Struck (12 page)

“I just—”

“You just know,” I finished for him, my voice rising. “Does this have something to do with the Seekers? You know, those crazy people you said you wanted to get me away from, and then instead you left me unconscious with them. Do you have any idea what they told me once I woke up from your little dream that’s not a dream?”

Jeremy’s hand went from his neck to his forehead, his thumb massaging one temple and his fingers the other. The fingers quickly moved to the bridge of his nose, pinching there. His neck strained like he was in pain.

“I’m sorry I ran out on you,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do.”

“How about
not
run out on me?”

His cheeks reddened. “I said I was sorry. Be angry with me if you want, but you have to listen to me, Mia.” His fingers pinched harder on the bridge of his nose. His eyes squeezed shut. “You have to stay away from the Seekers.”

“That’s what they said about you.”

“Don’t listen to anything they say.”

“Why not?”

“They’re dangerous.”

“You said that already. How are they dangerous?”

“Now that they know who you are, they’ll try to use you.” His teeth clamped so tightly it seemed they might shatter like glass.

Jeremy’s words took me back a step.

“Who am I?” I asked in a voice so soft my own ears barely picked it up.

Katrina’s words played through my mind.

A girl standing atop the last tower, surrounded by a raging storm and lightning made of blood … the final portent before the end
…

“I told you, I can’t explain it,” Jeremy said. “But—” He lowered his hand. “I could show you.”

Jeremy took a single step and closed the distance between us. I sucked in a breath as I felt a sort of tingling heat pouring off him, making fever erupt all over my skin. Was this the Spark? It sure didn’t feel like it. What it felt like was fire. Not like the fire that had turned the Dealer’s tent into an oven. Some other kind of fire. The kind you wanted to put your hand in. The kind you invited to burn you.

Jeremy raised his hands. He was shaking. “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

But I was, and I opened my mouth to tell him so. Then his palms pressed over my eyes. The thrill of his touch sank through my skin, and I was suddenly dizzy. I felt like I might fall to my knees. My mind filled with light, and then darkness and then—

It was like one of those little picture books with images that become a movie when you flip the pages.

Only these pages were about me.

* * *

I was surrounded on all sides by crumbled mountains of concrete and glass. There was a thick carpet of cement dust beneath my feet. Ahead of me in the torn and ruined street I saw the white pillar of the Tower, jabbing into the night sky like a blunt needle. I was in the Waste
.

Flip.

I took a step and the ground beneath me disappeared. I looked down and saw I had stepped into a chasm in the street. My stomach rose to my throat as I began the fall into darkness, knowing this was my last moment alive
.

Flip.

People dancing. Their bodies pressing in around me, moving in epileptic paroxysms to the heart-thumping electro beat. A beat like thunder. No … not like thunder. I turned my face up. We were on the roof of the Tower. The sky was heavy with wet black cotton clouds. Not
like
thunder. The beat
was
thunder. Lightning flashed … red lightning like blood-filled veins growing through the sky. My eyes burned. I blinked until I could see again
.

Flip.

The dancers were running. Running for the edge of the Tower as lightning attacked the roof. Some of the dancers leaped into nothingness. I heard them scream through their fall. But others joined hands in a ring that grew until it circled the Tower. There weren’t enough of them to close the circle, and I was glad, because I knew somehow that if they closed the circle they’d be able to break the storm. And I didn’t want them to break the storm. This was
my
storm, and I wanted to live it. I raised my hands to the sky, feeling the thrill of what was to come
.

Thunder crashed
.

I felt my charge rising up to meet the lightning. To connect. To
—

Flip.

“Hey! You! Get your hands off her!”

Jeremy withdrew his hands. I found myself blinking as though a bright light had been shone directly into my pupils.

“Back off, pervert!”

Jeremy stepped back, holding up his hands again, only now to show they were empty and innocent.

We stared at each other, both breathing like we’d come to a sudden halt after a sprint. But Jeremy was no longer shaking, and the pain was gone from his eyes.

“Now do you see?” he asked. “Do you understand?”

My skin sang with such intensity it seemed Jeremy would have to hear it. My whole body was burning with fever. I told my heart to cool down. It felt like a lightbulb about to pop.

“Are you listening, kid? I said back up!”

I turned around and saw Militiaman Brent jogging toward us, Taser in hand.

“It’s okay,” I called to him.

“The hell it is! He’s the stalker!”

I turned to Jeremy again, and found him backing away, down the sidewalk. “What was that? What did you do to me?”

“Get over here, kid!”

“I better go,” Jeremy said, glancing nervously at Militiaman
Brent. He began walking quickly back the way we’d come. I tried to grab his arm, but he kept moving.

He looked at me over his shoulder. “Don’t go to the Waste, Mia. Stay out of the Waste and away from the Seekers.”

He turned a corner and disappeared. I would have run after him, but Militiaman Brent reached me at that moment, looking pleased with himself.

“Think I might have scared him off for good this time,” my self-appointed bodyguard said, puffing out his chest.

I glared at him. “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

“Come on.” He patted me on the back. “I’ll make sure you get home safe. Now aren’t you glad I gave you that pepper spray?”

I set aside my annoyance with him and nodded. “You have no idea.”

11

PARKER MUST HAVE
been watching out the window for me, because he opened the front door the second I came within sight of the house.

“You should go,” I told Militiaman Brent. “We’ll be okay now.”

“You sure?” He cocked an eyebrow. “What if the stalker comes back?”

“He’s not dangerous.” I forced a smile. “He actually kind of came to my rescue today. I’m pretty sure he’s one of the good guys.”

Militiaman Brent nodded. “If you say so. Take care, Mia Price.” Parker reached me at that moment. “Keep an eye on your sister, kid,” the militiaman said, and slapped Parker on the back hard enough to make him stumble. “You two stay out of trouble.”

He saluted sharply before departing.

“What happened?” Parker demanded when Militiaman Brent was out of earshot. “Your eyes are red. Have you been crying?”

“I didn’t get the meds.” My voice scratched from my throat, still raw.

I expected an
I-told-you-not-to-go
from Parker, but he
only nodded. “It’s okay. We’ll figure out something else for Mom.” He hung his arm over my shoulder and walked me into the house. I realized for the first time Parker was now taller than me by at least an inch. When had that happened?

Inside, I stared at my reflection in the decorative mirror that hung on the wall in our foyer. The mirror had fallen during the quake but had stayed miraculously intact, except for one long crack running diagonally through the glass. At least it hadn’t shattered completely. I figured that exempted us from the seven years’ bad luck clause.

I barely recognized the face gazing back at me from the cracked glass that divided my image with a jagged, lightning-shaped line. My hair was frizzed out and gray with ash and sand. There was soot streaked on my cheeks. My eyes were more than red. They were blazing with veins, like the lightning scars on my skin had crawled into them.

I turned my back on that image. I didn’t want to see myself that way.

“How’s Mom?” I asked in a shaky voice.

Parker shrugged. “She hasn’t come out of her room, but I don’t hear the TV. I think she’s asleep.”

I nodded and moved to the kitchen, where I opened the freezer door. The memory of Jeremy’s heat was still alive on my skin like a sunburn. I stood there with the door open, bathing in frosty plumes of air. I wanted to climb inside and shut the door behind me, shut out the world and exist in the cold and the dark for a little while. Sometimes the heat of my own body became so unbearable I just wanted to turn it off. Turn everything off.

“What happened with the Dealer?” Parker asked.

“He stole my money and kicked me out,” I said, keeping it simple.

“All of it?”

“Yep.”

“What are we going to do now?”

I didn’t have an answer. I closed the freezer door. “I’m going upstairs for a while.”

“Mia?”

“Yeah?”

“I was thinking … don’t be mad, okay. I’m just suggesting something. Maybe … maybe we should take Mom to one of those revivals. The ones on the beach.”

It took me a moment to register what he was saying. The revivals on the beach …
Prophet’s
revivals.

Don’t make us go to Prophet
.

He does something to people like us
.

He changes us. Puts his hands on us and changes us
.

A cannonball-sized weight landed in my stomach. “Why would we do that?”

“Well …” He took a deep breath and launched into his pitch. “I’ve been reading about religious mysticism. There’s all kinds of weird stuff that’s happened in churches and cults and whatever. People with tumors the size of softballs get a blessing and suddenly the cancer is gone, like it was never there. Or people walk through fire or across broken glass or get themselves bitten by deadly snakes and don’t get hurt. And there are tribes in Africa that do rituals to bring rain during a drought, and sometimes it works. A storm will just appear out of nowhere.”

“Parker …”

“Some people think it’s God working through these people to perform miracles. But others think it’s like … like you get enough people together who believe the same way or want the same thing, and what they want just
happens
. It’s called concentrated will or collective consciousness or something like that. You
will
something to happen and it does. Maybe it’s like the Seekers were saying about the Spark, and how it’s all about concentrated energy and the power of thought. It’s like these miracles are about what you believe and how strongly you believe it, see?” he continued. “So that might work with Mom, like it’s worked with those people who had earthquake fever. She believes in this stuff Prophet keeps saying, so maybe if she believes he can heal her—”

“No,” I said.

“Why can’t we try? We could take her to one of Prophet’s revivals and see.”

I shook my head at him. I felt vaguely angry, somewhere down deep. But mostly I felt exhausted.

“You really want to take Mom to see Prophet?” I asked him. “You think we should encourage her belief in a televangelist cult leader who claims the world is going to end in three days?”

I watched the enthusiasm drain slowly from his eyes. “I want her to get better.”

“She will,” I said, forcing myself to sound certain when I wasn’t. “It just takes time.”

“What about the earthquake survivors’ group, then?” Parker asked.

“What about it?” I brushed past him, heading for the stairs that led up to my bedroom.

“You said we could talk to Mom about going, see if she’s willing to try it.”

I didn’t want to tell Parker the real reason I was reluctant. I doubted he remembered the room number listed on the flyer.

Room 317.

Mr. Kale’s room.

I was certain that if Parker realized this, he’d be even more determined to go.

I made a show of dragging myself up the stairs. “I’m tired, Parker. We can talk to Mom about it tomorrow.” I closed my door behind me, letting Parker know the conversation was over.

I flopped onto my bed, exhausted. I wished I could take a nap, shut down for a while. If I didn’t already know Mom’s sleeping pills wouldn’t do a thing for me—if she had any left—I would have popped one or five. But I’d tried every sleeping pill on the market. Nothing worked.

I grabbed my laptop off the nightstand and opened a browser, did a silent cheer when the Web page loaded. The Internet was slow, but at least it was working.

Out of curiosity more than interest, I’d looked at Schiz’s blog a few times. But that was before the quake. Before the Seekers.

The home page was simple, no photos or graphics or ads. Just a white background and black type. There were dozens of posts, too many for me to read them all, so I scrolled through the headlines. It took me about twenty seconds to come to the conclusion that the posts revolved
around two subjects: Rance Ridley Prophet and the coming apocalypse.

Rance Ridley … Prophet?

Signs of the End Times (plague, war, famine, all that good stuff)

Why Is the Church of Light Buying Property in the Waste?

Rance Ridley Prophet Wants YOU for His Army of God!

The Sky Is Falling, For Realz Bitches!

Where Is Prophet’s Twelfth Apostle?

Who IS Rance Ridley Prophet Really?

I started reading that one. The time stamp said it had been posted only five minutes ago.

Who IS Rance Ridley Prophet Really?

He’s the man of the hour. The man who predicted the Puente Hills Earthquake on live television minutes before it hit. Who turned Los Angeles into the Bible Belt’s long-lost buckle; who’s converting people to the Church of Light faster than an army of Mormon missionaries hopped up on Mountain Dew. The man Followers can’t shut up about. He’s Rance Ridley Prophet, and he wants YOU to surrender your soul! Doesn’t that sound fun? A nice religious lobotomy at one of his famous midnight revivals?