"Ms. Shumway says we can burn wood."
"People have to be careful about that, Captain Barbara--Barbie. Sure, you've got plenty of wood up there and you don't need electricity to ignite it and keep it going, but wood produces ash. Hell, it produces carcinogens."
"Heating season here starts ..." Barbie looked at Julia.
"November fifteenth," she said. "Or thereabouts."
"Ms. Shumway says mid-November. So tell me you're going to have this worked out by then."
"All I can say is that we intend to try like hell. Which brings me to the point of this conversation. The smart boys--the ones we've been able to convene so far--all agree that we're dealing with a force field--"
"Just like on Star Trick, " Barbie said. "Beam me up, Snotty."
"Beg your pardon?"
"Doesn't matter. Go on, sir."
"They all agree that a force field doesn't just happen. Something either close to the field of effect or in the center of it has to generate it. Our guys think the center is most likely. 'Like the handle of an umbrella,' one of them said."
"You think this is an inside job?"
"We think it's a possibility. And we just happen to have a decorated soldier in town--"
Ex-soldier, Barbie thought. And the decorations went into the Gulf of Mexico eighteen months ago. But he had an idea his term of service had just been extended, like it or not. Held over by popular demand, as the saying went.
"--whose specialty in Iraq was hunting down Al Qaeda bomb factories. Hunting them down and shutting them down."
So. Basically just another gennie. He thought of all those he and Julia Shumway had passed on the way out here, roaring away in the dark, providing heat and light. Eating propane to do it. He realized that propane and storage batteries, even more than food, had become the new gold standard in Chester's Mill. One thing he knew: people would burn wood. If it got cold and the propane was gone, they'd burn plenty. Hardwood, softwood, trashwood. And fuck the carcinogens.
"It won't be like the generators working away in your part of the world tonight," Cox said. "A thing that could do this ... we don't know what it would be like, or who could build such a thing."
"But Uncle Sammy wants it," Barbie said. He was gripping the phone almost tightly enough to crack it. "That's actually the priority, isn't it? Sir? Because a thing like that could change the world. The people of this town are strictly secondary. Collateral damage, in fact."
"Oh, let's not be melodramatic," Cox said. "In this matter our interests coincide. Find the generator, if it's there to be found. Find it the way you found those bomb factories, and then shut it down. Problem solved."
"If it's there."
"If it's there, roger that. Will you try?"
"Do I have a choice?"
"Not that I can see, but I'm career military. For us, free will isn't an option."
"Ken, this is one fucked-up fire drill."
Cox was slow to reply. Although there was silence on the line (except for a faint high hum that might mean the proceedings were being recorded), Barbie could almost hear him reflecting. Then he said: "That's true, but you still get all the good shit, you bitch."
Barbie laughed. He couldn't help it.
3
On the way back, passing the dark shape that was Christ the Holy Redeemer Church, he turned to Julia. In the glow of the dashboard lights, her face looked tired and solemn.
"I won't tell you to keep quiet about any of this," he said, "but I think you should hold one thing back."
"The generator that may or may not be in town." She took a hand off the wheel, reached back, and stroked Horace's head, as if for comfort and reassurance.
"Yes."
"Because if there's a generator spinning the field--creating your Colonel's Dome--then somebody must be running it. Somebody here."
"Cox didn't say that, but I'm sure it's what he thinks."
"I'll withhold that. And I won't e-mail any pictures."
"Good."
"They should run first in the Democrat anyway, dammit." Julia continued stroking the dog. People who drove one-handed usually made Barbie nervous, but not tonight. They had both Little Bitch and 119 to themselves. "Also, I understand that sometimes the greater good is more important than a great story. Unlike the New York Times. "
"Zing," Barbie said.
"And if you find the generator, I won't have to spend too many days shopping at Food City. I hate that place." She looked startled. "Do you think it'll even be open tomorrow?"
"I'd say yes. People can be slow to catch up with the new deal when the old deal changes."
"I think I better do a little Sunday shopping," she said thoughtfully.
"When you do, say hello to Rose Twitchell. She'll probably have the faithful Anson Wheeler with her." Remembering his earlier advice to Rose, he laughed and said, "Meat, meat, meat."
"Beg your pardon?"
"If you have a generator at your house--"
"Of course I do, I live over the newspaper. Not a house; a very nice apartment. The generator was a tax deduction." She said this proudly.
"Then buy meat. Meat and canned goods, canned goods and meat."
She thought about it. Downtown was just ahead now. There were far fewer lights than usual, but still plenty. For how long? Barbie wondered. Then Julia asked, "Did your Colonel give you any ideas about how to find this generator?"
"Nope," Barbie said. "Finding shit used to be my job. He knows that." He paused, then asked: "Do you think there might be a Geiger counter in town?"
"I know there is. In the basement of the Town Hall. Actually the subbasement, I guess you'd say. There's a fallout shelter there."
"You're shittin me!"
She laughed. "No shit, Sherlock. I did a feature story on it three years ago. Pete Freeman took the pictures. In the basement there's a big conference room and a little kitchen. The shelter's half a flight of stairs down from the kitchen. Pretty good-sized. It was built in the fifties, when the smart money was on us blowing ourselves to hell."
"On the Beach," Barbie said.
"Yep, see you that and raise you Alas, Babylon. It's a pretty depressing place. Pete's pictures reminded me of the Fuhrerbunker, just before the end. There's a kind of pantry--shelves and shelves of canned goods--and half a dozen cots. Also some equipment supplied by the government. Including a Geiger counter."
"The canned stuff must be extremely tasty after fifty years."
"Actually, they rotate in new goods every so often. There's even a small generator that went in after nine-eleven. Check the Town Report and you'll see an appropriation item for the shelter every four years or so. Used to be three hundred dollars. Now it's six hundred. You've got your Geiger counter." She shifted her eyes to him briefly. "Of course, James Rennie sees all things Town Hall, from the attic to the fallout shelter, as his personal property, so he'll want to know why you want it."
"Big Jim Rennie isn't going to know," he said.
She accepted this without comment. "Would you like to come back to the office with me? Watch the President's speech while I start comping the paper? It'll be a quick and dirty job, I can tell you that. One story, half a dozen pictures for local consumption, no Burpee's Autumn Sales Days circular."
Barbie considered it. He was going to be busy tomorrow, not just cooking but asking questions. Starting the old job all over again, in the old way. On the other hand, if he went back to his place over the drugstore, would he be able to sleep?
"Okay. And I probably shouldn't be telling you this, but I have excellent office-boy skills. I also make a mean cup of coffee."
"Mister, you are on." She raised her right hand off the wheel and Barbie slapped her five.
"Can I ask you one more question? Strictly not for publication?"
"Sure," he said.
"This sci-fi generator. Do you think you'll find it?"
Barbie thought it over as she pulled in beside the storefront that housed the Democrat 's offices.
"No," he said at last. "That would be too easy."
She sighed and nodded. Then she grasped his fingers. "Would it help, do you think, if I prayed for your success?"
"Couldn't hurt," Barbie said.
4
There were only two churches in Chester's Mill on Dome Day; both purveyed the Protestant brand of goods (although in very different ways). Catholics went to Our Lady of Serene Waters in Motton, and the town's dozen or so Jews attended Congregation Beth Shalom in Castle Rock when they felt in need of spiritual consolation. Once there had been a Unitarian church, but it had died of neglect in the late eighties. Everyone agreed it had been sort of hippydippy, anyway. The building now housed Mill New & Used Books.
Both Chester's Mill pastors were what Big Jim Rennie liked to call "kneebound" that night, but their modes of address, states of mind, and expectations were very different.
The Reverend Piper Libby, who ministered to her flock from the pulpit of the First Congregational Church, no longer believed in God, although this was a fact she had not shared with her congregants. Lester Coggins, on the other hand, believed to the point of martyrdom or madness (both words for the same thing, perhaps).
The Rev. Libby, still wearing her Saturday grubs--and still pretty enough, even at forty-five, to look good in them--knelt in front of the altar in almost total darkness (the Congo had no generator), with Clover, her German shepherd, lying behind her with his nose on his paws and his eyes at half-mast.
"Hello, Not-There," Piper said. Not-There was her private name for God just lately. Earlier in the fall it had been The Great Maybe. During the summer, it had been The Omnipotent Could-Be. She'd liked that one; it had a certain ring. "You know the situation I've been in--You should, I've bent Your ear about it enough--but that's not what I'm here to talk about tonight. Which is probably a relief to You."
She sighed.
"We're in a mess here, my Friend. I hope You understand it, because I sure don't. But we both know this place is going to be full of people tomorrow, looking for heavenly disaster assistance."
It was quiet inside the church, and quiet outside. "Too quiet," as they said in the old movies. Had she ever heard The Mill this quiet on a Saturday night? There was no traffic, and the bass thump of whatever weekend band happened to be playing at Dipper's (always advertised as being DIRECT FROM BOSTON!) was absent.
"I'm not going to ask that You show me Your will, because I'm no longer convinced You actually have a will. But on the off chance that You are there after all--always a possibility, I'm more than happy to admit that--please help me to say something helpful. Hope not in heaven, but right here on earth. Because ..." She was not surprised to find that she had started to cry. She bawled so often now, although always in private. New Englanders strongly disapproved of public tears from ministers and politicians.
Clover, sensing her distress, whined. Piper told him to hush, then turned back to the altar. She often thought of the cross there as the religious version of the Chevrolet Bowtie, a logo that had come into being for no other reason than because some guy saw it on the wallpaper of a Paris hotel room a hundred years ago and liked it. If you saw such symbols as divine, you were probably a lunatic.
Nevertheless, she persevered.
"Because, as I'm sure You know, Earth is what we have. What we're sure of. I want to help my people. That's my job, and I still want to do it. Assuming You're there, and that You care--shaky assumptions, I admit--then please help me. Amen."
She stood up. She had no flashlight, but anticipated no trouble finding her way outside with unbarked shins. She knew this place step for step and obstacle for obstacle. Loved it, too. She didn't fool herself about either her lack of faith or her stubborn love of the idea itself.
"Come on, Clove," she said. "President in half an hour. The other Great Not-There. We can listen on the car radio."
Clover followed placidly, untroubled by questions of faith.
5
Out on Little Bitch Road (always referred to as Number Three by Holy Redeemer worshippers), a far more dynamic scene was taking place, and under bright electric lights. Lester Coggins's house of worship possessed a generator new enough for the shipping tags still to be pasted on its bright orange side. It had its own shed, also painted orange, next to the storage barn behind the church.
Lester was a man of fifty so well maintained--by genetics as well as his own strenuous efforts to take care of the temple of his body--that he looked no more than thirty-five (judicious applications of Just For Men helped in this regard). He wore nothing tonight but a pair of gym shorts with ORAL ROBERTS GOLDEN EAGLES printed on the right leg, and almost every muscle on his body stood out.
During services (of which there were five each week), Lester prayed in an ecstatic televangelist tremolo, turning the Big Fellow's name into something that sounded as if it could have come from an overamped wah-wah pedal: not God but GUH-UH-UH-ODD! In his private prayers, he sometimes fell into these same cadences without realizing it. But when he was deeply troubled, when he really needed to take counsel with the God of Moses and Abraham, He who traveled as a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, Lester held up his end of the conversation in a deep growl that made him sound like a dog on the verge of attacking an intruder. He wasn't aware of this because there was no one in his life to hear him pray. Piper Libby was a widow who had lost her husband and both young sons in an accident three years before; Lester Coggins was a lifelong bachelor who as an adolescent had suffered nightmares of masturbating and looking up to see Mary Magdalene standing in his bedroom doorway.
The church was almost as new as the generator, and constructed of expensive red maple. It was also plain to the point of starkness. Behind Lester's bare back stretched a triple rank of pews beneath a beamed ceiling. Ahead of him was the pulpit: nothing but a lectern with a Bible on it and a large redwood cross hanging on a drape of royal purple. The choir loft was above and to the right, with musical instruments--including the Stratocaster Lester himself sometimes played--clustered at one end.
"God hear my prayer," Lester said in his growly I'm-really-praying voice. In one hand he held a heavy length of rope that had been knotted twelve times, one knot for each disciple. The ninth knot--the one signifying Judas--had been painted black. "God hear my prayer, I ask it in the name of the crucified and risen Jesus."
He began to whip himself across the back with the rope, first over the left shoulder and then over the right, his arm rising and flexing smoothly. His not inconsiderable biceps and delts began to pop a sweat. When it struck his already well-scarred skin, the knotted rope made a carpet-beater sound. He had done this many times before, but never with such force.
"God hear my prayer ! God hear my prayer! God hear my prayer! God hear my prayer!"
Whack and whack and whack and whack. The sting like fire, like nettles. Sinking in along the turnpikes and byroads of his miserable human nerves. Both terrible and terribly satisfying.
"Lord, we have sinned in this town, and I am chief among sinners. I listened to Jim Rennie and believed his lies. Yea, I believed, and here is the price, and it is now as it was of old. It's not just the one that pays for the sin of one, but the many. You are slow to anger, but when it comes, Your anger is like the storms that sweep a field of wheat, laying low not just one stalk or a score but every one. I have sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind, not just for one but for many."
There were other sins and other sinners in The Mill--he knew that, he was not naive, they swore and danced and sexed and took drugs he knew far too much about--and they no doubt deserved to be punished, to be scourged, but that was true of every town, surely, and this was the only one that had been singled out for this terrible act of God.
And yet ... and yet ... was it possible that this strange curse was not because of his sin? Yes. Possible. Although not likely.
"Lord, I need to know what to do. I'm at the crossroads. If it's Your will that I should stand in this pulpit tomorrow morning and co
nfess to what that man talked me into--the sins we participated in together, the sins I have participated in alone--then I will do so. But that would mean the end of my ministry, and it's hard for me to believe that's Your will at such a crucial time. If it's Your will that I should wait ... wait and see what happens next ... wait and pray with my flock that this burden should be lifted ... then I'll do that. Your will be done, Lord. Now and always."
He paused in his scourging (he could feel warm and comforting trickles running down his bare back; several of the rope knots had begun to turn red) and turned his tearstained face up toward the beamed roof.
"Because these folks need me, Lord. You know they do, now more than ever. So ... if it's Your will that this cup should be removed from my lips ... please give me a sign."
He waited. And behold, the Lord God said unto Lester Coggins, "I will shew you a sign. Goest thou to thy Bible, even as you did as a child after those nasty dreams of yours."
"This minute," Lester said. "This second. "
He hung the knotted rope around his neck, where it printed a blood horseshoe on his chest and shoulders, then mounted to the pulpit with more blood trickling down the hollow of his spine and dampening the elastic waistband of his shorts.
He stood at the pulpit as if to preach (although never in his worst nightmares had he dreamed of preaching in such scant garb), closed the Bible lying open there, then shut his eyes. "Lord, Thy will be done--I ask in the name of Your Son, crucified in shame and risen in glory."
And the Lord said, "Open My Book, and see what you see."
Lester did as instructed (taking care not to open the big Bible too close to the middle--this was an Old Testament job if ever there had been one). He plunged his finger down to the unseen page, then opened his eyes and bent to look. It was the second chapter of Deuteronomy, the twenty-eighth verse. He read:
"The Lord shalt smite thee with madness and blindness and astonishment of the heart."
Astonishment of the heart was probably good, but on the whole this wasn't encouraging. Or clear. Then the Lord spake again, saying: "Don't stop there, Lester."
He read the twenty-ninth verse.
"And thou shalt grope at noonday--"