Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg Read Free Book Online

realized, he was more excited than frightened now. He felt like a kid. It was too late to stop now. He was having too much fun. And so were the police.
    “I see them, Charlie! I’m in pursuit.”
    “You can take it for what it’s worth. These things were not manufactured in Detroit.” That was Longly!
    “It’s decelerating. I don’t know why it’s decelerating, but it’s getting closer. Three hundred yards.”
    “Can you catch up to it?” the dispatcher asked.
    “I don’t think so. About two hundred yards. That’s it for me. I don’t think we should rush into it.”
    “It’s following all the S-turns. It’s following all the roads.”
    “Radar shows ’em down to twenty-five miles per hour.”
    “Shit, that’s a school zone they just passed through.”
    “Look at the traffic lights! They turn to green just as they get up to them.”
    A lot of static.
    “Yes, sir . . . They’re going right out east on Harper Valley.”
    Neary came out of the tunnel and rounded a curve at ninety-five miles an hour, traded paint with a guardrail, went into a skid and managed to correct without running off into the central divider gully. He shot past a sign: E AST H ARPER V ALLEY E XIT —3 M ILES . Then Neary really stood on the accelerator, slowing to eighty-five when the Harper Valley exit loomed up.
    Skidding and braking, he whipped the truck off onto the exit road. It turned onto a two-lane country road, and Roy came down to a more cautious seventy.
    Up ahead he thought he might have seen something on the—
    A child!
    Neary stood on the brakes. An instant later, a woman ran out onto the road and grabbed for the child. The truck was skidding wildly now as Roy fought the wheel. The woman and child were frozen in his headlights for another instant—yards, feet ahead, directly under the wheels.
    Neary threw the wheel hard left, skidded by the two bodies, and plowed into a snow fence, taking some of it with him before coming to rest.
    For a long moment, everything was very still except for his panting breath. He switched off the engine. It took him three tries to get the door handle to work, so shaky were his arm muscles.
    Neary finally staggered out of the high weeds and back to the center of the road. The woman stared blindly at him, her arms around the little boy, her hands over the boy’s eyes, as if still shutting away from him the high, bright headlights bearing down upon them.
    “Lady,” Roy began, “you shouldn’t let your little boy—”
    “I’ve been searching for him for hours,” Jillian Guiler burst out. “He wandered away from our house. I’ve been looking for hours. He just ran away. Hours and hours I’ve been—”
    “Okay,” Neary said. “Okay, I’m sorry I—”
    “That’s a dangerous curve,” a voice said.
    Neary turned to see—of all things—an old farmer sitting in a chair on the back of an ancient pickup. His family, a wife and two sons, were grouped around him, some with binoculars, one boy with a toy telescope.
    “Just like the circus coming to town,” the farmer was saying, taking a swig from a bottle of something. “They come through at night . . . they come through late so they don’t disturb the residents.”
    A sudden wind sent Jillian’s hair flying back from her face. Roy could feel his own hair blown in the same direction. He turned to face the wind, whistling now through the snow fence.
    In Neary’s truck, tangled in yards of torn-up snow fence, the police radio talked on.
    “Can you run a make on them?”
    “. . . I may be gaining again.”
    “As long as they keep following the road.”
    “This is Randolph County. We’re monitoring you on the emergency frequency. What’ve you guys got down there?”
    Squinting downwind, Neary could see something coming along the road, but it turned out to be a low-winging flight of birds, escaping something. Something on the horizon. Something that glowed.
    A group of rabbits bounded past, ears flat against their