-Closing the Circuit-

Screaming. That was all there was. Panicked, short screams, long, drawn-out screams, screams of the young, the old, men, women; inhuman screams. That was all I could grasp.

"Activation plus six minutes. Pulse is 45, respiration 10," a ragged, yet somehow familiar voice began, pulling me from the deepest dark I've ever known. It wasn't enough to wake me completely, but enough to let me know I was alive. The next sentence the strange voice mumbled though, that was enough to make me fight the rest of the way back to reality. "Looking good, Cole."

The first thing I felt was a cold breeze blowing over me, immediately letting me know that a lot of my clothing was now either burnt or torn. The first smell I got let me know it was probably burned. Then I opened my eyes. That was when I felt all the pain, all in that one moment. My skin itched like something terrible but every movement I made felt like I was ripping any of the skin I still had. I breathed in suddenly in surprise and shock and nearly coughed on the ash that was still swirling around in the air. A distant thudding continued to grow and I started to move to get up and identify the source.

"The hell happened?" I asked myself as I began to pick myself up from, what I now realized to be, an island of road surrounded by a large and still smoldering crater of red and black seared earth. The heat I could feel radiating around me caused me to put my hands up to try and defend my face from waves of infrared energy. "Oh, God," I muttered as I finally got a good look at my surroundings. I was at the epicenter of a crater that had at least a thousand yard radius. Buildings outside the completely desolate ring were either crumbled to uninhabitable piles of rubble or on their way there. The thumping I had been hearing earlier finally came to a climax and maintained prominent behind me. I turned around to find a black helicopter hovering near the L train tracks.

"There's someone alive down there!" a man with a frightened voice said over a PA system on board the helicopter. "Hey, wave up if you can hear me," the man in the airborne vehicle said. I weakly put up my arm to signify my hearing still worked. "If you can walk, get out of there. Head for the bridge." I weakly nodded my head at the person in the helicopter, glad I could in fact walk. "Hey, you! In the garage!" the helicopter suddenly said in a somewhat angry but concerned voice. "Get the hell out of there! The whole thing is coming down!" I glanced in the direction the helicopter was now flying towards and saw a dark silhouette of a man in one of the flashes of arcing electricity in the building. I suddenly felt very motivated to get out of this hellish wasteland. I began to hobble my way down from my island of asphalt and made my way across the crater on ground that looked cool enough for me to walk on without melting my shoes.

"Cole! Cole, man, you there? C'mon, man, pick up!" a voice crackled through my phone.

"Zeke?" I asked, recognizing the voice enough to identify it as my best friend. "What the hell is going on? I thing there was an explosion," I told my friend. What else could explain the carnage?

"NO SHIT THERE WAS AN EXPLOSION!" my friend replied. Yeah. This was Zeke alright. And he had a point. It was a dumb statement on my part. "Television says terrorists are blowing stuff up all over the city. Meet me at the Fremont Bridge. We'll get Trish and find someplace to hunker down."

"I'll see you there," I told my friend as I came across a sketchy scene. I was going to have to go through the garage that the helicopter had warned was coming down as it was the only path that wouldn't melt me into a puddle. But to even get into the death trap, I had to cross a death trap. A car lay bridging a gap of smoldering debris and looked like it wouldn't stand up to a safety inspection. But I really didn't have much of a choice if I was going to be getting out of here. I took a couple of paces back getting ready for what I knew was going to hurt. I had just been at the epicenter of an explosion and here I was about to run over a precarious car with multiple third degree burns. Trish would kill me if she knew what I was going to do. I huffed three times in preparation and began my sprint. The tearing of scabs that were just beginning to form made me wince but I couldn't slow down now, I was past no return. I ran across the car and heard it groan and squeak in protest as I sprinted across it's top, but I got across. Then I saw what I should've seen before my little urban exploration session.

"UGH!" I yelled out as blue light arced at me and enveloped my body. However, almost as soon as it began, I noticed something wasn't right. I haven't been electrocuted before, it's not something I go looking to do on a regular basis, but I was sure it was supposed to be more... Painful. If anything, the arcing light was making me feel more... Healthy? The built up electricity quickly stopped arcing to me as it left my body I looked myself over. "What the hell," I said to myself in disbelief. Strange, I could've swore I had at least twice as many burns before the shock. "I should be dead," I realized. Or at least convulsing on the floor. Deciding I didn't want to stick around and experiment in a building that was supposed to be coming down, hurried past the substation that had attacked me.

I made my was to another part of the garage, but not without incident. I had to balance my way across a fallen support pillar that was at least thirty feet up in the air. I was really glad Trish wasn't with me in more ways than one. Just as I was about the exit the building though, another freak accident happened. An exposed wire suddenly arced to me again, sending pulsing waves of electricity through my body. But instead my my muscles convulsing like I was pretty sure they should've been, I was able to move around with my own free will. The arcing from the cable stopped soon enough, but then the really weird shit happened.

I was looking at my hand when suddenly I spurted electricity from it just like the cable had. Then it became an uncontrollable as the same thing began happening with my other hand as I panicked, it got worse until huge pillars of lightning were coming from my hands and surrounding various metal items still in the parking garage. Primarily, cars. One of them exploded and a section of ceiling above it collapsed, making a way out of the garage that was admittedly more convenient than the route I had been looking at before. I quickly got out of the garage and on to a street that would lead to the Fremont bridge.

"If you're able to walk, please evacuate across the bridge to the Neon. Remain calm, emergency personnel are en route," the helicopter that had found me before announced. I immediately thought of Trish and how all this would be making her see a lot of work for the next couple of days. Then I saw an ambulance with multiple bodies covered by sheets nearby. People had died. I mean, I kinda knew they would, but seeing it was something else. I continued to walk by, not wanting to get caught up in things that would make me sad. There were cop cars everywhere on his side of the bridge. Some of the cops nodded nervously to me, knowing me personally from packages I had delivered to them on occasion. They were all obviously on the look out for these supposed terrorists Zeke had told me about. As I began to walk across the bridge, a sudden tingling sensation began to build up near my spine, hurting in that ticklish sort of way.

"Cole! Over here man! We gotta go!" Zeke yelled out from across the bridge. Panic began to build in me as the tingling sensation continued to grow. What was happening? Then the real stuff came. Lighting bolts from the sky blasted down and instantly ablated concrete around me, sending chunks and chips of the rocky material flying like bullets. Some of the cop cars began to blow up as they took direct hits from the bolts. I began to run in fear of getting struck only to find the bolts chasing me across. I ran faster than I knew I could, the wind wiping at open wounds and closing ones alike making me cringe at the pain. It was starting to become to much for me to handle. The pain, the panic, I lost consciousness for the second time that day as I barely heard Trish cry out my name.

Mm-mM

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

The steady, monotonous tone was what told me there was still an outside world.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

The tempo it began to increase at told me that I was still alive. The tingling in my forearms though...

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.

That told me something was wrong.

I sprung up from my bed in panic glancing around the room to see a just as startled Trish and Zeke starring at me. At my arms. I looked down and saw the cause for concern as well. My arms were now enveloped in crackling electricity, fading in and out with various intensities. As my brain began to kick in more, the light only got brighter, seeming to increase with my panic. As the freaky display continued, I began to feel more and more... Drained, and slipped back to the dark.

Mm-mM

When I woke up this time, the room was quiet. I inhaled sharply and looked around, wanting to see who was tormenting me with all this damned electricity. My movement must've startled Zeke enough for him to wake up and push his magazine off his chest.

"Hey, you good?" he asked, looking a little scared of me.

"What's going on," I rasped, my voice sounding dry from disuse and lack of water.

"We've got no idea, man," Zeke responded truthfully. I looked around the room again.

"Where's Trish?" I asked, concerned for my girlfriend.

"Around," Zeke responded as he peered at me from behind his shades. "You sure you're good?" he asked again.

"Yeah, why wouldn't I be? Did that electric stuff stop happening? Did they catch the terrorists?" Zeke just continued to peer at me from behind his shades, occasionally flicking his eyes down to my hands. "What?" I asked, annoyed at his stranger-than-usual behavior.

"Well," Zeke began obviously startled out of whatever he was doing by my harsh voice. "It's just a theory right now," Zeke began cryptically, busing himself with the magazine he had a few moments ago. "But, well, Trish and I think the electricity came from you." For a moment, I just stared at him expecting to pull one of his 'gotch ya's on me. When it didn't come, I began to freak out just a bit.

"You're kidding, right? Zeke, in case you forgot, people don't shoot electricity from their hands. At least, real people don't. I think you've been reading to many of those damn comics," I responded, gesturing to his magazine. There had to be a reasonable explanation for all this shit. Where was Trish? She was the most educated out of the three of us and wouldn't be in as much of a joking mood. Then again, Zeke didn't have that tell tale sign of pranking either.

"Hey," Zeke said a little defensively, some bark coming into his voice. "Don't get snappy at me! I helped your sorry ass back here after you passed out. I'm just trying to help you man." Zeke cooled down and said in a much more meaningful voice, "We're all just trying to help you." Then the woman I had been wanting to see walked into the room. At first her face was overcome with a bright smile, then trepidation.

"Is he good?" she asked Zeke, taking glances at me and my hands as Zeke had been doing a couple of moments ago.

"Yeah, just bitchy," the man replied with a faint smile.

"What's going on babe?" I asked my girlfriend, wanting to here a logical voice state it's opinion. She walked over to the other side of my bed where a few medical instruments were. They weren't hooked up to me though and just stood there.

"Cole," she began, glancing at me with a slight smile breaking through her worry. "I'm going to try and hook these up to you, okay? Just... I don't know, stay calm?" I gave her the best confused look I could give. Sure, I had hardly ever been in a hospital, and when I had, I was usually just visiting someone. But being hooked up to life monitor equipment wasn't on my list of 'scary things'.

"Can you move okay?" Trish asked, ignoring my confounded look. I decided to drop the stare I was giving her and moved my arms around experimentally.

"Yeah," I replied after a couple of movements.

"Okay, go a head and let me see your chest. I need to put some bio-gel on it for the sensors." I began to comply but as I removed my shirt, Trish gave a slight gasp.

"What?" I said with a slight chuckle. "Ain't nothing you haven't seen," I finished with a sly smile. Trish however just continued to stare at me.

"Shit dude," Zeke said beside me. I decided to see what the big deal was and actually looked down at myself. I was tremendously disappointed.

"There's nothing there," I said to both of them. "What are you staring at?"

"Cole," Trish began slowly, finally looking back up at my face, "when we brought you in, you had third degree burns all over your body. Everywhere. Some parts of you didn't even have skin. It was a miracle you made it as far as you did." I looked into her face, trying to see the twinkle she always had when she was pulling my leg. It wasn't there. I looked down at my stomach and chest again. Not even a scratch. Even the sparse hair I had grew back. Hell, even the scar I had got back in sixth grade was gone. I reached out and touched where it should've been. Real, warm skin. What the hell...

"What's going on?" I asked, hoping anyone in the room would give at least an answer. It didn't even have to be the correct one, just one that made sense, that could explain this.

"I think you should tell him," Zeke finally said.

"Tell me what?" I asked frantically.

"But I'm not even sure-"

"Tell me what?!" I asked again, tired of not getting an answer. Trish looked down at me for a moment and then grabbed a squirt bottle of something. One she got a bit in her hands, she rubbed down my chest with it. Under other circumstances, I might've enjoyed this, maybe have a little fun with my girlfriend. But right now, that was the furthest thing from my mind.

"Cole, remember what I said," Trish said once she finished with the gel. She grabbed the contacts for the heart rate monitor and looked right into my eyes before she spoke again. "Relax."

I focused inwards and tried to calm down, despite all the uncertainty that was swirling around me. I slowed my breathing and after a few seconds nodded my head. Taking it as the sign to go, Trish lowered the contacts onto me. Immediately, the machine sprung to life.

"What the..." Trish said, spinning around on the machine, studding all the switches and knobs on it.

"What?" I asked, concerned that I had done something wrong.

"I didn't even turn it on yet," she replied. A second later, she lifted up an unplugged cord. The beeping on the machine began to climb faster and faster. "Cole," Trish said, trying to distract me from the cable she just dropped. "Cole, try and relax, okay?" But I couldn't. Suddenly, the screen on the machine began to fuzz up. That freaked me out even more. Then it happened. A single spark arched from my chest to the contact attached to it.

"Hey man," Zeke said now, sounding more than scared. "Just try and cool down, okay? No one's trying to hurt you." Watching everything was too much. So I closed my eyes and tried to focus inward again. But this time, I felt something completely different. The best way to explain it was a pull. I felt... something... jumping from different areas of my body towards a point on my chest. The more I focused on the feeling, the less jumpy it felt and turned into more of a controlled... flow?

"Good, Cole, you're doing great. Just... keep doing whatever it is you're doing," Trish encouraged, pulling my attention outward again. I then heard the heart rate monitor. It was beeping at a normal pace again, though it still wasn't plugged in. I focused back into myself. I tried to stop the tugging feeling and after a moment, all I felt was a distant pull. And then I heard nothing. No beeping, just the baited breath of my girlfriend and best friend beside me. I opened my eyes to a blank monitor.

"You good, man?" Zeke asked after a moment.

"What's going on?" I asked, ignoring the question not to be rude, but because I was starting to get frustrated with being in the dark. Trish thankfully pulled the contacts off my chest and I registered an end to the distant pulling sensation.

"I've got a theory," Trish began a confusing plethora of tones behind her voice. "It's... it's out there, but as far as I can tell, it's the closest thing to an answer we're going to get for a while."

"Let's hear it," I said anxiously. Trish nodded solemnly and took a seat to my right, opposite Zeke.

"I'm not sure how," she began looking again at my hand before quickly coming back to my face. "But I think the explosion somehow... I don't know... triggered something? You see, all of us send signals through our body via neural pathways that use minuscule amounts of electricity. My theory is that you're body is now, for some bizarre reason, producing way to much electricity."

"So... it's natural?" I asked skeptically.

"No," Trish quickly said. "It's very much unnatural." She then looked me over. "Cole, it takes a lot of energy to run a healthy human body. Three meals a day for most people. To be producing that much extra electric charge... Are you, like... I don't know, super hungry or anything?"

"Wait, what? Where did that-"

"Just... humor me. Are you feeling any hungrier than normal?" After a moment of thinking on, I actually felt unnaturally... un-hungry. I knew I wasn't full, and I could probably eat something, but I just wasn't hungry at all.

"Actually, I feel the opposite of hungry," I admitted to her to which she quirked an eyebrow. "I mean, I know I could eat if I was given food, but, I just don't feel hungry. At all. Not even a tiny bit."

"Maybe it's like a battery?" Zeke offered from his side of the bed, causing the two of us to look at him.

"What do you mean, 'like a battery,'" Trish asked.

"Maybe he stores electricity from other sources," Zeke clarified, "like a battery."

"Okay," Trish began, rolling her eyes. "Even if he was 'like a battery' and took electricity from other sources, it would have to be extremely small amounts over a long period of time in order for him to still be alive, and I haven't been giving him any electricity and I'm pretty sure you've got enough common sense that you haven been zapping him either so-"

"Actually," I interrupted, stopping Trish's rant short of completion. "On my way back to the bridge from the explosion, I got electrocuted. Twice." Trish looked at me for a moment again before trying to speak again.

"Even still, a couple of small shocks still aren't enough to account for-"

"They weren't small," I interrupted again. "One was a small sub station and another was an exposed power cable. Both were at least a couple seconds long." That got Trish to drop her jaw.

"But... that's not... you'd be..."

"Trish, apparently I've got large amounts of electricity just floating around in here," I began, gesturing to my chest. "Something tells me conventional thinking is out the window."

"So he's like a battery," Zeke said, the smallest amount of excitement in his voice.

"Trish," I said, ignoring my friend for a moment and reaching out to take a hold of Trish's hand. When I made contact, she jumped a little and I withdrew my hand. "Sorry," I said quickly. "Did I-"

"No, no. I just... you surprised me."

"I tried to touch you a couple days ago during one of your... episodes," Zeke began. "You kind of... well..."

"Sorry Zeke," I told my friend.

"Naw, it nothing," Zeke said, waving me off. "Now I got braggin' rights that I was the first guy to get zapped by you. And lived!" I smiled a bit, but stopped when Trish took my hand again.

"So... you can control it?" Trish said looking between me and my hand.

"I guess," I began. "It's really hard to focus on it, but, I bet I can get better at it with some practice.

"I suppose," she said looking back into my eyes. There was then a knock on the door.

"Trish?" another nurse said as she stepped through the door. "Someone in room 219 needs some help and we're swamped. Can you help out?"

"Yeah, be a second Beth," Trish said from beside me.

"'Kay," the other woman said nodding her head and stepping out.

"I've got to get back out there," Trish told me. "I'm off in three hours. I'll be able to make sure you're okay to get out of here then. Just, don't do anything crazy while I'm gone. That goes for you too, Zeke. No experiments."

"Fine, fine," Zeke said from beside me. I glanced over at him to see him screwing a light bulb back into a lamp.

"Love you," I called after her as she left. She stopped in the door way and gave me a full smile for the first time in what felt like years.

"Love you too," she replied as she stepped out the door. As soon as the door was shut, Zeke got back up and began fiddling with the bulb again.

Mm-mM

I had just finished getting the food down for everyone when they showed up.

While I was still in bed, Zeke had told me about how sideways the world had gone while I was out. Quarantines, gangs going out of control, and cops on the run. But I wasn't prepared for, 'gangs going out of control' meaning, 'gangs have AK-47's and inhuman behavior'. I'd have to have a talk with Zeke about this, but right now, I needed to keep these thugs away from the food. Some of these people looked worse than those children on humanitarian commercials. They needed the food more than some bozo with a gun.

Without a second thought, I jumped from my perch, a fall that would've killed anyone else, but, as I was finding out, only served to give me an adrenalin rush. As soon as I landed, I decided to put my new found... talents?... to the test. I focused on the strange pulsating feeling that originated from my gut and channeled the feeling to my hand, focusing on where I wanted that energy to go. I still had yet to get used to the feeling of that surge of power leaving my hand and arcing to the thug that was charging me. As it was, I wasn't all that used to the feeling and for a brief moment, stared at my hand after the gun wielding gang member fell to the ground, incapacitated. That was my first mistake of the day.

A searing pain made itself known in my left thigh, almost crippling me with pain as I grabbed at the wound. When I pulled my hand away, there was blood, but no nearly as much as I expected. A few more bullets grazed by me, pulling me out of my reflective thinking. I dove for one of the stone pillars in the park and hid behind it, bullets pelting surfaces around me. When there was a momentary break, I decided to take my chance and try to take out the other three thugs that remained. I took a deep breath and focused.

When I popped up from my cover, two things happened. The first and most obvious was that the thugs who had stopped firing began to take aim to fire again. The second and more confusing event was the speed at witch they were going about this process. Their guns were being raised ridiculously slowly, their shrouded faces turning to me in a similar manner. I looked around for Zeke who had been giving me some suppressing fire with his six shooter, but when I finally spotted him, he also was moving at a snails pace. Deciding to take advantage of whatever was going on, I raised my arm and took aim at the three hooded figures, aiming for the head for a quick put down. Before a single shot could be fired, I had taken down all three of the gun wielding gang members.

"Shit, man," Zeke said, realizing what just happened. "How'd you do that?"

"I don't know," I said, looking down at my hands. "I just... focused, I guess."

"Dang. We'll have to practice that one." Zeke then took a look at the crates we had been defending. "Let's get some grub before it's all gone."

"Yeah," I said, finally fixing my eyes on something other than my hands while Zeke pried at the boxes like a monkey after a banana. "But only take what we need, there's some people here that don't look to good." With a grunt of victory, Zeke finally got the lid off his crate, but his primal sounds of victory turned into ones of disappointment.

"Those idiots dropped canned prunes! What are we supposed to do with these? Give them to the old folks home?"

"That's not a bad idea," Trish said, making her debut. I sent her a smile and wave which she was quick to return. "Their supplies are running pretty low. Not many people are thinking about that demographic at the moment and they aren't necessarily high on some people's priority list."

"Shit," Zeke whispered to me as Trish helped to hand out food to people who were starting to come back now that the cost was clear of the thugs. "I don't want to sound like an ass, but your girlfriend is going to give out all the food and forget about us." I just smiled a bit and pulled a couple of cans of beans Trish had handed to me before she had started handing out food. "Shit," Zeke said as he took one of the cans. "Now I am an ass."

"Since when have you not been one?" I asked jokingly as Trish finished handing out the last of the cans. Unfortunately, it looked like there were still a lot of people who wouldn't be getting something. I noticed one kid who was alone and didn't get a thing. Sighing, I caught his attention and threw him my can of beans. I hadn't been that hungry since the... incident anyways. Suddenly the TV's around us began to go crazy and I was relived when I realized it wasn't me causing the disturbance but the Voice of Survival.

Something about the guy rubbed me the wrong way. Zeke said it was because he was a hipster, whatever that was, but for me, it just felt like he was a nobody who accidentally became somebody and was trying way to hard to stay a somebody. When I told this to Zeke, he just said, 'yup, that's a hipster.' Whatever, so I don't like him because he's a hipster. But soon I had a much better reason for not liking him.

"Take a look at this Empire City, the photo you're seeing was taken by security camera near ground zero."

"Hey, Cole! Look! You're on the big screen!" Zeke yelled, excited for me. However, I was pretty sure he was the only one feeling good about me being up on the TV in that moment.

"Someone from your family die?" the man who had been talking continued. "Well, now you know who to blame." There was more, but I couldn't hear it. I was numb. I felt light headed until I realized it was because I wasn't breathing. I gasped in a breath waking myself up to my surroundings. That was when I noticed the group of people around me wasn't looking so friendly any more. Even Zeke was giving me a strange glance. But what he was feeling was nothing compared to the one opinion that truly mattered to me. However, that one person, I couldn't see them no matter where I looked.

"Uh," Zeke began getting my attention over the rising volume of the people around me. "We should probably get out of here. Meet me by Stampton Bridge when it's cooled down enough." I just nodded in the affirmative and ran. I wasn't even sure if it was the right direction. In my rush, I caught a glimpse of the kid I had given my beans to. His face showed confusion, shifting from me to the food in his hand. I didn't stick around to see what he would do. I needed to get out of here. With a start, I realized that I had been shot earlier. But when I looked down at the wound, all I found was a hole in my pants and some dried blood. A mystery for a later time, for now, I could only be happy I wasn't limping away from an angry mob.

AN: So, quite the pause on the upload, I know. Sorry about that. It's probably going to be like this until CoTS gets done, which, maybe sooner rather than later. Anyways, let me know what you think. Thanks so far for the support you've shown thus far. I hope I can continue to please. Oh, also, have you begun to pick up on what I'm doing? If not, that's okay, it's pretty subtle right now, but should be more noticeable in the next chapter.