Fear: A Gone Novel

emerged of Francis had been a horror caught on camera, live, and rebroadcast again and again to a sickened world. Seventy million plays on YouTube.
    Soon after that, there had been Mary. That, mercifully, had not been filmed. They’d found her and removed what was left of the girl to a facility where she was kept alive. If you could call it life.
    The air-conditioning suddenly came alive. The trailers tended to be hot, even on cool days like this one with the ocean breeze blowing.
    “We know by now not to believe everything we hear,” Abana said mordantly.
    The colonel nodded. “They think there may be a … a softening, they’re calling it.” He held up a hand, cutting off the quick reaction. “No, they still can’t penetrate the barrier. But in the past when they’ve tried bombarding portions of the barrier with X-rays or gamma rays the barrier has acted as a perfect mirror, bouncing back a hundred percent of the energy that struck it.”
    “That’s changed?”
    “The last test showed ninety-eight-point-four percent refraction. It doesn’t sound like much. And it may not mean anything. But it’s been a hundred percent since day one. And a hundred percent every day since. And now it’s not a hundred percent.”
    “It’s weakening,” Abana said.
    “Maybe.”
    The three of them, Connie, Abana, and George (the parents of Sam, Dahra, and E.Z.) left the trailer. The California National Guard’s grandly named Camp Camino Real stood on the landward side of the highway, in a vacant stretch of land just a quarter mile from the southern boundary of the Bowl. It was an array of two dozen trailers and sheds laid out with military precision. More permanent buildings—a barracks, a motor pool, a maintenance building—were under construction.
    When Camp Camino Real had first gone up it was all alone on the lovely, windswept heights above the beach. But since then the Courtyard by Marriott had been completed, as had the Carl’s Jr. The Del Taco had just sold its first burrito a few days ago, and the Holiday Inn Express had opened one wing while construction continued on the rest.
    There were only two media satellite trucks left, parked by the side of the highway. But they rarely got any on-air time anymore: the country and the world had largely lost interest, although about two thousand tourists a day still made the trip up the highway to the viewing area, parking all along the highway for a mile or more.
    A handful of souvenir vendors still made a living from canvas-awninged stalls.
    George climbed into his car and drove off without a word. Connie and Abana lived here now, sharing a Winnebago with a privileged parking spot overlooking the Pacific. They had a nice gas barbecue donated by Home Depot, and every Friday evening she and Abana would have a cookout—burgers or ribs—with the media people and whatever Guardsmen or soldiers or highway patrolmen happened to be around and off duty.
    The two women walked across the highway from Camp Camino Real and sat in lawn chairs turned toward the ocean. Connie made coffee and brought a cup to Abana.
    “Do we hold a conference call on this?” Abana asked.
    Connie sighed. “The families will want to know.”
    The families . That was the term settled on by the media. At first they had referred to them as “the survivors.” But that had implied the others, the children, had died. Even at the start the mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, had rejected that idea.
    Out at sea a coast guard cutter rode on gentle waves, guarding the watery perimeter of the anomaly. A grief-crazed family member had driven a boatload of explosives into the side of the dome months earlier. The resulting explosion had had no effect on the Bowl, of course.
    “I was just getting to the point…,” Connie began.
    Abana waited and sipped her coffee.
    “I was getting to the point where I was starting to think I needed to get back to something else. You know? Like maybe it was time to move on.”
    Her friend nodded. “And now this. This weakening. This one-point-six-percent change.”
    “And now, and now, and now,” Connie said wearily. “Hope is cruel.”
    “Some guy, some physicist at Stanford, says if the barrier ever does come down it could be catastrophic.”
    “He’s not the first to say that.”
    “Yeah, well, maybe not. But he’s the first to have a Nobel Prize. He thinks the barrier is some form of protective coating over an antimatter sphere. He’s worried it could