The Shimmer (20 page)

"My motorcycle'll get there faster," Johnny said.

Luther almost added, "And my Jeep."

"My horse can get to places nobody else can," a cowboy said.

"Everybody's help is welcome," the mayor assured them through the bullhorn. "Those of you in the line, don't use your flashlights unless you absolutely need to. They'll ruin your night vision. Besides . . . " His tone indicated he was about to make a joke. "We don't want to scare whatever's making those lights. Heck, we may look as mysterious to them as they do to us."

But it didn't get a laugh, and Luther decided that some people in the crowd believed that the mayor was right.

Finally, a half hour before midnight, everybody started. Well, not everybody. Some people got tired and cold and went home. Others had too much to drink and fell asleep in their trucks. Lucky for them.

But the majority spread out carefully and started walking into the darkness of the rangeland.

"Happy Fourth of July!" someone shouted.

Luther stayed behind with Johnny, ready to drive into the field if anybody spotted anything. For a while, the backs of the people in the line were illuminated by the few remaining headlights. But despite the cloudless sky, the darkness of the field was murky, and when they disappeared into the darkness, it was like a magic trick.

A breeze cooled Luther's face as he strained to detect any movement out there.

"I see one!" a spotter exclaimed.

"Where?" his partner wanted to know.

"No! I'm wrong! Sorry, everybody! It was just a flashlight somebody turned on and off!"

Another light flickered and vanished. Luther could tell that it, too, was from a flashlight. Then several lights flickered. The temptation to see what was ahead on the ground was evidently contagious. The offand-on flashlights looked like giant fireflies bobbing and weaving out there.

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 unusualsounding 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 headlight 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 behind them.

From the sound of the receding engines, Luther could tell that nobody 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 toward. 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 accompanied by bobbing flashlights that suddenly seemed everywhere.

The people in the line had heard the truck and the horse rushing toward 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 paralyzed 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.

Chapter 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 toward 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."