Darrel, on the ground with his wife’s head in his lap, wailed like some primitive animal in the night. His hands were covered in blood and brain matter. I can still remember the sounds of him screaming, and to this day, I find it most disturbing.
My call to 911 rang once, and then it happened again.
Another bolt of lightning came out of nowhere, this time striking a jacaranda tree about a hundred feet away from us. The tree exploded just like the fountain had. My eardrums had already taken a beating from the AK-47, and this did further damage; the explosion was painfully deafening. A shower of debris swept past us, and a chunk of branch hit my hand and sent my phone flying out of it. I closed my eyes and covered my face as bits of jacaranda tree flew past me like a meteor swarm. When I looked up, there was little left of the top of the tree. The trunk remained, but the stubs of former branches were now aflame.
Then I saw another bolt strike a tree at the other end of the park. It was followed by an explosion as more people screamed. And then a bolt of lightning struck a boat in the water behind the park. It was a small Duffy and was probably filled with friends celebrating the holiday out on the water. Yet the lightning didn’t stop with just one bolt; there were several more. Bolt after bolt ripped through the sky and struck the small Duffy with a fury until finally, when the electrical assault stopped, the boat was completely torn apart and nothing more than smoldering driftwood remained on the surface of the water. I had never seen anything like it; the lightning had wanted to destroy that boat.
I knew we had to leave, and we had to leave quickly. I suppose in most situations like that it’s best to wait for the police and paramedics to arrive, but it was obvious that this was not like most situations. This was something else entirely, and I wanted to get my family inside and out of danger.
Several massive bolts of blue lightning that seemed to have originated from the very edge of the swirling clouds struck something to the east. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it sounded like a building. I heard a great explosion followed by falling rubble and, yet again, the ground trembled beneath my feet. Only seconds passed before several more of those massive blue bolts struck, this time on the west side of the island. At that time, I hadn’t realized what had just happened.
We were all on the ground. To this day, I can’t remember if we fell to the ground to take cover or if we were thrown to the ground as the earth shook; perhaps it was a little of both. I heard car alarms going off everywhere and I thought, far in the distance, I could hear emergency vehicles.
I looked up and saw remnants of the crowd running away in terror. Most certainly, everyone was trying to find a safe place indoors. In my peripheral vision, I could see bolts of lightning everywhere whipping down from the sky, striking things all around the island. Electrical explosions and a cacophony of destruction swirled about me. Suddenly, I was in Mother Nature’s war zone, and I thought the exact same thing everyone else was thinking: get inside and get inside quickly.
Toby was terrified. My wife, who had still barely pulled it together enough to utter a word, held him. Amazingly, the little girl my son had rescued hadn’t shed a single tear. She looked up dreamily toward the sky as if this were all just a fireworks show put on for her amusement only.
“My house,” I told Jesse. He nodded in agreement. My house wasn’t far, and once inside, we would be safe from the storm.
“Dad, what did those big bolts of lightning hit?” Owen asked. I knew he was referring to the massive blue ones that struck something on the east and west sides of the island.
“I have no idea,” I said. Even in moments of crisis, I guess Owen still thought Dad had all the answers. “Run home now.”
My family and Jesse began to run, and I turned my attention toward Darrel, who was still on the ground with his wife’s head in his lap. He wept inconsolably.
“Darrel, let’s go!”
He couldn’t really talk, but I could tell by the expression on his face that he didn’t want to leave his wife’s body behind. It was an understandable concern but, considering the circumstances, I tried my best to reason with him as the bizarre lightning strike continued its assault.
“You have to leave her!”
“No,” he whimpered while rubbing his bloodied hands through her tangled hair. I could see the fear on his face. I had seen a spark of a similar fear the day before, when he had first vocalized his concerns that his wife was running around behind his back. It was the fear of losing her, but this, of course, eclipsed that in a monstrous way.
“Darrel, you have to. We’re being attacked. Something’s happening. We have to get out of here.”
“I’m taking her,” he said, and picked up her body.
I knew that, under normal situations, it wasn’t good to move the body. The couple of CPR classes I had taken in my life as well as the common knowledge I’d acquired over the years told me that, but I didn’t try to stop him. Considering a large part of her face was missing, it was pretty obvious that she was dead and was going to remain that way. And none of those classes had guidelines for what to do in the event of a bizarre lightning attack.
As I watched Darrel struggle to get Jenna’s body in his arms, I had the feeling he knew she was dead too. Darrel struggled with her body as more brain fluids and blood poured out of her cracked head and ran down his shirt. Even in the shock of it all, I think Darrel Paisley didn’t want to let go. How could I blame him?
“Let’s go,” I said.
He blabbered something incoherent, and I began to run.
I heard one lone siren coming our way, and I was surprised. I had expected to hear more. When a guy shoots through a crowd of people like Swiss cheese, one expects an entire army to show up, and there was something disturbing about only hearing one. Time had lost all meaning to me, and maybe only a few seconds had passed since it all began and emergency teams would show up shortly, but, like me, nobody here was sticking around to find out.
Another blue bolt of lightning crackled down from the heavens and struck a building that might have only been a couple blocks away. The sky flashed a brilliant, blinding white, and we heard the explosion. Debris rained down like hail.
I saw Klutch standing before the open door of a large brick home adjacent to the park, and he was doing something quite impressive. Keeping guard by the entrance, he was holding a gun and ushering panicked people trying to find refuge from the chaos safely inside. Perhaps that was the house he had inherited, and many terrified people took him up on his offer. It surprised me to see Klutch, the same guy who just yesterday had stood in the same park and insulted everyone there, being so calm and collected and even helpful in that moment.
I began to understand Klutch. He was good in moments of crisis, perhaps even more poised than in times of calm and serenity; and his ego fed on the approval and need of others. As terrified citizens surged into his home, he looked up at the phantasmagoric display of light with a look of absolute control. He didn’t seem afraid of the storm, not yet. If what he said about himself was true, that he hadn’t lost a man when serving overseas, then perhaps this would be another challenge for him.
One police car, sirens blazing, pulled up to the edge of the park. There were no others. I didn’t wait any longer to see what happened but followed Jesse and my family through the narrow streets of Naples. Others were also running indoors. I turned around to make sure that Darrel was following me, and he was lagging behind because of the dead weight in his arms. How terrifying it was to see him there, still howling in desperation, as the lightning illuminated his terrified expression and the bloodied, shattered body dangling from his arms.
He was struggling to run. Carrying the weight was getting to him.
“Come on!” I yelled.
Another burst of lightning struck a light pole right next to us. The light exploded, and a plume of sparks fell down like luminescent rain. Like the other explosions, it had been deafening, and I instinctively covered my ears. I watched as the lightning ran down
the pole to the very base, sizzled there for a moment, and then ran back up to the broken light at the top.
As if everything else I had seen that night hadn’t been bizarre enough, I then saw one of the most bewildering sights of nature that I ever had. A little ball of lightning separated from the sizzling pole. It was a small, green, electrical ball of energy about the size of a grapefruit, and it floated toward me. I was so shocked from everything, I couldn’t move. I began to seriously wonder if the world was about to end and God Almighty had sent the first of His wrecking crew to Naples Island.
The ball slowly drifted toward me and hovered there, only a couple feet from my face. I heard some kind of soft, crackling static. I don’t know if it had intelligence, but I had the strange feeling that the ball was inspecting and probing me somehow. Did it want something from me? Was it trying to communicate with me? I wasn’t sure. Even in the chaos of the moment, there was a part of me that felt tempted to reach out and touch the hissing ball of green light. It was an almost irresistible urge, because there was something magnificently beautiful about it.
I began to back away from it, and it suddenly moved just a bit to the left, as if startled. Had I irritated it? Without warning, it shot to the left and burst through the window of a nearby house. Glass went flying, and the electrical orb was gone.
I was going to turn around to urge Darrel to run faster when I noticed there were more of these balls of lightning on the street. Five or six of them hovered around the electrocuted light pole like bloated fireflies, and it suddenly stank of sulphur.
Behind me, I heard Darrel drop his wife’s body to the ground. He fell to his knees beside her, and it was clear he didn’t have the strength to carry her anymore. I ran back and tried to reason with him.
“Darrel, let’s get out of here! Follow me!”
He looked at his wife’s body with what I interpreted to be a complete inability to compute the idea that she was dead—completely dead—and that Jenna was now only a corpse.
“I can’t leave her, I can’t─”
“You have to! We’ll come back for her!”
He reached his hand toward the body and bellowed miserably, but I was able to pull him away and get him moving. We ran alongside each other and tried to catch up to Jesse and my family. I noticed two of the floating lightning balls speed away like rockets and penetrate the side of a house. The balls seemed to go right through the wall without damaging the exterior at all.
I didn’t take the time to look any longer or think about it. Car alarms still wailed from every direction, and surprisingly, I hadn’t heard much more in the way of emergency vehicles. As I neared the front door of my home, I saw two people running toward me from the opposite direction and I recognized them. It was Samantha and Marsha. Marsha more or less waddled behind Samantha, who was well ahead of her.
Later, I learned that both of them happened to be walking toward the Second Street Bridge and Belmont Shore. Samantha was going to her yoga instructor’s get-together on Bayshore Drive, and Marsha was going to meet her aunt at Greta’s Kitchen for a late lunch. They hadn’t been walking together. From my observations, they had never really gotten along that well and probably wouldn’t have chosen to walk together even if they had the chance.
Jesse and my family had already gone inside when Darrel and I got to my house and saw both women running toward us. There were other people behind them, and they all darted into different homes and turned down different streets.
I waved to get their attention, but I was pretty sure they had already seen me. What else had happened? Had there been another shooting on the other side of the island? Maybe it wasn’t just Drake. Maybe this really was an act of terrorism, and the entire island was under attack.
“The bridge! The bridge!” Samantha yelled as she ran toward me.
I ushered Darrel inside my house, but I remained out front as the two women approached. They ran past Marsha’s home and right up to me.
“The bridge,” Samantha said, almost completely out of breath. She was gasping for air. Marsha was slower and still a few houses away.
“What happened?”
“The bridge. The lightning took it out. Destroyed it.”
“The lightning?”
“The whole bridge is gone. Nobody can get across.”
“Lightning took out a bridge? What?” I didn’t completely believe it.
I remembered the colossal bolts of lightning that had struck the east and west sides of the island. If somehow the lightning had taken out all three bridges, it would make sense as to why I hadn’t heard more sirens. How would the fire trucks, paramedics, and police officers get across? They would have to send in support by air, or emergency teams would have to swim across the bay to get to us. But the very idea of a lightning bolt taking out a bridge and stranding us made me more confident that what we were witnessing was not just a freak accident of nature but a very planned and very calculated attack of some kind.
“What do we do?” Samantha asked, terrified. Marsha, huffing and puffing with hands on her hips, finally caught up. Her mouth was a big O on her pale, doughy face, desperately trying to take in oxygen.
“Come inside, both of you. We stay together.”
It didn’t take much to convince them. They followed me, and once inside, I felt like I had stepped into a trauma ward. Darrel had fallen to his knees and was curled in a fetal position. I couldn’t even imagine the pain and loss he was feeling. Toby was completely freaking out and clinging onto my wife, and she was clinging onto him; they held each other so tightly and so violently, an outsider might have had difficulty discerning who was comforting who. The child that Owen had rescued had finally burst into hysterical screaming, and my son, who hadn’t had any experience holding another child since his little brother was born, tried unsuccessfully to comfort her.
Marsha and Samantha joined in the hysteria; I wondered what exactly they had witnessed when they saw lightning take out the bridge. Perhaps they had seen people die and cars go down with it. The expressions on their bewildered, terrified faces suggested a morbid tale.
Jesse alone seemed unfazed by the turmoil. He walked across our living room, pulled back the curtains, and gazed at the electrical storm all around us. As if it were in labor, the sky’s electrical contractions seemed to be happening closer together, and now it seemed the sky was constantly bleached with bright light and interrupted only by brief moments of darkness. Jesse, still holding the gun, stroked his long, grizzly beard and looked up at the celestial phenomenon like a hunter trying to find a weakness in his prey.
For many minutes, we wept in that room inconsolably. It was a house of mourning, a house of confusion. For the first time, I realized we were all drenched from the rain. Nobody had any idea what to say.
“He killed my wife, he killed her, he killed her,” Darrel blabbered, rocking back and forth on the ground.
“I should call the police,” I said. I was shaking all over.
“I wouldn’t be too concerned about that,” Jesse said. “I’m pretty sure they know something’s going on here. Turn on the television. See what the news says. And make sure everything’s locked. That psychopath is still out there.”
“Right,” I said. “Owen, make sure everything’s locked.”
“The front door?” he asked.
“Everything!” I snapped.
With the crying toddler in his arms, he left the room and began to batten down the house.
“Do you have guns here?” Jesse asked. He turned away from the window, and he looked all business.
“Guns?” I asked.
“Yeah, guns. That guy’s out there. And there could be more of them. We need protection. I only got a few bullets left in this thing.”
“No, no guns.”
He nodded, taking it in.
I’ve never owned a gun. To be honest, they scare me. That much power in my hands just doesn’t feel right. I’ve only been to a shooting range a few times in my life, and that
was because of research for my writing. I wanted to explain what it was like to shoot a firearm with some level of accuracy, but even then, I wasn’t very fond of it. Plain and simple, guns just make me nervous.
“No weapons of any kind? Nothing we can use?” he asked again.
“A baseball bat, maybe.”
“Then it’ll have to do.”
Talk of weapons and guns didn’t fall too easily on the ears of the others in the room. Marsha started completely freaking out and hyperventilating, and my wife and Samantha both had to calm her down.
“Guns? What do you mean we need more guns?” Marsha asked. “You mean there are more of them? We’re being attacked, we’re being attacked! Someone’s attacking us. And they killed his wife. They killed Darrel’s wife!”
“Drake shot her,” my wife explained.
“Drake?” Marsha said, hand over her heart. Her mouth became a big O again, this time much larger than before. She started to fan herself with her floppy, pudgy hand, and her eyes rolled back in their sockets. She lost her balance, and my wife and Samantha both helped her not take too hard a fall as she passed out and collapsed onto the couch.
Toby started screaming again and grabbed onto my wife.
“What happened to her? Did she die, Mom? Is she dead?”
“No, she’s not dead,” my wife said. He jumped back into her arms. “She’s scared, honey. We’re all scared.”
I fumbled for a remote control to get the television on. Maybe Jesse was right. Maybe the news would give us some indication as to what was really happening and when we could expect help to arrive. I turned it on and began flipping through stations, but the signal was terrible. We had satellite cable, and the screen was an incomprehensible blur of contorted colors and images.
Beside me, Jesse tried to call his son. He said his son was probably fine because he’d left Naples to go into Belmont Shore, but he wanted to be sure. But the call wouldn’t even go through.
Storm Taken: A Supernatural Thriller Page 11
