“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 unusual- sounding 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 head- light 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 be- hind them.
From the sound of the receding engines, Luther could tell that no- body 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 to- ward. 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 ac- companied by bobbing flashlights that suddenly seemed everywhere. The people in the line had heard the truck and the horse rushing to- ward 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.