But I was going to make lunch, he thought. A nice lunch, one you wouldn't be ashamed of inviting Martha Stewart to.
Sitting against the counter, still holding the belt (opening his fingers again would prove exquisitely painful), the lower right leg of his own pants darkening with blood from his lacerated knee, Jack Evans cradled his wife's head against his chest and began to weep.
4
Not too far away, on an abandoned woods road not even old Clay Brassey would have remembered, a deer was foraging tender shoots at the edge of Prestile Marsh. Her neck happened to be stretched across the Motton town line, and when the Dome dropped, her head tumbled off. It was severed so neatly that the deed might have been done with a guillotine blade.
We have toured the sock-shape that is Chester's Mill and arrived back at Route 119. And, thanks to the magic of narration, not an instant has passed since the sixtyish fellow from the Toyota slammed face-first into something invisible but very hard and broke his nose. He's sitting up and staring at Dale Barbara in utter bewilderment. A seagull, probably on its daily commute from the tasty buffet at the Motton town dump to the only slightly less tasty one at the Chester's Mill landfill, drops like a stone and thumps down not three feet from the sixtyish fellow's Sea Dogs baseball cap, which he picks up, brushes off, and puts back on.
Both men look up at where the bird came from and see one more incomprehensible thing in a day that will turn out to be full of them.
6
Barbie's first thought was that he was looking at an afterimage from the exploding plane - the way you sometimes see a big blue floating dot after someone triggers a flash camera close to your face. Only this wasn't a dot, it wasn't blue, and instead of floating along when he looked in a different direction - in this case, at his new acquaintance - the smutch hanging in the air stayed exactly where it was.
Sea Dogs was looking up and rubbing his eyes. He seemed to have forgotten about his broken nose, swelling lips, and bleeding forehead. He got to his feet, almost losing his balance because he was craning his neck so severely.
'What's that?' he said. 'What the hell is that, mister?'
A big black smear - candleflame-shaped, if you really used your imagination - discolored the blue sky.
'Is it... a cloud?' Sea Dogs asked. His doubtful tone suggested he already knew it wasn't.
Barbie said, 'I think...' He really didn't want to hear himself say this. 'I think it's where the plane hit.'
'Say what?' Sea Dogs asked, but before Barbie could reply, a good-sized grackle swooped fifty feet overhead. It struck nothing - nothing they could see, at any rate - and dropped not far from the gull.
Sea Dogs said, 'Did you see that?'
Barbie nodded, then pointed to the patch of burning hay to his left. It and the two or three patches on the right side of the road were sending up thick columns of black smoke to join the smoke rising from the pieces of the dismembered Seneca, but the fire wasn't going far; there had been heavy rain the day before, and the hay was still damp. Lucky thing, or there would have been grassf res racing away in both directions.
'Do you see that?' Barbie asked Sea Dogs.
'I'll be dipped in shit,' Sea Dogs said after taking a good long look. The fire had burned a patch of ground about sixty f;et square, moving forward until it was almost opposite the place where Barbie and Sea Dogs were facing one another. And there it spread - west to the edge of the highway, east into some small dairy farmer's four acres of grazeland - not raggedly, not the way grassfires normally advance, with the fire a bit ahead in one place and falling a little behind somewhere else - but as if on a straightedge.
Another gull came flying toward them, this one bound for Motton rather than The Mill.
'Look out,' Sea Dogs said. 'Ware that bird.'
'Maybe it'll be okay,' Barbie said, looking up and shading his eyes. 'Maybe whatever it is only stops them if they're coming from the south.'
'Judging by yonder busted plane, I doubt that,' Sea Dogs said. He spoke in the musing tones of a man who is deeply perplexed.
The outbound gull struck the barrier and fell directly into the largest chunk of the burning plane.
'Stops em both ways,' Sea Dogs said. He spoke in the tone of a man who has gotten confirmation of a strongly held but previously unproved conviction. 'It's some kind of force-field, like in a Star Trick movie.'
'Trek,' Barbie said.
'Huh?'
'Oh shit,' Barbie said. He was looking over Sea Dogs's shoulder.
'Huh?' Sea Dogs looked over his own shoulder. 'Blue - f**k?'
A pulp-truck was coming. A big one, loaded well past the legal weight limit with huge logs. It was also rolling well above the legal limit. Barbie tried to calculate what the stopping-speed on such a behemoth might be and couldn't even guess.