It was the only thing, she thought. That kind of takes the right and wrong out of it.
She tried to turn the page of her book and her stupid hand struck the Mighty Brite gadget. It went tumbling to the floor. The spot of brilliance it threw went up to the ceiling. Andrea looked at it and was suddenly rising out of herself. And fast. It was like riding an invisible express elevator. She had just a moment to look down and see her body still on the couch, twitching helplessly. Foamy drool was slipping down her chin from her mouth. She saw the wetness spreading around the crotch of her jeans and thought, Yep--I'll have to change again, all right. If I live through this, that is.
Then she passed through the ceiling, through the bedroom above it, through the attic with its dark stacked boxes and retired lamps, and from there out into the night. The Milky Way sprawled above her, but it was wrong. The Milky Way had turned pink.
And then began to fall.
Somewhere--far, far below her--Andrea heard the body she had left behind. It was screaming.
13
Barbie thought he and Julia would discuss what had happened to Piper Libby on their ride out of town, but they were mostly silent, lost in their own thoughts. Neither of them said they were relieved when the unnatural red sunset finally began to fade, but both of them were.
Julia tried the radio once, found nothing but WCIK booming out "All Prayed Up," and snapped it off again.
Barbie spoke only once, this just after they turned off Route 119 and began to drive west along the narrower blacktop of the Motton Road, where woods bulked up close on either side. "Did I do the right thing?"
In Julia's opinion he had done a great many right things during the confrontation in the Chief's office--including the successful treatment of two patients with dislocations--but she knew what he was talking about.
"Yes. It was the exquisitely wrong time to try asserting command."
He agreed, but felt tired and dispirited and not equal to the job he was beginning to see before him. "I'm sure the enemies of Hitler said pretty much the same thing. They said it in nineteen thirty-four, and they were right. In thirty-six, and they were right. Also in thirty-eight. 'The wrong time to challenge him,' they said. And when they realized the right time had finally come, they were protesting in Auschwitz or Buchenwald."
"This is not the same," she said.
"You think not?"
She made no reply to this, but saw his point. Hitler had been a paperhanger, or so the story went; Jim Rennie was a used car dealer. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Up ahead, fingers of brilliance shone through the trees. They printed an intaglio of shadows on the patched tar of Motton Road.
There were a number of military trucks parked on the other side of the Dome--it was Harlow over there at this edge of town--and thirty or forty soldiers moved hither and yon with a purpose. All had gas masks hooked to their belts. A silver tanker-truck bearing the legend EXTREME DANGER KEEP BACK had been backed up until it almost touched a door-size shape that had been spray-painted on the Dome's surface. A plastic hose was clamped to a valve on the back of tanker. Two men were handling the hose, which ended in a wand no bigger than the barrel of a Bic pen. These men were wearing shiny all-over suits and helmets. There were air tanks on their backs.
On the Chester's Mill side, there was only one spectator. Lissa Jamieson, the town librarian, stood beside an old-fashioned ladies' Schwinn with a milk-box carrier on the rear fender. On the back of the box was a sticker reading WHEN THE POWER OF LOVE IS STRONGER THAN THE LOVE OF POWER, THE WORLD WILL KNOW PEACE--JIMI HENDRIX.
"What are you doing here, Lissa?" Julia asked, getting out of her car. She held up a hand to shield her eyes from the bright lights.
Lissa was nervously fiddling with the ankh she wore around her neck on a silver chain. She looked from Julia to Barbie, then back to Julia again. "I go for a ride on my bike when I'm upset or worried. Sometimes I ride until midnight. It soothes my pneuma. I saw the lights and came to the lights." She said this in an incantatory way, and let go of her ankh long enough to trace some kind of complicated symbol in the air. "What are you doing out here?"
"Came to watch an experiment," Barbie said. "If it works, you can be the first one to leave Chester's Mill."
Lissa smiled. It looked a little forced, but Barbie liked her for the effort. "If I did that, I'd miss the Tuesday night special at Sweetbriar. Isn't it usually meatloaf?"
"Meatloaf's the plan," he agreed, not adding that if the Dome was still in place the following Tuesday, the specialite de la maison was apt to be zucchini quiche.
"They won't talk," Lissa said. "I tried."
A squat fireplug of a man came out from behind the tanker and into the light. He was dressed in khakis, a poplin jacket, and a hat with the logo of the Maine Black Bears on it. The first thing to strike Barbie was that James O. Cox had put on weight. The second was his heavy jacket, zipped to what was now dangerously close to a double chin. Nobody else--Barbie, Julia, or Lissa--was wearing a jacket. There was no need of them on their side of the Dome.
Cox saluted. Barbie gave it back, and it actually felt pretty good to snap one off.
"Hello, Barbie," Cox said. "How's Ken?"
"Ken's fine," Barbie said. "And I continue to be the bitch that gets all the good shit."
"Not this time, Colonel," Cox said. "This time it appears you got fucked at the drive-thru."
14
"Who's he?" Lissa whispered. She was still working at the ankh. Julia thought she'd snap the chain soon, if she kept at it. "And what are they doing over there?"
"Trying to get us out," Julia said. "And after the rather spectacular failure earlier in the day, I'd have to say they're wise to do it on the quiet." She started forward. "Hello, Colonel Cox--I'm your favorite newspaper editor. Good evening."
Cox's smile was--to his credit, she thought--only slightly sour. "Ms. Shumway. You're even prettier than I imagined."
"I'll say one thing for you, you're handy with the bullsh--"
Barbie intercepted her three yards from where Cox was standing and took her by the arms.
"What?" she asked.
"The camera." She had almost forgotten she had it around her neck until he pointed to it. "Is it digital?"
"Sure, Pete Freeman's extra." She started to ask why, then got it. "You think the Dome will fry it."
"That'd be the best-case scenario," Barbie said. "Remember what happened to Chief Perkins's pacemaker."
"Shit," she said. "Shit! Maybe I've got my old Kodak in the trunk."
Lissa and Cox were looking at each other with what Barbie thought was equal fascination. "What are you going to do?" she asked. "Is there going to be another bang?"
Cox hesitated. Barbie said, "Might as well come clean, Colonel. If you don't tell her, I will."
Cox sighed. "You insist on total transparency, don't you?"
"Why not? If this thing works, the people of Chester's Mill will be singing your praises. The only reason you're playing em close is force of habit."
"No. It's what my superiors have ordered."
"They're in Washington," Barbie said. "And the press is in Castle Rock, most of em probably watching Girls Gone Wild on pay-per-view. Out here it's just us chickens."
Cox sighed and pointed to the spray-painted door shape. "That's where the men in the protective suits will apply our experimental compound. If we're lucky, the acid will eat through and we'll then be able to knock that piece of the Dome out the way you can knock a piece of glass out of a window after you've used a glass-cutter."
"And if we're unlucky?" Barbie asked. "If the Dome decomposes, giving off some poison gas that kills us all? Is that what the gas masks are for?"
"Actually," Cox said, "the scientists feel it more likely that the acid might start a chemical reaction that would cause the Dome to catch fire." He saw Lissa's stricken expression and added, "They consider both possibilities very remote."
"They can, " Lissa said, twirling her ankh
. "They're not the ones who'd get gassed or roasted."
Cox said, "I understand your concern, ma'am--"
"Melissa," Barbie corrected. It suddenly seemed important to him that Cox understand these were people under the Dome, not just a few thousand anonymous taxpayers. "Melissa Jamieson. Lissa to her friends. She's the town librarian. She's also the middle-school guidance counselor, and teaches yoga classes, I believe."
"I had to give that up," Lissa said with a fretful smile. "Too many other things to do."
"Very nice to make your acquaintance, Ms. Jamieson," Cox said. "Look--this is a chance worth taking."
"If we felt differently, could we stop you?" she asked.
This Cox did not answer directly. "There's no sign that this thing, whatever it is, is weakening or biodegrading. Unless we're able to breach it, we believe you're in for the long haul."
"Do you have any idea what caused it? Any at all?"
"None," Cox said, but his eyes shifted in a way Rusty Everett would have recognized from his conversation with Big Jim.
Barbie thought, Why are you lying? Just that knee-jerk reaction again? Civilians are like mushrooms, keep them in the dark and feed them shit? Probably that was all it was. But it made him nervous.
"It's strong?" Lissa asked. "Your acid--is it strong?"
"The most corrosive in existence, as far as we know," Cox replied, and Lissa took two large steps back.
Cox turned to the men in the spacesuits. "Are you boys about ready?"
They gave him a pair of gloved thumbs-up. Behind them, all activity had stopped. The soldiers stood watching, with their hands on their gas masks.
"Here we go," Cox said. "Barbie, I suggest you escort those two beautiful ladies at least fifty yards back from--"
"Look at the stars, " Julia said. Her voice was soft, awestruck. Her head was tilted upward, and in her wondering face Barbie saw the child she had been thirty years ago.
He looked up and saw the Big Dipper, the Great Bear, Orion. All where they belonged ... except they had smeared out of clear focus and turned pink. The Milky Way had turned into a bubblegum spill across the greater dome of the night.
"Cox," he said. "Do you see that?"
Cox looked up.
"See what? The stars?"
"What do they look like to you?"
"Well ... very bright, of course--no light pollution to speak of in these parts--" Then a thought occurred to him, and he snapped his fingers. "What are you seeing? Have they changed color?"
"They're beautiful," Lissa said. Her eyes were wide and shining. "But scary, too."
"They're pink," Julia said. "What's happening?"
"Nothing," Cox said, but he sounded oddly reluctant.
"What?" Barbie asked. "Spill it." And added, without thinking: "Sir."
"We got the meteorological report at nineteen hundred hours," Cox said. "Special emphasis on winds. Just in case ... well, just in case. Leave it at that. The jet stream's currently coming west as far as Nebraska or Kansas, dipping south, then coming up the Eastern Seaboard. Pretty common pattern for late October."
"What's that got to do with the stars?"
"As it comes north, the jet passes over a lot of cities and manufacturing towns. What it picks up over those locations is collecting on the Dome instead of being whisked north to Canada and the Arctic. There's enough of it now to have created a kind of optical filter. I'm sure it's not dangerous...."
"Not yet, " Julia said. "What about in a week, or a month? Are you going to hose down our airspace at thirty thousand feet when it starts getting dark in here?"
Before Cox could reply, Lissa Jamieson screamed and pointed into the sky. Then she covered her face.
The pink stars were falling, leaving bright contrails behind them.
15
"More dope," Piper said dreamily as Rusty listened to her heartbeat.
Rusty patted Piper's right hand--the left one was badly scraped.
"No more dope," he said. "You're officially stoned."
"Jesus wants me to have more dope," she said in that same dreamy voice. "I want to get as high as a mockingbird pie."
"I believe that's 'elephant's eye,' but I'll take it under consideration."
She sat up. Rusty tried to push her back down, but he dared push on only her right shoulder, and that wasn't enough. "Will I be able to get out of here tomorrow? I have to see Chief Randolph. Those boys raped Sammy Bushey."
"And could have killed you," he said. "Dislocation or not, you fell extremely lucky. Let me worry about Sammy."
"Those cops are dangerous." She put her right hand on his wrist. "They can't go on being police. They'll hurt someone else." She licked her lips. "My mouth is so dry."
"I can fix that, but you'll have to lie down."
"Did you take sperm samples from Sammy? Can you match them to the boys? If you can, I'll hound Peter Randolph until he makes them give DNA samples. I'll hound him day and night."
"We're not equipped for DNA matching," Rusty said. Also, there are no sperm samples. Because Gina Buffalino washed her up, at Sammy's own request. "I'll get you something to drink. All the fridges except for the ones in the lab are turned off to save juice, but there's an Igloo cooler at the nurses' station."
"Juice," she said, closing her eyes. "Yes, juice would be good. Orange or apple. Not V8. Too salty."
"Apple," he said. "You're on clear liquids tonight."
Piper whispered: "I miss my dog," then turned her head away. Rusty thought she'd probably be out by the time he got back with her juice box.
Halfway down the corridor, Twitch rounded the corner from the nurses' station at a dead run. His eyes were wide and wild. "Come outside, Rusty."
"As soon as I get Reverend Libby a--"
"No, now. You have to see this."
Rusty hurried back to room 29 and peeped in. Piper was snoring in a most unladylike way--not unusual, considering her swelled nose.
He followed Twitch down the corridor, almost running to keep up with the other man's long strides. "What is it?" Meaning, What now?
"I can't explain, and you probably wouldn't believe me if I did. You have to see it for yourself." He banged out through the lobby door.
Standing in the driveway beyond the protective canopy where drop-off patients arrived were Ginny Tomlinson, Gina Buffalino, and Harriet Bigelow, a friend whom Gina had recruited to help out at the hospital. The three of them had their arms around each other, as if for comfort, and were staring up into the sky.
It was filled with blazing pink stars, and many appeared to be falling, leaving long, almost fluorescent trails behind them. A shudder worked up Rusty's back.
Judy foresaw this, he thought. "The pink stars are falling in lines." And they were. They were.
It was as if heaven itself was coming down around their ears.
16
Alice and Aidan Appleton were asleep when the pink stars began falling, but Thurston Marshall and Carolyn Sturges weren't. They stood in the backyard of the Dumagen house and watched them come down in brilliant pink lines. Some of the lines crisscrossed each other, and when this happened, pink runes seemed to stand out in the sky before fading.
"Is it the end of the world?" Carolyn asked.
"Not at all," he said. "It's a meteor swarm. They're most commonly observed during autumn here in New England. I think it's too late in the year for the Perseids, so this one's probably a wandering shower--maybe dust and chunks of rock from an asteroid that broke up a trillion years ago. Think of that, Caro!"
She didn't want to. "Are meteor showers always pink?"
"No," he said. "I think it probably looks white on the outside of the Dome, but we're seeing it through a film of dust and particulate matter. Pollution, in other words. It's changed the color."
She thought about that as they watched the silent pink tantrum in the sky. "Thurse, the little boy ... Aidan ... when he had that fit or whatever it was, he said ..."
"I remember what he said. 'The pink stars
are falling, they make lines behind them.'"
"How could he know that?"
Thurston only shook his head.
Carolyn hugged him tighter. At times like this (although there had never been a time exactly like this in her life), she was glad Thurston was old enough to be her father. Right now she wished he was her father.
"How could he know this was coming? How could he know ?"
17
Aidan had said something else during his moment of prophecy: Everyone is watching. And by nine thirty on that Monday night, when the meteor shower was at its height, that was true.
The news spreads by cell phone and e-mail, but mostly in the old way: mouth to ear. By quarter of ten, Main Street is full of people watching the silent fireworks display. Most are equally silent. A few are crying. Leo Lamoine, a faithful member of the late Reverend Coggins's Holy Redeemer congregation, shouts it's the Apocalypse, that he sees the Four Horsemen in the sky, that the Rapture will begin soon, et cetera, et cetera. Sloppy Sam Verdreaux--back on the street again since three that afternoon, sober and grumpy--tells Leo that if Leo doesn't shut up about the Acrockashit, he'll be seeing his own stars. Rupe Libby of the CMPD, hand on the butt of his gun, tells them both to shut the hell up and stop scaring people. As if they are not scared already. Willow and Tommy Anderson are in the parking lot of Dipper's, Willow crying with her head on Tommy's shoulder. Rose Twitchell stands beside Anson Wheeler outside Sweetbriar Rose; both are still wearing their aprons and they also have their arms around each other. Norrie Calvert and Benny Drake are with their parents, and when Norrie's hand steals into Benny's, he takes it with a thrill the falling pink stars cannot match. Jack Cale, the current manager of Food City, is in the supermarket parking lot. Jack called Ernie Calvert, the previous manager, late that afternoon and asked if Ernie would help him do a complete inventory of supplies on hand. They were well into this job, hoping to be done by midnight, when the furor on Main Street broke out. Now they stand side by side, watching the pink stars fall. Stewart and Fernald Bowie are outside their funeral parlor, gazing up. Henry Morrison and Jackie Wettington stand across from the funeral parlor with Chaz Bender, who teaches history up to the high school. "It's just a meteor shower seen through a haze of pollution," Chaz tells Jackie and Henry ... but he still sounds awed.