Read Black Lightning for Free Online Page A

over the edge to plunge into the abyss.
    He struggled against the urge; took a step backward.
    Then the bands tightened around his chest, his left arm began to tingle once again, and he felt that clammy sheen of sweat coat his body.
    “Glen?” he heard someone ask, but now the voice sounded too far away even to be readily identifiable. “Jesus, Glen, what is it?”
    Glen staggered backward, groping for something to steady himself with.
    Found nothing.
    His right hand moved wildly now, reached for the elevator.
    Missed.
    He staggered, his balance failing him, his knees buckling.
    It was his heart.
    Something had gone very wrong with his heart.
    He could hear it pounding in his ears, feel it beating crazily in his chest.
    Now the bands constricting his lungs tightened. He struggled for breath.
    “He’s having a heart attack,” he heard someone say as he felt strong hands grip his shoulders, steadying him as he crumbled onto the thick planks of the platform. “You got your phone, Jim?”
    Jim Dover was already punching 911 into the pad of his cellular phone, and as George Simmons and Alan Cline knelt next to Glen Jeffers’s supine figure, Dover ordered an ambulance, then began barking orders into the walkie-talkie that allowed him to communicate with the crew below. A moment later, all his instructions issued, he slapped the phone shut, dropped it into his pocket, and took charge of the situation on the tiny platform. Suddenly, even to Jim Dover, the sturdy planking seemed to be no more than an insignificant speck suspended in the middle of nothing. “We have to get him into the elevator. George, you and I should lift him up. Alan, hold his head. Not real high—just enough to slide him into the cage.”
    As the three men raised Glen Jeffers a few inches off the planking and eased him through the open gate of the elevator, the semiconscious man’s lips worked, and an incomprehensible sound came faintly from his lips.
    “What did he say?” Alan Cline demanded. When no one replied, Alan bent over his partner. “It’s okay, Glen,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady and reassuring. “Soon as we get you down, you’re going to be just fine.”
    The metal gate clanged shut and Jim Dover jabbed impatiently at the elevator’s controls. After a second’s hesitation, the cage jerked once, eliciting a barely audible grunt of pain from Glen Jeffers, then began inching its way downward at what seemed to be an impossibly slow pace.
    “For Christ’s sake,” Alan Cline demanded of no one in particular, “can’t you make this damned thing go any faster?” No one answered him, and he bent over his partner once more. “Take it easy, Glen. Just take it easy, okay?”
    Above his head, Jim Dover and George Simmons glanced uneasily at each other. Glen’s breathing was coming only in the shallowest of gasps, and his complexion had lost all its color, taking on a ghastly faint bluish pallor. “Either of you know CPR?” Dover asked. “I don’t think he’s going to make it.”
    Alan Cline glared up from his crouched position next to Glen. “Shut up, Jim, okay? Nobody’s going to die.” But as if to belie his partner’s words, a terrible rattling sound issued from Glen Jeffers’s lips, and now the blood drained from Alan Cline’s face. Racking his brain to remember what he’d been taught in the cardiopulmonary resuscitation course he’d taken almost a year ago, he pulled Glen’s mouth open, checked to make sure his tongue wasn’t blocking his throat, then began pressing rhythmically on his chest. As the elevator continued its agonizingly slow descent, he bent over, closed Glen’s nostrils with the fingers of his right hand, and began breathing directly into the unconscious man’s lungs.
    After three deep breaths he went back to work on Glen’s chest.
    They were only twenty feet above the building’s floor when finally another small groan escaped Glen Jeffers’s lips and his lungs began to work once again,