The Lights in The Sky

Prologue

Summer 1997

Annabelle, Texas

"What do you think it is?"

They stared at the colors above, coiling and pulsating like a glowing snaking from outer-space. Those bands of gilded red seemed to be lowering, detaching from the sky itself.

"Is it aliens?"

"It's not aliens," Mitch scoffed. He ambled forward, gaining a better vantage at his feet teetered on the rocky edge.

"Well then what is it?"

Shaking the blonde curls from his lean teenage face, Mitch Kaufman tried not to answer. He tried not to think about the parchment dryness in his mouth; the nervous blood throbbing in his skull; the heartbeat in his ear.

"It's an aurora." An eternity beneath it, the little speckles of city seemed like toys from a different world.

"A what?"

The other boys shifted uneasily.

"Auroras aren't sposed to look like that, though," said Casey. The tallest and thinnest of the three was the only one standing upright, his naturally squinty eyes barely more than slits as he surveyed the skies. His drawn, tight lips quivering just barely.

"Yea... I thought auroras only happen in the north," muttered Bill, small and cloistered in the shaded wedges of rock. He pulled his beanie tighter over his head and those elvish ears, as if to hide from it all. "Don't they only happen in the north?"

"Aurora Borealis," Mitch muttered.

He was barely listening, still staring into that mesmerizing vein of bloody gold twitching in the far reaches. He had read about auroras before, how the so-called 'Northern Lights' could be seen far far down in the south too, the 'Southern Lights'... but nothing like this. Whatever was causing this, with the magnetic poles and the solar winds, was doing something he had never seen in the magazines. It almost seemed like the sky was, was... bleeding.

"Where was the news about this?" Bill whispered, his voice prickling.

Casey's face was dark. "There wasn't any news."

Mitch swallowed. It was touching him, whatever it was, a certain slimy coldness to the air. The sliminess was all around them, as if a million unseen slugs were suddenly coagulating.

"Do you feel that?"

He turned to his two friends, their eyes tense.

"What is it?" Bill was now pacing, rubbing his shoulder, his arms and neck and face. "Dude, what is that?"

"Come on Mitch, Let's get outta here," Casey said, pleaded more like.

But Mitch couldn't stop. He was staring back into that incredible nightly sky with the lurid light now swimming toward them. It was moving, it was really moving on its own accord, no longer a color of the sky so much as something else, something now floating free from the high heavens.

"Mitch, come on."

"I..." Mitch couldn't find the words. There was a noise, a humming. His flesh was wet but the moisture unseen.

"Mitch!"

That's when the bolt struck. The three of them jumped, the nearby lightning reverberating across the catacomb of rock and stone.

"Come on!"

They were running, as another bolt exploded nearby, lighting the sky, ripping the rock with incandescent white.