The Fierce Reads Anthology(30)

“Rance!” He heard his father’s distant voice. “You stop this! I command it! God must judge us all! He must judge us all!”

Another bolt of lightning drew a jagged line across the clouds, illuminating, for a moment, a shovel lying against the wall of the nearby toolshed. Rance slipped and skidded through the mud and snatched it up.

He raised it high above his head and brought it down on the padlock. It did not break. He tried again. Nothing.

He pictured Olivia’s golden-green eyes and sun-bright hair in his mind, and raised the shovel once more before bringing it down with every ounce of strength he had.

He felt the charge before he really felt it. It tugged at his hair and woke his nerve endings and made his heart stutter.

The lightning filled him, washed everything to perfect, pristine white. Washed away Olivia’s face.



Rance had never been in a hospital, not even when he was born. So when he opened his eyes and found himself in an all-white room with white sheets pulled to his chest, he wondered if he had died. His vision was blurry, which made everything around him appear soft, heavenly. He blinked a hundred times, but the blurriness remained, as though he were looking through a sheet of ice.

Monitors beeped at a slow, steady pace. Rance began to remember what had happened before everything turned white: the storm and his attempt to free Olivia from the cellar, how he’d raised the shovel above his head, turning himself into a perfect lightning rod.

And the lightning had come for him. Come to judge him.

The beeping became faster and faster. Rance’s right hand began to feel hot to the point of pain, tingling with a fidgety, electric feeling.

He held his right hand before his eyes and saw, through the filmy veil that obscured his vision, veins of red on the palm of his hand, like it had been drizzled in blood.

There was a pounding in his head, a buzzing in his ears, and then a voice spoke so clearly inside his mind that Rance thought at first there must be someone else in the room.

Now you bear the mark. There is great work ahead for you. Gather your Apostles, for you are the new prophet of the Church of Light. The power is in your hands, and with your hands you must do the work of God.

Footsteps. Three indistinct figures entered, and the voice ceased speaking.

“He’s awake,” a woman said, and began touching him, checking the needle he hadn’t even realized was in his arm until she jostled it.

“There’s something wrong with his eyes.” His father’s voice filled the room, always deep and booming, the way it was when he gave a sermon.

“I’m afraid he’s developing cataracts,” another man said. His coat was white, but not his pants. They were black. He was no Follower. “It’s not a common aftereffect of being struck by lightning, but it has been known to happen.”

“His hair…when will its color return?”

His hair? What was wrong with his hair? Rance wished for a mirror.

“We don’t know,” the white-coated man answered.

“I thought you people were supposed to have all the answers,” the prophet said, a sneer in his voice. “What about that mark on his hand? What of that?”

“Lichtenberg figures,” said the man in the white coat. “Also caused by the lightning. But they should fade in a few days. The cataracts are…another matter.”

Rance spoke then, and his voice reminded him of his father’s. It carried a certainty he’d never had before. “I see more now than I ever could before,” he told the room. Then he directed his milky eyes toward his father. His father’s face was nothing but a smear of features.

“Tell me Prophet,” Rance said. “What became of Olivia?”

She’s dead, that voice whispered in his mind again. Strangely, he was already growing used to it. And already he trusted it. She’s dead, and it was this self-proclaimed prophet who took her from you. He is a false prophet, who declared an end that did not come. God does not speak to him. Your father’s time is past. You must remove him.

Rance couldn’t agree more.



Rance Ridley took the podium for the first time the day after his father’s body was found in the cellar. Apparently the former prophet had tripped and fallen down the steep steps and knocked himself out. He suffocated in the dark with his face shoved into the mud that remained from the rains and the flooding.

“My Followers,” Rance said to his congregation. “God sent his light into me the night of the storm, to chase away all darkness. He judged me and found me not wanting, but the same cannot be said of my father, the false prophet Ram Ridley. Let us not mourn the passing of the man who called himself prophet, when God never did. I have heard the voice of God. I have felt his light.”

He gazed out at his people, a blur of perfect white. For a moment, he tried to picture Olivia’s face, but he found it was already fading.

He blinked back tears and said what the voice had told him to say.

“God has chosen me, Rance Ridley, to be your one true prophet.”





Copyright (C) 2011 by Jennifer Bosworth

Art copyright (C) 2011 by Nekro





From



JENNIFER BOSWORTH



DEBUT AUTHOR



Read on for a preview of



STRUCK