Under the Dome: A Novel Read online

  Rory saw his smiling (but of course modest) face on the front page of USA Today ; being interviewed on Nightly News with Brian Williams ; sitting on a flower-bedecked float in a parade in his honor, with Prom Queen–type girls surrounding him (probably in strapless gowns, but possibly in bathing suits) as he waved to the crowd and confetti floated down in drifts. He would be THE BOY WHO SAVED CHESTER’S MILL!

  He snatched the rifle from the closet, got the step stool, and pawed a box of XP3s down from the shelf. He stuffed two cartridges into the breech (one for a backup), then raced back outside with the rifle held above his head like a conquering rebelista (but—give him this—he engaged the safety without even thinking about it). The key to the Yamaha ATV he had been forbidden to ride was hanging on the pegboard in barn 1. He held the key fob between his teeth while he strapped the rifle to the back of the ATV with a couple of bungee cords. He wondered if there would be a sound when the Dome popped. He probably should have taken the shooter’s plugs from the top shelf of the closet, but going back for them was unthinkable; he had to do this now.

  That’s how it is with big ideas.

  He drove the ATV around barn 2, pausing just long enough to size up the crowd in the field. Excited as he was, he knew better than to head for where the Dome crossed the road (and where the smudges of yesterday’s collisions still hung like dirt on an unwashed windowpane). Someone might stop him before he could pop the Dome. Then, instead of being THE BOY WHO SAVED CHESTER’S MILL, he’d likely wind up as THE BOY WHO GREASED COW TITS FOR A YEAR. Yes, and for the first week he’d be doing it in a crouch, his ass too sore to sit down. Someone else would end up getting the credit for his big idea.

  So he drove on a diagonal that would bring him to the Dome five hundred yards or so from the tent, marking the place to stop by the crushed spots in the hay. Those, he knew, had been made by falling birds. He saw the soldiers stationed in that area turn toward the oncoming blat of the ATV. He heard shouts of alarm from the fair-and-prayer folks. The hymn-singing came to a discordant halt.

  Worst of all, he saw his father waving his dirty John Deere cap at him and bawling, “RORY OH GODDAMMIT YOU STOP!”

  Rory was in too deep to stop, and—good son or not—he didn’t want to stop. The ATV struck a hummock and he bounced clear of the seat, holding on with his hands and laughing like a loon. His own Deere cap was spun around backward and he didn’t even remember doing it. The ATV tilted, then decided to stay up. Almost there, now, and one of the fatigues-clad soldiers was also shouting at him to stop.

  Rory did, and so suddenly he almost somersaulted over the Yamaha’s handlebars. He forgot to put the darned thing in neutral and it lurched forward, actually striking the Dome before stalling out. Rory heard the crimp of metal and the tinkle of the headlight as it shattered.

  The soldiers, afraid of being hit by the ATV (the eye which sees nothing to block an oncoming object triggers powerful instincts), fell off to either side, leaving a nice big hole and sparing Rory the need of telling them to move away from a possible explosive blowout. He wanted to be a hero, but didn’t want to hurt or kill anybody to do it.

  He had to hurry. The people closest to his stopping point were the ones in the parking lot and clustered around the Summer Blowout Sale tent, and they were running like hell. His father and brother were among them, both screaming at him to not do whatever he was planning to do.

  Rory yanked the rifle free of the bungee cords, socked the butt-plate into his shoulder, and aimed at the invisible barrier five feet above a trio of dead sparrows.

  “No, kid, bad idea!” one of the soldiers shouted.

  Rory paid him no mind, because it was a good idea. The people from the tent and the parking lot were close, now. Someone—it was Lester Coggins, who ran a lot better than he played guitar—shouted: “In the name of God, son, don’t do that!”

  Rory pulled the trigger. No; only tried to. The safety was still on. He looked over his shoulder and saw the tall, thin preacher from the holy-roller church blow past his puffing, red-faced father. Lester’s shirttail was out and flying. His eyes were wide. The cook from Sweetbriar Rose was right behind him. They were no more than sixty yards away now, and the Reverend looked like he was just getting into fourth gear.

  Rory thumbed off the safety.

  “No, kid, no!” the soldier cried again, simultaneously crouching on his side of the Dome and holding out his splayed hands.

  Rory paid no attention. It’s that way with big ideas. He fired.

  It was, unfortunately for Rory, a perfect shot. The hi-impact slug struck the Dome dead on, ricocheted, and came back like a rubber ball on a string. Rory felt no immediate pain, but a vast sheet of white light filled his head as the smaller of the slug’s two fragments thumbed out his left eye and lodged in his brain. Blood flew in a spray, then ran through his fingers as he dropped to his knees, clutching his face.

  12

  “I’m blind! I’m blind!” the boy was screaming, and Lester immediately thought of the scripture upon which his finger had landed: Madness and blindness and astonishment of the heart.

  “I’m blind! I’m blind!”

  Lester pried away the boy’s hands and saw the red, welling socket. The remains of the eye itself were dangling on Rory’s cheek. As he turned his head up to Lester, the splattered remains plopped into the grass.

  Lester had a moment to cradle the child in his arms before the father arrived and tore him away. That was all right. That was as it should be. Lester had sinned and begged guidance from the Lord. Guidance had been given, an answer provided. He knew now what he was to do about the sins he’d been led into by James Rennie.

  A blind child had shown him the way.

  THIS IS NOT AS BAD AS IT GETS

  1

  What Rusty Everett would recall later was confusion. The only image that stuck out with complete clarity was Pastor Coggins’s naked upper body: fishbelly-white skin and stacked ribs.

  Barbie, however—perhaps because he’d been tasked by Colonel Cox to put on his investigator’s hat again—saw everything. And his clearest memory wasn’t of Coggins with his shirt off; it was of Melvin Searles pointing a finger at him and then tilting his head slightly—sign language any man recognizes as meaning We ain’t done yet, Sunshine.

  What everyone else remembered—what brought the town’s situation home to them as perhaps nothing else could—were the father’s cries as he held his wretched, bleeding boy in his arms, and the mother screaming “Is he all right, Alden? IS HE ALL RIGHT?” as she labored her sixty-pounds-overweight bulk toward the scene.

  Barbie saw Rusty Everett push through the circle gathering around the boy and join the two kneeling men—Alden and Lester. Alden was cradling his son in his arms as Pastor Coggins stared with his mouth sagging like a gate with a busted hinge. Rusty’s wife was right behind him. Rusty fell on his knees between Alden and Lester and tried to pull the boy’s hands away from his face. Alden—not surprisingly, in Barbie’s opinion—promptly socked him one. Rusty’s nose started to bleed.

  “No! Let him help!” the PA’s wife yelled.

  Linda, Barbie thought. Her name is Linda, and she’s a cop.

  “No, Alden! No!” Linda put her hand on the farmer’s shoulder and he turned, apparently ready to sock her. All sense had departed his face; he was an animal protecting a cub. Barbie moved forward to catch his fist if the farmer let it fly, then had a better idea.

  “Medic here!” he shouted, bending into Alden’s face and trying to block Linda from his field of vision. “Medic! Medic, med—”

  Barbie was yanked backward by the collar of his shirt and spun around. He had just time enough to register Mel Searles—one of Junior’s buddies—and to realize that Searles was wearing a blue uniform shirt and a badge. This is as bad as it gets, Barbie thought, but as if to prove him wrong, Searles socked him in the face, just as he had that night in Dipper’s parking lot. He missed Barbie’s nose, which had probably been his target, but mashed Barbie
’s lips back against his teeth.

  Searles drew back his fist to do it again, but Jackie Wettington—Mel’s unwilling partner that day—grabbed his arm before he could. “Don’t do it!” she shouted. “Officer, don’t do it !”

  For a moment the issue was in doubt. Then Ollie Dinsmore, closely followed by his sobbing, gasping mother, passed between them, knocking Searles back a step.

  Searles lowered his fist. “Okay,” he said. “But you’re on a crime scene, asshole. Police investigation scene. Whatever.”

  Barbie wiped his bleeding mouth with the heel of his hand and thought, This is not as bad as it gets. That’s the hell of it—it’s not.

  2

  The only part of this Rusty heard was Barbie shouting medic. Now he said it himself. “Medic, Mr. Dinsmore. Rusty Everett. You know me. Let me look at your boy.”

  “Let him, Alden!” Shelley cried. “Let him take care of Rory!”

  Alden relaxed his grip on the kid, who was swaying back and forth on his knees, his bluejeans soaked with blood. Rory had covered his face with his hands again. Rusty took hold of them—gently, gently does it—and pulled them down. He had hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as he feared, but the socket was raw and empty, pouring blood. And the brain behind that socket was hurt plenty. The news was in how the remaining eye cocked senselessly skyward, bulging at nothing.

  Rusty started to pull his shirt off, but the preacher was already holding out his own. Coggins’s upper body, thin and white in front, striped with crisscrossing red welts in back, was running with sweat. He held the shirt out.

  “No,” Rusty said. “Rip it, rip it.”

  For a moment Lester didn’t get it. Then he tore the shirt down the middle. The rest of the police contingent was arriving now, and some of the regular cops—Henry Morrison, George Frederick, Jackie Wettington, Freddy Denton—were yelling at the new Special Deputies to help move the crowd back, make some space. The new hires did so, and enthusiastically. Some of the rubberneckers were knocked down, including that famous Bratz-torturer Samantha Bushey. Sammy had Little Walter in a Papoose carrier, and when she went on her ass, both of them began to squall. Junior Rennie stepped over her without so much as a look and grabbed Rory’s mom, almost pulling the wounded boy’s mother off her feet before Freddy Denton stopped him.

  “No, Junior, no! It’s the kid’s mother! Let her loose!”

  “Police brutality!” Sammy Bushey yelled from where she lay in the grass. “Police brutal—”

  Georgia Roux, the newest hire in what had become Peter Randolph’s police department, arrived with Carter Thibodeau (holding his hand, actually). Georgia pressed her boot against one of Sammy’s breasts—it wasn’t quite a kick—and said, “Yo, dyke, shut up.”

  Junior let go of Rory’s mother and went to stand with Mel, Carter, and Georgia. They were staring at Barbie. Junior added his eyes to theirs, thinking that the cook was like a bad goddamned penny that kept turning up. He thought Baarbie would look awfully good in a cell right next to Sloppy Sam’s. Junior also thought that being a cop had been his destiny all along; it had certainly helped with his headaches.

  Rusty took half of Lester’s torn shirt and ripped it again. He folded a piece, started to put it over the gaping wound in the boy’s face, then changed his mind and gave it to the father. “Hold it to the—”

  The words barely came out; his throat was full of blood from his mashed nose. Rusty hawked it back, turned his head, spat a half-clotted loogie into the grass, and tried again. “Hold it to the wound, Dad. Apply pressure. Hand to the back of his neck and squeeze. ”

  Dazed but willing, Alden Dinsmore did as he was told. The makeshift pad immediately turned red, but the man seemed calmer nonetheless. Having something to do helped. It usually did.

  Rusty flung the remaining piece of shirt at Lester. “More!” he said, and Lester began ripping the shirt into smaller pieces. Rusty lifted Dinsmore’s hand and removed the first pad, which was now soaked and useless. Shelley Dinsmore shrieked when she saw the empty socket. “Oh, my boy! My boy! ”

  Peter Randolph arrived at a jog, huffing and puffing. Still, he was far ahead of Big Jim, who—mindful of his substandard ticker—was plodding down the slope of the field on grass the rest of the crowd had trampled into a broad path. He was thinking of what a cluster-mug this had turned out to be. Town gatherings would have to be by permit only in the future. And if he had anything to do with it (he would; he always did), permits would be hard to come by.

  “Move these people back further!” Randolph snarled at Officer Morrison. And, as Henry turned to do so: “Move it back, folks! Give em some air!”

  Morrison bawled: “Officers, form a line! Push em back! Anyone who resists, put em in cuffs!”

  The crowd began a slow reverse shuffle. Barbie lingered. “Mr. Everett … Rusty … do you need any help? Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” Rusty said, and his face told Barbie everything he needed to know: the PA was all right, just a bloody nose. The kid wasn’t and never would be again, even if he lived. Rusty applied a fresh pad to the kid’s bleeding eyesocket and put the father’s hand over it again. “Nape of the neck,” he said. “Press hard. Hard. ”

  Barbie started to step back, but then the kid spoke.

  3

  “It’s Halloween. You can’t … we can’t …”

  Rusty froze in the act of folding another piece of shirt into a compression pad. Suddenly he was back in his daughters’ bedroom, listening to Janelle scream, It’s the Great Pumpkin’s fault!

  He looked up at Linda. She had heard, too. Her eyes were big, the color fleeing her previously flushed cheeks.

  “Linda!” Rusty snapped at her. “Get on your walkie! Call the hospital! Tell Twitch to get the ambulance—”

  “The fire!” Rory Dinsmore screamed in a high, trembling voice. Lester was staring at him as Moses might have stared at the burning bush. “The fire! The bus is in the fire! Everyone’s screaming! Watch out for Halloween!”

  The crowd was silent now, listening to the child rant. Even Jim Rennie heard as he reached the back of the mob and began to elbow his way through.

  “Linda!” Rusty shouted. “Get on your walkie! We need the ambulance! ”

  She started visibly, as if someone had just clapped his hands in front of her face. She pulled the walkie-talkie off her belt.

  Rory tumbled forward into the flattened grass and began to seize.

  “What’s happening?” That was the father.

  “Oh dear-to-Jesus, he’s dying!” That was the mother.

  Rusty turned the trembling, bucking child over (trying not to think of Jannie as he did it, but that, of course, was impossible) and tilting his chin up to create an airway.

  “Come on, Dad,” he told Alden. “Don’t quit on me now. Squeeze the neck. Compression on the wound. Let’s stop the bleeding.”

  Compression might drive the fragment that had taken the kid’s eye deeper in, but Rusty would worry about that later. If, that was, the kid didn’t die right out here on the grass.

  From nearby—but oh so far—one of the soldiers finally spoke up. Barely out of his teens, he looked terrified and sorry. “We tried to stop him. Boy didn’t listen. There wasn’t nothing we could do.”

  Pete Freeman, his Nikon dangling by his knee on its strap, favored this young warrior with a smile of singular bitterness. “I think we know that. If we didn’t before, we sure do now.”

  4

  Before Barbie could melt into the crowd, Mel Searles grabbed him by the arm.

  “Take your hand off me,” Barbie said mildly.

  Searles showed his teeth in his version of a grin. “In your dreams, Fucko.” Then he raised his voice. “Chief! Hey, Chief!”

  Peter Randolph turned toward him impatiently, frowning.

  “This guy interfered with me while I was trying to secure the scene. Can I arrest him?”

  Randolph opened his mouth, possibly to say Don’t waste my time. Then he looked around. Jim Rennie ha
d finally joined the little group watching Everett work on the boy. Rennie gave Barbie the flat stare of a reptile on a rock, then looked back at Randolph and nodded slightly.

  Mel saw it. His grin widened. “Jackie? Officer Wettington, I mean? Can I borrow a pair of your cuffs?”

  Junior and the rest of his crew were also grinning. This was better than watching some bleeding kid, and a lot better than policing a bunch of holy rollers and dumbbells with signs. “Payback’s a bitch, Baaaar -bie,” Junior said.

  Jackie looked dubious. “Pete—Chief, I mean—I think the guy was only trying to h—”

  “Cuff him up,” Randolph said. “We’ll sort out what he was or wasn’t trying to do later. In the meantime, I want this mess shut down.” He raised his voice. “It’s over, folks! You’ve had your fun, and see what it’s come to! Now go home! ”

  Jackie was removing a set of plasticuffs from her belt (she had no intention of handing them to Mel Searles, would put them on herself) when Julia Shumway spoke up. She was standing just behind Randolph and Big Jim (in fact, Big Jim had elbowed her aside on his way to where the action was).

  “I wouldn’t do that, Chief Randolph, unless you want the PD embarrassed on the front page of the Democrat. ” She was smiling her Mona Lisa smile. “With you so new to the job and all.”

  “What are you talking about?” Randolph asked. His frown was deeper now, turning his face into a series of unlovely crevices.

  Julia held up her camera—a slightly older version of Pete Free-man’s. “I have quite a few pictures of Mr. Barbara assisting Rusty Everett with that wounded child, a couple of Officer Searles hauling Mr. Barbara off for no discernible reason … and one of Officer Sear-les punching Mr. Barbara in the mouth. Also for no discernible reason. I’m not much of a photographer, but that one is really quite good. Would you like to see it, Chief Randolph? You can; the camera’s digital.”