HIGHWAYS AND BYWAYS

There was a weekly newspaper in Chester’s Mill called theDemocrat. Which was misinformation, since ownership and management—both hats worn by the formidable Julia Shumway—was Republican to the core. The masthead looked like this:

THE CHESTER’S MILLDEMOCRAT Est. 1890 Serving “The Little Town That Looks Like A Boot!”

But the motto was misinformation, too. Chester’s Mill didn’t look like a boot; it looked like a kid’s athletic sock so filthy it was able to stand up on its own. Although touched by the much larger and more prosperous Castle Rock to the southwest (the heel of the sock), The Mill was actually surrounded by four towns larger in area but smaller in population: Motton, to the south and southeast; Harlow to the east and northeast; the unincorporated TR-90 to the north; and Tarker’s Mills to the west. Chester’s and Tarker’s were sometimes known as the Twin Mills, and between them—in the days when central and western Maine textile mills were running full bore—had turned Prestile Stream into a polluted and fishless sump that changed color almost daily and according to location. In those days you could start out by canoe in Tarker’s running on green water, and be on bright yellow by the time you crossed out of Chester’s Mill and into Motton. Plus, if your canoe was made of wood, the paint might be gone below the waterline.

But the last of those profitable pollution factories had closed in 1979. The weird colors had left the Prestile and the fish had returned, although whether or not they were fit for human consumption remained a matter of debate. (The Democrat voted “Aye!”)

The town’s population was seasonal. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, it was close to fifteen thousand. The rest of the year it was just a tad over or under two, depending on the balance of births and deaths at Catherine Russell, which was considered to be the best hospital north of Lewiston.

If you asked the summer people how many roads led in and out of The Mill, most would say there were two: Route 117, which led to Norway–South Paris, and Route 119, which went through downtown Castle Rock on its way to Lewiston.

Residents of ten years or so could have named at least eight more, all twolane blacktop, from the Black Ridge and Deep Cut Roads that went into Harlow, to the Pretty Valley Road (yes, just as pretty as its name) that wound north into TR-90.

Residents of thirty years or more, if given time to mull it over (perhaps in the back room of Brownie’s Store, where there was still a woodstove), could have named another dozen, with names both sacred (God Creek Road) and profane (Little Bitch Road, noted on local survey maps with nothing but a number).

The oldest resident of Chester’s Mill on what came to be known as Dome Day was Clayton Brassey. He was also the oldest resident of Castle County, and thus holder of the Boston Post Cane. Unfortunately, he no longer knew what a Boston Post Cane was, or even precisely who he was. He sometimes mistook his great-great-granddaughter Nell for his wife, who was forty years dead, and the Democrat had stopped doing its yearly “oldest resident” interview with him three years previous. (On the last occasion, when asked for the secret of his longevity, Clayton had responded, “Where’s my Christing dinner?”) Senility had begun to creep up shortly after his hundredth birthday; on this October twenty-first, he was a hundred and five. He had once been a fine finish carpenter specializing in dressers, banisters, and moldings. His specialties in these latter days included eating Jell-O pudding without getting it up his nose and occasionally making it to the toilet before releasing half a dozen blood-streaked pebbles into the commode.

But in his prime—around the age of eighty-five, say—he could have named almost all the roads leading in and out of Chester’s Mill, and the total would have been thirty-four. Most were dirt, many were forgotten, and almost all of the forgotten ones wound through deep tangles of second-growth forest owned by Diamond Match, Continental Paper Company, and American Timber.

And shortly before noon on Dome Day, every one of them snapped closed.

On most of these roads, there was nothing so spectacular as the explosion of the Seneca V and the ensuing pulp-truck disaster, but there was trouble. Of course there was. If the equivalent of an invisible stone wall suddenly goes up around an entire town, there is bound to be trouble.

At the exact same moment the woodchuck fell in two pieces, a scarecrow did the same in Eddie Chalmers’s pumpkin field, not far from Pretty Valley Road. The scarecrow stood directly on the town line dividing The Mill from TR-90. Its divided stance had always amused Eddie, who called his bird-frightener the Scarecrow Without A Country—Mr. SWAC for short. Half of Mr. SWAC fell in The Mill; the other half fell “on the TR,” as the locals would have put it.

Seconds later, a flight of crows bound for Eddie’s pumpkins (the crows had never been afraid of Mr. SWAC) struck something where nothing had ever been before. Most broke their necks and fell in black clumps on Pretty Valley Road and the fields on both sides. Birds everywhere, on both sides of the Dome, crashed and fell dead; their bodies would be one of the ways the new barrier was eventually delineated.

On God Creek Road, Bob Roux had been digging potatoes. He came in for lunch (more commonly known as “dinnah” in those parts), sitting astride his old Deere tractor and listening to his brand new iPod, a gift from his wife on what would prove to be his final birthday. His house was only half a mile from the field he’d been digging, but unfortunately for him, the field was in Motton and the house was in Chester’s Mill. He struck the barrier at fifteen miles an hour, while listening to James Blunt sing “You’re Beautiful.” He had the loosest of grips on the tractor’s steering wheel, because he could see the road all the way to his house and there was nothing on it. So when his tractor came to a smash-halt, the potato-digger rising up behind and then crashing back down, Bob was flung forward over the engine block and directly into the Dome. His iPod exploded in the wide front pocket of his bib overalls, but he never felt it. He broke his neck and fractured his skull on the nothing he collided with and died in the dirt shortly thereafter, by one tall wheel of his tractor, which was still idling. Nothing, you know, runs like a Deere.

At no point did the Motton Road actually run through Motton; it ran just inside the Chester’s Mill town line. Here were new residential homes, in an area that had been called Eastchester since 1975 or so. The owners were thirty-and fortysomethings who commuted to Lewiston-Auburn, where they worked for good wages, mostly in white-collar jobs. All of these homes were in The Mill, but many of their backyards were in Motton. This was the case with Jack and Myra Evans’s home at 379 Motton Road. Myra had a vegetable garden behind their house, and although most of the goodies had been harvested, there were still a few fat Blue Hubbard squashes beyond the remaining (and badly rotted) pumpkins. She was reaching for one of these when the Dome came down, and although her knees were in Chester’s Mill, she happened to be reaching for a Blue Hubbard that was growing a foot or so across the Motton line.

She didn’t cry out, because there was no pain—not at first. It was too quick and sharp and clean for that.

Jack Evans was in the kitchen, whipping eggs for a noontime frittata. LCD Soundsystem was playing —“North American Scum”—and Jack was singing along when a small voice spoke his name from behind him. He didn’t at first recognize the voice as belonging to his wife of fourteen years; it sounded like the voice of a child. But when he turned he saw it was indeed Myra. She was standing inside the doorway, holding her right arm across her middle. She had tracked mud onto the floor, which was very unlike her. Usually she took her garden shoes off on the stoop. Her left hand, clad in a filthy gardening glove, was cradling her right hand, and red stuff was running through the muddy fingers. At first he thought Cranberry juice, but only for a second. It was blood. Jack dropped the bowl he’d been holding. It shattered on the floor.

Myra said his name again in that same tiny, trembling childvoice.

“What happened? Myra, what happened to you?”

“I had an accident,” she said, and showed him her right hand. Only there was no muddy right gardening glove to match the left one, and no right hand. Only a spouting stump. She gave him a weak smile and said “Whoops.” Her eyes rolled up to whites. The crotch of her gardening jeans darkened as her urine let go. Then her knees also let go and she went down. The blood gushing from her raw wrist—an anatomy lesson cutaway—mixed with the eggy batter splattered across the floor.

When Jack dropped to his knees beside her, a shard from the bowl jabbed deep into his knee. He hardly noticed, although he would limp on that leg for the rest of his life. He seized her arm and squeezed. The terrible bloodgush from her wrist slowed but didn’t stop. He tore his belt free of its loops and noosed it around her lower forearm. That did the job, but he couldn’t notch the belt tight; the loop was far beyond

the buckle.

“Christ,” he told the empty kitchen. “Christ.”

It was darker than it had been, he realized. The power had gone out. He could hear the computer in the study chiming its distress call. LCD Soundsystem was okay, because the little boombox on the counter was battery-powered. Not that Jack cared any longer; he’d lost his taste for techno.

So much blood. So much.

Questions about how she’d lost her hand left his mind. He had more immediate concerns. He couldn’t let go of the belt-tourniquet to get to the phone; she’d start to bleed again, and she might already be close to bleeding out. She would have to go with him. He tried pulling her by her shirt, but first it yanked out of her pants and then the collar started to choke her—he heard her breathing turn harsh. So he wrapped a hand in her long brown hair and hauled her to the phone caveman style.

It was a cell, and it worked. He dialed 911 and 911 was busy.

“It can’t be!” he shouted to the empty kitchen where the lights were now out (although from the boombox, the band played on). “911 cannot be fucking busy !”

He punched redial.

Busy.

He sat in the kitchen with his back propped up against the counter, holding the tourniquet as tightly as he could, staring at the blood and the batter on the floor, periodically hitting redial on the phone, always getting the same stupid dah-dah-dah. Something blew up not too far distant, but he barely heard it over the music, which was really cranked (and he never heard the Seneca explosion at all). He wanted to turn the music off, but in order to reach the boombox he would have to lift Myra. Lift her or let go of the belt for two or three seconds. He didn’t want to do either one. So he sat there and “North American Scum” gave way to “Someone Great” and “Someone Great” gave way to “All My Friends,” and after a few more songs, finally the CD, which was called Sound of Silver, ended. When it did, when there was silence except for police sirens in the distance and the endlessly chiming computer closer by, Jack realized that his wife was no longer breathing.

But I was going to make lunch, he thought. A nice lunch, one you wouldn’t be ashamed of inviting Martha Stewart to.

Sitting against the counter, still holding the belt (opening his fingers again would prove exquisitely painful), the lower right leg of his own pants darkening with blood from his lacerated knee, Jack Evans cradled his wife’s head against his chest and began to weep.

Not too far away, on an abandoned woods road not even old Clay Brassey would have remembered, a deer was foraging tender shoots at the edge of Prestile Marsh. Her neck happened to be stretched across the Motton town line, and when the Dome dropped, her head tumbled off. It was severed so neatly that the deed might have been done with a guillotine blade.

We have toured the sock-shape that is Chester’s Mill and arrived back at Route 119. And, thanks to the magic of narration, not an instant has passed since the sixtyish fellow from the Toyota slammed face-first into something invisible but very hard and broke his nose. He’s sitting up and staring at Dale Barbara in utter bewilderment. A seagull, probably on its daily commute from the tasty buffet at the Motton town dump to the only slightly less tasty one at the Chester’s Mill landfill, drops like a stone and thumps down not three feet from the sixtyish fellow’s Sea Dogs baseball cap, which he picks up, brushes off, and puts back on.

Both men look up at where the bird came from and see one more incomprehensible thing in a day that will turn out to be full of them.

Barbie’s first thought was that he was looking at an afterimage from the exploding plane—the way you sometimes see a big blue floating dot after someone triggers a flash camera close to your face. Only this wasn’t a dot, it wasn’t blue, and instead of floating along when he looked in a different direction—in this case, at his new acquaintance—the smutch hanging in the air stayed exactly where it was.

Sea Dogs was looking up and rubbing his eyes. He seemed to have forgotten about his broken nose, swelling lips, and bleeding forehead. He got to his feet, almost losing his balance because he was craning his neck so severely.

“What’s that?” he said. “What the hell is that, mister?”

A big black smear—candleflame-shaped, if you really used your imagination—discolored the blue sky.

“Is it … a cloud?” Sea Dogs asked. His doubtful tone suggested he already knew it wasn’t.

Barbie said, “I think …” He really didn’t want to hear himself say this. “I think it’s where the plane hit.”

“Say what ?” Sea Dogs asked, but before Barbie could reply, a good-sized grackle swooped fifty feet overhead. It struck nothing—nothing they could see, at any rate—and dropped not far from the gull.

Sea Dogs said, “Did you see that?”

Barbie nodded, then pointed to the patch of burning hay to his left. It and the two or three patches on the right side of the road were sending up thick columns of black smoke to join the smoke rising from the pieces of the dismembered Seneca, but the fire wasn’t going far; there had been heavy rain the day before, and the hay was still damp. Lucky thing, or there would have been grassfires racing away in both directions.

“Do you see that ?” Barbie asked Sea Dogs.

“I’ll be dipped in shit,” Sea Dogs said after taking a good long look. The fire had burned a patch of ground about sixty feet square, moving forward until it was almost opposite the place where Barbie and Sea Dogs were facing one another. And there it spread—west to the edge of the highway, east into some small dairy farmer’s four acres of grazeland—not raggedly, not the way grassfires normally advance, with the fire a bit ahead in one place and falling a little behind somewhere else—but as if on a straightedge.

Another gull came flying toward them, this one bound for Motton rather than The Mill.

“Look out,” Sea Dogs said. “Ware that bird.”

“Maybe it’ll be okay,” Barbie said, looking up and shading his eyes. “Maybe whatever it is only stops them if they’re coming from the south.”

“Judging by yonder busted plane, I doubt that,” Sea Dogs said. He spoke in the musing tones of a man who is deeply perplexed.

The outbound gull struck the barrier and fell directly into the largest chunk of the burning plane.

“Stops em both ways,” Sea Dogs said. He spoke in the tone of a man who has gotten confirmation of a strongly held but previously unproved conviction. “It’s some kind of force field, like in a Star Trick movie.”

“Trek,” Barbie said.

“Huh?”

“Oh shit,” Barbie said. He was looking over Sea Dogs’s shoulder.

“Huh?” Sea Dogs looked over his own shoulder. “Blue fuck !”

A pulp-truck was coming. A big one, loaded well past the legal weight limit with huge logs. It was also rolling well above the legal limit. Barbie tried to calculate what the stopping-speed on such a behemoth might be and couldn’t even guess.

Sea Dogs sprinted for his Toyota, which he’d left parked askew on the highway’s broken white line. The guy behind the wheel of the pulper—maybe high on pills, maybe smoked up on meth, maybe just young, in a big hurry, and feeling immortal—saw him and laid on his horn. He wasn’t slowing.

“Fuck me sideways!” Sea Dogs cried as he threw himself behind the wheel. He keyed the engine and backed the Toyota out of the road with the driver’s door flapping. The little SUV thumped into the ditch with its square nose canted up to the sky. Sea Dogs was out the next moment. He stumbled, landed on one knee, and then took off running into the field.

Barbie, thinking of the plane and the birds—thinking of that weird black smutch that might have been the plane’s point of impact—also ran into the grazeland, at first sprinting through low, unenthusiastic flames and sending up puffs of black ash. He saw a man’s sneaker—it was too big to be a woman’s—with the man’s foot still in it.

Pilot, he thought. And then: I have to stop running around like this.

“YOU IDIOT, SLOW DOWN!” Sea Dogs cried at the pulp-truck in a thin, panicky voice, but it was too late for such instructions. Barbie, looking back over his shoulder (helpless not to), thought the pulp-wrangler might have tried to brake at the last minute. He probably saw the wreckage of the plane. In any case, it wasn’t enough. He struck the Motton side of the Dome at sixty or a little more, carrying a log-load of almost forty thousand pounds. The cab disintegrated as it stopped cold. The overloaded carrier, a prisoner of physics, continued forward. The fuel tanks were driven under the logs, shredding and sparking. When they exploded, the load was already airborne, flipping over where the cab—now a green metal accordion—had been. The logs sprayed forward and upward, struck the invisible barrier, and rebounded in all directions. Fire and black smoke boiled upward in a thick plume. There was a terrific thud that rolled across the day like a boulder. Then the logs were raining back down on the Motton side, landing on the road and the surrounding fields like enormous jackstraws. One struck the roof of Sea Dogs’s SUV and smashed it flat, spilling the windshield onto the hood in a spray of diamond crumbles. Another landed right in front of Sea Dogs himself.

Barbie stopped running and only stared.

Sea Dogs got to his feet, fell down, grasped the log that had almost smashed out his life, and got up again. He stood swaying and wild-eyed. Barbie started toward him and after twelve steps ran into something that felt like a brick wall. He staggered backward and felt warmth cascade from his nose and over his lips. He wiped away a palmload of blood, looked at it unbelievingly, and then smeared it on his shirt.

Now cars were coming from both directions—Motton and Chester’s Mill. Three running figures, as yet still small, were cutting across the grazeland from a farmhouse at the other end. Several of the cars were honking their horns, as if that would somehow solve all problems. The first car to arrive on the Motton side pulled over to the shoulder, well back from the burning truck. Two women got out and gawked at the column of smoke and fire, shading their eyes.

“Fuck,” Sea Dogs said. He spoke in a small, breathless voice. He approached Barbie through the field, cutting a prudent east-tending diagonal away from the blazing pyre. The trucker might have been overloaded and moving too fast, Barbie thought, but at least he was getting a Viking funeral. “Did you see where that one log landed? I was almost kilt. Squashed like a bug.”

“Do you have a cell phone?” Barbie had to raise his voice to be heard over the furiously burning pulper.

“In my truck,” Sea Dogs said. “I’ll try for it if you want.”

“No, wait,” Barbie said. He realized with sudden relief that all this could be a dream, the irrational kind where riding your bicycle underwater or talking of your sex life in some language you never studied seems normal.

The first person to arrive on his side of the barrier was a chubby guy driving an old GMC pickup. Barbie recognized him from Sweetbriar Rose: Ernie Calvert, the previous manager of Food City, now retired. Ernie was staring at the burning clutter on the road with wide eyes, but he had his cell phone in his hand and was ratchet-jawing into it. Barbie could hardly hear him over the roar of the burning pulp-truck, but he made out “Looks like a bad one” and figured Ernie was talking to the police. Or the fire department. If it was the FD, Barbie hoped it was the one in Castle Rock. There were two engines in the tidy little Chester’s Mill firebarn, but Barbie had an idea that if they showed up here, the most they’d be able to do was douse a grassfire that was going to putter out on its own before much longer. The burning pulp-truck was close, but Barbie didn’t think they’d be able to get to it.

It’s a dream, he told himself. If you keep telling yourself that, you’ll be able to operate.

The two women on the Motton side had been joined by half a dozen men, also shading their eyes. Cars were now parked on both shoulders. More people were getting out and joining the crowd. The same thing was happening on Barbie’s side. It was as if a couple of dueling flea markets, both full of juicy bargains, had opened up out here: one on the Motton side of the town line, one on the Chester’s Mill side.

The trio from the farm arrived—a farmer and his teenaged sons. The boys were running easily, the farmer redfaced and panting.

“Holy shit!” the older boy said, and his father whapped him backside of the head. The boy didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were bugging. The younger boy reached out his hand, and when the older boy took it, the younger boy started to cry.

“What happened here?” the farmer asked Barbie, pausing to whoop in a big deep breath between happened and here.

Barbie ignored him. He advanced slowly toward Sea Dogs with his right hand held out in a stop gesture. Without speaking, Sea Dogs did the same. As Barbie approached the place where he knew the barrier to be —he had only to look at that peculiar straight-edge of burnt ground—he slowed down. He had already whammed his face; he didn’t want to do it again.

Suddenly he was swept by horripilation. The goosebumps swept up from his ankles all the way to the nape of his neck, where the hairs stirred and tried to lift. His balls tingled like tuning forks, and for a moment there was a sour metallic taste in his mouth.

Five feet away from him—five feet and closing—Sea Dogs’s already wide eyes widened some more. “Did you feel that?”

“Yes,” Barbie said. “But it’s gone now. You?”

“Gone,” Sea Dogs agreed.

Their outstretched hands did not quite meet, and Barbie again thought of a pane of glass; putting your inside hand up against the hand of some outside friend, the fingers together but not touching.

He pulled his hand back. It was the one he’d used to wipe his bloody nose, and he saw the red shapes of his own fingers hanging on thin air. As he watched, the blood began to bead. Just as it would on glass.

“Holy God, what does it mean?” Sea Dogs whispered.

Barbie had no answer. Before he could say anything, Ernie Calvert tapped him on the back. “I called the cops,” he said. “They’re coming, but no one answers at the Fire Department—I got a recording telling me to call Castle Rock.”

“Okay, do that,” Barbie said. Then another bird dropped about twenty feet away, falling into the farmer’s grazeland and disappearing. Seeing it brought a new idea into Barbie’s mind, possibly sparked by the time he’d spent toting a gun on the other side of the world. “But first, I think you better call the Air National Guard, up in Bangor.”

Ernie gaped at him. “The Guard ?”

“They’re the only ones who can institute a no-fly zone over Chester’s Mill,” Barbie said. “And I think they better do it right away.”

LOTTA DEAD BIRDS

The Mill’s Chief of Police heard neither explosion, though he was outside, raking leaves on the lawn of his Morin Street home. The portable radio was sitting on the hood of his wife’s Honda, playing sacred music on WCIK (call letters standing for Christ Is King and known by the town’s younger denizens as Jesus Radio). Also, his hearing wasn’t what it once had been. At sixty-seven, was anybody’s?

But he heard the first siren when it cut through the day; his ears were attuned to that sound just as a mother’s are to the cries of her children. Howard Perkins even knew which car it was, and who was driving. Only Three and Four still had the old warblers, but Johnny Trent had taken Three over to Castle Rock with the FD, to that damned training exercise. A “controlled burn,” they called it, although what it really amounted to was grown men having fun. So it was car Four, one of their two remaining Dodges, and Henry Morrison would be driving.

He stopped raking and stood, head cocked. The siren started to fade, and he started raking again. Brenda came out on the stoop. Almost everyone in The Mill called him Duke—the nickname a holdover from his high school days, when he had never missed a John Wayne picture down at the Star—but Brenda had quit that soon after they were married in favor of the other nickname. The one he disliked.

“Howie, the power’s out. And there were bangs. ”

Howie. Always Howie. As in Here’s Howie and Howie’s tricks and Howie’s life treatin you. He tried to be a Christian about it—hell, he was a Christian about it—but sometimes he wondered if that nickname wasn’t at least partially responsible for the little gadget he now carried around in his chest.

“What?”

She rolled her eyes, marched to the radio on the hood of her car, and pushed the power button, cutting off the Norman Luboff Choir in the middle of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

“How many times have I told you not to stick this thing on the hood of my car? You’ll scratch it and the resale value will go down.”

“Sorry, Bren. What did you say?”

“The power’s out! And something boomed. That’s probably what Johnny Trent’s rolling on.”

“It’s Henry,” he said. “Johnny’s over in The Rock with the FD.”

“Well, whoever it is—”

Another siren started up, this one of the newer kind that Duke Perkins thought of as Tweety Birds. That would be Two, Jackie Wettington. Had to be Jackie, while Randolph sat minding the store, rocked back in his chair with his feet cocked up on his desk, reading the Democrat. Or sitting in the crapper. Peter Randolph was a fair cop, and he could be just as hard as he needed to be, but Duke didn’t like him. Partly because he was so clearly Jim Rennie’s man, partly because Randolph was sometimes harder than he needed to be, but mostly because he thought Randolph was lazy, and Duke Perkins could not abide a lazy policeman.

Brenda was looking at him with large eyes. She had been a policeman’s wife for forty-three years, and she knew that two booms, two sirens, and a power failure added up to nothing good. If the lawn got raked this weekend—or if Howie got to listen to his beloved Twin Mills Wildcats take on Castle Rock’s football team—she would be surprised.

“You better go on in,” she said. “Something got knocked down. I just hope no one’s dead.”

He took his cell phone off his belt. Goddam thing hung there like a leech from morning til night, but he had to admit it was handy. He didn’t dial it, just stood looking down at it, waiting for it to ring.

But then another Tweety Bird siren went off: car One. Randolph rolling after all. Which meant something very serious. Duke no longer thought the phone would ring and moved to put it back on his belt, but then it did. It was Stacey Moggin.

“Stacey?” He knew he didn’t have to bellow into the goddam thing, Brenda had told him so a hundred times, but he couldn’t seem to help it. “What are you doing at the station on Saturday m—”

“I’m not, I’m at home. Peter called me and said to tell you it’s out on 119, and it’s bad. He said … an airplane and a pulp-truck collided.” She sounded dubious. “I don’t see how that can be, but—”

A plane. Jesus. Five minutes ago, or maybe a little longer, while he’d been raking leaves and singing along with “How Great Thou Art”—

“Stacey, was it Chuck Thompson? I saw that new Piper of his flying over. Pretty low.”

“I don’t know, Chief, I’ve told you everything Peter told me.”

Brenda, no dummy, was already moving her car so he could back the forest-green Chief’s car down the driveway. She had set the portable radio beside his small pile of raked leaves.

“Okay, Stace. Power out on your side of town, too?”

“Yes, and the landlines. I’m on my cell. It’s probably bad, isn’t it?”

“I hope not. Can you go in and cover? I bet the place is standing there empty and unlocked.”

“I’ll be there in five. Reach me on the base unit.”

“Roger that.”

As Brenda came back up the driveway, the town whistle went off, its rise and fall a sound that never failed to make Duke Perkins feel tight in the gut. Nevertheless, he took time to put an arm around Brenda. She never forgot that he took the time to do that. “Don’t let it worry you, Brennie. It’s programmed to do that in a general power outage. It’ll stop in three minutes. Or four. I forget which.”

“I know, but I still hate it. That idiot Andy Sanders blew it on nine-eleven, do you remember? As if they were going to suicide-bomb us next.”

Duke nodded. Andy Sanders was an idiot. Unfortunately, he was also First Selectman, the cheery Mortimer Snerd dummy that sat on Big Jim Rennie’s lap.

“Honey, I have to go.”

“I know.” But she followed him to the car. “What is it? Do you know yet?”

“Stacy said a truck and an airplane collided out on 119.”

Brenda smiled tentatively. “That’s a joke, right?”

“Not if the plane had engine trouble and was trying to land on the highway,” Duke said. Her little smile faded and her fisted right hand came to rest just between her breasts, body language he knew well. He climbed behind the wheel, and although the Chief’s cruiser was relatively new, he still settled into the shape of his own butt. Duke Perkins was no lightweight.

“On your day off!” she cried. “Really, it’s a shame! And when you could retire on a full P!”

“They’ll just have to take me in my Saturday slops,” he said, and grinned at her. It was work, that grin. This felt like it was going to be a long day. “Just as I am, Lord, just as I am. Stick me a sandwich or two in the fridge, will you?”

“Just one. You’re getting too heavy. Even Dr. Haskell said so and he never scolds anybody. ”

“One, then.” He put the shift in reverse … then put it back in park. He leaned out the window, and she realized he wanted a kiss. She gave him a good one with the town whistle blowing across the crisp October air, and he caressed the side of her throat while their mouths were together, a thing that always gave her the shivers and he hardly ever did anymore.

His touch there in the sunshine: she never forgot that, either.

As he rolled down the driveway, she called something after him. He caught part of it but not all. He really was going to have to get his ears checked. Let them fit him with a hearing aid if necessary. Although that would probably be the final thing Randolph and Big Jim needed to kick him out on his aging ass.

Duke braked and leaned out again. “Take care of my what ?”

“Your pacemaker!” she practically screamed. Laughing. Exasperated. Still feeling his hand on her throat, stroking skin that had been smooth and firm—so it seemed to her—only yesterday. Or maybe it had been the day before, when they had listened to KC and the Sunshine Band instead of Jesus Radio.

“Oh, you bet!” he called back, and drove away. The next time she saw him, he was dead.

Billy and Wanda Debec never heard the double boom because they were on Route 117, and because they were arguing. The fight had started simply enough, with Wanda observing it was a beautiful day and Billy responding he had a headache and didn’t know why they had to go to the Saturday flea market in Oxford Hills, anyway; it would just be the usual pawed-over crap.

Wanda said that he wouldn’t have a headache if he hadn’t sunk a dozen beers the night before.

Billy asked her if she had counted the cans in the recycling bin (no matter how loaded he got, Billy did his drinking at home and always put the cans in the recycling bin—these things, along with his work as an electrician, were his pride).

She said yes she had, you bet she had. Furthermore—

They got as far as Patel’s Market in Castle Rock, having progressed through You drink too much, Billy and You nag too much, Wanda to My mother told me not to marry you and Why do you have to be such a bitch. This had become a fairly well-worn call-and-response during the last two years of their four-year marriage, but this morning Billy suddenly felt he had reached his limit. He swung into the market’s wide hot-topped parking lot without signaling or slowing, and then back out onto 117 without a single glance into his rearview mirror, let alone over his shoulder. On the road behind him, Nora Robichaud honked. Her best friend, Elsa Andrews, tutted. The two women, both retired nurses, exchanged a glance but not a single word. They had been friends too long for words to be necessary in such situations.

Meanwhile, Wanda asked Billy where he thought he was going.

Billy said back home to take a nap. She could go to the shitfair on her own.

Wanda observed that he had almost hit those two old ladies (said old ladies now dropping behind fast; Nora Robichaud felt that, lacking some damned good reason, speeds over forty miles an hour were the devil’s work).

Billy observed that Wanda both looked and sounded like her mother.

Wanda asked him to elucidate just what he meant by that.

Billy said that both mother and daughter had fat asses and tongues that were hung in the middle and ran on both ends.

Wanda told Billy he was hungover.

Billy told Wanda she was ugly.

It was a full and fair exchange of feelings, and by the time they crossed from Castle Rock into Motton, headed for an invisible barrier that had come into being not long after Wanda had opened this spirited discussion by saying it was a beautiful day, Billy was doing better than sixty, which was almost top end for Wanda’s little Chevy shitbox.

“What’s that smoke?” Wanda asked suddenly, pointing northeast, toward 119.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Did my mother-in-law fart?” This cracked him up and he started laughing.

Wanda Debec realized she had finally had enough. This clarified the world and her future in a way that was almost magical. She was turning to him, the words I want a divorce on the tip of her tongue, when they reached the Motton–Chester’s Mill town line and struck the barrier. The Chevy shitbox was equipped with airbags, but Billy’s did not deploy and Wanda’s didn’t pop out completely. The steering wheel collapsed Billy’s chest; the steering column smashed his heart; he died almost instantly.

Wanda’s head collided with the dashboard, and the sudden, catastrophic relocation of the Chevy’s engine block broke one of her legs (the left) and one of her arms (the right). She was not aware of any pain, only that the horn was blaring, the car was suddenly askew in the middle of the road with its front end smashed almost flat, and her vision had come over all red.

When Nora Robichaud and Elsa Andrews rounded the bend just to the south (they had been animatedly discussing the smoke rising to the northeast for several minutes now, and congratulating themselves on having taken the lesser traveled highway this forenoon), Wanda Debec was dragging herself up the white line on her elbows. Blood gushed down her face, almost obscuring it. She had been half scalped by a piece of the collapsing windshield and a huge flap of skin hung down over her left cheek like a misplaced jowl.

Nora and Elsa looked at each other grimly.

“Shit-my-pajamas,” Nora said, and that was all the talk between them there was. Elsa got out the instant the car stopped and ran to the staggering woman. For an elderly lady (Elsa had just turned seventy), she was remarkably fleet.

Nora left the car idling in park and joined her friend. Together they supported Wanda to Norma’s old but perfectly maintained Mercedes. Wanda’s jacket had gone from brown to a muddy roan color; her hands looked as if she had dipped them in red paint.

“Whe’ Billy?” she asked, and Nora saw that most of the poor woman’s teeth had been knocked out. Three of them were stuck to the front of her bloody jacket. “Whe’ Billy, he arri’? Wha’ happen?”

“Billy’s fine and so are you,” Nora said, then looked a question at Elsa. Elsa nodded and hurried toward the Chevy, now partly obscured by the steam escaping its ruptured radiator. One look through the gaping passenger door, which hung on one hinge, was enough to tell Elsa, who had been a nurse for almost forty years (final employer: Ron Haskell, MD—the MD standing for Medical Doofus), that Billy was not fine at all. The young woman with half her hair hanging upside down beside her head was now a widow.

Elsa returned to the Mercedes and got into the backseat next to the young woman, who had slipped into semiconsciousness. “He’s dead and she will be, too, if you don’t get us to Cathy Russell hurry-up-chop­chop,” she told Nora.

“Hang on, then,” Nora said, and floored it. The Mercedes had a big engine, and it leaped forward. Nora swerved smartly around the Debec Chevrolet and crashed into the invisible barrier while still accelerating. For the first time in twenty years Nora had neglected to fasten her seat belt, and she went out through the windshield, where she broke her neck on the invisible barrier just as Bob Roux had. The young woman shot between the Mercedes’s front bucket seats, out through the shattered windshield, and landed facedown on the hood with her bloodspattered legs splayed. Her feet were bare. Her loafers (bought at the last Oxford Hills flea market she had attended) had come off in the first crash.

Elsa Andrews hit the back of the driver’s seat, then rebounded, dazed but essentially unhurt. Her door stuck at first, but popped open when she put her shoulder against it and rammed. She got out and looked around at the littered wreckage. The puddles of blood. The smashed-up Chevy shitbox, still gently steaming.

“What happened?” she asked. This had also been Wanda’s question, although Elsa didn’t remember that. She stood in a strew of chrome and bloody glass, then put the back of her left hand to her forehead, as if checking for a fever. “What happened? What just happened? Nora? Nora-pie? Where are you, dear?”

Then she saw her friend and uttered a scream of grief and horror. A crow watching from high in a pine tree on The Mill side of the barrier cawed once, a cry that sounded like a contemptuous snort of laughter.

Elsa’s legs turned rubbery. She backed until her bottom struck the crumpled nose of the Mercedes. “Nora­pie,” she said. “Oh, honey.” Something tickled the back of her neck. She wasn’t sure, but thought it was probably a lock of the wounded girl’s hair. Only now, of course, she was the dead girl.

And poor sweet Nora, with whom she’d sometimes shared illicit nips of gin or vodka in the laundry room at Cathy Russell, the two of them giggling like girls away at camp. Nora’s eyes were open, staring up at the bright midday sun, and her head was cocked at a nasty angle, as if she had died trying to look back over her shoulder and make sure Elsa was all right.

Elsa, who was all right—“just shaken up,” as they’d said of certain lucky survivors back in their ER days— began to cry. She slid down the side of the car (ripping her own coat on a jag of metal) and sat on the asphalt of 117. She was still sitting there and still crying when Barbie and his new friend in the Sea Dogs cap came upon her.

Sea Dogs turned out to be Paul Gendron, a car salesman from upstate who had retired to his late parents’ farm in Motton two years before. Barbie learned this and a great deal more about Gendron between their departure from the crash scene on 119 and their discovery of another one—not quite so spectacular but still pretty horrific—at the place where Route 117 crossed into The Mill. Barbie would have been more than willing to shake Gendron’s hand, but such niceties would have to remain on hold until they found the place where the invisible barrier ended.

Ernie Calvert had gotten through to the Air National Guard in Bangor, but had been put on hold before he had a chance to say why he was calling. Meanwhile, approaching sirens heralded the imminent arrival of the local law.

“Just don’t expect the Fire Department,” said the farmer who’d come running across the field with his sons. His name was Alden Dinsmore, and he was still getting his breath back. “They’re over to Castle Rock, burnin down a house for practice. Could have gotten plenty of practice right h—” Then he saw his younger son approaching the place where Barbie’s bloody handprint appeared to be drying on nothing more than sunny air. “Rory, get away from there!”

Rory, agog with curiosity, ignored him. He reached out and knocked on the air just to the right of Barbie’s handprint. But before he did, Barbie saw goosebumps rash out on the kid’s arms below the ragged sleeves of his cut-off Wildcats sweatshirt. There was something there, something that kicked in when you got close. The only place Barbie had ever gotten a similar sensation was close to the big power generator in Avon, Florida, where he’d once taken a girl necking.

The sound of the kid’s fist was like knuckles on the side of a Pyrex casserole dish. It silenced the little babbling crowd of spectators, who had been staring at the burning remains of the pulp-truck (and in some cases taking pictures of it with their cell phones).

“I’ll be dipped in shit,” someone said.

Alden Dinsmore dragged his son away by the ragged collar of his sweatshirt, then whapped him backside of the head as he had the older brother not long before. “Don’t you ever!” Dinsmore cried, shaking the boy. “Don’t you ever, when you don’t know what it is!”

“Pa, it’s like a glass wall! It’s—”

Dinsmore shook him some more. He was still panting, and Barbie feared for his heart. “Don’t you ever !” he repeated, and pushed the kid at his older brother. “Hang onto this fool, Ollie.”

“Yessir,” Ollie said, and smirked at his brother.

Barbie looked toward The Mill. He could now see the approaching flashers of a police car, but far ahead of it—as if escorting the cops by virtue of some higher authority—was a large black vehicle that looked like a rolling coffin: Big Jim Rennie’s Hummer. Barbie’s fading bumps and bruises from the fight in Dipper’s parking lot seemed to give a sympathetic throb at the sight.

Rennie Senior hadn’t been there, of course, but his son had been the prime instigator, and Big Jim had taken care of Junior. If that meant making life in The Mill tough for a certain itinerant short-order cook— tough enough so the short-order cook in question would decide to just haul stakes and leave town—even better.

Barbie didn’t want to be here when Big Jim arrived. Especially not with the cops. Chief Perkins had treated him okay, but the other one—Randolph—had looked at him as if Dale Barbara were a piece of dogshit on a dress shoe.

Barbie turned to Sea Dogs and said: “You interested in taking a little hike? You on your side, me on mine? See how far this thing goes?”

“And get away from here before yonder gasbag arrives?” Gendron had also seen the oncoming Hummer. “My friend, you’re on. East or west?”

They went west, toward Route 117, and they didn’t find the end of the barrier, but they saw the wonders it had created when it came down. Tree branches had been sheared off, creating pathways to the sky where previously there had been none. Stumps had been cut in half. And there were feathered corpses everywhere.

“Lotta dead birds,” Gendron said. He resettled his cap on his head with hands that trembled slightly. His face was pale. “Never seen so many.”

“Are you all right?” Barbie asked.

“Physically? Yeah, I think so. Mentally, I feel like I’ve lost my frickin mind. How about you?”

“Same,” Barbie said.

Two miles west of 119, they came to God Creek Road and the body of Bob Roux, lying beside his still-idling tractor. Barbie moved instinctively toward the downed man and once again bumped the barrier … although this time he remembered at the last second and slowed in time to keep from bloodying his nose again.

Gendron knelt and touched the farmer’s grotesquely cocked neck. “Dead.”

“What’s that littered all around him? Those white scraps?”

Gendron picked up the largest piece. “I think it’s one of those computer-music doohickies. Musta broke when he hit the …” He gestured in front of him. “The you-know.”

From the direction of town a whooping began, hoarser and louder than the town whistle had been.

Gendron glanced toward it briefly. “Fire siren,” he said. “Much good it’ll do.”

“FD’s coming from Castle Rock,” Barbie said. “I hear them.”

“Yeah? Your ears are better’n mine, then. Tell me your name again, friend.”

“Dale Barbara. Barbie to my friends.”

“Well, Barbie, what now?”

“Go on, I guess. We can’t do anything for this guy.”

“Nope, can’t even call anyone,” Gendron said gloomily. “Not with my cell back there. Guess you don’t have one?”

Barbie did, but he had left it behind in his now-vacated apartment, along with some socks, shirts, jeans, and underwear. He’d lit out for the territories with nothing but the clothes on his back, because there was nothing from Chester’s Mill he wanted to carry with him. Except a few good memories, and for those he didn’t need a suitcase or even a knapsack.

All this was too complicated to explain to a stranger, so he just shook his head.

There was an old blanket draped over the seat of the Deere. Gendron shut the tractor off, took the blanket, and covered the body.

“I hope he was listenin to somethin he liked when it happened,” Gendron said.

“Yeah,” Barbie said.

“Come on. Let’s get to the end of this whatever-it-is. I want to shake your hand. Might even break down and give you a hug.”

Shortly after discovering Roux’s body—they were now very close to the wreck on 117, although neither of them knew it—they came to a little stream. The two men stood there for a moment, each on his own side of the barrier, looking in wonder and silence.

At last Gendron said, “Holy jumped-up God.”

“What does it look like from your side?” Barbie asked. All he could see on his was the water rising and spreading into the under-growth. It was as if the stream had encountered an invisible dam.

“I don’t know how to describe it. I never seen anything quite like it.” Gendron paused, scratching both cheeks, drawing his already long face down so he looked a little like the screamer in that Edvard Munch painting. “Yes I have. Once. Sorta. When I brought home a couple of goldfish for my daughter’s sixth birthday. Or maybe she was seven that year. I brought em home from the pet store in a plastic bag, and that’s what this looks like—water in the bottom of a plastic bag. Only flat instead of saggin down. The water piles up against that … thing, then trickles off both ways on your side.”

“Is none going through at all?”

Gendron bent down, his hands on his knees, and squinted. “Yeah, some appears to go through. But not very much, just a trickle. And none of the crap the water’s carrying. You know, sticks and leaves and such.”

They pushed on, Gendron on his side and Barbie on his. As yet, neither of them were thinking in terms of inside and outside. It didn’t occur to them that the barrier might not have an end.

Then they came to Route 117, where there had been another nasty accident—two cars and at least two fatals that Barbie could be sure of. There was another, he thought, slumped behind the wheel of an old Chevrolet that had been mostly demolished. Only this time there was also a survivor, sitting beside a smashed-up Mercedes-Benz with her head lowered. Paul Gendron rushed to her, while Barbie could only stand and watch. The woman saw Gendron and struggled to rise.

“No, ma’am, not at all, you don’t want to do that,” he said.

“I think I’m fine,” she said. “Just … you know, shaken up.” For some reason this made her laugh, although her face was puffy with tears.

At that moment another car appeared, a slowpoke driven by an old fellow who was leading a parade of three or four other no doubt impatient drivers. He saw the accident and stopped. The cars behind him did, too.

Elsa Andrews was on her feet now, and with-it enough to ask what would become the question of the day: “What did we hit? It wasn’t the other car, Nora went around the other car.”

Gendron answered with complete honesty. “Dunno, ma’am.”

“Ask her if she has a cell-phone,” Barbie said. Then he called to the gathering spectators. “Hey! Who’s got a cell phone?”

“I do, mister,” a woman said, but before she could say more, they all heard an approaching whup-whup­whup sound. It was a helicopter.

Barbie and Gendron exchanged a stricken glance.

The copter was blue and white, flying low. It was angling toward the pillar of smoke marking the crashed pulp-truck on 119, but the air was perfectly clear, with that almost magnifying effect that the best days in northern New England seem to have, and Barbie could easily read the big blue 13on its side. And see the CBS eye logo. It was a news chopper, out of Portland. It must already have been in the area, Barbie thought. And it was a perfect day to get some juicy crash footage for the six o’clock news.

“Oh, no,” Gendron moaned, shading his eyes. Then he shouted: “Get back, you fools! Get back!”

Barbie chimed in. “No! Stop it! Get away!”

It was useless, of course. Even more useless, he was waving his arms in big go-away gestures.

Elsa looked from Gendron to Barbie, bewildered.

The chopper dipped to treetop level and hovered.

“I think it’s gonna be okay,” Gendron breathed. “The people back there must be waving em off, too. Pilot musta seen—”

But then the chopper swung north, meaning to hook in over Alden Dinsmore’s grazeland for a different view, and it struck the barrier. Barbie saw one of the rotors break off. The helicopter dipped, dropped, and swerved, all at the same time. Then it exploded, showering fresh fire down on the road and fields on the other side of the barrier.

Gendron’s side.

The outside.

Junior Rennie crept like a thief into the house where he had grown up. Or a ghost. It was empty, of course; his father would be out at his giant used car lot on Route 119—what Junior’s friend Frank sometimes called the Holy Tabernacle of No Money Down—and for the last four years Francine Rennie had been hanging out nonstop at Pleasant Ridge Cemetery. The town whistle had quit and the police sirens had faded off to the south somewhere. The house was blessedly quiet.

He took two Imitrex, then dropped his clothes and got into the shower. When he emerged, he saw there was blood on his shirt and pants. He couldn’t deal with it now. He kicked the clothes under his bed, drew the shades, crawled into the rack, and drew the covers up over his head, as he had when he was a child afraid of closet-monsters. He lay there shivering, his head gonging like all the bells of hell.

He was dozing when the fire siren went off, jolting him awake. He began to shiver again, but the headache was better. He’d sleep a little, then think about what to do next. Killing himself still seemed by far the best option. Because they’d catch him. He couldn’t even go back and clean up; he wouldn’t have time before Henry or LaDonna McCain came back from their Saturday errands. He could run—maybe—but not until his head stopped aching. And of course he’d have to put some clothes on. You couldn’t begin life as a fugitive buckytail naked.

On the whole, killing himself would probably be best. Except then the fucking short-order cook would win. And when you really considered the matter, all this was the fucking cook’s fault.

At some point the fire whistle quit. Junior slept with the covers over his head. When he woke up, it was nine PM. His headache was gone.

And the house was still empty.

CLUSTERMUG

When Big Jim Rennie scrunched to a stop in his H3 Alpha Hummer (color: Black Pearl; accessories: you name it), he was a full three minutes ahead of the town cops, which was just the way he liked it. Keep ahead of the competish, that was Rennie’s motto.

Ernie Calvert was still on the phone, but he raised a hand in a half-assed salute. His hair was in disarray and he looked nearly insane with excitement. “Yo, Big Jim, I got through to em!”

“Through to who?” Rennie asked, not paying much attention. He was looking at the still-burning pyre of the pulp-truck, and at the wreckage of what was clearly a plane. This was a mess, one that could mean a black eye for the town, especially with the two newest firewagons over in The Rock. A training exercise he had approved of … but Andy Sanders’s signature was the one on the approval form, because Andy was First Selectman. That was good. Rennie was a great believer in what he called the Protectability Quotient, and being Second Selectman was a prime example of the Quotient in action; you got all of the power (at least when the First was a nit like Sanders), but rarely had to take the blame when things went wrong.

And this was what Rennie—who had given his heart to Jesus at age sixteen and did not use foul language —called “a clustermug.” Steps would have to be taken. Control would have to be imposed. And he couldn’t count on that elderly ass Howard Perkins to do the job. Perkins might have been a perfectly adequate police chief twenty years ago, but this was a new century.

Rennie’s frown deepened as he surveyed the scene. Too many spectators. Of course there were always too many at things such as this; people loved blood and destruction. And some of these appeared to be playing a bizarre sort of game: seeing how far they could lean over, or something.

Bizarre.

“You people get back from there!” he shouted. He had a good voice for giving orders, big and confident. “That’s an accident site!”

Ernie Calvert—another idiot, the town was full of them, Rennie supposed any town was—tugged at his sleeve. He looked more excited than ever. “Got through to the ANG, Big Jim, and—”

“The who? The what ? What are you talking about?”

“The Air National Guard!”

Worse and worse. People playing games, and this fool calling the—

“Ernie, why would you call them, for gosh sakes?”

“Because he said … the guy said …” But Ernie couldn’t remember exactly what Barbie had said, so he moved on. “Well anyway, the colonel at the ANG listened to what I was telling him, then connected me with Homeland Security in their Portland office. Put me right through!”

Rennie slapped his hands to his cheeks, a thing he did often when he was exasperated. It made him look like a cold-eyed Jack Benny. Like Benny, Big Jim did indeed tell jokes from time to time (always clean ones). He joked because he sold cars, and because he knew politicians were supposed to joke, especially when election time came around. So he kept a small rotating stock of what he called “funnies” (as in “Do you boys want to hear a funny?”). He memorized these much as a tourist in a foreign land will pick up the phrases for stuff like Where is the bathroom or Is there a hotel with Internet in this village?

But he didn’t joke now. “Homeland Security! What in the cotton-picking devil for ?” Cotton-picking was by far Rennie’s favorite epithet.

“Because the young guy said there’s somethin across the road. And there is, Jim! Somethin you can’t see! People can lean on it! See? They’re doin it now. Or … if you throw a stone against it, it bounces back! Look!” Ernie picked up a stone and threw it. Rennie did not trouble looking to see where it went; he reckoned if it had struck one of the rubberneckers, the fellow would have given a yell. “The truck crashed into it … into the whatever-it-is … and the plane did, too! And so the guy told me to—”

“Slow down. What guy exactly are we talking about?”

“He’s a young guy,” Rory Dinsmore said. “He cooks at Sweetbriar Rose. If you ask for a hamburg medium, that’s how you get it. My dad says you can hardly ever get medium, because nobody knows how to cook it, but this guy does.” His face broke into a smile of extraordinary sweetness. “I know his name.”

“Shut up, Roar,” his brother warned. Mr. Rennie’s face had darkened. In Ollie Dinsmore’s experience, this was the way teachers looked just before they slapped you with a week’s worth of detention.

Rory, however, paid no mind. “It’s a girl’s name! It’s Baaarbara. ”

Just when I think I’ve seen the last of him, that cotton-picker pops up again, Rennie thought. That darned useless no-account.

He turned to Ernie Calvert. The police were almost here, but Rennie thought he had time to put a stop to this latest bit of Barbara-induced lunacy. Not that Rennie saw him around. Nor expected to, not really. How like Barbara to stir up the stew, make a mess, then flee.

“Ernie,” he said, “you’ve been misinformed.”

Alden Dinsmore stepped forward. “Mr. Rennie, I don’t see how you can say that, when you don’t know what the information is.”

Rennie smiled at him. Pulled his lips back, anyway. “I know Dale Barbara, Alden; I havethat much information.” He turned back to Ernie Calvert. “Now, if you’ll just—”

“Hush,” Calvert said, holding up a hand. “I got someone.”

Big Jim Rennie did not like to be hushed, especially by a retired grocery store manager. He plucked the phone from Ernie’s hand as though Ernie were an assistant who had been holding it for just that purpose.

A voice from the cell phone said, “To whom am I speaking?” Less than half a dozen words, but they were enough to tell Rennie that he was dealing with a bureaucratic son-of-a-buck. The Lord knew he’d dealt with enough of them in his three decades as a town official, and the Feds were the worst.

“This is James Rennie, Second Selectman of Chester’s Mill. Who are you, sir?”

“Donald Wozniak, Homeland Security. I understand you have some sort of problem out there on Highway

119. An interdiction of some kind.” Interdiction? Interdiction? What kind of Fedspeak was that? “You have been misinformed, sir,” Rennie said. “What we have is an airplane—a civilian plane, a local

plane—that tried to land on the road and hit a truck. The situation is completely under control. We do not

require the aid of Homeland Security.”

“Mister Rennie,” the farmer said, “that is not what happened.”

Rennie flapped a hand at him and began walking toward the first police cruiser. Hank Morrison was getting out. Big, six-five or so, but basically useless. And behind him, the gal with the big old tiddies. Wettington, her name was, and she was worse than useless: a smart mouth run by a dumb head. But behind her, Peter Randolph was pulling up. Randolph was the Assistant Chief, and a man after Rennie’s own heart. A man who could get ’er done. If Randolph had been the duty officer on the night Junior got in trouble at that stupid devilpit of a bar, Big Jim doubted if Mr. Dale Barbara would still have been in town to cause trouble today. In fact, Mr. Barbara might have been behind bars over in The Rock. Which would have suited Rennie fine.

Meanwhile, the man from Homeland Security—did they have the nerve to call themselves agents?—was still jabbering away.

Rennie interrupted him. “Thank you for your interest, Mr. Wozner, but we’ve got this handled.” He pushed the END button without saying goodbye. Then he tossed the phone back to Ernie Calvert.

“Jim, I don’t think that was wise.”

Rennie ignored him and watched Randolph stop behind the Wettington gal’s cruiser, bubblegum bars

flashing. He thought about walking down to meet Randolph, and rejected the idea before it was fully formed in his mind. Let Randolph come to him. That was how it was supposed to work. And how it would work, by God.

“Big Jim,” Randolph said. “What’s happened here?”

“I believe that’s obvious,” Big Jim said. “Chuck Thompson’s airplane got into a little argument with a pulp-truck. Looks like they fought it to a draw.” Now he could hear sirens coming from Castle Rock. Almost certainly FD responders (Rennie hoped their own two new—and horribly expensive—firewagons were among them; it would play better if no one actually realized the new trucks had been out of town when this clustermug happened). Ambulances and police would be close behind.

“That ain’t what happened,” Alden Dinsmore said stubbornly. “I was out in the side garden, and I saw the plane just—”

“Better move those people back, don’t you think?” Rennie asked Randolph, pointing to the lookie-loos. There were quite a few on the pulp-truck side, standing prudently away from the blazing remains, and even more on The Mill side. It was starting to look like a convention.

Randolph addressed Morrison and Wettington. “Hank,” he said, and pointed at the spectators from The Mill. Some had begun prospecting among the scattered pieces of Thompson’s plane. There were cries of

horror as more body parts were discovered.

“Yo,” Morrison said, and got moving.

Randolph turned Wettington toward the spectators on the pulp-truck side. “Jackie, you take …” But there Randolph trailed off.

The disaster-groupies on the south side of the accident were standing in the cow pasture on one side of the road and knee-deep in scrubby bushes on the other. Their mouths hung open, giving them a look of stupid interest Rennie was very familiar with; he saw it on individual faces every day, and en masse every March, at town meeting. Only these people weren’t looking at the burning truck. And now Peter Randolph, certainly no dummy (not brilliant, not by a long shot, but at least he knew which side his bread was buttered on), was looking at the same place as the rest of them, and with that same expression of slack-jawed amazement. So was Jackie Wettington.

It was the smoke the rest were looking at. The smoke rising from the burning pulper.

It was dark and oily. The people downwind should have been darned near choking on it, especially with a light breeze out of the south, but they weren’t. And Rennie saw the reason why. It was hard to believe, but he saw it, all right. The smoke did blow north, at least at first, but then it took an elbow-bend—almost a right angle—and rose straight up in a plume, as if in a chimney. And it left a dark brown residue behind. A long smudge that just seemed to float on the air.

Jim Rennie shook his head to clear the image away, but it was still there when he stopped.

“What is it?” Randolph asked. His voice was soft with wonder.

Dinsmore, the farmer, placed himself in fro

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 715