The Shimmer (43 page)

A beam of light shot from the colors that pulsed on the right side of the aircraft. It produced so much illumination that he could see the collapsed hangars of the old airfield. The beam of light streaked into one of them and angled toward the northwest in the direction of the observatory.

In the distance, the beam surged into the sky, deflected off something--a satellite, Page guessed--and rocketed toward the ground even farther northwest.

"I hear an engine!" Tori shouted.

"It isn't ours!"

A shadow passed through the colors on his left.

"Another plane!" Page yelled.

Not just another plane. A biplane of a type that dated back to World War I. A young man with a mustache and goggles was behind the controls in the rear seat, the tail of a scarf fluttering behind him.

Other images swirled within the colors: a man herding cattle, a woman on horseback riding along a dark road . . .

A handsome young man--James Deacon--leaning against a fence, staring toward darkness.

A teenager on a motorcycle racing across a murky field.

Soldiers holding their heads as if they feared their skulls would explode.

Edward Mullen shooting toward the lights, then firing into a crowd.

Tori sitting on a bench at the viewing area, gazing spellbound toward the shadowy distance.

At once all the images vanished, including the biplane. Its engine could no longer be heard.

The Cessna resumed its glide. The lights, which were now behind it, provided enough illumination for Page to see the weeds and dirt on the old runway.

"We're coming in short!"

The ground rose swiftly.

"Someone's ahead of us!" Tori yelled.

"What?"

"There's a man staggering along the runway!"

Page saw him then. Wavering, a man gaped at the Cessna, his head and clothes soaked with what had to be blood.

"Tori, get your door open!" Page yanked up the lever on his own door and pushed. He saw rocks among the weeds before the runway.

The Cessna couldn't stay in the air any longer. He pulled the controls back, raising the nose, hoping to keep the front wheel above the rocks. The left wheel struck and collapsed. He felt the plane drop on that side. The left wing dragged along the ground, then buckled.

Snagging, it caused the fuselage to twist to the left.

The propeller struck earth, a blade breaking off and flipping away, the torque yanking the engine out of its housing. Dust billowed over the canopy. As the fuselage kept tilting violently to the left, Page found that he was lying on his side. The snapping and grinding of metal was matched by the crunch of the plane skidding over dirt. The shock of stopping would have slammed Page's chest against the controls if his seat belt and shoulder harness hadn't been tight, but even so, the snap of his chest against the harness made him feel as if he'd been punched.

He had trouble breathing.

"Tori," he managed to say, "are you all right?"

She didn't answer.

"Tori?"

"I think I'm okay."

Thank God, Page thought. "We need to get out in case there's a fire."

His door was wedged against the ground. In pain, he managed to free his seat belt and harness.

"Climb through your door!"

With the fuselage on its side, Page was able to half stand and help Tori unbuckle her harness. He pushed at her hips, helping her get through the door on the right. Wincing, he pulled himself up, squirmed through the open door, crawled over the side, and dropped to the ground.

His chest ached, but the pain hardly mattered when he smelled aviation fuel.

"Run!" he shouted. But Tori didn't need encouragement. She charged forward onto the old runway. Flanking her, Page ran as hard as he could.

Ahead, the man they'd seen on the runway had collapsed. Without hesitation they knelt beside him, turning him onto his back. Even with all the blood, Page knew he'd seen this man before. On the previous night, he and Tori had driven past the abandoned airbase. A man in his forties, bald and sinewy, with rigid shoulders and an air of authority--he'd been unlocking the gate.

"Can you stand? Page asked. "We need to get you out of here."

The man mumbled something that sounded like "great-grandfather."

Page and Tori lifted him to his feet, guiding him along the old runway. The beam of light continued radiating through one of the hangars, streaking toward the northwest, soaring into the sky, then angling down toward something on the far horizon. The air was filled with a hiss-crackle-hum that smelled like an electrical fire. Page felt his hair standing up.

Struggling to get the man to the road, Page looked over his shoulder, and was stunned by how much brighter the lights were. Explosions tore up ground in the distance: bombs from long ago. The grass fire spread toward the runway. When the flames reached the Cessna, the fuel tanks erupted, sending a fireball into the sky.

The hiss-crackle-hum became unbearable. As heat from the beam of light threatened to set Page's clothes on fire, the sky was abruptly filled with what seemed a gigantic skyrocket, higher and farther away than any fireworks could reach. It sent huge trails of sparks flying in every direction.

"What the hell is that?" Tori asked in amazement.

The sparks radiated high and low, far and wide across the heavens.

Blazing tendrils showed every color imaginable, so massive a display that Page was stopped in his tracks, awestruck.

The sky seemed on fire.

At once the ray of light ceased.

It vanished at the same time as a blast lit the horizon, off in the direction of the observatory. The colors drooped in the sky. The sparks fell, their luster fading. As the hiss-crackle-hum went silent, the only illumination came from the grass fires.

Coughing from smoke that drifted over him, Page found that he was able to move again. He and Tori urged the man through the darkness. They reached a fence, lifted the man over it, passed between parked cars, and sank onto the road.

A new sound filled the night. The sound of hundreds of people crying.

"Great-grandfather," the man said.

People stumbled past them. Some got into cars, but the vehicles wouldn't start. Others called the names of loved ones. Pleas for help from God or somebody, anybody, blended with moans. A crowd gathered on the road, plodding along it, people looking like refugees from a war zone as they made their way toward Rostov. Sirens wailed from the direction of the town.

The fires showed Medrano climbing onto a pickup truck.

"Everybody stay calm!" he yelled. "We'll take care of you! Help's on the way!"

Page looked at the stranger they'd set on the road. His face was dark with blood.

"Hear those sirens? Just hang on, and you'll be okay," Page tried to assure him.

The man didn't respond. At first Page worried that he had died, but then he saw that the man's eyes were open, unblinking, staring at something that might have been far away, or else locked in his mind.

Page reached over and gripped Tori's hand. "You're sure you're okay?"

"We're alive," she answered. "Can't get much better than that."

The siren blared closer, red and blue lights flashing in the dark.

Chapter 80.

Anita woke periodically in the night, gradually recovering from the effects of the anesthetic. This time, when she opened her eyes, sunlight drifted between slats in blinds, revealing the hospital bed she lay on. Her left arm was in a cast, the weight of which added to the deep pain in her arm.

"The bullet did a lot of damage to the bones in your arm," a voice next to her said with effort, "but they were able to save it."

Anita looked to her left and found someone in the room's other bed. She recognized the voice--it was Brent's--but she couldn't see his face, which was covered with bandages.

"I told you I'd be here when you woke up," he said, his voice muffled. "I'm a man of my word."

Anita frowned. "What happened to you?"

"I chased that story until it caught me."

Still groggy from the drugs she'd been given, Anita said, "I don't understand."

"I got too close to it." Brent's voice dropped. "I got burned by it."

"Burned?"

"I don't think I'll be going to Atlanta. In fact, I don't think I'll be coanchoring with Sharon anymore, either. But given what the story cost us, I can guarantee that you and I will get that Emmy."

Anita tried to sit up. She was desperate to make sense out of what he was saying.

"You were burned?"

"The doctors aren't sure how bad the scars will be. They talked about skin grafts and specialists. If I'm lucky, I might be able to do some investigative reporting as long as my face is in shadows when I'm on camera."

Anita couldn't speak for a moment.

"Lo siento."

"Since I'm probably going to be in El Paso for quite a while, I guess I'd better start learning Spanish. What did you just tell me?"

"I'm truly sorry."

"Thank you. We made a good team."

"We're still a good team," Anita said.

"All the same, I think you'd better start looking for another partner."

"Do you like Mexican food?"

"I don't know what that's got to do with anything, but the truth is, I tried the stuff once and hated it."

"That's because you didn't eat in the right place. You haven't tasted anything till you dig into my mother's chicken enchiladas."

Chapter 81.

"A massive electrical storm?" Costigan leaned back behind his desk.

Although he wore his uniform and gunbelt, he still had the bandage around his head. It made him look vulnerable.

"A huge cell of dry lightning. That's what the feds say happened,"

Medrano told him. "All kinds of government types got involved, particularly the FBI and the National Science Foundation. The NSF runs the observatory. Or used to. The facility blew up last night."

"From dry lightning." Costigan looked confused. "Is that even possible? Could something like that disable the power systems in a couple of hundred vehicles? Not to mention several helicopters and a Cessna?"

"Whether or not it's possible isn't the point. That's the official explanation for what happened, and with all the television cameras disabled last night, we don't have pictures to prove otherwise."

"What about the satellite that exploded? Half the southern United States saw it."

"Space debris blew it apart. What looked like sparks was the wreckage burning as it entered the atmosphere. The fact that it happened at the same time as the dry lightning is entirely coincidental.

There's no way the government'll admit that it was experimenting with a weapon that uses electromagnetic energy."

Church bells rang across the street, announcing the start of the Sunday service.

"A weapon?" Costigan frowned. "You think that's what was going on?"

"I was there, and I promise you that what I saw wasn't dry lightning. I can think of only one thing that stops engines and generators and everything else that depends on electricity or magnets. You know anything about astronomy?"

"Enough to tell the difference between it and astrology."

"Ever since I was a kid and saw my first comet, I've had a telescope," Medrano said. "I subscribed to Astronomy magazine for as long as I can remember. Black holes, supernovas, spiral nebulae.

They're all pretty sexy. But solar storms are my personal favorite. I don't dare look at the sun through a telescope, of course. I need to rely on films taken by special cameras in observatories. Solar storms give off flares that look like the flicking end of a giant whip. They can get as hot as a hundred million degrees. They radiate the electromagnetic energy of ten million atomic bombs."

Costigan listened intently.

"They tend to run in eleven-year cycles," Medrano continued.

"From almost no activity to spectacular eruptions. At their peak, the electromagnetic waves have so much strength that when they reach Earth they can knock satellites out of orbit, shut down power plants, and turn television broadcasts into static. The Northern Lights are caused by them. What I saw last night looked like a combination of the two: Northern Lights and solar flares."

"Solar flares. An awful long way from the sun."

"I'm not saying they were solar flares. I'm just saying that's what they looked like. An electromagnetic burst from somewhere on the ground would explain a lot of what happened last night."

"But what caused it?"

"That's another way of asking what the lights are. Here's a theory.

The Earth's core is hotter than the surface of the sun." Medrano shrugged. "Maybe there are fault lines around here that allow electromagnetic waves to find their way to the surface."

Costigan thought about it. "As good an explanation as swamp gas, quartz crystals, radioactive gas, and temperature inversions, I suppose."