Under the Dome

1

Barbie and Rusty stepped outside and breathed deeply of the open air. It had a smoky tang from the recently extinguished fire west of town, but seemed very fresh after the exhaust fumes in the shed. A lackadaisical little breeze cat’s-pawed their cheeks. Barbie was carrying the Geiger counter in a brown shopping bag he’d found in the fallout shelter.

“This shit will not stand,” Rusty said. His face was set and grim.

“What are you going to do about it?” Barbie asked.

“Now? Nothing. I’m going back to the hospital and do rounds. Tonight, though, I intend to knock on Jim Rennie’s door and ask for a goddam explanation. He better have one, and he better have the rest of our propane as well, because we’re going to be dead out at the hospital by the day after tomorrow, even with every nonessential shut down.”

“This might be over by the day after tomorrow.”

“Do you believe it will be?”

Instead of answering the question, Barbie said, “Selectman Rennie could be a dangerous man to press right about now.”

“Just now? That tags you for a town newbie like nothing else could. I’ve been hearing that about Big Jim for the ten thousand or so years he’s been running this town. He either tells people to get lost or pleads patience. ‘For the good of the town,’ he says. That’s number one on his hit parade. Town meeting in March is a joke. An article to authorize a new sewer system? Sorry, the town can’t afford the taxes. An article to authorize more commercial zoning? Great idea, the town needs the revenue, let’s build a Walmart out on 117. The University of Maine Small Town Environmental Study says there’s too much graywater in Chester Pond? The selectmen recommend tabling discussion because everybody knows all those scientific studies are run by radical humanist bleeding-heart atheists. But the hospital is for the good of the town, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes. I would.” Barbie was a little bemused by this outburst.

Rusty stared at the ground with his hands in his back pockets. Then he looked up. “I understand the President tapped you to take over. I think it’s high time you did so.”

“It’s an idea.” Barbie smiled. “Except… Rennie and Sanders have got their police force; where’s mine?”

Before Rusty could reply, his cell phone rang. He flipped it open and looked at the little window. “Linda? What?”

He listened.

“All right, I understand. If you’re sure they’re both okay now. And you’re sure it was Judy? Not Janelle?” He listened some more, then said: “I think this is actually good news. I saw two other kids this morning—both with transient seizures that passed off quickly, long before I saw them, and both fine afterward. Had calls on three more. Ginny T. took another one. It could be a side effect of whatever force is powering the Dome.”

He listened.

“Because I didn’t have a chance to,” he said. His tone patient, nonconfrontational. Barbie could imagine the question which had prompted that: Kids have been having seizures all day and now you tell me?

“You’re picking the kids up?” Rusty asked. He listened. “Okay. That’s good. If you sense anything wrong, call me ASAP. I’ll come on the run. And make sure Audi stays with them. Yes. Uh-huh. Love you, too.” He hooked the phone on his belt and ran both hands through his hair hard enough to make his eyes look briefly Chinese. “Jesus jumped-up Christ.”

“Who’s Audi?”

“Our golden retriever.”

“Tell me about these seizures.”

Rusty did so, not omitting what Jannie had said about Halloween and what Judy had said about pink stars.

“The Halloween thing sounds like what the Dinsmore boy was raving about,” Barbie said.

“Does, doesn’t it?”

“What about the other kids? Any of them talking about Halloween? Or pink stars?”

“The parents I saw today said their kids babbled while the seizure was ongoing, but they were too freaked to pay any attention.”

“The kids themselves didn’t remember?”

“The kids didn’t even know they’d had seizures.”

“Is that normal?”

“It’s not ab normal.”

“Any chance your younger daughter was copying the older one? Maybe… I don’t know… vying for attention?”

Rusty hadn’t considered this—hadn’t had the time, really. Now he did. “Possible, but not likely.” He nodded to the old-fashioned yellow Geiger counter in the bag. “You going prospecting with that thing?”

“Not me,” Barbie said. “This baby’s town property, and the powers that be don’t like me much. I wouldn’t want to be caught with it.” He held the bag out to Rusty.

“Can’t. I’m just too busy right now.”

“I know,” Barbie said, and told Rusty what he wanted him to do. Rusty listened closely, smiling a little.

“Okay,” he said. “Works for me. What are you going to be doing while I’m running your errands?”

“Cooking dinner at Sweetbriar. Tonight’s special is chicken à la Barbara. Want me to send some up to the hospital?”

“Sweet,” Rusty said.

2

On his way back to Cathy Russell, Rusty stopped by the the Democrat ’s office and handed off the Geiger counter to Julia Shumway.

She listened as he relayed Barbie’s instructions, smiling faintly. “The man knows how to delegate, I’ll say that for him. I’ll see to this with pleasure.”

Rusty thought of cautioning her to be careful about who saw the town’s Geiger counter in her possession, but didn’t need to. The bag had disappeared into the kneehole of her desk.

On his way to the hospital, he reached Ginny Tomlinson and asked her about the seizure call she’d taken.

“Little kid named Jimmy Wicker. The grandfather called it in. Bill Wicker?”

Rusty knew him. Bill delivered their mail.

“He was taking care of Jimmy while the boy’s mom went to gas up their car. They’re almost out of regular at the Gas and Grocery, by the way, and Johnny Carver’s had the nerve to jack the price of regular to eleven dollars a gallon. Eleven! ”

Rusty bore this patiently, thinking he could have had his conversation with Ginny face-to-face. He was almost back to the hospital. When she was done complaining, he asked her if little Jimmy had said anything while he was seizing.

“Yes indeed. Bill said he babbled quite a bit. I think it was something about pink stars. Or Halloween. Or maybe I’m getting it confused with what Rory Dinsmore said after he was shot. People have been talking about that.”

Of course they have, Rusty thought grimly. And they’ll be talking about this, too, if they find out. As they probably will.

“All right,” he said. “Thanks, Ginny.”

“When you comin back, Red Ryder?”

“Almost there now.”

“Good. Because we have a new patient. Sammy Bushey. She was raped.”

Rusty groaned.

“It gets better. Piper Libby brought her in. I couldn’t get the names of the doers out of the girl, but I think Piper did. She went out of here like her hair was on fire and her ass—” A pause. Ginny yawned loud enough for Rusty to hear. “—her ass was catching.”

“Ginny my love—when’s the last time you got some sleep?”

“I’m fine.”

“Go home.”

“Are you kidding?” Sounding aghast.

“No. Go home. Sleep. No setting the alarm, either.” Then an idea struck him. “But stop by Sweetbriar Rose on the way, why don’t you? They’re having chicken. I heard it from a reliable source.”

“The Bushey girl—”

“I’ll be checking on her in five minutes. What you’re going to do is make like a bee and buzz.”

He closed his phone before she could protest again.

3

Big Jim Rennie felt remarkably good for a man who had committed murder the night before. This was partially because he did not see it as murder, no more than he had seen the death of his late wife as murder. It was cancer that had taken her. Inoperable. Yes, he had probably given her too many of the pain pills over the last week, and in the end he’d still had to help her with a pillow over her face (but lightly, ever so lightly, slowing her breathing, easing her into the arms of Jesus), but he had done it out of love and kindness. What had happened to Reverend Cog-gins was a bit more brutal—admittedly—but the man had been so bullish. So completely unable to put the town’s welfare ahead of his own.

“Well, he’s eating dinner with Christ the Lord tonight,” Big Jim said. “Roast beef, mashed with gravy, apple crisp for dessert.” He himself was eating a large plate of fettuccini alfredo, courtesy of the Stouffer’s company. A lot of cholesterol, he supposed, but there was no Dr. Haskell around to nag him about it.

“I outlasted you, you old poop,” Big Jim told his empty study, and laughed goodnaturedly. His plate of pasta and a glass filled with milk (Big Jim Rennie did not drink alcohol) were set on his desk blotter. He often ate in the study, and he saw no need to change that simply because Lester Coggins had met his end here. Besides, the room was once more squared away and spandy-clean. Oh, he supposed one of those investigation units like the ones on TV would be able to find plenty of blood-spatter with their luminol and special lights and things, but none of those people was going to be here in the immediate future. As for Pete Randolph doing any sleuthing in the matter… the idea was a joke. Randolph was an idiot.

“But,” Big Jim told the empty room in a lecturely tone, “he’s my idiot.”

He slurped up the last few strands of pasta, mopped his considerable chin with a napkin, then once more began to jot notes on the yellow legal pad beside the blotter. He had jotted plenty of notes since Saturday; there was so much to do. And if the Dome stayed in place, there would be more still.

Big Jim sort of hoped it would remain in place, at least for a while. The Dome offered challenges to which he felt certain he could rise (with God’s help, of course). The first order of business was to consolidate his hold on the town. For that he needed more than a scapegoat; he needed a bogeyman. The obvious choice was Barbara, the man the Democrat Party’s Commie-in-Chief had tapped to replace James Rennie.

The study door opened. When Big Jim looked up from his notes, his son was standing there. His face was pale and expressionless. There was something not quite right about Junior lately. As busy as he was with the town’s affairs (and their other enterprise; that had also kept him busy), Big Jim realized this. But he felt confident in the boy just the same. Even if Junior let him down, Big Jim was sure he could handle it. He’d spent a lifetime making his own luck; that wasn’t going to change now.

Besides, the boy had moved the body. That made him part of this. Which was good—the essence of smalltown life, in fact. In a small town, everybody was supposed to be a part of everything. How did that silly song put it? We all support the team.

“Son?” he asked. “All right?”

“I’m fine,” Junior said. He wasn’t, but he was better, the latest poisonous headache finally lifting. Being with his girlfriends had helped, as he’d known it would. The McCain pantry didn’t smell so good, but after he’d sat there awhile, holding their hands, he’d gotten used to it. He thought he could even come to like that smell.

“Did you find anything in his apartment?”

“Yes.” Junior told him what he had found.

“That’s excellent, Son. Really excellent. And are you ready to tell me where you put the… where you put him?”

Junior shook his head slowly back and forth, but his eyes stayed in exactly the same place while he did it—pinned on his father’s face. It was a little eerie. “You don’t need to know. I told you that. It’s a safe place, and that’s enough.”

“So now you’re telling me what I need to know.” But he said it without his usual heat.

“In this case, yes.”

Big Jim considered his son carefully. “Are you sure you’re all right? You look pale.”

“I’m fine. Just a headache. It’s going now.”

“Why not have something to eat? There are a few more fettuccinis in the freezer, and the microwave does a great job on them.” He smiled. “Might as well enjoy them while we can.”

The dark, considering eyes dropped for a moment to the puddle of white sauce on Big Jim’s plate, then rose again to his father’s face. “Not hungry. When should I find the bodies?”

“Bodies?” Big Jim stared. “What do you mean, bodies?”

Junior smiled, lips lifting just enough to show the tips of his teeth. “Never mind. It’ll help your cred if you’re surprised like everyone else. Let’s put it this way—once we pull the trigger, this town will be ready to hang Baaarbie from a sour apple tree. When do you want to do it? Tonight? Because that’ll work.”

Big Jim considered the question. He looked down at his yellow pad. It was crammed with notes (and splattered with alfredo sauce), but only one was circled: newspaper bitch.

“Not tonight. We can use him for more than Coggins if we play this right.”

“And if the Dome comes down while you’re playing it?”

“We’ll be fine,” Big Jim said. Thinking, And if Mr. Barbara is somehow able to squirm free of the frame—not likely, but cockroaches have a way of finding cracks when the lights go on—there’s always you. You and those other bodies. “Now get yourself something to eat, even if it’s only a salad.”

But Junior didn’t move. “Don’t wait too long, Dad,” he said. “I won’t.”

Junior considered it, considered him with those dark eyes that seemed so strange now, then seemed to lose interest. He yawned. “I’m going up to my room and sleep awhile. I’ll eat later.”

“Just make sure you do. You’re getting too thin.”

“Thin is in,” his son replied, and offered a hollow smile that was even more disquieting than his eyes. To Big Jim, it looked like a skull’s smile. It made him think of the fellow who now just called himself The Chef—as if his previous life as Phil Bushey had been canceled. When Junior left the room, Big Jim breathed a sigh of relief without even being aware of it.

He picked up his pen: so much to do. He would do it, and do it well. It was not impossible that when this thing was over, his picture would be on the cover of Time magazine.

4

With her generator still running—although it wouldn’t be for much longer unless she could find some more LP canisters—Brenda Perkins was able to fire up her husband’s printer and make a hard copy of everything in the VADER file. The incredible list of offenses Howie had compiled—and which he had apparently been about to act on at the time of his death—seemed more real to her on paper than they had on the computer screen. And the more she looked at them, the more they seemed to fit the Jim Rennie she’d known for most of her life. She had always known he was a monster; just not how big a monster.

Even the stuff about Coggins’s Jesus-jumping church fit… although if she was reading this right, it was really not a church at all but a big old holy Maytag that washed money instead of clothes. Money from a drug-manufacturing operation that was, in her husband’s words, “maybe one of the biggest in the history of the United States.”

But there were problems, which both Police Chief Howie “Duke” Perkins and the State AG had acknowledged. The problems were why the evidence-gathering phase of Operation Vader had gone on as long as it had. Jim Rennie wasn’t just a big monster; he was a smart monster. That was why he had always been content to remain the Second Selectman. He had Andy Sanders to break trail for him.

And to wear a target—that, too. For a long time, Andy was the only one against whom Howie had had hard evidence. He was the frontman and probably didn’t even know it, cheery gladhanding dumbshit that he was. Andy was First Selectman, First Deacon at Holy Redeemer, first in the hearts of the townsfolk, and out front on a trail of corporate documents that finally disappeared into the obfuscatory financial swamps of Nassau and Grand Cayman Island. If Howie and the State Attorney General had moved too soon, he would also have been first to get his picture taken while holding a number. Maybe the only one, should he believe Big Jim’s inevitable promises that all would be well if Andy just kept mum. And he probably would. Who was better at dummying up than a dummy?

Last summer, things had begun working toward what Howie had seen as the endgame. That was when Rennie’s name had started showing up on some of the paperwork the AG had obtained, most notably that of a Nevada corporation called Town Ventures. The Town Ventures money had disappeared west instead of east, not into the Caribbean but into mainland China, a country where the key ingredients of decongestant drugs could be bought in bulk, with few or any questions.

Why would Rennie allow such exposure? Howie Perkins had been able to think of only one reason: the money had gotten too big too fast for one holy washing machine. Rennie’s name had subsequently appeared on papers concerning half a dozen other fundamentalist churches in the northeast. Town Ventures and the other churches (not to mention half a dozen other religious radio stations and AM talkers, none as big as WCIK) were Rennie’s first real mistakes. They left dangling strings. Strings could be pulled, and sooner or later—usually sooner—everything unraveled.

You couldn’t let go, could you? Brenda thought as she sat behind her husband’s desk, studying the papers. You’d made millions—maybe tens of millions—and the risks were becoming outrageous, but you still couldn’t let go. Like a monkey who traps himself because he won’t let go of the food. You were sitting on a damn fortune and you just kept on living in that old three-story and selling cars at that pit of yours out on 119. Why?

But she knew. It wasn’t the money; it was the town. What he saw as his town. Sitting on a beach somewhere in Costa Rica or presiding over a guarded estate in Namibia, Big Jim would become Small Jim. Because a man without a sense of purpose, even one whose bank accounts are stuffed with money, is always a small man.

If she confronted him with what she had, could she make a deal with him? Force him out in return for her silence? She wasn’t sure. And she dreaded the confrontation. It would be ugly, possibly dangerous. She would want to have Julia Shumway with her. And Barbie. Only Dale Barbara was now wearing his own target.

Howie’s voice, calm but firm, spoke up in her head. You can afford to wait a little while—I was waiting for a few final items of proof myself—but I wouldn’t wait too long, honey. Because the longer this siege goes on, the more dangerous he’ll become.

She thought of Howie starting to back down the driveway, then stopping to put his lips on hers in the sunshine, his mouth almost as well known to her as her own, and certainly as well loved. Caressing the side of her throat as he did it. As if he knew the end was coming, and one last touch would have to pay for all. An easy and romantic conceit for sure, but she almost believed it, and her eyes filled with tears.

Suddenly the papers and all the machinations contained therein seemed less important. Even the Dome didn’t seem very important. What mattered was the hole that had appeared so suddenly in her life, sucking out the happiness she had taken for granted. She wondered if poor dumb Andy Sanders felt the same way. She supposed he did.

I’ll give it twenty-four hours. If the Dome’s still in place tomorrow night, I’ll go to Rennie with this stuff—with copies of this stuff—and tell him he has to resign in favor of Dale Barbara. Tell him that if he doesn’t, he’s going to read all about his drug operation in the paper.

“Tomorrow,” she murmured, and closed her eyes. Two minutes later she was asleep in Howie’s chair. In Chester’s Mill, the supper hour had come. Some meals (including chicken à la king for a hundred or so) were cooked on electric or gas ranges courtesy of the generators in town that were still working, but there were also people who had turned to their woodstoves, either to conserve their gennies or because wood was now all they had. The smoke rose in the still air from hundreds of chimneys.

And spread.

5

After delivering the Geiger counter—the recipient took it willingly, even eagerly, and promised to begin prospecting with it early on Tuesday—Julia headed for Burpee’s Department Store with Horace on his leash. Romeo had told her he had a pair of brand-new Kyocera photocopiers in storage, both still in their original shipping cartons. She was welcome to both.

“I also got a little propane tucked away,” he said, giving Horace a pat. “I’ll see you get what you need—for as long as I can, at least. We gotta keep that newspaper running, am I right? More important than ever, don’t you t’ink?”

It was exactly what she t’ought, and Julia had told him so. She had also planted a kiss on his cheek. “I owe you for this, Rommie.”

“I’ll be expectin a big discount on my weekly advertising circular when this is over.” He had then tapped the side of his nose with a forefinger, as if they had a great big secret. Maybe they did.

As she left, her cell phone chirruped. She pulled it out of her pants pocket. “Hello, this is Julia.”

“Good evening, Ms. Shumway.”

“Oh, Colonel Cox, how wonderful to hear your voice,” she said brightly. “You can’t imagine how thrilled we country mice are to get out-of-town calls. How’s life outside the Dome?”

“Life in general is probably fine,” he said. “Where I am, it’s on the shabby side. You know about the missiles?”

“Watched them hit. And bounce off. They lit a fine fire on your side—”

“It’s not my—”

“—and a fairly good one on ours.”

“I’m calling for Colonel Barbara,” Cox said. “Who should be carrying his own goddam phone by now.”

“Goddam right!” she cried, still in her brightest tone. “And people in goddam hell should have goddam icewater!” She stopped in front of the Gas & Grocery, now shut up tight. The hand-lettered sign in the window read HRS OF OP TOMORROW 11 AM–2 PM GET HERE EARLY!

“Ms. Shumway—”

“We’ll discuss Colonel Barbara in a minute,” Julia said. “Right now I want to know two things. First, when is the press going to be allowed at the Dome? Because the people of America deserve more than the government’s spin on this, don’t you think?”

She expected him to say he did not think, that there would be no New York Times or CNN at the Dome in the foreseeable future, but Cox surprised her. “Probably by Friday if none of the other tricks up our sleeve work. What’s the other thing you want to know, Ms. Shumway? Make it brief, because I’m not a press officer. That’s another pay grade.”

“You called me, so you’re stuck with me. Suck it up, Colonel.”

“Ms. Shumway, with all due respect, yours is not the only cell phone in Chester’s Mill I can reach out and touch.”

“I’m sure that’s true, but I don’t think Barbie will talk to you if you shine me on. He’s not particularly happy with his new position as prospective stockade commandant.”

Cox sighed. “What’s your question?”

“I want to know the temperature on the south or east side of the Dome—a true temperature, meaning away from the fire you guys set.”

“Why—”

“Do you have that information or not? I think you do, or can get it. I think you’re sitting in front of a computer screen right now, and you have access to everything, probably including my underwear size.” She paused. “And if you say sixteen, this call is over.”

“Are you exhibiting your sense of humor, Ms. Shumway, or are you always this way?”

“I’m tired and scared. Chalk it up to that.”

There was a pause on Cox’s end. She thought she heard the click of computer keys. Then he said, “It’s forty-seven Fahrenheit in Castle Rock. Will that do?”

“Yes.” The disparity wasn’t as bad as she had feared, but still considerable. “I’m looking at the thermometer in the window of the Mill Gas and Grocery. It says fifty-eight. That’s an eleven-degree difference between locations less than twenty miles apart. Unless there’s a hell of a big warm front pushing through western Maine this evening, I’d say something’s going on here. Do you agree?”

He didn’t answer her question, but what he did say took her mind off it. “We’re going to try something else. Around nine this evening. It’s what I wanted to tell Barbie.”

“One hopes Plan B will work better than Plan A. At this moment, I believe the President’s appointee is feeding the multitudes at Sweetbriar Rose. Chicken à la king is the rumor.” She could see the lights down the street, and her belly rumbled.

“Will you listen and pass on a message?” And she heard what he did not add: You contentious bitch?

“Happy to,” she said. Smiling. Because she was a contentious bitch. When she had to be.

“We’re going to try an experimental acid. A hydrofluoric compound, man-made. Nine times as corrosive as the ordinary stuff.”

“Living better through chemistry.”

“I’m told you could theoretically burn a hole two miles deep in the bedrock with it.”

“What highly amusing people you work for, Colonel.”

“We’re going to try where Motton Road crosses—” There was a rustle of paper. “Where it crosses into Harlow. I expect to be there.”

“Then I’ll tell Barbie to have someone else wash up.”

“Will you also be favoring us with your company, Ms. Shumway?”

She opened her mouth to say I wouldn’t miss it, and that was when all hell broke loose up the street.

“What’s going on there?” Cox asked.

Julia didn’t reply. She closed her phone and stuck it in her pocket, already running toward the sound of yelling voices. And something else. Something that sounded like snarling.

The gunshot came while she was still half a block away.

6

Piper went back to the parsonage and discovered Carolyn, Thurston, and the Appleton kids waiting there. She was glad to see them, because they took her mind off Sammy Bushey. At least temporarily.

She listened to Carolyn’s account of Aidan Appleton’s seizure, but the boy seemed fine now—chowing ever deeper into a stack of Fig Newtons. When Carolyn asked if the boy should see a doctor, Piper said, “Unless there’s a recurrence, I think you can assume it was brought on by hunger and the excitement of the game.”

Thurston smiled ruefully. “We were all excited. Having fun.”

When it came to possible lodging, Piper first thought of the McCain house, which was close by. Only she didn’t know where their spare key might be hidden.

Alice Appleton was on the floor, feeding Fig Newton crumbs to Clover. The shepherd was doing the old my-muzzle’s-on-your-ankle-because-I’m-your-best-friend routine in between offerings. “This is the best dog I’ve ever seen,” she told Piper. “I wish we could have a dog.”

“I’ve got a dragon,” Aidan offered. He was sitting comfortably on Carolyn’s lap.

Alice smiled indulgently. “That’s his invisible F-R-E-I-N.”

“I see,” Piper said. She supposed they could always break a window at the McCain place; needs must when the devil drives.

But as she got up to check on the coffee, a better idea occurred. “The Dumagens’. I should have thought of them right away. They went to Boston for a conference. Coralee Dumagen asked me to water her plants while they’re gone.”

“I teach in Boston,” Thurston said. “At Emerson. I edited the current issue of Ploughshares. ” And sighed.

“The key is under a flowerpot to the left of the door,” Piper said. “I don’t believe they have a generator, but there’s a woodstove in the kitchen.” She hesitated, thinking City people. “Can you use a wood-stove to cook on without setting the house on fire?”

“I grew up in Vermont,” Thurston said. “Was in charge of keeping the stoves lit—house and barn—until I went off to college. What goes around comes around, doesn’t it?” And sighed again.

“There’ll be food in the pantry, I’m sure,” Piper said.

Carolyn nodded. “That’s what the janitor at the Town Hall said.”

“Also Joooon-yer, ” Alice put in. “He’s a cop. A foxy one.” Thurston’s mouth turned down. “Alice’s foxy cop assaulted me,” he said. “Him or the other one. I couldn’t tell them apart, myself.”

Piper’s eyebrows went up.

“Punched Thurse in the stomach,” Carolyn said quietly. “Called us Massholes—which, I suppose, we technically are—and laughed at us. For me, that was the worst part, how they laughed at us. They were better once they had the kids with them, but…” She shook her head. “They were out of control.”

And just like that, Piper was back to Sammy. She felt a pulse beginning to beat in the side of her neck, very slow and hard, but she kept her voice even. “What was the other policeman’s name?”

“Frankie,” Carolyn said. “Junior called him Frankie D. Do you know these guys? You must, huh?”

“I know them,” Piper said.

7

She gave the new, makeshift family directions to the Dumagens’—the house had the advantage of being near to Cathy Russell if the boy had another seizure—and sat awhile at her kitchen table after they were gone, drinking tea. She did it slowly. Took a sip and set the cup down. Took a sip and set it down. Clover whined. He was tuned in to her, and she supposed he could sense her rage.

Maybe it changes my smell. Makes it more acrid or something.

A picture was forming. Not a pretty one. A lot of new cops, very young cops, sworn in less than forty-eight hours ago and already running wild. The sort of license they had exhibited with Sammy Bushey and Thurston Marshall wouldn’t spread to veteran cops like Henry Morrison and Jackie Wettington—at least she didn’t think so—but to Fred Denton? Toby Whelan? Maybe. Probably. With Duke in charge, those guys had been all right. Not great, the kind of guys apt to lip you unnecessarily after a traffic stop, but all right. Certainly the best the town’s budget could afford. But her mother had been wont to say, “You buy cheap, you get cheap.” And with Peter Randolph in charge—

Something had to be done.

Only she had to control her temper. If she didn’t, it would control her.

She took the leash from the peg by the door. Clover was up at once, tail swishing, ears perked, eyes bright.

“Come on, you big lug. We’re going to lodge a complaint.”

Her shepherd was still licking Fig Newton crumbs from the side of his muzzle as she led him out the door.

8

Walking across the town common with Clover heeling neatly to her right, Piper felt she did have her temper under control. She felt that way until she heard the laughter. It came as she and Clove were approaching the police station. She observed the very fellows whose names she had gotten out of Sammy Bushey: DeLesseps, Thibodeau, Searles. Georgia Roux was also present, Georgia who had egged them on, according to Sammy: Do that bitch. Freddy Denton was there too. They were sitting at the top of the stone PD steps, drinking sodas, gassing among themselves. Duke Perkins never would have allowed such a thing, and Piper reflected that if he could see them from wherever he was, he’d be rolling in his grave fast enough to set his own remains on fire.

Mel Searles said something and they all broke up again, laughing and backslapping. Thibodeau had his arm around the Roux girl, the tips of his fingers on the sideswell of her breast. She said something, and they all laughed harder.

It came to Piper that they were laughing about the rape—what a goldurn good old time it had been—and after that, her father’s advice never had a chance. The Piper who ministered to the poor and the sick, who officiated at marryings and buryings, who preached charity and tolerance on Sundays, was pushed rudely to the back of her mind, where she could only watch as though through a warped and wavery pane of glass. It was the other Piper who took over, the one who had trashed her room at fifteen, crying tears of rage rather than sorrow.

There was a slate-paved square known as War Memorial Plaza between the Town Hall and the newer brick PD building. At its center was a statue of Ernie Calvert’s father, Lucien Calvert, who had been awarded a posthumous Silver Star for heroic action in Korea. The names of other Chester’s Mill war dead, going all the way back to the Civil War, were engraved on the statue’s base. There were also two flagpoles, the Stars and Stripes at the top of one and the state flag, with its farmer, sailor, and moose, at the top of the other. Both hung limp in the reddening light of oncoming sunset. Piper Libby passed between the poles like a woman in a dream, Clover still heeling behind her right knee with his ears up.

The “officers” atop the steps burst into another hearty roar of laughter, and she thought of trolls in one of the fairy stories her dad had sometimes read her. Trolls in a cave, gloating over piles of ill-gotten gold. Then they saw her and quieted.

“Good evenin, Rev’run,” Mel Searles said, and got up, giving his belt a self-important little hitch as he did so. Standing in the presence of a lady, Piper thought. Did his mother teach him that? Probably. The fine art of rape he probably learned somewhere else.

He was still smiling as she reached the steps, but then it faltered and grew tentative, so he must have seen her expression. Just what that expression might be she didn’t know. From the inside, her face felt frozen. Immobile.

She saw the biggest of them watching her closely. Thibodeau, his face as immobile as hers felt. He’s like Clover, she thought. He smells it on me. The rage.

“Rev’run?” Mel asked. “Everything okay? There a problem?”

She mounted the steps, not fast, not slow, Clover still heeling neatly behind her right knee. “You bet there’s a problem,” she said, looking up at him.

“What—”

“You,” she said. “You’re the problem.”

She pushed him. Mel wasn’t expecting it. He was still holding his cup of soda. He went tumbling into Georgia Roux’s lap, flailing his arms uselessly for balance, and for a moment the soda was a dark manta ray hanging against the reddening sky. Georgia cried out in surprise as Mel landed on her. She sprawled backward, spilling her own soda. It went running across the wide granite slab in front of the double doors. Piper could smell either whiskey or bourbon. Their Cokes had been spiked with what the rest of the town could no longer buy. No wonder they’d been laughing.

The red fissure inside her head opened wider.

“You can’t—” Frankie began, starting to get up himself. She pushed him. In a galaxy far far away, Clover—ordinarily the sweetest of dogs—was growling.

Frankie went on his back, eyes wide and startled, for a moment looking like the Sunday school boy he once might have been.

“Rape is the problem!” Piper shouted. “Rape!”

“Shut up,” Carter said. He was still sitting, and although Georgia was cowering against him, Carter remained calm. The muscles of his arms rippled below his short-sleeved blue shirt. “Shut up and get out of here right now, if you don’t want to spend the night in a cell downstai—”

“You’re the one who’ll be going into a cell,” Piper said. “All of you.”

“Make her shut up,” Georgia said. She wasn’t whimpering, but she was close. “Make her shut up, Cart.”

“Ma’am—” Freddy Denton. His uniform shirt untucked and bourbon on his breath. Duke would have taken one look and fired his ass. Fired all their asses. He started to get up and this time he was the one who went sprawling, a look of surprise on his face that would have been comical under other circumstances. It was nice that they had been sitting while she was standing. Made it easier. But oh, how her temples were thudding. She returned her attention to Thibodeau, the most dangerous one. He was still looking at her with maddening calm. As though she were a freak he’d paid a quarter to see in a sideshow tent. But he was looking up at her, and that was her advantage.

“But it won’t be a cell downstairs,” she said, speaking directly to Thibodeau. “It’ll be in Shawshank, where they do to little play-yard bullies like you what you did to that girl.”

“You stupid bitch,” Carter said. He spoke as if remarking on the weather. “We weren’t anywhere near her house.”

“That’s right,” Georgia said, sitting up again. There was Coke splattered on one of her cheeks, where a virulent case of teenage acne was fading (but still holding onto a few final outposts). “And besides, everyone knows Sammy Bushey is nothing but a lying lesbo cunt.”

Piper’s lips stretched in a smile. She turned it on Georgia, who recoiled from the crazy lady who had appeared so suddenly on the steps while they’d been having a nice sunsetter or two. “How did you know the lying lesbo cunt’s name? I didn’t say it.”

Georgia’s mouth dropped into an O of dismay. And for the first time something flickered beneath Carter Thibodeau’s calm. Whether fear or just annoyance, Piper didn’t know.

Frank DeLesseps got cautiously to his feet. “You better not go around spreading accusations you can’t back up, Reverend Libby.”

“Nor assaulting police officers,” Freddy Denton said. “I’m willing to let it go this time—everyone’s under stress—but you have to cease and desist these accusations right now.” He paused, then added lamely: “And the pushing, of course.”

Piper’s gaze remained fixed on Georgia, her right hand curled so tightly around the black plastic grip of Clover’s leash it was throbbing. The dog stood with his forepaws spread and his head lowered, still growling. He sounded like a powerful outboard motor set to idle. The fur on his neck had bushed out enough to hide his collar.

“How’d you know her name, Georgia?”

“I… I… I just assumed…”

Carter gripped her shoulder and squeezed it. “Shut up, babe.” And then, to Piper, still not standing (Because he doesn’t want to be pushed back down, the coward), he said: “I don’t know what kind of bee you’ve got in your Jesus bonnet, but we were all together last night, at Alden Dinsmore’s farm. Trying to see if we could get anything out of the soldier-boys stationed on 119, which we couldn’t. That’s on the other side of town from Busheys’.” He looked around at his friends.

“Right,” Frankie said.

“Right,” Mel chimed in, looking at Piper distrustfully.

“Yeah!” Georgia said. Carter’s arm was around her again and her moment of doubt was gone. She looked at Piper defiantly.

“Georgie-girl assumed it was Sammy you were yelling about,” Carter said with that same infuriating calm. “Because Sammy’s the biggest lying scumbucket in this town.”

Mel Searles yodeled laughter.

“But you didn’t use protection,” Piper said. Sammy had told her this, and when she saw Thibodeau’s face tighten, she knew it was true. “You didn’t use protection and they rape-kitted her.” She had no idea if this was true, and didn’t care. She could see from their widening eyes that they believed it, and their belief was enough. “When they compare your DNA to what they found—”

“That’s enough,” Carter said. “Shut it.”

She turned her furious smile on him. “No, Mr. Thibodeau. We are only getting started, my son.”

Freddy Denton reached for her. She pushed him down, then felt her left arm caught and twisted. She turned and looked into Thibodeau’s eyes. No calm there now; they were shining with rage.

Hello, my brother, she thought incoherently.

“Fuck you, you fucking bitch,” he remarked, and this time she was the one who was pushed.

Piper fell backward down the stairs, trying instinctively to tuck and roll, not wanting to hit her head on one of those stone risers, knowing they could smash her skull in. Kill her or—worse—leave her a vegetable. She struck on her left shoulder instead, and there was a sudden howl of pain there. Familiar pain. She had dislocated that one playing high school soccer twenty years ago, and damned if she hadn’t just done it again.

Her legs flew over her head and she turned a back somersault, wrenching her neck, coming down on her knees and splitting the skin on both. She finally came to rest on her stomach and breasts. She had tumbled almost all the way to the bottom of the steps. Her cheek was bleeding, her nose was bleeding, her lips were bleeding, her neck hurt, but ah God, her shoulder was the worst, humped up all crooked in a way she remembered well. The last time she’d seen a hump like that, it had been in a red nylon Wildcats jersey. Nevertheless, she struggled to her feet, thanking God she still had the power to command her legs; she could also have been paralyzed.

She’d lost hold of the leash halfway down and Clover jumped at Thibodeau, his teeth snapping at the chest and belly under his shirt, tearing the shirt open, knocking Thibodeau backward, going for the young man’s vitals.

“Get him off me!” Carter screamed. Nothing calm about him now. “He’s gonna kill me!”

And yes, Clover was trying. His front paws were planted on Carter’s thighs, going up and down as Carter thrashed. He looked like a German shepherd on a bicycle. He shifted his angle of attack and bit deep into Carter’s shoulder, eliciting another scream. Then Clover went for the throat. Carter got his hands on the dog’s chest just in time to save his windpipe.

“Make him stop!”

Frank reached for the trailing leash. Clover turned and snapped at his fingers. Frank skittered backward, and Clover returned his attention to the man who had pushed his mistress down the steps. His muzzle opened, revealing a double line of shining white teeth, and he drove at Thibodeau’s neck. Carter got his hand up, then shrieked in agony as Clover seized on it and began to shake it like one of his beloved rag toys. Only his rag toys didn’t bleed, and Carter’s hand did.

Piper came staggering up the steps, holding her left arm across her midriff. Her face was a mask of blood. A tooth clung to the corner of her mouth like a crumb of food.

“GET HIM OFF ME, CHRIST, GET YOUR FUCKIN DOG OFF ME!”

Piper was opening her mouth to tell Clover to stand down when she saw Fred Denton drawing his gun.

“No!” she screamed. “No, I can make him stop!”

Fred turned to Mel Searles, and pointed at the dog with his free hand. Mel stepped forward and kicked Clover in the haunch. He did it high and hard, as he had once (not so long ago) punted footballs. Clover was whipped sideways, losing his hold on Thibodeau’s bleeding, shredded hand, where two fingers now pointed in unusual directions, like crooked signposts.

“NO!” Piper screamed again, so loud and so hard the world went gray before her eyes. “DON’T HURT MY DOG!”

Fred paid no attention. When Peter Randolph burst out through the double doors, his shirttail out, his pants unzipped, the copy of Outdoors he had been reading on the crapper still held in one hand, Fred paid no attention to that, either. He pointed his service automatic at the dog, and fired.

The sound was deafening in the enclosed square. The top of Clover’s head lifted off in a spray of blood and bone. He took one step toward his screaming, bleeding mistress—another—then collapsed.

Fred, gun still in hand, strode forward and grabbed Piper by her bad arm. The hump in her shoulder roared a protest. And still she kept her eyes on the corpse of her dog, whom she had raised from a pup.

“You’re under arrest, you crazy bitch,” Fred said. He pushed his face—pale, sweaty, the eyes seeming ready to pop right out of their sockets—close enough to hers for her to feel the spray of his spittle. “Anything you say can and will be used against your crazy ass.”

On the other side of the street, diners were pouring out of Sweet-briar Rose, Barbie among them, still wearing his apron and baseball cap. Julia Shumway arrived first.

She took in the scene, not seeing details so much as a gestalt summation: dead dog; clustered cops; bleeding, screaming woman with one shoulder higher than the other; bald cop—Freddy goddam Denton—shaking her by the arm connected to that shoulder; more blood on the steps, suggesting that Piper had fallen down them. Or had been pushed.

Julia did something she had never done before in her life: reached into her handbag, flipped her wallet open, and climbed the steps, holding it out, yelling “Press! Press! Press!”

It stopped the shaking, at least.

9

Ten minutes later, in the office that had been Duke Perkins’s not so long ago, Carter Thibodeau sat on the sofa under Duke’s framed pictures and certificates, with a fresh bandage on his shoulder and paper towels around his hand. Georgia was sitting beside him. Large beads of painsweat stood out on Thibodeau’s forehead, but after saying “I don’t think nothin’s broken,” he was silent.

Fred Denton sat in a chair in the corner. His gun was on the Chief’s desk. He had surrendered it willingly enough, only saying, “I had to do it—just look at Cart’s hand.”

Piper sat in the office chair that was now Peter Randolph’s. Julia had mopped most of the blood off Piper’s face with more paper towels. The woman was shivering with shock and in great pain, but she was as silent about it as Thibodeau. Her eyes were clear.

“Clover only attacked him”—she raised her chin to Carter—“after he pushed me down the stairs. The push caused me to lose hold of the leash. What my dog did was justified. He was protecting me from a criminal assault.”

“She attacked us!” Georgia cried. “Crazy bitch attacked us! Came up the steps spouting all this shit—”

“Shut up,” Barbie said. “All of you, shut the hell up.” He looked at Piper. “This isn’t the first time you’ve dislocated your shoulder, is it?”

“I want you out of here, Mr. Barbara,” Randolph said… but he spoke with no great conviction.

“I can deal with this,” Barbie said. “Can you?”

Randolph made no reply. Mel Searles and Frank DeLesseps stood outside the door. They looked worried.

Barbie turned back to Piper. “This is a subluxation—a partial separation. Not bad. I can pop it back in before you go to the hospital—”

“Hospital?” Fred Denton squawked. “She’s under arr—”

“Shut up, Freddy,” Randolph said. “Nobody’s under arrest. At least not yet.”

Barbie held Piper’s eyes with his own. “But I have to do it now, before the swelling gets bad. If you wait for Everett to do it at the hospital, they’ll have to give you anesthesia.” He leaned close to her ear and murmured, “While you’re out, they’ll be telling their side and you won’t be telling yours.”

“What are you saying?” Randolph asked sharply.

“That it’s going to hurt,” Barbie said. “Right, Rev?”

She nodded. “Go on. Coach Gromley did it right on the sidelines, and she was a total dope. Just hurry. And please don’t screw it up.”

Barbie said: “Julia, grab a sling from the first aid kit, then help me lie her down on her back.”

Julia, very pale and feeling ill, did as she was told.

Barbie sat down on the floor to Piper’s left, slipped off one shoe, and then grasped her forearm just above her wrist with both hands. “I don’t know Coach Gromley’s method,” he said, “but this is how a medic I knew in Iraq did it. You’re going to count to three and then yell wishbone.”

“Wishbone,” Piper said, bemused in spite of the pain. “Well okay, you’re the doctor.”

No, Julia thought—Rusty Everett was now the closest thing the town had to a doctor. She’d contacted Linda and gotten his cell phone number, but her call had been immediately shunted to voicemail.

The room was silent. Even Carter Thibodeau was watching. Barbie nodded to Piper. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead, but she had her game-face on, and Barbie respected the shit out of that. He slipped his sock-foot into her left armpit, snugging it tight. Then, while pulling slowly but steadily on her arm, he applied counter pressure with his foot.

“Okay, here we go. Let’s hear you.”

“One… two… three… WISHBONE! ”

When Piper shouted, Barbie pulled. Everyone in the room heard the loud thunk as the joint went back into place. The hump in Piper’s blouse magically disappeared. She screamed but didn’t pass out. He slipped the sling over her neck and around the arm, immobilizing it as well as he could.

“Better?” he asked.

“Better,” she said. “Much, thank God. Still hurts, but not as bad.”

“I’ve got some aspirin in my purse,” Julia said.

“Give her the aspirin and then get out,” Randolph said. “All of you except for Carter, Freddy, the Reverend, and me.”

Julia looked at him unbelievingly. “Are you kidding? The Reverend is going to the hospital. Can you walk, Piper?”

Piper stood up shakily. “I think so. A little way.”

“Sit down, Reverend Libby,” Randolph said, but Barbie knew she was already gone. He could hear it in Randolph’s voice.

“Why don’t you make me?” She gingerly lifted her left arm and the sling holding it. The arm trembled, but it was working. “I’m sure you can dislocate it again, very easily. Go on. Show these… these boys… that you’re just like them.”

“And I’ll put it all in the paper!” Julia said brightly. “Circulation will double!”

Barbie said, “Suggest you defer this business until tomorrow, Chief. Allow the lady to get some painkillers stronger than aspirin, and have those knee lacerations checked by Everett. Given the Dome, she’s hardly a flight risk.”

“Her dog tried to kill me,” Carter said. In spite of the pain, he sounded calm again.

“Chief Randolph, DeLesseps, Searles, and Thibodeau are guilty of rape.” Piper was swaying now—Julia put an arm around her—but her voice was firm and clear. “Roux is an accessory to rape.”

“The hell I am!” Georgia squawked.

“They need to be suspended immediately.”

“She’s lying,” Thibodeau said.

Chief Randolph looked like a man watching a tennis match. He finally settled his gaze on Barbie. “Are you telling me what to do, kiddo?”

“No, sir, just making a suggestion based on my enforcement experience in Iraq. You’ll make your own decisions.”

Randolph relaxed. “Okay, then. Okay.” He looked down, frowning in thought. They all watched him notice his fly was still unzipped and take care of that little problem. Then he looked up again and said, “Julia, take Reverend Piper to the hospital. As for you, Mr. Barbara, I don’t care where you go but I want you out of here. I’ll take statements from my officers tonight, and from Reverend Libby tomorrow.”

“Wait,” Thibodeau said. He extended his crooked fingers to Barbie. “Can you do anything about these?”

“I don’t know,” Barbie said—pleasantly enough, he hoped. The initial ugliness was over, and now came the political aftermath, which he remembered well from dealing with Iraqi cops who were not all that different from the man on the couch and the others crowding the doorway. What it came down to was making nice with people you wished you could spit on. “Can you say wishbone?”

10

Rusty had turned his cell phone off before knocking on Big Jim’s door. Now Big Jim sat behind his desk, Rusty in the seat before it—the chair of supplicants and applicants.

The study (Rennie probably called it a home office on his tax returns) had a pleasant, piney smell, as if it had recently been given a good scrubbing, but Rusty still didn’t like it. It wasn’t just the picture of an aggressively Caucasian Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount, or the self-congratulatory plaques, or the hardwood floor that really should have had a rug to protect it; it was all those things and something else as well. Rusty Everett had very little use for or belief in the supernatural, but nevertheless, this room felt almost haunted.

It’s because he scares you a little, he thought. That’s all it is.

Hoping that how he felt didn’t show in his voice or face, Rusty told Rennie about the hospital’s missing propane tanks. About how he had found one of them in the supply shed behind the Town Hall, currently running the Town Hall’s generator. And how it was the only one.

“So I have two questions,” Rusty said. “How did a tank from the hospital supply wander downtown? And where did the rest go?”

Big Jim rocked back in his chair, put his hands behind his neck, and looked up at the ceiling meditatively. Rusty found himself staring at the trophy baseball sitting on Rennie’s desk. Propped in front of it was a note from Bill Lee, once of the Boston Red Sox. He could read the note because it was turned outward. Of course it was. It was for guests to see, and marvel over. Like the pictures on the wall, the baseball proclaimed that Big Jim Rennie had rubbed elbows with Famous People: Look on my autographs, ye mighty, and despair. To Rusty, the baseball and the note turned outward seemed to sum up his bad feelings about the room he was in. It was window-dressing, a tinny testimonial to smalltown prestige and smalltown power.

“I wasn’t aware you had anyone’s permission to go poking around in our supply shed,” Big Jim remarked to the ceiling. His hammy fingers were still laced together behind his head. “Perhaps you’re a town official, and I wasn’t aware of it? If so, my mistake—my bad, as Junior says. I thought you were basically a nurse with a prescription pad.”

Rusty thought this was mostly technique—Rennie trying to piss him off. To divert him.

“I’m not a town official,” he said, “but I am a hospital employee. And a taxpayer.”

“So?”

Rusty could feel blood rushing to his face.

“So those things make it partly my supply shed.” He waited to see if Big Jim would respond to this, but the man behind the desk remained impassive. “Besides, it was unlocked. Which is all beside the point, isn’t it? I saw what I saw, and I’d like an explanation. As a hospital employee.”

“And a taxpayer. Don’t forget that.”

Rusty sat looking at him, not even nodding.

“I can’t give you one,” Rennie said.

Rusty raised his eyebrows. “Really? I thought you had your fingers on the pulse of this town. Isn’t that what you said the last time you ran for Selectman? And now you’re telling me you can’t explain where the town’s propane went? I don’t believe it.”

For the first time, Rennie looked nettled. “I don’t care if you believe it or not. This is news to me.” But his eyes darted fractionally to one side as he said it, as if to check that his autographed photo of Tiger Woods was still there; the classic liar’s tell.

Rusty said, “The hospital’s almost out of LP. Without it, the few of us who are still on the job might as well be working in a Civil War battlefield surgery tent. Our current patients—including a postcoronary and a serious case of diabetes that may warrant amputation—will be in serious trouble if the power goes out. The possible amp is Jimmy Sirois. His car is in the parking lot. It’s got a sticker on the bumper that says ELECT BIG JIM.”

“I’ll investigate,” Big Jim said. He spoke with the air of a man conferring a favor. “The town’s propane is probably stored in some other town facility. As for yours, I’m sure I can’t say.”

“What other town facilities? There’s the FD, and the sand-and-salt pile out on God Creek Road—not even a shed there—but those are the only ones I’m aware of.”

“Mr. Everett, I’m a busy man. You’ll have to excuse me now.”

Rusty stood. His hands wanted to ball into fists, but he wouldn’t let them. “I’m going to ask you one more time,” he said. “Straight out and straight up. Do you know where those missing tanks are?”

“No.” This time it was Dale Earnhardt Rennie’s eyes flickered to. “And I’m not going to read any implication into that question, son, because if I did I’d have to resent it. Now why don’t you run along and check on Jimmy Sirois? Tell him Big Jim sends his best, and he’ll stop by as soon as the nitpickery slows down a little.”

Rusty was still battling to hold onto his temper, but this was a fight he was losing. “Run along? I think you forgot that you’re a public servant, not a private dictator. For the time being I’m this town’s chief medical officer, and I want some an—”

Big Jim’s cell rang. He snared it. Listened. The lines around his drawn-down mouth grew grimmer. “Goshdarn it! Every time I turn my darn back…” He listened some more, then said: “If you’ve got people with you in the office, Pete, shut your trap before you open it too wide and fall right the heck in. Call Andy. I’ll be right there, and the three of us’ll clean this up.”

He killed the phone and got to his feet.

“I have to go to the police station. It’s either an emergency or more nitpickery, I won’t be able to tell which until I get there. And you’ll be wanted at either the hospital or the Health Center, I believe. There seems to be a problem with the Reverend Libby.”

“Why? What happened to her?”

Big Jim’s cold eyes surveyed him from hard little sockets. “I’m sure you’ll hear her story. I don’t know how true it’ll be, but I’m sure you’ll hear it. So go do your job, young fella, and let me do mine.”

Rusty walked down the front hall and out of the house, his temples throbbing. In the west, the sunset was a lurid bloodshow. The air was almost completely still, but bore a smoky stench just the same. At the foot of the steps, Rusty raised a finger and pointed it at the public servant waiting for him to leave his property before he, Rennie, left himself. Rennie scowled at the finger, but Rusty did not drop it.

“Nobody needs to tell me to do my job. And I’m going to make looking for that propane part of it. If I find it in the wrong place, someone else is going to be doing your job, Selectman Rennie. That’s a promise.”

Big Jim flapped a contemptuous hand at him. “Get out of here, son. Go to work.”

11

During the first fifty-five hours of the Dome’s existence, over two dozen children suffered seizures. Some, like those of the Everett girls, were noted. Many more were not, and in the days ahead, the seizure activity would rapidly taper down to nothing. Rusty would compare this to the minor shocks people experienced when they came too close to the Dome. The first time, you got that almost electric frisson that stiffened the hair on the back of your neck; after that, most people felt nothing. It was as if they had been inoculated.

“Are you saying the Dome is like chickenpox?” Linda asked him later. “Catch it once and you’re set for life?”

Janelle had two seizures, and so did a little kid named Norman Sawyer, but in both cases the second seizure was milder than the first, and not accompanied by any babble. Most of the kids Rusty saw had only the one, and there seemed to be no after-effects.

Only two adults had seizures during those first fifty-five hours. Both came around sunset on Monday evening, and both had easily traceable causes.

With Phil Bushey, aka The Chef, the cause was too much of his own product. Around the time Rusty and Big Jim parted company, Chef Bushey was sitting outside the storage barn behind WCIK, looking dreamily at the sunset (this close to the missile strikes, the scarlet in the sky was further darkened by soot on the Dome), his hitty-pipe clasped loosely in one hand. He was tweeked at least to the ionosphere; maybe a hundred miles beyond. In the few low-lying clouds which floated on that bloody light, he saw the faces of his mother, his father, his grandfather; he saw Sammy and Little Walter as well.

All the cloud-faces were bleeding.

When his right foot began to twitch and then his left foot picked up the beat, he ignored it. Twitchin was part of tweekin, everyone knew that. But then his hands began to tremble and his pipe fell into the long grass (yellow and sere as a result of the factory work that went on out here). A moment later his head began to jerk from side to side.

This is it, he thought with a calm that was partly relief. I finally overdid it. I’m checking out. Probably for the best.

But he didn’t check out, didn’t even pass out. He slid slowly sideways, twitching and watching as a black marble rose in the red sky. It expanded to a bowling ball, then an overinflated beachball. It went on growing until it had eaten up the red sky.

The end of the world, he thought. Probably for the best.

For a moment he thought he was wrong, because the stars came out. Only they were the wrong color. They were pink. And then, oh God, they began to fall down, leaving long pink trails behind them.

Next came fire. A roaring furnace, as if someone had opened a hidden trapdoor and loosed Hell itself on Chester’s Mill.

“It’s our treat,” he muttered. His pipe pressed against his arm, making a burn he would see and feel later. He lay twitching in the yellow grass with his eyes turned up to glabrous whites that reflected the lurid sunset. “Our Halloween treat. First the trick… then the treat.”

The fire was becoming a face, an orange version of the bloody ones he’d been looking at in the clouds just before the fit fell on him. It was the face of Jesus. Jesus was scowling at him.

And talking. Talking to him. Telling him that bringing the fire was his responsibility. His. The fire and the… the…

“The purity,” he muttered as he lay in the grass. “No… the purification. ”

Jesus didn’t look so mad now. And He was fading. Why? Because The Chef had understood. First came the pink stars; then came the purifying fire; then the trial would end.

The Chef stilled as the seizure passed into the first real sleep he’d had in weeks, perhaps months. When he woke up, it was full dark—every trace of red gone from the sky. He was chilled to the bone, but not damp.

Under the Dome, dew no longer fell.

12

While The Chef was observing the face of Christ in that evening’s infected sunset, Third Selectman Andrea Grinnell was sitting on her couch and trying to read. Her generator had quit—or had it ever run at all? She couldn’t remember. But she had a gadget called a Mighty Brite light that her sister Rose had tucked into her Christmas stocking last year. She’d never had occasion to use it until now, but it worked just fine. You clamped it to your book and turned it on. Easy-peasy. So light wasn’t a problem. The words, unfortunately, were. The words kept squirming around on the page, sometimes even changing places with each other, and Nora Roberts’s prose, ordinarily crystal clear, made absolutely no sense. Yet Andrea kept trying, because she could think of nothing else to do.

The house stank, even with the windows open. She was suffering diarrhea and the toilet would no longer flush. She was hungry but couldn’t eat. She had tried a sandwich around five PM—just an inoffensive cheese sandwich—and had thrown it up in the kitchen wastebasket minutes after it was down. A shame, because eating that sandwich had been hard work. She was sweating heavily—had already changed her clothes once, probably should change them again, if she could manage to do it—and her feet kept jittering and jerking.

They don’t call it kicking the habit for nothing, she thought. And I’ll never make the emergency meeting tonight, if Jim still means to have one.

Considering how her last conversation with Big Jim and Andy Sanders had gone, maybe that was good; if she showed up, they’d just bully her some more. Make her do things she didn’t want to do. Best she stay away until she was clear of this… this…

“This shit, ” she said, and brushed her damp hair out of her eyes. “This fucking shit in my system.”

Once she was herself again, she would stand up to Jim Rennie. It was long overdue. She would do it in spite of her poor aching back, which was such a misery without her OxyContin (but not the white-hot agony she had expected—that was a welcome surprise). Rusty wanted her to take methadone. Methadone, for God’s sake! Heroin under an alias!

If you’re thinking about going cold turkey, don’t, he had told her. You’re apt to have seizures.

But he’d said it could take ten days his way, and she didn’t think she could wait that long. Not with this awful Dome over the town. Best to get it over with. Having come to this conclusion, she had flushed all of her pills—not just the methadone but a few last Oxy-Contin pills she’d found in the back of her nightstand drawer—down the toilet. That had been just two flushes before the toilet gave up the ghost, and now she sat here shivering and trying to convince herself she’d done the right thing.

It was the only thing, she thought. That kind of takes the right and wrong out of it.

She tried to turn the page of her book and her stupid hand struck the Mighty Brite gadget. It went tumbling to the floor. The spot of brilliance it threw went up to the ceiling. Andrea looked at it and was suddenly rising out of herself. And fast. It was like riding an invisible express elevator. She had just a moment to look down and see her body still on the couch, twitching helplessly. Foamy drool was slipping down her chin from her mouth. She saw the wetness spreading around the crotch of her jeans and thought, Yep—I’ll have to change again, all right. If I live through this, that is.

Then she passed through the ceiling, through the bedroom above it, through the attic with its dark stacked boxes and retired lamps, and from there out into the night. The Milky Way sprawled above her, but it was wrong. The Milky Way had turned pink.

And then began to fall.

Somewhere—far, far below her—Andrea heard the body she had left behind. It was screaming.

13

Barbie thought he and Julia would discuss what had happened to Piper Libby on their ride out of town, but they were mostly silent, lost in their own thoughts. Neither of them said they were relieved when the unnatural red sunset finally began to fade, but both of them were.

Julia tried the radio once, found nothing but WCIK booming out “All Prayed Up,” and snapped it off again.

Barbie spoke only once, this just after they turned off Route 119 and began to drive west along the narrower blacktop of the Motton Road, where woods bulked up close on either side. “Did I do the right thing?”

In Julia’s opinion he had done a great many right things during the confrontation in the Chief’s office—including the successful treatment of two patients with dislocations—but she knew what he was talking about.

“Yes. It was the exquisitely wrong time to try asserting command.”

He agreed, but felt tired and dispirited and not equal to the job he was beginning to see before him. “I’m sure the enemies of Hitler said pretty much the same thing. They said it in nineteen thirty-four, and they were right. In thirty-six, and they were right. Also in thirty-eight. ‘The wrong time to challenge him,’ they said. And when they realized the right time had finally come, they were protesting in Auschwitz or Buchenwald.”

“This is not the same,” she said.

“You think not?”

She made no reply to this, but saw his point. Hitler had been a paperhanger, or so the story went; Jim Rennie was a used car dealer. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Up ahead, fingers of brilliance shone through the trees. They printed an intaglio of shadows on the patched tar of Motton Road.

There were a number of military trucks parked on the other side of the Dome—it was Harlow over there at this edge of town—and thirty or forty soldiers moved hither and yon with a purpose. All had gas masks hooked to their belts. A silver tanker-truck bearing the legend EXTREME DANGER KEEP BACK had been backed up until it almost touched a door-size shape that had been spray-painted on the Dome’s surface. A plastic hose was clamped to a valve on the back of tanker. Two men were handling the hose, which ended in a wand no bigger than the barrel of a Bic pen. These men were wearing shiny all-over suits and helmets. There were air tanks on their backs.

On the Chester’s Mill side, there was only one spectator. Lissa Jamieson, the town librarian, stood beside an old-fashioned ladies’ Schwinn with a milk-box carrier on the rear fender. On the back of the box was a sticker reading WHEN THE POWER OF LOVE IS STRONGER THAN THE LOVE OF POWER, THE WORLD WILL KNOW PEACE—JIMI HENDRIX.

“What are you doing here, Lissa?” Julia asked, getting out of her car. She held up a hand to shield her eyes from the bright lights.

Lissa was nervously fiddling with the ankh she wore around her neck on a silver chain. She looked from Julia to Barbie, then back to Julia again. “I go for a ride on my bike when I’m upset or worried. Sometimes I ride until midnight. It soothes my pneuma. I saw the lights and came to the lights.” She said this in an incantatory way, and let go of her ankh long enough to trace some kind of complicated symbol in the air. “What are you doing out here?”

“Came to watch an experiment,” Barbie said. “If it works, you can be the first one to leave Chester’s Mill.”

Lissa smiled. It looked a little forced, but Barbie liked her for the effort. “If I did that, I’d miss the Tuesday night special at Sweetbriar. Isn’t it usually meatloaf?”

“Meatloaf’s the plan,” he agreed, not adding that if the Dome was still in place the following Tuesday, the spécialité de la maison was apt to be zucchini quiche.

“They won’t talk,” Lissa said. “I tried.”

A squat fireplug of a man came out from behind the tanker and into the light. He was dressed in khakis, a poplin jacket, and a hat with the logo of the Maine Black Bears on it. The first thing to strike Barbie was that James O. Cox had put on weight. The second was his heavy jacket, zipped to what was now dangerously close to a double chin. Nobody else—Barbie, Julia, or Lissa—was wearing a jacket. There was no need of them on their side of the Dome.

Cox saluted. Barbie gave it back, and it actually felt pretty good to snap one off.

“Hello, Barbie,” Cox said. “How’s Ken?”

“Ken’s fine,” Barbie said. “And I continue to be the bitch that gets all the good shit.”

“Not this time, Colonel,” Cox said. “This time it appears you got fucked at the drive-thru.”

14

“Who’s he?” Lissa whispered. She was still working at the ankh. Julia thought she’d snap the chain soon, if she kept at it. “And what are they doing over there?”

“Trying to get us out,” Julia said. “And after the rather spectacular failure earlier in the day, I’d have to say they’re wise to do it on the quiet.” She started forward. “Hello, Colonel Cox—I’m your favorite newspaper editor. Good evening.”

Cox’s smile was—to his credit, she thought—only slightly sour. “Ms. Shumway. You’re even prettier than I imagined.”

“I’ll say one thing for you, you’re handy with the bullsh—”

Barbie intercepted her three yards from where Cox was standing and took her by the arms.

“What?” she asked.

“The camera.” She had almost forgotten she had it around her neck until he pointed to it. “Is it digital?”

“Sure, Pete Freeman’s extra.” She started to ask why, then got it. “You think the Dome will fry it.”

“That’d be the best-case scenario,” Barbie said. “Remember what happened to Chief Perkins’s pacemaker.”

“Shit,” she said. “Shit! Maybe I’ve got my old Kodak in the trunk.”

Lissa and Cox were looking at each other with what Barbie thought was equal fascination. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Is there going to be another bang?”

Cox hesitated. Barbie said, “Might as well come clean, Colonel. If you don’t tell her, I will.”

Cox sighed. “You insist on total transparency, don’t you?”

“Why not? If this thing works, the people of Chester’s Mill will be singing your praises. The only reason you’re playing em close is force of habit.”

“No. It’s what my superiors have ordered.”

“They’re in Washington,” Barbie said. “And the press is in Castle Rock, most of em probably watching Girls Gone Wild on pay-per-view. Out here it’s just us chickens.”

Cox sighed and pointed to the spray-painted door shape. “That’s where the men in the protective suits will apply our experimental compound. If we’re lucky, the acid will eat through and we’ll then be able to knock that piece of the Dome out the way you can knock a piece of glass out of a window after you’ve used a glass-cutter.”

“And if we’re unlucky?” Barbie asked. “If the Dome decomposes, giving off some poison gas that kills us all? Is that what the gas masks are for?”

“Actually,” Cox said, “the scientists feel it more likely that the acid might start a chemical reaction that would cause the Dome to catch fire.” He saw Lissa’s stricken expression and added, “They consider both possibilities very remote.”

“They can, ” Lissa said, twirling her ankh. “They’re not the ones who’d get gassed or roasted.”

Cox said, “I understand your concern, ma’am—”

“Melissa,” Barbie corrected. It suddenly seemed important to him that Cox understand these were people under the Dome, not just a few thousand anonymous taxpayers. “Melissa Jamieson. Lissa to her friends. She’s the town librarian. She’s also the middle-school guidance counselor, and teaches yoga classes, I believe.”

“I had to give that up,” Lissa said with a fretful smile. “Too many other things to do.”

“Very nice to make your acquaintance, Ms. Jamieson,” Cox said. “Look—this is a chance worth taking.”

“If we felt differently, could we stop you?” she asked.

This Cox did not answer directly. “There’s no sign that this thing, whatever it is, is weakening or biodegrading. Unless we’re able to breach it, we believe you’re in for the long haul.”

“Do you have any idea what caused it? Any at all?”

“None,” Cox said, but his eyes shifted in a way Rusty Everett would have recognized from his conversation with Big Jim.

Barbie thought, Why are you lying? Just that knee-jerk reaction again? Civilians are like mushrooms, keep them in the dark and feed them shit? Probably that was all it was. But it made him nervous.

“It’s strong?” Lissa asked. “Your acid—is it strong?”

“The most corrosive in existence, as far as we know,” Cox replied, and Lissa took two large steps back.

Cox turned to the men in the space-suits. “Are you boys about ready?”

They gave him a pair of gloved thumbs-up. Behind them, all activity had stopped. The soldiers stood watching, with their hands on their gas masks.

“Here we go,” Cox said. “Barbie, I suggest you escort those two beautiful ladies at least fifty yards back from—”

“Look at the stars, ” Julia said. Her voice was soft, awestruck. Her head was tilted upward, and in her wondering face Barbie saw the child she had been thirty years ago.

He looked up and saw the Big Dipper, the Great Bear, Orion. All where they belonged… except they had smeared out of clear focus and turned pink. The Milky Way had turned into a bubblegum spill across the greater dome of the night.

“Cox,” he said. “Do you see that?”

Cox looked up.

“See what? The stars?”

“What do they look like to you?”

“Well… very bright, of course—no light pollution to speak of in these parts—” Then a thought occurred to him, and he snapped his fingers. “What are you seeing? Have they changed color?”

“They’re beautiful,” Lissa said. Her eyes were wide and shining. “But scary, too.”

“They’re pink,” Julia said. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” Cox said, but he sounded oddly reluctant.

“What?” Barbie asked. “Spill it.” And added, without thinking: “Sir.”

“We got the meteorological report at nineteen hundred hours,” Cox said. “Special emphasis on winds. Just in case… well, just in case. Leave it at that. The jet stream’s currently coming west as far as Nebraska or Kansas, dipping south, then coming up the Eastern Seaboard. Pretty common pattern for late October.”

“What’s that got to do with the stars?”

“As it comes north, the jet passes over a lot of cities and manufacturing towns. What it picks up over those locations is collecting on the Dome instead of being whisked north to Canada and the Arctic. There’s enough of it now to have created a kind of optical filter. I’m sure it’s not dangerous….”

“Not yet, ” Julia said. “What about in a week, or a month? Are you going to hose down our airspace at thirty thousand feet when it starts getting dark in here?”

Before Cox could reply, Lissa Jamieson screamed and pointed into the sky. Then she covered her face.

The pink stars were falling, leaving bright contrails behind them.

15

“More dope,” Piper said dreamily as Rusty listened to her heartbeat.

Rusty patted Piper’s right hand—the left one was badly scraped.

“No more dope,” he said. “You’re officially stoned.”

“Jesus wants me to have more dope,” she said in that same dreamy voice. “I want to get as high as a mockingbird pie.”

“I believe that’s ‘elephant’s eye,’ but I’ll take it under consideration.”

She sat up. Rusty tried to push her back down, but he dared push on only her right shoulder, and that wasn’t enough. “Will I be able to get out of here tomorrow? I have to see Chief Randolph. Those boys raped Sammy Bushey.”

“And could have killed you,” he said. “Dislocation or not, you fell extremely lucky. Let me worry about Sammy.”

“Those cops are dangerous.” She put her right hand on his wrist. “They can’t go on being police. They’ll hurt someone else.” She licked her lips. “My mouth is so dry.”

“I can fix that, but you’ll have to lie down.”

“Did you take sperm samples from Sammy? Can you match them to the boys? If you can, I’ll hound Peter Randolph until he makes them give DNA samples. I’ll hound him day and night.”

“We’re not equipped for DNA matching,” Rusty said. Also, there are no sperm samples. Because Gina Buffalino washed her up, at Sammy’s own request. “I’ll get you something to drink. All the fridges except for the ones in the lab are turned off to save juice, but there’s an Igloo cooler at the nurses’ station.”

“Juice,” she said, closing her eyes. “Yes, juice would be good. Orange or apple. Not V8. Too salty.”

“Apple,” he said. “You’re on clear liquids tonight.”

Piper whispered: “I miss my dog,” then turned her head away. Rusty thought she’d probably be out by the time he got back with her juice box.

Halfway down the corridor, Twitch rounded the corner from the nurses’ station at a dead run. His eyes were wide and wild. “Come outside, Rusty.”

“As soon as I get Reverend Libby a—”

“No, now. You have to see this.”

Rusty hurried back to room 29 and peeped in. Piper was snoring in a most unladylike way—not unusual, considering her swelled nose.

He followed Twitch down the corridor, almost running to keep up with the other man’s long strides. “What is it?” Meaning, What now?

“I can’t explain, and you probably wouldn’t believe me if I did. You have to see it for yourself.” He banged out through the lobby door.

Standing in the driveway beyond the protective canopy where drop-off patients arrived were Ginny Tomlinson, Gina Buffalino, and Harriet Bigelow, a friend whom Gina had recruited to help out at the hospital. The three of them had their arms around each other, as if for comfort, and were staring up into the sky.

It was filled with blazing pink stars, and many appeared to be falling, leaving long, almost fluorescent trails behind them. A shudder worked up Rusty’s back.

Judy foresaw this, he thought. “The pink stars are falling in lines.” And they were. They were.

It was as if heaven itself was coming down around their ears.

16

Alice and Aidan Appleton were asleep when the pink stars began falling, but Thurston Marshall and Carolyn Sturges weren’t. They stood in the backyard of the Dumagen house and watched them come down in brilliant pink lines. Some of the lines crisscrossed each other, and when this happened, pink runes seemed to stand out in the sky before fading.

“Is it the end of the world?” Carolyn asked.

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s a meteor swarm. They’re most commonly observed during autumn here in New England. I think it’s too late in the year for the Perseids, so this one’s probably a wandering shower—maybe dust and chunks of rock from an asteroid that broke up a trillion years ago. Think of that, Caro!”

She didn’t want to. “Are meteor showers always pink?”

“No,” he said. “I think it probably looks white on the outside of the Dome, but we’re seeing it through a film of dust and particulate matter. Pollution, in other words. It’s changed the color.”

She thought about that as they watched the silent pink tantrum in the sky. “Thurse, the little boy… Aidan… when he had that fit or whatever it was, he said…”

“I remember what he said. ‘The pink stars are falling, they make lines behind them.’”

“How could he know that?”

Thurston only shook his head.

Carolyn hugged him tighter. At times like this (although there had never been a time exactly like this in her life), she was glad Thurston was old enough to be her father. Right now she wished he was her father.

“How could he know this was coming? How could he know?”

17

Aidan had said something else during his moment of prophecy: Everyone is watching. And by nine thirty on that Monday night, when the meteor shower was at its height, that was true.

The news spreads by cell phone and e-mail, but mostly in the old way: mouth to ear. By quarter of ten, Main Street is full of people watching the silent fireworks display. Most are equally silent. A few are crying. Leo Lamoine, a faithful member of the late Reverend Coggins’s Holy Redeemer congregation, shouts it’s the Apocalypse, that he sees the Four Horsemen in the sky, that the Rapture will begin soon, et cetera, et cetera. Sloppy Sam Verdreaux—back on the street again since three that afternoon, sober and grumpy—tells Leo that if Leo doesn’t shut up about the Acrockashit, he’ll be seeing his own stars. Rupe Libby of the CMPD, hand on the butt of his gun, tells them both to shut the hell up and stop scaring people. As if they are not scared already. Willow and Tommy Anderson are in the parking lot of Dipper’s, Willow crying with her head on Tommy’s shoulder. Rose Twitchell stands beside Anson Wheeler outside Sweetbriar Rose; both are still wearing their aprons and they also have their arms around each other. Norrie Calvert and Benny Drake are with their parents, and when Norrie’s hand steals into Benny’s, he takes it with a thrill the falling pink stars cannot match. Jack Cale, the current manager of Food City, is in the supermarket parking lot. Jack called Ernie Calvert, the previous manager, late that afternoon and asked if Ernie would help him do a complete inventory of supplies on hand. They were well into this job, hoping to be done by midnight, when the furor on Main Street broke out. Now they stand side by side, watching the pink stars fall. Stewart and Fernald Bowie are outside their funeral parlor, gazing up. Henry Morrison and Jackie Wettington stand across from the funeral parlor with Chaz Bender, who teaches history up to the high school. “It’s just a meteor shower seen through a haze of pollution,” Chaz tells Jackie and Henry… but he still sounds awed.

The fact that accumulating particulate matter has actually changed the color of the stars brings the situation home to people in a new way, and gradually the weeping becomes more widespread. It is a soft sound, almost like rain.

Big Jim is less interested in a bunch of meaningless lights in the sky than he is in how people will interpret those lights. Tonight, he expects they’ll just go home. Tomorrow, though, things may be different. And the fear he sees on most faces may not be such a bad thing. Fearful people need strong leaders, and if there’s one thing Big Jim Rennie knows he can provide, it’s strong leadership.

He’s outside the police station doors with Chief Randolph and Andy Sanders. Standing below them, crowded together, are his problem children: Thibodeau, Searles, the Roux chippie, and Junior’s friend, Frank. Big Jim descends the steps that Libby fell down earlier (she could have done us all a favor if she’d broken her neck, he thinks) and taps Frankie on the shoulder. “Enjoying the show, Frankie?”

The boy’s big scared eyes make him look twelve instead of twenty-two or whatever he is. “What is it, Mr. Rennie? Do you know?”

“Meteor shower. Just God saying hello to His people.”

Frank DeLesseps relaxes a little.

“We’re going back inside,” Big Jim says, jerking his thumb at Randolph and Andy, who are still watching the sky. “We’ll talk for a while, then I’ll call you four in. I want you all to tell the same cotton-picking story when I do. Have you got that?”

“Yes, Mr. Rennie,” Frankie says.

Mel Searles looks at Big Jim, his eyes like saucers and his mouth hanging loose. Big Jim thinks the boy looks like his IQ might reach all the way up to seventy. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, either. “It looks like the end of the world, Mr. Rennie,” he says.

“Nonsense. Are you Saved, son?”

“I guess so,” Mel says.

“Then you have nothing to worry about.” Big Jim surveys them one by one, ending with Carter Thibodeau. “And the way to salvation tonight, young men, is all of you telling the same story.”

Not everyone sees the pink stars. Like the Appleton kids, Rusty Everett’s Little Js are fast asleep. So is Piper. So is Andrea Grinnell. So is The Chef, sprawled on the dead grass beside what might be America’s biggest methamphetamine lab. Ditto Brenda Perkins, who cried herself to sleep on her couch with the VADER printout scattered on the coffee table before her.

The dead also do not see, unless they look from a brighter place than this darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night. Myra Evans, Duke Perkins, Chuck Thompson, and Claudette Sanders are tucked away in the Bowie Funeral Home; Dr. Haskell, Mr. Carty, and Rory Dinsmore are in the morgue of Catherine Russell Hospital; Lester Coggins, Dodee Sanders, and Angie McCain are still hanging out in the McCain pantry. So is Junior. He is between Dodee and Angie, holding their hands. His head aches, but only a little. He thinks he might sleep the night here.

On Motton Road, in Eastchester (not far from the place where the attempt to breach the Dome with an experimental acid compound is even then going on beneath the strange pink sky), Jack Evans, husband of the late Myra, is standing in his backyard with a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and his home protection weapon of choice, a Ruger SR9, in the other. He drinks and watches the pink stars fall. He knows what they are, and he wishes on every one, and he wishes for death, because without Myra, the bottom has dropped out of his life. He might be able to live without her, and he might be able to live like a rat in a glass cage, but he cannot manage both. When the falling meteors become more intermittent—this is around quarter after ten, about forty-five minutes after the shower began—he swallows the last of the Jack, casts the bottle onto the grass, and blows his brains out. He is The Mill’s first official suicide.

He will not be the last.

18

Barbie, Julia, and Lissa Jamieson watched silently as the two spacesuited soldiers removed the thin nozzle from the end of the plastic hose. They put it into an opaque plastic bag with a ziplock top, then put the bag into a metal case stenciled with the words HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. They locked it with separate keys, then took off their helmets. They looked tired, hot, and out of spirits.

Two older men—too old to be soldiers—wheeled a complicated-looking piece of equipment away from the site of the acid experiment, which had been performed three times. Barbie guessed the older guys, possibly scientists from NSA, had been doing some sort of spectrographic analysis. Or trying to. The gas masks they had been wearing during the testing procedure were now pushed up on top of their heads like weird hats. Barbie could have asked Cox what the tests were supposed to show, and Cox might even have given him a straight answer, but Barbie was also out of spirits.

Overhead, the last few pink meteoroids were zipping down the sky.

Lissa pointed back toward Eastchester. “I heard something that sounded like a gunshot. Did you?”

“Probably a car backfiring or some kid shooting off a bottle rocket,” Julia said. She was also tired and drawn. Once, when it became clear that the experiment—the acid test, so to speak—wasn’t going to work, Barbie had caught her wiping her eyes. It hadn’t stopped her from taking pictures, with her Kodak, though.

Cox walked toward them, his shadow thrown in two different directions by the lights that had been set up. He gestured to the place where the door-shape had been sprayed on the Dome. “I’d guess this little adventure cost the American taxpayer about three-quarters of a million dollars, and that’s not counting the R&D expenses that went into developing the acid compound. Which ate the paint we sprayed on there and did absolutely fuck-all else.”

“Language, Colonel,” Julia said, with a ghost of her old smile.

“Thank you, Madam Editor,” Cox said sourly.

“Did you really think this would work?” Barbie asked.

“No, but I didn’t think I’d ever live to see a man on Mars, either, but the Russians say they’re going to send a crew of four in 2020.”

“Oh, I get it,” Julia said. “The Martians got wind of it, and they’re pissed.”

“If so, they retaliated on the wrong country,” Cox said… and Barbie saw something in his eyes.

“How sure are you, Jim?” he asked softly.

“I beg pardon?”

“That the Dome was put in place by extraterrestrials.”

Julia took two steps forward. Her face was pale, her eyes blazing. “Tell us what you know, goddammit!”

Cox raised his hand. “Stop. We don’t know anything. There is a theory, however. Yes. Marty, come over here.”

One of the older gentlemen who had been running tests approached the Dome. He was holding his gas mask by the strap.

“Your analysis?” Cox asked, and when he saw the older gentle-man’s hesitation: “Speak freely.”

“Well…” Marty shrugged. “Trace minerals. Soil and airborne pollutants. Otherwise, nothing. According to spectrographic analysis, that thing isn’t there.”

“What about the HY-908?” And, to Barbie and the women: “The acid.”

“It’s gone,” Marty said. “The thing that isn’t there ate it up.”

“Is that possible, according to what you know?”

“No. But the Dome isn’t possible, according to what we know.”

“And does that lead you to believe that the Dome may be the creation of some life-form with more advanced knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, whatever?” When Marty hesitated again, Cox repeated what he’d said earlier. “Speak freely.”

“It’s one possibility. It’s also possible that some earthly supervillain set it up. A real-world Lex Luthor. Or it could be the work of a renegade country, like North Korea.”

“Who hasn’t taken credit for it?” Barbie asked skeptically.

“I lean toward extraterrestrial,” Marty said. He knocked on the Dome without wincing; he’d already gotten his little shock from it. “So do most of the scientists working on this right now—if we can be said to be working when we’re not actually doing anything. It’s the Sherlock Rule: When you eliminate the impossible, the answer, no matter how improbable, is what remains.”

“Has anyone or anything landed in a flying saucer and demanded to be taken to our leader?” Julia asked.

“No,” Cox said.

“Would you know if something had?” Barbie asked, and thought: Are we having this discussion? Or am I dreaming it?

“Not necessarily,” Cox said, after a brief hesitation.

“It could still be meteorological,” Marty said. “Hell, even biological—a living thing. There’s a school of thought that this thing is actually some kind of E. coli hybrid.”

“Colonel Cox,” Julia said quietly, “are we something’s experiment? Because that’s what I feel like.”

Lissa Jamieson, meanwhile, was looking back toward the nice houses of the Eastchester burblet. Most of the lights there were out, either because the people who lived there had no generators or were saving them.

“That was a gunshot,” she said. “I’m sure that was a gunshot.”