Far Horizons: Tales of Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror. Issue #17 August 2015 | Page 58

came overhead of where I was standing, and I looked
up and down the Interstate to see if anyone else was
on the road. It was just me, a crowd of one like I was
the only guy at the homecoming game. And the lights
kept coming. I stopped counting at twenty-five, but
there was plenty more than that.

As the first ones neared the ground, it looked
like they were going to hit a few hundred yards away.
When they did they went out without a bang or a
fizzle. Normal meteors hit with a bang like a bomb,
and you found them in a hole, smoking from the heat.
Some would trail sparks as they broke up in the air. I
ain’t seen that, but I’ve seen pictures of them doing
it. Anyhow they kept landing in what looked like
the same place. And that was pretty spooky being
Halloween and all. Not much freaks me out, but those
lights went pretty close.

Then the last ones came over and fell in that
same part of the field as I watched them. I have to say
I wondered just what the hell they were. They weren’t
meteors; I knew that much. And much as I wanted to
look and see, there was a little voice in my ear that
said maybe I shouldn’t. There are things we don’t
need to know about, that’s what it told me, things we
should just walk away from and get back on the road.
And the other voice was a little bit louder, and it won.
Come on, take a look Egbert it said, what harm will
it do? Curiosity is what drives people on. It took us
to the moon so a few hundred yards into a field on
Halloween night can’t be all that dangerous, can it?

So I opened the door to the rig and pulled out
my jacket, gloves, and cap, wrapped my scarf around
my neck, pulled on my University of Nebraska cap—
Go Cornhuskers!—and, dropping my thermos into a
pocket, went out into the field to have a look.

It was a lot colder than I thought it might
be, and the damp grass soon got my boots as wet as
damnation. Even through my gloves I could feel the
cold, and I didn’t want to sneeze in case the snot froze
to my face. My old man used to say that in Nebraska,
it got as cold as witch’s tit, and I found no cause to
disagree with him on that night.

I kept on walking, and the grass wrapped
around my legs and made it hard work walking. The
ground was slippery as shit too. Several times, I damn
near on fell on my ass. I walked about five minutes,
but I had no idea how close or far I was from where
the lights had fallen. I figured they were closer than
they were, but night is a bad time to work out distance.
I drank some coffee to warm me up and wished I’d
slipped a little whiskey into it.

I stopped for a moment and looked back to
the lookout where my rig was waiting. It sure would
be warm in that cab, and I’d be a few miles on down
the road if I’d had any sense. But no, I was trodging
through a field to look at some weird ass lights. Mom
used to say I didn’t have a lick of sense when I was
a kid. I thought to myself that nothing much had
changed over the years since then.

The truck seemed to be telling me to get my
ass back inside and get on down to Cheyenne too,
but—fool that I was—I wasn’t about to listen. Those
lights had me hooked like a fisherman catching a bass,
so I shrugged my shoulders, set my bearings as best
I could, and kept on walking, bearing a little to the
right to get on track. I didn’t want to miss those lights,
whatever they were.

A howl came up from the distance, I couldn’t
tell how far since sound travels a fair piece in cold
weather. I reckoned it was a few miles off, five or so,
a coyote most likely. I was glad it wasn’t a wolf. They
reckon there ain’t any wolves around here, but you
hear stories that they might be coming back. Anyway,
there was no answer so it wasn’t one of them. Coyotes
can be pretty mean, and when the weather gets
cold and food is hard to find, they can get meaner. I
tightened my grip on my thermos just in case and kept
going.

I pulled my cap down as far as I could and
pulled my jacket collar up as I went. I reckoned the air
had got even colder by a few degrees since I left the
lookout, and I breathed clouds into the air that swirled
and vanished. The coyote howled again. It sounded
closer, but it probably wasn’t, and I was ready anyway.
The night was bright enough to see pretty easy, so I

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