Under the Dome: A Novel (10 page)

“In the hall, Rusty?” Ginny said. She didn’t give the kid a glance.

“I’ll be right back, Benny. Sit there and take it easy.”

“Chillaxin’. No prob.”

Rusty followed Ginny out into the hall. “Ambulance time?” he asked. Beyond Ginny, in the sunny waiting room, Benny’s mother was looking grimly down at a paperback with a sweet-savage cover.

Ginny nodded. “119, at the Tarker’s town line. There’s another accident on the
other
town line—Motton—but I’m hearing everyone involved in that one is DATS.” Dead at the scene. “Truck-plane collision. The plane was trying to land.”

“Are you
shitting
me?”

Alva Drake looked around, frowning, then went back to her paperback. Or at least to looking at it while she tried to decide if her husband would support her in grounding Benny until he was eighteen.

“This is an authentic no-shit situation,” Ginny said. “I’m getting reports of other crashes, too—”

“Weird.”

“—but the guy out on the Tarker’s town line is still alive. Rolled a delivery truck, I believe. Buzz, cuz. Twitch is waiting.”

“You’ll finish the kid?”

“Yes. Go on, go.”

“Dr. Rayburn?”

“Had patients in Stephens Memorial.” This was the Norway–South Paris hospital. “He’s on his way, Rusty. Go.”

He paused on his way out to tell Mrs. Drake that Benny was fine. Alva did not seem overjoyed at the news, but thanked him. Dougie Twitchell—Twitch—was sitting on the bumper of the out-of-date ambulance Jim Rennie and his fellow selectmen kept not replacing, smoking a cigarette and taking some sun. He was holding a portable CB, and it was lively with talk: voices popping like corn and jumping all over each other.

“Put out that cancer-stick and let’s get rolling,” Rusty said. “You know where we’re going, right?”

Twitch flipped the butt away. Despite his nickname, he was the calmest nurse Rusty had ever encountered, and that was saying a lot. “I know what Gin-Gin told you—Tarker’s-Chester’s town line, right?”

“Yes. Overturned truck.”

“Yeah, well, plans have changed. We gotta go the other way.” He pointed to the southern horizon, where a thick black pillar of smoke was rising. “Ever had a desire to see a crashed plane?”

“I have,” Rusty said. “In the service. Two guys. You could have spread what was left on bread. That was plenty for me, pilgrim. Ginny says they’re all dead out there, so why—”

“Maybe so, maybe no,” Twitch said, “but now Perkins is down, and he might not be.”

“
Chief
Perkins?”

“The very same. I’m thinking the prognosis ain’t good if the pacemaker blew right out of his chest—which is what Peter Randolph is claiming—but he
is
the Chief of Police. Fearless Leader.”

“Twitch. Buddy. A pacemaker can’t blow like that. It’s perfectly unpossible.”

“Then maybe he
is
still alive, and we can do some good,” Twitch said. Halfway around the hood of the ambo, he took out his cigarettes.

“You’re not smoking in the ambulance,” Rusty said.

Twitch looked at him sadly.

“Unless you share, that is.”

Twitch sighed and handed him the pack.

“Ah, Marlboros,” Rusty said. “My very favorite OPs.”

“You slay me,” Twitch said.

5

They blew through the stoplight where Route 117
T
’d into 119 at the center of town, siren blaring, both of them smoking like fiends (with the windows open, which was SOP), listening to the chatter from the radio. Rusty understood little of it, but he was clear on one thing: he was going to be working long past four o’clock.

“Man, I don’t know what happened,” Twitch said, “but there’s this: we’re gonna see a genuine aircraft crash site. Post-crash, true, but beggars cannot be choosers.”

“Twitch, you’re one sick canine.”

There was a lot of traffic, mostly headed south. A few of these folks might have legitimate errands, but Rusty thought most were human flies being drawn to the smell of blood. Twitch passed a line
of four with no problem; the northbound lane of 119 was oddly empty.

“Look!” Twitch said, pointing. “News chopper! We’re gonna be on the six o’clock news, Big Rusty! Heroic paramedics fight to—”

But that was where Dougie Twitchell’s flight of fancy ended. Ahead of them—at the accident site, Rusty presumed—the helicopter did a buttonhook. For a moment he could read the number
13
on its side and see the CBS eye. Then it exploded, raining down fire from the cloudless early afternoon sky.

Twitch cried out:
“Jesus, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it!”
And then, childishly, hurting Rusty’s heart even in his shock:
“I take it back!”

6

“I gotta go back,” Gendron said. He took off his Sea Dogs cap and wiped his bloody, grimy, pallid face with it. His nose had swollen until it looked like a giant’s thumb. His eyes peered out of dark circles. “I’m sorry, but my schnozz is hurting like hell, and … well, I ain’t as young as I used to be. Also …” He raised his arms and dropped them. They were facing each other, and Barbie would have taken the guy in his arms and given him a pat on the back, if it were possible.

“Shock to the system, isn’t it?” he asked Gendron.

Gendron gave a bark of laughter. “That copter was the final touch.” And they both looked toward the fresh column of smoke.

Barbie and Gendron had gone on from the accident site on 117 after making sure that the witnesses were getting help for Elsa Andrews, the sole survivor. At least she didn’t seem badly hurt, although she was clearly heartbroken over the loss of her friend.

“Go on back, then. Slow. Take your time. Rest when you need to.”

“Pushing on?”

“Yes.”

“Still think you’re gonna find the end of it?”

Barbie was silent for a moment. At first he’d been sure, but now—

“I hope so,” he said.

“Well, good luck.” Gendron tipped his cap to Barbie before putting it back on. “I hope to shake your hand before the day’s out.”

“Me, too,” Barbie said. He paused. He had been thinking. “Can you do something for me, if you can get to your cell phone?”

“Sure.”

“Call the Army base at Fort Benning. Ask for the liaison officer and tell them you need to get in touch with Colonel James O. Cox. Tell them it’s urgent, that you’re calling for Captain Dale Barbara. Can you remember that?”

“Dale Barbara. That’s you. James Cox, that’s him. Got it.”

“If you reach him … I’m not sure you will, but
if
… tell him what’s going on here. Tell him if no one’s gotten in touch with Homeland Security, he’s the man. Can you do that?”

Gendron nodded. “If I can, I will. Good luck, soldier.”

Barbie could have done without ever having been called that again, but he touched a finger to his forehead. Then he went on, looking for what he no longer thought he would find.

7

He found a woods road that roughly paralleled the barrier. It was overgrown and disused, but much better than pushing through the puckerbrush. Every now and then he diverted to the west, feeling for the wall between Chester’s Mill and the outside world. It was always there.

When Barbie came to where 119 crossed into The Mill’s sister town of Tarker’s Mills, he stopped. The driver of the overturned delivery truck had been taken away by some good Samaritan on the other side of the barrier, but the truck itself lay blocking the road
like a big dead animal. The back doors had sprung open on impact. The tar was littered with Devil Dogs, Ho Hos, Ring Dings, Twinkies, and peanut butter crackers. A young man in a George Strait tee-shirt sat on a stump, eating one of the latter. He had a cell phone in hand. He looked up at Barbie. “Yo. Did you come from …” He pointed vaguely behind Barbie. He looked tired and scared and disillusioned.

“From the other side of town,” Barbie said. “Right.”

“Invisible wall the whole way? Border closed?”

“Yes.”

The young man nodded and hit a button on his cell. “Dusty? You there yet?” He listened some more, then said: “Okay.” He ended the call. “My friend Dusty and I started east of here. Split up. He went south. We’ve been staying in touch by phone. When we can get through, that is. He’s where the copter crashed now. Says it’s getting crowded there.”

Barbie bet it was. “No break in this thing anywhere on your side?”

The young man shook his head. He didn’t say more, and didn’t need to. They could have missed breaks, Barbie knew that was possible—holes the size of windows or doors—but he doubted it.

He thought they were cut off.

1

Barbie walked back down Route 119 into the center of town, a distance of about three miles. By the time he got there, it was six o’clock. Main Street was almost deserted, but alive with the roar of generators; dozens of them, by the sound. The traffic light at the intersection of 119 and 117 was dark, but Sweetbriar Rose was lit and loaded. Looking through the big front window, Barbie saw that every table was taken. But when he walked in the door, he heard none of the usual big talk: politics, the Red Sox, the local economy, the Patriots, newly acquired cars and pickemups, the Celtics, the price of gas, the Bruins, newly acquired power tools, the Twin Mills Wildcats. None of the usual laughter, either.

There was a TV over the counter, and everyone was watching it. Barbie observed, with that sense of disbelief and dislocation everyone who actually finds him- or herself at the site of a major disaster must feel, that CNN’s Anderson Cooper was standing out on Route 119 with the still-smoldering hulk of the wrecked pulp-truck in the background.

Rose herself was waiting table, occasionally darting back to the counter to take an order. Wispy locks of hair were escaping her net and hanging around her face. She looked tired and harried. The counter was supposed to be Angie McCain’s territory from four until closing, but Barbie saw no sign of her tonight. Perhaps she’d been out of town when the barrier slammed down. If that were the case, she might not be back behind the counter for a good long while.

Anson Wheeler—whom Rosie usually just called “the kid,” although the guy had to be at least twenty-five—was cooking, and Barbie dreaded to think what Anse might do to anything more complicated than beans and franks, the traditional Saturday-night special at Sweetbriar Rose. Woe to the fellow or gal who ordered breakfast-for-dinner and had to face Anson’s nuclear fried eggs. Still, it was good he was here, because in addition to the missing Angie, there was also no sign of Dodee Sanders. Although
that
particular drip didn’t need a disaster to keep her away from work. She wasn’t lazy, exactly, but she was easily distracted. And when it came to brainpower … jeez, what could you say? Her father—Andy Sanders, The Mill’s First Selectman—would never be a Mensa candidate, but Dodee made him look like Albert Einstein.

On the TV, helicopters were landing behind Anderson Cooper, blowing his groovy white hair around and nearly drowning his voice. The copters looked like Pave Lows. Barbie had ridden in his share during his time in Iraq. Now an Army officer walked into the picture, covered Cooper’s mike with one gloved hand, and spoke in the reporter’s ear.

The assembled diners in Sweetbriar Rose murmured among themselves. Barbie understood their disquiet. He felt it himself. When a man in a uniform covered a famous TV reporter’s mike without so much as a by-your-leave, it was surely the End of Days.

The Army guy—a Colonel but not
his
Colonel, seeing Cox would have completed Barbie’s sense of mental dislocation—finished what he had to say. His glove made a windy
whroop
sound when he took it off the mike. He walked out of the shot, his face a stolid blank. Barbie recognized the look: Army pod-person.

Cooper was saying, “The press is being told we have to fall back half a mile, to a place called Raymond’s Roadside Store.” The patrons murmured again at this. They all knew Raymond’s Roadside in Motton, where the sign in the window said COLD BEER HOT SANDWICHES FRESH BAIT. “This area, less than a hundred yards from what we’re calling the barrier—for want of a better term—has been declared a national security site. We’ll resume our
coverage as soon as we can, but right now I’m sending it back to you in Washington, Wolf.”

The headline on the red band beneath the location shot read
BREAKING NEWS MAINE TOWN CUT OFF MYSTERY DEEPENS.
And in the upper righthand corner, in red, the word
SEVERE
was blinking like a neon tavern sign.
Drink Severe Beer,
Barbie thought, and nearly chuckled.

Wolf Blitzer took Anderson Cooper’s place. Rose had a crush on Blitzer and would not allow the TV to be tuned to anything but
The Situation Room
on weekday afternoons; she called him “my Wolfie.” This evening Wolfie was wearing a tie, but it was badly knotted and Barbie thought the rest of his clothes looked suspiciously like Saturday grubs.

“Recapping our story,” Rose’s Wolfie said, “this afternoon at roughly one o’clock—”

“Twas earlier than that, and by quite a patch,” someone said.

“Is it true about Myra Evans?” someone else asked. “Is she really dead?”

“Yes,” Fernald Bowie said. The town’s only undertaker, Stewart Bowie, was Fern’s older brother. Fern sometimes helped him out when he was sober, and he looked sober tonight. Shocked sober. “Now shutcha quack so I can hear this.”

Barbie wanted to hear it, too, because Wolfie was even now addressing the question Barbie cared most about, and saying what Barbie wanted to hear: that the airspace over Chester’s Mill had been declared a no-fly zone. In fact, all of western Maine and eastern New Hampshire, from Lewiston-Auburn to North Conway, was a no-fly zone. The President was being briefed. And for the first time in nine years, the color of the National Threat Advisory had exceeded orange.

Julia Shumway, owner and editor of the
Democrat,
shot Barbie a glance as he passed her table. Then the pinched and secretive little smile that was her specialty—almost her trademark—flickered on her face. “It seems that Chester’s Mill doesn’t want to let you go, Mr. Barbara.”