In the other bed Judy stirred and spoke. 'Mumma? Is it brefkus? Did I miss the bus?'

'She's having a seizure,' Rusty said.

' Well, help her!' Linda cried. 'Do something! Is she dying?'

'No,' Rusty said. The part of his brain that remained analytical knew this was almost certainly just petit mal—as the others must have been, or they would have known about this already, But it was different when it was one of your own.

Judy sat bolt upright in bed, spilling stuffed animals everywhere. Her eyes were wide and terrified, nor was she much comforted when Linda tore the child out of bed and clasped her in her arms.

'Make her stop! Make her stop, Rusty!'

If it was petit mal, it would stop on its own.

Please God let it stop on its own, he thought.

He placed his palms on the sides of Jan's trembling, thrumming head and tried to rotate it upward, wanting to make sure her airway remained clear. At first he wasn't able to—the goddam foam pillow was fighting him. He tossed it on the floor. It struck Audrey on the way dbwn, but she didn't so much as flinch, only maintained her rapt gaze.

Rusty was now able to cock Jannie's head back a little, and he could hear her breathing. It wasn't rapid; there was no harsh tearing for oxygen, either.

'Mommy, what's the matter with Jan-Jan?'Judy asked, beginning to cry 'Is she mad? Is she sick?'

'Not mad and only a little sick.' Rusty was astounded at how calm he sounded. 'Why don't you let Mommy take you down to our—'

'No!' they cried together, in perfect two-part harmony.

'Okay,' he said, 'but you have to be quiet. Don't scare her when she wakes up, because she's apt to be scared already.

'A little scared,' he amended. 'Audi, good girl. That's a very very good girl.'

Such compliments usually sent Audrey into paroxysms of joy, but not tonight. She didn't even wag her tail. Then, suddenly, the golden gave a small woof and lay down, dropping her muzzle onto one paw. Seconds later, Jan's trembling ceased and her eyes closed.

'I'll be damned,' Rusty said.

'What?' Linda was now sitting on the edge of Judy's bed with Judy on her lap.' What?'

'It's over,' Rusty said.

But it wasn't. Not quite. When Jannie opened her eyes again, they were back where they belonged, but they weren't seeing him.

'The Great Pumpkin!' Janelle cried. 'It's the Great Pumpkin's fault! You have to stop the Great Pumpkin!'

Rusty gave her a gentle shake. 'You were having a dream, Jannie. A bad one, I guess. But it's over and you're all right.'

In a moment she still wasn't completely there, although her eyes shifted and he knew she was seeing and hearing him now. 'Stop Halloween, Daddy! You have to stop Halloween!'

'Okay, honey, I will. Halloween's off. Completely.'

She blinked, then raised one hand to brush her clumped and sweaty hair off her forehead. 'What? Why? I was going to be Princess Leia! Does everything have to go wrong with my life?' She began to cry.

Linda came over—Judy scurrying behind and holding onto the skirt of her mother's robe—and took Janelle in her arms. 'You can still be Princess Leia, honeylove, I promise.'

Jan was looking at her parents with puzzlement, suspicion, and growing fright. 'What are you doing in here? And why is she up?' Pointing to Judy.

'You peed in your bed,' Judy said smugly, and when Jan realized—realized and started to cry harder—Rusty felt like smacking Judy a good one. He usually felt like a pretty enlightened parent (especially compared to those he sometimes saw creeping into the Health Center with their arm-broke or eye-blackened children), but not tonight.

'It doesn't matter,' Rusty said, hugging Jan close. 'It wasn't your fault. You had a little problem, but it's over now.'

'Does she have to go to the hospital?' Linda asked.

'Only to the Health Center, and not tonight.Tomorrow morning. I'll get her fixed up with the right medicine then.'

'NO SHOTS.!' Jannie screamed, and began to cry harder than ever. Rusty loved the sound of it. It was a healthy sound. Strong.

'No shots, sweetheart. Pills.'

'Are you sure?' Lin asked.

Rusty looked at their dog, now lying peacefully with her snout on her paw, oblivious of all the drama.

'Audrey's sure,' he said. 'But she ought to sleep in here with the girls for tonight.'

'YayFJudy cried. She fell to her knees and hugged Audi extravagantly.

Rusty put an arm around his wife. She laid her head on his shoulder as if too weary to hold it up any longer.

'Why now?' she asked. 'Why now?'

'I don't know. Just be grateful it was only petit mal.'

On that score, his prayer had been answered.

MADNESS, BLINDNESS, ASTONISHMENT OF THE HEART

1

Scarecrow Joe wasn't up early; he was up late. All night, in fact.

This would be Joseph McClatchey, age thirteen, also known as King of the Geeks and Skeietor, residing at 19 Mill Street. Standing six-two and weighing one-fifty, he was indeed skeletal. And he was a bona fide brain. Joe remained in the eighth grade only because his parents were adamantly opposed to the practice of 'skipping forward.'

Joe didn't mind. His friends (he had a surprising number for a scrawny thirteen-year-old genius) were there. Also, the work was a tit and there were plenty of computers to goof with; in Maine, every middle school kid got one. Some of the better websites were blocked, of course, but it hadn't taken Joe long to conquer such minor annoyances. He was happy to share the information with his homies, two of whom were those dauntless board-benders Norrie Calvert and Benny Drake. (Benny particularly enjoyed surfing the Blondes in White Panties site during his daily library period.) This sharing no doubt explained some of Joe's popularity, bu: not all; kids just thought he was cool. The bumper sticker plastered on his backpack probably came closest to explaining why It read FIGHT THE POWERS THAT BE.

Joe was a straight-A student, a dependable and sometime? brilliant basketball center on the middle school team (varsity as a seventh-grader!), and a foxy-good soccer player. He could tickle the piano keys, and two years previous had won second prize in the annual Town Christmas Talent Competition with a hilariously laid-back dance routine to Gretchen Wilson's 'Redneck Woman.' It had the adults in attendance applauding and screaming with laughter. Lissa Jamieson, the town's head librarian, said he could make a living doing that if he wanted to, but growing up to be Napoleon Dynamite was not Joe's ambition.

'The fix was in,' Sam McClatchey had said, gloomily lingering his son's second-place medal. It was probably true; the winner that year had been Dougie Twitchell, who happened to be the Third Selectman's brother. Twitch had juggled half a dozen Indian clubs while singing 'Moon River.'

Joe didn't care if the fix was in or not. He had lost interest in dancing the way he lost interest in most things once he had to some degree mastered them. Even his love of basketball, which as a fifth-grader he had assumed to be eternal, was fading.

Only his passion for the Internet, that electronic galaxy of endless possibilities, did not seem to pall for him.

His ambition, unexpressed even to his parents, was to become President of the United States. Maybe, he sometimes thought, I'll do the Napoleon Dynamite thing at my inaugural. That shit would he on YouTube for eternity.

Joe spent the entire first night the Dome was in place on the Internet. The McClatcheys had no generator, but Joe's laptop was juiced and ready to go. Also, he had half a dozen spare batteries. He had urged the other seven or eight kids in his informal computer club to also keep spares on hand, and he knew where there were more if they were needed. They might not be; the school had a kickass generator, and he thought he could recharge there with no trouble. Even if Mill Middle went into lockdown, Mr Allnut, the janitor, would no doubt hook him up; Mr Allnut was also a fan of blondesinwhitepanties.com. Not to mention country music downloads, which Scarecrow Joe saw he got for free.

Joe all but wore out his Wi-Fi connection that first night, going from blog to blog with the jitter-jive agility of a toad hopping on hot rocks. Each blog was more dire than the last. The facts were thin, the conspiracy theories lush. Joe agreed with his dad and mom, who called the weirder conspiracy theorists who lived on (and for) the Internet 'the tinfoil-hat folks,' but he was also a believer in the idea that, if you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity.

As Dome Day became Day Two, all the blogs were suggesting the same thing: the pony in this case was not terrorists, invaders from space, or Great Cthulhu, but the good old military-industrial complex. The specifics varied from site to site, but three basic theories ran through all of them. One was that the Dome was some sort of heartless experiment, with the people of Chester's Mill serving as guinea pigs. Another was that it was an experiment that had gone wrong and out of control ('Exactly like in that movie The Mist' one blogger wrote). A third was that it wasn't an experiment at all, but a coldly created pretext to justify war with America's stated enemies. 'And WE'LL WIN!' ToldjaSo87 wrote. 'Because with this new weapon, WHO CAN STAND AGAINST US? My friends, WE HAVE BECOME THE NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS OF NATIONS!!!!'

Joe didn't know which if any of these theories was the truth. He didn't really care.What he cared about was the expressed common denominator, which was the government.