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Folk will tell you to steer clear of him. "Nastiest old cuss you ever met, lives near the old Brown place. Just between you, me and the fencepost, he's always in trouble with the law, and a welfare cheat to boot."

Across the way, working late in old Fred Dillon's garage, was Spencer Dale. He was regarded as likable and polite, for a longhair. Always wore overalls to work, that was a good sign. Hiring that boy was the smartest thing Fred ever did. The minute Spencer started on with him, all the women in town started having car troubles. But Spencer had a hidden side as well. He didn't get out much, and his silence spawned rumors.

Over all of them the meteors passed, burning to vapor overhead. And then, at the peak of their frequency, it happened.

First, they heard the scream of its passage across the sky. Delbert Cullim stopped cursing his server and looked up, troubled, but he couldn't find the source of the sound. Spencer paused in his work as an orange glow moved across the dusty windowpanes of Fred's garage. Kelly, standing in her front yard, told her son to go inside as a fireball, trailing sparks, streaked by overhead.

With a flash of light, it disappeared into a patch of woods south of town. Everyone who saw it braced themselves for an impact, but nothing came. The ground did not shake, nor did a mushroom cloud rise. The people stared at each other, feeling strangely unfullfilled by this anticlimax. But the ones who drove out to the site got their reward. From between the shadows of the trees came the roar and flicker of a wildfire.

They called out the fire department, who succeeded in putting it out, but not before it burned down the old Brooks dairy farm. No one ever found the meteorite, and not for lack of searching. If that had been the end of it, the event would have been just another nine-day's wonder for the town, until they decided to put it aside to focus on more important things. But it was not the end of it.

In the weeks that followed, the firemen that extinguished the blaze grew ill and died, their bodies riddled with tumors.

Lights appeared in the night sky, hovering over the spot where the Brooks farm had stood.

A hiker told his friends he saw an army truck, painted like camouflage, skulking around near the border of the woods.

People claimed they heard inhuman voices crying out in the night, speaking strange languages.

The rumors grew, feeding on one another, as the summer air grew hot and tense, and the town braced itself for a season of storms.