David

David opened his eyes and was glad he could still see. The bolt of lightning had appeared directly inside of the library and he'd looked directly into it. He had never been close enough to lightning to see more than just a whitewashed flash in his surroundings and still images of lightning strikes had always given him the impression that they were thin and spindly but now a blur covered all but the edges of his vision.

He suddenly realized that it hurt a lot.

David closed his eyes again and pressed his palms over his eyelids and shook his head without a thought, then stopped immediately. He opened his eyes again and was relieved to see that it was slightly less blurry now.

He closed his eyes again. The sharp pain had become more of a dull ache and even that was fading. He was sure it could have gone a lot worse. David realized after a few moments of rubbing his eyes again that he was sitting on the floor.

He had been prepared for the thunder to be incredibly loud. He had been prepared for the lightning to possibly short circuit some of the electrical equipment in the library and not for it to somehow punch its way through the ceiling. And though the deafening fury of the lightning had met the silence of the library way quicker than the speed of his thoughts, he had certainly not expected the sensation of heat and the sudden sense of weightlessness which had followed.

David tried to make sense of what had happened.

Like most buildings constructed in his neighborhood, where real estate prices were sky high and permits were difficult to obtain when the Buildings Department was being cooperative, the library was a mutt born of lumber and drywall. Laid over the top of it was a roof of asphalt, which dried into a neat, relatively lightweight slice of something that wasn't quite rubber and wasn't quite cement. In theory, it was waterproof but the exposure to the elements caused it to expand and contract, like rubber, and form cracks, like cement. The upside was, of course, the low cost.

The solution to the inevitable leaks, like the particularly persistent one in David's kitchen, wasn't to replace the roof with something more durable but to have men who should have been wearing hard hats scale the walls of whatever property they were working on with ladders while balancing gallons and gallons of a compound in the price range of paint. It was a suspension of aluminium and various solvents and plastics which had incredibly long names and was slathered over the asphalt every few years or so on days without rain. It dried quickly into an insulative film that wasn't quite metal, wasn't quite plastic and wasn't quite reliable. The upside was obvious.

When he walked through the neighborhood in the summer, David would breathe in the metallic tang of reactants and the cloying, suffocating scent of industry that floated down from the rooftops as it dried.

That smell was what he noticed first as he continued to rub his eyes. Heavy metals, burning plastic and ozone. Of course, this only explained why the lightning might have hit the roof and not something like a satellite dish.

It didn't explain the sudden lash of force which had rippled outwards from the lightning bolt and left him flat on the ground.

David's ears rang from the thunder which followed but the sound of the violent downpour meeting the street outside was unmistakable.

There had not been fire. The blistering, dry heat had been unforgettable but ephemeral. He might have nearly blinded himself by staring into the corona of a lightning bolt but the lasting damage had clearly been done to the lights. An invisible force had come with the heat and was the cause of any injuries he might have.

David opened his eyes again and looked around and realized why the rain was so loud. The doors to the library were slightly ajar and the rain was actually falling in the library because there was not a single window with an intact pane of glass. But David was far too alive for it to have been a gas explosion.

The epiphany which crept up on him was less like a moment of clarity and more like when he skipped a question on a test he'd forgotten the answer to, then figured out several questions later.

The interior of the library wasn't quite a vacuum in a strict sense but was undoubtedly a sealed space which took breaths through the vents and air conditioning units nominally. The building must have been designed with the intent to protect older books from humidity and other environmental concerns because the windows did not open.

This was why pulling the doors open had always given David the mental image of a toilet plunger and the resulting gust of wind like that of a refrigerator door.

If it had been any normal debris which had fallen from the sky with the strength to go through the ceiling, David imagined that there would have been a soft pop masked entirely by the sound of the roof caving in. He had difficulty imagining how that would happen or what would even count as normal debris.

David noted a persistent ache in his bones and immediately wished he hadn't. The pain wasn't overwhelming, but it was impossible to ignore - the sort of pain that was annoying enough to convince David that he was still alive.

The lightning, which was so hot that it wasn't quite within the definition of traditional forms of matter, had met the cool, compressed bubble of air within the library and some of that heat had been passed along. The air had discovered the need to occupy far more space than what was available and the only hole had been made by the lightning to begin with.

Casualties included the glass of all the windows, a few bookshelves which hadn't been wise enough to put their trust in the walls of the library and David, who had been picked up and tossed at least several yards. David was mostly certain it wasn't some kind of cosmic reckoning for having the gall to sleep through chemistry class as a sophomore in high school and then doing it again in physics the following year.

He pushed himself off the floor with his palms and noticed that his chair was several feet behind him, on its back with its legs askew. Thankfully, he'd formed the poor habit of perching at an acute angle over anything he was reading - at the literal edge of his seat, and they'd parted ways in the blast.

David didn't notice until there was a prick in his right palm that the floor was gritty and sharp.

Now that his eyes had adjusted to the lighting, he realized that not one of the long, fluorescent lighting tubes which lined the ceilings of the library remained. The glass had broken into a million pieces and covered the floor with the consistency of coarse, sparkling sand to the extent that it looked like someone had put glitter into the air conditioning.

It was still late afternoon outside of the library, even if it was hard to tell because of the rain, but the low, grey glow of daylight had settled into the building with the help of the well polished linoleum floors and the remains of the glass tubes.

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The library was lit like a clear night after a snowstorm - David could even read the aged plaques that had been nailed to the top of bookshelves for everyone who didn't have experience with the Dewey Decimal system.

He carefully stood, making sure he didn't put his hand on the floor again. He'd gotten lucky. The shard of glass hadn't gone deep.

David's mother always told a crazy story about how some lady she knew had gotten into a car accident and a bit of glass had gotten into her bloodstream and killed her. It wasn't something he'd necessarily believed but he could do without a deep cut in his hand.

As he stood, directly in his line of sight was the profile of the checkout and reservation desk. His heart picked up in pace, pounding madly and sweat began to form at his brow as a desperation set in. There was a figure crumpled up behind the desk at an unnatural angle and he knew - he'd known the moment he'd looked, that it could only be Mr. Watterson.

David only realized when he heard the crunching of glass underfoot that he was less than ten paces from the librarian. Mr. Watterson, who had been sitting behind the checkout desk, had not been nearly as lucky. He'd been thrown back by the blast into the bookshelves behind him. The books, which were a combination of returns that were not yet sorted for return to their original locations and reservations, which had sheets of paper with the relevant details affixed with thin rubber bands, covered the floor in a morbid pile.

Mr. Watterson was slumped over, resting halfway in the bookshelf. The angry gash on the back of his neck was less worrisome than the angle it was bent at or the thick, sticky pool of blood which had formed beneath him, running down his body in slow rivulets.

David bit his lip to hold back a scream and felt a stab of self-directed annoyance for the bile rising in his throat and the sudden unsteadiness in his knees. He righted himself with a sharp intake of breath before he realized that there was a cocktail of sludge, debris and rainwater pouring in from an opening the size of a manhole in the ceiling in front of the checkout desk, about as far from David as Mr. Watterson was.

It was undoubtedly where the lightning had struck. David had been knocked out of his chair despite being on the other side of the library, but Mr. Watterson had been about as close as he could without actually being hit. The blast had taken out the windows even further away, on the opposite wall.

Underneath the site of impact was a surprisingly large, waterlogged wreck made up of what David expected - wood, drywall and asphalt charred into a steaming, blackened, bubbling mass. There was no hiss from the steam that still rose from it but had it not been directly beneath the hole in the ceiling, where water came through as if it were a faucet, David was sure that he would have opened his eyes to a raging fire.

David stood in silence with his shoulders stiff and his head bowed, looking from the pouring water to Mr. Watterson and back. After he'd been old enough for his mother to trust him with the keys to the apartment they lived in, David had rarely gone to the library. In recent years, the commute to school took nearly an hour - so even if there was a book he could have borrowed instead of buying online, David never went out of his way to visit the library.

He'd not registered that this man who rarely spoke had been the same librarian as the frantic, disorganized disciplinarian who checked if he was doing his homework whenever no one was at the checkout counter and shouted at him for reading while eating candy bars.

The steam was gone now and there was a rapidly forming puddle with the consistency of a muddy pond which had already reached the checkout desk and pooled around it, with little shallow trails which spread outwards and grew in size and split like a model river of sewage rather than water. It sparkled with the glass from the shattered lighting tubes and glistened with a sickly pearlescent chemical sheen. It smelled peculiar, not quite like charred plastic or reactants. It was almost tangy or acidic.

David frowned.

He couldn't remember the last time it had rained this hard. Some years ago, there had been a hurricane which made it all the way up the east coast and flooded the sewers, which ejected its contents onto the street but given the size of the hole in the ceiling, the water that could have conceivably been collected before the lightning strike must have run out by now.

Another minute brought on no changes to the way the water surged into the building and it was this which gave David the final hint as to what the smell was. It was the same as the one which came from the air conditioner from his history classroom last semester, one of the few air conditioned classrooms in the entire school.

The leaking coolant had stank so much everyone had agreed that it wasn't worth the trouble. A pipe of some sort supplying the cooling system had burst and on top of what had already happened, the library was going to be flooded.

David sighed and looked back over at Mr. Watterson. The water had made it to him.

The unfairness of the whole situation involuntarily clenched David's fists. Mr. Watterson had gotten into this accident because he'd been kind enough not to kick him and-

Alice.

The sheer magnitude of his thoughtlessness left David quivering in rage as he turned and sprinted to the other end of the library. He noted, as a sardonic grin found its way to his face, that maybe running wasn't so bad now that he couldn't hear the echo of his footfalls over the sound of the rain coming through the open windows, the water roaring in from the hole in the ceiling and the menacing rumble of thunder.

The thought was completely forgotten in an instant, replaced by the very real fear that he was hallucinating.

Alice had not moved.

She was still peacefully asleep in that most precarious position of her left knuckles digging into her cheek in her folding chair, which had not moved, with the point of her left elbow digging into the table, which had not moved. Next to her was her guqin, which he had ignobly stuffed into its travelling case and propped up against the table at an angle beside her. It had taken a few tries before it stopped sliding off slowly. It kept vigil beside her and it had not moved.

"What..." he trailed off, unable to vocalize the questions he'd wanted to ask, without anyone to ask and unsure if he wanted to know the answers to begin with.

There was lightning from outside the windows on the walls behind Alice, close enough to startle him, which lit each window like a camera flash and left long shadows between them, dividing the room in the sharpest of contrasts.

Not a single window was intact. Every single one had varying amounts of jagged glasses still clinging to the illusion of sitting in their frames. David let the threat of more lightning make his choice for him.

He walked up to Alice briskly and leaned over the table across from her and started shaking her lightly by the shoulders, which still moved up and down easily with her breathing.

"Alice, wake up. We have to go, the storm's picking up again."

He couldn't even move her. For just a moment, he was struck by how beautiful she was. The lines on her face looked almost sculpted and there was the hint of a smile on pert, well formed lips. She looked like the masterpiece of an artist who'd set out to capture the image of something otherworldly - a faerie, a siren, an immortal, he wasn't sure. He caught himself the moment the idle thought of her being cursed like Sleeping Beauty came to his mind.

Thunder sounded again, remarkably angry and remarkably close.

He shook her by the shoulders again. "We really, really have to leave," he muttered, almost entirely sure she couldn't hear him.

There was no response.

"Please, Alice, we really have to go. It's going to flood and the storm's getting worse. Mr. Watterson's already..." David couldn't finish his sentence so he tried another.

"We're not safe here anymore."

The thunder responded to him, long and loud.

David was sure he was losing his mind because he'd begun thinking about how the thunder was feeling.

This time, it was triumphant and derisive.

He wasn't sure how he knew but in the moments before it happened, it had seemed entirely inevitable to him, like the Greek myths about the Fates weaving together the story of the world before it happened.

So David leaned over the table further and gave Alice a short, deliberate look as if he were trying to memorize her features, then slipped his arms around her, embracing her.

The Lightning struck them in the ruined Library.