Under the Dome: A Novel (103 page)

“I like to suck Barbie’s dick like a peppermint stick,” the Buffalo-girl
said, and the old fuck said he enjoyed that, too. Then, when Junior blinked his eyes, the two of them were just walking down the hall. No green aura, no dirty stuff. So maybe it had been a hallucination. On the other hand, maybe not. One thing was for sure: they were all in it together. All in league with
Baaarbie.
He was in jail, but that was just temporary. To gain sympathy, probably. All part of
Baaarbie
’s
plaaan.
Plus, he thought that in jail he was beyond Junior’s reach.

“Wrong,” he whispered as he sat by the window, looking out at the night with his now-defective vision.
“Wrong.”

Junior knew exactly what had happened to him; it had come in a flash, and the logic was undeniable. He was suffering from thallium poisoning, like what had happened to that Russian guy in England. Barbie’s dog tags had been coated with thallium dust, and Junior had handled them, and now he was dying. And since his father had sent him to Barbie’s apartment, that meant
he
was a part of it, too. He was another of Barbie’s … his … what did you call those guys …

“Minions,” Junior whispered. “Just another one of Big Jim Rennie’s filet minions.”

Once you thought about it—once your mind was
clarified
—it made perfect sense. His father wanted to shut him up about Coggins and Perkins. Hence, thallium poisoning. It all hung together.

Outside, beyond the lawn, a wolf loped across the parking lot. On the lawn itself, two naked women were in the 69 position.
Sixty-nine, lunchtime!
he and Frankie used to chant when they were kids and saw two girls walking together, not knowing what it meant, only knowing that it was rude. One of the cracksnackers looked like Sammy Bushey. The nurse—Ginny, her name was—had told him that Sammy was dead, which was obviously a lie and meant that Ginny was in on it, too; in on it with
Baaarbie.

Was there anyone in this whole town who wasn’t? Who he could be
sure
wasn’t?

Yes, he realized, there were two. The kids he and Frank had found out by the Pond, Alice and Aidan Appleton. He remembered their haunted eyes, and how the girl had hugged him when he
picked her up. When he told her she was safe, she had asked
Do you promise?,
and Junior had told her yes. It made him feel really good to promise. The trusting weight of her had made him feel good, too.

He made a sudden decision: he would kill Dale Barbara. If anyone got in his way, he would kill them, too. Then he would find his father and kill him … a thing he had dreamed of doing for years, although he had never admitted it to himself fully until now.

Once that was done, he’d seek out Aidan and Alice. If someone tried to stop him, he’d kill them, too. He would take the kids back out to Chester Pond, and he would take care of them. He would keep the promise he had made to Alice. If he did, he wouldn’t die. God would not let him die of thallium poisoning while he was taking care of those kids.

Now Angie McCain and Dodee Sanders went prancing across the parking lot, wearing cheerleader skirts and sweaters with big Mills Wildcats
W
s on their chests. They saw him looking and began to gyrate their hips and lift up their skirts. Their faces slopped and jiggled with decay. They were chanting,
“Open up the pantry door! Come on in, let’s fuck some more! Go … TEAM!”

Junior closed his eyes. Opened them. His girlfriends were gone. Another hallucination, like the wolf. About the 69 girls he wasn’t so sure.

Maybe, he thought, he wouldn’t take the children out to the Pond, after all. That was pretty far from town. Maybe he would take them to the McCain pantry, instead. That was closer. There was plenty of food.

And, of course, it was dark.

“I’ll take care of you, kids,” Junior said. “I’ll keep you safe. Once Barbie’s dead, the whole conspiracy will fall apart.”

After a while he leaned his forehead against the glass and then he too slept.

4

Henrietta Clavard’s ass might only have been bruised instead of broken, but it still hurt like a sonofabitch—at eighty-four, she’d found,
everything
that went wrong with you hurt like a sonofabitch—and at first she thought it was her ass that woke her at first light on that Thursday morning. But the Tylenol she’d taken at three AM still seemed to be holding. Plus, she’d found her late husband’s fanny-ring (John Clavard had suffered hemorrhoids), and that helped considerably. No, it was something else, and shortly after awakening, she realized what it was.

The Freemans’ Irish setter, Buddy, was howling. Buddy
never
howled. He was the most polite dog on Battle Street, a short lane just beyond Catherine Russell Drive. Also, the Freemans’ generator had stopped. Henrietta thought that might have actually been what woke her up, not the dog. Certainly it had put her to sleep last night. It wasn’t one of those rackety ones, blowing blue exhaust smoke into the air; the Freemans’ generator gave off a low, sleek purr that was actually quite soothing. Henrietta supposed it was expensive, but the Freemans could afford it. Will owned the Toyota franchise Big Jim Rennie had once coveted, and although these were hard times for most car dealers, Will had always seemed the exception to the rule. Just last year, he and Lois had put a very nice and tasteful addition on the house.

But that
howling.
The dog sounded hurt. A hurt pet was the sort of thing nice people like the Freemans saw to immediately … so why weren’t they?

Henrietta got out of bed (wincing a little as her butt came out of the comforting hole in the foam doughnut) and went to the window. She could see the Freemans’ split-level perfectly well, although the light was gray and listless instead of sharp and clear, as it usually was on mornings in late October. From the window she could hear Buddy even better, but she couldn’t see anyone moving around over there. The house was entirely dark, not so much as a Coleman
lantern glowing in a single window. She would have thought they’d gone somewhere, but both cars were parked in the driveway. And where was there to go, anyway?

Buddy continued to howl.

Henrietta got on her housecoat and slippers and went outside. As she was standing on the sidewalk, a car pulled up. It was Douglas Twitchell, no doubt on his way to the hospital. He looked puffy-eyed and was clutching a takeout cup of coffee with the Sweetbriar Rose logo on the side as he got out of his car.

“You all right, Mrs. Clavard?”

“Yes, but something’s wrong at the Freemans’. Hear that?”

“Yeah.”

“Then so must they. Their cars are there, so why don’t they stop it?”

“I’ll take a look.” Twitch took a sip of his coffee, then set it down on the hood of his car. “You stay here.”

“Nonsense,” said Henrietta Clavard.

They walked down twenty yards or so of sidewalk, then up the Freemans’ driveway. The dog howled and howled. The sound of it made Henrietta’s skin cold in spite of the morning’s limp warmth.

“The air’s very bad,” she said. “It smells like Rumford used to when I was just married and all the paper mills were still running. This can’t be good for people.”

Twitch grunted and rang the Freemans’ bell. When that brought no response, he first knocked on the door and then hammered.

“See if it’s unlocked,” Henrietta said.

“I don’t know if I should, Mrs.—”

“Oh, bosh.” She pushed past him and tried the knob. It turned. She opened the door. The house beyond it was silent and full of deep early morning shadows. “Will?” she called. “Lois? Are you here?”

No one answered but more howls.

“The dog’s out back,” Twitch said.

It would have been quicker to cut straight through, but neither of them liked to do that, so they walked up the driveway and along the breezeway between the house and the garage where Will stored not
his cars but his toys: two snowmobiles, an ATV, a Yamaha dirtbike and a bloated Honda Gold Wing.

There was a high privacy fence around the Freeman backyard. The gate was beyond the breezeway. Twitch pulled the gate open, and was immediately hit by seventy pounds of frantic Irish setter. He shouted in surprise and raised his hands, but the dog didn’t want to bite him; Buddy was in full please-rescue-me mode. He put his paws on the front of Twitch’s last clean tunic, smearing it with dirt, and began to slobber all over his face.

“Stop it!” Twitch shouted. He pushed Buddy, who went down but popped right back up, laying fresh tracks on Twitch’s tunic and swabbing his cheeks with a long pink tongue.

“Buddy, down!”
Henrietta commanded, and Buddy shrank onto his haunches at once, whining and rolling his eyes between them. A puddle of urine began to spread out beneath him.

“Mrs. Clavard, this is not good.”

“No,” Henrietta agreed.

“Maybe you better stay with the d—”

Henrietta once more said bosh and marched into the Freemans’ backyard, leaving Twitch to catch up with her. Buddy slunk along behind them, head down and tail tucked, whining disconsolately.

There was a stone-flagged patio with a barbecue on it. The barbecue was neatly covered with a green tarp that said THE KITCHEN’S CLOSED. Beyond this, on the edge of the lawn, was a redwood platform. On top of the platform was the Freemans’ hot tub. Twitch supposed the high privacy fence was there so they could sit in it naked, maybe even pitch a little woo if the urge took them.

Will and Lois were in it now, but their woo-pitching days were done. They were wearing clear plastic bags over their heads. The bags appeared to have been cinched at the necks with either twine or brown rubber bands. They had fogged up on the inside, but not so much that Twitch couldn’t make out the empurpled faces. Sitting on the redwood apron between the earthly remains of Will and Lois Freeman was a whiskey bottle and a small medicine vial.

“Stop,” he said. He didn’t know if he was talking to himself, or Mrs. Clavard, or possibly to Buddy, who had just voiced another bereft howl. Certainly he couldn’t be talking to the Freemans.

Henrietta didn’t stop. She walked to the hot tub, marched up the two steps with her back as straight as a soldier’s, looked at the dis-colored faces of her perfectly nice (and perfectly normal, she would have said) neighbors, glanced at the whiskey bottle, saw it was Glenlivet (at least they’d gone out in style), then picked up the medicine vial with its Sanders Hometown Drug label.

“Ambien or Lunesta?” Twitch asked heavily.

“Ambien,” she said, and was gratified the voice emerging from her dry throat and mouth sounded normal. “Hers. Although I’d guess she shared it last night.”

“Is there a note?”

“Not here,” she said. “Maybe inside.”

But there wasn’t, at least not in any of the obvious places, and neither of them could think of a reason to hide a suicide note. Buddy followed them from room to room, not howling but whining deep in his throat.

“I guess I’ll bring him back t’house with me,” Henrietta said.

“You’ll have to. I can’t take him to the hospital. I’ll call Stewart Bowie to come and get … them.” He hooked a thumb back over his shoulder. His stomach was roiling, but that wasn’t the bad part; the bad part was the depression that came stealing into him, putting a shadow across his normally sunny soul.

“I don’t understand why they would do it,” Henrietta said. “If we’d been a year under the Dome … or even a month … yes, maybe. But less than a
week
? This is not how stable people respond to trouble.”

Twitch thought he understood, but didn’t want to say it to Henrietta: it
was
going to be a month, it
was
going to be a year. Maybe longer. And with no rain, fewer resources, and fouler air. If the most technologically hip country in the world hadn’t been able to get a handle on what had happened to Chester’s Mill by now (let alone solve the problem), it probably wasn’t going to happen soon. Will
Freeman must have understood that. Or maybe it had been Lois’s idea. Maybe when the generator had died, she’d said
Let’s do it before the water in the hot tub gets cold, honey. Let’s get out from under the Dome while our bellies are still full. What do you say? One more dip, with a few drinks to see us off.

“Maybe it was the plane that pushed them over the edge,” Twitch said. “The Air Ireland that hit the Dome yesterday.”

Henrietta didn’t answer with words; she hawked back and spat snot into the kitchen sink. It was a somehow shocking gesture of repudiation. They went back outside.

“More people will do this, won’t they?” she asked when they had reached the end of the driveway. “Because suicide gets in the air sometimes. Like a cold germ.”

“Some already have.” Twitch didn’t know if suicide was painless, as the song said, but under the right circumstances, it could certainly be catching. Maybe especially catching when the situation was unprecedented and the air started to smell as foul as it did on this windless, unnaturally warm morning.

“Suicides are cowards,” Henrietta said. “A rule to which there are no exceptions, Douglas.”

Twitch, whose father had died a long and lingering death as a result of stomach cancer, wondered about that but said nothing.

Henrietta bent to Buddy with her hands on her bony knees. Buddy stretched his neck up to sniff her. “Come next door, my furry friend. I have three eggs. You may eat them before they go bad.”

She started away, then turned back to Twitch.
“They are cowards,”
she said, giving each word its own special emphasis.

5

Jim Rennie checked out of Cathy Russell, slept soundly in his own bed, and woke refreshed. Although he would not have admitted it to anyone, part of the reason was knowing Junior was out of the house.

Now, at eight o’clock, his black Hummer was parked a door or two up from Rosie’s (in front of a fire hydrant, but what the hell; currently there was no fire department). He was having breakfast with Peter Randolph, Mel Searles, Freddy Denton, and Carter Thibodeau. Carter had taken up what was becoming his usual station, at Big Jim’s right hand. He wore two guns this morning: his own on his hip, and Linda Everett’s recently returned Beretta Taurus in a shoulder rig.