Even before the stone and wood begin falling, people run outside, not dead, not annihilated, to find out who and what has been destroyed instead of them.

They dash into the giddiness of survivors, anticipating themselves on the evening news, or even CNN, eager to wonder aloud what happened and why, and what carelessness or wickedness made it occur, to see in what way they are superior to those dead and maimed, as yet unknown.

“I bet it’s the high school,” a man just removed from the hardware store says to a younger woman who was just parking her car. “Thank God it’s not a school day.”

“The Lord was looking after them,” she says, shading her eyes. “Somebody must have been killed, though.”

And they stand there, bonding in disaster, watching with everyone else as the thick smoke rises to merge with low-hanging clouds to the north. Then their strange rain begins, joining the drizzle that has chilled them all day.

At first, they notice the dust, along with what might be clumps of clay. Then come pieces of wood, none large enough to be of much danger, but adequate to send most of the curious under roof. Only the holiday-happy teen-agers, the boys primarily, stay outside to seek thrills.

It is the stone, though, that they all will remember.

No larger pieces reach the town itself, where a hail of pebbles peppers Dropshaft Road and the tops of houses for several seconds afterward, playing a discordant tune on tin roofs.

It is not the native red brick of which almost everything substantial in the area is built, but something grayer, older.

People will later claim there was a smell, musty and dry-rotted.

As soon as it’s safe, many will venture closer, as close as they’re allowed, and most will return with large and small stone fragments gathered from the roadside or in front yards. What they bring back exhibits precise angles hewn by men instead of nature.

That night, with no coordination, without even speaking of it, members of almost every family in the older part of town will have a piece of somber ancient stone sitting somewhere in the living room or den, something to which a person can point for validation while telling the story.