The static’s brittle echo rebounded off the walls.
“Phasing, my ass.” Halloway clamped his hands to his ears. “Damn it, that hurts. Do something.”
Another researcher flicked a switch, disengaging the speakers. The static all but disappeared, coming only from headphones on a desk. When Gordon put them on, Halloway couldn’t hear the static at all.
What he did hear, though, was the hum of the many electronic devices that were crammed into the room-and the deeper vibration, almost undetectable, that the facility’s electrical generator or the huge dishes aboveground sent through the walls.
The music had distracted him from his increasing headache, but now the pain intensified through his skull.
“Where did it come from?”
The researchers gave each other guarded looks, as if hiding something.
“Bring it back!”
“We don’t know how we received it in the first place,” Gordon explained too quickly, “let alone how to find it again.”
“Just bring it back!” Halloway demanded.
“You’re not even supposed to be in here,” Gordon realized, now that the music no longer occupied his attention. “This area’s strictly off-limits. You belong in the surveillance room.”
“Like hell. My job’s to protect this place. I can go anywhere I want.”
“Well, how about protecting it by checking the security monitors? While you’ve been hanging around in here, a terrorist assault team might have surrounded us.”
Buddy, if you hear that music again and you don’t let me know, Halloway silently vowed, terrorists will be the least of your worries.
23
Dozens of emergency lights flashed in the darkness. Their chaos of orange, blue, and white contrasted starkly with the shimmering colors Page had thought he’d seen earlier. An engine rumbled as firefighters sprayed foam on what was left of the burning bus. Eight Highway Patrol cars were parked next to three police cars from Rostov. Law enforcement officers and medical personnel seemed everywhere. Page heard the wail of a departing ambulance and the roar of a medevac helicopter as it rose from a nearby field, its takeoff lights painfully intense.
From his vantage point a short distance down the road, he watched a patrolman interviewing Tori in her car next to the viewing platform. Page had already spoken to several officers and took for granted that they’d have more questions. Right now he was grateful for the chance to step back from the commotion and try to adjust to the trauma of what had happened.
He found himself next to a metal pole that had a large, brass rectangle attached to the top. Words were embossed on the rectangle. The harsh reflection from the emergency vehicles provided just enough illumination for him to be able to read:
Welcome to the Rostov lights. Many people have claimed to see them, but no one has ever been able to explain them. If you’re lucky enough to experience them, decide for yourself what they are.
Footsteps approached. Page turned from the plaque and saw a silhoette of a man in a cowboy hat. As the figure came nearer, he recognized a Highway Patrol captain he’d spoken with earlier. The Hispanic man had a broad face, with prominent cheek- and jaw- bones. The emergency lights revealed his blue tie and tan uniform. His last name was Medrano.
“We finished interviewing your wife,” he announced. “You can take her back to where you’re staying.”
Page didn’t comment on the complexities that lay behind that statement.
“You’re done with me, too?”
“For now. All the survivors tell the same story. The guy went crazy. If not for you and your wife, a lot more people would have been killed. You still don’t have any idea why he did it?” Medrano looked as if he desperately wanted something that would explain what had happened.
“Only that he said the lights were evil.”
“The lights? The way you talk about them… You saw them, too?”
“It took some effort, but yeah. At least, I saw something.”
The captain looked puzzled. “I live in Harrington, about a hundred miles down the road. It’s a big town because of the oil refinery, but there’s not a lot to do. Whenever my wife’s parents or my brother and his family came to visit, we used to drive here to try to see the lights. I bet I made that trip a dozen times. Never saw a thing. Neither did my wife’s parents or my brother and his family, even though strangers standing right next to us claimed they could. We finally gave up and stopped coming. What’d they look like?”
“They seemed miles away, yet I thought they were so close I tried to reach out and touch them. They bobbed and floated, merged and separated, and came together again. They kept changing colors. Once I saw them, I had trouble turning away from them.”
Medrano nodded. “That’s usually the way they’re described.”
“The thing is, I’m beginning to wonder if I just persuaded myself they were out there. It was like mass hysteria, and I might have just been caught up in it.”
“Yeah, that’s one explanation-that people talk each other into seeing them.”
“One explanation? What are the others?”
“Phosphorescent gas that rises from seams in the earth. Another theory suggests that the underground rocks here have a lot of quartz crystals in them. After the heat of the day, the rapid cooling causes the rocks to contract and give off static electricity.”
Page looked past Medrano toward the emergency lights, the smoke rising from the shell of the bus-and the corpses.
“All those people died because of static electricity?” He shook his head. “If so, that makes it even more senseless.”
“Your wife says the killer shouted to the crowd, ‘Don’t you realize what they’re doing to you?’”
“He meant the lights. Then he started shooting at the horizon. He yelled, ‘Go back to hell where you came from.’ Then, ‘You’re all damned.’ I thought he meant the lights again, but it turned out he meant that the crowd was damned because the next thing he opened fire on everyone around him.”
“Some kind of religious lunatic,” Medrano suggested.
“He sure had a fixation on hell. ‘Came from hell.’ ‘Going back to hell.’ He said that a couple of times while he was shooting people.”
“Well, the fire that burned him gave him a taste of where he was going,” Medrano said.
“That thought occurred to me, too. Do you know who he was?”
“Not yet-any ID he had on him was destroyed. By process of elimination, we’ll figure out which car he used and track its registration number.”
“Unless he came on the bus.”
“With an AK-47 that nobody noticed?”
“He could have carried it in something like a guitar case,” Page offered.
“Yeah, that’s possible. You know, you do think like a cop. Well, if the shooter arrived on the bus, any evidence was probably destroyed by the fire. That’ll make our job a lot more difficult.”
Page shivered, perhaps because of the cool breeze or perhaps be- cause he looked toward the corpses again.
“You could use a windbreaker,” Medrano said.
“Chief Costigan told me the same thing. Any word about how he’s doing?”
“An ambulance driver phoned me from the Rostov hospital. He’s in surgery. What about you? How are you holding up?”
Page rubbed his right side, where the gunman had kicked him. “I’m not looking forward to seeing the bruise.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. There’s a lot to sort through. For now, I’m just glad to be alive.”
“Ever been involved in a shooting before?”
“Once. But nobody died. For certain, my wife was never in a shooting before. If it hadn’t been for her, the guy might have reached me.”