him in horror. Duncan stares back.

All of her hair is standing up on end.