I Died When the Sky Fell, Now I Wake Up Holding Lightning novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Twelve Days
Greta wakes on her own ceiling with lightning in her hand, twelve days before the sky falls. Her neighbor calls her Dispatch. She quits in front of her boss, and the sky rings for only two people in the lobby.
I died on the county emergency channel with four hundred people listening.
The sky had rung for three nights by then, a flat metal note that made everyone's teeth hurt.
The grid was gone, and the Center's last generator was coughing.
I was still giving out shelter addresses when the doors came in.
Then the line went quiet, and I was on the floor.
I woke up looking at my own ceiling.
My ears were ringing.
My head felt split down the middle.
I lay still and listened for the generator, and heard a refrigerator humming instead.
I grabbed my phone off the nightstand.
The screen said Thursday, June 26.
It also said the battery was at one percent, though I had plugged it in last night.
Then it said one hundred percent.
Blue light was crawling across my palm.
It ran between my fingers in thin bright threads, and the phone charger beside the bed popped and went black.
I sat up and held my hand out in front of me.
The threads lifted off my skin and crawled up the wall, and the smoke alarm chirped once.
"Okay," I said out loud. "Okay."
I knew what day it was.
It was twelve days before the sky rang the first time.
Someone knocked on my door.
I closed my fist, and the light went out.
I opened the door a crack.
Hollis Rennick from across the hall stood in the corridor with a flashlight in one hand and a gallon jug of water in the other.
He was in his work boots and a canvas coat, though it was already warm.
We had said hello in the elevator a handful of times.
"Morning, Dispatch," he said.
He held the jug out to me.
"Storm season," he said. "Keep it by the bed. And the flashlight."
I looked at him.
He looked back with tired, steady eyes.
"I never told you where I work," I said.
"You wear the lanyard in the elevator," he said.
I wasn't wearing it now.
He put the water and the flashlight into my hands and turned away before I could say anything else.
I took them.
I stood there until his door shut.
The Emergency Management Center sat on a hill above the river, a low gray building with a flag.
I had worked there four years.
Lorraine Pruitt was waiting at my console with two coffees.
"There she is," she said. "Cream, no sugar. You look pale, hon."
"Bad night," I said.
"We'll fix that."
She was my deputy director and had been kind to me from my first day.
She put one cup by my keyboard and slid a clipboard next to it.
"Continuity drill on the eighth," she said. "We're moving the whole staff to Shelter Four for the day, so I need names. You sign here, and your plus-one goes in this column. Fee waived for staff."
I looked at the sheet.
There were thirty-one names on it already.
Shelter Four held two hundred people.
The county had four hundred and ten employees, and I knew because I had counted them out loud into a radio, with the doors coming in.
I knew too that Shelter Four had a second set of locks, ordered last month, which I had seen on a delivery slip in this very office.
"Is the drill for everyone?" I said.
"For everyone who signs," Lorraine said, and smiled. "Don't worry. I'll make sure you're covered."
She tapped the line.
The pen was already in my hand.
I put it down.
"No," I said.
The dispatch floor was full, and I said it loud enough for the whole floor to hear.
"I'm not signing a list for who gets in. Nobody here should."
Lorraine's smile stayed where it was.
"Greta," she said, kind as ever. "It's just a drill."
"Then it can be a drill for everybody."
I took off my lanyard and laid it on the console.
I picked up my jacket and the water jug and walked out past forty stunned faces.
Nobody called after me.
The lobby was cool and quiet, and I was halfway across it when two men from the co-op crew opened the panel by the elevators.
One of them was Hollis.
He wore a hard hat now, and he looked up when I came in.
Then the sky rang.
It came through the glass ceiling, one flat note of metal, and the sound went straight into my bones.
The receptionist kept typing.
The other lineman went on working.
Hollis dropped his wrench, and his eyes found mine across the lobby.
He had heard it too.
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