The Mill’s Chief of Police heard neither explosion, though he was outside, raking leaves on the lawn of his Morin Street home. The portable radio was sitting on the hood of his wife’s Honda, playing sacred music on WCIK (call letters standing for Christ Is King and known by the town’s younger denizens as Jesus Radio). Also, his hearing wasn’t what it once had been. At sixty-seven, was anybody’s?
But he heard the first siren when it cut through the day; his ears were attuned to that sound just as a mother’s are to the cries of her children. Howard Perkins even knew which car it was, and who was driving. Only Three and Four still had the old warblers, but Johnny Trent had taken Three over to Castle Rock with the FD, to that damned training exercise. A “controlled burn,” they called it, although what it really amounted to was grown men having fun. So it was car Four, one of their two remaining Dodges, and Henry Morrison would be driving.
He stopped raking and stood, head cocked. The siren started to fade, and he started raking again. Brenda came out on the stoop. Almost everyone in The Mill called him Duke—the nickname a holdover from his high school days, when he had never missed a John Wayne picture down at the Star—but Brenda had quit that soon after they were married in favor of the other nickname. The one he disliked.
“Howie, the power’s out. And there were bangs. ”
Howie. Always Howie. As in Here’s Howie and Howie’s tricks and Howie’s life treating you. He tried to be a Christian about it—hell, he was a Christian about it—but sometimes he wondered if that nickname wasn’t at least partially responsible for the little gadget he now carried around in his chest.

Their outstretched hands did not quite meet, and Barbie again thought of a pane of glass; putting your inside hand up against the hand of some outside friend, the fingers together but not touching.
He pulled his hand back. It was the one he’d used to wipe his bloody nose, and he saw the red shapes of his own fingers hanging on thin air. As he watched, the blood began to bead. Just as it would on glass.
“Holy God, what does it mean?” Sea Dogs whispered.
Barbie had no answer. Before he could say anything, Ernie Calvert tapped him on the back. “I called the cops,” he said. “They’re coming, but no one answers at the Fire Department—I got a recording telling me to call Castle Rock.”
“Okay, do that,” Barbie said. Then another bird dropped about twenty feet away, falling into the farmer’s grazeland and disappearing. Seeing it brought a new idea into Barbie’s mind, possibly sparked by the time he’d spent toting a gun on the other side of the world. “But first, I think you better call the Air National Guard, up in Bangor.”
Ernie gaped at him. “The Guard ?”
“They’re the only ones who can institute a no-fly zone over Chester’s Mill,” Barbie said. “And I think they better do it right away.”

It’s a dream, he told himself. If you keep telling yourself that,
you’ll be able to operate.
The two women on the Motton side had been joined by half a dozen men, also shading their eyes. Cars were now parked on both shoulders. More people were getting out and joining the crowd. The same thing was happening on Barbie’s side. It was as if a couple of dueling flea markets, both full of juicy bargains, had opened up out here: one on the Motton side of the town line, one on the Chester’s Mill side.
The trio from the farm arrived—a farmer and his teenaged sons. The boys were running easily, the farmer redfaced and panting.
“Holy shit!” the older boy said, and his father whapped him backside of the head. The boy didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were bugging. The younger boy reached out his hand, and when the older boy took it, the younger boy started to cry.
“What happened here?” the farmer asked Barbie, pausing to whoop in a big deep breath between happened and here.
Barbie ignored him. He advanced slowly toward Sea Dogs with his right hand held out in a stop gesture. Without speaking, Sea Dogs did the same. As Barbie approached the place where he knew the barrier to be —he had only to look at that peculiar straight-edge of burnt ground—he slowed down. He had already whammed his face; he didn’t want to do it again.

Suddenly he was swept by horripilation. The goosebumps swept up from his ankles all the way to the nape of his neck, where the hairs stirred and tried to lift. His balls tingled like tuning forks, and for a moment there was a sour metallic taste in his mouth.
Five feet away from him—five feet and closing—Sea Dogs’s already wide eyes widened some more. “Did you feel that?”
“Yes,” Barbie said. “But it’s gone now. You?”
“Gone,” Sea Dogs agreed.

Sea Dogs got to his feet, fell down, grasped the log that had almost smashed out his life, and got up
Now cars were coming from both directions—Motton and Chester’s Mill. Three running figures, as yet still small, were cutting across the grazeland from a farmhouse at the other end. Several of the cars were honking their horns, as if that would somehow solve all problems. The first car to arrive on the Motton side pulled over to the shoulder, well back from the burning truck. Two women got out and gawked at the column of smoke and fire, shading their
eyes.

again. He stood swaying and wild-eyed. Barbie started toward him and after twelve steps ran into something that felt like a brick wall. He staggered backward and felt warmth cascade from his nose and over his lips. He wiped away a palmload of blood, looked at it unbelievingly, and then smeared it on his shirt.

7

“Fuck,” Sea Dogs said. He spoke in a small, breathless voice. He approached Barbie through the field, cutting a prudent east-tending diagonal away from the blazing pyre. The trucker might have been overloaded and moving too fast, Barbie thought, but at least he was getting a Viking funeral. “Did you see where that one log landed? I was almost kilt. Squashed like a bug.”
“Do you have a cell phone?” Barbie had to raise his voice to be heard over the furiously burning pulper.
“In my truck,” Sea Dogs said. “I’ll try for it if you want.”
“No, wait,” Barbie said. He realized with sudden relief that all this could be a dream, the irrational kind where riding your bicycle underwater or talking of your sex life in some language you never studied seems normal.
The first person to arrive on his side of the barrier was a chubby guy driving an old GMC pickup. Barbie recognized him from Sweetbriar Rose: Ernie Calvert, the previous manager of Food City, now retired. Ernie was staring at the burning clutter on the road with wide eyes, but he had his cell phone in his hand and was ratchet-jawing into it. Barbie could hardly hear him over the roar of the burning pulp-truck, but he made out “Looks like a bad one” and figured Ernie was talking to the police. Or the fire department. If it was the FD, Barbie hoped it was the one in Castle Rock. There were two engines in the tidy little Chester’s Mill firebarn, but Barbie had an idea that if they showed up here, the most they’d be able to do was douse a grassfire that was going to putter out on its own before much longer. The burning pulp-truck was close, but Barbie didn’t think they’d be able to get to it.

Sea Dogs sprinted for his Toyota, which he’d left parked askew on the highway’s broken white line. The guy behind the wheel of the pulper —maybe high on pills, maybe smoked up on meth, maybe just young, in a big hurry, and feeling immortal—saw him and laid on his horn . He wasn’t slowing.
“Fuck me sideways!” Sea Dogs cried as he threw himself behind the wheel. He keyed the engine and backed the Toyota out of the road with the driver’s door flapping . The little SUV thumped into the ditch with its square nose canted up to the sky. Sea Dogs was out the next moment. He stumbled, landed on one knee, and then took off running into the field.
Barbie, thinking of the plane and the birds—thinking of that weird black smutch that might´ve been the plane’s point of impact—also ran into the grazeland , at first sprinting through low, unenthusiastic flames and sending up puffs of black ash. He saw a man’s sneaker—it was too big to be a woman’s—with the man’s foot still in it.
Pilot, he thought. And then: I have to stop running around like this.
“YOU IDIOT, SLOW DOWN!” Sea Dogs cried at the pulp-truck in a thin, panicky voice, but it was too late for such instructions. Barbie, looking back over his shoulder (helpless not to), thought the pulp-
wrangler might have tried to brake at the last minute.
He probably saw the wreckage of the plane. In any case, it wasn’t enough. He struck the Motton side of the Dome at sixty or a little more, carrying a log-load of almost forty thousand pounds. The cab disintegrated as it stopped cold. The overloaded carrier, a prisoner of physics, continued forward. The fuel tanks were driven under the logs, shredding and sparking. When they exploded, the load was already airborne, flipping over where the cab—now a green metal accordion—had been. The logs sprayed forward and upward, struck the invisible barrier, and rebounded in all directions. Fire and black smoke boiled upward in a thick plume. There was a terrific thud that rolled across the day like a boulder. Then the logs were raining back down on the Motton side, landing on the road and the surrounding fields like enormous jackstraws. One struck the roof of Sea Dogs’s SUV and smashed it flat, spilling the windshield onto the hood in a spray of diamond crumbles. Another landed right in front of Sea Dogs himself.
Barbie stopped running and only stared.

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´ve been grassfires 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 feet 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 fuck !”
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.

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´ve been done with a guillotine blade.

5

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 Dog said.

 At no point did the Motton Road actually run through Motton. It ran just inside the Chester´s Mill town line. Here were new residential homes, in an area that had been called Eastchester since 1975 or so. The owners were thirty - and fortysomethings who comuted to Lewiston-Auburn, where they worked for good wages, mostly in white-collar jobs. All of these homes were in The Mill, but many of their backyards were in Motton. This was the case with Jack and Myra Evans´s home at 379 Motton Road. Myra had a vegetable garden behind their house, and although most of the goodies had been harvested, there were still a few fat Blue Hubbard squashes beyond the remaining (and badly rotted) pumpkins. She was reaching for one of these when the dome came down, and although her knees were in Chester´s Mill, she happened to be reaching for a Blue Hubbard that was growing a foot or so across the Motton line.
She didn´t cry out, because there was no pain - not at first. It was too quick and sharp and clean for that.

Jack Evans was in the kichen, whiping eggs for a noontime frittata. LCD Soundsystem was playing - ´North American Scum´ - and Jack was singing along when a small voice spoke his name from behind him. He didn´t at first recognize the voice as belonging to his wife of fourteen years; it sounded like the voice of a child. But when he turned he saw it was indeed Myra. She was standing inside the doorway, holding her right arm across her middle. She had tracked mud onto the floor, which was very unlike her. Usually she took her garden shoes off on the stoop. Her left hand, clad in a filthy gardening glove, was cradling her right hand, and red stuff was running through the muddy fingers. Ar first he thought Cranberry juice, but only for a second. It was blood. Jack dropped the bowl he´d been holding. It shattered on the floor.

Myra said his name again in that same tiny, trembling child voice.
´what happened? Myra, what happened to you?"
I had an accident", she said, and showed him her right hand. Only there was no muddy right gardenin glove to march the left one, and no right hand. Only a spouting stump. She gave him a weak smile and said ´Whoops.´Her eyes rolled up to whites. The crotch of her gardening jeans darkened as herurine let go. Then her knews  also  let go and she went down. The blood gushing fron her raw wrist and anatomy lesson cutaway - mixed with the eggy bater splattered across the floor. 

When Jack dropped to his knees beside her, a shard from the bowl jabbed deep into his knee. He harly noticed, although he would limp on that leg for the rest of his life. He seized her arm and squeezed. The terrible bloodgush from her wrist slowed bt didn´t stop. He tore his belt free of its loop and noosed it around her lower forearm. That did the job, but he couldn´t notch the belt tight, the loop was far  beyond the buckle.
 Christ,´he told the empty kitchen. ´Christ´.
It was darker than it had been, he realized. The power had gone out. He could hear the computer in the study chiming its distress call. LCD Soundsystem was okey, because the little boom box on the counter was battry-powered. Not that Jack cared any longer; he´d lost his taste for techno.
So much blood. So much.

Questions about how she´d lost her hand left his mind. He had more inmediate concerns. He coudn´t let go of the belt-torniquet to get to the phone; she´d start to bleed again, and she might already be close to bleeding out. She would have to go with him. He tried pulling her by her shirt, but first it yanked out of her pants and then the collar started to choke her - he heard her breatching turn harsh. So he wrapped a hand in her long brown hair and hauled her to the phone caveman style.
It was a cell, and it worked. He dialed 911 and 911 was busy.
´It can´t be!´he shouted to the empty kichen where the light were now out (although from the boombox, the band played on)
´911 canot be fucking busy!
He punched redial.
Busy.
He sat in the kitchen with his back propped up agains the counter, holding the tourniquet as tighly as he could, staring at the blood and the batter on the floor, periodically hitting redial on the phone, always  getting the same stupid dah-dah-dah. Something blew up no too far distan, but he barely head it over the music, which was really cranked and he never heard the Seneca explosion at all). He wanted to turn the music off, but in order to reach the boombox he would have to lift Myura. Lift her on let go of the belt for two or three seconds. He didn´t wan to do either one. So he sat there and ´North American Scaum´gave way to ´Someone Great´and ´Someone Great´gave way to Áll My Friends,´and after a few more songs, finally the CD which was called Sound of Silver, ended.  When it did, when there was silence except for the police sirent in the distance and the endlessly chiming ocmputer closer by, Jack realized that his wife was no longer breathing. 
But I was goint 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 finger again would prove exquisitely painful), the lower right leg of his own pant darkening with blood from his lacerated knew, Jack Evans cradled his wife´s head against his chest and began to weep.

There was a weekly newspaper in Chester´s Mill called the Democrat. Which was misinformation, since ownership and management - both hats worn by the formidable Julia Shumway - was Republican to the core. The masthead looked like this:

THE CHESTER´S MILL DEMOCRAT

Est. 1890

Serving ´The Little Town That Looks Like A Boot!´

But the motto was misinformation, too. Chester´s Mill didn´t look like a boot; it look like a kid´s athletic sock so filthy it was able to stand up on its own. Although touched by the much larger and more properous Clastle Rock to the sothwest (the heel of the sock), The Mill was actually surrounded by four towns larger in area but smaller in population: Motton, to the south and southeast; Harlow to the east and northeast; the unicorporated TR-90 to the north; and Tarkers Mills to the west. Chester´s and Tarker´s were sometimes known as the Twin Mills, and beween them - in the days when central and western Maine textile mills were running full bore - had turned Prestile Stream into a polluted and fishless sump that changed color almost dayly and according to location. In those days you could start out by canoe in Tarker´s  running on green water, and be on bright yellow by the time you crossed out of Chester´s Mill and into Motton. Plus, if you canoe was made of wood, the paint might be gone below the water line.
But the last of those profitable pollution factories had closed in 1979. The weird colors had left the Prestile and the fish had returned, although whether or not they were fit for human consuption remained a matter of debate. (The Democrat voted ´Aye!!)
The town´s population was seasonal. Between Memorial Day and Labor Day, it was close to fifteen thousand. The rest of the year it was just a tad over or under two, depending on the balance of births and deaths at Catherine Russel, which was considered to be the best hospital noth of Lewiston.
If you asked the summer people how many road led in and out of The Mill, most would say there were two: Route 117, which led to Norway - South Paris, and Route 119, which went through downtonwn Castle Rock on its way to Lewiston. 

 

He was standing over her bloody,beshited, and undoubtedly dead body, wondering what to do next, when there was another distant boom from the south. Not a gun; much too big. An explosion. Maybe chuck Thompson´s fancy little airplane had crashed after all. It wasn´t impossible, on a day when you set out just to shout at someone - read them the riot act a little, no more than that-  and she ended up making you kill her, anything was possible.
A police siren started yowling. Junior was sure it was for him. Someone had looked in the window and seen him choking her. It galvanized  him into action. He started down the hall to the front door, got as far as the towel he´d knocked off her hair with that first slap, then stopped.  They´d come that way, that was just the way they´d come. Pull up out front, those bright new LED flashers sending arrows of pain into the squealling meat of his poor brain - 
He turned around and ran back to the kitchen. He looked down before stepping over Angie´s body, he couln´t help it. I first grade, before steppin over Angie´s body, he and Frank had sometimes pulled her braids and she would stick her tongue out at them and cross her eyes. Now her eyes bulged form their sockets like ancient marbles and her mouth was full of blood

Did I do that? Did I really?
Yes. He had. And even that single fleeting look was enough to explain why. Her fucking teeth. Those humungous choppers.
A second siren joined the first, then a third. But they were going away. Thank Christ, they were going away. They were heading south down Main Street, toward those booming sounds.

Nevertheless, Junior did not slow down. He skulked across the McCains´ backyard, unaware that he would have screamed guilt about something to anyone who happened to be watching (no one was).
Beyond LaDonna´s tomato plants was a high board fence and a gate. 
There was a padlock, but it was hanging open on the hasp. In his years of growing up and sometimes hanging out here, Junior had never seen it closed.

He opened the gate. Beyond were scrub woods and a path leading down to the muted bable of Prestile Stream. Once, when he was thirteen, Junior had spied Frank and Angie standing on that path and kissing, her arms around his neck, his hand cupping her breast, and understood that childhood was almost over. 
He leaned down and vomited into the running water. The sundappes on the water were malicious, awful. Then his vision cleared enough so he could see the Peace Bridge to his right. The fisherboys were gone, but as he looked, a pair of police cars raced down Town Common Hill.

The town shistle went off. The Town Hall generator had kicked on just as it was supposed to during power failure, Alowing the whistle to bradcast ist hight-decibel disaster message. Junior moaned and covered his ears.

The Peace Bridge was really just a covered pedestrian walkway, now ramshackle and sagging. Its actual name was the Alvin Cheser Pass - Through, but it had become the Peace Bridge in 1969, when some kids (at the time there had been rumors in town about which ones) had painted a big blue peace sign on the side. It was still there, although now faded to a ghost. For the last ten years Peace Bridge had been condemned. Police  DO NOT CROSS tape Xed both ends,  but of course it was still used. Two or three night a week, members of Chief Perkins´s Fuzznuts Brigade would shine their light in there, always at one end or the other, never both. They didn´t want to bust the kid who were drinking and necking, just scare them away. Every year at town meeting, someone would move that Peace Bridge be demolished and someone else would move that it be renovated, and both motions would be tabled. The town had its own secret will, it seemed , and that secret will wanted the Peace Bridge to stay just as it was.

Today, Junior Rennie was glad of that. He shambled along the Prestile´s northern bank until he was beneath the bridge - the police sirens now fading, the town whistle yelling as loud as ever - and climbed up to Strout Lane. He looked both ways, then trotted past the sign reading DEAD END, BRIDGE CLOSED. He ducked under the crisscross of yelow tape, into the shadows. The sun shone through the holey roof, dropping dimes of light on the worn wooden boards underfoot, but after the blaze of that kichen from hell, it was blessdly dark. Pigeons sweettalked in the roofbeams. Beer cans and Allen´s Coffee Flavored Brandey bottles were scattered along the wooden sides.

I will never give away with this.  I don´t know if I left any of me under her nails, can´t remember if she got me or not, but my blood´s there. And my fingerprints. I only have two choices, really: run or turn myself in.

No, there was a third. He could kill himself.
He had to get home. Had to draw all the curtains in his room and turn it into a cave. Take another Imitrex, lie down, maybe sleep a little.  Then he might be able to think. And if they came for him while he was asleep= Why, that would save him the problem of choosing beween Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3.
Junior crossed the town common. When someone - some old guy he only vaguely recognized - grabbed his arm and said, "What  happened, Junior? What´s going on?" Junior only shook his head, brushed the old man´s hand away, and kept going.
Behind him, the town whistle whooped like the end of the world.

The light was killing him, it was frying his howling brains, but he didn´t let it stop him. Too late for that now.
He ran her straight into the Formica-topped kicken table without slowing. It Struck her in the stomach, then slid and slammed into the wall. The sugar bowl and the salt and pepper went flying. Her breath scaped her in a big woofing sound. Holding her around the waist with one hand and by the wet snaggles of her hair with the other, Junior whirled her and threw her against the Coldspot. She struck it with a bang that knocked off most of the fridge magnets. Her face was dazed and paper-pale. Now she was bleeding from her nose as well as her lower lip. The blood was brilliant agains her white skin. He saw her eyes shilft toward the butcher block filled with knives on the counter, and when she tried to rise, he brought his knee into the center of her face, hard.  There was a muffled crunching sound, as if someone had dropped a big piece of china - a platter, maybe - in another room.

It´s what I should´ve done to Dale Barbara, he thought, and stepped back with the heels of his palms pressed against his throbbing temples. Tears from his watering eyes spilled down his cheeks. He had bitten his tongue badly - blood was streaming down his chin and pattering on the floor - but Junios wan´t aware of it. The pain in his head was too intense.


Angie lay facedown among the fridge magnets. The largest said WHAT GOES IN YOUR MOUTH TODAY SHOWS UP ON YOUR ASS TOMORROW. He thought she was out, but all at once she bean to shiver all over. Her fingers trembled as if she were preparing to play something complex on the piano. (Only instrument this bitch ever played is the skinflute, he thought) Then her legs began to crash up and down, and her arms followed suit. Now Angie looked like she was trying  to swim away from him. She was having a goddam seizure.

Will could see the tightness around Gared's mouth, the barely suppressed anger in his eyes under the thick black hood of his cloak. Gared had spent forty years in the Night's Watch, man and boy, and he was not accustomed to being made light of. Yet it was more than that. Under the wounded pride, Will could sens e something else in the older man. You could taste it; a nervous tension that came perilous close to fear. Will shared his unease. He had been four years on the Wall. 

The first time he had been sent beyond, all the old stories had come rushing back, and his bowels had turned to water. He had laughed about it afterward. He was a veteran of a hundred rangings by now, and the endless dark wilderness that the southron called the haunted forest had no more terrors for him. Until tonight. Something was different tonight. There was an edge to this darkness that made his hackles rise. Nine days they had been riding, north and northwest and then north again, farther and farther from the Wall, hard on the track of a band of wildling raiders. Each day had been worse than the day that had come before it. Today was the worst of all. A cold wind was blowing out of the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things. All day, Will had felt as though something were watching him, something cold and implacable that loved him not. Gared had felt it too. Will wanted nothing so much as to ride hellbent for the safety of the Wall, but that was not a feeling to share with your commander. Especially not a commander like this one. Ser Waymar Royce was the youngest son of an ancient house with too many heirs. He was a handsome youth of eighteen, grey-eyed and graceful and slender as a knife. Mounted on his huge black destrier, the knight towered above Will and G ared on their smaller garrons. He wore black leather boots, black woolen pants , black moleskin gloves, and a fine supple coat of gleaming black ringmail over layers of black wool and boiled leather. Ser Waymar had been a Sworn Brother of the Night's Watch for less than half a year, but no one could say he had n ot prepared for his vocation. At least insofar as his wardrobe was concerned. His cloak was his crowning glory; sable, thick and black and soft as sin. "Bet he killed them all himself, he did," Gared told the barracks over wine, "twis ted their little heads off, our mighty warrior." They had all shared the laugh . It is hard to take orders from a man you laughed at in your cups, Will reflect ed as he sat shivering atop his garron. Gared must´ve felt the same. "Mormont said as we should track them, and we did," Gared said.
"They're dead. They shan't trouble us no more. There's hard riding before us. I don't like this weather. If it snows, we could be a fortnight getting back, and snow's the best we can hope for. Ever seen an ice storm, my lord?"

"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them. "The wildlings are dead." "Do the dead frighten you?" Ser Waymar Royce asked with just the hint of a smile. Gared did not rise to the bait. He was an old man, past fifty, and he had seen the lordlings come and go. "Dead is dead," he said. "We have no business with the dead." "Are they dead?" Royce asked softly. "What proof have we?" "Will saw them," Gared said. "If he says they are dead, that's proof enough for me." Will had known they would drag him into the quarrel sooner or later. He wished it had been later rather than sooner. "My mother told me that dead men sing no songs," he put in. "My wet nurse said the same thing, Will," Royce replied. "Never believe anything you hear at a woman's tit. There are things to be learned even from the dead." His voice echoed, too loud in the twilit forest. "We have a long ride before us," Gared pointed out. "Eight days, maybe nine. And night is falling." Ser Waymar Royce glanced at the sky with disinterest. "It does that every day about this time. Are you unmanned by the dark, Gared?"

I went there with him three times a week throughout my childhood, a Monday, Wednesday, Friday early morning ritual with the clockwork regularity of a good front-crawl stroke. I have vivied memories of this dignified old man stripping down to nakedness next to me, his body slowly emerging as he neatly disposed of each item of clothing decency being salvaged at the very end by a slight turning away and a magnificent pair of imported athletic bathing trunks. He stood straight and he was ready. It had an epic simplicity. Swimming instruction, which in time beame swimming pratice, was gruelling but there was the deep pleasure of doing a stroke with increasing ease and speed, over and over, till hypnosis practically, the water tuning rom molten lead to liquid light.

He never got them to go beyond wading up 

He tried to teach my parents to swim, but he never got them to go beyond wading up to their knees at the beach and making ludicrous round motions with their arms, which, if they were practising the breat-stroke, made them look as if they were walking through a jumble, spreading the tall grass ahead of them, or, if it was the front crawl, as if they were running down a hill and flailing their arms so as not to fall. Ravi was just as unenthusiastic.
Mamaji had to wait until I came into the picture to find a willing disciple. The day I came of swimming age, which, to Mother´s ditress, Mamaji Claimed was seven, he brought me down to the beach, spread his arms seaward and said, "This is my gift to you."
"And then he nearly downed you," claimed Mother.
I remained faithful to my aquatic guru. Under his watchful eye I lay on the beach and fluttered my legs and scarthed away at the sand with my hand turning my head at every stroke to breathe. I must have looked like a a child throwing a peculiar, slow-motion tantrum. In the water, as he held me at the surface, I tried my best to swim. It was much more difficult than on land. but Mamaji was patient and encouraging.

When he felt that I had progressed sufficiently, we turned our backs on the laughing and the shouting, the running and the splashing, the blue-green waves and the bubbly surf, and headed for the proper rectangularity and the formal flatness (and the paying admission) of the ashram swimming pool.

And he really might have managed to do that, but then her robe came open and she was naked underneath it. He could see the dark patch of hair over her breedin-farm, her goddam itchy breeding farm that was all the fucking trouble, when you got right down to it those farms were all the fucking trouble in the world, and his head was throbbling, thudding, whamming, smashing, splitting. It felt like it was going to go thermonuclear at any moment. A perfect little mushroom cloud would shoot out of each ear just before everythign exploded above the neck, and Junior Rennie (who didn´t know he had a brain tumor - wheezy old Dr Haskell had never even considered the possibility, not in an otherwise helthy young man headly out of his teens) went crazy. It wasn´t a lucky morning for claudette Sanders or Chuck Thompson; in point of fact, it wasn´t a lucky morning for anyone in Chester´s Mill.
But few were as unlucky as the ex-girlfriend of Frank DeLesseps.

4

She did have two more semi-coherent thoughts as she leaned against the newel post and looked at his bulging eyes and the way he was biting his tongue - biting it so hard his teeth sunk into it.
He´s crazy. I have to call the police before he really hurts me.
She turned to run down the front hall to the kichen, where she would pull the handset off the wall phone, punch 911, and then just start  screaming. She got two steps, then stumbled on the towel she´d wapped around her hair.
He yanked her against his body. He was baking, as if with a high fever. She could feel his heartbeat: quick-quick, running away with itself.

"You lying bitch!" he scremed directly into her ear. It sent a spike of pain dep into her head. she scremed herself, but the sound seemed faint and inconsequential copared to his. then his arms were warppped around  her waist adn she was being propelled down the hall at a manic speed, nothing but her toes touching the carpet. Something wnet through her mind about being the hood ornament on a runaway car, and then they were in the kichen, which was filled with billiant sunshine.
Junior screamed again. This time not with rage but pain.

He didn´t get much into that first one, because he was still in the doorway and there wasn´t much room to swing; he could only draw his arm back to half-cock. He might not have hit her at all (at least not to start with) had she not been flashing a grin - God, those teeth, they´d given him the creeps even in grammar school - and if she hadn´t called him Junior.
Of course eveyone in town called him Junior, he thought of himself as Junior but he hadn´t realized how much he hated it, how much he hoped to die in a maggot pie hated it until he heard it come bolting out from between the spooky tombstone teeth of the bitch who had caused him so much trouble. The sound of it went through his head like the sunglare whe he´d looked up to see the plane.
But as slaps from half-cock go, this one wasn´t bad. She went stumbling backward against the newel post of the stairway and the towel flew off her hair. Wet brown snaggles hung around her cheeks, making her look like Medusa. The smile had been replaced by a look of sunned suprise, and Junior saw a trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth. That was good. That was fine. The bitch deserved to bleed for what she had done. So much trouble, not just for him but for Frankie and Mel and Carter, too.
His mother´s voice in his head: Don´t let yourself get out of control, honey. She was dead and still wouln´t stop giving advice. Teach her a lesson, but make it a little one.

He looked up again, this time squinting his eyes against the hateful light, but the Seneca was gone, and even the buzz of its engine (also aggravating - all sounds were  aggravating when he was getting one of these bitchkitties) was fading. Chuck Thompson with some flyboy or flygirl wannabe. And although Junior had nothing against Chuck - hardly knew him - he wished with sudden, childdish ferocity that Chuck´s pupil would fuck up bigtime and crash the plane.
Preferably in the middle of his father´s car dealership.
Another sickish throb of pain twisted through his head, but he went up the steps to the McCains´ door anyway. This had to be done.This was over-fucking-due. Angie needed a lesson.
But just a little one. Don´t let yourself get out of control
As if summoned, his mother´s voice replied. Her maddeningly complacent voice. Junior was always a bad-tempered boy, but he keeps it under much better control now. Don´t you, Junior?
Well. Gee. He had, anyway. Football had helped. But now there was no football. Now there wasn´t even college. Instead, there were the headaches. And they made him feel like one mean motherfucker.
Don´t let yourself get out of control.
No. But he would talk to her, headache or no headache.
And, as the old saying was, he just might have to talk to her by hand. Who knew? making Angie feel worse might make him feel better.
Junior rang the bell.

2

Angie McCain was just out of the shower. She slipped on a robe, belted it, then wrapped a towel around her wet hair. "coming! she called as she not-quite-trotted down the stairs to the first floor. There was a little smile on her face. It was Frankie, she was quite sure it must be Frankie. Things were finally coming rightside up. the bastardly short-order cook (good-looking but still a bastard) had either left town or was leaving, and her parents were out. combine the two and you got a sign from God that thigns were coming rightside up. She and Frankie could put all the crap in the rearview and get back together.

She knew exactly how to handle it: open the door and then open her robe. Right there in the saturday-morning daylight, where anybody passing might see her. She´d make sure it was Frankie first, of course - she had no intention of flashing fat old Mr Wicker if he´d rung the bell with a package or a registered mail - but it was at least half an hour too early for the mail. 

No, it was Frankie. She was sure. 

She opened the door, the little smile widening to a welcoming grin - perhaps not fortunate, since her teeth were rather crammed together and the size of jumbo chiclets. Once hand was on the tie of he robe. But she did´t pull it. Because it wasn´t Frankie. It was Junior, and he looked so angry -

She had seen his black look before - many time, in fact - but never this black since eighth grade, when Junior broke the Dupree kid´s arm. The little fag had dared to swish his buble-butt onto town common basketball court and ask to play. And she supposed Junior must have had the same thunderstom on his face that night in Dipper´s parking lot, but of course she hadn´t been there, she had only heard about it. Everybody in The Mill had heard about it. She´d been called in to talk to Chief Perkins, that damn Barbie had been there, and evetually that had gotten out, too. 

"Junior? Junior, What - 

Then he slapped her, and thinking pretty much ceased.

The two boys fishing near the Peace Bridge didn´t look up when the plane

flew overhead, but Junior Rennie did. He was a block farther down, on prestile Street, and he recognized the sound. it was Chuck Thompson´s Seneca V. He looked up, saw the plane, then dropped his head fast when the bright sunlight shining through the trees sent a bolt of agony in through his eyes. Another headache. He´d been having a lot of them lately. Sometimes the medication killed them. Sometimes, especially in the last three or four months, it didn´t.

Migraines, Dr Haskell said. All Junior knew was that they hurt like the end of the world, and bright light made them worse, especially when they were hatching. Sometimes he thought of the ants he and Frank DeLesseps had burned up when they were just kids. You used a magnifying glass and focused the sun on them as they crawled in and out of their hill. The result was fricasseed formicants. Only these days, when one of his headches was hatching, his brain was the anthill and his eyes turned into twin magnifiying glasses.

He was forty-five or so, when Dr Haskell said they might let up? Maybe. But this morning a headache wasn´t going to stop him. The sight of Henry McCains´s 4Runner or LaDonna McCain´s Prius in the driveway might have; in that case he might´ve turned around, gone back to his own house, taken another Imitrex, and lain down in his bedroom with the sades drawn and a cool washcloth on his forehead. Possibly feeling the pain start to diminish as the headache derailed, but probably not. Once those black spiders really got a foothold-

His first impulse was to cover the body parts, but there were too many. Now he could see another leg (this one in green slacks) , and a female torso caught in a clump of juniper. He could pull off his shirt and drape it over the woman´s head, but after that? Well, there were two extra shirts in his backpack -

Here came a car from the direction of Motton, the next town to the south. One of the smaller SUVs, and moving fast. Someone had either heard the crash or seen the flash. Help. Thank god for help. Straddling the white line and standing well clear of the fire that was still running down from the sky in that weird water-on-a- windowpane way, Barbie waved his arms over his head, crossing them in big Xs.

The driver honked once in acknowledgment, then slammed on his brakes, laying forty feet of rubber. He was out almost before his little green Toyota had stopped, a big, rangy fellow with long gray hair cascading out from under a Sea Dogs baseball cap. He ran toward the side of the road, meaning to skirt the main firefall.
"What happened?" he cried. "what in the BLUE fu-"
Then he struck something. Hard. There was nothing there, but Barbie saw the guy´s nose snap to the side as it broke. The man rebounded from the nothing, bleeding from the mouth, nose, and forehead. He fell on his back, then struggled to a sitting position. He stared at Barbie with dazed, wondering eyes as blood form his nose and mouth cascaded down the front of his workshirt, and Barbie stared back.

But no. They were coming down. Down the Milkwater. Chett raised his eyes and there it was. The river´s stony banks were bearded by ice, its pale milky waters flowing endlessly down out of the Frostfangs. And now Mance Rayder and his wildlings were flowing down the same way. Thoren Smallwood had returned in a lather three days past. While he was telling the Old Bear what his scouts had seen, his man Kedge Whiteye told the rest of them. "They´re still well up the foothills, but they were coming, "kedge said warming his hands over the fire. "Harma the Dogshead has the van, the poxy bitch. Goady crept up on her camp and saw her plain by the fire. that fool Tumberjon wanted to pick her off  with an arrow, but Smallwood had better sense."

"Third watch," the big man said, through hair and frozen snot. "Me and Softfoot. I remember, Chett." the moon would be black tonight, and they had jiggered the watches so as to have eight of their own standing sentry, with two more guarding the horses. It wasn´t going to get much riper than that. besides, the wildlings could be upon them any day now. Chett meant to be well away from here before that happened. He meant to live.
Three hundred  sworn brothers of the Night´s Watch had ridden north, two hundred from Castle Black and another undred from the Shadow Tower. It was the biggest ranging in livivng memory, near a thrid of the Watch´s strength.  They meant to find Ben Stark, Ser Waymar Royce, and the other rangers who´d gone missing, and discover why the wildlings were leaving their villages. Well, they were no closer to Stark and Royce than when they´d left the Wall but they´d learned where all the wildling had gone - up into the icy heights of the godsforsaken Frosfangs. They could squat up there till the end of time and it wouldn´t prick Chett´s boils none.

"Bugger that Old Bear too," said the Sisterman, a thin man with sharp features and nervous eyes. "Mormont will be dead before daybreak, remember? Who cares what he likes!
Small Paul blinked his black little eyes. Maybe he had forgotten. Chett thought, he was stupid enough to forget most anything. "why do we have to kill the Old Bear? Why don´t we just go off and let him be?
"You think he´ll let us be?" said Lark. "he´ll hunt us down. You want to be hunted, you great muttonhead?"
"No," said Small Paul. "I don´t want that. I don´t."
"So you´ll kill him?" said Lark.
"Yes." The huge man stamped the butt of his spear on the frozen riverbank. "I will. He shouldn´t hunt us."
The sisterman took his hands  from his armpits and turned to Chett. "We need to kill all the officers, I say".
Chet was sick of hearing it. "We been over this. The Old Bear dies, and Blane from the Shadow Tower. Grubs and Aethan as well, their ill luck for drawing the watch , Dywen and Bannen  for their tracking, and Ser Piggy for the ravens. That´s all. We kill them quiet, while they sleep.One scream and we´re wormfood, every one uf us." His boils were red with rage. "just do your bit and see that your cousins do theirs. And Paul, try and remember, it´s third watch, not second."

"Seven hells." He gave the leashes a hard yank to get the dogs´ attention. "Track, you bastards. That´s a bear print. You want some meat or no? Find!"  But the hounds only huddle closer, whining. Chett snapped his short lash above their heads, and the black bitch snarled at him. "Dog meat would taste as good as bear," he warned her, his breath frosting with every word.

Lark the Sisterman stood with his arms crossed over his chest and his hands tucked up into his armpits. He wore black wool gloves, but he was always complaining how his fingers were frozen. "It´s too bloddy cold to hunt," he said. "Bugger his bear, he´s not worth freezing over."
"We can´t go back emptyhand, Lark," Rumbled Small Paul through the brown whiskers that covered most of his face. "The Lord Commander wouldn´t like that." There was ice under the big man´s squashed pug nose, where his snot had frozen. A huge hand in a thick fur glove clenched tight around the shaft of a spear.

The day was grey and bitter cold, and the dog would not take the scent. The big black bitch had taken one sniff at the bear tracks, baked off, and skulked back to the pack with her tail between her legs. The dogs huddled together miserably on the riverbank as the wind snapped at them. Chett felt it too, biting through his layers of black wool and boiled leather. It was too bloody cold for man or beast, but here they were. His mouth twisted, and he could almost feel the boils that covered his cheeks and neck growing red and angry. I should be safe back at the Wall, tending the bloddy ravens and making fires for old Maester Aemon. It was the bastard Jon Snow who had taken that from him, him and his fat friend Sam Tarly. It was their fault he was here, freezing his bloddy balls off with a pack of hounds deep in the haunted forest.

I was named after a swimming pool. Quite peculiar considering my parents never took to water. One of my father´s earliers business contacts was Francis Adirubasamy. He became a good friend of the family. I called him Mamaji, mama being the Tamil word for uncle and ji being a suffix used in India to indicate respect and affection. When he was a young man, long before I was born, mamaji was a champion competitive swimmer, the champion of all South India. He looked the part his whole life. My brother Ravi once told me that when Mamaji was born he didn´t want to give up on breathing water and so the doctor, to save his life, had to take him by the feet and swing him above his head round and round.
"It did the trick!" said Ravi, wildly apinning his hand above his head. "He caughed out water started breathing air, but it forced all his flesh and blood no his upper body. that´s why his chest is so thinck and his legs are so skynny."
I believed him. (Ravi was a merciless teaser. the first time he called Mamaji "Mr. fish" to my face I left a banana peel in his bed.) Even in his sixties when he was a little stooped and a lifetime of counter obstetric gravity had begun to nudge his flesh down wards, Mamaji swam thirty lengths every morning at the pool of the Aurobindo Ashram.

The lamp in the rocks on the side of the hill was little more than a mote of light and after a while they walked back. Everything too wet to make a fire. They ate their poor meal cold and ley down in their bedding with the lamp between them. He´d brought the boy´s book but the boy was too tired for reading. Can we leave the lamp on till I´m asleep? he said. Yes. Of course we can.
He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian. Can i ask you something? he said.
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
And we´re still going south.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay what?
Nothing. Just okay?
Go to sleep.
Okay
I´m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?
Yes. That´s okay.
And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course you can.
What would you do if I died?
If you died I´d want to die too.
So you could be with me?
Yes. So I could be with you.
Okay.
He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried froth again.
Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupposed in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through the trees. He desdended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he cought for a long time.
Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.

They passed through the city at noon of the day folloing. He kept the pistol to hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimaicng at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that. You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you wanna remember and you remember what you wanna forget.

There was a lake a mile from his uncle´s farm where he and his uncle used to go in the fall for firewood. He sat in the back of the rowboat trailing his hand in the cold wake while his uncle bent to the oars. the old man´s feet in their black kid shoes braced against the uprights. His straw hat. His cob pipe in his teeth  and a thin drool swinging from the pipebowl. He turned to take a sight on the far shore, cradling the oarhandles, taking the pipe from his mouth to wipe his chin with the back of his hand. The shore was lined with brichtrees that stood bone pale against the dark of the evergreens beyond. The edge of the lake a riprap of twisted stumps, gray and weathered, the windfall trees of hurricane years past. The trees themselves had long been sawed for firewood and carried away. His uncle turned the boat and shipped the oars and they drifted over the sandry shallows until the transom grated in the sand. 

A dead perch lolling belly up in the clear water. Yellow leaves. They left their shoes on the warm painted boards and dragged the boat up onto the beach and se out the anchor at the end of its rope. A lardean poured with concrete with an eyebolt in the center. They walked along the shore while his uncle studied the treestumps, puffin at his pipe, a manila rope coiled over hsi choulder. He ppicked on out and they turned it over, using the roots for leverage, until they got it half floating in the water. Trousers rolled to the knee but still they got wet. they tied the rope to a cleat at the rear of the boat and rowed back across the lake, kerking the stump slowly beind them. By then it was already evening. Just the slow periodic rack an dshuffle of the oarlock. The lake dark glass and windowlight coming on along the shore. A radio somewhere. Neither of them had spoken a word. This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shapre the days upon.

They bore on south in the days and week to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill counry. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the intersate high way below them through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and growing colder. Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapres of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up an dblowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk. 

They were days fording that couterized terrain. The boy had found some crayons and pinted his facemask with fangs and he trudged on uncomplaining. One of the front wheels of the cart had gone wonky. What to do about it? Nothing. Where all was burnt to ash before them no fire were to be had andthen nights were long and dark and cold beyond anything they´d yet encountered. Cold to crack the stones. To take your life. he held the boy shivering against him and counted each frail breath in the blackness.

He woke to the sound of distant thuder and sat up. The fain light all about, quivering and sourceless, refracted in the rain of driftin soot. He pulled the tarp about them and he lay awake a long time listening. If they got wet there´d be no fires to dry by. If they got wet they would probably die.