Under the Dome: A Novel (39 page)

“It’s automated!” Jackie said. “The whole freaking thing!”

“Then why do we feel like someone’s here? And don’t say you don’t.”

Jackie didn’t. “Because it’s weird. The jock even does time-checks. Honey, this setup must have cost a fortune! Talk about the ghost in the machine—how long do you think it will run?”

“Probably till the propane runs out and the generator stops.” Linda spotted another closed door and opened it with her foot, as Jackie had … only, unlike Jackie, she drew her gun and held it, safety on and muzzle down, beside her leg.

It was a bathroom, and it was empty. There was, however, a picture of a very Caucasian Jesus on the wall.

“I’m not religious,” Jackie said, “so you’ll have to explain to me why people would want Jesus watching them poop.”

Linda shook her head.

“Let’s get out of here before I lose it,” she said. “This place is the Radioland version of the
Mary Celeste.
”

Jackie looked around uneasily. “Well, the vibe is spooky, I’ll give you that.” She suddenly raised her voice in a harsh shout that made Linda jump. She wanted to tell Jackie not to yell like that. Because someone might hear her and come. Or some
thing.

“Hey! Yo! Anybody here? Last chance!”

Nothing. No one.

Outside, Linda took a deep breath. “Once, when I was a teenager, some friends and I went to Bar Harbor, and we stopped for a picnic at this scenic turnout. There were half a dozen of us. The day was clear, and you could see practically all the way to Ireland. When we were done eating, I said I wanted to take a picture. My friends were all horsing around and grabassing, and I kept backing up, trying to get everyone in the frame. Then this one girl—Arabella, my best friend back then—stopped trying to give this other girl a wedgie and shouted, ‘Stop, Linda,
stop
!’ I stopped and looked around. Know what I saw?”

Jackie shook her head.

“The Atlantic Ocean. I’d backed up all the way to the drop-off at the edge of the picnic area. There was a warning sign, but no fence or guardrail. One more step and I would have gone down. And how I felt then is how I felt in there.”

“Lin, it was
empty.
”

“I don’t think so. And I don’t think you do, either.”

“It was spooky, sure. But we checked the rooms—”

“Not the studio. Plus the TV was on and the music was too loud. You don’t think they turn it up that loud ordinarily, do you?”

“How do I know what holy rollers do?” Jackie asked. “Maybe they were expecting the Apocolick.”

“Lypse.”

“Whatever. Do you want to check the storage barn?”

“Absolutely not,” Linda said, and that made Jackie snort laughter.

“Okay. Our report is no sign of the Rev, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Then we’re off to town. And coffee.”

Before getting into unit Two’s shotgun seat, Linda took one more look at the studio building, sitting there wreathed in white-bread audio joy. There was no other sound; she realized she didn’t hear a single bird singing, and wondered if they had all killed themselves smashing into the Dome. Surely that wasn’t possible. Was it?

Jackie pointed at the mike. “Want me to give the place a shout through the loudspeaker? Say if anyone’s hiding in there they should beat feet into town? Because—I just thought of this—maybe they were scared of us.”

“What I want is for you to stop screwing around and get out of here.”

Jackie didn’t argue. She reversed down the short driveway to Little Bitch Road, and turned the cruiser toward The Mill.

8

Time passed. Religious music played. Norman Drake returned and announced that it was nine thirty-four, Eastern Daylight God Loves You Time. This was followed by an ad for Jim Rennie’s Used Cars, delivered by the Second Selectman himself. “It’s our annual Fall Sales Spectacular, and boy, did we overstock!” Big Jim said in a rueful thejoke’s-on-me voice. “We’ve got Fords, Chevvies, Plymouths! We’ve got the hard-to-get Dodge Ram and even the harder-to-get Mustang! Folks, I’m sitting on not one or two but
three
Mustangs that are like new, one the famous V6 convertible, and each comes with the famous Jim Rennie Christian Guarantee. We service what we sell, we finance, and we do it all at low low prices. And right now”—he chuckled more ruefully than ever—“we’ve just
GOT
to clear this
LOT
! So come on down! The coffeepot’s always on, neighbor, and you’ll love the feelin when Big Jim’s dealin!”

A door neither woman had noticed eased open at the back of the
studio. Inside were more blinking lights—a galaxy of them. The room was little more than a cubby choked with wires, splitters, routers, and electronic boxes. You would have said there was no room for a man. But The Chef was beyond skinny; he was emaciated. His eyes were only glitters sunk deep in his skull. His skin was pale and blotchy. His lips folded loosely inward over gums that had lost most of their teeth. His shirt and pants were filthy, and his hips were naked wings; Chef’s underwear days were now just a memory. It is doubtful that Sammy Bushey would have recognized her missing husband. He had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand (he could only eat soft things now) and a Glock 9 in the other.

He went to the window overlooking the parking lot, thinking he’d rush out and kill the intruders if they were still there; he had almost done it while they were inside. Only he’d been afraid. Because demons couldn’t actually be killed. When their human bodies died, they just flew into another host. When they were between bodies, the demons looked like blackbirds. Chef had seen this in vivid dreams that came on the increasingly rare occasions when he slept.

They were gone, however. His
atman
had been too strong for them.

Rennie had told him he had to shut down out back, and Chef Bushey had, but he might have to start up some of the cookers again, because there had been a big shipment to Boston a week ago and he was almost out of product. He needed smoke. It was what his
atman
fed on these days.

But for now he had enough. He had given up on the blues music that had been so important to him in his Phil Bushey stage of life—B. B. King, Koko and Hound Dog Taylor, Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf, even the immortal Little Walter—and he had given up on fucking; he had even pretty much given up on moving his bowels, had been constipated since July. But that was okay. What humiliated the body fed the
atman.

He checked the parking lot and the road beyond once more to make sure the demons weren’t lurking, then tucked the automatic
into his belt at the small of his back and headed for the storage shed, which was actually more of a factory these days. A factory that was shut down, but he could and would fix that if necessary.

Chef went to get his pipe.

9

Rusty Everett stood looking into the storage shed behind the hospital. He was using a flashlight, because he and Ginny Tomlinson—now the administrative head of medical services in Chester’s Mill, crazy as that was—had decided to kill the power to every part of the plant that didn’t absolutely need it. From his left, in its own shed, he could hear the big generator roaring away, eating ever deeper into the current long tank of propane.

Most of the tanks are gone,
Twitch had said, and by God, they were.
According to the card on the door, there’s supposed to be seven, but there’s only two.
On that, Twitch was wrong. There was only one. Rusty ran the beam of his flashlight over the blue
CR HOSP
stenciled on the tank’s silver side below the supply company’s Dead River logo.

“Told you,” Twitch said from behind him, making Rusty jump.

“You told me wrong. There’s only one.”

“Bullshit!” Twitch stepped into the doorway. Looked while Rusty shone the beam around, highlighting boxes of supplies surrounding a large—and largely empty—center area. Said: “It’s
not
bullshit.”

“No.”

“Fearless leader, someone is stealing our propane.”

Rusty didn’t want to believe this, but saw no way around it.

Twitch squatted down. “Look here.”

Rusty dropped to one knee. The quarter-acre behind the hospital had been asphalted the previous summer, and without any cold weather to crack or buckle it—not yet, anyway—the area was a smooth black sheet. It made it easy to see the tire tracks in front of the shed’s sliding doors.

“That looks like it could have been a town truck,” Twitch remarked.

“Or any other big truck.”

“Nevertheless, you might want to check the storage shed behind the Town Hall. Twitch no trust-um Big Chief Rennie. Him bad medicine.”

“Why would he take our propane? The Selectmen have plenty of their own.”

They walked to the door leading into the hospital’s laundry—also shut down, at least for the time being. There was a bench beside the door. A sign posted on the bricks read SMOKING HERE WILL BE BANNED AS OF JANUARY 1
^ST
. QUIT NOW AND AVOID THE RUSH!

Twitch took out his Marlboros and offered them to Rusty. Rusty waved them away, then reconsidered and took one. Twitch lit them up. “How do you know?” he asked.

“How do I know what?”

“That they’ve got plenty of their own. Have you checked?”

“No,” Rusty said. “But if they
were
going to poach, why from us? Not only is stealing from the local hospital usually considered bad form by the better class of people, the post office is practically right next door. They must have some.”

“Maybe Rennie and his friends already snatched the post office’s gas. How much would they have, anyway? One tank? Two? Peanuts.”

“I don’t understand why they’d need
any.
It makes no sense.”

“Nothing about any of this makes sense,” Twitch said, and yawned so hugely that Rusty could hear his jaws creak.

“You finished rounds, I take it?” Rusty had a moment to consider the surreal quality of that question. Since Haskell’s death, Rusty had become the hospital’s head doc, and Twitch—a nurse just three days ago—was now what Rusty had been: a physician’s assistant.

“Yep.” Twitch sighed. “Mr. Carty isn’t going to live out the day.”

Rusty had thought the same thing about Ed Carty, who was suffering
from end-stage stomach cancer, a week ago, and the man was still hanging in. “Comatose?”

“Roger that, sensei.”

Twitch was able to count their other patients off on the digits of one hand—which, Rusty knew, was extraordinarily lucky. He thought he might even have felt lucky, if he hadn’t been so tired and worried.

“George Werner I’d call stable.”

Werner, an Eastchester resident, sixty years old and obese, had suffered a myocardial infarction on Dome Day. Rusty thought he would pull through … this time.

“As for Emily Whitehouse …” Twitch shrugged. “It ain’t good, sensei.”

Emmy Whitehouse, forty years old and not even an ounce over-weight, had suffered her own MI an hour or so after Rory Dinsmore’s accident. It had been much worse than George Werner’s because she’d been an exercise freak and had suffered what Doc Haskell had called “a health-club blowout.”

“The Freeman girl is getting better, Jimmy Sirois is holding up, and Nora Coveland is totally cool. Out after lunch. On the whole, not so bad.”

“No,” Rusty said, “but it’ll get worse. I guarantee you. And … if you suffered a catastrophic head injury, would you want me to operate on you?”

“Not really,” Twitch said. “I keep hoping Gregory House will show up.”

Rusty butted his cigarette in the can and looked at the nearly empty supply shed. Maybe he
should
have a peek into the storage facility behind the Town Hall—what could it hurt?

This time he was the one who yawned.

“How long can you keep this up?” Twitch asked. All the banter had gone out of his voice. “I only ask because right now you’re what this town’s got.”

“As long as I have to. What worries me is getting so tired I screw something up. And of facing stuff that’s way beyond my
skill set.” He thought of Rory Dinsmore … and Jimmy Sirois. Thinking of Jimmy was worse, because Rory was now beyond the possibility of medical mistakes. Jimmy, on the other hand …

Rusty saw himself back in the operating room, listening to the soft bleep of the equipment. Saw himself looking down at Jimmy’s pale bare leg, with a black line drawn on it where the cut would have to be made. Thought of Dougie Twitchell trying out his anesthesiologist skills. Felt Ginny Tomlinson slapping a scalpel into his gloved hand and then looking at him over the top of her mask with her cool blue eyes.

God spare me from that,
he thought.

Twitch put a hand on Rusty’s arm. “Take it easy,” he said. “One day at a time.”

“Fuck that, one
hour
at a time,” Rusty said, and got up. “I have to go over to the Health Center, see what’s shaking there. Thank
Christ
this didn’t happen in the summer; we would’ve had three thousand tourists and seven hundred summer-camp kids on our hands.”

“Want me to come?”

Rusty shook his head. “Check on Ed Carty again, why don’t you? See if he’s still in the land of the living.”

Rusty took one more look at the supply shed, then plodded around the corner of the building and on a diagonal toward the Health Center on the far side of Catherine Russell Drive.

10

Ginny was at the hospital, of course; she would give Mrs. Coveland’s new bundle of joy a final weigh-in before sending them home. The receptionist on duty at the Health Center was seventeen-year-old Gina Buffalino, who had exactly six weeks’ worth of medical experience. As a candy striper. She gave Rusty a deer-in-the-headlights look when he came in that made his heart sink, but the waiting room was empty, and that was a good thing. A
very
good thing.

“Any call-ins?” Rusty asked.

“One. Mrs. Venziano, out on the Black Ridge Road. Her baby got his head caught between the bars of his playpen. She wanted an ambulance. I … I told her to grease the kid’s head up with olive oil and see if she could get him out that way. It worked.”

Rusty grinned. Maybe there was hope for this kid yet. Gina, looking divinely relieved, grinned back.