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.