On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day in Chester’s Mill, Maine, the town is inexplicably and suddenly sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field.
Авторы: King Stephen Edwin
‘Hey! Who’s got a cell phone?’
‘I do, mister,’ a woman said, but before she could say more, they all heard an approaching whup-whup-whup sound. It was a helicopter.
Barbie and Gendron exchanged a stricken glance.
The copter was blue and white, flying low. It was angling toward the pillar of smoke marking the crashed pulp-truck on 119, but the air was perfectly clear, with that almost magnifying effec; that the best days in northern New England seem to have, and Barbie could easily read the big blue 13 on its side. And see the CBS eve logo. It was a news chopper, out of Portland. It must already have been in the area, Barbie thought. And it was a perfect day to get some juicy crash footage for the six o’clock news.
‘Oh, no,’ Gendron moaned, shading his eyes. Then he shouted: ‘Get back, you fools! Get back!’
Barbie chimed in. ‘No! Stop it! Get away!’
It was useless, of course. Even more useless, he was waving his arms in big go-away gestures.
Elsa looked from Gendron to Barbie, bewildered.
The chopper dipped to treetop level and hovered.
‘I think it’s gonna be okay,’ Gendron breathed. ‘The people back there must be waving em off, too. Pilot musta seen—’
But then the chopper swung north, meaning to hook in over Alden Dinsmore’s grazeland for a different view, and it struck the barrier. Barbie saw one of the rotors break off. The helicopter dipped, dropped, and swerved, all at the same time. Then it exploded, showering fresh fire down on the road and fields on the other side of the barrier.
Gendron’s side.
The outside.
7
Junior Rennie crept like a thief into the house where he had grown up. Or a ghost. It was empty, of course; his father would be out at his giant used car lot on Route 119—what Junior’s friend Frank sometimes called the Holy Tabernacle of No Money Down—and for the last four years Francine Rennie had been hanging out nonstop at Pleasant Ridge Cemetery. The town whistle had quit and the police sirens had faded off to the south somewhere. The house was blessedly quiet.
He took two Imitrex, then dropped his clothes and got into the shower. When he emerged, he saw there was blood on his shirt and pants. He couldn’t deal with it now. He kicked the clothes under his bed, drew the shades, crawled into the rack, and drew the covers up over his head, as he had when he was a child afraid of closet-monsters. He lay there shivering, his head gonging like all the bells of hell.
He was dozing when the fire siren went off, jolting him awake. He began to shiver again, but the headache was better. He’d sleep a little, then think about what to do next. Killing himself still seemed by far the best option. Because they’d catch him. He couldn’t even go back and clean up; he wouldn’t have time before Henry or LaDcnna McCain came back from their Saturday errands. He could run—maybe—but not until his head stopped aching. And of course he’d have to put some clothes on. You couldn’t begin life as a fugitive buckytail naked.
On the whole, killing himself would probably be best. Except then the fucking short-order cook would win. And when you really considered the matter, all this was the fucking cook’s fault.
At some point the fire whistle quit. Junior slept with the covers over his head. When he woke up, it was nine p.m. His headache was gone.
And the house was still empty.
CLUSTERMUG
1
When Big Jim Rennie scrunched to a stop in his H3 Alphj Hummer (color: Black Pearl; accessories: you name it), he was a full three minutes ahead of the town cops, which was just the way lie liked it. Keep ahead of the competish, that was Rennie’s motto.
Ernie Calvert was still on the phone, but he raised a hand in a half-assed salute. His hair was in disarray and he looked nearly insane with excitement. Yo, Big Jim, I got through to em!’
‘Through to who?’ Rennie asked, not paying much attention. He was looking at the still-burning pyre of the pulp-truck, and at the wreckage of what was clearly a plane. This was a mess, one that could mean a black eye for the town, especially with the two newest firewagons over in The Rock. A training exercise he hac approved of… but Andy Sanders’s signature was the one on the approval form, because Andy was First Selectman. That was good. Rennie was a great believer in what he called the Protectability Quotient, and being Second Selectman was a prime example of the Quotient in action; you got all of the power (at least when the First was a nit like Sanders), but rarely had to take the blame when things went wrong.
And this was what Rennie—who had given his heart to Jesus at age sixteen and did not use foul language—called ‘a clustermug.’ Steps would have to be taken. Control would
