Under the Dome: A Novel (37 page)

“Bounces off
what,
you dimwit?” Thurston demanded. With the dope in the sink, he now used one hand to cover his privates … or at least tried to; his love-machine was indeed extremely long and skinny.

“The Dome,” Frankie said. “And I don’t appreciate your mouth.” He took a long step forward and punched the current guest editor of
Ploughshares
in the gut. Thurston made a hoarse whoofing sound, doubled over, staggered, almost kept his feet, went to his knees, and vomited up about a teacup’s worth of thin white gruel that still smelled of Brie.

Carolyn held her swelling wrist. “You’ll go to jail for this,” she promised Junior in a low, trembling voice. “Bush and Cheney are long gone. This isn’t the United States of North Korea anymore.”

“I know that,” Junior said, with admirable patience for one who was thinking he wouldn’t mind doing a little more choking; there was a small dark Gila monster in his brain that thought a little more choking would be just the way to start the day off right.

But no. No. He had to do his part in completing the evacuation. He had taken the Oath of Duty, or whatever the fuck it was.

“I
do
know it,” he repeated. “But what you two Massholes don’t get is that you aren’t in the United States of
America
anymore, either. You’re in the Kingdom of Chester now, and if you don’t behave, you’re going to end up in the
Dungeons
of Chester. I promise. No phone call, no lawyer, no due process. We’re trying to save your lives here. Are you too fuck-dumb to understand that?”

She was staring at him, stunned. Thurston tried to get up, couldn’t manage it, and crawled toward her. Frankie helped him along with a boot to the butt. Thurston cried out in shock and pain. “That’s for holding us up, Grampa,” Frankie said. “I admire your taste in chicks, but we’ve got a lot to do.”

Junior looked at the young woman. Great mouth. Angelina lips. He bet she could, as the saying went, suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. “If he can’t get dressed by himself, you help him. We’ve got four more cabins to check out, and when we get back here, you want to be in that Volvo of yours and on your way into town.”

“I don’t understand any of this!”
Carolyn wailed.

“Not surprised,” Frankie said, and plucked the Baggie of dope out of the sink. “Didn’t you know this stuff makes you stupid?”

She began to cry.

“Don’t worry,” Frankie said. “I’m confisticating it, and in a couple of days, booya, you’ll smarten up all on your own.”

“You didn’t read us our rights,” she wept.

Junior looked astonished. Then he laughed. “You have the right to get the fuck out of here and shut the fuck up, okay? In this situation those are the only rights you have. Do you understand that?”

Frankie was examining the confisticated dope. “Junior,” he said, “there’s hardly any seeds in this. This is fucking
primo.
”

Thurston had reached Carolyn. He got to his feet, farting quite loudly as he did so. Junior and Frankie looked at each other. They tried to hold it in—they were officers of the law, after all—and couldn’t. They burst out laughing simultaneously.

“Trombone Charlie is back in town!”
Frankie yelled, and they gave each other a high five.

Thurston and Carolyn stood in the bedroom doorway, covering their mutual nakedness in an embrace, staring at the cackling intruders. In the background, like voices in a bad dream, loudhailers continued to announce that the area was being evacuated. Most of the amplified voices were now retreating toward Little Bitch.

“I want that car gone when we get back,” Junior said. “Or I
will
fuck you up.”

They left. Carolyn dressed herself, then helped Thurston—his stomach hurt too much for him to bend over and put on his own shoes. By the time they were finished, both of them were crying. In the car, on their way back down the camp lane that led to Little Bitch Road, Carolyn tried to reach her father on her cell. She got nothing but silence.

At the intersection of Little Bitch and Route 119, a town police car was pulled across the road. A stocky female cop with red hair pointed at the soft shoulder, then waved at them to use it. Carolyn pulled over instead, and got out. She held up her puffy wrist.

“We were assaulted! By two guys calling themselves cops! One named Junior and one named Frankie! They—”

“Get your ass gone or I’ll assault you myself,” Georgia Roux said. “I ain’t shittin, honeypie.”

Carolyn stared at her, stunned. The whole world had turned sideways and slipped into a
Twilight Zone
episode while she was asleep. That had to be it; no other explanation made even marginal sense. They’d hear the Rod Serling voice-over anytime now.

She got back into the Volvo (the sticker on the bumper, faded but still readable: OBAMA ’12! YES WE
STILL
CAN) and detoured around the police car. Another, older cop was sitting inside it, going over a checklist on a clipboard. She thought of appealing to him, then thought better of it.

“Try the radio,” she said. “Let’s find out if something really
is
going on.”

Thurston turned it on and got nothing but Elvis Presley and the Jordanaires, trudging through “How Great Thou Art.”

Carolyn snapped it off, thought of saying
The nightmare is officially complete,
and didn’t. All she wanted was to get out of Weirdsville as soon as possible.

2

On the map, the Chester Pond camp road was a thin hooklike thread, almost not there. After leaving the Marshall cabin, Junior and Frankie sat for a moment in Frankie’s car, studying this.

“Can’t be anybody else down there,” Frankie said. “Not at this time of the year. What do you think? Say fuck it and go back to town?” He cocked a thumb at the cabin. “They’ll be along, and if they’re not, who really gives a shit?”

Junior considered it for a moment, then shook his head. They had taken the Oath of Duty. Besides, he wasn’t anxious to get back and face his father’s pestering about what he’d done with the Reverend’s body. Coggins was now keeping his girlfriends company in the McCain pantry, but there was no need for his dad to know that. At least not until the big man figured out how to nail Barbara with it. And Junior believed his father
would
figure it out. If there was one thing Big Jim Rennie was good at, it was nailing people.

Now it doesn’t even matter if he finds out I left school,
Junior thought,
because I know worse about him. Way worse.

Not that dropping out seemed very important now; it was chump change compared to what was going on in The Mill. But he’d have to be careful, just the same. Junior wouldn’t put it past his father to nail
him,
if the situation seemed to call for it.

“Junior? Earth to Junior.”

“I’m here,” he said, a little irritated. “Back to town?”

“Let’s check out the other cabins. It’s only a quarter of a mile, and if we go back to town, Randolph’ll find something else for us to do.”

“Wouldn’t mind a little chow, though.”

“Where? At Sweetbriar? Want some rat poison in your scrambled eggs, courtesy of Dale Barbara?”

“He wouldn’t dare.”

“You positive?”

“Okay, okay.” Frankie started the car and backed down the little stub of driveway. The brightly colored leaves hung moveless on the trees, and the air felt sultry. More like July than October. “But the Massholes better be gone when we come back, or I just might have to introduce Titsy McGee to my helmeted avenger.”

“I’ll be happy to hold her down,” Junior said. “Yippee-ki-yi-yay, motherfucker.”

3

The first three cabins were clearly empty; they didn’t even bother getting out of the car. By now the camp road was down to a pair of wheelruts with a grassy hump between them. Trees overhung it on both sides, some of the lower branches almost close enough to scrape the roof.

“I think the last one’s just around this curve,” Frankie said. “The road ends at this shitpot little boat land—”

“Look out!”
Junior shouted.

They came out of the blind curve and two kids, a boy and a girl, were standing in the road. They made no effort to get out of the way. Their faces were shocked and blank. If Frankie hadn’t been afraid of tearing the Toyota’s exhaust system out on the camp road’s center hump—if he’d been making any kind of speed at all—he would have hit them. Instead he stood on the brake, and the car stopped two feet short.

“Oh my God, that was close,” he said. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”

“If my father didn’t, you won’t,” Junior said.

“Huh?”

“Never mind.” Junior got out. The kids were still standing there. The girl was taller and older. Maybe nine. The boy looked about five. Their faces were pale and dirty. She was holding his hand. She looked up at Junior, but the boy looked straight ahead, as if examining something of interest in the Toyota’s driver’s side headlamp.

Junior saw the terror on her face and dropped to one knee in front of her. “Honey, are you okay?”

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 Plano, 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
breffus
! 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.”