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pulp-truck, but he made out “Looks like a bad one” and figured Ernie was talking to the police. Or the fire department. If itwas 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.
    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.
    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.”

LOTTA DEAD BIRDS

1

    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.