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
Bitch Road instead of down Route 119. The advantage is that she doesn’t have to walk. She takes her Acura (and runs the air-conditioning full blast). Her destination is the cozy little house where Clayton Brassey has spent his declining years. He is her great-great uncle once removed (or some damn thing), and while she isn’t quite sure of either their kinship or degree of separation, she knows he has a generator. If it’s still working, she can watch on TV. She also wants to assure herself that Uncle Clayt’s still okay—or as okay as it’s possible to be when you’re a hundred and five and your brains have turned to Quaker Oatmeal.
He’s not okay. Clayton Brassey has given up the mantle of oldest living town resident. He’s sitting in the living room in his favorite chair with his chipped enamel urinal in his lap and the Boston Post cane leaning against the wall nearby, and he’s cold as a cracker.There’s no sign of Nell Toomey, his great-great granddaughter and chief caregiver; she’s gone out to the Dome with her brother and sister-in-law.
Marta says, ‘Oh, Unc—I’m sorry, but probably it was time.’
She goes into the bedroom, gets a fresh sheet from the closet, and tosses it over the old man. The result makes him look a bit like a covered piece of furniture in an abandoned house. A highboy, perhaps. Marta can hear the gennie putting away out back and thinks what the hell. She turns on the TV, tunes it to CNN, and sits on the couch. What’s unfolding on-screen almost makes her forget she’s keeping company with a corpse.
It’s an aerial shot, taken with a powerful distance lens from a helicopter hovering above the Motton flea market where the visitor buses will park.The early starters inside the Dome have already arrived. Behind them comes the hay. two-lane blacktop filled from side to side and stretching all the way back to Food City. The similarity of the town’s citizens to trekking ants is unmistakable.
Some newscaster is blabbing away, using words like wonderful and amazing. The second time he says I have never seen anything like this, Marta mutes the sound, thinking Nobody has, you dummocks. She is thinking about getting up and seeing what there might be in the kitchen to snack on (maybe that’s wrong with a corpse in the room, but she’s hungry, dammit), when the picture goes to a split screen. On the left half, another helicopter is now tracking the line of buses heading out of Castle Rock, and the super at the bottom of the screen reads VISITORS TO ARRIVE SHORTLY AFTER 10 a.m.
There’s time to fix a little something, after all. Marta finds crackers, peanut butter, and—best of all—three cold bottles of Bud. She takes everything back into the living room on a tray and settles in. ‘Thanks, Unc,’ she says.
Even with the sound off (especially with the sound off), the juxtaposed images are riveting, hypnotic. As the first beer hits her (joyously!), Marta realizes it’s like waiting for an irresistible force to meet an immovable object, and wondering if there will be an explosion when they come together.
Not far from the gathering crowd, on the knoll where he has been digging his father’s grave, Ollie Dinsmore leans on his spade and watches the crowd arrive: two hundred, then four, then eight. Eight hundred at least. He sees a woman with a baby on her back in one of those Papoose carriers, and wonders if she’s insane, bringing a kid that small out in this heat, without even a hat to protect its head. The arriving townsfolk stand in the hazy sun, watching and waiting anxiously for the buses. Ollie thinks what a slow, sad walk they are going to have once the hoopla’s over. All the way back to town in the simmering late-afternoon heat. Then he turns once more to the job at hand.
Behind the growing crowd, on both shoulders of 119, the police—a dozen mostly new officers led by Henry Morrison—park with their flashers throbbing. The last two police cars are late arriving, because Henry ordered them to fill their trunks with containers of water from the spigot at the Fire Department, where, he has discovered, the generator is not only working but looks good to go for another couple of weeks. There’s nowhere near enough water—a foolishly meager amount, in fact, given the size of the crowd—but it’s the best they can do. They’ll save it for the folks who faint in the sun. Henry hopes there won’t be many, but he knows there will be some, and he curses Jim Rennie for the lack of preparation. He knows it’s because Rennie doesn’t give a damn, and to Henry’s mind that makes the negligence worse.
He has ridden out with Pamela Chen, the only one of the new ‘special deputies’ he completely trusts, and when he sees the size of the crowd, he tells her to call the hospital. He wants the ambulance out here, standing by. She comes
