by Stephen King
“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 space-suits. “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 l
ate 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.
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,” Juli
a 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.”