Under the Dome: A Novel (79 page)

Big Jim shook his head. “Hard to say, Pete, but this thing is big. Must’ve been in the planning stages for a long time. You can’t just look at the newbies in town and say it’s got to be them. Some of the people in on it could have been here for years. Decades, even. It’s what they call deep cover.”

“Christ. But
why,
Jim?
Why,
in God’s name?”

“I don’t know. Testing, maybe, with us for guinea pigs. Or maybe it’s a power grab. I wouldn’t put it past that thug in the White House. What matters is we’re going to have to beef up security and watch for the liars trying to undermine our efforts to keep order.”

“Do you think
she
—” He inclined his head toward Julia, who was watching her business go up in smoke with her dog sitting beside her, panting in the heat.

“I don’t know for sure, but the way she was this afternoon? Storming around the station, yelling to see him? What does that tell you?”

“Yeah,” Randolph said. He was looking at Julia Shumway with flat-eyed consideration. “And burning up your own place, what better cover than that?”

Big Jim pointed a finger at him as if to say
You could have a bingo there.
“I have to get off my feet. Get on the horn to George Frederick. Tell him to keep his good weather eye on that Lewiston Canuck.”

“All right.” Randolph unclipped his walkie-talkie.

Behind them, Fernald Bowie shouted:
“Roof’s comin down! You on the street, stand back! You men on top of those other buildings at the ready, at the ready!”

Big Jim watched with one hand on the driver’s door of his Hummer as the roof of the
Democrat
caved in, sending a gusher of sparks straight up into the black sky. The men posted on the adjacent buildings checked that their partners’ Indian pumps were primed and then stood at parade rest, waiting for sparks with their nozzles in their hands.

The expression on Shumway’s face as the
Democrat
’s roof let go did Big Jim’s heart more good than all the cotton-picking medicines and pacemakers in the world. For years he’d been forced to put up with her weekly tirades, and while he wouldn’t admit he had been afraid of her, he surely had been annoyed.

But look at her now,
he thought.
Looks like she came home and found her mother dead on the pot.

“You look better,” Randolph said. “Your color’s coming back.”

“I
feel
better,” Big Jim said. “But I’ll still go home. Grab some shuteye.”

“That’s a good idea,” Randolph said. “We need you, my friend. Now more than ever. And if this Dome thing doesn’t go away …” He shook his head, his basset-hound eyes never leaving Big Jim’s face. “I don’t know how we’d get along without you, put it that way. I love Andy Sanders like a brother but he doesn’t have much in the way of brains. And Andrea Grinnell hasn’t been worth a tin shit since she fell and hurt her back. You’re the glue that holds Chester’s Mill together.”

Big Jim was moved by this. He gripped Randolph’s arm and squeezed. “I’d give my life for this town. That’s how much I love it.”

“I know. Me too. And no one’s going to steal it out from under us.”

“Got that right,” Big Jim said.

He drove away, mounting the sidewalk to get past the roadblock that had been placed at the north end of the business district. His heart was steady in his chest again (well, almost), but he was troubled,
nonetheless. He’d have to see Everett. He didn’t like the idea; Everett was another noseyparker bent on causing trouble at a time when the town had to pull together. Also, he was no doctor. Big Jim would almost have felt better about trusting a vet with his medical problems, except there was none in town. He’d have to hope that if he needed medicine, something to regularize his heartbeat, Everett would know the right kind.

Well,
he thought,
whatever he gives me, I can check it out with Andy.

Yes, but that wasn’t the biggest thing troubling him. It was something else Pete had said:
If this Dome thing doesn’t go away …

Big Jim wasn’t worried about that. Quite the opposite. If the Dome
did
go away—too soon, that was—he could be in a fair spot of trouble even if the meth lab wasn’t discovered. Certainly there would be cotton-pickers who would second-guess his decisions. One of the rules of political life that he’d grasped early was
Those who can, do; those who can’t, question the decisions of those who can.
They might not understand that everything he’d done or ordered done, even the rock-throwing at the market this morning, had been of a caretaking nature. Barbara’s friends on the outside would be especially prone to misunderstanding, because they would not
want
to understand. That Barbara
had
friends, powerful ones, on the outside was a thing Big Jim hadn’t questioned since seeing that letter from the President. But for the time being they could do nothing. Which was the way Big Jim wanted it to stay for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe even a month or two.

The truth was, he liked the Dome.

Not for the long term, of course, but until the propane out there at the radio station was redistributed? Until the lab was dismantled and the supply barn that had housed it had been burned to the ground (another crime to be laid at the door of Dale Barbara’s co-conspirators)? Until Barbara could be tried and executed by police firing squad? Until any blame for how things were done during the crisis could be spread around to as many people as possible, and the credit accrued to just one, namely himself?

Until then, the Dome was just fine.

Big Jim decided he’d get kneebound and pray on it before turning in.

7

Sammy limped down the hospital corridor, looking at the names on the doors and checking behind those with no names just to be sure. She was starting to worry that the bitch wasn’t here when she came to the last one and saw a get-well card thumbtacked there. It showed a cartoon dog saying “I heard you weren’t feeling so well.”

Sammy drew Jack Evans’s gun from the waistband of her jeans (that waistband a little looser now, she’d finally managed to lose some weight, better late than never) and used the automatic’s muzzle to open the card. On the inside, the cartoon dog was licking his balls and saying, “Need a hindlick maneuver?” It was signed
Mel, Jim Jr., Carter,
and
Frank,
and was exactly the sort of tasteful greeting Sammy would have expected of them.

She pushed the door open with the barrel of the gun. Georgia wasn’t alone. This did not disturb the deep calm that Sammy felt, the sense of peace nearly attained. It might have if the man sleeping in the corner had been an innocent—the bitch’s father or uncle, say—but it was Frankie the Tit Grabber. The one who’d raped her first, telling her she’d better learn to keep her mouth for when she was on her knees. That he was sleeping didn’t change anything. Because guys like him always woke up and recommenced their fuckery.

Georgia wasn’t asleep; she was in too much pain, and the longhair who’d come in to check her hadn’t offered her any more dope. She saw Sammy, and her eyes widened. “D’yew,” she said. “Ged outta here.”

Sammy smiled. “You sound like Homer Simpson,” she said.

Georgia saw the gun and her eyes widened. She opened her now mostly toothless mouth and screamed.

Sammy continued to smile. The smile widened, in fact. The scream was music to her ears and balm to her hurts.

“Do that bitch,” she said. “Right, Georgia? Isn’t that what you said, you heartless cunt?”

Frank woke up and stared around in wide-eyed befuddlement. His ass had migrated all the way to the edge of his chair, and when Georgia shrieked again, he jerked and fell onto the floor. He was wearing a sidearm now—they all were—and he grabbed for it, saying “Put it down, Sammy, just put it down, we’re all friends here, let’s be friends here.”

Sammy said, “You ought to keep your mouth closed except for when you’re on your knees gobbling your friend Junior’s cock.” Then she pulled the Springfield’s trigger. The blast from the automatic was deafening in the small room. The first shot went over Frankie’s head and shattered the window. Georgia screamed again. She was trying to get out of bed now, her IV line and monitor wires popping free. Sammy shoved her and she flopped askew on her back.

Frankie still didn’t have his gun out. In his fear and confusion, he was tugging at the holster instead of the weapon, and succeeding at nothing but yanking his belt up on the right side. Sammy took two steps toward him, grasped the pistol in both hands like she’d seen people do on TV, and fired again. The left side of Frankie’s head came off. A flap of scalp struck the wall and stuck there. He clapped his hand to the wound. Blood sprayed through his fingers. Then his fingers were gone, sinking into the oozing sponge where his skull had been.

“No more!”
he cried. His eyes were huge and swimming with tears.
“No more, don’t! Don’t hurt me!”
And then:
“Mom! MOMMY!”

“Don’t bother, your mommy didn’t raise you right,” Sammy said, and shot him again, this time in the chest. He jumped against the wall. His hand left his wrecked head and thumped to the floor, splashing in the pool of blood that was already forming there. She shot him a third time, in the place that had hurt her. Then she turned to the one on the bed.

Georgia was huddled in a ball. The monitor above her was beeping like crazy, probably because she’d pulled out the wires connected to it. Her hair hung in her eyes. She screamed and screamed.

“Isn’t that what you said?” Sammy asked. “Do that bitch, right?”

“I horry!”

“What?”

Georgia tried again.
“I horry! I horry, Hammy!”
And then, the ultimate absurdity:
“I take it ack!”

“You
can’t.
” Sammy shot Georgia in the face and again in the neck. Georgia jumped the way Frankie had, then lay still.

Sammy heard running footsteps and shouts in the corridor. Sleepy cries of concern from some of the rooms as well. She was sorry about causing a fuss, but sometimes there was just no choice. Sometimes things had to be done. And when they were, there could be peace.

She put the gun to her temple.

“I love you, Little Walter. Mumma loves her boy.”

And pulled the trigger.

8

Rusty used West Street to get around the fire, then hooked back onto Lower Main at the 117 intersection. Bowie’s was dark except for small electric candles in the front windows. He drove around back to the smaller lot as his wife had instructed him, and parked beside the long gray Cadillac hearse. Somewhere close by, a generator was clattering.

He was reaching for the door handle when his phone twittered. He turned it off without looking to see who might be calling, and when he looked up again, a cop was standing beside his window. A cop with a drawn gun.

It was a woman. When she bent down, Rusty saw a cloudburst of frizzy blond hair, and at last had a face to go with the name his wife had mentioned. The police dispatcher and receptionist on the day shift. Rusty assumed she had been pressed into full-time service on or just after Dome Day. He also assumed that her current duty-assignment had been self-assigned.

She holstered the pistol. “Hey, Dr. Rusty. Stacey Moggin. You treated me for poison oak two years ago? You know, on my—” She patted her behind.

“I remember. Nice to see you with your pants up, Ms. Moggin.”

She laughed as she had spoken: softly. “Hope I didn’t scare you.”

“A little. I was silencing my cell phone, and then there you were.”

“Sorry. Come on inside. Linda’s waiting. We don’t have much time. I’m going to stand watch out front. I’ll give Lin a double-click on her walkie if someone comes. If it’s the Bowies, they’ll park in the side lot and we can drive out on East Street unnoticed.” She cocked her head a little and smiled. “Well … that’s a tad optimistic, but at least unidentified. If we’re lucky.”

Rusty followed her, navigating by the cloudy beacon of her hair. “Did you break in, Stacey?”

“Hell, no. There was a key at the cop-shop. Most of the businesses on Main Street give us keys.”

“And why are you in on this?”

“Because it’s all fear-driven bullshit. Duke Perkins would have put a stop to it long ago. Now come on. And make this fast.”

“I can’t promise that. In fact, I can’t promise anything. I’m not a pathologist.”

“Fast as you can, then.”

Rusty followed her inside. A moment later, Linda’s arms were around him.

9

Harriet Bigelow screamed twice, then fainted. Gina Buffalino only stared, glassy with shock. “Get Gina out of here,” Thurse snapped. He had gotten as far as the parking lot, heard the shots, and come running back. To find this. This slaughter.

Ginny put an arm around Gina’s shoulders and led her back into the hall, where the patients who were ambulatory—this
included Bill Allnut and Tansy Freeman—were standing, big-eyed and frightened.

“Get this one out of the way,” Thurse told Twitch, pointing at Harriet. “And pull her skirt down, give the poor girl some modesty.”

Twitch did as he was told. When he and Ginny reentered the room, Thurse was kneeling by the body of Frank DeLesseps, who had died because he’d come in place of Georgia’s boyfriend and over-stayed visiting hours. Thurse had flapped the sheet over Georgia, and it was already blooming with blood-poppies.

“Is there anything we can do, Doctor?” Ginny asked. She knew he wasn’t a doctor, but in her shock it came automatically. She was looking down at Frank’s sprawled body, and her hand was over her mouth.

“Yes.” Thurse rose and his bony knees cracked like pistol shots. “Call the police. This is a crime scene.”

“All the ones on duty will be fighting that fire downstreet,” Twitch said. “Those who aren’t will either be on their way or sleeping with their phones turned off.”

“Well call
somebody,
for the love of Jesus, and find out if we’re supposed to do anything before we clean up the mess. Take photographs, or I don’t know what. Not that there’s much doubt about what happened. You’ll have to excuse me for a minute. I’m going to vomit.”