Under the Dome: A Novel (58 page)

Among the early arrivals are Units Two and Four of the Chester’s Mill PD. Close behind them comes Frank DeLesseps in his Nova (he’s ripped off the ASS, GAS, OR GRASS sticker, feeling it hardly becomes an officer of the law). Carter and Georgia are in Two; Mel Searles and Freddy Denton in Four. They have been parked down the street by LeClerc’s Maison des Fleurs, by order of Chief Randolph. “No need to get there too soon,” he has instructed them. “Wait until there are a dozen or so cars in the parking lot. Hey, maybe they’ll just read the sign and go home.”

This doesn’t happen, of course, just as Big Jim Rennie knew it wouldn’t. And the appearance of the officers—especially such young and callow ones, for the most part—acts as an incitement rather than a calmative. Rose is the first to begin haranguing them. She picks on
Freddy, showing him her long list of supplies, then pointing through the window, where most of the stuff she wants is ranked neatly on the shelves.

Freddy is polite to begin with, aware that people (not quite a crowd, not yet) are watching, but it’s hard to keep his temper with this mouthy little pipsqueak in his face. Doesn’t she realize he’s only following orders?

“Who do you think is feeding this town, Fred?” Rose asks. Anson puts a hand on her shoulder. Rose shakes it off. She knows Freddy is seeing rage instead of the deep distress she feels, but she can’t help it. “Do you think a Sysco truck full of supplies is just going to parachute down from the sky?”

“Ma’am—”

“Oh, can it! Since when am I a ma’am to you? You’ve been eating blueberry pancakes and that nasty limp bacon you like at my place four and five days a week for twenty years, and calling me Rosie while you did it. But you won’t be eating pancakes tomorrow unless I get some
flour
and some
shortening
and some
syrup
and …” She breaks off. “Finally! Sense! Thank You, God!”

Jack Cale is opening one of the double doors. Mel and Frank have taken up station in front of it, and he has just room to squeeze between them. The prospective shoppers—there are nearly two dozen now, even though the market’s official opening time of nine AM is still a minute away—surge forward, only to stop when Jack selects a key from the bunch on his belt, and locks up again. There’s a collective groan.

“Why the hell’d you do that?” Bill Wicker calls out indignantly. “My wife sent me down for aigs!”

“Take it up with the Selectmen and Chief Randolph,” Jack responds. His hair is raring every whichway. He throws Frank DeLesseps a black look and fires an even blacker one at Mel Searles, who is trying unsuccessfully to suppress a grin, perhaps even his famous
nyuck-nyuck-nyuck.
“I know
I
will. But for now, I’ve had enough of this shit. I’m done.” He strides off through the crowd with his head down and his cheeks burning even brighter than his hair.
Lissa Jamieson, just arriving on her bicycle (everything on her list will fit into the milk box perched on the rear fender; her wants are small-going-on-minuscule), has to swerve to avoid him.

Carter, Georgia, and Freddy are ranged in front of the large plate-glass window, where Jack would have set out wheelbarrows and fertilizer on an ordinary day. Carter’s fingers are Band-Aided, and a thicker bandage bulks under his shirt. Freddy has his hand on his gun-butt as Rose Twitchell continues to chew on him, and Carter wishes he could backhand her one. His fingers are okay, but his shoulder aches a bitch. The small cluster of would-be shoppers has become a large cluster, and more cars are turning into the parking lot.

Before Officer Thibodeau can really study the crowd, however, Alden Dinsmore gets into his personal space. Alden looks haggard, and seems to have lost twenty pounds since the death of his son. He’s wearing a black mourning band on his left arm and seems dazed.

“Need to go in, son. My wife sent me to stock up on the canned.” Alden doesn’t say the canned what. Probably the canned everything. Or maybe he just got thinking about the empty bed upstairs, the one that will never be filled again, and the Foo Fighters poster that will never be looked at again, and the model airplane on the desk that will never be finished, and clean forgot.

“Sorry, Mr. Dimmesdale,” Carter says. “You can’t do that.”

“It’s Dinsmore,” Alden says in a dazed voice. He starts toward the doors. They are locked, no way he can get in, but Carter still gives the farmer a good hearty shove backward. For the first time, Carter has some sympathy for the teachers who used to send him to detention back in high school; it is irritating not to be minded.

Also it’s hot and his shoulder aches in spite of the two Percocet his mother gave him. Seventy-five at nine AM is rare in October, and the faded blue color of the sky says it will be hotter by noon, hotter still by three PM.

Alden stumbles backward into Gina Buffalino, and they both would fall if not for Petra Searles—no lightweight she—steadying
them. Alden doesn’t look angry, only puzzled. “M’wife sent me for the canned,” he explains to Petra.

A mutter comes from the gathering people. It’s not an angry sound—not quite yet. They came for groceries and the groceries are there but the door is locked. Now a man has been shoved by a high-school dropout who was a car mechanic last week.

Gina is looking at Carter, Mel, and Frank DeLesseps with widening eyes. She points. “Those are the guys that raped her!” she tells her friend Harriet without lowering her voice. “Those are the guys that raped Sammy Bushey!”

The smile disappears from Mel’s face; the urge to
nyuck-nyuck
has left him. “Shut up,” he says.

At the back of the crowd, Ricky and Randall Killian have arrived in a Chevrolet Canyon pickemup. Sam Verdreaux is not far behind, walking, of course; Sam lost his license to drive for good in ’07.

Gina takes a step backward, staring at Mel with wide eyes. Beside her, Alden Dinsmore hulks like a farmer-robot with a dead battery. “You guys are supposed to be police? Hel-
lo
?”

“That rape stuff was nothing but a whore lie,” Frank says. “And you better quit yelling about it before you get arrested for disturbing the peace.”

“Fuckin right,” Georgia says. She has moved a little closer to Carter. He ignores her. He is surveying the crowd. And that’s what it is now. If fifty people make a crowd, then this is one. More coming, too. Carter wishes he had his gun. He doesn’t like the hostility he’s seeing.

Velma Winter, who runs Brownie’s (or did, before it closed), arrives with Tommy and Willow Anderson. Velma is a big, burly woman who combs her hair like Bobby Darin and looks like she could be the warrior queen of Dyke Nation, but she has buried two husbands and the story you can hear at the bullshit table in Sweet-briar is that she fucked them both to death and is looking for number three at Dipper’s on Wednesdays; that’s Country Karaoke Night, and draws an older crowd. Now she plants herself in front of Carter, hands on her meaty hips.

“Closed, huh?” she says in a businesslike voice. “Let’s see your paperwork.”

Carter is confused, and being confused makes him angry. “Back off, bitch. I don’t need no paperwork. The Chief sent us down here. The Selectmen ordered it. It’s gonna be a food depot.”

“Rationing? That what you mean?” She snorts. “Not in
my
town.” She shoves between Mel and Frank and starts hammering on the door. “Open up!
Open up in there!
”

“Nobody home,” Frank says. “You might as well quit it.”

But Ernie Calvert hasn’t left. He comes down the pasta-flour-and-sugar aisle. Velma sees him and starts hammering louder. “Open up, Ernie! Open up!”

“Open up!” voices from the crowd agree.

Frank looks at Mel and nods. Together they grab Velma and muscle her two hundred pounds away from the door. Georgia Roux has turned and is waving Ernie back. Ernie doesn’t go. Numb fuck just stands there.

“Open up!”
Velma bawls.
“Open up! Open up!”

Tommy and Willow join her. So does Bill Wicker, the postman. So does Lissa, her face shining—all her life she has hoped to be part of a spontaneous demonstration, and here’s her chance. She raises a clenched fist and begins to shake it in time—two small shakes on
open
and a big one on
up.
Others imitate her.
Open up
becomes
Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP!
Now they are all shaking their fists in that two-plus-one rhythm—maybe seventy people, maybe eighty, and more arriving all the time. The thin blue line in front of the market looks thinner than ever. The four younger cops look toward Freddy Denton for ideas, but Freddy has no ideas.

He does, however, have a gun.
You better fire it into the air pretty soon, Baldy,
Carter thinks,
or these people are gonna run us down.

Two more cops—Rupert Libby and Toby Whelan—drive down Main Street from the PD (where they’ve been drinking coffee and watching CNN), blowing past Julia Shumway, who is jogging along with a camera slung over her shoulder.

Jackie Wettington and Henry Morrison also start toward the supermarket, but then the walkie-talkie on Henry’s belt crackles. It’s Chief Randolph, saying that Henry and Jackie should hold their station at the Gas & Grocery.

“But we hear—” Henry begins.

“Those are your orders,” Randolph says, not adding that they are orders he is just passing on—from a higher power, as it were.

“Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP!”
The crowd shaking fisted power-salutes in the warm air. Still scared, but excited, too. Getting into it. The Chef would have looked at them and seen a bunch of tyro tweekers, needing only a Grateful Dead tune on the soundtrack to make the picture complete.

The Killian boys and Sam Verdreaux are working their way through the crowd. They chant—not as protective coloration but because that crowd-molting-into-mob vibe is just too strong to resist—but don’t bother shaking their fists; they have work to do. No one pays them any particular mind. Later, only a few people will remember seeing them at all.

Nurse Ginny Tomlinson is also working her way through the crowd. She has come to tell the girls they are needed at Cathy Russell; there are new patients, one a serious case. That would be Wanda Crumley from Eastchester. The Crumleys live next to the Evanses, out near the Motton town line. When Wanda went over this morning to check on Jack, she found him dead not twenty feet from where the Dome cut off his wife’s hand. Jack was sprawled on his back with a bottle beside him and his brains drying on the grass. Wanda ran back to her house, crying her husband’s name, and she had no more than reached him when she was felled by a coronary. Wendell Crumley was lucky not to crash his little Subaru wagon on his way to the hospital—he did eighty most of the way. Rusty is with Wanda now, but Ginny doesn’t think Wanda—fifty, overweight, a heavy smoker—is going to make it.

“Girls,” she says. “We need you at the hospital.”

“Those are the ones, Mrs. Tomlinson!” Gina shouts. She
has
to
shout to be heard over the chanting crowd. She’s pointing at the cops and beginning to cry—partly from fear and tiredness, mostly from outrage. “Those are the ones who raped her!”

This time Ginny looks beyond the uniforms, and realizes Gina’s right. Ginny Tomlinson isn’t afflicted with Piper Libby’s admittedly vile temper, but she
has
a temper, and there’s an aggravating factor at work here: unlike Piper, Ginny saw the Bushey girl with her pants off. Her vagina lacerated and swelled. Huge bruises on her thighs that couldn’t be seen until the blood was washed off. Such a lot of blood.

Ginny forgets about the girls being needed at the hospital. She forgets about getting them out of a dangerous and volatile situation. She even forgets about Wanda Crumley’s heart attack. She strides forward, elbowing someone out of her way (it happens to be Bruce Yardley, the cashier-
cum
-bagboy, who is shaking his fist like everyone else), and approaches Mel and Frank. They are both studying the ever more hostile crowd, and they don’t see her coming.

Ginny raises both hands, looking for a moment like the bad guy surrendering to the sheriff in a Western. Then she brings both hands around and slaps both young men at the same time. “You
bastards
!” she shouts. “How
could
you? How could you be so
cowardly
? So catdirt
mean
? You’ll go to
jail
for this, all of y—”

Mel doesn’t think, just reacts. He punches her in the center of her face, breaking her glasses and her nose. She goes stumbling backward, bleeding, crying out. Her old-fashioned RN cap, shocked free of the bobbypins holding it, tumbles from her head. Bruce Yardley, the young cashier, tries to grab her and misses. Ginny hits a line of shopping carts. They go rolling like a little train. She drops to her hands and knees, crying in pain and shock. Bright drops of blood from her nose—not just broken but shattered—begin falling on the big yellow RK of NO PARKING ZONE.

The crowd goes temporarily silent, shocked, as Gina and Harriet rush to where Ginny crouches.

Then Lissa Jamieson’s voice rises, a clear perfect soprano:
“YOU PIG BASTARDS!”

That’s when the chunk of rock flies. The first rock-thrower is never identified. It may be the only crime Sloppy Sam Verdreaux ever got away with.

Junior dropped him off at the upper end of town, and Sam, with visions of whiskey dancing in his head, went prospecting on the east bank of Prestile Stream for just the right rock. Had to be big but not too big, or he wouldn’t be able to throw it with any accuracy, even though once—a century ago, it seems sometimes; at others it seems very close—he was the starting pitcher for the Mills Wildcats in the first game of the Maine state tourney. He had found it at last, not far from the Peace Bridge: a pound, pound and a half, and as smooth as a goose egg.

One more thing,
Junior had said as he dropped Sloppy Sam off. It wasn’t Junior’s one more thing, but Junior did not tell Sam this any more than Chief Randolph had told Wettington and Morrison, who had ordered them to stay on station. Wouldn’t have been politic.

Aim for the chick.
That was Junior’s final word to Sloppy Sam before leaving him.
She deserves it, so don’t miss.