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By Root 768 0

the wooded slopes flanking the narrow, winding road were growing dark, he was not concerned. He’d made the drive from his isolated encampment down into Bug Jump half a dozen times during the past week and felt he knew the sorry excuse for a road pretty well. Returning uphill after dark, he’d travel more slowly. It was just that, while he had enjoyed proving wrong all of his friends who had insisted he wouldn’t last more than twenty-four hours in the Sierra Nevada wilderness without running screaming for the nearest Starbucks, he had to admit that he did miss human company. While, based on what he had seen so far, it would be a stretch to so classify some of the local denizens of downtown Bug Jump, there were enough who struck him as being halfway normal for him to look forward to the occasional jaunts into the bucolic mountain village.

Thus far he’d spent five nights of his agreed-upon week in the northern California mountains camping out alone, as promised. With just two more days to go before he drove back to Sacramento to catch his return flight home, he felt he deserved a bit of a break. There was a grocery store in Bug Jump. There was a bank-cum-post office combo. There was a gas station. And so, of course, there was a bar. Bouncing and grinding down the steep slope of half-graded decomposing granite, racing the onset of night, he was not heading for the bank.

The light that appeared in the sky was bright enough to not only draw his attention away from the difficult thoroughfare, but to cause him to stop and temporarily put the big 4X4 in park. It idled at a rumble, pleased at the opportunity to rest, like a male lion contentedly digesting half a dead wildebeest.

Now what the hell is that? he found himself wondering as he rolled down the driver’s side window and stuck his head partway out. Could it be a meteorite? Living in Chicago, one didn’t see many meteorites. One didn’t see many stars, for that matter, and sometimes even the moon was a questionable indistinct splotch behind the clouds. Watching the bright object descend at a steep angle, he was fully aware he had little basis for comparison and small knowledge with which to evaluate what he was seeing.

Within the light, he thought he could make out a slightly oblong shape. That couldn’t be right. Falling meteorites were rounded, weren’t they? Or cometlike, with a fiery tail? Did they blink in and out like this one as they made their doomed plunge through the atmosphere? It seemed to him that the object was falling too slowly to be a meteorite, but what did he know about representative intraatmospheric velocities of terminal substellar objects?

Then it was gone, vanished behind the tall trees. He sat there for a long moment, listening. For several minutes there was no sound at all. Then an owl hooted querulously. Burned up completely, whatever it was, he decided. Or hit the ground a long, long ways off. Certainly it hadn’t made a sound. Rolling up the window, he put the Durango back in drive and resumed his own less fiery descent. He was thirsty, he was hungry, and if he was real lucky, he mused, he might find someone with whom to strike up a conversation. While he did not think that likely to involve the latest forward projections for pineapple juice concentrate or frozen bacon, he was perfectly willing to talk politics, sports, or anything else. Even in Bug Jump.

Twenty minutes later, the lights of the optimistically self-categorized town appeared below him. Soon he was pulling up outside the single bar-restaurant. A mix of country music and broad-spectrum pop filtered out over the unpaved parking area; the only rap to be found here being on the food. Mother Earth had long since sucked down the original layer of gravel that had once covered the lot. In the absence of rain the uneven, washboarded surface onto which he stepped was as hard as concrete.

It was Friday night, and Bug Jump was jumpin’. Besides his rented Durango, there were more than a dozen other vehicles parked haphazardly around the lot. No cars: only SUVs, pickups, and a couple of sorely used