STRUCK BY LIGHTNING

TW: Violence, murder

Elliot Mercer was dead for eleven minutes.

At 4:17 on a Tuesday afternoon in June, Elliot was struck by lightning while he was crossing a parking lot behind the building where he worked. At 4:23, paramedics found him without a pulse. At 4:28, after repeated attempts at resuscitation, the monitor still showed no organized cardiac activity. One additional attempt at cardioversion using full power was successful in restoring normal heart rhythm.

At 4:29, Elliot opened his eyes.

In Tampa Bay, drenching rain is not uncommon, and the Bay is known as the lightning death capital of the world. Elliot’s last memory was of rain coming down so violently that the cars in the parking lot seemed to be dissolving behind it. He had been running toward his own car holding his jacket over his head while jingling the car keys in his hand when the world became orange. There was no thunder, at least none that he remembered. There was only the peculiar sensation of his hair standing on end, his skin tingling, then an intense orange-white flash.

Emergency medical technicians used a defibrillator to shock his heart back into normal rhythm. He woke up soon after that in the ambulance. The first things he noticed were severe cramping pain and the nidorous odor of burnt flesh. 

He spent nine days in the hospital.

The doctors expected burns, neurological damage, cardiac arrhythmias, kidney failure, memory loss. He had some of these briefly but not persistently. His survival was remarkable enough, but by the third day something else had begun to interest them.

A CT scan showed something no one could explain. Embedded within his body, running along each side of his spine, were bilateral columns of hyper-dense and highly vascularized tissue that didn’t belong there. It appeared to be living tissue. It had its own blood supply and was intertwined with an unusually heavy network of nerve fibers. The columns ran from the bottom of the cervical spine down to the sacral nerves, appeared cylindrical, and measured approximately 16 inches long and two inches thick.

The radiology team, a neurologist, and a vascular surgeon met to discuss the findings. All were totally stumped. They had no idea what these columns represented. 

The vascular surgeon suggested performing a biopsy, but Elliot refused. 

"New organs don't just grow in people," Elliot said.

"No," the neurologist replied. "They don't."

"So what is it?"

"We don't know."

"Is it dangerous?"

"We don't know that, either."

Whatever these strange columns of tissue were, they weren't bothering him at all, and after nine days of being examined, scanned, prodded, photographed, discussed and occasionally displayed to groups of physicians who spoke about him as though he were an unusually interesting cadaver, he was finally discharged home.

The first strange incident occurred that night.

Elliot was standing barefoot in his kitchen, drinking orange juice directly from the carton, when he reached for the refrigerator door.

A blue arc of electricity jumped from his fingers to the metal handle. He jerked backward. The refrigerator went dark. So did the microwave. So did the clock on the stove and the overhead light.

From somewhere down the hallway came the irritated voice of a neighbor.

"Power's out again. Check the breaker box.”

Elliot stood motionless in the darkness.

There was a peculiar sensation deep in his back, approximately where the doctors had found the mysterious tissue. It wasn't painful. It felt almost like a pressure. From there the sensation seemed to move upward through his body, along his shoulders and down his arms. His fingertips tingled.

Elliot looked at his hand. He pointed at the sink. Nothing happened. He laughed at himself. Then he tried again. This time he concentrated. A thin blue-white arc snapped from his fingertip to the faucet.

Elliot stopped laughing.

For the next three hours, he experimented.

At first the distances were measured in inches. He discovered that he could produce a spark almost at will, although doing so required a peculiar type of concentration he found difficult to describe. He wasn't contracting a muscle exactly. It was more like deciding to move a muscle he had never known existed.

By midnight, he could throw an arc several feet with pinpoint accuracy.

He tried it on a fork, a screwdriver, an empty beer can. A small discharge made the can jump. A larger one left a blackened hole in its side.

He discovered something else. The electricity returned.

After each discharge, the pressure in his back gradually rebuilt. If he stood near an electrical outlet or appliance, it seemed to return faster. When he placed his hand against the refrigerator, he could actually feel current entering him, although the sensation bore no resemblance to an electrical shock. It was a pleasurable feeling, similar to eating something delicious when very hungry. 

Whatever had grown inside him was doing something impossible. It was storing electricity.

Elliot slept very little that night.

Over the next several weeks, he learned much more about his ability to control and produce electricity. 

He could deliver a mild shock through his fingertips, no worse than static electricity. He could produce enough current to cause painful muscle contraction. At higher levels, he could disable small electronic devices or start a fire. He discovered that he could send an arc perhaps ten or twelve feet under favorable conditions. But if desired, he could turn the arc into a serious, direct bolt of current. 

He learned caution. He wore rubber-soled shoes. He stopped touching strangers. He avoided swimming pools. Most importantly, he told no one.

At work, the lightning strike made him briefly famous. Coworkers called him Electric Elliot until the joke became tiresome. People asked whether he could predict storms or make light bulbs glow by holding them. Elliot laughed along with them.

The irony amused him.

His first deliberate use of the power against another person occurred six weeks after the accident.

He was leaving a convenience store shortly before midnight when he heard shouting from the side of the building. A young woman was backed against the wall while a man stood in front of her. Another man watched from several feet away, holding a tire iron.

Elliot might ordinarily have kept walking. Instead, he stopped.

“Hey, bud. Leave her alone."

The first man turned. "Mind your own business, jerk face.”

Elliot surprised himself by not being afraid.

"She is my business."

The man took two steps toward him. Elliot raised his hand.

The discharge was small, barely visible. The man cried out and collapsed onto one knee, head hanging forward.

"What the hell?"

Elliot felt the pressure rebuilding inside him.

“Get lost, both of you.”

Neither man argued.

Elliot drove home with his hands trembling on the steering wheel, not from fear but from exhilaration. For the first time, the strange phenomenon inside him seemed less like an abnormality and more like a gift.

The next incident was harder to justify. The distinction between using the power constructively and abusing it became increasingly difficult to differentiate.

Elliot had never thought of himself as an intimidating person. He was twenty-six, of average height and build, and had spent most of his life negotiating the small frustrations everyone else endured. He waited in lines. He accepted bad service. He tolerated rude people. He argued with landlords and supervisors and customer-service representatives and generally lost.

Now he discovered that arguments could have decisive endings in his favor.

His supervisor, Warren Pike, had always been particularly good at making Elliot feel insignificant. Pike was a heavyset man in his fifties who had perfected the managerial art of humiliating subordinates while maintaining the expression of someone explaining arithmetic to a slow child.

One afternoon he reprimanded Elliot in front of six coworkers for an error Elliot had not committed.

Elliot waited until the others had left.

"You know that wasn't my mistake."

Pike continued looking at his computer.

"It happened on your account."

"That doesn't make it my mistake."

"Then perhaps you should pay closer attention to what's happening on your account."

Elliot felt the familiar pressure deep in his back.

“Hey, look at me, chubster.”

Pike looked up. "Excuse me?"

"I said look at me when I'm talking to you."

Pike leaned back in his chair.

"Maybe you should take the rest of the afternoon off before I make it a permanent vacation.”

Elliot calmly responded, “Oh, really?”

Suddenly, Pike screamed, “Ow!” as he jumped out of his chair, as if someone had sunk a large pin deep into his buttocks.

Elliot coyly asked, “Hey, what happened? Are you OK?”

Once regaining his composure, Pike stammered, “I don’t know. I got a sudden severe pain right in my butt. I don’t know what happened.”

Elliot responded, “Oh, what a shame! That really did seem to hurt! I sure hope it doesn’t happen again!”

Suddenly, Pike again screamed, “Ow!” as he lurched forward, grabbing his backside.

Elliot smirked, “Warren, this is a fair warning. Don’t ever talk down to me again, or next time, I’ll turn up the juice and fry you to a crisp. You’re lucky I was using only low amperage.”

Pike stared at him, mouth agape. 

Elliot walked out.

The following morning, Pike was polite. Exceedingly polite.

And that affected Elliot more deeply than anything that had happened since the lightning strike. It was one thing to possess power. It was another to discover that wielding that power could improve people's manners.

Elliot began making small adjustments to his world.

The neighbor downstairs had a habit of playing music after midnight. Elliot had complained twice without result. The third time, he went downstairs and knocked.

The neighbor opened the door.

"It's after one."

“So?"

Elliot touched the metal doorframe. A blue spark sizzled between his fingers.

The music stopped.

A mechanic tried to charge him for work Elliot believed had not been necessary. The discussion became much shorter after every light in the garage flickered simultaneously.

A man at a bar shoved him in an obnoxious manner. Elliot deactivated his legs, causing them to spasm uncontrollably, the man collapsing as he stood there. 

None of these people was seriously injured. Elliot reminded himself of that whenever a small residue of discomfort followed an incident. He also always remembered not to strike out with too much power. 

He wasn't a violent man. He was simply no longer helpless.

His friends noticed the change before he did.

"You've gotten strange," his friend Kevin told him one evening.

They were sitting in Elliot's apartment watching a basketball game.

"Strange how?"

"I don't know. Angry. Overly self-assured.“

"I'm not angry. But I have been feeling very confident lately.”

"Okay."

Elliot turned toward him.

"What does that mean?"

"Nothing."

"No, you said it. What does it mean?"

Kevin looked at him for a moment.

Then he shrugged.

"Nothing."

Elliot noticed that Kevin had glanced at his hands. For the first time it occurred to Elliot that people might be afraid of him.

The thought should have disturbed him. Instead, part of him loved the feeling.

Elliot’s girlfriend, Rachel, whom Elliot had been seeing for several months, also noticed the change. She knew nothing about the source of his increasingly peculiar confidence, although at first she liked his new decisiveness. But soon things took an ominous tone. 

One evening, they argued over something so trivial that neither of them remembered later how it began.

Rachel was standing near the sofa.

"You don't listen anymore," she said.

"I listen."

"No. You seem more aloof lately. Almost uncaring.”

"That's ridiculous.” 

“I feel it even now.”

Elliot felt irritation rising. The lamp beside Rachel flickered. She stopped speaking.

Elliot noticed. So did she. Neither of them looked at the lamp.

"What were you going to say?" Elliot asked.

"Nothing."

"You were saying something."

"It doesn't matter. Don’t worry about it.”

Elliot came to the sad realization that even his friends were becoming afraid of him. For the first time, he saw himself from the other side of the room. He apologized. Rachel said there was nothing to apologize for.

That made him feel worse.

For several days afterward, Elliot used no electricity at all. He decided that he had allowed things to go too far. Whatever had happened to him did not give him the right to frighten people.

He sincerely believed it. For a while. But restraint had become more difficult now that he had discovered how unnecessary it was.

Within weeks, the old habits returned. Elliot did not think of himself as threatening people. He merely allowed them to understand the situation. Usually he didn't have to demonstrate anything. A small spark between his fingers or causing someone to experience a mild tingling sensation was enough.

People became remarkably cooperative. And Elliot mistook cooperation for respect.

Months passed. The strange tissue on either side of his spinal cord had grown in diameter and capacitance. Follow-up imaging showed that it had spread through much of the muscle, branching between muscle fibers and surrounding nerves. The doctors urged Elliot to let them investigate further.

He refused. By then, he could scarcely remember what it had been like to live without it. He also began to understand and feel the nature of electricity. He intrinsically knew that electrical power was the product of voltage times amps, and could vary its output at will.

The end came at a gas station on an ordinary Thursday night.

Elliot had stopped to fill his car on the way home. He was standing beside the pump when shouting erupted near the convenience store.

Two young men were arguing. One of them stumbled backward into Elliot's car.

"Watch it," Elliot said.

The man turned. He was perhaps twenty, thin, agitated and obviously looking for somewhere to put his anger.

"What'd you say?"

"You heard me."

The young man walked toward him.

"Go home before you get hurt,” Elliot said.

The young man reached beneath his jacket and produced a revolver.

Elliot looked at the gun and laughed derisively, as the anger began to boil within him. 

The agitated young man raised the gun, pointing it at Elliot’s head, and pulled the hammer back. “Tu madre!”

With a combination of fear and fury, Elliot raised his hand and blasted the gunman with full power. The electrical arc was as enormous as a giant Tesla coil. For an instant, the gas station became brighter than daylight.

The man’s body instantly burst into flames and crumpled into a charred husk. 

The electrical discharge jumped elsewhere. Elliot saw it branch toward the pump. Only then did he fully realize where he was standing.

The explosion of the underground gas tanks lifted him 20 feet off the ground.

He vaguely remembered the blistering heat and crimson flames, seeing the roof over the pumps fold upward, and then nothing.

Elliot woke twelve days later. Rachel was sitting beside the bed. He tried to speak, but his throat hurt. She stood and called for the nurse.

It took several days before he understood what had happened.

There was not much left of the young man with the gun, just a blackened chunk of gristle. Two other people had been injured, though both would recover. Elliot himself had suffered burns, fractures and extensive injuries to his abdomen and pelvis. The explosion had torn blood vessels deep in his back, causing massive retroperitoneal hemorrhage.

The surgeons had operated for hours. Much of his psoas muscle group and surrounding tissue had been destroyed. They removed much of it, along with the strange tissue growing through it.

Elliot listened without speaking.

My capacitors. What happened to them?” he finally asked.

The surgeon frowned.

"What capacitors?"

"The tissue. The cylindrical tissue along my spine.”

"Most of it was unsalvageable."

"Where is it?"

"Pathology has some specimens."

Elliot stared at the ceiling.

That evening, after everyone had left, he reached toward the metal railing beside the bed. He concentrated.

Nothing happened.

He tried again. Nothing.

He touched the rail with his fingertip. Cold metal. No current.

Elliot closed his eyes. His recovery took months.

He had to learn to walk normally again. There were skin grafts, physical therapy and two additional operations. Rachel visited occasionally at first and then less often. Kevin came twice. Warren Pike sent a card signed by everyone at work.

Eventually Elliot went home. For three weeks, he tried not to think about it.

The doctors had explained what they had removed. There was nothing left to examine except a few preserved fragments, and those, according to the pathologist, looked like badly burned muscle interlaced with an unusual concentration of nerve fibers.

Elliot knew better. He had tested himself dozens of times since the operation. Nothing. Still, an idea persisted.

The organs had stored electricity. That much he knew. Perhaps removing it had merely left him needing a recharge, so to speak. Perhaps whatever the lightning had changed inside him was still there, waiting.

Late one evening, Elliot went to the utility closet. He connected cables from an overhead lighting fixture he had prepared and stood for a moment, looking at them.

Then he switched on the current.

His entire body contracted and oscillated rapidly. Elliot was thrown backward onto the floor. The breaker snapped somewhere inside the wall, and the room went dark.

For several seconds he lay there unable to move. His arms burned. His heart hammered irregularly, then gradually settled. The smell of scorched insulation hung in the air.

Elliot stared into the darkness. After a while, he began to laugh. It was not a laugh brought about by humor, but by irony.

He pushed himself painfully to his feet, found the breaker panel and restored the circuit. The ceiling light came on. Elliot looked up at it. Just a light bulb.

And this time, the electricity stayed where it belonged.