It's because he scares you a little, he thought. That's all it is.

Hoping that how he felt didn't show in his voice or face, Rusty told Rennie about the hospital's missing propane tanks. About how he had found one of them in the supply shed behind the Town Hall, currently running the Town Halls generator. And how it was the only one.

'So I have two questions,' Rusty said. 'How did a tank from the hospital supply wander downtown? And where did the rest go?'

Big Jim rocked back in his chair, put his hands behind his neck, and looked up at the ceiling meditatively. Rusty found himself staring at the trophy baseball sitting on Rennie's desk. Propped in front of it was a note from Bill Lee, once of the Boston Red Sox. He could read the note because it was turned outward. Of course it was. It was for guests to see, and marvel over. Like the pictures on the wall, the baseball proclaimed that Big Jim Rennie had rubbed elbows with Famous People: Look on my autographs, ye mighty, and despair.To Rusty, the baseball and the note turned outward seemed to sum up his bad feelings about the room he was in. It was window-dressing, a tinny testimonial to smalltown prestige and smalltown power.

'I wasn't aware you had anyone's permission to go poking around in our supply shed,' Big Jim remarked to the ceiling. His hammy fingers were still laced together behind his head. 'Perhaps you're a town official, and I wasn't: aware of it? If so, my mistake—my bad, as Junior says. I thought you were basically a nurse with a prescription pad.'

Rusty thought this was mostly technique—Rennie trying to piss him off. To divert him.

'I'm not a town official,' he said, 'but I am a hospital employee. And a taxpayer.'

'So?'

Rusty could feel blood rushing to his face.

'So those things make it partly my supply shed.' He waited to see if Big Jim would respond to this, but the man behind the desk remained impassive. 'Besides, it was unlocked. Which is all beside the point, isn't it? I saw what I saw, and I'd like an explanation. As a hospital employee.'

'And a taxpayer. Don't forget that.'

Rusty sat looking at him, not even nodding.

'I can't give you one,' Rennie said.

Rusty raised his eyebrows. 'Really? I thought you had your fingers on the pulse of this town. Isn't that what you said the last time you ran for Selectman? And now you're telling me you can't explain where the town's propane went? I don't believe it.'

For the first time, Rennie looked nettled. 'I don't care if you believe it or not. This is news to me.' But his eyes darted fractionally to one side as he said it, as if to check that his autographed photo of Tiger Woods was still there; the classic liars' tell.

Rusty said, 'The hospital's almost out of LP. Without it, the few of us who are still on the job might as well be working in a Civil War battlefield surgery tent. Our current patients—including a post-coronary and a serious case of diabetes that may warrant amputation—will be in serious trouble if the power goes out. The possible amp is Jimmy Sirois. His car is in the parking lot. It's got a sticker on the bumper that says ELECT BIG JIM.'

'I'll investigate,' Big Jim said. He spoke with the air of a man conferring a favor. 'The town's propane is probably stored in some other town facility. As for yours, I'm sure I can't say.'

' What other town facilities? There's the FD, and the sand-and-salt pile out on God Creek Road—not even a shed there—but those are the only ones I'm aware of.'

'Mr Everett, I'm a busy man. You'll have to excuse me now.'

Rusty stood. His hands wanted to ball into fists, but he wouldn't let them. 'I'm going to ask you one more time,' he said. 'Straight out and straight up. Do you know where those missing tanks are?'

'No.'This time it was Dale Earnhardt Rennie's eyes flickered to. 'And I'm not going to read any implication into that question, son, because if I did I'd have to resent it. Now why don't you run along and check on Jimmy Sirois? Tell bim Big Jim sends his best, and he'll stop by as soon as the nitpickery slows down a little.'

Rusty was still battling to hold onto his temper, but this was a fight he was losing. 'Run along? I think you forgot that you're a public servant, not a private dictator. For the time being I'm this town's chief medical officer, and I want some an—'

Big Jim's cell rang. He snared it. Listened. The lines around his drawn-down mouth grew grimmer. 'Cyoshdam it! Every time I turn my darn hutk.. .' He listened some more, then said: 'If you've got people with you in the office, Pete, shut your trap before you open it too wide and fall right the heck in. Call Andy. I'll be right there, and the three of us'll clean this ^vp.'

He killed the phone and got to his feet.

'I have to go to the police station. It's either an emergency or more nitpickery, I won't be able to tell which until I get there. And you'll be wanted at either the hospital or the Health Center, I believe. There seems to be a problem with the Reverend Libby.'

'Why? What happened to her?'

Big Jim's cold eyes surveyed him from hard little sockets. 'I'm sure you'll hear her story. I don't know how true it'll be, but I'm sure you'll hear it. So go do your job, young fella, and let me do mine.'

Rusty walked down the front hall and out of the house, his temples throbbing. In the west, the sunset was a lurid bloodshow. The air was almost completely still, but bore a smoky stench just the same. At the foot of the steps, Rusty raised a finger and pointed it at the public servant waiting for him to leave his property before he, Rennie, left himself. Rennie scowled at the finger, but Rusty did not drop it.

'Nobody needs to tell me to do my job. And I'm going to make looking for that propane part of it. If I find it in the wrong place, someone else is going to be doing your job, Selectman Rennie. That's a promise.'

Big Jim flapped a contemptuous hand at him. 'Get out of here, son. Go to work.'

11

During the first fifty-five hours of the Dome's existence, over two dozen children suffered seizures. Some, like those of the Everett girls, were noted. Many more were not, and in the days ahead, the seizure activity would rapidly taper down to nothing. Rusty would compare this to the minor shocks people experienced when they came too close to the Dome. The first time, you got that almost electric frisson that stiffened the hair on the back of your neck; after that, most people felt nothing. It was as if they had been inoculated.

'Are you saying the Dome is like chickenpox?' Linda asked him later. 'Catch it once and you're set for life?'

Janelle had two seizures, and so did a little kid named Norman Sawyer, but in both cases the second seizure was milder than the first, and not accompanied by any babble. Most of the kids Rusty saw had only the one, and there seemed to be no after-effects.

Only two adults had seizures during those first fifty-five hours, Both came around sunset on Monday evening, and both had easily traceable causes.

With Phil Bushey, aka The Chef, the cause was too much of his own product. Around the time Rusty and Big Jim parted company, Chef Bushey was sitting outside the storage barn behind WCIK, looking dreamily at the sunset (this close to the missile strikes, the scarlet in the sky was further darkened by soot on the Dome), his hitty-pipe clasped loosely in one hand. He was tweeked at least to the ionosphere; maybe a hundred miles beyond. In the few low-lying clouds which floated on that bloody light, he saw the faces of his mother, his father, his grandfather; he saw Sammy and Little Walter as well.

All the cloud-faces were bleeding.

When his right foot began to twitch and then his left foot picked up the beat, he ignored it. Twitchin was part of tweekin, everyone knew that. But then his hands began to tremble and his pipe fell into the long grass (yellow and sere as a result of the factory work that went on out here). A moment later his head began to jerk from side to side.

This is it, he thought with a calm that was partly relief. I finally overdid it. I'm checking out. Probably for the best.

But he didn't check out, didn't even pass out. He slid slowly sideways, twitching and watching as a black marble rose in the red sky. It expanded to a bowling ball, then an overinflated beachball. It went on growing until it had eaten up the red sky.

The end of the world, he thought. Probably for the best.

For a moment he thought he was wrong, because the stars came out. Only they were the wrong color. They were pink. And then, oh God, they began to fall down, leaving long pink trails behind them.

Next came fire. A roaring furnace, as if someone had opened a hidden trapdoor and loosed Hell itself on Chester's Mill.

'It's our treat,' he muttered. His pipe pressed against his arm, making a burn he would see and feel later. He lay twitching in the yellow grass with his eyes turned up to glabrous whites that reflected the liirid sunset. 'Our Halloween treat. First the trick… then the treat.'

The fire was becoming a face, an orange version of the bloody ones he'd been looking at in the clouds just before the fit fell on him. It was the face of Jesus. Jestis was scowling at him.

And talking. Talking to him. Telling him that bringing the fire was his responsibility. His. The fire and the… the…

'The purity,' he muttered as he lay in the grass. 'No… the purification.'

Jesus didn't look so mad now. And He was fading. Why? Because The Chef had understood. First came the pink stars; then came the purifying fire; then the trial would end.

The Chef stilled as the seizure passed into the first real sleep he'd had in weeks, perhaps months. When he woke up, it was full dark f- every trace of red gone from the sky. He was chilled to the bonej but not damp.

Under the Dome, dew no longer fell.

12

While The Chef was observing the face of Christ in that evening's infected sunset, Third Selectman Andrea Grinnell was sitting on her couch and trying to read. Her generator had quit—or had it ever run at all? She couldn't remember. But she had a gadget called a Mighty Brite light that her sister Rose had tucked into her Christmas stocking last year. She'd never had occasion to use it until now, but it worked just fine. You clamped it to your book and turned it on. Easy-peasy. So light wasn't a problem. The words, unfortunately, were. The words kept squirming around on the page, sometimes even changing places with each other, and Nora Roberts's prose, ordinarily crystal clear, made absolutely no sense.Yet Andrea kept trying, because she could think of nothing else to do.

The house stank, even with the windows open. She was suffering diarrhea and the toilet would no longer flush. She was hungry but couldn't eat. She had tried a sandwich around five p.m.—just an inoffensive cheese sandwich—and had thrown it up in the kitchen wastebasket minutes after it was down. A shame, because eating that sandwich had been hard work. She was sweating heavily—had already changed her clothes once, probably should change them again, if she could manage to do it—and her feet kept jittering and jerking.

They don't call it kicking the habit for nothing, she thought. And I'll never make the emergency meeting tonight, if Jim still means to have one.

Considering how her last conversation with Big Jim and Andy Sanders had gone, maybe that was good; if she showed up, they'd just bully her some more. Make her do things she didn't want to do. Best she stay away until she was clear of this… this…

'This shit', she said, and brushed her damp hair out of her eyes. 'This fucking shit in my system.'

Once she was herself again, she would stand up to Jim Rennie. It was long overdue. She would do it in spite of her poor aching back, which was such a misery without her OxyContin (but not the white-hot agony she had expected—that was a welcome surprise). Rusty wanted her to take methadone. Methadone, for God's sake! Heroin under an alias!

If you're thinking about going cold turkey, don't, he had told her. You're apt to have seizures.

But he'd said it could take ten days his way, and she didn't think she could wait that long. Not with this awful Dome over the town. Best to get it over with. Having come to this conclusion, she had flushed all of her pills—not just the methadone but a few last OxyContin pills she'd found in the back of her nightstand drawer—down the toilet. That had been just two flushes before the toilet gave up the ghost, and now she sat here shivering and trying to convince herself she'd done the right thing.

It was the only thing, she thought. That kind of takes the right and wrong out oj 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 thp right thing?'

I^i 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 ppetty 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 the 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 pncutna. 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 tthink 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 vised 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 cavised 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 space-suits. 'Are you boys about readv?'

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 Baxbie 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 th^ 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.

Up 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 Tonilinson, 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 often, 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.

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 Pvennie 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, Searies, the Roux chippie, and Juniors 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 Motion 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 space-suited 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, Madarn 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 gentleman'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 iacid.'

'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'