The Shimmer (21 page)

"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 anything 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 because 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 outside 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.

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.

Chapter 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.

The harsh lights only made the pressure in his head more intense.

"Are you okay?" one of the other guards asked.

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"You look like hell."

Halloway had given up trying to make anybody else understand about the hum. No one else seemed to hear it.

"Every day's the same. We keep looking at those monitors. Nothing ever happens."

"That's the way I like it," the second guard said. "You'd rather have somebody attack us, just for the excitement? Maybe you didn't get shot at enough over in Iraq."

"As if terrorists care about an observatory," the first guard said. "I have no idea what we're doing here, but the pay's good."

"You got that right. The pay's good. So Earl, just shut up and quit complaining."

The night-viewing function on the cameras outside had been activated several hours earlier. On the monitors, the dishes, the fences, the scrub grass, the dirt, the miles and miles of godforsaken nothing--all of it was tinted green. One of the screens showed three coyotes loping by. Their body heat made them glow brightly. On a different screen, a jackrabbit jerked its head up. Sensing the coyotes, the rabbit bounded away in a panic. It, too, glowed unnaturally.

Moments later a third screen showed the coyotes chasing the rabbit through the green darkness.

"Who says nothing ever happens?" the first guard asked. "Any bets on who wins?"

"My money's on the rabbit," the second guard answered.

"How much? Oops, too late. Just as well you didn't have time to make your bet."

Halloway scowled at the screen. "Man, even blood looks green on those night-vision images." He stood and walked toward the doorway, stumbling slightly.

"Get some sleep," the second guard said.

"If only." Halloway left the room and walked along the stark corridor. His bootsteps echoed irritably.

The door to the Data Analysis area was closed. Wincing from his headache, he put his left ear against it.

You're not supposed to be in here, the researcher named Gordon had told him after Halloway had made an effort to be friends with him.

Gordon's eyes had looked stern behind his spectacles. This area's offlimits. You belong in the surveillance room.

Try to be nice to people, and they treat you like shit, Halloway thought.

He pressed his ear harder against the cold metal door. All he heard was the hum. Throughout the afternoon, he'd made yet another effort to find what caused it. He'd searched every room in the facility-the latrines, the sleeping quarters, the kitchen, the mess hall, the generator room, the exercise room, the surveillance room--and yet again, he hadn't found any answers.

I didn't get a chance to check the research area again, he thought darkly. That son of a bitch Gordon decided I wasn't good enough to be allowed in there any longer.

The hum filled Halloway's head. The only time he hadn't been in pain was last night when he'd listened to the music--the wonderful music that made him feel he was dancing with the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, smelling her cinnamon hair, tasting orange juice and vodka.

He gripped the doorknob and turned it.

Nothing happened. That bastard Gordon had locked it.

Halloway banged on the door but didn't get a response.

He hammered louder.

Down the hall, one of the guards leaned his head out from the surveillance room. "What are you doing?"

"What's it look like?"

"We were told to stay out of there."

"I thought I heard somebody shouting for help."

Halloway pounded so hard that his fist throbbed, but the pain was nothing compared to his headache.

Suddenly the door was yanked open. Standing in the harsh lights of the research area, Gordon glared from behind his tortoiseshell glasses. His face was bright red. "What's the matter with you? Damn it, follow orders."

Halloway stared past him toward the other researchers. Amid banks of glowing electronic instruments, they all wore earphones. A headset--presumably Gordon's--was lying on a table.

"You're listening to the music, aren't you? But you didn't let me know."

"You have no idea what you're interfering with. Unless you want to lose your job, leave us alone."

Gordon started to close the door.

Halloway pressed a hand against it and stopped him. "That's what you're doing, right? You're listening to the music."

Gordon put more effort into closing the door.

Halloway rammed it open, knocking him back.

"Hey!" Gordon shouted.

Halloway stalked past him, approaching the table. The other researchers thought he was coming at them and stumbled away. But all he cared about was the earphones. Faintly the music drifted from them. The wonderful, soothing music.

"Gordon, you brought it back, but you didn't tell me."

"Of course we didn't tell you. You're just a damned guard."

"I tried to be friends," Halloway said.

"What?"

"Friendship doesn't mean anything to you."

"What are you talking about?"

A guard appeared in the doorway. He held an M4.

"Is everything all right?"

"Lock this man up until a helicopter comes to fly him out of here,"

Gordon said. "He's fired."

Halloway picked up the earphones.

The guard came over. "You heard him, Earl. They want you out of here."

Halloway raised the earphones toward his head.

The guard gripped his left forearm. "The music isn't our business, Earl. Make this easy for everybody. Let's go."

Halloway put down the earphones.

The guard looked relieved. "Good. We'll just let these people do their work."

Halloway punched the guard in the throat.

"Uhhhh . . ."

The guard dropped the M4 and raised both hands to his smashed larynx.

Halloway picked up the rifle and fired a three-shot burst into Gordon's face. The tortoiseshell glasses disintegrated.

Hearing screams behind him, he turned and saw the other scientists scrambling for cover.

Aim away from the equipment, he warned himself.