Of course the next strike (no. 7) did come. It arrived in a preposterously arrogant manner, in a situation so laden with cliché that even Nick had to laugh it off when he could laugh, weeks later, after the trembles, the delusions, and the spark-filled sideshows. He knew that the next one would be his last. The next one would be the killer. The end. No more after that one. He felt no. 8 at the side of his vision, as he stared out the window at the dead town, so dry—caught in a midsummer drought—it made his throat itch. In his field of vision there now appeared a blank spot, empty and deep and dark. The room crackled in the midsummer heat. The window opened to a view of a defunct farm town, circa 1920, with false-front facades in the Western style, buildings shell-shocked and plucked clean of life. The beaverboard walls grew rank and emitted a dry mustard smell. In the long afternoon shadows the farm boys hung out with crumpled bags to their faces—breathing the glue the way injured grunts took bottled oxygen. As if it made a difference. When he ventured downstairs he walked with a hobble, keeping his weight off the balls of his feet, which were swollen and raw. Now I can safely be called enfeebled, he told the boys. They gathered around him, fingering his scars, showing in kind their own tattoos and flesh wounds, stumps that flicked quickly, glossy twists that traced the half-healed paths of box-cutter slashes and paint-scraper battles. They offered him crumpled bags. He declined. They offered him gasoline to sniff, weed, Valium. They asked him to tell his stories, and he did, giving them long tales, embellishing details at will, watching them nod slowly in appreciation. Here was something they could understand. Nature playing mind games. Nature fucking with him. He dug deep into the nature of lightning. He made himself heroic. He raised his fist like Zeus, catching bolts out of air. He tossed balled lightning, dribbled in for a fast break. This was the least he could do for them. He pitied them for their empty eyes, for the dead slurry way they spoke.

In the dark room as the days turned and the sun raged over the cracked streets below, shrub-size weeds driving up through the damaged macadam, Nick let the siege mentality develop. He would avoid the next one. No. 7 had come just after his complete recovery, when he was called back to Chicago to make a court appearance in litigation over an option fund. He had gone out to the Oak Ridge Country Club with Albert Forster. The club would soon install lightning detection equipment—the first of its kind of the Chicago metro area—to forewarn of exactly the kind of conditions that led to strike no. 7. A mass of cold air arrived from Canada, dug into the hot reaches of the Central Plains, picked up steam, and formed a storm front that had already spawned a classic F-4 tornado, reducing one trailer park to a salad of pink fluffly insulation material, chips of fiberglass, and chunks of Sheetrock. As he teed up on the second hole, bunching his shoulders in a manner that foretold of his forthcoming slice, the front was tonguing into the sticky summer air overhead. In the end it was just another bolt. Simple as that. It appeared as a surprise. Two blunt rumbles swallowed the golf course, a flick behind them, and then, just as Nick threw his club into his backswing, adjusting his shoulders, head cocked, eyes upward on the sky, no. 7 forked down, split into five wayward crabs of raw voltage, and speared him in the brow the way you’d poke a shrimp with a cocktail fork.