'What happened?' she asked. 'I must have fallen asleep. I had a dream, only 1 can't remember what it was. It was bad, though. I know that.'

Joe McClatchey rolled over and pushed himself to his knees.

'Jo-Jo?' Benny asked. He hadn't called his friend Jo-Jo since fourth grade. 'You okay?'

'Yeah. The pumpkins were on fire.'

' What pumpkins?'

Joe shook his head. He couldn't remember. All he knew was that he wanted to grab some shade and drink the rest of his Snapple. Then he thought of the Geiger counter. He fished it out of the ditch and saw with relief that it was still working—they'd built things tough in the twentieth century, it seemed.

He showed Benny the +200 reading, and tried to show Norrie, but she was looking up the slope of Black Ridge to the orchard at the top.

'What's that?' she asked, and pointed.

Joe initially saw nothing. Then a bright purple light flashed out. It was almost too bright to look at. Shortly thereafter, it flashed again. He looked down at his watch, wanting to time the flashes, but his watch had stopped at 4:02.

'I think it's what we were looking for,' he said, getting to his feet. He expected his legs to feel rubbery, but they didn't. Except for being too hot, he felt pretty much okay. 'Now let's get the hell out of here before it makes us sterile, or something.'

'Dude,' Benny said. 'Who wants kids? They might turn out like me.' Nevertheless, he mounted his bike.

They rode back the way they came, not stopping to rest and drink until they were over the bridge and back to Route 119.

SALT

1

The female officers standing by Big Jim's H3 were still talking—Jackie now nervously puffing a cigarette—but they broke off as Julia Shumway stalked past them.

'Julia?' Linda asked hesitantly. 'What did—'

Julia kept on. The last thing she wanted while she was still boiling was to talk to any more representatives of law and order as it now seemed to exist in Chester's Mill. She walked halfway to the Democrat's office before she realized that anger wasn't all she was feeling. It wasn't even most of what she was feeling. She stopped under the awning of Mill New & Used Books (CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE, read the hand-lettered sign in the window), partly to wait for her racing heart to slow, mostly to look inside herself. It didn't take long.

'Mostly I'm just scared,' she said, and jumped a little at the sound of her own voice. She hadn't meant to speak aloud.

Pete Freeman caught up with her. 'Are you all right?'

'Fine.' It was a lie, but it emerged stoutly enough. Of course, she couldn't tell what her face was saying. She reached up and tried to flatten the sleepstack of hair at the back of her head. It went down… then sprang up again. Bed head on top of everything else, she thought. Very nice. The finishing touch.

'I thought Rennie was actually going to have our new Chief arrest you,' Pete said. He was big-eyed and at that moment looked much younger than his thirtysomething years.

'I was hoping.'Julia framed an invisible headline with her hands. 'DEMOCRAT REPORTER SCORES EXCLUSIVE JAILHOUSE INTERVIEW WITH ACCUSED MURDERER.'

'Julia? What's going on here? Aside from the Dome, that is? Did you see all those guys filling out forms? It was kinda scary.'

'I saw it,' Julia said, 'and I intend to write about it. I intend to write about all this. And at town meeting on Thursday night, I don't think I'll be the only one with serious questions for James Rennie.'

She laid a hand on Pete's arm.

'I'm going to see what I can find out about these murders, then I'll write what I have. Plus an editorial as strong as I can make it without rabble-rousing.' She uttered a humorless bark of laughter. 'When it comes to rousing rabble, Jim Rennie's got the home court advantage.'

'I don't understand what you—'

'That's okay, just get busy. I need a couple of minutes to get hold of myself. Then maybe I can figure out who to talk to first. Because there isn't a helluva lot of time, if we're going to go to press tonight.'

'Photocopier,' he said.

'Huh?'

'Go to photocopier tonight.'

She gave him a shaky smile and shooed him on his way. At the door to the newspaper office he looked back. She tossed him a wave to show she was okay, then peered through the dusty window of the bookstore. The downtown movie theater had been shut for half a decade, and the drive-in outside of town was long gone (Rennie's auxiliary car lot stood "where its big screen had once towered over 119), but somehow Ray Towle had kept this dirty little emporium galoriurn crutching along. Part of the window display consisted of self-help books. The rest of the window was heaped with paperbacks featuring fogbound mansions, ladies in distress, and barechested hunks both afoot and on horseback. Several of said hunks were waving swords and appeared to be dressed in just their underpants. GET THE HOTS FOR DARK PLOTS! the sign on this side read.

Dark plots indeed.

If the Dome wasn't bad enough, weird enough, there's the Selectman from Hell.

What worried her the most, she realized—what scared her the most—was how fast this was happening, Rennie had gotten used to being the biggest, meanest rooster in the farmyard, and she would have expected him to try to strengthen his hold on the town eventually—say after a week or a month cut off from the outside world. But this was only three days and change. Suppose Cox and his scientists cracked through the Dome tonight? Suppose it even disappeared on its own? Big Jim would immediately shrink back to his former size, only he'd have egg on his face, too.

'What egg?' she asked herself, still looking in at the DARK PLOTS. 'He'd just say he was doing the best he could under trying circumstances. And they'd believe him.'

That was probably true. But it still didn't explain why the man hadn't waited to make his move.

Because something went wrong and he had to. Also—

'Also, I don't think he's completely sane,' she told the heaped-up paperbacks. 'I don't think he ever was.'

Even if true, how did you explain people 'who still had fully stocked pantries rioting at the local supermarket? It made no sense, unless—

'Unless he instigated it.'

That was ridiculous, the Blue Plate Special at the Paranoid Cafe. Wasn't it? She supposed she could ask some of the people who'd been at Food City what they'd seen, but weren't the murders more important? She was the only real reporter she had, after all, and—