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
back five minutes later with news Henry finds both incredible and completely unsurprising. One of the patients answered the phone at reception, Pamela says—a young woman who came in early this morning with a broken wrist. She says all the medical personnel is gone, and the ambulance is gone, too.
‘Well, that’s just great,’ Henry says. ‘I hope your first aid skills are up to snuff, Pammie, because you may have to use them.’
‘I can give CPR,’ she says.
‘Good.’ He points to Joe Boxer, the Eggo-loving dentist. Boxer is wearing a Hue armband and self-importandy waving people to either side of the road (most pay no attention). ‘And if someone gets a toothache, that self-important prick can pull it for them.’
‘If they’ve got the cash to pay’ Pamela says. She has had experience of Joe Boxer, when her wisdom teeth came in. He said something about ‘trading one service for another’ while eying her breasts in a way she didn’t care for at all.
‘I think there’s a Red Sox hat in the back of my car,’ Henry says. ‘If so, would you take it over there?’ He points to the woman Ollie has already noticed, the one with the bareheaded baby. ‘Put it on the kid and tell that woman she’s an idiot.’
‘Ill take the hat but I won’t tell her any such thing,’ Pamela says quietly. ‘That’s Mary Lou Costas. She’s seventeen, she’s been married for a year to a trucker who’s almost twice her age, and she’s probably hoping he comes to see her.’
Henry sighs. ‘She’s still an idiot, but I guess at seventeen we all are.’
And still they come. One man appears to have no water, but he is carrying a large boombox that’s blaring WCIK gospel. Two of his friends are unfurling a banner.The words on it are flanked by gigantic, clumsily drawn Q-Tips. PLEASE RES-Q US, the sign reads.
‘This is going to be bad,’ Henry says, and of course he is right, but he has no idea how bad.
The growing crowd waits in the sun. The ones with weak bladders wander into the underbrush west of the road to pee. Most get scratched up before finding relief. One overweight woman (Mabel Alston; she also suffers from what she calls the dia-betties) sprains her ankle and lies there hollering until a couple of men come over and get her on her remaining good foot. Lennie Meechum, the town postmaster (at least until this week, when delivery of the U.S. mail was canceled for the foreseeable future), borrows a cane for her.Then he tells Henry that Mabel needs a ride back to town. Henry says he can’t spare a car. She’ll have to rest in the shade, he says.
Lennie waves his arms at both sides of the road. ‘In case you didn’t notice, it’s cow-pasture on one side and brambles on the other. No shade to speak of
Henry points to the Dinsmore dairy barn.’Plenty of shade there.’
‘It’s a quarter of a mile away!’ Lennie says indignantly.
It’s an eighth of a mile at most, but Henry doesn’t argue. ‘Put her in the front seat of my car.’
‘Awful hot in the sun,’ Lennie says. ‘She’ll need the fac’try air.’
Yes, Henry knows she’ll need the air-conditioning, which means running the motor, which means burning gasoline.There’s no shortage of that right now—assuming they can pump it out of the tanks at the Gas & Grocery, that is—and he supposes they’ll have to worry about later later.
‘Key’s in the ignition,’ he says. ‘Turn it to low cool, do you understand?’
Lennie says he does and heads back to Mabel, but Mabel’s not ready to move, although sweat is pouring down her cheeks and her face is bright red. ‘I didn’t go yet!’ she bawls. ‘I got to go\’
Leo Lamoine, one of the new officers, strolls up to Henry. This is company Henry could do without; Leo has the brain of a turnip. ‘How’d she get out here, sport?’ he asks. Leo Lamoine is the kind of man who calls everyone ‘sport.’
‘I don’t know, but she did,’ Henry says wearily. He’s getting a headache. ‘Round up some women to take her behind my police car and hold her up while she piddles.’
‘Which ones, sport?’
‘Big ones,’ Henry says, and walks away before the sudden strong urge to punch Leo Lamoine in the nose can overpower him.
‘What kind of police force is this?’ a woman asks as she and four others escort Mabel to the rear of unit Three, where Mabel will pee while holding onto the bumper, the others standing in front of her for modesty’s sake.
Thanks to Rennic and Randolph, your fearless leaders, the unprepared kind, Henry would like to reply, but he doesn’t. He knows his mouth got him into trouble the night before, when he spoke in favor of Andrea Grinnell’s being heard. What he says is:’The only one you’ve got.’
To be fair, most people are, like Mabel’s female honor guard, more than willing to help one another. Those who have remembered to bring water share
