LIGHTNING GIRL #1

Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, USA

Tuesday, November 10th, 2015

One of the most violent thunderstorms in memory raged in the black night sky above the cemetery. Rows of white headstones, slicked by rain, shone like pearls beneath the lightning. A lone gravedigger tirelessly shovelled back dirt and mud to get a filthy, sodden casket into the open air. After hours of work, he'd found what he sought.

Liam Kent threw down the shovel and lowered a strange device into the grave on a rope, a piece of machinery gutted from a ruined spaceship that had lain untouched in a backwater part of New England until he had unearthed that, too. He followed the device, jumping into the grave and landing on the casket, where he slipped on the muddy wood. He was sure he'd sprained something but had come too far to let that stop him. He drew out a hammer he had brought expressly for this purpose and smashed the latch on the side to pieces, kneeling as he hauled open the top half's lid.

Esther Drummond had died a little over four years ago of a nasty bullet wound to the gut, unable to receive medical attention until it was far, far too late. He was interested in her because she had been in Torchwood, on the front lines; she had come face to face with immortality, with what little he knew of the Blessing and the Miracle, and that was what he wanted. He had a machine he believed could cheat death, but if he wasn't there to use it, it wouldn't do him any good. He needed something else, and he was sure the woman in the coffin would be able to point him in the right direction, at least. He needed to understand so many things – who was Captain Jack Harkness really, and how had he lived so long? How did Clara Oswald manage to duplicate herself, and could Kent use the same technique to keep himself alive indefinitely? What were the Doctor's secrets?

Esther's body had decayed significantly. She was a blackish, blueish husk, leathery skin stretched over bones and little else besides. But the device Kent had brought with him would fix all that, he was sure. What little information he could parse in the spaceship's husk pointed to it being for healers – an ambulance, perhaps. The same kind of ambulance he had heard brought people back to life in London, during the Second World War? Was that Harkness's secret? Kent needed to know.

He flicked some switches on the device and it lit up blue, humming. Stepping away to let it do its job, he slipped again and went down into the mud at the casket's side. The device started to hover, rotating in the air above the body as it detected somebody in severe need of healing. It was just about to do its magic when a bolt of lightning came down from the sky and struck the machine as Kent climbed onto the coffin to see what it would do.

There was an explosion and he was launched through the air like a cartoon character by the almighty force, thrown out of the grave. He slammed into the nearest headstone on the next row down in a crumpled heap, so winded he completely lost consciousness.

When he came to sometime later, the body had vanished.

Esther remembered being shot in the stomach in Buenos Aires, and then she remembered waking in the middle of a lightning storm more vicious than any she'd ever seen in an amount of pain she could not comprehend. She was soaking wet, staring up at the sky far above.

With what few thoughts she could string together, she decided she must have been shocked with defibrillators, trying to restart her heart – maybe the bullet wound had been patched up, she had had a blood transfusion, was being wheeled through a hospital and hallucinating the distant moonlight and the angry clouds and biblical rain. She could barely lift her arms, her vision was milky with cataracts, and when she tried to cry out for help she realised she did not have any teeth. Not in her gums, at least.

She was choking and rolled to her side to vomit a viscous, black fluid containing the very teeth she had been missing. She squinted in the shadows to see her hand, but it was not a hand she recognised – it was monstrous and decayed, spindly, skeletal fingers and holes where the nails should be. She heaved again, losing more teeth. If she had been in pain before, it was unimaginably worse when she was retching and bits and pieces of herself were spilling out onto a soiled, silk lining – a coffin!?

Her first assumption was that the Miracle was still in effect. She had been shot, she had been buried, and she was quite clearly not dead. She had been dragged mercilessly back to life by a powerful, external force, not brain dead any longer. But though she was sickened to admit it, she did not seem to be recently dead. And the Miracle didn't give people the luxury of unconsciousness or healing. Was she becoming more lucid? It was difficult to tell, but if she was…

Finally, she got rid of all the teeth that had been blocking her airways. How she had not choked she didn't know. And how far gone did a body have to be for the teeth and nails to fall out? What were the stains in the casket? Were they from her, from her own decomposition?

She tried to sit up. Her limbs had nothing to them anymore, she had wasted away almost completely and the clothes – synthetic fibres that wouldn't decay, luckily – were hanging from her body. She was hardly there at all.

There was an object lying on top of the casket, sparking and smoking. It was no technology she had ever seen. She reached out to touch it and blue sparks began to dance. They leapt from the machine to her skin and – to her immense wonder – her rotten hand began to return to life. She was amazed. whatever the device was, it had a rope attached to it leading up and out of the grave she was in, which had been dug up. Who would dig up her body? Her mind immediately went to Jack. Maybe he felt guilty about her getting shot, had tried to use some of his immortality for her – but she knew that didn't make sense. Jack didn't need machines to come back to life.

She could not yet get to her feet, clambering onto the casket lid to get at the device, which continued to spit sparks in her direction. She needed it like she needed air to breathe, grabbing it and watching her hands steadily recover before her weakened eyes – which were getting clearer by the second as well. But quickly, it went completely dead. She was left floundering, knowing she needed to get out of the ground but unsure if she had the strength to lift herself up on the rope and fight her way out.

Until that moment, Esther had only ever heard stories about people who had been struck by lightning and survived, left with gnarly scars with all the fillings in their mouths burned out, but she'd never been struck by lightning herself. She was sure she was going to die again, for the second time in what felt like the same day, when a bolt came down from the sky and found her perfectly. But though she did collapse back into her coffin, it had the opposite effect: she was energised. She had never felt more alive than at that moment and saw electricity coarse through her veins, glowing vivid blue and white underneath her skin.

Of course, it was Victor Frankenstein who had raised the Creature's body up through the rafters of his castle during a lightning storm, to be sparked back to life by the violence of nature. But surely that couldn't actually happen? You couldn't just electrocute long-dead bodies and have them awaken, let alone force them to heal a violent injury and total decomposition. They'd put her in a dress to bury her, however, so she couldn't see the wound in her gut, she could only feel it. It was white-hot with pain, more intense than any other part of her body. Was it getting better?

But that could wait; she had to get out of the grave, and thanks to the lightning bolt, had just about mustered the strength. Already the ragged skin on her bones was starting to fill out with muscle mass and fat. She clambered up the rope and out into the open air, rain and wind whipping around her now that she was no longer protected by the four walls of her own grave. There was somebody else there, a young man, but he was out cold behind another headstone. She staggered towards him and saw a phone had fallen from the inside pocket of his jacket, and that he was so dirty he must have been the one who'd dug her up. She picked up the phone and only just managed to glimpse the date – 2015 – before it died completely in her hands.

"C'mon…" she muttered hoarsely, then dropped the phone in shock. She could talk. Her ruined vocal cords had healed that much already (though she could hardly understand her own words with her teeth still missing). This was not the Miracle; she was sure now. It was something else entirely. She'd just about decided to take the phone with her when it began to smoke in her hand, then exploded. It wasn't a very alarming explosion, hardly a stutter, but she dropped it, nonetheless. Electrical sparks danced across her fingers.

Esther straightened up properly and realised she knew exactly where she was: Arlington National Cemetery. Frowning, she returned to her grave to get a look at the headstone.

IN MEMORY OF
ESTHER DRUMMOND
MEDAL OF HONOR
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY
MAY 4 1980
SEPTEMBER 3 2011
DEFENDER OF EARTH

"Medal of Honor?" she mumbled to herself toothlessly. It must have been awarded posthumously, for ending the Miracle on the CIA's behalf. She wouldn't have thought that would be enough to get her interred in Arlington, but apparently, that was what had happened.

She went back over the facts in her mind. She had been shot in Argentina, she had bled to death, and now she had risen from the grave four years later back in Washington. At least that was something, she had lived in D.C. her entire life, she knew it like the back of her hand –her gnarled, decaying hand missing all its fingernails. But then she came across the horrible realisation: if that was what her hands looked like, what on Earth did her face look like? She returned to the unconscious man and his broken phone, holding it up so that she could reflect enough moonlight in its screen to see her reflection.

She wished she'd continued in blissful ignorance. Esther was, admittedly, a nerd; she'd played no small number of horror video games featuring zombies, ever since she first played Resident Evil 2, and now a zombie was staring right back at her from the other side of a mirror. She dropped the phone and shrieked. She wasn't dead but she also wasn't alive: she was undead, through and through, a real-life zombie.

But she was still lucid, she still knew what was happening, and most importantly she was not craving human flesh or brains. No, there was only one thing she knew she needed above all else: power. Electricity. She couldn't just rely on lightning bolts, she needed to get into the city, across the Potomac and back into Washington. At the very least she needed to find a streetlamp. She clung to the broken phone and picked a random direction to walk in, shambling through the headstones towards a light source she could just about see in the distance, trying to formulate a plan.

Get to a power source, find a disguise so that people didn't see she was a corpse, and get back to the city to find somebody – anybody – who could help her. A phone booth, that was what she needed since the cell in her hand was busted. Find a power source, find a phone booth. And maybe an oversized trench coat along the way and a mask that didn't make her look like a bank robber.

Unfortunately, Arlington was huge. She knew she needed to go east but she didn't have a clue which way east was; there were too many clouds to see the stars and she had not been buried with a compass. She hadn't been buried with anything other than the clothes on her back.

She didn't know how far she walked until she finally came upon the visitor's centre near the entrance, but it couldn't have come any sooner. And the lights were on inside, too – there must be security guards on the premises – but that didn't matter, she just needed to get to the national grid. She made a beeline through the night to get to the building and found herself immediately impeded by electronic locks on a side door. She grumbled under her breath, still struggling to form coherent words, smacking a fist against the lock in frustration. It exploded at her touch; she jumped backwards in alarm. But sure enough, the next time she tried the door she found that the lock had stopped working. She ignored the war exhibits and tried to find an office.

That didn't take a long time, thankfully. She found a small and middling office with a computer and a landline. The computer was just CCTV footage of the main gates and the entrance, but the guard was nowhere to be seen. She would have to leave quickly to avoid getting caught and arrested. However, her struggles didn't end when she finally had a means of communicating with the living. As soon as she touched the computer's keyboard the energy was sapped from it, and from the flickering light fixture above her until it died. The whole building went dark and somebody swore.

"I guess I'll go reset the fuse box again," she heard when she strained her ears. She glanced around the room but could not see the fuse box anywhere in that room, so she'd bought herself some more time, at least. Except, now the phone wouldn't work. Great. She picked up the handset anyway and held it to her ear, then got an idea. Maybe she wasn't just syphoning electricity from nearby sources, what if she could output it as well? She had played a game with that exact premise, after all. Straining, she tried to visualise sending sparks forth from her hand in the same way she pulled them in, and remarkably, it worked.

Now she just had to try and remember useful phone numbers. She had a number for Jack in her head that she'd committed to memory long ago, but predictably enough, it didn't work. The same for Gwen Cooper, though she wasn't sure she'd be able to call the UK without having to go through an operator. Third, she tried Rex Matheson. She would have tried him first, but it had taken the two failed attempts to remember the last digits of his old cell number. Again, it was dead, so she tried his house, always thankful that she hadn't let the digital revolution stop her from dutifully memorising important numbers (and to think, she'd been made fun of for this habit). Four years had passed so she had no idea if he still lived there, but at least this number actually rang.

It rang for quite some time, it being the middle of the night and all, and she waited with bated breath for the security guard to return having meddled with the fuse box and found that there wasn't a fault – but then, finally, she heard a voice: Rex's voice.

"Hello?" She'd woken him up.

"Rex!" she exclaimed – or tried to. The words wouldn't come out because she was still toothless. Would he even recognise her voice? "I can't talk – I don't have any teeth-"

"Look, what is this? Some kind of joke? I told you not to prank call this number anymore."

"It's me! It's Esther! I'm not dead!"

"Do you even know who you're talking to? I work for the CIA, I can trace this call, find out who you are, come to your house, and then you'll wish I just called the cops."

"Don't call the cops – I'm at the cemetery, I need your help, I need-"

"Enough of this shit. I'm unplugging the phone. Good luck trying to find out if my refrigerator is running now." Rex hung up. Sure enough, when Esther immediately re-dialled the number, it didn't even ring. But at least she now knew that Rex was not only still in D.C., but at his old apartment, and she knew where that was.

Esther now had a plan, and it would go a lot smoother if she could get her hands on a car.

She swiped a set of keys from the security guard's desk and stole out of the building the same way she'd come in. They were for a Chevy, and there was handily only one Chevy in the parking lot. It was difficult to unlock the door because most of the dexterity and strength in her arms had been sapped, and even trickier to turn the key in the ignition. But she managed it and grinned, laughing a little, as the car roared to life. It wouldn't take long at all for her to get across the Potomac to Rex's at all, and nobody would see her on the way.

However, she'd made a grave error; smiling and laughing weren't on the cards. Her entire lower mandible crunched and then fell into her lap. She was horrified, because that was her mouth, and it had fallen off, oozing out more black fluids. Her trouble didn't stop there. Sparks burst out of her hands after the scare, flooding the car. The headlights flashed, the alarm went off for a second, and then the battery exploded so hard the hood was blown off and crashed into the side of the visitor's centre opposite her.

Uh-oh.

Detached jawbone in hand, she fled the car immediately, leaving the keys stuck in the dashboard. Thunder rumbled and rolled overhead. She hoped the security guard would mistake the sound of his car exploding for the storm, and that at the very least, may think a freak accident had occurred and that the car had been struck by lightning. Maybe he'd think he must have left the keys in the ignition rather than taking him inside with him. Glancing over her shoulder, Esther was well out of his line of sight. The heavy storm worked to her advantage. Maybe he did think it had just been thunder.

But what about her face? Her jaw? In a desperate panic, she held the bone up to her face and tried to shove it back into place. She could not go to a hospital; if she'd been dead for four years, there was no way her health insurance would still pay out, and at any rate, what were the doctors going to do? Take her to be examined, no doubt, to see how exactly she'd risen from the grave – and she sincerely doubted they'd be able to explain it.

Gingerly she let go of her jawbone and it miraculously stayed affixed. She had to be careful. Maybe she could find some tape and stick it back on that way? Not that that would help her to talk.

Exiting Arlington, she realised she had no option but to walk along the side of the road, cross the Potomac, and get to Columbia Heights that way. She crossed her arms tightly and tried to ignore how her skin was sloughing away from her muscles, or what was left of her muscles, and trudged on weakened ankles towards Memorial Bridge. Every time a raindrop fell on her she saw a small flicker of electricity; it made her glitter. Not very discreet.

It didn't take long for her ankles to start to throb. Though, the fact they were throbbing at all meant she had blood flow and her heart really was beating. She'd been wasting away in a coffin for years, so it wasn't exactly surprising, but she wasn't sure how long it would take her to make the journey across the bridge.

A car slowed as she neared Memorial Circle. The window rolled down and Esther looked at the floor, pretending not to notice the car.

"Excuse me?" It was a woman inside, "Are you alright, miss?" Esther said nothing. "Ma'am, it's the middle of the night, you shouldn't be walking around here. Is there somewhere you need to go? Into the city?" Silence. "Have you been robbed?"

"I'm – I'm okay," said Esther, very conscious of her jaw. The words didn't come out properly, she sounded like she'd just been to the dentist and had her cheeks numbed.

"Pardon?" Esther tried to wave her away wordlessly. "Miss-" She turned on the car's interior lights. They shone just brightly enough that she could see Esther and evidently was horrified. She wailed. Esther stepped back and the woman pressed down the accelerator, speeding away into the rain and fishtailing a little.

Great.

Limping onward, she wasn't disturbed again by a passing car trying to be a do-gooder. And it was probably for the best; she didn't want to make a second car explode that evening. The more she walked, the worse the pain in her legs got, though her face was feeling better and better. Her cloudy vision was clearing, she could open and close her mouth a little, and thought her hair was getting thicker by the minute.

She crossed the bridge. Continued on past the Lincoln Memorial. Avoided the reflecting pool and tried to stay away from any lights. And lights she did approach at first flickered and then went out until she was far enough away again.

But she was so cold. She needed clothes. Her half-rotten funeral attire wasn't protecting her from the poor weather at all. But where could she get clothes? Everything was convenience stores or apartment buildings, and she didn't know how to break into an apartment. Nor did she have any money. She was only a third of the way to Rex's and didn't think she should risk taking the Metro.

If she just kept heading north and kept a few blocks away from the White House and its security – god knew what the secret service would do if they came across her – she thought she'd find some department stores.

There were even more lights around her the deeper she got into D.C. She still didn't know what time it was, but everything was closed up. She did go by an all-night convenience store and debated going in but didn't want another person to deride her as a zombie and run screaming out of the shop.

So, she kept going. Finally, she saw a chain clothing store across the street. She'd broken out of places before, sure, but breaking in? Thinking the front door would have cameras, she crept into the neighbouring alley towards the loading bay. Lights continued to go on and off around her. There was a camera pointing to the back door as well, but just the one that she could see. She'd spent enough time in the CIA running surveillance on closed-circuit cameras that she knew exactly where they would be placed to watch the backdoor, so she was sure that it was the only one. It was pointing away from her.

She kept her back to the alley wall to avoid the camera's peripheral vision and soon enough was right underneath it. She had shot the phone with enough electricity to get it to connect, maybe she could do the trick twice, and overload the camera? Once again it took a lot of strain, but she managed it: she shot lightning from the palm of her hand and it struck the camera, making it smoke rather pathetically.

With enough concentrated energy she could power on the loading bay's security shutters, which was a lot easier than trying to break open a padlock. The inner door was still ajar and she was able to walk right in. Most cameras in places like that, especially big chains, were dummies. As long as she didn't set off the alarms she wouldn't take enough for the theft to even be noticed. Any shoplifter coming in during the day could be blamed.

But she still didn't want to stick around or try to use the changing rooms. She went straight to outerwear, finding a cardigan a size too big for her and a beige trench coat that reminded her of the one she had before the Miracle. She found a bag, pulled off her funerary shoes and threw them in. It felt a little wrong to just dispose of the clothes she'd been buried in.

Thankfully she found a pair of boots that didn't have heels and were in her size, making her sore ankles significantly comfier when she put them on along with the clean socks. A baseball cap was the finishing touch on her look. In movies, when people needed to fly under the radar they'd throw on a baseball cap, so that was what she did.

Already feeling better, the rest of the walk northward felt a lot less daunting. She could walk properly and she was a damn sight warmer. Having lived in D.C. her whole life, she knew a few shortcuts here and there. She was still avoiding the lights and looking at the floor every time she passed a window so that she didn't see her reflection.

When she'd just passed Dupont Circle and was getting closer and closer to Columbia Heights, she cut into yet another alley. There were no lights whatsoever and when she got halfway through it, something moved to her left. She thought it was a cat, but it was a man, there was just enough moonlight to see.

"Hey, there," he said. This was exactly the reason she'd always avoided creepy alleyways. "Where are you going at this time of night?" She said nothing, just kept walking. "Hey, I'm talking to you."

"I'm just trying to get home," she said, surprising herself. Her voice was hoarse as if she had the flu, but the words were clear enough for him to hear – not like when she'd called Rex and only been able to mumble.

"How much?"

"Excuse me?"

"For a ride, how much?" She sped up again. "I'm talking to you, where are your manners?"

"I'm really not – I'm not what you think. I'm on my way home."

"Free, then?"

"What?"

He grabbed her arm but wasn't prepared. Her immediate fear sent a surge of power outwards.

There was a flash.

The guy flew back and landed against a dumpster.

She stared at him, but he was either out cold or dead. Her automatic reaction was to check and maybe call an ambulance, but her hands were still crackling. She couldn't check him for a pulse or then he'd really be dead. And she had no way to call for help.

She had to keep walking, now as fast as possible, and hope she didn't run into anybody else who wanted to proposition her.

Still with no watch, she had no way to say how long the walk from Arlington to Columbia Heights had taken. A damn sight longer than if she could drive a car. But she made it. She found Rex's apartment building.

The buzzer didn't work; it exploded at her touch and she almost swore. But it did short-circuit the electronic lock and leave the door open for her to walk right in. The stairs took a lot of effort, but she didn't trust the elevator to work properly. It was the fourth floor. She finally made it and knocked on the door.

No answer.

She knocked again and again until she was pounding on the door loud enough to wake up the whole floor. Eventually she heard movement inside and took a step back.

"Goddammit!" Rex shouted, "Whoever the hell that is, better have a good reason to-" After undoing at least four locks on the other side of the door, Rex opened it and saw her standing there in the dark hallway. She panicked, and the more the feeling grew the more the light above her flickered. "Who's there?" She didn't speak, but took off the baseball cap. "Is that-? Esther?"

"Hi, Rex."

The bulb above her exploded.

AN: I won't write this, but Esther eventually takes a container ship because planes aren't safe to reach the UK looking for Torchwood, at which point UNIT apprehends her and puts her in a containment cell for four MORE years, until she's finally busted out by Rory, Rose, and Clara Ravenwood, in Chapter 405 of 4D12C, "Shock Jockey". I did write a lot of that but in the end it was just boring so I've cut it all.