Struck
Authors: Jennifer Bosworth
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #General, #Love & Romance, #Science Fiction, #Mysteries & Detective Stories
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
About the Book
My name is Mia Price and I am a
LIGHTNING ADDICT.
I want the lightning to find me. I crave it like
LUNGS CRAVE OXYGEN.
Nothing makes you feel more alive than being
STRUCK.
To Ryan, for believing
It never rains in California
But girl, don’t they warn ya
It pours, man, it pours
Albert Hammond
Prologue
When you’ve been struck by lightning as many times as I have, you start to expect the worst pretty much all the time. You never know when that jagged scrawl of white fire, charged with a hundred million volts of electricity, might blaze down from the sky and find its mark on you; sear a hole like a bullet right through you, or turn your hair to ash; maybe leave your skin blackened to a crisp, or stop your heart; make you blind, or deaf, or both.
Sometimes lightning plays with you a little, lifts you into the air and drops you twenty yards away, blows your shoes off, or flash-fries the clothes from your body, leaving you naked and steaming in the rain. Lightning could wipe the last few hours or days from your memory, or overload your brain, short-circuiting your personality and rendering you a completely different person. I heard about a woman who was struck by lightning and cured of terminal cancer. A paraplegic who was given the ability to walk again.
Sometimes lightning strikes
you
, but it’s the person standing next to you who ends up in the hospital. Or the morgue.
Any of that could happen, or none of it, or something else no one’s ever heard of. The thing about lightning is you
never know what it’s going to do to you. Lightning could turn you into some kind of freakish human battery, storing up energy, leaving you with the persistent feeling that any day now you’re going to spontaneously combust. Like a bomb is going to go off inside you and do, well … what bombs do best.
Or maybe that’s just me.
My name is Mia Price, and I am a human lightning rod. Do they make a support group for that? They should, and let me tell you why.
My name is Mia Price, and I am a lightning
addict
.
There. Now you know the truth. I want the lightning to find me. I crave it like lungs crave oxygen. There’s nothing that makes you feel more alive than being struck. Unless, of course, it kills you. It does that to me from time to time, which is why I moved to Los Angeles. As the song says, it never rains in Southern California. But the song also says when it pours, it
pours
.
The song is right.
My name is Mia Price, and it’s been one year since my last strike, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped expecting the worst. Lightning only strikes in L.A. a handful of times every year. The problem is, I traded thunderstorms for earthquakes, one earthquake in particular. The one that changed the city, and my life, forever.
That day, the day of the worst natural disaster to hit the United States, oh, pretty much ever … it rained.
Actually, it poured.
PART 1
Lightning never strikes twice in the same place
.
—Proverb
APRIL 14
Three days until the storm …
1
I DON’T SLEEP
much. An hour here. Two hours there. Chronic insomnia, it’s one of my more tolerable lightning strike aftereffects. Not as bad as the veiny red scars that cover me from neck to toes, or the burning in my chest that flares hotter when I get a little emotional. Insomnia? Eh. It could be worse (and usually is). Most people wish they had more hours in the day. I keep almost the full twenty-four.
When I go to bed at night, it’s not with the intention to sleep. If sleep happens, great. If it doesn’t, well, that’s something I’ve gotten used to.
So when I opened my eyes and saw a guy standing over my bed, I had to assume I’d finally fallen asleep. And when I noticed the shiny silver knife gripped in his hand—the kind of pretty, decorative blade that has no practical application but murder—I decided this was not a dream I wanted to see through to the end. It would have been nice to stay asleep a bit longer, but now I was going to have to wake myself before Nightmare Boy used his knife to gut me.
“Wake up, Mia,” I told myself in a voice that came out hoarse and scratchy, like it would have if I’d actually awakened.
The guy startled back from my bed. He dropped the
knife and it fell straight down and stuck in the wood floor with a
thunk
. Must be sharp. He scrambled to yank it free, but looked unsure what to do with it after that. His face was in shadow, but his wide, white eyes and jerky movements told me he was as scared as I was supposed to be. As far as nightmares went, he wasn’t too bad. I decided to stay asleep.
I closed my eyes, hoping I’d open them to a new dream.
But there were no more dreams that night, only Nightmare Boy’s soft, retreating footsteps.
When I opened my eyes again, feeling as though I hadn’t slept at all, it was the morning I’d been dreading. The morning when my brother, Parker, and I would return to school for the first time since the quake.
We had a dream dictionary kicking around the house somewhere. If I consulted it, I was pretty sure it would confirm my suspicion that a knife in your dream was a bad omen. Not that I needed an omen to give me the heads-up that this day was going to suck.
As I dragged myself out of bed, I noticed a small split in the floor, right about where Nightmare Boy’s knife had lodged itself in the floorboards. Strange. Then again, there were plenty of other little cracks and splits on the old floor of my restored attic bedroom.
I put thoughts of the dream away. I had bigger problems—real problems—to worry about. I didn’t know what to expect back at school, but if the changes that had taken root throughout the rest of the city were any indication, I should probably give in and expect the worst, as usual.
Thanks for the warning, Nightmare Boy. Not that it’ll do me any good.
2
I STOOD OUTSIDE
Mom’s bedroom door and listened to Prophet’s muffled voice. I couldn’t make out what he said, but after a month of Mom obsessively watching his televised sermons, I could guess the subject matter.
The end of the world is at hand.
Those who surrender their souls to Prophet will be saved.
Those who don’t will suffer and die and suffer some more.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We heard you the first time.
“Mom?” I tapped on the door before turning the knob. It was seven in the morning, and outside the sun was doing its job, but Mom’s bedroom was a cave. She sat at her window in the grungy bathrobe she hadn’t shed in days, peeking through the slats in the blinds. Her eyes traveled back and forth between the window and the TV, which was playing
The Hour of Light
, Rance Ridley Prophet’s morning broadcast. He did three shows a day: morning, midday, and evening. Ever since we brought her home from the hospital, Mom had been obsessed with Prophet. The only way she missed his broadcast was if the electricity or cable went out. I almost looked forward to those outages now.
“Brothers and sisters,” Prophet intoned, “God will soon
make His final judgment. You must decide now on which side you will stand, on the side of heaven, or on the side of earth and its wicked, worldly pleasures. Will you be lifted up, raptured to paradise, or laid low by God’s terrible vengeance?”
Prophet’s voice drowned out my entrance into the bedroom. Sometimes I wondered if Mom’s hearing was somehow damaged during the quake. She seemed so oblivious to what went on around her. The doctor who attended to her for all of five minutes before he gave her bed away to someone more needy said she was fine. Malnourished and dehydrated, but she’d live. After three days trapped under a collapsed building, she had some bad bruises, a few cracked ribs, and a dozen lacerations on her face and arms—caused by the wall of glass that had exploded near her when the building started to buckle—most of which had nearly healed by now. Physically, she was as sound as could be expected. Mental health was another matter.
The Internet—along with our utilities and cable—had been in and out since the quake, but when our connection was working I’d researched Mom’s symptoms until I determined what was wrong with her: Acute Stress Disorder—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’s evil twin on steroids—caused by a traumatic event, which is re-experienced in flashbacks, anxiety, delusions, emotional detachment, even amnesia.
Mom had all the symptoms and then some. She should have been in a hospital, under the care of a psychiatrist and a team of nurses tending to her around the clock. But the hospitals were still full of patients with actual life-threatening
injuries, people with broken backs and crushed limbs and infected burns. People suffering from earthquake fever, an immunity disorder caused by mold released from the ground during the quake. People so malnourished and dehydrated from the lack of food and water in the city that the only way their bodies would accept nutrients was through a tube. There were no beds for those with functioning bodies but malfunctioning minds.