It was raining pretty heavily today, but that was nice. It was needed. The wildfire smoke had been fouling up the air for a week or two now. The rain will help wash it away.
Michael was outside hosing off his car in the rain. He knew that if you let ash-water pool on the paint it can cause issues, so he always hosed his car off when the rains came after the smoke season. He didn’t use soap or anything like that, just quick and with a sponge.
The clouds and rolled in pretty fast. It was quite a relief to Michael that the smoke would be gone so quickly. He wasn’t sure how far away the forest fires were this time, but they seemed awfully large this year. Sometimes it can seem like the fire is fighting a battle of its own.
The clouds started off as a soft grey but worked their way up to near black rather quickly. The rain started coming down pretty hard. Luckily Michael had just finished removing the ash from his car and gathered his things to move back inside. He emptied his bucket of soap into the driveway, then he threw all of his washing supplies into his bucket and walked into his garage.
As he walked back out of his garage he saw a giant bolt of lightning split the tree that stood on its own in the median of their col-de-sac. This both scared and saddened Michael, as he really enjoyed that tree as it acted as a sort of waypoint for the houses.
Then he saw the lightning strike again, just to the left of the tree. Then it struck again, a little further down the street this time. Michael could see the mail delivery person watching the lightning bolts getting closer and closer to their vehicle. They decided that waiting around was not the correct thing to do so they started running. Almost as soon as they had shut the door behind them a bolt of lightning struck the vehicle, sending it a few inches into the air and rupturing all of the tires.
The delivery person kept running and Michael swore that the lightning kept following them. The lightning was not doing in a straight line to the side, but it was following the person. The person was starting to move in a zig-zag pattern and the lightning was copying them! It was almost as if the lightning was starting to try to get a lead on them.
Michael went inside of his house to get out of the storm. He was starting to make a cup of coffee when lightning struck the kitchen window. At least Michael thought that was what happened as he got himself back up off the floor and burned his hand on the still red-hot metal window frame. Lightning struck again.
Michael decided it was time to copy the delivery person and start running, but not on foot. He ran out to his car and started the vehicle. He drove over the median containing the now-split tree and out into the road. He could see in the rearview mirror that lightning was following his car at a distance.
Looking forward he could see that lightning was following other people. Michael lived on a hill, and he was rounding the crest of it right now. The view gave him a good view of his surroundings. Michael paused for a moment to take in what he saw, which was a storm larger than he had ever seen with lightning striking down over the city below.
Except for one area: the now burning industrial district. It seems that right above each burning building the sky was completely clear.
“The heat seemed to be causing the sentient storm to dissipate” thought Michael. “How do we get more heat into the sky?”
Burn the wind turbines, he thought as lightning struck his rear bumper.
Michael drove down the hill and took a hard left down the more narrow road which lead to the grasslands. Property owners had recently rented out unused graze land for the purpose of wind turbines.
Michael drove right through a wooden fence and into the first field of turbines he could find. He drove the car as close to them as he could, bobbing and weaving, with the intent of trying to get the storm to accidentally hit the turbines.
It worked.
First one was burning, then two, and now a dozen. Michael still had half a tank of gas and felt like he could do this all day. But he had no need to, as the storm was staring to spread out above him. The lightning became less frequent, weaker even.
Michael was screaming towards a rock face when he slammed on the breaks, turned the wheel, and spun to the side to a complete stop. He looked back to see his handy work. The entire field was ablaze now and the storm was circling around the field, but not over it.
The storm seemed to have abandoned Michael as the thick smoke carried heat up into the atmosphere. He jumped as he heard a loud boom. He looked into the distance and saw that the first turbine that had been struck had now fallen to the ground.
He sat and watched tower after tower fall and explode, most with a sputter but a couple with a boom. The grass fire was starting to spread but was not going to be a very big danger as these grassland was a sort of island between several rivers and streams.
Michael put his car back into drive and spun towards the nearest fence. He drove right through the fence and across a shallow agricultural trench that ran between properties. The storm had given up a lot of territory now. It seemed as if there was a critical mass of heat being emitted by the city now and the beast was ready to move on.