Ernie laid on his back for 10 or 15 seconds, trying to figure out what had happened. When he realized Zach was down, too, Ernie crawled over to his friend. Zach wasn't breathing and had no pulse. His pants were completely shredded, and his jacket and his shirt were melted to his arms. He was bleeding out of his eye from where the lightning had hit him. Ernie says he thought his friend was dead.

"First thing I did, I just said a prayer," Ernie says. "I just said, 'God, if it's your will for us to die, let it be.' Because I didn't know what was wrong with me. I could hardly breathe. And I said, 'But if it is your plan for us to get down, we're going to need your strength right now.'"

Then remembering a ninth-grade class, Ernie performed CPR on Zach for about 20 seconds before Zach started breathing again.

"I saw that he was alive and then I just kind of panicked," Ernie says. "I went over to Zach's backpack because his grandma's cell phone was in there."