The Shimmer (42 page)

His grandfather shocked the hell out of him by speaking.

"The lights."

Warren dropped the video game control, turned toward his grandfather, and gaped.

"I saw them," the old man said.

"You can talk?" Warren asked in astonishment.

His grandfather didn't seem to hear him. Instead the old man just kept talking, his voice hoarse. A lot of it Warren didn't understand-stuff about Texas, an airbase, lights, and an underground research station.

"Rostov." Whatever that meant.

"Ears bleed. Nose. Tear ducts. Burns. Time sped up. God help me.

Alice." That was the name of Warren's grandmother. His grandfather began to weep.

Warren ran to get a Kleenex and wiped his grandfather's bearded face.

"It's all right, Grandpa. I'll help you. What are you trying to say?"

Warren's grandfather stopped talking then. It was days before Warren realized that when he'd wiped his grandfather's tears, he had stood between his grandfather and the balls of light in the video game.

His parents thought he was lying.

"No, he talked for five minutes," Warren insisted.

"What about?"

Warren told them.

"Lights," his father said. "My mother talked about the research he'd been doing down in Texas, something about lights."

"Texas?"

"Outside a nothing town called Rostov. His father had something to do with lights, too. Way back in the First World War. I never figured it out."

"Aren't there some letters?" Warren's mother asked.

"Letters?"

"Between his father and mother. I remember Alice showed them to us. According to her, Edward treasured anything to do with his father because he was just a toddler when his father disappeared," she said.

"Some of the letters came from France during the First World War.

They mentioned something about lights."

"Yes, I remember now. Where did we put Dad's stuff?"

After a twenty-minute search, they found the letters in the bottom of a box in a closet. They took them into the living room and clustered around the white-bearded figure in his rocking chair.

"Yep, look at this," Warren's father said. "'I dream about the lights.

I can't wait to come back and find them.' January twentieth, 1918.

Wow. Dad, what do you know about this?"

But Warren's grandfather was again catatonic.

The next afternoon, as Warren played the video game, his grandfather pointed toward the floating, drifting lights and began to tell a story that he'd kept locked within him since 1945--about a secret facility under a remote airbase in Texas and a weapon of unknown power.

Spellbound, Warren felt as if electricity straightened the hairs on his arms. From then on, he told his friends that his father had chores for him to do after school. He hurried home and put on the video game. As the floating, drifting balls of light appeared, his grandfather talked increasingly about the lights.

But one day, when Warren rushed home, his mother met him outside and told him to be quiet because his grandfather was asleep in the bedroom. This disappointed Warren because he wanted to hear more about the lights and what had happened that terrible morning in 1945.

He played a video game, got bored, and decided to see if his grandfather was awake. Opening the door, he found that the bed was empty.

A window was open.

He called his mother, who hurried home. Although the two of them drove along every street on Fort Bragg, they couldn't find him.

Military policemen widened the search. The police outside the base widened the search even farther.

Hospitals, shelters, churches, parks. Warren's grandfather wasn't at any of them.

"How the hell can an old man disappear?" Warren's father demanded.

"I think I know where he went," Warren said.

"Maybe he figured out where Alice is buried and decided to visit her," Warren's mother suggested.

"No. He went to Rostov," Warren said.

"Rostov? Texas?"

"The airfield where he got hurt. He's always talking about it. I think that's where he went."

"How could an old man get to Texas?"

"I'm not saying he got there. I'm just saying I bet that's where he went."

The police sent a missing-person bulletin to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, all the states between North Carolina, where Fort Bragg was located, and west Texas.

Three days later, the Rostov police chief phoned. Yes, Warren's grandfather had managed to get there. He'd been found at the old airfield.

He was dead.

Chapter 78.

Raleigh felt the table beneath his head begin to vibrate. In the darkness, he straightened. The room seemed warmer, enough to make him sweat.

Of course it's warmer, he thought. The generator failed. The air conditioner isn't working.

But if that's the case, then the air-circulation pump isn't working, either, he realized. The only oxygen I can get is in this room.

The darkness made him imagine that the room was smaller than it was.

Relax. Take slow, calm breaths. There's plenty of air.

The ringing in Raleigh's ears persisted, aggravated by the earplugs.

The noise-reducing headphones pinched the sides of his head. Sweat trickled from under them. He wiped the sweat away with his hands.

Thirst made him wish that he'd thought to put bottles of water on the table while the light was dimming. When he came to his feet, the darkness intensified the scrape of the chair. He turned to the left, extended his arms, and shuffled across the floor, pawing the empty space. Sooner than he expected, his fingers touched the smooth metal of the filing cabinet.

No problem.

The bottles of water were in the top drawer. He groped inside and tucked three of the bottles under his left arm. He gripped two energy bars with his right hand and shuffled back toward the desk.

He bumped a sharp corner. Cursing, he quickly set down what he carried and rubbed his throbbing hip.

The accumulating humidity made his nostrils moist. After wiping them with a handkerchief, he felt his way around the table to where his chair again made a screeching sound. He took three long swallows from a bottle of water, wiped moisture from his lips, tore open the wrapping on an energy bar, and suddenly felt queasy.

The water he'd swallowed had an aftertaste, as if there were metal in it. Was it starting to turn bad?

Will it make me throw up?

The metallic taste became stronger.

Sweat trickled down his face. As the table continued vibrating, the darkness seemed less absolute, perhaps because his eyes were adjusting. He could almost see the water bottles.

Of course. I've always had great eyesight.

The blackness developed shades of gray. He definitely saw the outline of the bottles. That was the good news. The bad news was that the ringing in his ears was sharper, and the metallic taste almost made him gag.

The bottles were coming into view, but a haze surrounded them.

Damned sweat's getting in my eyes. He wiped them with the back of a hand, but the bottles remained blurred, even though the gray of the room was now so pale that he could see a hint of the table.

And the energy bars.

And his hands.

The effect was similar to the way night fades just before dawn.

Through blurred vision, Raleigh was able to distinguish the filing cabinet. He saw walls and the metal door across from him, everything still hazy.

Again he rubbed his eyes to clear them of sweat. The room was now light enough that he could see colors, the orange wrappers on the energy bars, the blue labels on the water bottles, the red on his hands.

Red?

Drops of blood covered the table. His shirt was blotched with it. In dismay, he realized that the metallic taste hadn't come from the water and the moisture on his face hadn't been sweat. It was blood running from his tear ducts and his nose.

He screamed.

The illumination came from the floor, the walls, and the ceiling.

Raleigh lunged toward the door, unlocked it, and yanked it open.

A glare made him shield his eyes.

The team lay before him. Covered with blood, those who were still alive groaned. One man had the strength to aim his M4 at him.

Raleigh stooped to grab the carbine with the grenade launcher but didn't need to use it--the man with the M4 passed out, his gun clattering to the concrete floor.

Raleigh charged over the bodies, yanked open another door, and raced into the chamber where the now useless Suburbans were parked. The glare was even brighter as he hurried toward the stairwell that led to the surface.

If I run fast enough, maybe I can go far enough.

I wasn't exposed as long as the rest of the team. Maybe I won't bleed out.

Chest heaving, he pounded up the stairs. He reached the door to the outside, turned the knob, rammed his shoulder against it, but couldn't make it budge. He jabbed numbers on a pad next to the door, entering the unlock sequence, but the door still wouldn't budge.

Of course! Raleigh thought. Without electricity, the code pad can't work!

Wailing uncontrollably, he hurried down the steps, raised the carbine, and fired a grenade at the door. The explosion threw him off balance. When the smoke cleared, he saw that the door hung askew. A glare showed beyond it.

As blood dripped from his face, he rushed up the stairs, entered the ruins of the hangar, and sprinted outside. Behind him, a massive light intensified, but straight ahead lay the darkness of the road.

Keep running!

He managed only three long, frenzied strides before something bounded from the darkness and struck his chest, knocking him onto his back. Jaws snapped at his neck. The German shepherd. Its face was bloody. In a frenzy, the dog drove its teeth toward Raleigh's neck.

He grabbed its throat, trying to push it away. It clawed and writhed.

He couldn't keep hold of its blood-slicked fur.

About to tear into his throat, it suddenly stopped and stared beyond his face. The blood on its muzzle reflected churning lights. With a yelp, it spun and raced into the darkness.

Raleigh struggled to his feet and staggered forward. The impact of falling had knocked his headphones off. The flow of blood had loosened his earplugs. Without their protection, he heard a hiss-cracklehum behind him.

And something else.

The motor of an airplane.

Of all the stories his grandfather had told him, the one that haunted him the most was about how Raleigh's great-grandfather had flown a World War I biplane toward the dark horizon in an effort to learn the origin of the lights. As a boy, Raleigh had imagined that biplane going farther and farther away, getting smaller, receding into the distance, becoming only a speck.

Vanishing.

My great-grandfather.

Turning, he was nearly blinded by a wave of lights speeding toward him. In the distance, grassland was ablaze, the flames adding to the glare, the smoke reflecting it. He gaped toward the twisting colors, the dominant hue of which was orange and reminded him of the sun.

Something moved inside them.

A biplane swooped into view, its orange at first indistinguishable from that of the flares around it. The biplane had two seats, one behind the other. In the rear seat, a young man worked the controls. He wore a uniform and goggles. Even at a distance, it was obvious that he was handsome.

He had a mustache. The tail of a scarf floated behind him.

Before Raleigh understood what he was doing, he started along the old airstrip. He knew he ought to run toward the road, but ever since the age of thirteen, all of his thoughts had been about the lights and their secrets.

When he was eighteen, he'd come to this airbase and searched it, finding a way into the underground facility. Like his grandfather, he'd joined the Army with the purpose of rising through military intelligence. At last he'd gained the authority he needed to track down his great-grandfather's reports about the lights, to follow clues that led him to his grandfather's reports about the lights.

The biplane swooped nearer.

Without warning, the engine stopped.

The biplane disappeared. It was instantly replaced by a small, single-wing aircraft, a Cessna, the engine of which was silent, its propeller fluttering uselessly. Raleigh saw a man and a woman through the canopy. Their faces were twisted with fear.

The plane was about to crash.

Chapter 79.

One moment, Page was trying to guide the Cessna over the Badlands and onto the murky grass. The next, swirling colors enveloped the plane. If time had seemed prolonged during the gliding descent, it became even more so now.

The Cessna appeared not to be moving.