Stephen King - Under the Dome

“What’s that got to do with the stars?”

“As it comes north, the jet passes over a lot of cities and manufacturing towns. What it picks up over those locations is collecting on the Dome instead of being whisked north to Canada and the Arctic. There’s enough of it now to have created a kind of optical filter. I’m sure it’s not dangerous….”

“Not yet, ” Julia said. “What about in a week, or a month? Are you going to hose down our airspace at thirty thousand feet when it starts getting dark in here?”

Before Cox could reply, Lissa Jamieson screamed and pointed into the sky. Then she covered her face.

The pink stars were falling, leaving bright contrails behind them.

“More dope,” Piper said dreamily as Rusty listened to her heartbeat.

Rusty patted Piper’s right hand—the left one was badly scraped.

“No more dope,” he said. “You’re officially stoned.”

“Jesus wants me to have more dope,” she said in that same dreamy voice. “I want to get as high as a mockingbird pie.”

“I believe that’s ‘elephant’s eye,’ but I’ll take it under consideration.”

She sat up. Rusty tried to push her back down, but he dared push on only her right shoulder, and that wasn’t enough. “Will I be able to get out of here tomorrow? I have to see Chief Randolph. Those boys raped Sammy Bushey.”

“And could have killed you,” he said. “Dislocation or not, you fell extremely lucky. Let me worry about Sammy.”

“Those cops are dangerous.” She put her right hand on his wrist. “They can’t go on being police. They’ll hurt someone else.” She licked her lips. “My mouth is so dry.”

“I can fix that, but you’ll have to lie down.”

“Did you take sperm samples from Sammy? Can you match them to the boys? If you can, I’ll hound Peter Randolph until he makes them give DNA samples. I’ll hound him day and night.”

“We’re not equipped for DNA matching,” Rusty said. Also, there are no sperm samples. Because Gina Buffalino washed her up, at Sammy’s own request. “I’ll get you something to drink. All the fridges except for the ones in the lab are turned off to save juice, but there’s an Igloo cooler at the nurses’ station.”

“Juice,” she said, closing her eyes. “Yes, juice would be good. Orange or apple. Not V8. Too salty.”

“Apple,” he said. “You’re on clear liquids tonight.”

Piper whispered: “I miss my dog,” then turned her head away. Rusty thought she’d probably be out by the time he got back with her juice box.

Halfway down the corridor, Twitch rounded the corner from the nurses’ station at a dead run. His eyes were wide and wild. “Come outside, Rusty.”

“As soon as I get Reverend Libby a—”

“No, now. You have to see this.”

Rusty hurried back to room 29 and peeped in. Piper was snoring in a most unladylike way—not unusual, considering her swelled nose.

He followed Twitch down the corridor, almost running to keep up with the other man’s long strides. “What is it?” Meaning, What now?

“I can’t explain, and you probably wouldn’t believe me if I did. You have to see it for yourself.” He banged out through the lobby door.

Standing in the driveway beyond the protective canopy where drop-off patients arrived were Ginny Tomlinson, Gina Buffalino, and Harriet Bigelow, a friend whom Gina had recruited to help out at the hospital. The three of them had their arms around each other, as if for comfort, and were staring up into the sky.

It was filled with blazing pink stars, and many appeared to be falling, leaving long, almost fluorescent trails behind them. A shudder worked up Rusty’s back.

Judy foresaw this, he thought. “The pink stars are falling in lines.” And they were. They were.

It was as if heaven itself was coming down around their ears.

Alice and Aidan Appleton were asleep when the pink stars began falling, but Thurston Marshall and Carolyn Sturges weren’t. They stood in the backyard of the Dumagen house and watched them come down in brilliant pink lines. Some of the lines crisscrossed each other, and when this happened, pink runes seemed to stand out in the sky before fading.

“Is it the end of the world?” Carolyn asked.

“Not at all,” he said. “It’s a meteor swarm. They’re most commonly observed during autumn here in New England. I think it’s too late in the year for the Perseids, so this one’s probably a wandering shower—maybe dust and chunks of rock from an asteroid that broke up a trillion years ago. Think of that, Caro!”

She didn’t want to. “Are meteor showers always pink?”

“No,” he said. “I think it probably looks white on the outside of the Dome, but we’re seeing it through a film of dust and particulate matter. Pollution, in other words. It’s changed the color.”

She thought about that as they watched the silent pink tantrum in the sky. “Thurse, the little boy… Aidan… when he had that fit or whatever it was, he said…”

“I remember what he said. ‘The pink stars are falling, they make lines behind them.’”

“How could he know that?”

Thurston only shook his head.

Carolyn hugged him tighter. At times like this (although there had never been a time exactly like this in her life), she was glad Thurston was old enough to be her father. Right now she wished he was her father.

“How could he know this was coming? How could he know ?”

Aidan had said something else during his moment of prophecy: Everyone is watching. And by nine thirty on that Monday night, when the meteor shower was at its height, that was true.

The news spreads by cell phone and e-mail, but mostly in the old way: mouth to ear. By quarter of ten, Main Street is full of people watching the silent fireworks display. Most are equally silent. A few are crying. Leo Lamoine, a faithful member of the late Reverend Coggins’s Holy Redeemer congregation, shouts it’s the Apocalypse, that he sees the Four Horsemen in the sky, that the Rapture will begin soon, et cetera, et cetera. Sloppy Sam Verdreaux—back on the street again since three that afternoon, sober and grumpy—tells Leo that if Leo doesn’t shut up about the Acrockashit, he’ll be seeing his own stars. Rupe Libby of the CMPD, hand on the butt of his gun, tells them both to shut the hell up and stop scaring people. As if they are not scared already. Willow and Tommy Anderson are in the parking lot of Dipper’s, Willow crying with her head on Tommy’s shoulder. Rose Twitchell stands beside Anson Wheeler outside Sweetbriar Rose; both are still wearing their aprons and they also have their arms around each other. Norrie Calvert and Benny Drake are with their parents, and when Norrie’s hand steals into Benny’s, he takes it with a thrill the falling pink stars cannot match. Jack Cale, the current manager of Food City, is in the supermarket parking lot. Jack called Ernie Calvert, the previous manager, late that afternoon and asked if Ernie would help him do a complete inventory of supplies on hand. They were well into this job, hoping to be done by midnight, when the furor on Main Street broke out. Now they stand side by side, watching the pink stars fall. Stewart and Fernald Bowie are outside their funeral parlor, gazing up. Henry Morrison and Jackie Wettington stand across from the funeral parlor with Chaz Bender, who teaches history up to the high school. “It’s just a meteor shower seen through a haze of pollution,” Chaz tells Jackie and Henry… but he still sounds awed.

The fact that accumulating particulate matter has actually changed the color of the stars brings the situation home to people in a new way, and gradually the weeping becomes more widespread. It is a soft sound, almost like rain.