The Shimmer (39 page)

"And the static coming from that directional radio," a researcher said. "Doesn't matter what frequency I use. That's all I receive."

"No, there's something in the background. But I can barely hear it."

Somebody chuckled. "Probably a Mexican radio station playing mariachi music."

"Look, what's that over there?"

"A shooting star. Wow. Haven't seen one since I was a kid. I've been living in the city for so long, I almost forgot what they look like."

"There's another one."

"No, that one's not a shooting star. It's too low on the horizon, and it's lasting too long."

"A bunch of them. They look like skyrockets. I bet we're seeing fireworks from across the border. Does anybody know if it's a Mexican holiday?"

"Hey, whoever's in that tent, stop turning up the volume on that radio. The static's hurting my ears."

"Nobody's in the tent," one of the researchers said. "The static's getting louder on its own."

"And the fireworks are getting brighter," a soldier said. "Look at all those colors. They remind me of the Northern Lights. I saw them once when I was a kid and my dad took me camping on Lake Michigan."

"But these are to the south. And they're awfully low on the horizon," an engineer reminded him. He turned and stared toward the tent. "Are you sure nobody's screwing with that radio? Now the static's louder than the generator."

Abruptly the static ended.

So did the shooting stars or the skyrockets or the Northern Lights--or whatever they were. The horizon turned completely dark.

So did the glowing instruments in the tent. The generator stopped droning.

"What the hell happened to everything?"

"Gentlemen," Edward said, "welcome to the lights."

Chapter 69.

Page frowned when something changed on the ground behind the Cessna. The glow of the spotlights abruptly went out.

Tori noticed it, also. "Something happened behind us."

He banked the aircraft to the left and returned in the direction from which they'd come. But the landscape no longer appeared the same. "Where's the observation area? I don't see the floodlights."

"Not only that," Tori said, "I don't see any headlights. There was a whole line of traffic a couple of minutes ago. Now the road's invisible. And the helicopters--I don't see their lights anymore, either."

"Their radio transmissions have stopped," Page told her, puzzled.

Below them, a fireball suddenly illuminated the darkness. Two other explosions followed. Startled, Page saw the twisting impact of a helicopter crashing onto vehicles at the side of the road, its distant rumble reaching him. Huge chunks of metal flipped along the ground. The spreading flames revealed specks of people racing away in panic.

"God help them," Tori murmured.

Shock waves bumped the plane.

"Maybe we should head back," Page managed to say.

"No, it can't be a coincidence. Somehow what's happening down there has to be connected to the lights. We came up here to do something--if we don't finish this now, I don't think I'll ever have the strength to try it again." Tori paused. "I want to find the truth."

"Whatever you want," Page assured her. "We're in this together."

"Yes." Tori savored the word. "Together."

Avoiding the updraft of the flames and debris, Page flew south toward the murky horizon.

"What are those dark lumps ahead?" Tori asked.

"The Badlands."

Tori pointed. "Something's beyond them."

"I don't see anything."

"Faint red lights. Three of them."

Page concentrated. "I still don't see them."

"They're getting brighter."

"Where are they coming from? Give me a heading."

Tori looked at the indicator. "One hundred and forty degrees."

"All I see is blackness."

"They're dividing. They're even brighter now. They're changing from red to blue and green and yellow. How can you possibly not see them?"

"Maybe if I went lower."

"They're dividing again."

Page eased back on the throttle. The aircraft gradually descended, the sinking, floating sensation reminding him of what he felt when he saw the lights.

Except that this time, he didn't see them.

"So many now. They're like a rainbow rippling across the ground,"

Tori said, her voice strange. "They're moving toward the observation area."

"I'm as open as I can possibly be. Why can't I see them?"

As Page descended farther toward the darkness, all at once he did see the lights. It was as if a veil had dissolved, but the colors weren't rippling the way Tori had described.

They writhed in anger.

"Something's wrong." Page shoved in the throttle and raised the nose.

A yellow filament shot up, like a flare from a solar storm. It lengthened until it snapped free, condensing into a twisting mass that sped higher.

Climbing, Page banked to the right.

The light kept coming.

He banked to the left.

The light did the same.

Transparent, iridescent, pulsing, it suddenly filled the cockpit. Page could no longer hear the plane's engine. Instead he heard a rushing wind. Shades of yellow swirled around him. Images flickered.

He saw an aquarium filled with wavering plants and a model of a shipwreck, but the plants were actually cuttlefish, their tentacles resembling ferns, and parts of the shipwreck were more cuttlefish that had cleverly camouflaged themselves to match their surroundings.

And now his father was pointing toward more and more cuttlefish, and his mother, who would die from breast cancer within the year, was smiling because her husband and son were getting along for a change.

And Page heard a voice within the rushing air. It was his father.

"Sometimes we need to learn to see in a new way."

The engine stopped.

The yellow vanished.

Without warning, Page found himself in darkness, his night vision blunted by the residual image of the light. He strained his eyes, desperate to see out through the canopy. With relief, he found that the difference between the glow of the stars and moon above him and the darkness below him was enough for him at least to identify the horizon.

The ground straight ahead seemed darker than the areas around it.

Lumpy.

Page frantically realized that, trying to escape the pursuing light, he'd become disoriented and turned the aircraft toward the Badlands. The silence was dismaying. Normally his headphones muffled the sound of the engine, reducing it to a drone. But now he heard nothing.

The instrument panel was dark. The radio was dead.

His father had told him repeatedly what to do in case of an engine failure. The first thing was to put the aircraft into a glide. At a speed of sixty-five knots, the Cessna would lose a thousand feet for every nine thousand feet that it glided. In theory, this provided enough time to choose a location for an emergency touchdown--ideally a field, or even a road. During the day, the options would be visible, but in the dark, it wasn't possible to know if a stretch of blackness was grass or rocks or a chasm.

At least the moon and the stars made the dark lumps of the Badlands look different from the flatness around them. Page kept the Cessna gliding at what he could only estimate was sixty-five knots.

With the airspeed indicator not visible, he needed to rely on the feel of the aircraft, on thousands of hours of judging how it handled at various speeds.

They continued to drop.

"Tori, make sure your seat belt's tight! Just before we touch down, open your door! The impact of landing might twist the fuselage and wedge the door shut!"

He decided not to add, And trap you inside.

To minimize the possibility of a fire, Page twisted the fuel selector dial to the off position, sealing the fuel lines. The closer they got to the ground, the more his eyes worked sufficiently for him to distinguish the lumps of the Badlands.

Tori saw them, too.

"Will we clear them?" she shouted.

"That's the plan."

"A damned good one."

The Cessna glided lower. Time stretched. A minute felt like forever.

"My skin feels burned," Tori said.

Page frowned, touching his cheek. "So does mine."

"I saw my father," she said.

"What?"

"When the light swirled around us, I saw my father. I was a little girl. He was dragging me to the car. I hit him, trying to get away so I could look at the lights."

"I saw my father, too."

The dark ground sped closer.

"I love you," Tori said.

"I love you."

The boulders loomed.

"Brace yourself."

Skimming over the Badlands, Page thought he felt a wheel strike something. At once the uneven darkness was gone, replaced by what seemed to be grassland. But anything could be under the Cessna-rocks that would snap the wheels and flip the aircraft, or a fence that could do the same thing.

They were over the old military airbase, Page realized. Floating, he tried to hold off landing as long as possible, not only because that made for a theoretically softer impact but because as long as they were still in the air, they remained alive.

He couldn't help thinking about the unexploded bombs below him.

Chapter 70.

Blood dripped from Halloway's nostrils. He stopped dancing long enough to wipe the back of his right hand across his mouth. Seeing the red liquid on his knuckles, he felt troubled, but only for a moment. That blood didn't matter any more than the blood trickling from his ears did.

The woman in his arms mattered.

The glass of vodka and orange juice, always full--that mattered.

Most of all, the music mattered. Halloway remembered his youthful dreams of becoming a rock star, of having the world at his feet, of being able to give orders and do anything he wanted. He'd practiced with his guitar until his fingers had calluses. He'd written song after song. He'd followed rock bands from city to city, doing his best to be indispensable, buying drugs for them, getting girls for them, trying to persuade them to listen to his songs and maybe record them and maybe even let him sing in the background because good buddy Earl deserved repayment for all the favors he'd done.

Pretty soon, he'd be the guy people followed and got girls and drugs for.

But one city became another and another, just as one band became another and another, and one day Halloway realized that nobody was ever going to record his songs, just as they damned sure weren't going to let him sing. What was he, some kind of moron, that he didn't grasp that they were laughing at him and using him?

He went back to Providence, worked as a busboy in a restaurant, got his girlfriend pregnant, and joined the Army. The next thing he knew, he was killing people instead of singing to them.

The sadness of his life spilled over him as he danced to the heartbreaking music. His eyes blurred with tears. When he used his right hand to wipe them, he managed to see that there was a lot more blood on his knuckles than there'd been a minute ago. Frowning, he used his left hand to wipe his eyes. Seeing red liquid on those knuckles, he realized that blood was streaming from his tear ducts as well as his ears and his nose, but that didn't matter, either--because then it occurred to him that his eyes were blurred for another reason.

He smelled something other than the cinnamon hair of the woman. Coughing, he looked toward the hallway beyond the open door, but he couldn't actually see the hallway.

A haze filled it.

Chapter 71.

Lockhart piled more dead grass and tumbleweeds on the fire he'd built over the air-circulation pipes. The area around him blazed from spotlights that had been activated at sunset, casting a grotesque glare over the huge dishes. The lights were so powerful that he felt their heat.

Or maybe it was the heat from the fire, which rose about five feet into the air now. After shooting every surveillance camera Lockhart could find, he'd searched the area for another way to get into the complex.

Damn it, the place is airtight, he'd thought.

Immediately he'd realized that of course the facility couldn't possibly be airtight. There had to be pipes to pump the air in and out.

Otherwise people inside would suffocate.

In the end, Lockhart discovered three sets of them, hidden among the dishes.

He didn't have matches. Muzzle flashes from his M4 had done just fine, however. First he'd piled dead grass and tumbleweeds over the pipes. Then, shooting into them, he'd had no trouble starting fires.

The trick was to keep hurrying from one fire to another, constantly adding more brush. It quickly became obvious which pipes were which. Smoke was sucked into one and blown upward from another.