He got out of the van and--after a brief interior debate--stripped off most of his makeshift shielding, leaving only the apron, gloves, and goggles. Then he walked down the length of the barn, holding the sensor tube of the Geiger counter out in front of him and promising himself he'd go back for the rest of his "suit" the second the needle jumped.
But when he emerged from the side of the barn and the light flashed out no more than forty yards away, the needle didn't stir. It seemed impossible--if, that was, the radiation was related to the light. Rusty could think of only one possible explanation: the generator had created a radiation belt to discourage explorers such as himself. To protect itself. The same could be true of the lightheadedness he'd felt, actual unconsciousness in the case of the kids. Protection, like a porcupine's quills or a skunk's perfume.
Isn't it more likely that the counter's malfunctioning? You could be giving yourself a lethal dose of gamma rays at this very second. The damn thing's a cold war relic.
But as he approached the edge of the orchard, Rusty saw a squirrel dart through the grass and run up one of the trees. It paused on a branch weighted down with unpicked fruit and stared at the two-legs intruder below, its eyes bright, its tail bushed out. To Rusty it looked fine as fiddlesticks, and he saw no animal corpses in the grass,or on the overgrown lanes between the trees: no suicides, and no probable radiation victims, either.
Now he was very close to the light, its timed flashes so brilliant that he squeezed his eyes nearly shut each time it came. To his right, the whole world seemed to lie at his feet. He could see the town, toy-like and perfect, four miles away. The grid of the streets; the steeple of the Congo church; the twinkle of a few cars on the move. He could see the low brick structure of Catherine Russell Hospital, and, far to the west, the black smudge where the missiles had struck. It hung there, a beauty mark on the cheek of the day. The sky overhead was a faded blue, almost its normal color, but at the horizon the blue became a poison yellow. He felt quite sure some of that color had been caused by pollution--the same crap that had turned the stars pink--but he suspected most of it was nothing more sinister than autumn pollen sticking to the Dome's unseen surface.
He got moving again. The longer he was up here--especially up here and out of view--the more nervous his friends would become. He wanted to go directly to the source of the light, but first he walked out of the orchard and to the edge of the slope. From here he could see the others, although they were little more than specks. He set the Geiger counter down, then waved both hands slowly back and forth over his head to show he was okay. They waved back.
"Okay," he said. Inside the heavy gloves, his hands were slick with sweat. "Let's see what we've got here."
16
It was snack-time at East Street Grammar School. Judy and Janelle Everett sat at the far end of the play-yard with their friend Deanna Carver, who was six--thus fitting neatly between the Little Js, age-wise. Deanna was wearing a small blue armband around the left sleeve of her tee-shirt. She had insisted that Carrie tie it on her before she went to school, so she could be like her parents.
"What's it for?" Janelle asked.
"It means I like the police," Deanna said, and munched on her Fruit Roll-Up.
"I want one," Judy said, "only yellow." She pronounced this word very carefully. Back when she was a baby she'd said lello, and Jannie had laughed at her.
"They can't be yellow," Deanna said, "only blue. This Roll-Up is good. I wish I had a billion."
"You'd get fat," Janelle said. "You'd bust. "
They giggled at this, then fell silent for a little while and watched the bigger kids, the Js nibbling on their homemade peanut butter crackers. Some girls were playing hopscotch. Boys were climbing on the monkey bars, and Miss Goldstone was pushing the Pruitt twins on the swing-glider. Mrs. Vanedestine had organized a kickball game.
It all looked pretty normal, Janelle thought, but it wasn't normal. Nobody was shouting, nobody was wailing with a scraped knee, Mindy and Mandy Pruitt weren't begging Miss Goldstone to admire their matching hair-dos. They all looked like they were just pretending snack-time, even the grownups. And everyone--including her--kept stealing glances up at the sky, which should have been blue and wasn't, quite.
None of that was the worst, though. The worst--ever since the seizures--was the suffocating certainty that something bad was going to happen.
Deanna said, "I was going to be the Little Mermaid on Halloween, but now I en't. I en't going to be nothing. I don't want to go out. I'm scared of Halloween."
"Did you have a bad dream?" Janelle asked.
"Yes." Deanna held out her Fruit Roll-Up. "Do you want the rest of this. I en't so hungry as I thought."
"No," Janelle said. She didn't even want the rest of her peanut butter crackers, and that wasn't a bit like her. And Judy had eaten just half a cracker. Janelle remembered once how she'd seen Audrey corner a mouse in their garage. She remembered how Audrey had barked, and lunged at the mouse when it tried to scurry from the corner it was in. That had made her feel sad, and she called her mother to take Audrey away so she wouldn't eat the mousie. Mummy laughed, but she did it.
Now they were the mice. Jannie had forgotten most of the dreams she'd had during the seizures, but still she knew this much.
Now they were the ones in the corner.
"I'm just going to stay home," Deanna said. A tear stood in her left eye, bright and clear and perfect. "Stay home all Halloween. En't even coming to school. Won't. Can't nobody make me."
Mrs. Vanedestine left the kickball game and began ringing the all-in bell, but none of the three girls stood up at first.
"It's Halloween already," Judy said. "Look." She pointed across the street to where a pumpkin stood on the porch of the Wheelers' house. "And look." This time she pointed to a pair of cardboard ghosts flanking the post office doors. "And look. "
This last time she pointed at the library lawn. Here was a stuffed dummy that had been put up by Lissa Jamieson. She had undoubtedly meant it to be amusing, but what amuses adults often scares children, and Janelle had an idea the dummy on the library lawn might be back to visit her that night while she was lying in the dark and waiting to go to sleep.
The head was burlap with eyes that were white crosses made from thread. The hat was like the one the cat wore in the Dr. Seuss story. It had garden trowels for hands (bad old clutchy-grabby hands, Janelle thought) and a shirt with something written on it. She didn't understand what it meant, but she could read the words: SWEET HOME ALABAMA PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG.
"See?" Judy wasn't crying, but her eyes were wide and solemn, full of some knowledge too complex and too dark to be expressed. "Halloween already."
Janelle took her sister's hand and pulled her to her feet. "No it's not," she said ... but she was afraid it was. Something bad was going to happen, something with a fire in it. No treats, only tricks. Mean tricks. Bad tricks.
"Let's go inside," she told Judy and Deanna. "We'll sing songs and stuff. That'll be nice."
It usually was, but not that day. Even before the big bang in the sky, it wasn't nice. Janelle kept thinking about the dummy with the white-cross eyes. And the somehow awful shirt: PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG.
17
Four years before the Dome dropped down, Linda Everett's grandfather had died and left each of his grandchildren a small but tidy sum of money. Linda's check had come to $17,232.04. Most of it went into the Js' college fund, but she had felt more than justified in spending a few hundred on Rusty. His birthday was coming up, and he'd wanted an Apple TV gadget since they'd come on the market some years earlier.
She had bought him more expensive presents during the course of their marriage, but never one which pleased him more. The idea that he could download movies from the Net, then watch them on TV instead of being chained to the smaller screen of his computer, tickled him to death. The gadget was a white plastic square, about seven inches on a side and three-quarters of an inch thick. The object Rusty found
on Black Ridge looked so much like his Apple TV addon that he at first thought it actually was one ... only modified, of course, so it could hold an entire town prisoner as well as broadcast The Little Mermaid to your television via Wi-Fi and in HD.
The thing on the edge of the McCoy Orchard was dark gray instead of white, and rather than the familar apple logo stamped on top of it, Rusty observed this somehow troubling symbol:
Above the symbol was a hooded excrescence about the size of the knuckle on his little finger. Inside the hood was a lens made of either glass or crystal. It was from this that the spaced purple flashes were coming.
Rusty bent and touched the surface of the generator--if it was a generator. A strong shock immediately surged up his arm and through his body. He tried to pull back and couldn't. His muscles were locked up tight. The Geiger counter gave a single bray, then fell silent. Rusty had no idea whether or not the needle swung into the danger zone, because he couldn't move his eyes, either. The light was leaving the world, funneling out of it like water going down a bathtub drain, and he thought with sudden calm clarity: I'm going to die. What a stupid way to g--
Then, in that darkness, faces arose--only they weren't human faces, and later he would not be sure they were faces at all. They were geometric solids that seemed to be padded in leather. The only parts of them that looked even vaguely human were diamond shapes on the sides. They could have been ears. The heads--if they were heads--turned to each other, either in discussion or something that could have been mistaken for it. He thought he heard laughter. He thought he sensed excitement. He pictured children in the play-yard at East Street Grammar--his girls, perhaps, and their friend Deanna Carver--exchanging snacks and secrets at recess.
All of this happened in a space of seconds, surely no more than four or five. Then it was gone. The shock dissipated as suddenly and completely as it did when people first touched the surface of the Dome; as quickly as his lightheadedness and the accompanying vision of the dummy in the crooked tophat. He was just kneeling at the top of the ridge overlooking the town, and sweltering in his leaden accessories.
Yet the image of those leatherheads remained. Leaning together and laughing in obscenely childish conspiracy.
The others are down there watching me. Wave. Show them you're all right.
He raised both hands over his head--now they moved smoothly--and waved them slowly back and forth, just as if his heart were not pounding like a jackrabbit in his chest, as if sweat weren't running down his chest in sharply aromatic rivulets.
Below, on the road, Rommie and the kids waved back.
Rusty took several deep breaths to calm himself, then held the Geiger counter's sensor tube out to the flat gray square, which sat on a spongy mat of grass. The needle wavered just below the +5 mark. A background count, no more.
Rusty had little doubt that this flat square object was the source of their troubles. Creatures--not human beings, creatures--were using it to keep them prisoner, but that wasn't all. They were also using it to observe.
And having fun. The bastards were laughing. He had heard them.
Rusty stripped off the apron, draped it over the box with its slightly protruding lens, got up, backed away. For a moment nothing happened. Then the apron caught fire. The smell was pungent and nasty. He watched the shiny surface blister and bubble, watched the flames erupt. Then the apron, which was essentially no more than a plastic-coated sheet of lead, simply fell apart. For a moment there were burning pieces, the biggest one still lying on top of the box. A moment later, the apron--or what remained of it--disinte-grated. A few swirling bits of ash remained--and the smell--but otherwise ... poof. Gone.
Did I see that? Rusty asked himself, then said it aloud, asking the world. He could smell roasted plastic and a heavier smell that he supposed was smelted lead--insane, impossible--but the apron was gone nonetheless.
"Did I actually see that?"
As if in answer, the purple light flashed out of the hooded knuckle on top of the box. Were those pulses renewing the Dome, the way the touch of a finger on a computer keyboard could refresh the screen? Were they allowing the leatherheads to watch the town? Both? Neither?
He told himself not to approach the flat square again. He told himself the smartest thing he could do would be to run back to the van (without the weight of the apron, he could run) and then drive like hell, slowing only to pick up his companions waiting below.
Instead he approached the box again and dropped to his knees before it, a posture too much like worship for his liking.
He stripped off one of the gloves, touched the ground beside the thing, then snatched his hand back. Hot. Bits of burning apron had scorched some of the grass. Next he reached for the box itself, steeling himself for another burn or another shock ... although neither was what he was most afraid of; he was afraid of seeing those leather shapes again, those not-quite-heads bent together in some laughing conspiracy.
But there was nothing. No visions and no heat. The gray box was cool to the touch, even though he'd seen the lead apron on top of it bubbling up and then actually catching fire.
The purple light flashed out. Rusty was careful not to put his hand in front of it. Instead, he gripped the thing's sides, mentally saying goodbye to his wife and girls, telling them he was sorry for being such a damn fool. He waited to catch fire and burn. When he didn't, he tried to lift the box. Although it had the surface area of a dinner plate and wasn't much thicker, he couldn't budge it. The box might as well have been welded to the top of a pillar planted in ninety feet of New England bedrock--except it wasn't. It was sitting on top of a grassy mat, and when he wriggled his fingers deeper beneath, they touched. He laced them together and tried again to lift the thing. No shock, no visions, no heat; no movement, either. Not so much as a wiggle.
He thought: My hands are gripping some sort of alien artifact. A machine from another world. I may have even caught a glimpse of its operators.
The idea was intellectually amazing--flabbergasting, even--but it had no emotional gradient, perhaps because he was too stunned, too overwhelmed with information that did not compute.
So what next? Just what the hell next?
He didn't know. And it seemed he wasn't emotionally flat after all, because a wave of despair rolled through him, and he was only just able to stop from vocalizing that despair in a cry. The four people down below might hear it and think he was in trouble. Which, of course, he was. Nor was he alone.
He got to his feet on legs that trembled and threatened to give out beneath him. The hot, close air seemed to lie on his skin like oil. He made his way slowly back toward the van through the apple-heavy trees. The only thing he was sure of was that under no circumstances could Big Jim Rennie learn of the generator. Not because he would try to destroy it, but because he'd very likely set a guard around it to make sure it wasn't destroyed. To make sure it kept right on doing what it was doing, so he could keep on doing what he was doing. For the time being, at least, Big Jim liked things just the way they were.
Rusty opened the door of the van and that was when, less than a mile north of Black Ridge, a huge explosion rocked the day. It was as if God had leaned down and fired a heavenly shotgun.
Rusty shouted in surprise and looked up. He immediately shielded his eyes from the fierce temporary sun burning in the sky over the border between TR-90 and Chester's Mill. Another plane had crashed into the Dome. Only this time it had been no mere Seneca V. Black smoke billowed up from the point of impact, which Rusty estimated as being at least twenty thousand feet. If the black spot left by the missle strikes was a beauty mark on the cheek of the day, then this new mark was a skin tumor. One that had been allowed to run wild.
Rusty forgot about the generator. He forgot about the four people waiting for him. He forgot about his own children, for whom he had just risked being burned alive and then discorporated. For a space of two minutes, there was no room for anything in his mind but black awe.
Rubble was falling to ea
rth on the other side of the Dome. The smashed forward quarter of the jetliner was followed by a flaming motor; the motor was followed by a waterfall of blue airline seats, many with passengers still strapped into them; the seats were followed by a vast shining wing, seesawing like a sheet of paper in a draft; the wing was followed by the tail of what was probably a 767. The tail was painted dark green. A lighter green shape had been superimposed on it. It looked to Rusty like a clover.
Not a clover, a shamrock.
Then the body of the plane crashed to earth like a defective arrow and lit the woods on fire.
18
The blast rocks the town and they all come out to see. All over Chester's Mill, they come out to see. They stand in front of their houses, in driveways, on sidewalks, in the middle of Main Street. And although the sky north of their prison is mostly cloudy, they have to shield their eyes from the glare--what looked to Rusty, from his place atop Black Ridge, like a second sun.
They see what it is, of course; the sharper-eyed among them can even read the name on the body of the plummeting plane before it disappears below the treeline. It is nothing supernatural; it has even happened before, and just this week (although on a smaller scale, admittedly). But in the people of Chester's Mill, it inspires a kind of sullen dread that will hold sway over the town from then until the end.
Anyone who has ever cared for a terminal patient will tell you that there comes a tipping point when denial dies and acceptance finds its way in. For most people in Chester's Mill, the tipping point came at midmorning on October twenty-fifth, while they stood either alone or with their neighbors, watching as more than three hundred people plunged into the woods of TR-90.
Earlier that morning, perhaps fifteen percent of the town was wearing blue "solidarity" armbands; by sundown on this Wednesday in October, it will be twice that. When the sun comes up tomorrow, it will be over fifty percent of the population.
Denial gives way to acceptance; acceptance breeds dependence. Anyone who's ever cared for a terminal patient will tell you that, too. Sick people need someone who will bring them their pills and glasses of cold sweet juice to wash them down with. They need someone to soothe their aching joints with arnica gel. They need someone to sit with them when the night is dark and the hours stretch out. They need someone to say, Sleep now, it will be better in the morning. I'm here, so sleep. Sleep now. Sleep and let me take care of everything.