"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.
7
"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 straightedge 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
1
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 ca
ressed 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.
2
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.