Under the Dome: A Novel Page 14

  Cox also laughed, no doubt thinking they were off to a good start. “How are you, Captain Barbara?”

  “Sir, I’m fine, sir. But with respect, it’s just Dale Barbara now. The only things I captain these days are the grills and Fry-O-Lators in the local restaurant, and I’m in no mood for small talk. I am perplexed, sir, and since I’m looking at the backs of a bunch of pogey-bait Marines who won’t turn around and look me in the eye, I’m also pretty goddam pissed off.”

  “Understood. And you need to understand something from my end. If there was anything at all those men could do to aid or end this situation, you would be looking at their faces instead of their asses. Do you believe that?”

  “I’m hearing you, sir.” Which wasn’t exactly an answer.

  Julia was still snapping. Barbie shifted to the edge of the road. From his new position he could see a bivouac tent beyond the trucks. Also what might have been a small mess tent, plus a parking area filled with more trucks. The Marines were building a camp here, and probably bigger ones where Routes 119 and 117 left town. That suggested permanence. His heart sank.

  “Is the newspaper woman there?” Cox asked.

  “She’s here. Taking pictures. And sir, full disclosure, whatever you tell me, I tell her. I’m on this side now.”

  Julia stopped what she was doing long enough to flash Barbie a smile.

  “Understood, Captain.”

  “Sir, calling me that earns you no points.”

  “All right, just Barbie. Is that better?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “As to how much the lady decides to publish … for the sake of the people in that little town of yours, I hope she’s got sense enough to pick and choose.”

  “My guess is she does.”

  “And if she e-mails pictures to anyone on the outside—one of the newsmagazines or the New York Times, for instance—you may find your Internet goes the way of your landlines.”

  “Sir, that’s some dirty sh—”

  “The decision would be made above my pay grade. I’m just saying.” Barbie sighed. “I’ll tell her.”

  “Tell me what?” Julia asked.

  “That if you try to transmit those pictures, they may take it out on the town by shutting down Internet access.”

  Julia made a hand gesture Barbie did not ordinarily associate with pretty Republican ladies. He returned his attention to the phone.

  “How much can you tell me?”

  “Everything I know,” Cox said.

  “Thank you, sir.” Although Barbie doubted Cox would actually spill everything. The Army never told everything it knew. Or thought it knew.

  “We’re calling it the Dome,” Cox said, “but it’s not a Dome. At least, we don’t think it is. We think it’s a capsule whose edges conform exactly to the borders of the town. And I do mean exactly.”

  “Do you know how high it goes?”

  “It appears to top out at forty-seven thousand and change. We don’t know if the top is flat or rounded. At least not yet.”

  Barbie said nothing. He was flabbergasted.

  “As to how deep … who knows. All we can say now is more than a hundred feet. That’s the current depth of an excavation we’re making on the border between Chester’s Mill and the unincorporated township to the north.”

  “TR-90.” To Barbie’s ears, his voice sounded dull and listless.

  “Whatever. We started in a gravel pit that was already dug down to forty feet or so. I’ve seen spectrographic images that blow my mind. Long sheets of metamorphic rock that have been sheared in two. There’s no gap, but you can see a shift where the northern part of the sheet dropped a little. We’ve checked seismographic reports from the Portland meteorological station, and bingo. There was a bump at eleven forty-four AM. Two point one on the Richter. So that’s when it happened.”

  “Great,” Barbie said. He supposed he was being sarcastic, but he was too amazed and perplexed to be sure.

  “None of this is conclusive, but it’s persuasive. Of course the exploring has just started, but right now it does look as if the thing is down as well as up. And if it goes up five miles …”

  “How do you know that? Radar?”

  “Negative, this thing doesn’t show on radar. There’s no way of telling it’s there until you hit it, or until you’re so close you can’t stop. The human toll when the thing went up was remarkably low, but you’ve got one hell of a bird-kill around the edges. Inside and outside.”

  “I know. I’ve seen them.” Julia was done with her pictures now. She was standing next to him, listening to Barbie’s end of the conversation. “So how do you know how high it is? Lasers?”

  “No, they also shoot right through. We’ve been using missiles with dummy warheads. We’ve been flying F-15A sorties out of Bangor since four this afternoon. Surprised you didn’t hear them.”

  “I might have heard something,” Barbie said. “But my mind was occupied with other things.” Like the airplane. And the pulp-truck. The dead people out on Route 117. Part of the remarkably low human toll.

  “They kept bouncing off … and then, at forty-seven thousand plus, just zippity-zoom, up up and away. Between you and me, I’m surprised we didn’t lose any of those fighter-jocks.”

  “Have you actually overflown it yet?”

  “Less than two hours ago. Mission successful.”

  “Who did it, Colonel?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Was it us? Is this an experiment that went wrong? Or, God help us, some kind of test? You owe me the truth. You owe this town the truth. These people are goddam terrified.”

  “Understood. But it wasn’t us.”

  “Would you know if it was?”

  Cox hesitated. When he next spoke, his voice was lower. “We have good sources in my department. When they fart in the NSA, we hear it. The same is true about Group Nine at Langley and a couple of other little deals you never heard of.”

  It was possible that Cox was telling the truth. And it was possible he wasn’t. He was a creature of his calling, after all; if he had been drawing sentry duty out here in the chilly autumn dark with the rest of the pogeybait Marines, Cox too would have been standing with his back turned. He wouldn’t have liked it, but orders were orders.

  “Any chance it’s some sort of natural phenomenon?” Barbie asked.

  “One that conforms exactly to the man-made borders of a whole town? Every nook and fucking cranny? What do you think?”

  “I had to ask. Is it permeable? Do you know?”

  “Water goes through,” Cox said. “A little, anyway.”

  “How is that possible?” Although he’d seen for himself the weird way water behaved; both he and Gendron had seen it.

  “We don’t know, how could we?” Cox sounded exasperated. “We’ve been working on this less than twelve hours. People here are slapping themselves on the back just for figuring out how high it goes. We may figure it out, but for now we just don’t know.”

  “Air?”

  “Air goes through to a greater degree. We’ve set up a monitoring station where your town borders on … mmm …” Faintly, Barbie heard paper rustle. “Harlow. They’ve done what they call ‘puff tests.’ I guess that must measure outgoing air pressure against what bounces back. Anyway, air goes through, and a lot more freely than water does, but the scientists say still not completely. This is going to severely fuck up your weather, pal, but nobody can say how much or how bad. Hell, maybe it’ll turn Chester’s Mill into Palm Springs.” He laughed, rather feebly.

  “Particulates?” Barbie thought he knew the answer to that one.

  “Nope,” Cox said. “Particulate matter doesn’t go through. At least we don’t think so. And you want to be aware that works both ways. If particulate matter doesn’t get in, it won’t get out. That means auto emissions—”

  “Nobody’s got that far to drive. Chester’s Mill is maybe four miles across at its widest. Along a diagonal—” He looked at Julia.

&n
bsp; “Seven, tops,” she said.

  Cox said, “We don’t think oil-heat pollutants are going to be a big deal, either. I’m sure everybody in town has a nice expensive oil furnace—in Saudi Arabia they have bumper stickers on their cars these days saying I Heart New England—but modern oil furnaces need electricity to provide a constant spark. Your oil reserves are probably good, considering the home-heating season hasn’t started yet, but we don’t think it’s going to be very useful to you. In the long run, that may be a good thing, from the pollution standpoint.”

  “You think so? Come on up here when it’s thirty below zero and the wind’s blowing at—” He stopped for a moment. “Will the wind blow?”

  “We don’t know,” Cox said. “Ask me tomorrow and I may at least have a theory.”

  “We can burn wood,” Julia said. “Tell him that.”

  “Ms. Shumway says we can burn wood.”

  “People have to be careful about that, Captain Barbara—Barbie. Sure, you’ve got plenty of wood up there and you don’t need electricity to ignite it and keep it going, but wood produces ash. Hell, it produces carcinogens.”

  “Heating season here starts …” Barbie looked at Julia.

  “November fifteenth,” she said. “Or thereabouts.”

  “Ms. Shumway says mid-November. So tell me you’re going to have this worked out by then.”

  “All I can say is that we intend to try like hell. Which brings me to the point of this conversation. The smart boys—the ones we’ve been able to convene so far—all agree that we’re dealing with a force field—”

  “Just like on Star Trick, ” Barbie said. “Beam me up, Snotty.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Go on, sir.”

  “They all agree that a force field doesn’t just happen. Something either close to the field of effect or in the center of it has to generate it. Our guys think the center is most likely. ‘Like the handle of an umbrella,’ one of them said.”

  “You think this is an inside job?”

  “We think it’s a possibility. And we just happen to have a decorated soldier in town—”

  Ex-soldier, Barbie thought. And the decorations went into the Gulf of Mexico eighteen months ago. But he had an idea his term of service had just been extended, like it or not. Held over by popular demand, as the saying went.

  “—whose specialty in Iraq was hunting down Al Qaeda bomb factories. Hunting them down and shutting them down.”

  So. Basically just another gennie. He thought of all those he and Julia Shumway had passed on the way out here, roaring away in the dark, providing heat and light. Eating propane to do it. He realized that propane and storage batteries, even more than food, had become the new gold standard in Chester’s Mill. One thing he knew: people would burn wood. If it got cold and the propane was gone, they’d burn plenty. Hardwood, softwood, trashwood. And fuck the carcinogens.

  “It won’t be like the generators working away in your part of the world tonight,” Cox said. “A thing that could do this … we don’t know what it would be like, or who could build such a thing.”

  “But Uncle Sammy wants it,” Barbie said. He was gripping the phone almost tightly enough to crack it. “That’s actually the priority, isn’t it? Sir? Because a thing like that could change the world. The people of this town are strictly secondary. Collateral damage, in fact.”

  “Oh, let’s not be melodramatic,” Cox said. “In this matter our interests coincide. Find the generator, if it’s there to be found. Find it the way you found those bomb factories, and then shut it down. Problem solved.”

  “If it’s there.”

  “If it’s there, roger that. Will you try?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not that I can see, but I’m career military. For us, free will isn’t an option.”

  “Ken, this is one fucked-up fire drill.”

  Cox was slow to reply. Although there was silence on the line (except for a faint high hum that might mean the proceedings were being recorded), Barbie could almost hear him reflecting. Then he said: “That’s true, but you still get all the good shit, you bitch.”

  Barbie laughed. He couldn’t help it.

  3

  On the way back, passing the dark shape that was Christ the Holy Redeemer Church, he turned to Julia. In the glow of the dashboard lights, her face looked tired and solemn.

  “I won’t tell you to keep quiet about any of this,” he said, “but I think you should hold one thing back.”

  “The generator that may or may not be in town.” She took a hand off the wheel, reached back, and stroked Horace’s head, as if for comfort and reassurance.

  “Yes.”

  “Because if there’s a generator spinning the field—creating your Colonel’s Dome—then somebody must be running it. Somebody here.”

  “Cox didn’t say that, but I’m sure it’s what he thinks.”

  “I’ll withhold that. And I won’t e-mail any pictures.”

  “Good.”

  “They should run first in the Democrat anyway, dammit.” Julia continued stroking the dog. People who drove one-handed usually made Barbie nervous, but not tonight. They had both Little Bitch and 119 to themselves. “Also, I understand that sometimes the greater good is more important than a great story. Unlike the New York Times. ”

  “Zing,” Barbie said.

  “And if you find the generator, I won’t have to spend too many days shopping at Food City. I hate that place.” She looked startled. “Do you think it’ll even be open tomorrow?”

  “I’d say yes. People can be slow to catch up with the new deal when the old deal changes.”

  “I think I better do a little Sunday shopping,” she said thoughtfully.

  “When you do, say hello to Rose Twitchell. She’ll probably have the faithful Anson Wheeler with her.” Remembering his earlier advice to Rose, he laughed and said, “Meat, meat, meat.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “If you have a generator at your house—”

  “Of course I do, I live over the newspaper. Not a house; a very nice apartment. The generator was a tax deduction.” She said this proudly.

  “Then buy meat. Meat and canned goods, canned goods and meat.”

  She thought about it. Downtown was just ahead now. There were far fewer lights than usual, but still plenty. For how long? Barbie wondered. Then Julia asked, “Did your Colonel give you any ideas about how to find this generator?”

  “Nope,” Barbie said. “Finding shit used to be my job. He knows that.” He paused, then asked: “Do you think there might be a Geiger counter in town?”

  “I know there is. In the basement of the Town Hall. Actually the subbasement, I guess you’d say. There’s a fallout shelter there.”

  “You’re shittin me!”

  She laughed. “No shit, Sherlock. I did a feature story on it three years ago. Pete Freeman took the pictures. In the basement there’s a big conference room and a little kitchen. The shelter’s half a flight of stairs down from the kitchen. Pretty good-sized. It was built in the fifties, when the smart money was on us blowing ourselves to hell.”

  “On the Beach,” Barbie said.

  “Yep, see you that and raise you Alas, Babylon. It’s a pretty depressing place. Pete’s pictures reminded me of the Führerbunker, just before the end. There’s a kind of pantry—shelves and shelves of canned goods—and half a dozen cots. Also some equipment supplied by the government. Including a Geiger counter.”

  “The canned stuff must be extremely tasty after fifty years.”

  “Actually, they rotate in new goods every so often. There’s even a small generator that went in after nine-eleven. Check the Town Report and you’ll see an appropriation item for the shelter every four years or so. Used to be three hundred dollars. Now it’s six hundred. You’ve got your Geiger counter.” She shifted her eyes to him briefly. “Of course, James Rennie sees all things Town Hall, from the attic to the fallout shelter,
as his personal property, so he’ll want to know why you want it.”

  “Big Jim Rennie isn’t going to know,” he said.

  She accepted this without comment. “Would you like to come back to the office with me? Watch the President’s speech while I start comping the paper? It’ll be a quick and dirty job, I can tell you that. One story, half a dozen pictures for local consumption, no Burpee’s Autumn Sales Days circular.”

  Barbie considered it. He was going to be busy tomorrow, not just cooking but asking questions. Starting the old job all over again, in the old way. On the other hand, if he went back to his place over the drugstore, would he be able to sleep?

  “Okay. And I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I have excellent office-boy skills. I also make a mean cup of coffee.”

  “Mister, you are on.” She raised her right hand off the wheel and Barbie slapped her five.

  “Can I ask you one more question? Strictly not for publication?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “This sci-fi generator. Do you think you’ll find it?”

  Barbie thought it over as she pulled in beside the storefront that housed the Democrat ’s offices.

  “No,” he said at last. “That would be too easy.”

  She sighed and nodded. Then she grasped his fingers. “Would it help, do you think, if I prayed for your success?”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Barbie said.

  4

  There were only two churches in Chester’s Mill on Dome Day; both purveyed the Protestant brand of goods (although in very different ways). Catholics went to Our Lady of Serene Waters in Motton, and the town’s dozen or so Jews attended Congregation Beth Shalom in Castle Rock when they felt in need of spiritual consolation. Once there had been a Unitarian church, but it had died of neglect in the late eighties. Everyone agreed it had been sort of hippydippy, anyway. The building now housed Mill New & Used Books.

  Both Chester’s Mill pastors were what Big Jim Rennie liked to call “kneebound” that night, but their modes of address, states of mind, and expectations were very different.