Under the Dome: A Novel Read online

  Brenda considered it, considered the file she had found marked VADER, then shook her head slowly. “It’s too soon for anything like that.”

  “What about just Fire Chief? How bout dat one?” The Lewiston on parle coming on stronger in his voice now.

  Brenda looked around at the smoldering brush and charred trash-wood trees. Ugly, granted, like something out of a World War I battlefield photo, but no longer dangerous. The people who had shown up here had seen to that. The crew. Her crew.

  She smiled. “That I might consider.”

  12

  The first time Ginny Tomlinson came down the hospital hallway she was running, responding to a loud beeping that sounded like bad news, and Piper didn’t have a chance to speak to her. Didn’t even try. She had been in the waiting room long enough to get the picture: three people—two nurses and a teenage candy striper named Gina Buffalino—in charge of an entire hospital. They were coping, but barely. When Ginny came back, she was walking slowly. Her shoulders were slumped. A medical chart dangled from one hand.

  “Ginny?” Piper asked. “Okay?”

  Piper thought Ginny might snap at her, but she offered a tired smile instead of a snarl. And sat down next to her. “Fine. Just tired.” She paused. “Also, Ed Carty just died.”

  Piper took her hand. “I’m very sorry to hear that.”

  Ginny squeezed her fingers. “Don’t be. You know how women talk about having babies? This one had an easy delivery, this one had it hard?”

  Piper nodded.

  “Death is like that, too. Mr. Carty was in labor a long time, but now he’s delivered.”

  To Piper the idea seemed beautiful. She thought she could use it in a sermon … except she guessed that people wouldn’t want to hear a sermon on death this coming Sunday. Not if the Dome was still in place.

  They sat for a while, Piper trying to think of the best way to ask what she had to ask. In the end, she didn’t have to.

  “She was raped,” Ginny said. “Probably more than once. I was afraid Twitch was going to have to try his suturing, but I finally got it stopped with a vaginal pack.” She paused. “I was crying. Luckily, the girl was too stoned to notice.”

  “And the baby?”

  “Your basic healthy eighteen-month-old, but he gave us a scare. He had a mini-seizure. It was probably exposure to the sun. Plus dehydration … hunger … and he has a wound of his own.” Ginny traced a line across her forehead.

  Twitch came down the hall and joined them. He looked light-years from his usual jaunty self.

  “Did the men who raped her also hurt the baby?” Piper’s voice remained calm, but a thin red fissure was opening in her mind.

  “Little Walter? I think he just fell,” Twitch said. “Sammy said something about the crib collapsing. It wasn’t completely coherent, but I’m pretty sure it was an accident. That part, anyway.”

  Piper was looking at him, bemused. “That was what she was saying. I thought it was ‘little water.’”

  “I’m sure she wanted water,” Ginny said, “but Sammy’s baby really is Little, first name, Walter, second name. They named him after a blues harmonica player, I believe. She and Phil—” Ginny mimed sucking a joint and holding in the smoke.

  “Oh, Phil was a lot more than a smokehound,” Twitch said. “When it came to drugs, Phil Bushey was a multitasker.”

  “Is he dead?” Piper asked.

  Twitch shrugged. “I haven’t seen him around since spring. If he is, good riddance.”

  Piper looked at him reproachfully.

  Twitch ducked his head a little. “Sorry, Rev.” He turned to Ginny. “Any sign of Rusty?”

  “He needed some time off,” she said, “and I told him to go. He’ll be back soon, I’m sure.”

  Piper sat between them, outwardly calm. Inside, the red fissure was widening. There was a sour taste in her mouth. She remembered a night when her father had forbidden her to go out to Skate Scene at the mall because she’d said something smart to her mother (as a teenager, Piper Libby had been an absolute font of smart things to say). She had gone upstairs, called the friend she had expected to meet, and told that friend—in a perfectly pleasant, perfectly even voice—that something had come up and she wouldn’t be able to meet her after all. Next weekend? For sure, uh-huh, you bet, have a good time, no, I’m fine, b’bye. Then she had trashed her room. She finished by yanking her beloved Oasis poster off the wall and tearing it up. By then she had been crying hoarsely, not in sorrow but in one of those rages that had blown through her teenage years like force-five hurricanes. Her father came up at some point during the festivities and stood in the doorway, regarding her. When she finally saw him there she stared back defiantly, panting, thinking how much she hated him. How much she hated them both. If they were dead, she could go live with her aunt Ruth in New York. Aunt Ruth knew how to have a good time. Not like some people. He had held his hands out to her, open, extended. It had been a somehow humble gesture, one that had crushed her anger and almost crushed her heart.

  If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you, he had said, and then left her, walking down the hallway with his head bent. She hadn’t slammed the door behind him. She had closed it, very quietly.

  That was the year she had made her often vile temper her number one priority. Killing it completely would be killing part of herself, but she thought if she did not make some fundamental changes, an important part of her would remain fifteen for a long, long time. She had begun working to impose control, and mostly she had succeeded. When she felt that control slipping, she would remember what her father had said, and that open-handed gesture, and his slow walk along the upstairs hall of the house she had grown up in. She had spoken at his funeral service nine years later, saying My father told me the most important thing I’ve ever heard. She hadn’t said what that thing was, but her mother had known; she had been sitting in the front pew of the church in which her daughter was now ordained.

  For the last twenty years, when she felt the urge to flash out at someone—and often the urge was nearly uncontrollable, because people could be so stupid, so willfully dumb—she would summon her father’s voice: If you don’t control your temper, your temper will control you.

  But now the red fissure was widening and she felt the old urge to throw things. To scratch skin until the blood came sweating out.

  “Did you ask her who did it?”

  “Yes, of course,” Ginny said. “She won’t say. She’s scared.” Piper remembered how she’d first thought the mother and baby lying beside the road was a bag of garbage. And that, of course, was what they’d been to whoever did this. She stood up. “I’m going to talk to her.”

  “That might not be such a good idea right now,” Ginny said. “She’s had a sedative, and—”

  “Let her take a shot,” Twitch said. His face was pale. His hands were knotted between his knees. The knuckles cracked repeatedly. “And make it a good one, Rev.”

  13

  Sammy’s eyes were at half-mast. They opened slowly when Piper sat down beside her bed. “You … were the one who …”

  “Yes,” Piper said, taking her hand. “My name is Piper Libby.”

  “Thank you,” Sammy said. Her eyes began to drift closed again.

  “Thank me by telling me the names of the men who raped you.”

  In the dim room—warm, with the hospital’s air-conditioning shut down—Sammy shook her head. “They said they’d hurt me. If I told.” She glanced at Piper. It was a cowlike glance, full of dumb resignation. “They might hurt Little Walter, too.”

  Piper nodded. “I understand you’re frightened,” she said. “Now tell me who they were. Give me the names.”

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Looking away from Piper now. “They said they would hurt—”

  Piper had no time for this; the girl would zone out on her. She grasped Sammy’s wrist. “I want those names, and you’re going to give them to me.”

  “I don’t dare. ” Sammy
began to ooze tears.

  “You’re going to do it because if I hadn’t come along, you might be dead now.” She paused, then drove the dagger the rest of the way in. She might regret it later, but not now. Right now the girl in the bed was only an obstacle standing between her and what she needed to know. “Not to mention your baby. He might be dead, too. I saved your life, I saved his, and I want those names. ”

  “No.” But the girl was weakening now, and part of the Reverend Piper Libby was actually enjoying this. Later she’d be disgusted; later she’d think You’re not that much different from those boys, forcing is forcing. But now, yes, there was pleasure, just as there had been pleasure in tearing the treasured poster from the wall and ripping it to shreds.

  I like it because it is bitter, she thought. And because it is my heart.

  She leaned over the crying girl. “Dig the wax out of your ears, Sammy, because you need to hear this. What they’ve done once they’ll do again. And when they do, when some other woman shows up here with a bloody snatch and possibly pregnant with a rapist’s child, I will come to you, and I will say—”

  “No! Stop!”

  “‘You were part of it. You were right there, cheering them on.’”

  “No!” Sammy cried. “Not me, that was Georgia! Georgia was the one cheering them on!”

  Piper felt cold disgust. A woman. A woman had been there. In her head, the red fissure opened wider. Soon it would begin to spew lava.

  “Give me the names,” she said.

  And Sammy did.

  14

  Jackie Wettington and Linda Everett were parked outside Food City. It was closing at five PM instead of eight. Randolph had sent them there thinking the early closing might cause trouble. A ridiculous idea, because the supermarket was almost empty. There were hardly a dozen cars in the parking lot, and the few remaining shoppers were moving in a slow daze, as if sharing the same bad dream. The two officers saw only one cashier, a teenager named Bruce Yardley. The kid was taking currency and writing chits instead of running credit cards. The meat counter was looking depleted, but there was still plenty of chicken and most of the canned and dry-goods shelves were fully stocked.

  They were waiting for the last customers to leave when Linda’s cell phone rang. She looked at the caller ID and felt a little stab of fear in her stomach. It was Marta Edmunds, who kept Janelle and Judy when Linda and Rusty were both working—as they had been, almost nonstop, since the Dome came down. She hit callback.

  “Marta?” she said, praying it was nothing, Marta asking if it was okay for her to take the girls down to the common, something like that. “Everything all right?”

  “Well … yes. That is, I guess so.” Linda hating the worry she heard in Marta’s voice. “But … you know that seizure thing?”

  “Oh God—did she have one?”

  “I think so,” Marta said, then hurried on: “They’re perfectly okay now, in the other room, coloring.”

  “What happened? Tell me!”

  “They were on the swings. I was doing my flowers, getting them ready for winter—”

  “Marta, please !” Linda said, and Jackie laid a hand on her arm.

  “I’m sorry. Audi started to bark, so I turned around. I said, ‘Honey, are you all right?’ She didn’t answer, just got out of the swing and sat down underneath—you know, where there’s a little dip from all the feet? She didn’t fall out or anything, just sat down. She was staring straight ahead and doing that lip-smacking thing you told me to watch for. I ran over … kind of shook her … and she said … let me think …”

  Here it comes, Linda thought. Stop Halloween, you have to stop Halloween.

  But no. It was something else entirely.

  “She said ‘The pink stars are falling. The pink stars are falling in lines.’ Then she said, ‘It’s so dark and everything smells bad.’ Then she woke up and now everything’s fine.”

  “Thank God for that,” Linda said, and spared a thought for her five-year-old. “Is Judy okay? Did it upset her?”

  There was a long pause on the line and then Marta said, “Oh.”

  “Oh? What does that mean, oh ?”

  “It was Judy, Linda. Not Janelle. This time it was Judy.”

  15

  I want to play that other game you said, Aidan had told Carolyn Sturges when they had stopped on the common to talk to Rusty. The other game she had in mind was Red Light, although Carolyn had only the slightest recollection of the rules—not surprising, since she hadn’t played it since she was six or seven.

  But once she was standing against a tree in the commodious backyard of the “passionage,” the rules came back to her. And, unexpectedly, to Thurston, who seemed not only willing to play, but eager.

  “Remember,” he instructed the children (who somehow seemed to have missed the pleasures of Red Light themselves), “she can count to ten as fast as she wants to, and if she catches you moving when she turns around, you have to go all the way back.”

  “She won’t catch me, ” Alice said.

  “Me, either,” Aidan said stoutly.

  “We’ll see about that,” Carolyn said, and turned her face to the tree: “One, two, three, four … five, six, seven … eight-nine-ten RED LIGHT!”

  She whirled around. Alice was standing with a smile on her mouth and one leg extended in a big old giant step. Thurston, also smiling, had his hands extended in Phantom of the Opera claws. She caught the slightest movement from Aidan, but didn’t even think about sending him back. He looked happy, and she had no intention of spoiling that.

  “Good,” she said. “Good little statues. Here comes Round Two.” She turned to the tree and counted again, invaded by the old, childishly delicious fear of knowing people were moving in while her back was turned. “Onetwo threefour fivesix seveneightnineten REDLIGHT!”

  She whirled. Alice was now only twenty paces away. Aidan was ten paces or so behind her, trembling on one foot, a scab on his knee very visible. Thurse was behind the boy, one hand on his chest like an orator, smiling. Alice was going to be the one to catch her, but that was all right; in the second game the girl would be “it” and her brother would win. She and Thurse would see to it.

  She turned to the tree again. “Onetwothreefo—”

  Then Alice screamed.

  Carolyn turned and saw Aidan Appleton lying on the ground. At first she thought he was still trying to play the game. One knee—the one with the scab on it—was up, as if he were trying to run on his back. His wide eyes were staring at the sky. His lips were folded into a poochy little O. There was a dark spot spreading on his shorts. She rushed to him.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Alice asked. Carolyn could see all the stress of the terrible weekend crushing in on her face. “Is he all right?”

  “Aidan?” Thurse asked. “You okay, big fella?”

  Aidan went on trembling, his lips seeming to suck at an invisible straw. His bent leg came down … then kicked out. His shoulders twitched.

  “He’s having some kind of seizure,” Carolyn said. “Probably from overexcitement. I think he’ll come out of it if we just give him a few m—”

  “The pink stars are falling,” Aidan said. “They make lines behind them. It’s pretty. It’s scary. Everyone is watching. No treats, only tricks. Hard to breathe. He calls himself the Chef. It’s his fault. He’s the one.”

  Carolyn and Thurston looked at each other. Alice was kneeling by her brother, holding his hand.

  “Pink stars,” Aidan said. “They fall, they fall, they f—”

  “Wake up!” Alice shouted into his face. “Stop scaring us!”

  Thurston Marshall touched her shoulder gently. “Honey, I don’t think that’s helping.”

  Alice paid him no mind. “Wake up, you … you CRAPHEAD!”

  And Aidan did. He looked at his sister’s tear-streaked face, puzzled. Then he looked at Carolyn and smiled—the sweetest goddam smile she had ever seen in her life.

  “Did I win?” he asked.


  16

  The gennie in the Town Hall’s supply shed was badly maintained (someone had shoved an old-timey galvanized tin washbasin under it to catch the dripping oil), and, Rusty guessed, about as energy-efficient as Big Jim Rennie’s Hummer. But he was more interested in the silver tank attached to it.

  Barbie looked briefly at the generator, grimaced at the smell, then moved to the tank. “It isn’t as big as I would’ve expected,” he said … although it was a hell of a lot bigger than the canisters they used at Sweetbriar, or the one he had changed out for Brenda Perkins.

  “It’s called ‘municipal size,’” Rusty said. “I remember that from the town meeting last year. Sanders and Rennie made a big deal of how the smaller tanks were going to save us yea bucks during ‘these times of costly energy.’ Each one holds eight hundred gallons.”

  “Which means a weight of … what? Sixty-four hundred pounds?”

  Rusty nodded. “Plus the weight of the tank. It’s a lot to lift—you’d need a forklift or a hydraulic Power Step—but not to move. A Ram pickup is rated for sixty-eight hundred pounds, and it could probably carry more. One of these midsize tanks would fit in the bed, too. Sticking out the end a little bit, is all.” Rusty shrugged. “Hang a red flag from it and you’re good to go.”

  “This is the only one here,” Barbie said. “When it’s gone, the Town Hall lights go out.”

  “Unless Rennie and Sanders know where there are more,” Rusty agreed. “And I’m betting they do.”

  Barbie ran a hand over the blue stenciling on the tank: CR HOSP. “This is what you lost.”

  “We didn’t lose it; it was stolen. That’s what I’m thinking. Only there should be five more of our tanks in here, because we’re missing a total of six.”

  Barbie surveyed the long shed. Despite the stored plows and cartons of reserve parts, the place looked empty. Especially around the generator. “Never mind whatever got kited from the hospital; where’s the rest of the town’s tanks?”