It was the boy who answered. He spoke while still examining the headlamp. 'I want my mother. And I want my breffus.'

Frankie joined him. 'Are they real?' Speaking in a voice that said I'm joking, but not really. He reached out and touched the girl's arm.

She jumped a little, and looked at him. 'Mumma didn't come back.' She spoke in a low voice.

'What s your name, hon?'Junior asked.'And who's your mommy?'

'I'm Alice Rachel Appleton,' she said. 'This is Aidan Patrick Appleton. Our mother is Vera Appleton. Our father is Edward Appleton, but he and Mommy got a divorce last year and now he lives in Piano, Texas. We live in Weston, Massachusetts, at Sixteen Oak Way. Our telephone number is—' She recited it with the toneless accuracy of a directory assistance recording.

Junior thought, Oh boy. More Massholes. But it made sense; who else would burn expensive gasoline just to watch the fucking leaves fall off the fucking trees?

Frankie was also kneeling now. 'Alice,' he said, 'listen to me, sweetheart. Where is your mother now?'

'Don't know.'Tears—big clear globes—began to roll down her cheeks. 'We came to see the leaves. Also, we were going to go in the kayak. We like the kayak, don't we, Aide?'

'I'm hungry'Aidan said mournfully, and then he too began to cry.

Seeing them like that made Junior feel like crying himself. He reminded himself he was a cop. Cops didn't cry, at least not on duty. He asked the girl again where her mother was, but it was the little boy who answered.

'She went to get Woops.'

'He means Whoopie Pies,' Alice said. 'But she went to get other stuff, too. Because Mr Killian didn't caretake the cabin like he was supposed to. Mommy said I could take care of Aidan because I'm a big girl now and she'd be right back, she was only going to Yoder's. She just said don't let Aide go near the pond.'

Junior was starting to get the picture. Apparently the woman had expected to find the cabin stocked with food—a few staples, at least—but if she'd known Roger Killian well, she would have known better than to depend on him. The man was a class-A dumbbell, and had passed his less-than-sterling intellect on to his entire brood.Yoder's was a nasty little store just across the Tarker's Mills town line specializing in beer, coffee brandy, and canned spaghetti. Ordinarily it would have been a twenty-minute run there and another twenty back. Only she hadn't come back, and Junior knew why.

'Did she go Saturday morning?' he asked. 'She did, didn't she?'

'I want her!' Aidan cried.'And I want my breffusl My belly hurts!'

'Yes,' the girl said. 'Saturday morning. We were watching cartoons, only now we can't watch anything, because the electricity's broke.'

Junior and Frankie looked at each other. Two nights alone in the dark. The girl maybe nine, the boy about five. Junior didn't like to think about that.

'Did you have anything to eat?' Frankie asked Alice Appleton. 'Sweetheart? Anything at all?'

'There was a onion in the vegetable draw,' she whispered. 'We each had half. With sugar.'

'Oh, fuck,' Frankie said. Then: 'I didn't say that. You didn't hear me say that. Just a second.' He went back to the car, opened the passenger door, and began to rummage in the glove compartment.

'Where were you going, Alice?' Junior asked.

'To town. To look for Mommy and to find something to eat. We were going to walk past the next camp and then cut: through the woods.' She pointed vaguely north. 'I thought that would be quicker.'

Junior smiled, but he was cold inside. She wasn't pointing toward Chester's Mill; she was pointing in the direction of TR-90. At nothing but miles of tangled second-growth and boggy sumps. Plus the Dome, of course. Out there, Alice and Aidan would almost certainly have died of starvation; Hansel and Gretel minus the happy ending.

And we came so close to turning around. Jesus.

Frankie returned. He had a Milky Way. It looked old and squashed, but it was still in the wrapper. The way the children fixed their eyes on it made Junior think of the kids you saw on the news sometimes. That look on American faces was unreal, horrible.

'It's all I could find,' Frankie said, stripping off the wrapper.'We'll get you something better in town.'

He broke the Milky Way in two and gave a piece to each child. The candy was gone in five seconds. When he had finished his piece, the boy stuck his fingers knuckle-deep into his mouth. His cheeks hollowed rhythmically in and out as he sucked them.

Like a dog licking grease off a stick, Junior thought.

He turned to Frankie. 'Never mind waiting until we get back to town. We're gonna stop at the cabin where the old man and the chick were. And whatever they got, these kids are going to get it.'

Frankie nodded and picked up the boy. Junior picked up the little girl. He could smell her sweat, her fear. He stroked her hair as if he could stroke that oily reek away.

'You're all right, honey,' he said. 'You and your brother both. You're all right. You're safe.'

'Do you promise?'

'Yes.'

Her arms tightened around his neck. It was one of the best things Junior had ever felt in his life.

4

The western side of Chester's Mill was the least populated part of town, and by quarter of nine that morning it was almost entirely clear. The only police car left on Little Bitch was Unit 2. Jackie Wettington was driving and Linda Everett was riding shotgun. Chief Perkins, a smalltown cop of the old school, would never have sent two women out together, but of course Chief Perkins was no longer in charge, and the women themselves enjoyed the novelty. Men, especially male cops with their endless yee-haw banter, could be tiring.

'Ready to go back?' Jackie asked. 'Sweetbriar'll be closed, but we might be able to beg a cup of coffee.'

Linda didn't reply. She was thinking about where the Dome cut across Little Bitch. Going out there had been unsettling, and not just because the sentries were still standing with their backs turned, and hadn't budged when she gave them a good morning through the car's roof speaker. It was unsettling because there was now a great big red X spray-painted on the Dome, hanging in midair like a sci-fi hologram. That was the projected point of impact. It seemed impossible that a missile fired from two or three hundred miles away could hit such a small spot, but Rusty had assured her that it could.

'Lin?'

She came back to the here and now.'Sure, I'm ready if you are.'

The radio crackled. 'Unit Two, Unit Two, do you read, over?'

Linda unracked the mike.'Base, this is Two. We hear you, Stacey, but reception out here isn't very good, over?'

'Everybody says the same,' Stacey Moggin replied. 'It's worse near the Dome, better as you get closer to town. But you're still on Little Bitch, right? Over.'

'Yes,' Linda said. 'Just checked the Killians and the Bouchers. Both gone. If that missile busts through, Roger Killian's going to have a lot: of roast chickens, over.'

'We'll have a picnic. Pete wants to talk to you. Chief Randolph, I mean. Over.'

Jackie pulled the cruiser to the side of the road. There was a pause with static crackling in it, then l^andolph came on. He didn't bother with any overs, never had.

'Did you check the church, Unit Two?'

'Holy Redeemer?' Linda asked. 'Over.'

'That's the only one I know out there, Officer Everett. Unless a Hindu mosque grew overnight.'

Linda didn't think Hindus were the ones who worshipped in mosques, but this didn't seem like the right time for corrections. Randolph sounded tired and grouchy. 'Holy Redeemer wasn't in our sector,' she said. 'That one belonged to a couple of the new cops. Thibodeau and Searles, I think. Over.'

'Check it again,' Randolph said, sounding more irritable than ever. 'No one's seen Coggins, and a couple of his parishioners want to canoodle with him, or whatever they call it.'

Jackie put a finger to her temple and mimed shooting herself. Linda, who wanted to get back and check on her kids at Marta Edmunds's house, nodded.

'Roger that, Chief,' Linda said. 'Will do. Over.'

'Check the parsonage, too.' There was a pause. 'Also the radio station. The damn thing keeps bellowing away, so there must be someone there.'

'Will do.' She started to say over and out, then thought of something else. 'Chief, is there anything new on the TV? Has the President said anything? Over?'

'I don't have time to listen to every word that guy drops out of his silly mouth. Just go on and hunt up the padre and tell him to get his butt back here. And get your butts back, too. Out.'

Linda racked the mike and looked at Jackie.

'Get our butts back there?'Jackie said. 'Our buttsT

'He's a butt,' Linda said.

The remark was supposed to be funny, but it fell flat. For a moment they just sat in the idling car, not talking. Then Jackie spoke in a voice that was almost too low to be heard. 'This is so bad.'

'Randolph instead of Perkins, you mean?'

'That, and the new cops.' She gave the last word verbal quotation marks. 'Those kids. You know what? When I was punching in, Henry Morrison told me Randolph hired two more this morning. They came in off the street with Carter Thibodeau and Pete just signed em up, no questions asked.'

Linda knew the sort of guys who hung out with Carter, either at Dipper's or at the Gas & Grocery, where they used the garage to tune up their finance-company motorcycles. 'Two more? Why?'

'Pete told Henry we might need em if that missile doesn't work. "To make sure the situation doesn't get out of hand," he said. And you know who put that idea in his head.'

Linda knew, all right. 'At least they're not carrying guns.'

'A couple are. Not department issue; their personals. By tomorrow—if this doesn't end today, that is—they all will be. And as of this morning Pete's letting them ride together instead of pairing them with real cops. Some training period, huh? Twenty-four hours, give or take. Do you realize those kids now outnumber us?'

Linda considered this silently.

'Hitler Youth,'Jackie said.'That's what I keep thinking. Probably overreacting, but I hope to God this thing ends today and I don't have to find out.'

'I can't quite see Peter Randolph as Hitler.'

'Me, either. I see him more as Hermann Goering. It's Rennie I think of when I think of Hitler.' She put the cruiser in gear, made a K-turn, and headed them back toward Christ the Holy Redeemer Church.

The church was unlocked and empty, the generator off.The parsonage was silent, but Reverend Coggins's Chevrolet was parked in the little garage. Peering in, Linda could read two stickers on the bumper. The one on the right: IF THE RAPTURE'S TODAY, SOMEBODY GRAB MY STEERING WHEEL! The one on the left boasted MY OTHER CAR IS A 10-SPEED.

Linda called the second one to Jackie's attention. 'He does have a bike—I've seen him riding it. But I don't see it in the garage, so maybe he rode it into town. Saving gas.'

'Maybe,' Jackie said. 'And maybe we ought to check the house to make sure he didn't slip in the shower and break his neck.'

'Does that mean we might have to look at him naked?'

'No one said police work was pretty,'Jackie said. 'Come on.'

The house was locked, but in towns where seasonal residents form, a large part of the population, the police are adept at gaining entry. They checked the usual places for a spare key. Jackie was the one who found it, hanging on a hook behind a kitchen shutter. It opened the back door.

'Reverend Coggins?' Linda called, sticking her head in. 'It's the police, Reverend Coggins, are you here?'

No answer. They went in. The lower floor was neat and orderly, but it gave Linda an uncomfortable feeling. She told herself it was just being in someone else's house. A religious person's house, and uninvited.

Jackie went upstairs. 'Reverend Coggins? Police. If you're here, please make yourself known.'

Linda stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up. The house felt wrong, somehow. That made her think of Janelle, shaking in the grip of her seizure. That had been wrong, too. A queer certainty stole into her mind: if Janelle were here right now, she would have another seizure. Yes, and start talking about queer things. Halloween and the Great Pumpkin, maybe.

It was a perfectly ordinary flight of stairs, but she didn't want to go up there, just wanted Jackie to report the place was empty so they could go on to the radio station. But when her partner called for her to come up, Linda did.

6

Jackie was standing in the middle of Coggins's bedroom. There was a plain wooden cross on one wall and a plaque on another. The plaque read HIS EYE IS ON THE SPARROW. The coverlet of the bed was turned back.There were traces of blood on the sheet beneath.

'And this,' Jackie said. 'Come around here.'

Reluctantly, Linda did. Lying on the polished wood floor between the bed and the wall was a knotted length of rope. The knots were bloody.

'Looks like somebody beat him,'Jackie said grimly.'Hard enough to knock him out, maybe. Then they laid him on the…' She looked at the other woman. 'No?'

'I take it you didn't grow up in a religious home,' Linda said.

'I did so. We worshipped the Holy Trinity: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. What about you?'

'Plain old tapwater Baptist, but I heard about things like this. I think he was flagellating himself

'Yug! People did that for sins, right?'

'Yes. And I don't think it ever went entirely out of style.'

'Then this makes sense. Sort of. Go in the bathroom and look on the toilet tank.'

Linda made no move to do so.The knotted rope was bad enough, the feel of the house—too empty, somehow—was worse.

'Go on. It's nothing that'll bite you, and I'll bet you a dollar to a dime that you've seen worse.'

Linda went into the bathroom. Two magazines were lying on top of the toilet tank. One was a devotional, The Upper Room. The other was called Young Oriental Slits. Linda doubted if that one was sold in many religious bookshops.

'So,' Jackie said. 'Are we getting a picture here? He sits on the john, tosses the truffle—'

'Tosses the truffle?'Linda giggled in spite of her nerves. Or because of them.

'It's what my mother used to call it,' Jackie said. 'Anyway, after he's done with that, he opens a medium-sized can of whoop-ass to expiate his sins, then goes to bed and has happy Asian dreams. This morning he gets up, refreshed and sin-free, does his morning devo-tionals, then rides into town on his bike. Make sense?'

It did. It just didn't explain why the house felt so wrong to her. 'Let's check the radio station,' she said. 'Then we'll head into town ourselves and get coffee. I'm buying.'

'Good,'Jackie said. 'I want mine black. Preferably in a hypo.'

7

The low-slung, mostly glass WCIK studio was also locked, but speakers mounted beneath the eaves were playing 'Good Night, Sweet Jesus' as interpreted by that noted soul singer Perry Como. Behind the studio the broadcast tower loomed, the flashing red lights at the top barely visible in the strong morning light. Near the tower 'was a long barnlike structure which Linda assumed must hold the station's generator and whatever other supplies it needed to keep beaming the miracle of God's love to western Maine, eastern New Hampshire, and possibly the inner planets of the solar system.

Jackie knocked, then hammered.

'I don't think anybody's here,' Linda said… but this place seemed wrong, too. And the air had a funny smell, stale and sallow. It reminded her of the way her mother's kitchen smelled, even after a good airing. Because her mother smoked like a chimney and believed the only things worth eating were those fried in a hot skillet greased with plenty of lard.

Jackie shook her head. 'We heard someone, didn't we?'

Linda had no answer for that, because it was true. They had been listening to the station on their drive from the parsonage, and had heard a smooth deejay announcing the next record as 'Another message of God's love in song.'

This time the hunt for the key was longer, but Jackie finally found it in an envelope taped beneath the mailbox. With it was a scrap of paper on which someone had scrawled 16 9 3.

The key was a dupe, and a litde sticky, but after some chivvying, it worked. As soon as they were in, they heard the steady beep of the security system.The keypad was on the wall. When Jackie punched in the numbers, the beeping quit. Now there was only the music.

Perry Como had given way to something instrumental; Linda thought it sounded suspiciously like the organ solo from 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.'The speakers in here were a thousand times better than the ones outside and the music was louder, almost like a living thing.

Did people work in this holier-than-thou racket? Linda wondered. Answer the phones? Do business? How could they?

There was something wrong in here, too. Linda was sure of it. The place felt more than creepy to her; it felt outright dangerous. When she saw that Jackie had unsnapped the strap on her service automatic, Linda did the same. The feel of the gun-butt under her hand was good. Thy rod and thy gun-butt, they comfort me, she thought.

'Hello?'Jackie called.'Reverend Coggins? Anybody?'

There was no answer. The reception desk was empty. To the left of it were two closed doors. Straight ahead was a window running the entire length of the main room. Linda could see blinking lights inside it. The broadcast studio, she assumed.

Jackie pushed the closed doors open with her foot, standing well back. Behind one was an office. Behind the other was a conference room of surprising luxury, dominated by a giant flat-screen TV. It was on, but muted. Anderson Cooper, almost life-sized, looked like he was doing his standup on Castle Rock's Main Street. The buildings were draped with flags and yellow ribbons. Linda saw a sign on the hardware store that read: SET THEM FREE. That made Linda feel even eerier. The super running across the bottom of the screen read DEFENSE DEPARTMENT SOURCES CLAIM MISSILE STRIKE IS IMMINENT.

'Why is the TV on?' Jackie asked.

'Because whoever was minding the store left it that way when—'

A booming voice interrupted her. 'That was Raymond Howell's version of "Christ My Lord and Leader.'"

Both women jumped.

'And this is Norman Drake, reminding you of three important facts; you're listening to the Revival Time Hour on WCIK, God loves you, and He sent his Son to die for you on Calvary's cross. It's nine twenty-five a.m., and as we always like to remind you, time is short. Have you given your heart to the Lord? Back after this.'

Norman Drake gave way to a silver-tongued devil selling the entire Bible on DVDs, and the best thing about it was you could pay in monthly installments and return the whole deal if you weren't just as happy as a pig in shit. Linda and Jackie went to the broadcast studio window and looked in. Neither Norman Drake nor the silver-tongued devil was there, but when the commercial ended and the deejay came back to announce the next song of praise, a green light turned red and a red light turned green. When the music started up, another red light went green.

'It's automated!'Jackie said. 'The whole freaking thing!'

'Then why do we feel like someone's here? And don't say you don't.'

Jackie didn't.'Because it's weird.The jock even does time-checks. Honey, this setup must have cost a fortune! Talk about the ghost in the machine—how long do you think it will run?'

'Probably till the propane runs out and the generator stops.' Linda spotted another closed door and opened it with her foot, as Jackie had… only, unlike Jackie, she drew her gun and held it, safety on and muzzle down, beside her leg.