Under the Dome: A Novel (76 page)

She swung the wheel of her Prius hard left without thinking, getting into the other lane, and the two vehicles missed each other by inches. Horace, who’d been sitting on the backseat wearing his usual expression of oh-boy-going-for-a-ride delight, tumbled to the floor with a surprised yip. It was the only sound. Neither woman screamed, or even cried out. It was too quick for that. Death or serious injury passed them by in an instant and was gone.

Julia swung back into her own lane, then pulled onto the soft shoulder and put her Prius in park. She looked at Rose. Rose looked back, all big eyes and open mouth. In back, Horace jumped onto the seat again and gave a single bark, as if to ask what the delay was. At the sound, both women laughed and Rose began patting her chest above the substantial shelf of her bosom.

“My heart, my heart,” she said.

“Yeah,” Julia said. “Mine, too. Did you see how close that was?”

Rose laughed again, shakily. “You kidding? Hon, if I’d had my arm cocked out the window, that sonofabitch would have amputated my elbow.”

Julia shook her head. “Drunk, probably.”

“Drunk
assuredly,
” Rose said, and snorted.

“Are you okay to go on?”

“Are you?” Rose asked.

“Yes,” Julia said. “How about you, Horace?”

Horace barked that he had been born ready.

“A near-miss rubs the bad luck off,” Rose said. “That’s what Granddad Twitchell used to claim.”

“I hope he was right,” Julia said, and got rolling again. She watched closely for oncoming headlights, but the next glow they saw was from the spots set up at the Harlow edge of the Dome. They didn’t see Sammy Bushey. Sammy saw them; she was standing in front of the Evans garage, with the keys to the Evans Malibu in her hand. When they had gone by, she raised the garage door (she had to do it by hand, and it hurt considerably) and got behind the wheel.

20

There was an alley between Burpee’s Department Store and the Mill Gas & Grocery, connecting Main Street and West Street. It was used mostly by delivery trucks. At quarter past nine that night, Junior Rennie and Carter Thibodeau walked up this alley in almost perfect darkness. Carter was carrying a five-gallon can, red with a yellow diagonal stripe on the side, in one hand. GASOLINE, read the word on the stripe. In the other hand he held a battery-powered bullhorn. This had been white, but Carter had wrapped the horn in black masking tape so it wouldn’t stand out if anyone looked their way before they could fade back down the alley.

Junior was wearing a backpack. His head no longer ached and his limp had all but disappeared. He was confident that his body was finally beating whatever had fucked it up. Possibly a lingering virus of some kind. You could pick up every kind of shit at college, and getting the boot for beating up that kid had probably been a blessing in disguise.

At the head of the alley they had a clear view of the
Democrat.
Light spilled out onto the empty sidewalk, and they could see Freeman and Guay moving around inside, carrying stacks of paper to the door and then setting them down. The old wooden structure housing the newspaper and Julia’s living quarters stood between Sanders Hometown Drug and the bookstore, but was separated from both—by a paved walkway on the bookstore side and an alley like the one in which he and Carter were currently lurking on the drugstore side. It was a windless night, and he thought that if his father mobilized the troops quickly enough, there would be no collateral damage. Not that he cared. If the entire east side of Main Street burned, that would be fine with Junior. Just more trouble for Dale Barbara. He could still feel those cool, assessing eyes on him. It wasn’t right to be looked at that way, especially when the man doing the looking was behind bars. Fucking
Baaarbie.

“I should have shot him,” Junior muttered.

“What?” Carter asked.

“Nothing.” He wiped his forehead. “Hot.”

“Yeah. Frankie says if this keeps on, we’re all apt to end up stewed like prunes. When are we supposed to do this?”

Junior shrugged sullenly. His father had told him, but he couldn’t exactly remember. Ten o’clock, maybe. But what did it matter? Let those two over there burn. And if the newspaper bitch was upstairs—perhaps relaxing with her favorite dildo after a hard day—let her burn, too. More trouble for
Baaarbie.

“Let’s do it now,” he said.

“You sure, bro?”

“You see anyone on the street?”

Carter looked. Main Street was deserted and mostly dark. The gennies behind the newspaper office and the drugstore were the only ones he could hear. He shrugged. “All right. Why not?”

Junior undid the pack’s buckles and flipped back the flap. On top were two pairs of light gloves. He gave one pair to Carter and put on the other. Beneath was a bundle wrapped in a bath towel. He opened it and set four empty wine bottles on the patched asphalt. At
the very bottom of the pack was a tin funnel. Junior put it in one of the wine bottles and reached for the gasoline.

“Better let me, bro,” Carter said. “Your hands are shakin.”

Junior looked at them with surprise. He didn’t feel shaky, but yes, they were trembling. “I’m not afraid, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Never said you were. It ain’t a head problem. Anybody can see that. You need to go to Everett, because you got somethin wrong with you and he’s the closest thing we got to a doctor right now.”

“I feel fi—”

“Shut up before someone hears you. Do the fuckin towel while I do this.”

Junior took his gun from its holster and shot Carter in the eye. His head exploded, blood and brains everywhere. Then Junior stood over him, shooting him
again
and
again
and
ag
—

“Junes?”

Junior shook his head to clear away this vision—so vivid it was hallucinatory—and realized his hand was actually gripping the butt of his pistol. Maybe that virus wasn’t quite out of his system yet.

And maybe it wasn’t a virus after all.

What, then? What?

The fragrant odor of gas smacked his nostrils hard enough to make his eyes burn. Carter had begun filling the first bottle.
Glug glug glug
went the gas can. Junior unzipped the side pocket of the backpack and brought out a pair of his mother’s sewing scissors. He used them to cut four strips from the towel. He stuffed one into the first bottle, then pulled it out and stuck the other end inside, letting a length of gasoline-soaked terry cloth hang. He repeated the process with the others.

His hands weren’t shaking too badly for that.

21

Barbie’s Colonel Cox had changed from the last time Julia had seen him. He had a good shave for going on half past nine, and his hair
was combed, but his khakis had lost their neat press and tonight his poplin jacket seemed to be bagging on him, as if he had lost weight. He was standing in front of a few smudges of spray paint left over from the unsuccessful acid experiment, and he was frowning at the bracket shape like he thought he could walk through it if he only concentrated hard enough.

Close your eyes and click your heels three times,
Julia thought.
Because there’s no place like Dome.

She introduced Rose to Cox and Cox to Rose. During their brief getting-to-know-you exchange, Julia looked around, not liking what she saw. The lights were still in place, shining at the sky as if signaling a glitzy Hollwood premiere, and there was a purring generator to run them, but the trucks were gone and so was the big green HQ tent that had been erected forty or fifty yards down the road. A patch of flattened grass marked the place where it had been. There were two soldiers with Cox, but they had the not-ready-for-prime-time look she associated with aides or attachés. The sentries probably weren’t gone, but they had been moved back, establishing a perimeter beyond hailing distance of any poor slobs who might wander up on The Mill side to ask what was going on.

Ask now, plead later,
Julia thought. “Fill me in, Ms. Shumway,” Cox said.

“First answer a question.”

He rolled his eyes (she thought she would have slapped him for that, if she’d been able to get at him; her nerves were still jangled from the near miss on the ride out here). But he told her to ask away.

“Have we been abandoned?”

“Absolutely not.” He replied promptly, but didn’t quite meet her eye. She thought that was a worse sign than the queerly empty look she now saw on his side of the Dome—as if there had been a circus, but it had moved on.

“Read this,” she said, and plastered the front page of tomorrow’s paper against the Dome’s unseen surface, like a woman mounting a sale notice in a department store window. There was a faint, fugitive
thrum in her fingers, like the kind of static shock you could get from touching metal on a cold winter morning, when the air was dry. After that, nothing.

He read the entire paper, telling her when to turn the pages. It took him ten minutes. When he finished, she said: “As you probably noticed, ad space is way down, but I flatter myself the quality of the writing has gone up. Fuckery seem to bring out the best in me.”

“Ms. Shumway—”

“Oh, why not call me Julia. We’re practically old pals.”

“Fine. You’re Julia and I’m JC.”

“I’ll try not to confuse you with the one who walked on water.”

“You believe this fellow Rennie’s setting himself up as a dictator? A kind of Downeast Manuel Noriega?”

“It’s the progression to Pol Pot I’m worried about.”

“Do you think that’s possible?”

“Two days ago I would have laughed at the idea—he’s a used-car salesman when he isn’t running selectmen’s meetings. But two days ago we hadn’t had a food riot. Nor did we know about these murders.”

“Not Barbie,” Rose said, shaking her head with stubborn weariness.
“Never.”

Cox took no notice of this—not because he was ignoring Rose, Julia felt, but because he thought the idea was too ridiculous to warrant any attention. It warmed her toward him, at least a little. “Do you think Rennie committed the murders, Julia?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. Everything he’s done since the Dome appeared—from shutting down alcohol sales to appointing a complete dope as Police Chief—has been political, aimed at increasing his own clout.”

“Are you saying murder isn’t in his repertoire?”

“Not necessarily. When his wife passed, there were rumors that he might have helped her along. I don’t say they were true, but for rumors like that to start in the first place says something about how people see the man in question.”

Cox grunted agreement.

“But for the life of me I can’t see how murdering and sexually abusing two teenage girls could be political.”

“Barbie would
never,
” Rose said again.

“The same with Coggins, although that ministry of his—especially the radio station part—is suspiciously well endowed. Brenda Perkins, now?
That
could have been political.”

“And you can’t send in the Marines to stop him, can you?” Rose asked. “All you guys can do is watch. Like kids looking into an aquarium where the biggest fish takes all the food, then starts eating the little ones.”

“I can kill the cellular service,” Cox mused. “Also Internet. I can do that much.”

“The police have walkie-talkies,” Julia said. “He’ll switch to those. And at the meeting on Thursday night, when people complain about losing their links to the outside world, he’ll blame you.”

“We were planning a press conference on Friday. I could pull the plug on that.”

Julia grew cold at the thought. “Don’t you dare. Then he wouldn’t have to explain himself to the outside world.”

“Plus,” Rose said, “if you kill the phones and the Internet, no one can tell you or anyone else what he’s doing.”

Cox stood quiet for a moment, looking at the ground. Then he raised his head. “What about this hypothetical generator that’s maintaining the Dome? Any luck?”

Julia wasn’t sure she wanted to tell Cox that they had put a middle-school kid in charge of hunting for it. As it turned out, she didn’t have to, because that was when the town fire whistle went off.

22

Pete Freeman dropped the last stack of papers by the door. Then he straightened up, put his hands in the small of his back, and stretched
his spine. Tony Guay heard the crackle all the way across the room. “That sounded like it hurt.”

“Nope; feels good.”

“My wife’ll be in the sack by now,” Tony said, “and I’ve got a bottle ratholed in my garage. Want to come by for a nip on your way home?”

“No, I think I’ll just—” Pete began, and that was when the first bottle crashed through the window. He saw the flaming wick from the corner of his eye and took a step backward. Only one, but it saved him from being seriously burned, perhaps even cooked alive.

The window and the bottle both shattered. The gasoline ignited and flared in a bright manta shape. Pete simultaneously ducked and pivoted from the hips. The fire-manta flew past him, igniting one sleeve of his shirt before landing on the carpet in front of Julia’s desk.

“What the FU—”
Tony began, and then another bottle came arcing through the hole. This one smashed on top of Julia’s desk and rolled across it, spreading fire among the papers littered there and dripping more fire down the front. The smell of burning gas was hot and rich.

Pete ran for the water cooler in the corner, beating the sleeve of his shirt against his side. He lifted the water bottle awkwardly against his middle, then held his flaming shirt (the arm beneath now felt as if it were developing a bad sunburn) under the bottle’s spouting mouth.

Another Molotov cocktail flew out of the night. It fell short, shattering on the sidewalk and lighting a small bonfire on the concrete. Tendrils of flaming gasoline ran into the gutter and went out.

“Dump the water on the carpet!”
Tony shouted.
“Dump it before the whole place catches fire!”

Pete only looked at him, dazed and panting. The water in the cooler bottle continued to gush onto a part of the carpet that did not, unfortunately, need wetting.