Sheriff Leon Biggs floundered when he found himself
alone in the night. Caitlin had taken the opportunity to run. The girl
could well spell the end of his career, but the green fireballs bursting
into luminescence in the night sky thundered and streaked their way to the
earth and utterly horrified him. Thousands were coming down at the same
steep angle, some close enough to whistle and crackle as they approached
the ground, others hardly more than a distant growl in the night sky.
He could hear their dull sounds of impact when they
struck nearby. He had no idea how big the meteors were, how far away they
were striking, or how much damage was being inflicted upon the forest and
nearby Brighton Hollow. He tried to anticipate what the surrounding
county and more distant authorities of state and federal agencies would
require of him.
Sobered by the fiercesome spectacle in the night sky,
he felt small and foolish. What an idiot he had been to have chased
Caitlin so far into the wilderness. Three miles of dense woods and
rolling hills now separated him from his duties. He started back along
the deer trail, huffing and puffing and feeling a twinge of angina. He
deserved to fall flat on his face and die as a consequence of his
stupidity.
Even so, despite the risk and the fireworks going on
overhead, temptation continued to gnaw at him. It occurred to him that
the meteor shower might enthrall Caitlin and slow her pace. If he could
find her again, now would be the time to convince her that what he wanted
of her was not such an evil thing. He had let her slip through his
fingers once too often. If she eluded him again, he would never have
another chance. She would slip from his grasp forever and take with her
the only spark of life that still burned in his aging body and soul.
The intensity of the meteor shower quieted. The
woods became forebodingly dark. His radio crackled, and he put it to his
ear in hopes of picking up the sound of Rex Hogan's voice. The static,
though, was too much to contend with.
Leon clipped the radio to his belt and used his
pencil flashlight to continue his way through the intensifying darkness. He felt vindicated at long last by those who criticized his practice of
wearing his uniform and side-arm off-duty. His was and had always been a
twenty-four-hour-a-day job.
The meteors were still coming down sporadically. They were small objects, he decided. The ones that growled and crackled
through the atmosphere were no more than a few miles off. He wondered at
the occasional soft thumping sound when they hit, thinking of Rex and
Doc's wild story of something alive inside the meteor that had struck the
Danielson house.
Anxiety chewed at his gut. What in hell were they? How much damage had they caused in town?
Where in hell had Caitlin run off to?
He sighed repeatedly as he hurried along the dark
trail, pausing when a dull ache intensified in his chest, pressing on when
it abated. His imagination entertained apocalyptic visions of the end of
the world, and a heart attack to prematurely end his participation in it.
In time, the worst of his fears were replaced by a
roaring headache, legacy of the whiskey he had imbibed during the course
of the afternoon. If the fall of meteors came to naught, maybe he could
still slip away and spend the balance of the night sleeping it off. Or,
maybe he had pushed Caitlin too far this time. Maybe trouble worse than a
bunch of green lights in the sky awaited him back at Brighton Hollow if
she had cried rape.
The fear of being ruined by his own perversity was
more than whiskey talking, more than a mid-life crisis rearing its
clownish head. To begin with, he was more than middle-aged. He was
pushing sixty-three, and he generally had no use for women anymore. He
hadn't been able to get it up for Vivian in ages, in fact. It was just
child-like Caitlin that bothered him so, the last female on the face of
the earth capable of chipping a spark from the old flint. He dreaded the
creeping debilitation of his advancing years and the inevitable arrival of
the grim reaper. When he was with Caitlin, he was young again. Looking
into Caitlin's eyes, he saw her dead mother, Katrina, looking back at
him. He took such terrible risks entertaining those fantasies.
Damn her foolish young soul to the farthest and
darkest reaches of hell for what she had done to him.
He climbed another hill and the angina worsened. He
felt like a kid's windup toy shuffling along at two miles an hour, powered
by a rusty, creaky spring that was about to snap. It was almost pitch
black by now, and still the meteors came down, although hardly more than
one or two a second.
One passed overhead particularly close, sending the
very air to quivering with its passage. It hit ground a mile or so
directly ahead with a flash of light and a flurry of sparks. A ruddy
light began to glow. A fire had been started.
A shot of adrenaline brought him instantly alert. Caitlin was just ahead somewhere. Her curiosity would get the best of
her. The proximity of the impact promised one final confrontation on his
own terms.
Novels by
William G. Tedford