Under the Dome: A Novel Page 21

  Barbie’s admiration for her deepened, because he thought she was running a bluff. If she’d been taking pictures, why was she holding the lenscap in her left hand, as if she’d just taken it off?

  “It’s a lie, Chief,” Mel said. “He tried to take a swing at me. Ask Junior.”

  “I think my pictures will show that young Mr. Rennie was involved in crowd control and had his back turned when the punch landed,” Julia said.

  Randolph was glowering at her. “I could take your camera away,” he said. “Evidence.”

  “You certainly could,” she agreed cheerily, “and Pete Freeman would take a picture of you doing it. Then you could take Pete’s camera … but everyone here would see you do it.”

  “Whose side are you on here, Julia?” Big Jim asked. He was smiling his fierce smile—the smile of a shark about to take a bite out of some plump swimmer’s ass.

  Julia turned her own smile on him, the eyes above it as innocent and enquiring as a child’s. “Are there sides, James? Other than over there”—she pointed at the watching soldiers—“and in here?”

  Big Jim considered her, his lips now bending the other way, a smile in reverse. Then he flapped one disgusted hand at Randolph.

  “I guess we’ll let it slide, Mr. Barbara,” Randolph said. “Heat of the moment.”

  “Thanks,” Barbie said.

  Jackie took her glowering young partner’s arm. “Come on, Officer Searles. This part’s over. Let’s move these people back.”

  Searles went with her, but not before turning to Barbie and making the gesture: finger pointing, head cocked slightly. We ain’t done yet, Sunshine.

  Rommie’s assistant Toby Manning and Jack Evans appeared, carrying a makeshift stretcher made out of canvas and tent poles. Rommie opened his mouth to ask what the hell they thought they were doing, then closed it again. The field day had been canceled anyway, so what the hell.

  5

  Those with cars got into them. Then they all tried to drive away at the same time.

  Predictable, Joe McClatchey thought. Totally predictable.

  Most of the cops worked to unclog the resulting traffic jam, although even a bunch of kids (Joe was standing with Benny Drake and Norrie Calvert) could tell that the new and improved Five-O had no idea what it was doing. The sound of po-po curses came clear on the summery air (“Can’t you back that sonofawhore UP!” ). In spite of the mess, nobody seemed to be laying on their horns. Most folks were probably too bummed to beep.

  Benny said, “Look at those idiots. How many gallons of gas do you think they’re blowing out their tailpipes? Like they think the supply’s endless.”

  “Word,” Norrie said. She was a tough kid, a smalltown riot grrrl with a modified Tennessee Tophat mullet ’do, but now she only looked pale and sad and scared. She took Benny’s hand. Scarecrow Joe’s heart broke, then remended itself in an instant when she took his as well.

  “There goes the guy who almost got arrested,” Benny said, pointing with his free hand. Barbie and the newspaper lady were trudging across the field toward the makeshift parking lot with sixty or eighty other people, some dragging their protest signs dispiritedly behind them.

  “Nancy Newspaper wasn’t taking pictures at all, y’know,” Scarecrow Joe said. “I was standing right behind her. Pretty foxy.”

  “Yeah,” Benny said, “but I still wouldn’t want to be him. Until this shit ends, the cops can do pretty much what they want.”

  That was true, Joe reflected. And the new cops weren’t particularly nice guys. Junior Rennie, for example. The story of Sloppy Sam’s arrest was already making the rounds.

  “What are you saying?” Norrie asked Benny.

  “Nothing right now. It’s still cool right now.” He considered. “Fairly cool. But if this goes on … remember Lord of the Flies ?” They had read it for honors English.

  Benny intoned: “‘Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in.’ People call cops pigs, but I’ll tell you what I think, I think cops find pigs when the shit gets deep. Maybe because they get scared, too.”

  Norrie Calvert burst into tears. Scarecrow Joe put an arm around her. He did it carefully, as if he thought doing such a thing might cause them both to explode, but she turned her face against his shirt and hugged him. It was a one-armed hug, because she was still holding onto Benny with her other hand. Joe thought he had felt nothing in his whole life as weirdly thrilling as her tears dampening his shirt. Over the top of her head, he looked at Benny reproachfully.

  “Sorry, dude,” Benny said, and patted her back. “No fear.”

  “His eye was gone!” she cried. The words were muffled against Joe’s chest. Then she let go of him. “This isn’t fun anymore. This is not fun.”

  “No.” Joe spoke as if discovering a great truth. “It isn’t.”

  “Look,” Benny said. It was the ambulance. Twitch was bumping across Dinsmore’s field with the red roof lights flashing. His sister, the woman who owned Sweetbriar Rose, was walking ahead of him, guiding him around the worst potholes. An ambulance in a hayfield, under a bright afternoon sky in October: it was the final touch.

  Suddenly, Scarecrow Joe no longer wanted to protest. Nor did he exactly want to go home.

  At that moment, the only thing in the world he wanted was to get out of town.

  6

  Julia slid behind the wheel of her car but didn’t start it; they were going to be here awhile, and there was no sense in wasting gas. She leaned past Barbie, opened the glove compartment, and brought out an old pack of American Spirits. “Emergency supplies,” she told him apologetically. “Do you want one?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you mind? Because I can wait.”

  He shook his head again. She lit up, then blew smoke out her open window. It was still warm—a real Indian summer day for sure—but it wouldn’t stay that way. Another week or so and the weather would turn wrong, as the oldtimers said. Or maybe not, she thought. Who in the hell knows? If the Dome stayed in place, she had no doubt that plenty of meteorologists would weigh in on the subject of the weather inside, but so what? The Weather Channel Yodas couldn’t even predict which way a snowstorm would turn, and in Julia’s opinion they deserved no more credence than the political geniuses who blabbed their days away at the Sweetbriar Rose bullshit table.

  “Thanks for speaking up back there,” he said. “You saved my bacon.”

  “Here’s a newsflash, honey—your bacon’s still hanging in the smokehouse. What are you going to do next time? Have your friend Cox call the ACLU? They might be interested, but I don’t think anyone from the Portland office is going to be visiting Chester’s Mill soon.”

  “Don’t be so pessimistic. The Dome might blow out to sea tonight. Or just dissipate. We don’t know.”

  “Fat chance. This is a government job—some government’s—and I’ll bet your Colonel Cox knows it.”

  Barbie was silent. He had believed Cox when Cox said the U.S. hadn’t been responsible for the Dome. Not because Cox was necessarily trustworthy, but because Barbie just didn’t think America had the technology. Or any other country, for that matter. But what did he know? His last service job had been threatening scared Iraqis. Sometimes with a gun to their heads.

  Junior’s friend Frankie DeLesseps was out on Route 119, helping to direct traffic. He was wearing a blue uniform shirt over jeans—there probably hadn’t been any uniform pants in his size at the station. He was a tall sonofabitch. And, Julia saw with misgivings, he was wearing a gun on his hip. Smaller than the Glocks the regular Mill police carried, probably his own property, but it was a gun, all right.

  “What will you do if the Hitler Youth comes after you?” she asked, lifting her chin in Frankie’s direction. “Good luck hollering police brutality if they jug you and decide to finish what they started. There’s only two lawyers in town. One’s senile and the other drives a Boxster Jim Rennie got him at discount. Or so I’ve heard.”

  “I can take care of myself.”


  “Oooh, macho.”

  “What’s up with your paper? It looked ready when I left last night.”

  “Technically speaking, you left this morning. And yes, it’s ready. Pete and I and a few friends will make sure it gets distributed. I just didn’t see any point in starting while the town was three-quarters empty. Want to be a volunteer newsboy?”

  “I would, but I’ve got a zillion sandwiches to make. Strictly cold food at the restaurant tonight.”

  “Maybe I’ll drop by.” She tossed her cigarette, only half-smoked, from the window. Then, after a moment’s consideration, she got out and stepped on it. Starting a grassfire out here would not be cool, not with the town’s new firetrucks stranded in Castle Rock.

  “I swung by Chief Perkins’s house earlier,” she said as she got back behind the wheel. “Except of course it’s just Brenda’s now.”

  “How is she?”

  “Terrible. But when I said you wanted to see her, and that it was important—although I didn’t say what it was about—she agreed. After dark might be best. I suppose your friend will be impatient—”

  “Stop calling Cox my friend. He’s not my friend.”

  They watched silently as the wounded boy was loaded into the back of the ambulance. The soldiers were still watching, too. Probably against orders, and that made Julia feel a little better about them. The ambulance began to buck its way back across the field, lights flashing.

  “This is terrible,” she said in a thin voice.

  Barbie put an arm around her shoulders. She tensed for a moment, then relaxed. Looking straight ahead—at the ambulance, which was now turning into a cleared lane in the middle of Route 119—she said: “What if they shut me down, my friend? What if Rennie and his pet police decide to shut my little newspaper down?”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Barbie said. But he wondered. If this went on long enough, he supposed every day in Chester’s Mill would become Anything Can Happen Day.

  “She had something else on her mind,” Julia Shumway said.

  “Mrs. Perkins?”

  “Yes. It was in many ways a very strange conversation.”

  “She’s grieving for her husband,” Barbie said. “Grief makes people strange. I said hello to Jack Evans—his wife died yesterday when the Dome came down—and he looked at me as if he didn’t know me, although I’ve been serving him my famous Wednesday meatloaf since last spring.”

  “I’ve known Brenda Perkins since she was Brenda Morse,” Julia said. “Almost forty years. I thought she might tell me what was troubling her … but she didn’t.”

  Barbie pointed at the road. “I think you can go now.”

  As Julia started the engine, her cell phone trilled. She almost dropped her bag in her hurry to dig it out. She listened, then handed it to Barbie with her ironic smile. “It’s for you, boss.”

  It was Cox, and Cox had something to say. Quite a lot, actually. Barbie interrupted long enough to tell Cox what had happened to the boy now headed to Cathy Russell, but Cox either didn’t relate Rory Dinsmore’s story to what he was saying, or didn’t want to. He listened politely enough, then went on. When he finished, he asked Barbie a question that would have been an order, had Barbie still been in uniform and under his command.

  “Sir, I understand what you’re asking, but you don’t understand the … I guess you’d call it the political situation here. And my little part in it. I had some trouble before this Dome thing, and—”

  “We know all about that,” Cox said. “An altercation with the Second Selectman’s son and some of his friends. You were almost arrested, according to what I’ve got in my folder.”

  A folder. Now he’s got a folder. God help me.

  “That’s fine intel as far as it goes,” Barbie said, “but let me give you a little more. One, the Police Chief who kept me from being arrested died out on 119, not far from where I’m talking to you, in fact—”

  Faintly, in a world he could not now visit, Barbie heard paper rattle. He suddenly felt he would like to kill Colonel James O. Cox with his bare hands, simply because Colonel James O. Cox could go out for Mickey-D’s any time he wanted, and he, Dale Barbara, could not.

  “We know about that, too,” Cox said. “A pacemaker problem.”

  “Two,” Barbie went on, “the new Chief, who is asshole buddies with the only powerful member of this town’s Board of Selectmen, has hired some new deputies. They’re the guys who tried to beat my head off my shoulders in the parking lot of the local nightclub.”

  “You’ll have to rise above that, won’t you? Colonel?”

  “Why are you calling me Colonel? You’re the Colonel.”

  “Congratulations,” Cox said. “Not only have you reenlisted in your country’s service, you’ve gotten an absolutely dizzying promotion.”

  “No!” Barbie shouted. Julia was looking at him with concern, but he was hardly aware of it. “No, I don’t want it!”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got it,” Cox said calmly. “I’m going to e-mail a copy of the essential paperwork to your editor friend before we shut down your unfortunate little town’s Internet capacity.”

  “Shut it down ? You can’t shut it down!”

  “The paperwork is signed by the President himself. Are you going to say no to him? I understand he can be a tad grumpy when he’s crossed.”

  Barbie didn’t reply. His mind was whirling.

  “You need to visit the Selectmen and the Police Chief,” Cox said. “You need to tell them the President has invoked martial law in Chester’s Mill, and you’re the officer in charge. I’m sure you’ll encounter some initial resistance, but the information I’ve just given you should help establish you as the town’s conduit to the outside world. And I know your powers of persuasion. Saw them firsthand in Iraq.”

  “Sir,” he said. “You have so misread the situation here.” He ran a hand through his hair. His ear was throbbing from the goddamned cell phone. “It’s as if you can comprehend the idea of the Dome, but not what’s happening in this town as a result of it. And it’s been less than thirty hours.”

  “Help me understand, then.”

  “You say the President wants me to do this. Suppose I were to call him up and tell him he can kiss my rosy red ass?”

  Julia was looking at him, horrified, and this actually inspired him.

  “Suppose, in fact, I said I was a sleeper Al Qaeda agent, and I was planning to kill him—pow, one to the head. How about that?”

  “Lieutenant Barbara—Colonel Barbara, I mean—you’ve said enough.”

  Barbie did not feel this was so. “Could he send the FBI to come and grab me? The Secret Service? The goddam Red Army? No, sir. He could not.”

  “We have plans to change that, as I have just explained.” Cox no longer sounded loose and good-humored, jest one ole grunt talkin to another.

  “And if it works, feel free to have the federal agency of your choice come and arrest me. But if we stay cut off, who in here’s going to listen to me? Get it through your head: this town has seceded. Not just from America but from the whole world. There’s nothing we can do about it, and nothing you can do about it either.”

  Quietly, Cox said: “We’re trying to help you guys.”

  “You say that and I almost believe you. Will anybody else around here? When they look to see what kind of help their taxes are buying them, they see soldiers standing guard with their backs turned. That sends a hell of a message.”

  “You’re talking a whole lot for someone who’s saying no.”

  “I’m not saying no. But I’m only about nine feet from being arrested, and proclaiming myself the commandant pro tem won’t help.”

  “Suppose I were to call the First Selectman … what’s his name … Sanders … and tell him …”

  “That’s what I mean about how little you know. It’s like Iraq all over again, only this time you’re in Washington instead of boots on the ground, and you seem as clueless as the rest of the desk soldiers. Read my l
ips, sir: some intelligence is worse than no intelligence at all.”

  “A little learning is a dangerous thing,” Julia said dreamily.

  “If not Sanders, then who?”

  “James Rennie. The Second Selectman. He’s the Boss Hog around here.”

  There was a pause. Then Cox said, “Maybe we can give you the Internet. Some of us are of the opinion that cutting it off’s just a knee-jerk reaction, anyway.”

  “Why would you think that?” Barbie asked. “Don’t you guys know that if you let us stay on the Net, Aunt Sarah’s cranberry bread recipe is sure to get out sooner or later?”

  Julia sat up straight and mouthed, They’re trying to cut the Internet? Barbie raised one finger toward her—Wait.

  “Just hear me out, Barbie. Suppose we call this Rennie and tell him the Internet’s got to go, so sorry, crisis situation, extreme measures, et cetera, et cetera. Then you can convince him of your usefulness by changing our minds.”

  Barbie considered. It might work. For a while, anyway. Or it might not.

  “Plus,” Cox said brightly, “you’ll be giving them this other information. Maybe saving some lives, but saving people the scare of their lives, for sure.”

  Barbie said, “Phones stay up as well as Internet.”

  “That’s hard. I might be able to keep the Net for you, but … listen, man. There are at least five Curtis LeMay types sitting on the committee presiding over this mess, and as far as they’re concerned, everyone in Chester’s Mill is a terrorist until proved otherwise.”

  “What can these hypothetical terrorists do to harm America? Suicide-bomb the Congo Church?”

  “Barbie, you’re preaching to the choir.”

  Of course that was probably the truth.

  “Will you do it?”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that. Wait for my call before you do anything. I have to talk to the late Police Chief’s widow first.”

  Cox persisted. “Will you keep the horse-trading part of this conversation to yourself?”

  Again, Barbie was struck by how little even Cox—a freethinker, by military standards—understood about the changes the Dome had already wrought. In here, the Cox brand of secrecy no longer mattered.