Kurt Wells and his wife, Samantha, were being driven home from dinner in a French restaurant one night in Vermont. He was looking through the business section of a newspaper, checking his stocks.
“How are your investments doing, Kurt?” she asked.
“Wonderful!” he said. “Excellent! They’re the highest they’ve been in…oh…four years.”
“Really?” she asked. “And so many people complain about the economy.”
“The people who don’t matter complain,” he said. “And the people who do matter, don’t complain.”
Their chauffeur, worried about his unemployed brother, tried to keep his sigh inaudible.
A sudden, loud crack of thunder startled all three of them. Then the rain started to fall.
“Have our large umbrella ready for us, Phil,” she told their driver.
“Yes, ma’am,” Phil said.
A huge gust of wind whistled by the car, startling them all again.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “This is going to be a nasty one.”
A flash of lightning switched the black of night to white for a split second. The rain was coming down heavily now, drenching the car.
The Wellses could see their mansion, surrounded by its large, gated lawn. In the flashing lightning and black of night, it looked to Phil like Dracula’s castle.
The gates opened, and the car went in. A bolt of lightning hit the right side of the gate just after the car drove past.
“My God!” Kurt shouted. “That scared the life out of me!”
“Oh, the gate is destroyed,” Samantha said. “How much it will cost to replace it!”
You can afford it, you billionaire bitch, Phil thought.
“Drop us off by the front door, and have our umbrella ready,” Kurt said. “I don’t want to go through the annoyance of parking in the basement parking lot, and then having to go up the stairs to the ground floor, what with my gout.”
Phil parked as instructed, and had the umbrella in his hand. He got out of the car and went over to open the right back door of the limo. He had the umbrella over himself for the moment.
“The umbrella is not for you, Phil, it’s for us!” Kurt snapped at him; then he held it over Kurt and Samantha.
Yeah, I’ve gotta get totally soaked for you, don’t I, you selfish oligarch bastard, Phil thought.
The couple got out of the car. A gust of wind blew rain all over Kurt and Samantha. His black tuxedo and her dark red evening gown were soaked.
“Phil, be careful!” she shouted. “Make sure the umbrella protects us from the rain!”
Yeah, like I’m supposed to be able to predict when the wind’s gonna blow the rain which way, Phil thought.
A bolt of lightning hit the walkway just a few feet behind where the three of them were.
“Oh, my God!” she screamed.
“Hurry up and get us inside, you lazy fool!” Kurt shouted.
Since when am I dawdling, you grumpy piece of shit? Phil thought. I wanna get out of this storm as quickly as you do. I can’t help it if the wind and rain are slowing us all down.
They’d reached the front door of the mansion and the butler opened it to let the couple in. Just then, the loudest crack of thunder they’d hear that night jolted all four of them.
Immediately after that, without even a second to calm down, a jagged fork of lightning came right at Kurt and Samantha, not only electrifying them, but also impaling them with its points.
They both screamed as their bodies shook and their blood sprayed and mixed with the rain. After several more seconds of this screaming, shaking, and spraying of blood—their bodies lit up like Christmas trees and burning to crisps—the forked spear of a lightning bolt disappeared, and the two lifeless bodies fell face-forward on the walkway immediately in front of the door.
They were charred black from head to toe. Holes in their chests, the diameter of thick spears, went all the way through from their backs to their fronts. Phil and the butler—shaking as much as their dead bosses had just been, their eyes and mouths agape—could see through their bosses’ backs to the concrete underneath. The two servants would keep shaking for another two minutes, always staring at the corpses.
Finally, Phil looked up at the night sky, for the storm had stopped just after Kurt and Samantha died. It stopped as quickly as it had begun. He intuited, correctly, that it was as if the whole purpose of the storm had been to cause the deaths of his wealthy bosses.
As he looked up there, he sensed how correct he had been to assume that it had, indeed, been the purpose of the storm, for Phil could clearly make out, in the darker spots inside the clouds, a large man’s face: eyes, nostrils, a smiling mouth, and even a beard.
It wasn’t pareidolia, either: it was too perfectly proportioned for that. In fact, Phil was sure he saw the eyes and mouth move.
Infinite Ocean 