Close Encounters of the Third Kind (7 page)

Neary finally staggered out of the high weeds and back to the center of the road. The woman stared blindly at him, her arms around the little boy, her hands over the boy’s eyes, as if still shutting away from him the high, bright headlights bearing down upon them.

“Lady,” Roy began, “you shouldn’t let your little boy—”

“I’ve been searching for him for hours,” Jillian Guiler burst out. “He wandered away from our house. I’ve been looking for hours. He just ran away. Hours and hours I’ve been—”

“Okay,” Neary said. “Okay, I’m sorry I—”

“That’s a dangerous curve,” a voice said.

Neary turned to see—of all things—an old farmer sitting in a chair on the back of an ancient pickup. His family, a wife and two sons, were grouped around him, some with binoculars, one boy with a toy telescope.

“Just like the circus coming to town,” the farmer was saying, taking a swig from a bottle of something. “They come through at night . . . they come through late so they don’t disturb the residents.”

A sudden wind sent Jillian’s hair flying back from her face. Roy could feel his own hair blown in the same direction. He turned to face the wind, whistling now through the snow fence.

In Neary’s truck, tangled in yards of torn-up snow fence, the police radio talked on.

“Can you run a make on them?”

“. . . I may be gaining again.”

“As long as they keep following the road.”

“This is Randolph County. We’re monitoring you on the emergency frequency. What’ve you guys got down there?”

Squinting downwind, Neary could see something coming along the road, but it turned out to be a low-winging flight of birds, escaping something. Something on the horizon. Something that glowed.

A group of rabbits bounded past, ears flat against their heads.

“Here they come again,” the farmer said.

Neary whirled back to stare down the road.

“Jesus!” he whispered to himself. “Jesus Chr—”

The very breath seemed to have been sucked out of his lungs. The vacuum was filled by a bass rumble, as though the air was being disturbed by lightning. Closing soundlessly on them at high speed was what looked like a sudden sunrise at two
A.M.
, flying past him from east to west. Without thinking, Roy covered his face with one arm and grabbed for the woman and the boy with the other. Jillian felt her face and neck burn, then prickle. The three clung tightly together as something like an Indian-summer sunset, flashing and blinking autumn colors, swept past them, slowing above the road ahead. A billboard featuring McDonald’s golden arches was studied by six fingers of light before the massive Christmas ornament moved on, a white spotlight picking out the dotted line on the road beneath it.

A third vehicle—resembling a jack-o’-lantern to Neary because there almost seemed to be a phantom face leering out of each of the bright lights, out of each of the thousands of little stained-glass colored sections—closed over, then passed them and, following the road, made a right turn, signaled by three sequential directional lights flashing red like a T-bird.

Neary and Jillian were gasping with fright, but little Barry was jumping up and down, shouting, “Ice cream! Ice cream!” and laughing.

The old farmer, still sitting in his chair in the back of the pickup, said casually, “Yep, they can fly rings around the moon, but we’re years ahead of ’em on the highway.”

That was too much for Roy and Jillian. Their eyes locked, but they could think of nothing to say.

Neary swallowed, trying to get some words, some sounds, something out of his mouth. Something more was coming down the road. With a desperate shove, he threw himself, Jillian, and Barry off to the side of the road.

Just in time. Two police cruisers howled past at well over one hundred miles per hour.

Neary headed back to his truck.

“Stick around,” the farmer said to him. “You should’ve seen it an hour ago.”

“This is nuts,” said Neary, just as another Indiana cruiser roared by.

“I may be drunk but I know I’m here,” the old man shouted over the roar.

Barry was laughing again.

Neary got into the truck and started backing it out of the tangle of snow fence and high weeds. He spun his wheels in frustration, then calmed down and got the truck out of there.

“Where are we?” Neary asked Jillian.

“Harper Valley.”

The truck took off.

“They just play,” Barry said, snuggling up against his mother.

“What, Barry?”

“They play nice.”

9  

A
ccelerator jammed on the floor, Neary hunched close to the windshield, following the curves of the on-ramp and the glow ahead and above.

As he shot onto the highway, he heard the police calling to one another, although he did not yet have them in sight.

“I’m gaining on them, Bob!”

Roy’s head was almost touching the glass. He moved back a moment and glanced down at the speedometer. Ninety-five, ninety-seven, ninety-nine.

“. . . that’s the Ohio tolls up there!”

Up ahead the flashing red and yellow lights of the last of the cruisers came into Neary’s view. He had to slow slightly to hold on to the road as they swept around long bends. The formation of brilliant lights was still far ahead, sweeping smoothly around the bends as if gravity was some ancient law.

In the distance, the line of tollbooths looked deserted to Neary. The normal bluish fluorescent light apparently blacked out here by the power failure, too. At this hour of the night, there was little traffic between Indiana and Ohio.

At the tollbooths, one of the attendants was dozing on his stool. The three flaming orbs soared smoothly up and over the line of booths. All hell broke loose. Red battery-operated alarm lights flashed on and off. Sirens tore the stillness to pieces. The dozing attendant jerked awake. Some dude was trying to get through his tolls without paying! In the blink of an eye, the first police cruiser shot through the gates. The second cruiser whooshed past, sirens and roof lights crazy. As the attendant started out of the booth to see what the hell, the third cruiser displaced air, followed closely by Neary’s yellow DWP truck.

“I’m closing the gap,” one of the policemen called.

“Man, you gotta see this. They’re glued to the road!” A hairpin curve was just ahead, and for the first time since the pursuit began the objects decided not to stay glued to the road. They shot straight out over the guardrail and into the air. An instant later, the police officer, obviously locked in on the night lights and doing at least eighty-five, followed them through the guardrail and high into Ohio airspace for a sensational moment before it pancaked into the embankment and lost all its wheels and doors.

“DeWitt! You okay, DeWitt!”

The second patrol car seized the opportunity to save itself and, brakes on fire, sideslipped right up to the littered cliffside. Roy saw the two police officers jump over the mangled guardrail and tear down the embankment to the creamed cruiser.

The third police car and then Neary, following, finally stopped. The other cops ran down the embankment while Neary looked up at the sky. The three firelights arced upward into a low-lying cloud bank. Once inside they turned the clouds to fire until the internal illumination gently faded restoring normal night again. Neary turned back toward Indiana. The fluorescent lighting on both sides of the tollbooths was flickering back to life. Then Roy saw on the horizon a tapestry of light. A distant city was coming back on. Tolono? Harper Valley? It seemed the blackout was over.

As it turned out, Trooper Roger DeWitt was in better shape than his wrinkled cruiser. Sporting a broken nose, minor but multiple contusions and a possible concussion, he had strutted around the stationhouse for one hour telling everybody including DWIs, one male rape victim, and a dozen witnesses of that evening’s skyjinks his version of God’s truth. Now he was inside making his verbal report to Captain Rasmussen while in the State Highway Patrol processing room the other officers and Roy Neary were working up reports of their night to remember. It was now three thirty
A.M.
, and Neary was fading. A man only has so many ounces of adrenaline, Neary thought. He craved a Mars Bar but would have settled for Mounds or M&M’s. There weren’t enough typewriters to go round, so Roy worked in pencil. He had a landslide of a headache.

“Got any aspirin?” he asked the room.

No one paid any attention to him.

“If Longly hadn’t been with me,” one of the troopers said to another, “I would have gone psychiatric.”

Longly grinned. “I don’t want to file this report,” he said. “I want to publish it.”

Just then, a door across the room burst open and DeWitt emerged, limping, from the captain’s office, closing the door behind him, but not before the captain had shoved through it. “It’s enough to outrage common sense.” The captain addressed everyone in the processing room. “Ordinary people look to the police
not
to make bizarre reports of this nature.”

“My knowledge is Gods truth,” DeWitt offered in his own defense.

“I will not see this department pressed between the pages of the
National Enquirer.”
Rasmussen looked at Longly and another trooper behind their typewriters. Again he spoke to the room. “When Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are done, have them get their behinds in here.”

Slamming back, from whence the room fell stone quiet.

“Was he mad ’cause your car’s gonna be a taxi next week?”

“Sweet Jesus.” DeWitt now looked dazed as well as damaged. “I told him the whole thing. I didn’t hold back nothing. The shooting stars. The speed. What the hell, I ain’t no demolition derby . . . not on purpose.”

“And?”

“He gave me a two-week suspension.”

“
What?
” The other troopers stopped what they were doing and stared at the man.

“That’s what I said.” DeWitt started limping for the door. “Go try to tell somebody the truth and we’ll all be watching TV in the daytime.”

Roy watched the officers turn to their typewriters. He watched them reading over their respective reports. Some cops exchanged forced smiles. Then, as if some invisible puppeteer pulled simultaneously on five strings, five right hands reached into five typewriters and yanked out five n217 forms, crumpled them, and dropped them into wastebaskets.

“Go ahead, talk, mister,” one officer said to Roy, smiling sheepishly as he inserted a new report form in his typewriter. “Be my guest.”

Neary searched for a friend in the room and immediately understood the general situation. He got up and left.

10