The River

10

Brian awakened suddenly, and listened, and smelled.

For a moment he could not tell what had brought him up from sleep. They had banked the fire well and the coals would last until morning. It was still warm and red, giving off a little smoke. There were no bugs, the night cool wasn’t too cold, no animals prowled, and he could find nothing wrong and was closing his eyes to sleep again when he heard it.

The far-off sound of thunder. Not loud; low and rumbling. He could smell rain coming, but that should pose no problem. The storms and the wind came from the north-northwest and they had the hill in back to protect them. With the overhang facing south and being on the side of the hill, the rain wouldn’t bother them. In fact, they’d had an evening of soft rain and nothing had come in the shelter — not a drop.

And with the storm blowing any rain away from the opening, they should stay dry and safe.

Brian put a couple of pieces of wood on the fire to make sure it kept going, added a handful of green leaves to make smoke and keep the mosquitoes down, checked to see that Derek was still sleeping, and lay back on his bed.

Maybe the storm wouldn’t even hit them. He remembered the tornado that had caught him before and decided he wouldn’t worry. The odds against getting hit twice by anything as wild as a tornado were huge, and there was nothing they could do anyway, except just hope that it would miss them. He remembered the sound the tornado had made — the wild roaring — and the storm it had come from, and this was different.

A summer rainstorm with soft thunder — it didn’t seem anything to worry about and certainly nothing to keep him awake. He went back to sleep, slipping into a light doze.

Things moved in and out — he dreamed that he was talking to Derek, saying in the dream that he thought they should use the radio to call the plane and cancel the rest of the “operation,” as Derek kept calling it in the dream, because it didn’t seem to prove anything.

He was awakened by an explosion.

It seemed to come from inside his skull, inside his thinking, inside the dream: a sharp crack, so loud that he snapped awake, rolled over, and was on his feet, moving to the back of the shelter without thinking, without knowing he was moving.

It was thunder.

But not like he’d heard before, not like he’d ever heard. It was around them, exploding around them, the lightning cracking around the shelter, so close it seemed to Brian that it came from inside him.

“What—”

He knew that he opened his mouth, that he made sound, but he could hear nothing except the whack-crack of the thunder, see nothing but images frozen in the split-instants of brilliance from the lightning.

Like a camera taking pictures by a strobe light, things would seem frozen in time, caught and frozen, and then there would be another flash and things would be different.

Derek was moving.

In one flash he was still on his bed, but raised his jacket falling away from where he’d had it as a blanket, as he rose.

Darkness.

Then the next flash of light and he was on his knees.

Darkness.

Then he was leaning forward and his hand was out, reaching for his briefcase and radio next to the bed, one finger out, his face concentrating; and Brian thought, no, don’t reach, stay low; and he might have yelled it, screamed it, but it didn’t matter. No sound could be loud enough to get over the thunder.

There was a slashing, new, impossibly loud crack as lightning seemed to hit the shelter itself and Brian saw the top of the pine next to the opening suddenly explode and felt/saw the bolt come roaring down the tree, burning and splitting and splintering the wood and bark, and he saw it hit Derek.

Camera image.

Some thing, some blueness of heat and light and raw power seemed to jump from the tree to the briefcase and radio and enter Derek’s hand. All in the same part of a second it hit him and his back arched, snapped him erect, and then it seemed to fill the whole shelter and slammed into Brian as well.

He saw the blueness, almost a ball of energy, the crack/flash of color that came from inside his mind, inside his life, and then he was back and down and saw nothing more.