The fact that accumulating particulate matter has actually changed the color of the stars brings the situation home to people in a new way, and gradually the weeping becomes more widespread. It is a soft sound, almost like rain.
Big Jim is less interested in a bunch of meaningless lights in the sky than he is in how people will interpret those lights. Tonight, he expects they'll just go home. Tomorrow, though, things may be different. And the fear he sees on most faces may not be such a bad thing. Fearful people need strong leaders, and if there's one thing Big Jim Rennie knows he can provide, it's strong leadership.
He's outside the police station doors with Chief Randolph and Andy Sanders. Standing below them, crowded together, are his problem children: Thibodeau, Searles, the Roux chippie, and Junior's friend, Frank. Big Jim descends the steps that Libby fell down earlier (she could have done us all a favor if she'd broken her neck, he thinks) and taps Frankie on the shoulder. "Enjoying the show, Frankie?"
The boy's big scared eyes make him look twelve instead of twenty-two or whatever he is. "What is it, Mr. Rennie? Do you know?"
"Meteor shower. Just God saying hello to His people."
Frank DeLesseps relaxes a little.
"We're going back inside," Big Jim says, jerking his thumb at Randolph and Andy, who are still watching the sky. "We'll talk for a while, then I'll call you four in. I want you all to tell the same cotton-picking story when I do. Have you got that?"
"Yes, Mr. Rennie," Frankie says.
Mel Searles looks at Big Jim, his eyes like saucers and his mouth hanging loose. Big Jim thinks the boy looks like his IQ might reach all the way up to seventy. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, either. "It looks like the end of the world, Mr. Rennie," he says.
"Nonsense. Are you Saved, son?"
"I guess so," Mel says.
"Then you have nothing to worry about." Big Jim surveys them one by one, ending with Carter Thibodeau. "And the way to salvation tonight, young men, is all of you telling the same story."
Not everyone sees the pink stars. Like the Appleton kids, Rusty Everett's Little Js are fast asleep. So is Piper. So is Andrea Grinnell. So is The Chef, sprawled on the dead grass beside what might be America's biggest methamphetamine lab. Ditto Brenda Perkins, who cried herself to sleep on her couch with the VADER printout scattered on the coffee table before her.
The dead also do not see, unless they look from a brighter place than this darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night. Myra Evans, Duke Perkins, Chuck Thompson, and Claudette Sanders are tucked away in the Bowie Funeral Home; Dr. Haskell, Mr. Carty, and Rory Dinsmore are in the morgue of Catherine Russell Hospital; Lester Coggins, Dodee Sanders, and Angie McCain are still hanging out in the McCain pantry. So is Junior. He is between Dodee and Angie, holding their hands. His head aches, but only a little. He thinks he might sleep the night here.
On Motton Road, in Eastchester (not far from the place where the attempt to breach the Dome with an experimental acid compound is even then going on beneath the strange pink sky), Jack Evans, husband of the late Myra, is standing in his backyard with a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and his home protection weapon of choice, a Ruger SR9, in the other. He drinks and watches the pink stars fall. He knows what they are, and he wishes on every one, and he wishes for death, because without Myra, the bottom has dropped out of his life. He might be able to live without her, and he might be able to live like a rat in a glass cage, but he cannot manage both. When the falling meteors become more intermittent--this is around quarter after ten, about forty-five minutes after the shower began--he swallows the last of the Jack, casts the bottle onto the grass, and blows his brains out. He is The Mill's first official suicide.
He will not be the last.
18
Barbie, Julia, and Lissa Jamieson watched silently as the two spacesuited soldiers removed the thin nozzle from the end of the plastic hose. They put it into an opaque plastic bag with a ziplock top, then put the bag into a metal case stenciled with the words HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. They locked it with separate keys, then took off their helmets. They looked tired, hot, and out of spirits.
Two older men--too old to be soldiers--wheeled a complicated-looking piece of equipment away from the site of the acid experiment, which had been performed three times. Barbie guessed the older guys, possibly scientists from NSA, had been doing some sort of spectrographic analysis. Or trying to. The gas masks they had been wearing during the testing procedure were now pushed up on top of their heads like weird hats. Barbie could have asked Cox what the tests were supposed to show, and Cox might even have given him a straight answer, but Barbie was also out of spirits.
Overhead, the last few pink meteoroids were zipping down the sky.
Lissa pointed back toward Eastchester. "I heard something that sounded like a gunshot. Did you?"
"Probably a car backfiring or some kid shooting off a bottle rocket," Julia said. She was also tired and drawn. Once, when it became clear that the experiment--the acid test, so to speak--wasn't going to work, Barbie had caught her wiping her eyes. It hadn't stopped her from taking pictures, with her Kodak, though.
Cox walked toward them, his shadow thrown in two different directions by the lights that had been set up. He gestured to the place where the door-shape had been sprayed on the Dome. "I'd guess this little adventure cost the American taxpayer about three-quarters of a million dollars, and that's not counting the R&D expenses that went into developing the acid compound. Which ate the paint we sprayed on there and did absolutely fuck-all else."
"Language, Colonel," Julia said, with a ghost of her old smile.
"Thank you, Madam Editor," Cox said sourly.
"Did you really think this would work?" Barbie asked.
"No, but I didn't think I'd ever live to see a man on Mars, either, but the Russians say they're going to send a crew of four in 2020."
"Oh, I get it," Julia said. "The Martians got wind of it, and they're pissed."
"If so, they retaliated on the wrong country," Cox said ... and Barbie saw something in his eyes.
"How sure are you, Jim?" he asked softly.
"I beg pardon?"
"That the Dome was put in place by extraterrestrials."
Julia took two steps forward. Her face was pale, her eyes blazing. "Tell us what you know, goddammit!"
Cox raised his hand. "Stop. We don't know anything. There is a theory, however. Yes. Marty, come over here."
One of the older gentlemen who had been running tests approached the Dome. He was holding his gas mask by the strap.
"Your analysis?" Cox asked, and when he saw the older gentle-man's hesitation: "Speak freely."
"Well ..." Marty shrugged. "Trace minerals. Soil and airborne pollutants. Otherwise, nothing. According to spectrographic analysis, that thing isn't there."
"What about the HY-908?" And, to Barbie and the women: "The acid."
"It's gone," Marty said. "The thing that isn't there ate it up."
"Is that possible, according to what you know?"
"No. But the Dome isn't possible, according to what we know."
"And does that lead you to believe that the Dome may be the creation of some life-form with more advanced knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, whatever?" When Marty hesitated again, Cox repeated what he'd said earlier. "Speak freely."
"It's one possibility. It's also possible that some earthly supervillain set it up. A real-world Lex Luthor. Or it could be the work of a renegade country, like North Korea."
"Who hasn't taken credit for it?" Barbie asked skeptically.
"I lean toward extraterrestrial," Marty said. He knocked on the Dome without wincing; he'd already gotten his little shock from it. "So do most of the scientists working on this right now--if we can be said to be working when we're not actually doing anything. It's the Sherlock Rule: When you eliminate the impossible, the answer, no matter how improbable, is what remains."
"Has anyone or anything landed in a flying saucer an
d demanded to be taken to our leader?" Julia asked.
"No," Cox said.
"Would you know if something had?" Barbie asked, and thought: Are we having this discussion? Or am I dreaming it?
"Not necessarily," Cox said, after a brief hesitation.
"It could still be meteorological," Marty said. "Hell, even biological--a living thing. There's a school of thought that this thing is actually some kind of E. coli hybrid."
"Colonel Cox," Julia said quietly, "are we something's experiment? Because that's what I feel like."
Lissa Jamieson, meanwhile, was looking back toward the nice houses of the Eastchester burblet. Most of the lights there were out, either because the people who lived there had no generators or were saving them.
"That was a gunshot," she said. "I'm sure that was a gunshot."
FEELING IT
1
Other than town politics, Big Jim Rennie had only one vice, and that was high school girls' basketball--Lady Wildcats basketball, to be exact. He'd had season tickets ever since 1998, and attended at least a dozen games a year. In 2004, the year the Lady Wildcats won the State Class D championship, he attended all of them. And although the autographs people noticed when they were invited into his home study were inevitably those of Tiger Woods, Dale Earnhardt, and Bill "Spaceman" Lee, the one of which he was proudest--the one he treasured--was Hanna Compton's, the little sophomore point guard who had led the Lady Wildcats to that one and only gold ball.
When you're a season ticket holder, you get to know the other season ticket holders around you, and their reasons for being fans of the game. Many are relatives of the girls who play (and often the spark-plugs of the Booster Club, putting on bake sales and raising money for the increasingly expensive "away" games). Others are basketball purists, who will tell you--with some justification--that the girls' games are just better. Young female players are invested in a team ethic that the boys (who love to run and gun, dunk, and shoot from way downtown) rarely match. The pace is slower, allowing you to see inside the game and enjoy every pick-and-roll or give-and-go. Fans of the girls' game relish the very low scores that boys' basketball fans sneer at, claiming that the girls' game puts a premium on defense and foul shooting, which are the very definition of old-school hoops.
There are also guys who just like to watch long-legged teenage girls run around in short pants.
Big Jim shared all these reasons for enjoying the sport, but his passion sprang from another source entirely, one he never vocalized when discussing the games with his fellow fans. It would not have been politic to do so.
The girls took the sport personally, and that made them better haters.
The boys wanted to win, yes, and sometimes a game could get hot if it was against a traditional rival (in the case of The Mills Wildcats sports teams, the despised Castle Rock Rockets), but mostly with the boys it was about individual accomplishments. Showing off, in other words. And when it was over, it was over.
The girls, on the other hand, loathed losing. They took loss back to the locker room and brooded over it. More importantly, they loathed and hated it as a team. Big Jim often saw that hate rear its head; during a loose ball-brawl deep in the second half with the score tied, he could pick up that No you don't, you little bitch, that ball is MINE vibe. He picked it up and fed on it.
Before 2004, the Lady Wildcats made the state tournament only once in twenty years, that appearance a one-and-done affair against Buckfield. Then had come Hanna Compton. The greatest hater of all time, in Big Jim's opinion.
As the daughter of Dale Compton, a scrawny pulp-cutter from Tarker's Mills who was usually drunk and always argumentative, Hanna had come by her out-of-my-face 'tude naturally enough. As a freshman she had played JV for most of the season; Coach swung her up to varsity only for the last two games, where she'd outscored everyone and left her opposite number from the Richmond Bobcats writhing on the hardwood after a hard but clean defensive play.
When that game was over, Big Jim had collared Coach Woodhead. "If that girl doesn't start next year, you're crazy," he said.
"I'm not crazy," Coach Woodhead had replied.
Hanna had started hot and finished hotter, blazing a trail that Wildcats fans would still be talking about years later (season average: 27.6 points per game). She could spot up and drop a three-pointer any time she wanted, but what Big Jim liked best was to watch her split the defense and drive for the basket, her pug face set in a sneer of concentration, her bright black eyes daring anyone to get in her way, her short ponytail sticking out behind her like a raised middle finger. The Mill's Second Selectman and premier used car dealer had fallen in love.
In the 2004 championship game, the Lady Wildcats had been leading the Rock Rockets by ten when Hanna fouled out. Luckily for the Cats, there was only a buck-sixteen left to play. They ended up winning by a single point. Of their eighty-six total points, Hanna Compton had scored a brain-freezing sixty-three. That spring, her argumentative dad had ended up behind the wheel of a brand-new Cadillac, sold to him at cost-minus-forty-percent by James Rennie, Sr. New cars weren't Big Jim's business, but when he wanted one "off the back of the carrier," he could always get it.
Sitting in Peter Randolph's office, with the last of the pink meteor shower still fading away outside (and his problem children waiting--anxiously, Big Jim hoped--to be summoned and told their fate), Big Jim recalled that fabulous, that outright mythic, basketball game; specifically the first eight minutes of the second half, which had begun with the Lady Wildcats down by nine.
Hanna had taken the game over with the single-minded brutality of Joseph Stalin taking over Russia, her black eyes glittering (and seemingly fixed upon some basketball Nirvana beyond the sight of normal mortals), her face locked in that eternal sneer that said, I'm better than you, I'm the best, get out of my way or I'll run you the fuck down. Everything she threw up during that eight minutes had gone in, including one absurd half-court shot that she launched when her feet tangled together, getting rid of the rock just to keep from being called for traveling.
There were phrases for that sort of run, the most common being in the zone. But the one Big Jim liked was feeling it, as in "She's really feeling it now." As though the game had some divine texture beyond the reach of ordinary players (although sometimes even ordinary players felt it, and were transformed for a brief while into gods and goddesses, every bodily defect seeming to disappear during their transitory divinity), a texture that on special nights could be touched: some rich and marvelous drape such as must adorn the hardwood halls of Valhalla.
Hanna Compton had never played her junior year; the championship game had been her valedictory. That summer, while driving drunk, her father had killed himself, his wife, and all three daughters while driving back to Tarker's Mills from Brownie's, where they had gone for ice cream frappes. The bonus Cadillac had been their coffin.
The multiple-fatality crash had been front-page news in western Maine--Julia Shumway's Democrat published an issue with a black border that week--but Big Jim had not been grief-stricken. Hanna never would have played college ball, he suspected; there the girls were bigger, and she might have been reduced to role-player status. She never would have stood for that. Her hate had to be fed by constant action on the floor. Big Jim understood completely. He sympathized completely. It was the main reason he had never even considered leaving The Mill. In the wider world he might have made more money, but wealth was the short beer of existence. Power was champagne.
Running The Mill was good on ordinary days, but in times of crisis it was better than good. In times like that you could fly on the pure wings of intuition, knowing that you couldn't screw up, absolutely couldn't. You could read the defense even before the defense had coalesced, and you scored every time you got the ball. You were feeling it, and there was no better time for that to happen than in a championship game.
This was his championship game, and everything was breaking his way. He had the sense--the total belief--that
nothing could go wrong during this magical passage; even things that seemed wrong would become opportunities rather than stumbling blocks, like Hanna's desperation half-court shot that had brought the whole Derry Civic Center to its feet, the Mills fans cheering, the Castle Rockers raving in disbelief.
Feeling it. Which was why he wasn't tired, even though he should have been exhausted. Which was why he wasn't worried about Junior, in spite of Junior's reticence and pale watchfulness. Which was why he wasn't worried about Dale Barbara and Barbara's troublesome coterie of friends, most notably the newspaper bitch. Which was why, when Peter Randolph and Andy Sanders looked at him, dumbfounded, Big Jim only smiled. He could afford to smile. He was feeling it.
"Close the supermarket?" Andy asked. "Won't that get a lot of people upset, Big Jim?"
"The supermarket and the Gas and Grocery," Big Jim corrected, still smiling. "Brownie's we don't have to worry about, it's already closed. A good thing, too--it's a dirty little place." Selling dirty little magazines, he did not add.
"Jim, there's still plenty of supplies at Food City," Randolph said. "I spoke to Jack Cale about that just this afternoon. Meat's thin, but everything else is holding up."
"I know that," Big Jim said. "I understand inventory, and Cale does, too. He should; he's Jewish, after all."
"Well ... I'm just saying everything's been orderly so far, because people keep their pantries well stocked." He brightened. "Now, I could see ordering shorter hours at Food City. I think Jack could be talked into that. He's probably already thinking ahead to it."
Big Jim shook his head, still smiling. Here was another example of how things broke your way when you were feeling it. Duke Perkins would have said it was a mistake to put the town under any extra stress, especially after this night's unsettling celestial event. Duke was dead, however, and that was more than convenient; it was divine.