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
hands spread. He could see drops of mist sparkling on her hair, which was pulled away from her face and bunned at the back. The little rainbow broke up, then re-formed behind her.
‘Nothing but mist!’ she called, sounding rapturous.’All tiat water over there and nothing but mist over here! Like from a humidifier.’
Peter Randolph held up his cell phone and shook hi; head. ‘I get a signal, but I’m not getting through. My guess is that all these spectators’—he swept his arm in a big arc—’have got everything, jammed up.’
Duke didn’t know if that were possible, but it was true that almost everyone he could see was either yakking or taking pictures. Except for Lissa, that was, who was still doing her woodnymph imitation.
‘Go get her,’ Duke told Randolph. ‘Pull her back before she decides to haul out: her crystals or something.’
Randolph’s face suggested that such errands were far below his pay grade, but he went. Duke uttered a laugh. It was short but genuine.
‘What in the goodness sakes do you see that’s worth laughing about?’ Rennie asked. More Castle County cops were pulling up on the Motton side. If Perkins didn’t look out, The Rock would end up taking control of this thing. And getting the gosh-darn credit.
Duke stopped laughing, but he was still smiling. Unabashed. ‘It’s a clustermug,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that your word, Big Jim? And in my experience, sometimes laughing is the only way to dea] with a clustermug.’
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about!’Rennie almost shouted.
The Dinsmore boys stepped back from him and stood beside their father.
‘I know.’ Duke spoke gently. ‘And that’s okay. All you need to understand right now is that I’m the chief law enforcement officer on the scene, at least until the County Sheriff gets here, and you’re, a town selectman. You have no official standing, so I’d like you to move back.’
Duke raised his voice and pointed to where Officer Henry Morrison was stringing yellow tape, stepping around two largeish pieces of airplane fuselage to do it. ‘I’d like everyone to move back and let us do our job! Follow Selectman Rennie. He’s going to lead you behind the yellow tape.’
‘I | don’t appreciate this, Duke,’ Rennie said.
‘God bless you, but I don’t give a shit,’ Duke said. ‘Get off my scene, Big Jim. And be sure to go around the tape. No need for Henry to have to string it twice.’
‘Chief Perkins, I want you to remember how you spoke to me today. Because I will.’
Rennie stalked toward the tape. The other spectators followed, most looking over their shoulders to watch the water spray off the diesel-smudged barrier and form a line of wetness on the road. A couple of the sharper ones (Ernie Calvert, for instance) had already noticed that this line exactly mimicked the border between Motton and The Mill.
Rennie felt a childish temptation to snap Hank Morrison’s carefully strung tape with his chest, but restrained himself. He would not, however, go around and get his Land’s End slacks snagged in a mess of burdocks. They had cost him sixty dollars. He shuffled under, holding up the tape with one hand. His belly made serious ducking impossible.
Behind him, Duke walked slowly toward the place—where Jackie had suffered her collision. He held one hand outstretched before him like a blind man prospecting his way across an unfamiliar room.
Here was where she had fallen down… and here…
He felt the buzzing she had described, but instead of passing, it deepened to searing pain in the hollow of his left shoulder. He had just enough time to remember the last thing Brenda had said—Take care of your pacemaker— and then it exploded in his chest with enough force to blow open his Wildcats sweatshirt, which he’d donned that morning in honor of this afternoon’s game. Blood, scraps of cotton, and bits of flesh struck the barrier.
The crowd aaahed.
Duke tried to speak his wife’s name and failed, but hi; saw her face clearly in his mind. She was smiling. Then, darkness.
4
The kid was Benny Drake, fourteen, and a Razor. The Razors were a small but dedicated skateboarding club, frowned on by the local constabulary but not actually outlawed, in spite of calls from Selectmen Rennie and Sanders for such action (at last March’s town meeting, this same dynamic duo had succeeded in tabling a budget item that would have funded a safe-skateboarding area on the town common behind the bandstand).
The adult was Eric ‘Rusty’ Everett, thirty-seven, a physician’s assistant working with Dr Ron Haskell, whom Rusty often thought of as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Because, Rusty would have explained (if he’d anyone other than his wife he could trust with such disloyalty),
