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.

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 to- ward 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.”

“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 any- thing 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 be- cause 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 out- side 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.