Under the Dome

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.”