Under the Dome: A Novel Read online

  It was a joke.

  A bad joke.

  “Colonel Cox, you can go fuck yourself.”

  He hung up, swiveled his desk chair, and hurled the gold baseball. It hit the signed photo of Tiger Woods. The glass shattered, the frame fell to the floor, and Carter Thibodeau, who was used to striking fear into hearts but who rarely had fear struck into his own, jumped to his feet.

  “Mr. Rennie? Are you all right?”

  He didn’t look all right. Irregular purple patches flared on his cheeks. His small eyes were wide and bulging from their sockets of hard fat. The vein in his forehead pulsed.

  “They will never take this town from me,” Big Jim whispered.

  “Course they won’t,” Carter said. “Without you, we’re sunk.”

  This relaxed Big Jim to some degree. He reached for the telephone, then remembered Randolph had gone home to bed. The new Chief had gotten precious little rack-time since the crisis began, and had told Carter that he intended to sleep until at least noon. And that was okay. The man was useless, anyway.

  “Carter, make a note. Show it to Morrison, if he’s running things at the PD this morning, then leave it on Randolph’s desk. After that, come right back here.” He paused to consider for a moment, frowning. “And see if Junior’s headed there. He went out while I was talking to Colonel Do-What-I-Want on the telephone. Don’t go looking for him if he’s not, but if he is, make sure he’s all right.”

  “Sure. What’s the message?”

  “ ‘Dear Chief Randolph: Jacqueline Wettington is to be severed from the Chester’s Mill PD immediately.’”

  “Does that mean fired?”

  “Yes indeed.”

  Carter was scribbling in his book, and Big Jim gave him time to catch up. He was okay again. Better than okay. He was feeling it. “Add, ‘Dear Officer Morrison: When Wettington comes in today, please inform her she is relieved of duty and tell her to clean out her locker. If she asks you for cause, tell her we are reorganizing the department and her services will no longer be required.’”

  “Does required have a c in it, Mr. Rennie?”

  “The spelling doesn’t matter. The message matters.”

  “Okay. Right.”

  “If she has further questions, she can see me.”

  “Got it. Is that all?”

  “No. Tell whichever one sees her first to take her badge and gun. If she gets poopy and says the gun’s her personal property, they can give her a receipt and tell her it will either be returned or she’ll be reimbursed when this crisis is over.”

  Carter scribbled some more, then looked up. “What do you think is wrong with Junes, Mr. Rennie?”

  “I don’t know. Just megrims, I imagine. Whatever it is, I don’t have time to deal with it right now. There are more pressing matters at hand.” He pointed at the notebook. “Bring me that.”

  Carter did. His handwriting was the looping scrawl of a third-grader, but everything was there. Rennie signed it.

  9

  Carter took the fruits of his secretarial labor to the PD. Henry Morrison greeted them with an incredulity that fell just short of mutiny. Carter also looked around for Junior, but Junior wasn’t there, and no one had seen him. He asked Henry to keep an eye out.

  Then, on impulse, he went downstairs to visit Barbie, who was lying on his bunk with his hands behind his head.

  “Your boss called,” he said. “That guy Cox. Mr. Rennie calls him Colonel Do-What-I-Want.”

  “I’ll bet he does,” Barbie said.

  “Mr. Rennie gave him the big fuck you. And you know what? Your Army pal had to eat it and smile. What do you think of that?”

  “I’m not surprised.” Barbie kept looking at the ceiling. He sounded calm. It was irritating. “Carter, have you thought about where all this is going? Have you tried taking the long view?”

  “There isn’t any long view, Baaarbie. Not anymore.”

  Barbie just kept looking at the ceiling with a little smile dimpling the corners of his mouth. As if he knew something Carter did not. It made Carter want to unlock the cell door and punch the shitlicker’s lights out. Then he remembered what had happened in Dipper’s parking lot. Let Barbara see if he could fight a firing squad with his dirty tricks. Let him try that.

  “I’ll see you around, Baaaarbie. ”

  “I’m sure,” Barbie said, still not bothering to look at him. “It’s a small town, son, and we all support the team.”

  10

  When the parsonage doorbell rang, Piper Libby was still in the Bruins tee-shirt and shorts that served as her nightwear. She opened the door, assuming her visitor would be Helen Roux, an hour early for her ten o’clock appointment to discuss Georgia’s funeral and burial arrangements. But it was Jackie Wettington. She was wearing her uniform, but there was no badge over her left breast and no gun on her hip. She looked stunned.

  “Jackie? What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve been fired. That bastard has had it in for me since the PD Christmas party, when he tried to cop a feel and I slapped his hand, but I doubt if that was all of it, or even most of it—”

  “Come in,” Piper said. “I found a little gas-operated hotplate—from the last minister, I think—in one of the pantry cupboards, and for a wonder, it still works. Doesn’t a cup of hot tea sound good?”

  “Wonderful,” Jackie said. Tears welled in her eyes and over-spilled. She wiped them off her cheeks almost angrily.

  Piper led her into the kitchen and lit the single-burner Brinkman camp-grill on the counter. “Now tell me everything.”

  Jackie did, not failing to include Henry Morrison’s condolences, which had been clumsy but sincere. “He whispered that part,” she said, taking the cup Piper gave her. “It’s like the goddam Gestapo over there now. Excuse my language.”

  Piper waved this away.

  “Henry says that if I protest at the town meeting tomorrow, I’ll only make things worse—Rennie’ll whip out a bunch of trumped-up incompetency charges. He’s probably right. But the biggest incompetent in the department this morning is the one running the place. As for Rennie … he’s packing the PD with officers who’ll be loyal to him in case of any organized protest to the way he’s doing things.”

  “Of course he is,” Piper said.

  “Most of the new hires are too young to buy a legal beer, but they’re carrying guns. I thought of telling Henry he’d be the next to go—he’s said things about the way Randolph’s running the department, and of course the bootlickers will have passed his comments on—but I could see by his face that he already knows it.”

  “Do you want me to go see Rennie?”

  “It wouldn’t do any good. I’m actually not sorry to be out, I just hate to be fired. The big problem is that I’ll look very good for what’s going to happen tomorrow night. I may have to disappear with Barbie. Always assuming we can find a place to disappear to. ”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  “I know, but I’m going to tell you. And this is where the risks start. If you don’t keep this to yourself, I’ll wind up in the Coop myself. Maybe even standing next to Barbara when Rennie lines up his firing squad.”

  Piper regarded her gravely. “I’ve got forty-five minutes before Georgia Roux’s mother shows up. Is that time enough for you to say what you have to say?”

  “Plenty.”

  Jackie began with the examination of the bodies at the funeral home. Described the stitch marks on Coggins’s face and the golden baseball Rusty had seen. She took a deep breath and next spoke of her plan to break Barbie out during the special town meeting the following night. “Although I have no idea where we can put him if we do get him out.” She sipped her tea. “So what do you think?”

  “That I want another cuppa. You?”

  “I’m good, thanks.”

  From the counter, Piper said: “What you’re planning is terribly dangerous—I doubt if you need me to tell you that—but there may be no other way to save an in
nocent man’s life. I never believed for a second that Dale Barbara was guilty of those murders, and after my own close encounter with our local law enforcement, the idea that they’d execute him to keep him from taking over doesn’t surprise me much.” Then, following Barbie’s train of thought without knowing it: “Rennie isn’t taking the long view, and neither are the cops. All they care about is who’s boss of the treehouse. That kind of thinking is a disaster waiting to happen.”

  She came back to the table.

  “I’ve known almost from the day I came back here to take up the pastorate—which was my ambition ever since I was a little girl—that Jim Rennie was a monster in embryo. Now—if you’ll pardon the melodramatic turn of phrase—the monster has been born.”

  “Thank God,” Jackie said.

  “Thank God the monster has been born?” Piper smiled and raised her eyebrows.

  “No—thank God you’re down with this.”

  “There’s more, isn’t there?”

  “Yes. Unless you don’t want to be a part of it.”

  “Honey, I’m already a part of it. If you can be jailed for plotting, I could be jailed for listening and not reporting. We’re now what our government likes to call ‘homegrown terrorists.’ ”

  Jackie received this idea in glum silence.

  “It isn’t just Free Dale Barbara you’re talking about, is it? You want to organize an active resistance movement.”

  “I suppose I do,” Jackie said, and gave a rather helpless laugh. “After six years with the U.S. Army, I never would have expected it—I’ve always been a my-country-right-or-wrong sort of girl—but … has it occurred to you that the Dome might not break? Not this fall, not this winter? Maybe not next year or even in our lifetimes?”

  “Yes.” Piper was calm, but most of the color had left her cheeks. “It has. I think it’s occurred to everyone in The Mill, if only in the backs of their minds.”

  “Then think about this. Do you want to spend a year or five years in a dictatorship run by a homicidal idiot? Assuming we have five years?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then the only time to stop him might be now. He may no longer be in embryo, but this thing he’s building—this machine—is still in its infancy. It’s the best time.” Jackie paused. “If he orders the police to start collecting guns from ordinary citizens, it might be the only time.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Let us have a meeting here at the parsonage. Tonight. These people, if they’ll all come.” From her back pocket she took the list she and Linda Everett had labored over.

  Piper unfolded the sheet of notebook paper and studied it. There were eight names. She looked up. “Lissa Jamieson, the librarian with the crystals? Ernie Calvert? Are you sure about those two?”

  “Who better to recruit than a librarian when you’re dealing with a fledgling dictatorship? As for Ernie … my understanding is that after what happened at the supermarket yesterday, if he came across Jim Rennie flaming in the street, he wouldn’t piss on him to put him out.”

  “Pronounally vague but otherwise colorful.”

  “I was going to have Julia Shumway sound Ernie and Lissa out, but now I’ll be able to do it myself. I seem to have come into a lot of free time.”

  The doorbell rang. “That may be the bereaved mother,” Piper said, getting to her feet. “I imagine she’ll be half-shot already. She enjoys her coffee brandy, but I doubt if it dulls the pain much.”

  “You haven’t told me how you feel about the meeting,” Jackie said.

  Piper Libby smiled. “Tell our fellow homegrown terrorists to arrive between nine and nine thirty tonight. They should come on foot, and by ones—standard French Resistance stuff. No need to advertise what we’re doing.”

  “Thank you,” Jackie said. “So much.”

  “Not at all. It’s my town, too. May I suggest you slip out by the back door?”

  11

  There was a pile of clean rags in the back of Rommie Burpee’s van. Rusty knotted two of them together, fashioning a bandanna he tied over the lower half of his face, but still his nose, throat, and lungs were thick with the stench of dead bear. The first maggots had hatched in its eyes, open mouth, and the meat of its exposed brain.

  He stood up, backed away, then reeled a little bit. Rommie grabbed him by the elbow.

  “If he passes out, catch him,” Joe said nervously. “Maybe that thing hits adults further out.”

  “It’s just the smell,” Rusty said. “I’m okay now.”

  But even away from the bear, the world smelled bad: smoky and heavy, as if the entire town of Chester’s Mill had become a large closed room. In addition to the odors of smoke and decaying animal, he could smell rotting plant life and a swampy stench that no doubt arose from the drying bed of the Prestile. If only there was a wind, he thought, but there was just an occasional pallid puff of breeze that brought more bad smells. To the far west there were clouds—it was probably raining a bitch over in New Hampshire—but when they reached the Dome, the clouds parted like a river dividing at a large outcropping of rock. Rusty had become increasingly doubtful about the possibility of rain under the Dome. He made a note to check some meteorological websites … if he ever got a free moment. Life had become appallingly busy and unsettlingly unstructured.

  “Did Br’er Bear maybe die of rabies, doc?” Rommie asked.

  “I doubt it. I think it’s exactly what the kids said: plain suicide.”

  They piled into the van, Rommie behind the wheel, and drove slowly up Black Ridge Road. Rusty had the Geiger counter in his lap. It clucked steadily. He watched the needle rise toward the +200 mark.

  “Stop here, Mr. Burpee!” Norrie cried. “Before you come out of the woods! If you’re gonna pass out, I’d just as soon you didn’t do it while you were driving, even at ten miles an hour.”

  Rommie obediently pulled the van over. “Jump out, kids. I’m gonna babysit you. The doc’s going on by himself.” He turned to Rusty. “Take the van, but drive slow and stop the second the radiation count gets too high to be safe. Or if you start to feel woozy. We’ll walk behind you.”

  “Be careful, Mr. Everett,” Joe said.

  Benny added, “Don’t worry if you pass out and Wilson the van. We’ll push you back onto the road when you come to.”

  “Thanks,” Rusty said. “You’re all heart and a mile wide.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  Rusty got behind the wheel and closed the driver’s-side door. On the passenger bucket, the Geiger counter clicked. He drove—very slowly—out of the woods. Up ahead, Black Ridge Road rose toward the orchard. At first he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, and had a moment of bone-deep disappointment. Then a bright purple flash hit him in the eyes and he jammed on the brakes in a hurry. Something up there, all right, a bright something amid the scrabble of untended apple trees. Just behind him, in the van’s outside mirror, he saw the others stop walking.

  “Rusty?” Rommie called. “Okay?”

  “I see it.”

  He counted to fifteen, and the purple light flashed again. He was reaching for the Geiger counter when Joe looked in at him through the driver’s-side window. The new pimples stood out on his skin like stigmata. “Do you feel anything? Woozy? Swimmy in the head?”

  “No,” Rusty said.

  Joe pointed ahead. “That’s where we blacked out. Right there.” Rusty could see scuff-marks in the dirt at the left side of the road.

  “Walk that far,” Rusty said. “All four of you. Let’s see if you pass out again.”

  “Cheesus,” Benny said, joining Joe. “What am I, a guinea pig?”

  “Actually, I think Rommie’s the guinea pig. You up for it, Rommie?”

  “Yuh.” He turned to the kids. “If I pass out and you don’t, drag me back here. It seems to be out of range.”

  The quartet walked to the scuff-marks, Rusty watching intently from behind the wheel of the van. They had almost re
ached them when Rommie first slowed, then staggered. Norrie and Benny reached out on one side to steady him, Joe on the other. But Rommie didn’t fall. After a moment he straightened up again.

  “Dunno if it was somethin real or only … what do you call it … the power of suggestion, but I’m okay now. Was just a little light-headed for a second, me. You kids feel anything?”

  They shook their heads. Rusty wasn’t surprised. It was like chick-enpox: a mild sickness mostly suffered by children, who only caught it once.

  “Drive ahead, Doc,” Rommie said. “You don’t want to be carryin all those pieces of lead sheet up there if you don’t have to, but be careful.”

  Rusty drove slowly forward. He heard the accelerating pace of clicks from the Geiger counter, but felt absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. From the ridge, the light flashed out at fifteen-second intervals. He reached Rommie and the children, then passed them.

  “I don’t feel anyth—” he began, and then it came: not light-headedness, exactly, but a sense of strangeness and peculiar clarity. While it lasted he felt as if his head were a telescope and he could see anything he wanted to see, no matter how far. He could see his brother making his morning commute in San Diego, if he wanted to.

  Somewhere, in an adjacent universe, he heard Benny call out: “Whoa, Dr. Rusty’s losin it!”

  But he wasn’t; he could still see the dirt road perfectly well. Divinely well. Every stone and chip of mica. If he had swerved—and he supposed he had—it was to avoid the man who was suddenly standing there. The man was skinny, and made taller by an absurd red, white, and blue stovepipe hat, comically crooked. He was wearing jeans and a tee-shirt that read SWEET HOME ALABAMA PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG.

  That’s not a man, it’s a Halloween dummy.

  Yes, sure. What else could it be, with green garden trowels for hands and a burlap head and stitched white crosses for eyes?

  “Doc! Doc! ” It was Rommie.

  The Halloween dummy burst into flames.

  A moment later it was gone. Now there was just the road, the ridge, and the purple light, flashing at fifteen-second intervals, seeming to say Come on, come on, come on.