Aftershock & Others

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Oh, that works just fine.”

  “Then why—?”

  “It’s the only way I can be with my little boy.”

  I tried to speak but couldn’t find a word to say. Stunned, I watched her roll over and go to sleep.

  No way I could let her leave without learning what she’d meant by that, so I kept looking in on her during my shift, waiting for her to wake up. After suturing the twenty-centimeter gash a kid from the local supermarket had opened in his thigh when his box cutter slipped, I checked room six again and found it empty.

  The desk told me she’d paid by credit card and taken off in a cab, lightning detector and all.

  I spent the next week hunting her, starting with her Jersey address; I left messages on the answering machine there, but they were never returned. Finally, after badgering the various taxi companies in town, I tracked Kim McCormick to a Travelodge out on 98.

  I sat in my car in the motel parking lot one afternoon, gathering courage to knock on her door, and wondering at this bizarre urge. I’m not the obsessive type, but I knew her words would haunt me until I’d learned what they meant.

  It’s the only way I can be with my little boy.

  Taking a deep breath, I made myself move. August heat and humidity gave me a wet slap as I stepped out and headed for her door. Nickel clouds hung low and a wind-driven Wal-Mart flyer wrapped itself around my leg like a horny mutt. I kicked it away.

  She answered my knock almost immediately, but I could tell from her expression she didn’t know me. To tell the truth, with her hair dried and combed, and color in her cheeks, I barely recognized her. She wore dark blue shorts and a white LaCoste—sans bra, I noticed. I hadn’t appreciated before how attractive she was.

  “Yes?”

  “Ms. McCormick, I’m Dr. Glyer. We met at the emergency room after you were—”

  “Oh, yes! I remember you now.” She gave me a crooked grin that I found utterly charming. “This a house call?”

  “In a way.” I felt awkward standing on the threshold. “I was wondering about your foot.”

  She stepped back into the room but didn’t ask me in. “Still hurts,” she said. I noticed the bandage on her left heel as she slipped her feet into a pair of backless shoes. “But I get around okay in clogs.”

  I scanned the room. A laptop sat on the nightstand, screen-saver fish gliding across its screen. The bed was unmade, two Chinese food containers in the wastebasket, a Wendy’s bag next to the TV on the dresser. The Weather Channel was on, showing a map of Florida with a bright red rectangle superimposed on its midsection. The words SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING crawled along the bottom of the screen.

  “Glad to hear it. Listen, I’d…I’d like to talk to you about what you said when you were in the ER.”

  “Sorry?” she said, cocking her head toward me. “I didn’t catch that.”

  I repeated.

  “What did I say?” She said it absently as she hurried about the room, stuffing sundry items into her gym bag, one of which I recognized as her lightning detector.

  “Something about being with your little boy.”

  That got her. She stopped and looked at me. “I said that?”

  I nodded. “‘It’s the only way I can be with my little boy,’ to be exact.”

  She sighed. “I shouldn’t have said that. I was still off my head from the shock, I guess. Forget it.”

  “I can’t. It’s haunted me.”

  She stepped closer, staring into my eyes. “Why should that haunt you?”

  “Long story. That’s why I was wondering if we might sit down somewhere and—”

  “Maybe some other time. I’m just on my way out.”

  “Where? Maybe we can go together and talk on the way.”

  “You can’t go where I’m going.” She slipped past me and closed the door behind her. She flashed me a bright, excited smile as she turned away. “I’m off to see my little boy.”

  I watched her get into a white Mercedes Benz with Jersey plates. As she pulled away, I hurried to my car and followed. Her haste, the approaching storm, the lightning detector…I had a bad feeling about this.

  I didn’t bother hanging back—I doubted she knew what kind of car I was driving, or would be checking for anyone following her. She turned off 98 onto a two-lane blacktop that ran straight as the proverbial arrow toward the western horizon. A lot of Florida roads are like that. Why? Because they can be. The state is basically a giant sandbar, flat as a flounder’s belly, and barely above sea level. Roads here don’t have to wind around hills and valleys, so they’re laid out as the shortest distance between two points.

  Ahead the sky was growing rapidly more threatening, the gray clouds darkening; lightning flashed in their ecchymotic bellies.

  The light had dimmed to late-dusk level by the time she turned off the blacktop and bounced northward along a sandy road. She stopped her car about fifty yards from a small rise where a majestic Nelson pine towered over the surrounding scrub. She got out with her gym bag in hand and hurried toward the tree in a limping trot. Wind whipped her shorts around her bare legs, twisted her hair across her face. A bolt of lightning cracked the sky far to my left, and thunder rumbled past a few seconds later. I gaped in disbelief as she pulled off her shirt and shorts, stuffed them into the bag, and seated herself on the far side of the trunk.

  “She’s crazy!” I said aloud as I gunned the engine.

  I pulled past her car and stopped as close to the tree as the road would allow. Amid more lightning and thunder, I jumped out and dashed up the rise.

  “Kim!” I shouted. “This is insane! Get away from there!”

  She started at the sound of my voice, looked up, and threw her free arm across her breasts. Her other hand gripped the lightning detector, its red warning light blinking madly.

  “Leave me alone! I know what I’m doing!”

  “You’ll be killed!” I picked up her gym bag and held it out to her. “Please! Get back in your car!”

  Her face contorted with fury as she slapped the bag from my hand, then covered her breasts again. “Get out of here! You don’t understand and you’ll ruin everything!” Her voice rose to a scream. “Go away!”

  I backed off, unsure of what to do. I debated grabbing her and wrestling her to safety, but did I have the right? As crazy as this seemed, Kim McCormick was a grown woman, and very determined to be here. A daylight-bright flash, followed instantaneously by a deafening crash of thunder and a torrent of cold rain decided it. I ducked back toward my car.

  “Keep your windows closed!” I heard Kim shout behind me. “And don’t touch any metal!”

  Drenched, I huddled on the front seat and did just that. The storm roared in with maniacal fury, lashing the car with gale-force winds and rain so heavy I felt as if I’d parked under a waterfall. I couldn’t see Kim—couldn’t even see the big Nelson pine. I hated the thought of her getting soaked and risking electrocution out there in the lightning-strobed darkness, but what could I do?

  Mostly I resented feeling helpless. I fought the urge to throw the car into gear and leave Kim McCormick to her fate. I had to stay…needed to stay. I felt tenuously bound to this peculiar woman, by something unseen, un-spoken.

  The lightning and thunder finally abated as the storm chugged off to the east. When the rain had eased to a steady downpour, I lowered the window and squinted at the pine, afraid of what I’d see.

  Kim was still huddled against the trunk, looking miserable: hair a rattail tangle, knees drawn up, head down, but seemingly none the worse for the terrible risk she’d taken.

  I stepped out and tried not to stare at her glistening, pale skin as I approached. She glanced up at me. The bright excitement of an hour ago had fled her eyes, leaving a hollow look. I reached into her bag and pulled out her shirt. I held it out to her.

  “Now can we talk?”

  Kim pointed to a pink scar that puckered her right palm. “This is from the first time I was hit.”

  I�
�d followed her back to her motel, waited while she took a quick shower, then brought her here to Cajun Heat, my favorite restaurant. She’d seemed pretty down when we were seated, but a couple of Red Stripes and an appetizer of steamed spiced shrimp had perked her up some.

  “That one was an accident,” she said. “I was visiting my sister in West Texas last year. She and her husband and I had been fishing on White River Lake when it started to get stormy. We came ashore and I was standing on the dock, helping unload the boat. It hadn’t even started raining yet, but somehow I took a direct hit.” She rubbed the scar. “I had a fishing rod in my hand, my palm against the reel. That’s all I remember. Karen and Bill were knocked off their feet but they told me later they saw me fly twenty feet through the air. I broke my forearm when I landed. My heart had stopped. They had to give me CPR.”

  “You were lucky.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” She stared at her palm with a rueful smile. Her wet hair was pulled back and fastened with an elastic band, making her look younger than her thirty-eight years. “Karen still jokes about how she thinks Bill was maybe a little too enthusiastic with the mouth-to-mouth.”

  I said, “So the first strike was accidental. After what I saw today, I gather the next seven were anything but. Dare I ask why?”

  Kim continued staring at her palm. “You already think I’m nuts. I don’t want you thinking I’m a complete psycho.”

  “Try me.”

  “Hmm?” She glanced up. “Sorry. I’m a little hard of hearing, especially when there’s background noise.”

  “I said, Try me.”

  She looked me in the eye, then let out a deep sigh. “Immediately after that first strike, I saw my son Timmy. I could see the lake and the dock and the boat, but they were faint and ghostly. I was standing right where I’d been when I got hit, but I could see my body sprawled behind me. Karen and Bill were running toward it, but slowly, like they were swimming through molasses, and they too looked faint, translucent. Timmy, though—he looked perfectly real and solid, but he was far away, hovering over the water, waving to me. He looked healthy, like he’d never been sick, but he was so far. He kept beckoning me closer but I couldn’t move. Then he faded away.”

  The pieces fell into place, and there it was, staring me in the face. Somehow I’d sensed it. Now I knew.

  “When did he die?”

  She blinked in surprise, then looked away. “Almost three years ago.” Her eyes brimmed with tears but none spilled over. “Two years, eleven months, two weeks, and three days, to be exact.”

  “You had a very vivid hallucin—”

  “No,” she said firmly, shaking her head. “He was there. You can’t appreciate how real he was if you didn’t see him. I’m a hardheaded realist, Doctor Glyer, and—”

  “Call me Joe.”

  “Okay. Fine. But let’s get something straight, Doctor Joe. I’m no New-Agey hollow-head into touchy-feely spirituality. I was an investment banker, and a damn good one—Wharton MBA, Salomon Brothers, the whole nine yards. I dealt with the reality of cold hard cash and down-and-dirty bottom lines every day. As far as the afterlife was concerned, I was right up there with the big-time skeptics. To me, life began when you were born, you lived out your years, then you died. That was it. Game over, no replay. But not anymore. This is real. I don’t know what happened, or how it happened, but for an all-too-brief time after that lightning strike, I saw Timmy, and he saw me, and that changed everything.” She closed her eyes. “I thought I was getting over losing him, but…”

  No, I thought as her voice trailed off. You never get over it.

  But I said nothing.

  “Anyway, at first I tried to duplicate the effect by shocking myself with my house current, but that didn’t work. I concluded I’d need the millions of volts only lightning can provide to see. So I went back to Texas and hung around that dock during half a dozen storms but I couldn’t buy another hit.”

  “Are you trying to die? Is that it?”

  She tossed me a withering look. “I have a Ruger nine-millimeter automatic back at my motel room. When I want to die, I’ll use that. I am not suicidal.”

  “Then what else do you call flirting with death like you did today? And you’ve been hit eight times? The fact that you’re still alive is amazing—you’ve had a fantastic run of luck, but you’ve got to know that sooner or later it’s going to run out.”

  The waitress arrived then and we dropped into silence as she set steaming plates of jambalaya before us.

  “You don’t know much about lightning, do you,” Kim said when we were alone again.

  “I’ve treated my share of—”

  “But do you know that it’s usually not fatal, that better than nine out of ten victims survive?”

  Truthfully, I hadn’t known the survival rate was that high. “Well, you’re closing in on number ten.”

  She shrugged. “Just a number. The first shock on that dock in Texas should have killed me. The usual bolt carries a current of ten thousand amps at a hundred million volts. Makes the electric chair look like a triple-A battery. Of course the charge only lasts a tiny fraction of a second, but that first one was enough to put me into cardiac arrest. If Karen and Bill hadn’t known CPR, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  She dug into her jambalaya and chewed for a few seconds.

  “Good, isn’t it,” I said.

  She nodded. “Delicious.”

  But she said it with no great conviction, and I got the feeling that eating was something Kim McCormick did simply to keep from feeling hungry.

  “But where was I? Oh, yes. After failing to get hit a second time in Texas, I started studying up on lightning. We still don’t understand it completely, but what we do know is fascinating. Do you realize that worldwide, every second of every minute of every day there are almost a thousand lightning flashes? Most are cloud to cloud or cloud to air. Only fifteen percent hit the ground. Those are the ones I’m interested in.”

  This was the most animated I’d seen her. I leaned across the table, drawn by her enthusiasm.

  “But you’re from Jersey. You were first struck in Texas. What are you doing here?”

  “It’s where the lightning is. The National Weather service keeps track of lightning—something called flash density ratings. According to their records, Central Florida is the lightning capital of the country, maybe the world. You’ve got this broad strip of hot, low-lying land between two huge, cooler bodies of water. Take atmospheric instability due to wide temperature gradients, add tons of moisture, and voilà—thunderstorm alley.”

  “Seems you’ve been pretty successful around here—if you can call getting hit by lightning success.”

  She smiled. “I do. I started up around the Orlando area because of all the lakes. Being out in a boat during a storm is the best way to get hit, but I started thinking it was too risky, too easy to get knocked overboard and drown. Or take a direct hit from a positive giant.”

  “A what?”

  “A positive giant. They originate at the very top of the storm cell, maybe fifty thousand feet up, and they can strike thirty miles ahead of the storm. You’ve heard of people getting struck down by a so-called ‘bolt from the blue’? That’s a positive giant. I don’t want to get hit by one of those because they’re so much more powerful than a regular bolt. Almost always fatal.” She pointed her fork at me. “See? Told you I’m not suicidal.”

  “I believe you, I believe you.”

  “Good. Anyway, I settled on golf courses as my best bet. The landscapers take down a lot of the little trees but tend to leave the really big ones between the fairways.” She showed me a pink, half-dollar-size scar on her right elbow. “That’s an exit burn from the strike at Ventura Country Club.” She parted her hair to reveal a quarter-size scar on her right parietal scalp. “This one’s an entry at Hunter’s Creek Golf Club. I could show you more, but not in public. I’ve got other scars you can’t see. Like a mild seizure disorder, for instance—I t
ake Dilantin for that. And I’ve lost some of my hearing.”

  I was losing my appetite. This poor, deranged woman. “And did you see…?”

  “Timmy?” She smiled. Her eyes fairly glowed. “Yes. Every single time.”

  Kim McCormick was delusional. Had to be. And yet she was so convincing. But then that’s the power of a delusion.

  But what if it wasn’t a delusion? What if she really…?

  I couldn’t let myself go there.

  “One of these times…”

  “You’re right, I suppose. And I’m prepared for it. I’ve got a solid will: How I’m to be cremated, where my ashes will go, and a list of all the charities that’ll share my assets. But I stack the deck in my favor when I go out. That’s why I get under a tree. Odds are against taking a direct hit that way. You get a secondary jolt—a flash that jumps from the primary strike point—and so far that’s worked just fine for my purposes. Plus I keep low to the ground to reduce my chance of being thrown too far.”

  “But why do you undress?”

  “I figure wet skin attracts a charge better than wet fabric.”

  I shook my head. “How long are you going to keep this up?”

  “Until I get closer to him. He seems nearer here than he was in Texas, but he’s still too far away.”

  “Too far for what?”

  “I need to see his eyes, hear his voice, read his lips.”

  “Why? What are you looking for?”

  A lost look tinged with terrible sorrow fluttered across her features. Her voice was barely audible. “Forgiveness.”

  I stared at her.

  “Don’t ask,” she whispered before I could speak. “Subject closed.” She shook herself and gave me a forced smile. “Let’s talk about something else. Anything but the weather.”

  I stand alone on a rotted wharf, engulfed in fog. The stagnant pond before me carries a vaguely septic stench. No sound, no movement. I wait. Soon I hear the creak of wood, the gentle lap of a polished hull gliding through still water. A dark shape appears, with the distinctive curved bow of a gondola. It noses toward me through the fog, but as it nears I notice something unusual about the hull. It’s classic glossy black, like all gondolas, but the seating area is closed over. I realize with a start that the hull is a coffin…a child’s coffin…and bright red blood is oozing from under the lid. I shout to the gondolier. He’s gaunt, the traditional striped shirt hanging loose on his bony frame. His face is hidden by his broad straw hat until he lifts his head and stares at me. I scream when I see the scar running across his left eye. He grins and begins poling his floating sarcophagus away, back into the fog. I jump into the foul water and swim after him, stroking frantically as I try to catch up. But the gondola is too fast and the fog swallows it again, leaving me alone and lost in the water. I swim in circles, my arms growing weaker and weaker…finally they refuse to respond, dangling limply at my sides as I slip beneath the surface…water rushes into my nose and throat, choking me…