One day the dome had simply appeared, a perfect sphere twenty miles in diameter that extended down beneath the ground as far as it rose into the sky. That dome was centered on a nuclear power plant but encompassed vast tracts of forest, hills, farmland, and ocean and almost all the town of Perdido Beach, California, which lay at the extreme southern end.

The instant the dome appeared (impenetrable, opaque, and utterly impervious to drills, lasers, and shaped explosive charges), every single person fifteen years of age and older had been ejected.

Ejected.

They had popped up on the beach, in the road, on lawns, in homes, in people’s swimming pools. Some had been injured or killed, suddenly materializing in front of speeding trucks. Some had drowned, finding themselves without warning a mile out to sea. A few had materialized in solid objects, with one man skewered by a lamppost, like a human shish kebab. And some had been turned inside out, for reasons that no one had understood then or later.

Monster, Four Years Earlier