It was an infernal recipe: above-normal temperatures, plus drought, plus unyielding Santa Anas, and now dry thunderstorms. It was shaping up to be a hell of a fire season. Lightning had started over six hundred wildfires in the last two weeks, mostly in Santa Barbera, Los Angeles, and Riverside Counties. If it stayed bad, that might climb to a couple of thousand, and FEMA and the National Guard would be out here.
So far, Northeast Orange County had been safe. But then Billy had seen that lightning, and now he had a grim feeling things would get worse.
He heard a humming sound, and his rearview mirror caught a steady blue-white glow. He thought a car had pulled up behind him, and he glanced back.
Billy's cruiser was passed by a floating ball of blue-white light, about as big as a basketball. It hummed as it went by. He swallowed hard, and found that his throat was bone dry. The ball glowed translucently, not too bright to see through. It turned, bobbing, six feet from his car's door, and crossed the street, growing as it went.
In seconds, Billy's mind raced from UFOs, to swamp gas, to the glowing tops of masts of ships at night -- what was it called? St. Elmo's fire. All wrong. Then he had it. Ball lightning.
When it reached the sidewalk, it was larger than Billy's outstretched arms. As it climbed the hill, its humming faded, but it seemed to keep growing. When it was six feet tall, it left a tiny orange flame on the grass beneath it. The wind made the flame dance and spray a ribbon of smoke along the hillside. The flame spread, amoeba-like, and tossed embers that swam through the smoke.
Billy picked up his radio. "Tango-five-five, dispatch."
Carla's voice came back. "Dispatch, go."
"I just saw a..." Better keep it simple. "That is, lightning strike and brushfire at Yorba Linda Boulevard and Camino Seco."
There was a pause while, he imagined, she said shit. "Roger, Billy, I'll make the call."
The fire had eaten a few square yards now, and it pulsed as gusts of wind pushed it. The ball lightning drifted over the summit of the nearest hill and vanished.
Billy's troubles were just beginning that night, and he didn't think of the ball lightning again until the next day. No one else saw it. And no one else saw two figures appear out of nowhere, where the ball of light was last seen.
The two figures, and their cargo, slipped away from Chino Hills State Park and escaped up the shadowy street.
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Outrageous Fortunes: a Novel of Alternate Histories is available now on the Kindle.
Turing's Revenge and Other Stories Page 8