A spotter yelled into his walkie-talkie, telling the people in the field, “Turn off those flashlights! You’re making it hard for us to see what’s beyond you!”
“Cut the flashlights!” another spotter shouted.
Gradually they went off, and finally all Luther saw was darkness. The sky was another matter. When he happened to look up, he saw the flashing lights of an airliner speeding toward its distant destination. Another moving light-this one not flashing-probably came from a satellite.
“Shit,” Johnny said, hugging himself. “If I’d known it’d be this boring, I never would’ve suggested coming out here. I’m freezing my ass off. This is worse than the stupid fireworks.”
Luther was about to agree when he glanced toward the grassland, and something in him came to attention as a patch of darkness seemed to brighten a little.
Probably just another flashlight, he decided.
But it appeared to be far beyond where the searchers were likely to be, and it was different from the darkness around it.
“Johnny.” Luther pointed. “Do you-”
“I see something!” a spotter announced.
“So do I!” somebody else exclaimed.
So did Luther. Definitely. A ball of yellow light out there in the distance. Then a ball of green joined it. They bobbed as if floating in water, then merged into a single large ball that was red. A few seconds later, they drifted apart, and there were three of them, blue, orange, and a different shade of green.
Luther realized that he’d raised a hand to his right ear. An almost undetectable, high-pitched sound irritated his eardrum. It reminded him of a vibration he’d heard when he’d watched a man repair an old piano that was always stored in a corner of the school’s gymnasium. The man had taken a shiny metal object from his toolbox. It had a stem and a two-pronged fork. He tapped it against the side of the piano, and the fork vibrated with a hum, allowing the man to adjust a wire in the piano until the tuning fork and the piano wire hummed identically.
Luther heard something similar now, like a note from an unusual- sounding piano, except that the barely perceptible vibration was annoying, making him imagine a hot needle piercing each of his eardrums.
“I see another one!” a spotter yelled.
“Two hundred degrees!” his companion shouted, checking his compass.
“One hundred and eighty!” someone farther along the fence yelled.
The other spotters made their reports.
“A hundred and seventy!”
“A hundred and sixty-five!”
In a rush, the mayor and two members of the town council leaned over the hood of a pickup truck, one of them pressing down a map while another aimed a flashlight and the mayor drew lines on the paper.
“They intersect at one seventy-five!” the mayor shouted. He used a ruler to measure the distance on the map and compared it to the scale at the bottom. “Looks to be about eight miles out!” he shouted into his walkie-talkie.
Standing nearby, Luther heard a crackly response from the mayor’s walkie-talkie. “Eight miles? In the dark? That’ll take all night!”
“Just keep the line going! Head for the lights, and make sure nothing gets around you! We’ll send the trucks out now! They’ll get there in no time!”
Luther heard the sudden roar of an engine and realized that it was Johnny kick-starting his motorcycle. Two trucks started up, but Johnny was the first through the gap in the fence. He had his head- light dimmed, and when the trucks quickly followed, they used only their parking lights. Even so, Luther could see the dust they raised, and the red of their taillights revealed two horsemen riding close be- hind them.
From the sound of the receding engines, Luther could tell that no- body was speeding, but in the dark, with minimal lights, speeding was a relative term. Twenty-five miles an hour would be plenty.
At once it occurred to him that he’d been left behind.
His Jeep didn’t have a top. He leaped over the door, landed in the driver’s seat, and twisted the ignition key. As the engine rumbled and his parking lights revealed the fence, he steered into the gap. His Jeep had a stiff suspension. Bumping across the rough grassland jerked his head back.
Man, I hope the other kids saw me make that jump. Luther was reminded of an old movie that he loved to watch whenever it was on television: Bullitt. It had the greatest car chase, and Steve McQueen was the coolest driver ever, but not even McQueen could have done that jump better.
Luther’s front wheels jolted over rocks. A jackrabbit raced across his path. A night breeze ruffled his long hair. He pulled a luminous compass from his shirt pocket, took a quick glance down at it, and aimed toward 175 degrees.
The darkness formed a wall on either side. Even at this reduced speed, Luther had the sense of hurtling through space. His faint lights allowed him to see only a hundred feet or so ahead of him. Combined with the shudder of the Jeep over holes and rocks, they made it difficult for him to keep a clear, steady gaze on the area he aimed to- ward. The Ghost Lights were sometimes hard to see, even if he was standing breathlessly still in the gravel parking lot, but now he realized that, under these conditions, he couldn’t hope to notice them unless he got very close.
Abruptly he saw movement ahead. The people in the line! he realized. Silhouettes materialized. They were scattered to the side, as if they’d scrambled to get away from Johnny’s motorcycle and the trucks and the horsemen. Two people writhed in pain on the ground, while someone yelled into a walkie-talkie. Then Luther saw a horse thrashing on the ground, one of its legs bent at a sickening angle. A cowboy lay beside it. He wasn’t moving.
The next second there were only rocks and clumps of grass and the elusive darkness beyond his parking lights as he hurried on.
If I’m not careful, I’m going to run into somebody, he realized.
Wary, he put on his headlights and gasped at the black, cinder-like boulders that suddenly appeared before him. They stretched all the way to the right. If he’d been going any faster, he’d have flipped the Jeep as he steered sharply to the left and tore up dust that swirled around his head, blocking his vision.
Keep turning! Keep turning!
The damned Badlands. As he swung clear of the boulders, coughing from the dust, he noticed a glow ahead of him.
I must be closer to the lights than I realized.
They increased until they hurt his eyes, quickly becoming larger and brighter. At first he thought it was because he was gaining on them, but as they intensified, he realized that they were moving, too.
They’re coming toward me!
Luther didn’t know why that frightened him. The whole point of the hunt was to get close to the lights and explain what caused them, but as they magnified, he felt his stomach contract.
Two of the lights weren’t colored, though. Close to the ground, they sped nearer. With a start, Luther had the sick understanding that they were the headlights of a pickup truck.
It’s going to hit me!
He swerved to the right and felt the truck speed past him so closely that wind from it hurled grit into his eyes. He braked hard and skidded over rocks and grass. The jolt knocked his teeth together. Frantic, he pawed at his eyes, trying to regain his sight. Dust filled his lungs, making him cough again.
Then his vision became clear enough for him to see a panicked horse galloping toward him. It didn’t have a rider. Terrified, Luther raised his arms across his face, certain the frothing animal would collide with the Jeep. He imagined the agony of its weight flipping onto him, crushing him. But at once the hooves thundered past.
He spun to look behind him. Farther back, distant shouts were ac- companied by bobbing flashlights that suddenly seemed everywhere. The people in the line had heard the truck and the horse rushing to- ward them and were running in every direction to avoid getting hit.
A woman screamed. The horse wailed. Or could that terrible animal outcry possibly have come from a human being?
Luther felt paralyz
ed by the chaos. Then the roar of another engine made him stare ahead again. He saw the colored orbs chasing the headlights of a truck that veered to avoid Luther’s car, angling sharply to his right. A single headlight raced next to the truck-Johnny’s motorcycle. Continuing to veer to the right, the truck smashed through a barbed-wire fence and detached a sign that flipped through the air. The sign nearly hit Johnny’s motorcycle.
Luther knew exactly what the sign said. He’d seen identical ones on the fences that enclosed the area over there.
PROPERTY OF U.S. MILITARY
DANGER
TOXIC CHEMICALS
UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE
The speeding taillights dimmed, pursued by the colors, which diminished as well, until all Luther saw was the darkness of the grassland.
A far-off rumble sounded like thunder. Several flashes might have been lightning on the horizon or fireworks from a distant town. But Luther had no doubt what really caused the rumble and the flashes. Despite the distance, he thought he heard Johnny screaming.
36
“So the sign didn’t exaggerate?” Brent asked as they stood atop the brightly lit motor home and the crowd milled impatiently in the shadowy parking lot below. Anita continued to direct her camera to- ward him and Hamilton.
“During the Second World War, there was an active military airfield in that area.” Hamilton sounded as if he were in pain. “This area’s so remote it was a perfect place for flight crews to practice bombing runs.
Usually what they dropped didn’t have detonators or explosives. But sometimes it was the real thing-to get the crews used to the shock waves. Not all the bombs exploded when they hit the ground. After so many years, the detonators became very unstable.”
“And your friend-did he survive?”
“Johnny?” Hamilton grimaced, as if the memory belonged to yesterday. “He and two men in the pickup truck were blown apart when they drove over a couple of the bombs.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Brent, of course, had already known it. Hamilton had told him about it earlier in the day. But Brent needed to put on a grave look of sympathy.
“Nobody dared go looking for them in the dark,” Hamilton continued. “A local pilot went up at dawn. She flew over the area and saw the wreckage and gave details about the location. But even then, a recovery team couldn’t just rush in for fear of setting off other bombs. It took them until midafternoon to get there.” He shook his head and looked as if he might be sick. “By then the coyotes had gotten to what was left of the bodies and-”
Brent decided it was time to change the subject. The program was close to being a tabloid as it was, without describing animals eating corpses.
“And the lights? What happened to them?”
“They just disappeared. The next night, they didn’t come back- and the night after that. It was a couple of months before they returned.”
“You said the lights chased your friend’s motorcycle and the truck?”
“And the other truck and the two cowboys. That’s the way it looked to me. Of course, it might have been an optical illusion. During the investigation, a psychiatrist claimed that everybody just got carried away, that we saw the lights because we wanted to see them, and when one person panicked, everyone panicked. I don’t know what to believe. That night the lights sure seemed real, and they sure seemed to have a will of their own. They scared one of the horses so bad it broke its leg, and another threw its rider and bolted away. That was the horse I saw galloping toward me. The cowboy broke an arm and his collarbone.”
“And what about you? From what you’ve said, the lights didn’t bother you.”
“I sat in the darkness for a long time, trying to figure out what I’d seen. I tried to tell myself that my eyes had played tricks on me. But if I was seeing some kind of hallucination, Johnny and the guys in the pickup truck must have seen exactly the same hallucination. Why else would they have been driving so fast to get away? When I finally got the strength to turn the Jeep around and go back to this parking lot, I realized that my shirt collar was wet.”
“Wet?”
“With blood.”
“What?” Hamilton hadn’t told him about this before.
“There was a sound.”
“A sound?”
“High pitched. Almost impossible to hear. It felt like a hot needle against my eardrums. They broke.”
“Broke?”
“My eardrums. Blood flowed out of my ears. I couldn’t hear any- thing for three months. My doctor was afraid I’d be permanently deaf. It’s amazing how much of that night I shut out of my memory. Talking about this again…”
Hamilton actually looked as if he were going to cry.
Time to wrap this up, Brent thought. He pointed toward the darkness.
“And now, all these years later, another tragedy has happened be- cause of the lights. We’re going to take a short break. As soon as we come back, we’ll train our cameras on the area behind me and try to find some answers about-”
“I see one!” somebody in the crowd shouted.
“Where?”
“Over there! To the right!”
“I see it, too!”
Brent felt the motor home shake as the crowd pressed in that direction.
“Look! A half dozen of them!”
Brent sensed Anita moving forward with the camera.
“Where?” someone shouted. “I still don’t see them!”
“To the right!” someone else yelled.
Brent stared in the direction a lot of people were pointing. All he saw was darkness. He hoped that the camera operators on the ground and in the chopper were following his instructions and focusing on the crowd. The people were the story. Their reactions were becoming frenzied.
“Yes! My God, they’re beautiful!” a woman exclaimed.
At once Brent saw something in the distance. Six lights appeared to float. They converged in pairs, then separated.
“I see them!” Brent said to the viewers at home. “This is extraordinary. You’re the first live audience ever to view the mysterious Rostov lights.”
Anita was next to him now, aiming the camera toward the lights. The intense look on her face told Brent that she was getting fabulous images.
“Perhaps this will help us understand what causes them,” he told his audience.
“That isn’t them,” Hamilton interrupted.
Brent continued. “Perhaps we’ll be able to-”
“I’m telling you those aren’t the Rostov lights,” Hamilton insisted.
“But I can see them. They’re obviously out there.”
“Headlights.”
“What?”
“You’re looking at the road from Mexico. Those are the headlights of cars driving along the highway. The road goes up and down over there. That’s why the headlights seem to float. A lot of people have been fooled by that road.”
“But…”
“The lights don’t look anything like that. Besides, it’s the wrong direction. That’s southwest. You need to look southeast.”
“Over there!” a man yelled.
As one, the crowd turned southeast, and the Winnebago shook again. Several pointed emphatically.
“There!”
Brent turned to stare in this new direction and felt overwhelmed. The first thing he noticed were the colors. He’d grown up in Michigan. One disturbing summer night when he was ten, he’d been out- side after dark and had seen countless ribbons of colors rippling across the sky. They’d radiated from the north and filled the heavens, eerily lustrous, swirling as if alive.
He’d run into the house and warned his mother, “We’re going to die!”
“What?”
“The sky’s on fire! It’s the end of the world!” His father had died from a heart attack six months earlier. That was probably why death had been on Brent’s mind.
When his mother had finally realized what was happening, she’d held his hand and made him go outside with her.
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He’d struggled with her. “No! It’ll kill us!”
“There’s no reason to be afraid. What you’re seeing is the aurora borealis.”
“The what?”
“The Northern Lights. I heard an explanation for them once. Apparently they’re magnetic rays from the sun reflecting off the polar ice cap.”
What Brent saw now-off in the distance-made him feel as if the Northern Lights had been squeezed into seven shimmering orbs. Their iridescent colors kept changing, rippling from within, giving the impression that something churned at their cores. Their shimmer was hypnotic as they drifted and floated, sank and rose and hovered. Even though they were far away, Brent tried to reach out and touch them.
Many in the crowd felt the same. They reached toward the darkness.
“Get out of my way!” a man yelled.
“You’re blocking the view!” somebody complained.
“Move!” a woman insisted. “I need to get closer! I need to be cured!”
“Stop shoving!”
“No, don’t…”
Everyone surged toward the fence.
“Can’t breathe!”
People slammed against the motor home. As it shook, Brent had trouble keeping his balance. When even more people surged, it trembled violently. He reached out for something to hold him up, but all he grasped was air. The next time the Winnebago shook, his knees gave way. Suddenly he was in the air, plummeting toward the crowd. He fell between bodies, struck the gravel, and groaned from the mass of people charging over him.
37
Earl Halloway sat in the harshly lit surveillance room beneath the observatory’s dishes. He’d just swallowed six aspirins, for a total of a half bottle today, but he still couldn’t control his headache. His stomach burned. The hum from the facility’s generator or the dishes or whatever the hell caused it became louder, making him grind his teeth to try to relieve the pressure behind his ears.
This wasn’t Halloway’s shift, but there was no way he could contain himself enough to watch a movie on the computer in his room. He’d attempted to turn off the lights and lie in bed with a wet washcloth over his closed eyes. But the headache was too excruciating for him to lie still, so he’d come to the security office in the hope that doing something useful would distract him from it.
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