Voltage

Can't Stay Here

That evening Gloria cooked for one.

Hunter watched her set a single plate on the table, sit down, and eat without looking toward the hallway where he was standing. He went back to his room. He had forty-three dollars in his account and a phone that would not charge. He sat on the scorched mattress and did the math on his situation the way he always had — quietly, without drama, because panicking about money had never once produced more of it.

Vantage had covered the hospital bills. They had not covered his lost wages for the three days he was admitted, or the eleven days of recovery the discharge papers recommended. He had no sick leave. He had been a floor contractor, not a staff employee. The distinction mattered enormously to the company and not at all to his bank balance.

He needed to go back to work. He also needed to not touch anything electrical until he understood what was happening to him. Those two facts were directly in conflict and he had no solution for either of them.

At eight o'clock, Gloria knocked on his door and opened it without waiting for an answer.

"I need to talk to you," she said.

Hunter set his phone down. "Go ahead."

She stayed in the doorway. She looked at the mattress, then at him. "The socket in your room is dead. The bathroom light is gone. The breaker on this side of the house has tripped twice today and I haven't touched anything."

"I know," Hunter said.

"You know." She crossed her arms. "So what is it? Is it something from the accident? Is it a medical thing?"

"I think so. I don't know exactly what it is yet."

"You don't know." She was quiet for a moment. "Hunter, I have a washing machine on that circuit. I have a refrigerator. If you're doing something that's pulling power or shorting things out, I need to know. This is my house."

"I understand that."

"Do you?" Her voice stayed flat, which was worse than if she had raised it. "Because you've been back two days and I've replaced a bulb and reset my breaker four times and the mattress in this room looks like someone held a blowtorch to it."

Hunter stood up. Not aggressively he just needed to not be sitting down for this part. "I'm not doing it on purpose."

"I didn't say you were."

"But you want me to leave."

She didn't answer right away. That was its own answer.

"I want to understand what's happening in my house," she said. "And I want to know if it's going to stop."

Hunter picked up his duffel bag from the floor and unzipped it.

"Hunter "

"You're right," he said. "It's your house."

She watched him pull clothes from the dresser and drop them into the bag. She did not stop him. She did not tell him to stay. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and watched, and when he zipped the bag and picked it up, she stepped aside to let him through.

He was at the front door when she spoke again.

"You don't have anywhere to go."

"I know," he said.

He opened the door and left.

He walked for forty minutes without a destination.

The city at ten o'clock was loud on the main roads and empty everywhere else. He stayed off the main roads. He passed a 24-hour laundromat, a shuttered phone repair shop, a row of auto-body garages with their roller doors pulled down. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets. Every streetlight he passed stayed on. That was something, at least he was not discharging randomly anymore. The surges seemed tied to contact, or to stress above a certain threshold.

He filed that away.

He ended up at an underpass on Drewe Street, two blocks from the industrial district. It was dry. No one was using it. He sat with his back against the concrete support column and thought about his options, which took about four minutes because there were not many.

He could call his father. He had not spoken to his father in eight months. That option lasted approximately three seconds before he moved on.

He could go to a shelter. The nearest one was the Calvary Street facility, which had a curfew of nine p.m. and a six-night maximum stay policy. He had used it once before, two years ago. He knew how it worked.

He could figure out what was happening to him first, and deal with shelter after.

He chose the third option. He was not sure it was the right one. He chose it anyway.

He put his back against the column, kept his hands out of contact with the metal reinforcement bars running through the concrete, and ran through everything he knew.

The charge built during sleep that was the mattress. It discharged through conductive contact the tap, the fence post, the fixture ring, the charger. The fence post incident had pulled enough current to trip a breaker ten meters away. The light bulb in his hand had lit without a power source. That meant the output was significant and it was increasing.

He did not know the upper limit. He did not know if there was one.

He sat with that fact for a long time.

They came at half past eleven. Three of them.

Hunter heard them before he saw them boots on concrete, the particular kind of unhurried pace that meant they were not in a hurry because they did not expect any resistance. The underpass was theirs. He had known that when he sat down, and he had stayed anyway because he was tired and out of options and had decided to deal with it when it happened.

It was happening now.

The one in front was broad across the shoulders, wearing a red and grey jacket Hunter recognized as Ashline crew colors. He stopped six feet away and looked at Hunter the way people look at problems they are deciding how to handle.

"You're in the wrong place," he said.

"I can move," Hunter said. He started to get up.

"Too late for that." The man on the left pulled a folding knife and snapped it open. Not threatening yet — just showing it. Establishing what the conversation was.

Hunter's back hit the concrete support column. He had nowhere to go. His right hand pressed flat against the column surface behind him and he felt it immediately the hum running up his arm, stronger than it had been at the fence, stronger than it had been anywhere. The column was reinforced concrete with a steel rebar core running through it straight into the ground.

A conductor. A large one.

The man with the knife took a step forward.

Hunter did not make a decision. There was no time for a decision. His body discharged.

The current ran from his palm into the rebar, down through the column, and spread outward through the wet ground. The man closest to the column the one in the red and grey jacket was standing in a shallow puddle. The current reached him in under a second. Both his legs locked. He convulsed once, hard, and dropped face-down onto the concrete.

The other two stopped moving.

Hunter's hand was still on the column. He pulled it away.

The man on the ground was breathing. Hunter could hear it shallow and fast, but there. The discharge had been strong enough to drop him and not strong enough to stop his heart. Hunter did not know why that line existed where it did. He did not know if it would hold the next time.

The two standing men looked at their friend on the ground, then at Hunter.

Then they ran.

Hunter stood against the column and waited for his hands to stop shaking. It took longer than he expected.

He looked at the man on the ground. He was already moving pushing himself up onto one elbow, confused, one side of his face scraped from the concrete. He would be upright in a few minutes. He would have a story to tell that no one would believe.

Hunter picked up his bag and walked in the opposite direction.

He did not sleep.

He sat in the open scrubland behind the fabrication district until four in the morning, running tests on himself. He used a section of exposed copper drainage pipe he found in the rubble at the edge of the lot. He touched it and held the contact deliberately, controlling his breathing, trying to vary the output.

He could reduce it. That was the first thing he confirmed. When he was calm and focused, the discharge dropped to almost nothing a faint hum in the pipe, not enough to do damage. When he pushed, deliberately, it spiked hard. The pipe glowed orange at the point of contact for three seconds before he let go.

He could control the volume. He just did not know the ceiling yet.

At four-fifteen, he sat back and looked at his hands in the dark. The pale discoloration where the burns had been was still there. He pressed his palms together and felt the current move between them, one hand to the other, a closed loop.

He needed someone who knew how electricity actually worked. Not a doctor. Not someone who would report him or run tests on him or lock him in a room. Someone who worked with it practically who understood conduction and resistance and load and output without needing a laboratory to think straight.

He knew one person who might fit that description.

The problem was he had not spoken to Dayo Osei since the accident. And the last time he had seen him, Dayo had been doing chest compressions on a dead man's ribcage.

Hunter pulled out his phone still dead, still uncharged and held it in his palm for ten seconds.

The screen lit up. Battery at thirty-one percent.

He stared at it.

Then he opened his contacts and found Dayo's number