“As long as you’re okay, Meredith,” I said to her.
“I am,” she said. “Are you?”
I don’t really know the answer to that question. We’re all gathered along the waterfront, just watching the lights. They’ve been arcing for a good half-hour now. We haven’t heard any sirens. Mr Shurin, at his house, says he hasn’t heard anything either, though there are a lot of people who’ve pulled their cars over just to watch it. Steve called the hospital, and they told him they didn’t need him.
So whatever ’s going on is at least not killing anyone.
Or not killing anyone that we know of, that is. I wonder how the indie kids are doing?
“Is it the end of the world?” Nathan asks.
“I doubt the end of the world would start with our town,” Jared says. “Though maybe it would, actually.”
And then all the lights stop.
“Whoa,” Nathan says, pretty drunk by now.
The lights weren’t making any sound, not any that made it this far out to the lake at any rate, but it still feels like a silence has fallen. We all stare at the empty sky for a few quiet minutes. Then Mel stands, taking Steve by the hand. She leans under his arm as they head back into the cabin.
“I’m ready for bed, too,” Henna says, getting up from the log. Nathan gets up with her, more than a little stumbling. “You all right?” Henna asks him.
“Yeah,” he laughs, “just a little hammered.”
“We noticed,” I say, still sitting next to Jared. “All of us.” Jared elbows me, hard.
Nathan just stares at me. “You don’t even know me,” he says. “You haven’t even tried.”
“No,” Henna says, taking him by the arm and leading him to the cabin. “No, he hasn’t.”
I watch them go until it’s just me and Jared out here, him sipping a beer, me having a Coke. The smell of the beer is making me a bit grumpy, too. The staler it gets, the more it smells like my dad.
“You need to lay off him,” Jared says.
“Why? We don’t know anything about him. He said he used to be an indie kid; what if he brought all this shit with him?”
“Mike–”
“And why was he by my house? Why did he want to get up on that bridge?”
“That was Henna’s idea–”
“He could be the cause of all this, for all we know. And now he’s in there with her.”
“She’s not going to sleep with him,” Jared says, frustrated. “He’s not going to sleep with her.”
“How do you know?”
And there’s a silence. I turn to him.
Then something clicks.
“Oh, no. No way.”
“Mike, I–”
“Jared, please don’t say–”
But then he stands, his attention suddenly grabbed by something out in the darkness. He’s still in his towel. So am I, with just my jacket over me. His eyes are running back and forth across the undeveloped part of the lake down from the cabin. It’s full of trees.
There’s a blue light among them. Getting closer.
“Shit,” I say, standing, too, ready to get the others, ready to run–
“No,” Jared says. “No, it’s not…”
He takes off. Towards it. “Jared!” I yell.
But then of course I run after him. My feet are bare and I’m stepping on rocks and pine cones and God knows what else in the dark. “What are you doing?!”
The blue light emerges from the line of trees, and I see.