Under the Dome: A Novel (120 page)

Andy opens the tin, sees six fat home-rolled cigarettes crammed in there, and thinks:
These are soldiers of ecstasy.
It is the most poetic thought of his life, and makes him feel like weeping.

“Can you give me an amen, Sanders?”

“Amen.”

The Chef uses the remote control to turn off the TV. He’d like to see the buses arrive—stoned or not, paranoid or not, he’s as fond of a happy reunion story as anyone—but the bitter men might come at any time.

“Sanders!”

“Yes, Chef.”

“I’m going to get the Christian Meals on Wheels truck out of the garage and park it on the far side of the supply building. I can settle in behind it and have a clear view of the woods.” He picks up GOD’S WARRIOR. The grenades attached to it dangle and swing. “The more I think of it, the more sure I am that’s the way they’ll come. There’s an access road. They probably think I don’t know about it, but”—Chef’s red eyes gleam—“the Chef knows more than people think.”

“I know. I love you, Chef.”

“Thank you, Sanders. I love you, too. If they come from the woods, I’ll let them get out in the open and then cut them down like wheat at harvest-time. But we can’t put all our eggs in one basket. So I want you to go out front to where we were the other day. If any of them come that way—”

Andy raises CLAUDETTE.

“That’s right, Sanders. But don’t be hasty. Draw out as many as you can before you start shooting.”

“I will.” Sometimes Andy is struck by the feeling that he must be living in a dream; this is one of those times. “Like wheat at harvest-time.”

“Yea verily. But listen, because this is important, Sanders. Don’t come right away if you hear me start shooting. And I won’t come right away if I hear
you
start. They might guess we’re not together, but I’m wise to that trick. Can you whistle?”

Andy sticks a couple of fingers in his mouth and lets loose a piercing whistle.

“That’s good, Sanders. Amazing, in fact.”

“I learned it in grammar school.”
When life was much simpler,
he does not add.

“Don’t do it unless you’re in danger of being overwhelmed. Then I’ll come. And if you hear
me
whistle, run like hell to reinforce my position.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s have a smoke on it, Sanders, what do you say?”

Andy seconds the motion.

On Black Ridge, at the edge of the McCoy orchard, seventeen exiles from town stand against the smudged skyline like Indians in a John Ford Western. Most are staring in fascinated silence at the silent parade of people moving out Route 119. They are almost six miles distant, but the size of the crowd makes it impossible to miss.

Rusty’s the only one who’s looking at something closer, and it fills him with a relief so great it seems to sing. A silver Odyssey van is speeding along Black Ridge Road. He stops breathing as it approaches the edge of the trees and the glow-belt, which is now invisible again. There is time for him to think how horrible it would be if whoever is driving—Linda, he assumes—blacked out and the van crashed, but then it’s past the danger point. There might have been the smallest swerve, but he knows even that could have been his imagination. They’ll be here soon.

They are standing a hundred yards to the left of the box, but Joe McClatchey thinks he can feel it, just the same: a little pulse that digs at his brain each time the lavender light shines out. That might just be his mind playing tricks on him, but he doesn’t think so.

Barbie is standing next to him, with his arm around Miz Shumway. Joe taps him on the shoulder and says, “This feels bad, Mr. Barbara. All those people together. This feels
awful.
”

“Yes,” Barbie says.

“
They’re
watching. The leatherheads. I can feel them.”

“So can I,” Barbie says.

“Me too,” Julia says, in a voice almost too low to hear.

In the conference room of the Town Hall, Big Jim and Carter Thibodeau watch silently as the split-screen image on the TV gives way to a shot at ground level. At first the image is jerky, like video of an approaching tornado or the immediate aftermath of a car-bombing. They see sky, gravel, and running feet. Someone mutters, “Come on, hurry up.”

Wolf Blitzer says, “The pool-coverage truck has arrived. They’re obviously hurrying, but I’m sure that in a moment … yes. Oh my goodness, look at that.”

The camera steadies on the hundreds of Chester’s Mill residents at the Dome just as they rise to their feet. It’s like watching a large group of open-air worshippers rising from prayer. The ones at the front are being jostled against the Dome by the ones behind; Big Jim sees flattened noses, cheeks, and lips, as if the townspeople are being pressed against a glass wall. He feels a moment of vertigo and realizes why: this is the first time he’s seeing from the outside. For the first time the enormity of it and the reality of it strike home. For the first time he is truly frightened.

Faintly, slightly deadened by the Dome, comes the sound of pistol shots.

“I think I’m hearing gunfire,” Wolf says. “Anderson Cooper, do you hear gunfire? What’s happening?”

Faintly, sounding like a call from a satellite phone originating deep in the Australian outback, Cooper comes back: “Wolf, we’re not there yet, but I’ve got a small monitor and it looks like—”

“I see it now,” Wolf says. “It appears to be—”

“It’s Morrison,” Carter says. “The guy’s got guts, I’ll say that much.”

“He’s out as of tomorrow,” Big Jim replies.

Carter looks at him, eyebrows raised. “What he said at the meeting last night?”

Big Jim points a finger at him. “I knew you were a bright boy.”

At the Dome, Henry Morrison isn’t thinking about last night’s meeting, or bravery, or even doing his duty; he’s thinking that people are going to be crushed against the Dome if he doesn’t do something, and quick. So he fires his gun into the air. Taking the cue, several other cops—Todd Wendlestat, Rance Conroy, and Joe Boxer—do the same.

The shouting voices (and the cries of pain from the people at the front who are being squashed) give way to shocked silence, and Henry uses his bullhorn: “SPREAD OUT! SPREAD OUT, GODDAMMIT! THERE’S ROOM FOR EVERYONE
IF YOU JUST SPREAD THE FUCK OUT
!”

The profanity has an even more sobering effect on them than the
gunshots, and although the most stubborn ones remain on the highway (Bill and Sarah Allnut are prominent among them; so are Johnny and Carrie Carver), the others begin to spread along the Dome. Some head to the right, but the majority shuffle to the left, into Alden Dinsmore’s field, where the going’s easier. Henrietta and Petra are among them, weaving slightly from liberal applications of Canada Dry Rocket.

Henry holsters his weapon and tells the other officers to do the same. Wendlestat and Conroy comply, but Joe Boxer continues to hold his snubnosed.38—a Saturday-night special if Henry has ever seen one.

“Make me,” he sneers, and Henry thinks:
It’s all a nightmare. I’ll wake up soon in my own bed and I’ll go to the window and stand there looking out at a beautiful crisp fall day.

Many of those who have chosen to stay away from the Dome (a disquieting number have remained in town because they’re beginning to experience respiratory problems) are able to watch on television. Thirty or forty have gravitated to Dipper’s. Tommy and Willow Anderson are at the Dome, but they’ve left the roadhouse open and the big-screen TV on. The people who gather on the honky-tonk hardwood floor to watch do so quietly, although there is some weeping. The HDTV images are crystal clear. They are heartbreaking.

Nor are they the only ones who are affected by the sight of eight hundred people lining up along the invisible barrier, some with their hands planted on what appears to be thin air. Wolf Blitzer says, “I have never seen such longing on human faces. I …” He chokes up. “I think I better let the images speak for themselves.”

He falls silent, and that’s a good thing. This scene needs no narration.

At his press conference, Cox said,
Visitors will debark and walk… visitors will be allowed within two yards of the Dome, we consider that a safe distance.
Nothing like that happens, of course. As soon as the doors of the buses open, people spill out in a flood, calling the names of their nearest and dearest. Some fall and are briskly trampled
(one will be killed in this stampede and fourteen will be injured, half a dozen seriously). Soldiers who attempt to enforce the dead zone directly in front of the Dome are swept aside. The yellow DO NOT CROSS tapes are knocked down and disappear in the dust raised by running feet. The newcomers swarm forward and spread out on their side of the Dome, most crying and all of them calling for their wives, their husbands, their grandparents, their sons, their daughters, their fiancées. Four people have either lied about their various electronic medical devices or forgotten about them. Three of these die immediately; the fourth, who didn’t see his battery-powered hearing-aid implant on the list of forbidden devices, will linger in a coma for a week before expiring of multiple brain hemorrhages.

Little by little they sort themselves out, and the pool TV cameras see it all. They observe the townspeople and the visitors pressing their hands together, with the invisible barrier between; they watch them try to kiss; they examine men and women weeping as they look into each other’s eyes; they note the ones who faint, both inside the Dome and out, and those who fall to their knees and pray facing each other with their folded hands raised; they record the man on the outside who begins hammering his fists against the thing keeping him from his pregnant wife, hammering until his skin splits and his blood beads on thin air; they peer at the old woman trying to trace her fingers, the tips pressed white and smooth against the unseen surface between them, over her sobbing granddaughter’s forehead.

The press helicopter takes off again and hovers, sending back images of a double human snake spread over a quarter of a mile. On the Motton side, the leaves flame and dance with late October color; on the Chester’s Mill side they hang limp. Behind the towns-folk—on the road, in the fields, caught in the bushes—are dozens of discarded signs. At this moment of reunion (or almost-reunion), politics and protest have been forgotten.

Candy Crowley says: “Wolf, this is without a doubt the saddest, strangest event I’ve witnessed in all my years of reporting.”

Yet human beings are nothing if not adaptable, and little by little the excitement and the strangeness begin to wear off. The
reunions merge into the actual visiting. And behind the visitors, those who have been overwhelmed—on both sides of the Dome—are being carried away. On The Mill side, there’s no Red Cross tent to drag them to. The police put them in such scant shade as the police cars allow, to wait for Pamela Chen and the schoolbus.

In the police station, the WCIK raiding party is watching with the same silent fascination as everyone else. Randolph lets them; there is a little time yet. He checks the names off on his clipboard, then motions Freddy Denton to join him on the front steps. He has expected grief from Freddy for taking over the head honcho role (Peter Randolph has been judging others by himself his whole life), but there is none. This is a far bigger deal than rousting scuzzy old drunks out of convenience stores, and Freddy is delighted to hand off the responsibility. He wouldn’t mind taking credit if things went well, but suppose they don’t? Randolph has no such qualms. One unemployed troublemaker and a mild-mannered druggist who wouldn’t say shit if it was in his cereal? What can possibly go wrong?

And Freddy discovers, as they stand on the steps Piper Libby tumbled down not so long ago, that he isn’t going to be able to duck the leadership role completely. Randolph hands him a slip of paper. On it are seven names. One is Freddy’s. The other six are Mel Sear-les, George Frederick, Marty Arsenault, Aubrey Towle, Stubby Norman, and Lauren Conree.

“You will take this party down the access road,” Randolph says. “You know the one?”

“Yep, busts off from Little Bitch this side of town. Sloppy Sam’s father laid that little piece of roa—”

“I don’t care who laid it,” Randolph says, “just drive to the end of it. At noon, you take your men through the belt of woods there. You’ll come out in back of the radio station.
Noon,
Freddy. That doesn’t mean a minute before or a minute after.”

“I thought we were
all
supposed to go in that way, Pete.”

“Plans have changed.”

“Does Big Jim know they’ve changed?”

“Big Jim is a selectman, Freddy. I’m the Police Chief. I’m also your superior, so would you kindly shut up and listen?”

“Soh-
ree,
” Freddy says, and cups his hands to his ears in a way that is impudent, to say the least.

“I’ll be parked down the road that runs past the
front
of the station. I’ll have Stewart and Fern with me. Also Roger Killian. If Bushey and Sanders are foolish enough to engage you—if we hear shooting from behind the station, in other words—the three of us will swoop in and take them from behind. Have you got it?”

“Yeah.” It actually sounds like a pretty good plan to Freddy.

“All right, let’s synchronize watches.”

“Uh … sorry?”

Randolph sighs. “We have to make sure they’re the same, so noon comes at the same time for both of us.”

Freddy still looks puzzled, but he complies.

From inside the station, someone—it sounds like Stubby—shouts: “Whoop, another one bites the dust! The fainters’re stacked up behind them cruisers like cordwood!” This is greeted by laughter and applause. They are pumped up, excited to have pulled what Melvin Searles calls “possible shootin duty.”

“We saddle up at eleven fifteen,” Randolph tells Freddy. “That gives us almost forty-five minutes to watch the show on TV.”

“Want popcorn?” Freddy asks. “We got a whole mess of it in the cupboard over the microwave.”

“Might as well, I guess.”

Out at the Dome, Henry Morrison goes to his car and helps himself to a cool drink. His uniform is soaked through with sweat and he can’t recall ever feeling so tired (he thinks a lot of that is down to bad air—he can’t seem to completely catch his breath), but on the whole he is satisfied with himself and his men. They have managed to avoid a mass crushing at the Dome, nobody has died on this side—yet—and folks are settling down. Half a dozen TV cameramen race to and fro on the Motton side, recording as many heartwarming reunion vignettes as possible. Henry knows it’s an invasion of privacy, but he supposes America and the world beyond may have a
right to see this. And on the whole, people don’t seem to mind. Some even like it; they are getting their fifteen minutes. Henry has time to search for his own mother and father, although he’s not surprised when he doesn’t see them; they live all the way to hell and gone up in Derry, and they’re getting on in years now. He doubts if they even put their names in the visitor lottery.