A creepypasta inspired by those extremely erratic alerts on my phone when a storm is nearby. If you worry about that kind of thing, the dog makes it through this story. Hitchhiker’s Guide references are always free.
Tim pulled his pickup truck into the driveway of his small adobe house and turned off the engine, glad to be home after being fired unceremoniously and unexpectedly. He looked over at the small box of items he’d taken from his cramped desk area, wondering how to feel about all this, and his phone’s digital assistant made a loud announcement that grated on his nerves.
“Rain in 68 minutes”, it asserted. He grunted. The weather app might have been useful in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he was from, but it was generally wrong in Tucson. Still, it was supposed to be monsoon season at this point in July, so picking up some milk, bread, and dog food would have to wait until the next morning. Coming home from the store without dipping under a couple of low-slung bridges was a torturous route at best, and his truck’s A/C was out anyway. Though Tim had never seen the water reach that high in his 3 years in the desert, the underpasses were labeled up to 8 feet to alert people to the depth.
Tim slammed his keys onto the table in the entryway and patted Rufus, who joyfully trotted up to greet him. “That’s a good boy, you don’t care about my ‘inferior work performance’, do you buddy?” Tim asked, scritching Rufus behind the ears where he knew he liked it. Despite the fear of unemployment that yawned ahead of him, Tim was feeling strangely ebullient. He had just settled in with a beer and popcorn, and was twelve minutes into his favorite Batman movie when his living room exploded into light.
Tim squinted around in confusion once his eyesight recovered. His TV screen was black, and it and the electronics around it were smoking. Fire was licking up the curtains around the front window, and Rufus looked to be barking in terror, but Tim couldn’t hear anything except a distant ringing, like a children’s bell choir gone subtly wrong. At any rate, he ran for the kitchen, looking for the fire extinguisher. It was in its place under the sink, but by the time he pulled the pin, the fire had engulfed one entire wall of the living room and was headed rapidly for the front door. He grabbed Rufus’s collar and dragged the snarling poodle mix out said door before he could really think about what he was doing, snatching up the keys as he fled.
“Come on!” he told his dog, pushing him encouragingly, “load up!” At the command, Rufus leapt into his customary place on the passenger’s side, mostly through force of habit. He whined unhappily. As Tim hopped into the driver’s seat and turned the key, his phone announced “Rain in 60 minutes”. Tim frowned at this but paid it no real attention, other than noting that his hearing was back. Yeah, the palm trees were whipping their leaves a bit and the sky looked ominous, but you just never knew around here. Tim didn’t have to think about where he was going – he just started driving and was halfway there before he realized he was headed for his best friend’s house.
When he got to Jason’s, he saw a large green and black mass of something on the walkway in front of the house. He was confused for a second, then his heart leapt with terror as he saw two things – the massive saguaro in the front yard wasn’t standing…and sticking out from under the fallen saguaro was one of Jason’s prized Nike shoes. Tim leapt out, threaded his way around the charred mass of cactus, and tried to find a pulse, but Jason seemed to have been there for a while and his skin was clammy. A voice rose unbidden from Tim’s pocket. “Rain in 35 minutes.” He wished he’d turned that damn feature off, and also, it couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes, the drive wasn’t that long. Tim was distraught enough about finding his friend dead that it didn’t register with him that strongly.
Tim called an ambulance because he didn’t know who else he was supposed to call, and reported Jason’s address and what had happened. As he stared in morbid fascination at the black marks up and down the cactus, he realized they were burns in a fractal pattern. The hairs on the back of his neck and down both arms began to stand on end, and he heard Rufus barking frantically from inside the truck. Why should a mark from lightning creep him out like this? Tim felt increasingly that he just did not have the hang of Thursdays.
When he felt the little hairs seemingly take the opportunity to dance, Tim turned to head back for his truck to wait for the paramedics – and the lightning struck exactly where he had been standing a second before. Rufus’s barks had turned into growls, and Tim once again couldn’t hear, though this time it was much more painful. He felt something running down the side of his cheek and frowned. It couldn’t be raining; he couldn’t see any droplets falling. His fingers came away covered in blood. Still creeped out, but with his goosebumps beginning to settle down, Tim turned and saw – nothing. Until he looked at the dirt and saw a branching, twisted mass of…sand? It hadn’t been there, obviously, because he’d just walked through that spot.
Tim had never seen fulgurite before, except on Supernatural, but he remembered the episode about it firmly enough that he deduced he’d either pissed off a storm god in a big way, or there were an awful lot of lightning-related coincidences conspiring to rob him of everything and everyone he cared about.
At any rate, he was going to get the hell back in his truck and decide what to do from in there. As he settled into the seat again, the voice from his pocket announced blandly “Rain in 4 minutes”. As he pulled the phone out of his pocket in annoyance to turn off the feature, lightning hit the bed of his truck.
Tim still couldn’t hear, so he experienced the strike as an impact more than anything, but the searing flash from behind him that lit up the dashboard brighter than the brightest Tucson sun made it obvious. Suddenly in a worse panic than before, Tim turned the key and got nothing. Not even a little click. He screamed and punched the steering wheel. The truck didn’t honk.
Tim thought that if the storm was going to keep coming for him, Rufus would be in its path too, and he left him in the truck, with the (fortunately hand-cranked) windows as far open as he could leave them and a hastily-scrawled note for the paramedics so they’d know how to contact his sister down in Vail to take care of his beloved dog. The hair stood up on his neck again and he started to run blindly towards downtown, thinking vaguely that the taller buildings might make him less of a favorable target.
Tim was charging down the sidewalk of Granada Avenue, feeling the triumph of being within sight of the city services building – the tallest in town – when he began to feel the lightning strikes were herding him rather further north than he intended to go. His brief elation deflated when he tried turning onto Congress towards the landmark and it struck some 15 feet in front of him the second he made the move. He didn’t want to go north; there was nothing to act as a lightning rod up there. He managed to run along Congress as far as its odd little intersection with Pennington, and figured even partially heading eastward was progress. But the strikes got more frequent and more threatening the closer he tried to get to his goal. He fled, sobbing, as newspaper machines, outdoor café tables, and anything else in the way blazed with an unnatural light before igniting. He just wanted to live.
The lightning herded him north on Church Avenue for what felt like a marathon-length period. His legs were sore and wobbly. He couldn’t get much further without a break. As he crossed 6th Street, the lightning changed tactics, striking slightly further from him, but pushing him eastward instead. It couldn’t have done that 20 minutes ago when I was by the 20-story buildings?” Tim thought angrily, but it wasn’t like storms could be reasoned with. Especially not this one.
The lightning continued to push him, but its strength seemed to be petering out. Tim held out hope that he could get indoors somewhere, though every shop he’d passed was closed at this hour. He looked without hope at the large satellite building of the U of A campus whose parking lot he was being forced across, and shivered with fear as he drew near the set of railroad tracks that bisected this part of town. He figured maybe if he jumped across the tracks in two large leaps, he could make it without contacting the deathly metal that would surely spell his demise.
The lightning pushed him straight along the tracks, southeastward and under a small trestle bridge, and as he came out from under the bridge, he felt hope kindled within him. There was a small cement-lined tunnel just down the garbage-cluttered wash. The wind whipped up, driving sand into his skin, and a crumpled newspaper skittered across the back of his neck a split second after his hairs began to stand on end once again. Tim yelled involuntarily. As he paused with nameless trepidation before the threshold of the tunnel, the lightning finally hit its mark.
Tim came to a few minutes later, confused that he was in total darkness. The afterlife couldn’t possibly smell this much like moist rot. Squinting, he finally made out the light of the tunnel entrance at least several hundred yards distant. How the hell-?
His phone interrupted, the first sign that he could hear anything at all. “Rain started 40 minutes ago and will continue for 3 hours.” Not being from Tucson, Tim had never heard the stories about the tunnels where various people lived during the dry season. There was a pregnant pause and the distant light was extinguished as he heard the rushing flash flood.