Chapter One

Glass shattered and metal dented as cars rammed into cars. Terrified bleats and joyful squeals welled up unevenly on both sides of the street.

Yet the boy was still oblivious to all this. His bouncy walk and bobbing head followed rhythms different from those of the rest of the world.

The tiny smooth earphones were the culprits. For years now they, and dozens of their predecessors, had assisted him in maintaining a pocket-sized parallel universe of awesomeness. He’d cruise in this kick-ass bubble and sneer at the deluded wretches on the outside.

His name was Derek Wilmot.

He never thought he’d get caught up in something like this. After all, the crazy stuff on TV and the web rarely had anything to do with real life.

That’s what he had always believed deep down, as most teens tend to, convinced of their invincibility, immortality, and inherent good luck. With the drumbeats pounding away at his tympanic membranes, he didn’t even pay immediate attention to the hairs bristling on the nape of his neck as the air’s electrical charge spiked.

On the other side of the three-way junction up ahead, the sliding glass doors of a business high-rise finished letting in and out another quota of people, and closed themselves. As the door halves met, a sharp light splashed across the glass. Additional shining shards flared up in the glasses of a woman who had just turned the corner and now walked toward Derek.

This sudden blossoming of light in front of him made the boy look up, and then a gust of air slammed into his back. He saw the woman with the shades stumble to a standstill. Her mouth sagged, her nostrils flared, a gilded phone slipped from her fingers and fell by her leopard boots.

And were those other figures behind her actually sprinting into his direction?

Without thinking, Derek turned around.

Bad move.

Bad, bad move.

The wavering, shining apparition was staggering.

An oblong spot of blazing cold whiteness, about twenty feet high and eight feet wide, its lower end hovering inches above the street, snow-fumes curling beneath it.

Around this overpowering light, cars stood jammed at odd angles to each other. Animal terror and bestial rapture distorted people’s faces. Two men clambered over a blue Ford Fusion that blocked their way and threw themselves into the glow. Not even a ripple marked their passing through the surface of the shining entity.

Deadlights! I mustn’t look into it, mustn’t look!

The thought came a second too late. Derek’s eyes strained to catch all the wonderful nothingness flickering within the dazzling apparition.

Beckoning.

He felt his mouth contort into an idiotic grin. The accompanying movement of facial muscles forced the earplugs out, and he finally heard the voices of the terrified and the seduced, his own included.

His now rubbery legs began taking him toward the welcoming glow, a tiny portion of his mind still screaming to stop, to turn around, to run. The invading light was stronger, and with every step he took it grew in power, pushing his already dwindled reasoning part further back into some dark, isolated corner.

L-light-me-light-mine-nothing-light-nothing-anymore…

Suddenly, the right-hand half of the horizon surged upward; the city skyline—a row of jagged teeth rising to swallow up the sky.

W-what?

Shaking but strong fingers dug into his flesh, someone’s breath warmed his ear: bawling, ordering, pleading—vaguely familiar, but suddenly incomprehensible words.

Derek was being held down, right cheek pressed into the snow, which stuck to his face, and crept down his collar, but he didn’t notice, he didn’t care, all he wanted was to reach the light…

Go-let me go-me into light-the light-into the light-me go-you let go…

But in another two-three minutes the pale iridescence grew transparent, withered, and with a final whispery surge of air—vanished. Taking with it those it had seduced and swallowed up. Leaving behind only a tiny whirlpool of mist.

In a few seconds that too was gone.

During their brief existence in the middle of Randolph Street, the Deadlights had managed to strike with mortal terror over thirty people who scrambled over cars and each other in blind panic—and to force twenty-two people to come to them at a run, some of them jumping out of cars and even building windows.

To disappear without trace.

Only two of those attracted by the luminous invader survived the ordeal. One was Derek, tackled by Christopher Ellis, fifty-six, who, in spite of the profound terror planted into him by the white light, had managed to control himself long enough to save the boy.

The other survivor was Alita Gomez, seventy-three years of age, who simply hadn’t managed to reach it in time. Discarding her walking cane, losing her balance and falling after her fifth step, she had continued toward her goal at a laborious crawl over the cold pavement. And there she remained for a long time; shuddering with remorse, helpless tears streaming down her face, hands clawing at the spot from which the now vanished thing had called her.

Although he was spared disappearance within the light, Derek’s mental state did not go back to the way it was before the encounter. His initial joyful readiness to enter the light transformed into a consuming desire to find it again. A hysteric frenzy alternated by bouts of deep gloom, during which he would rock back and forth, arms wrapped around his body.

For the next two days after the incident it would be Derek’s lot to be kept under sedation inside a special ward.

On the third day no one would come to sedate him.

On the fourth day no one would come to feed him.

On the evening of the fourth day, the outer wall of the ward would collapse.

Thus freed, he’d walk the depopulated streets and drive over lonely highways, evading the various devil-critters and suspiciously alien plants, averting his gaze from the sky’s intimidating glare, searching for the light.

But all that had yet to happen.