Under the Dome: A Novel (132 page)

“Girls are strong, too. Especially when they’re scared to death.”

“Is it hollow? If it isn’t, we’re back to square one.”

She held the spindle up to her face. Barbie looked down one end and saw her blue eye staring back from the other. “Go, Sam,” he said. “We’re in business.”

“You sure it’ll work?” Sam shouted back, dropping the van’s transmission into drive.

“You bet!” Barbie returned, because
How the hell should I know
would cheer nobody up. Including himself.

7

The survivors at the Dome watched silently as the van tore down the dirt track that led back to what Norrie Calvert had taken to calling “the flash-box.” The Odyssey dimmed into the hanging smog, became a phantom, and then disappeared.

Rusty and Linda were standing together, each carrying a child. “What do you think, Rusty?” Linda asked.

He said, “I think we need to hope for the best.”

“And prepare for the worst?”

“That too,” he said.

8

They were passing the farmhouse when Sam called back, “We’re goin into the orchard now. You want to hold onto your jockstraps, kiddies, because I ain’t stoppin this bitch even if I rip the undercarriage right out’n it.”

“Go for it,” Barbie said, and then a vicious bump tossed him in the air with his arms wrapped around one of the spare tires. Julia was clutching the other one like a shipwreck victim clutching a life ring. Apple trees flashed by. The leaves looked dirty and dispirited. Most of the fruit had fallen to the ground, shaken free by the wind that had sucked through the orchard after the explosion.

Another tremendous bump. Barbie and Julia went up and came down together, Julia sprawling across Barbie’s lap and still holding onto her tire.

“Where’d you get your license, you old fuck?” Barbie shouted. “Sears and Roebuck?”

“Walmart!” the old man shouted back. “
Everything’s
cheaper at
Wally World!” Then he stopped cackling. “I see it. I see the blinkyass whoremaster. Bright purple light. Gonna pull right up beside it. You wait until I stop before you go carvin on those tires, less you want to tear em wide open.”

A moment later he stamped on the brake and brought the Odyssey to a scrunching halt that sent Barbie and Julia sliding into the back of the rear seat.
Now I know what a pinball feels like,
Barbie thought.

“You drive like a Boston cabbie!” Julia said indignantly.

“You just make sure you tip”—Sam was stopped by a hard fit of coughing—“twenty percent.” His voice sounded choked.

“Sam?” Julia asked. “Are you all right?”

“Maybe not,” he said matter-of-factly. “I’m bleedin somewhere. Could be throat, but it feels deeper. B’lieve I might have ruptured a lung.” Then he was coughing again.

“What can we do?” Julia asked.

Sam got the coughing under control. “Make em shut off their fuckin jammer so we can get out of here. I got no more smokes.”

9

“This is all me,” Julia said. “Just so you know that.”

Barbie nodded. “Yessum.”

“You’re strictly my air-boy. If what I try doesn’t work, we can change jobs.”

“It might help if I knew exactly what you had in mind.”

“There’s nothing exact about it. All I have is intuition and a little hope.”

“Don’t be such a pessimist. You’ve also got two tires, two garbage bags, and a hollow spindle.”

She smiled. It lit up her tense, dirty face. “Duly noted.”

Sam was coughing again, doubled over the wheel. He spat something out. “Dear God and sonny Jesus, don’t that taste nasty,” he said. “Hurry
up.
”

Barbie punctured his tire with the knife and heard the
pwoosh
of air as soon as he pulled the blade free. Julia slapped the spindle into his hand as efficiently as an OR nurse. Barbie jammed it into the hole, saw the rubber grip it … and then felt a divine rush of air spurt into his sweaty face. He breathed deeply once, unable to help himself. The air was much fresher, much
richer,
than that pushed through the Dome by the fans. His brain seemed to wake up, and he came to an immediate decision. Instead of putting a garbage bag over their makeshift nozzle, he tore a large, ragged swatch from one of them.

“What are you
doing
?” Julia screamed.

There was no time to tell her she wasn’t the only one with intuitions.

He plugged the spindle with the plastic. “Trust me. Just go to the box and do what you have to do.”

She gave him a final look that seemed to be all eyes, then opened the Odyssey’s doorgate. She half fell to the ground, picked herself up, stumbled over a hummock, and went to her knees beside the flash-box. Barbie followed her with both tires. He had Sam’s knife in his pocket. He fell on his knees and offered Julia the tire with the black spindle sticking out of it.

She yanked the plug, breathed in—her cheeks hollowing with the effort—exhaled to one side, then breathed in again. Tears were rolling down her cheeks, cutting clean places there. Barbie was crying, too. It had nothing to do with emotion; it was if they had been caught out in the world’s nastiest acid rain. This was far worse than the air at the Dome.

Julia sucked in more. “Good,” she said, speaking on the exhale and almost whistling the word. “So good. Not fishy. Dusty.” She breathed in again, then tilted the tire toward him.

He shook his head and pushed it back, although his lungs were beginning to pound. He patted his chest, then pointed at her.

She took another deep breath, then sucked in one more. Barbie pushed down on top of the tire to help her along. Faintly, in some other world, he could hear Sam coughing and coughing and coughing.

He’ll rip himself apart,
Barbie thought. He felt as if he might come apart himself if he didn’t breathe soon, and when Julia pushed the tire at him a second time, he bent over the makeshift straw and sucked in deeply, trying to draw the dusty, wonderful air all the way to the bottom of his lungs. There wasn’t enough, it seemed there could never be enough, and there was a moment when panic

(
God I’m drowning
)

almost engulfed him. The urge to bolt back to the van—never mind Julia, let Julia take care of herself—was nearly too strong to resist … but he did resist it. He closed his eyes, breathed, and tried to find the cool, calm center that had to be there someplace.

Easy. Slow. Easy.

He dragged in a third long, steady inhale from the tire, and his pounding heart began to slow a little. He watched Julia lean forward and grip the box on either side. Nothing happened, and this didn’t surprise Barbie. She had touched the box when they first came up here, and was now immune to the shock.

Then, suddenly, her back arched. She moaned. Barbie tried to offer her the spindle-straw, but she ignored it. Blood burst from her nose and began to trickle from the corner of her right eye. Red drops slid down her cheek.

“What’s happenin?” Sam called. His voice was muffled, choked.

I don’t know,
Barbie thought.
I don’t know what’s happening.

But he knew one thing: if she didn’t take more air soon, she’d die. He pulled the spindle out of the tire, clamped it between his teeth, and plunged Sam’s knife into the second tire. He drove the spindle into the hole and plugged it with the swatch of plastic.

Then he waited.

10

This is the time that is no time:

She’s in a vast white roofless room with an alien green sky above. It’s … what? The playroom? Yes, the playroom.
Their
playroom.

(
No, she’s lying on the floor of the bandstand.
)

She’s a woman of a certain age.

(
No, she’s a little girl.
)

There is no time.

(
It’s 1974 and there’s all the time in the world.
)

She needs to breathe from the tire.

(
She doesn’t.
)

Something is looking at her. Something terrible. But
she
is terrible to
it,
as well, because she’s bigger than she’s supposed to be, and she’s here. She’s not supposed to be here. She’s supposed to be in the box. Yet she is still harmless. It knows that, even though it is

(
just a kid
)

very young; barely out of the nursery, in fact. It speaks.

—
You are make-believe.

—
No, I’m real. Please, I’m real. We all are.

The leatherhead regards her with its eyeless face. It frowns. The corners of its mouth turn down, although it has no mouth. And Julia realizes how lucky she is to have found one of them alone. There are usually more, but they have

(
gone home to dinner gone home to lunch gone to bed gone to school gone on vacation, doesn’t matter they’re gone
)

gone somewhere. If they were here together, they would drive her back. This one could drive her back alone, but she is curious.

She?

Yes.

This one is female, like her.

—
Please let us go. Please let us live our little lives.

No answer. No answer. No answer. Then:

—
You aren’t real. You are
—

What? What does she say?
You are toys from the toyshop?
No, but it’s something like that. Julia has a flicker-memory of the ant farm her brother had when they were kids. The recollection comes and goes in less than a second. Ant farm isn’t right, either, but like
toys from the toyshop,
it’s close. It’s in the ballpark, as they say.

—
How can you have lives if you aren’t real?

—
WE ARE SO REAL!
she cries, and this is the moan Barbie hears.—
AS REAL AS YOU!

Silence. A thing with a shifting leather face in a vast white roofless room that is also somehow the Chester’s Mill bandstand. Then:

—
Prove it.

—
Give me your hand.

—
I have no hand. I have no body. Bodies aren’t real. Bodies are dreams.

—
Then give me your mind!

The leatherhead child does not. Will not.

So Julia takes it.

11

This is the place that is no place:

It’s cold on the bandstand, and she’s so scared. Worse, she’s … humiliated? No, it’s much worse than humiliation. If she knew the word
abased,
she would say
Yes, yes, that’s it, I’m abased.
They took her slacks.

(
And somewhere soldiers are kicking naked people in a gym. This is someone else’s shame all mixed up with hers.
)

She’s crying.

(
He feels like crying, but doesn’t. Right now they have to cover this up.
)

The girls have left her now, but her nose is still bleeding—Lila slapped her and promised to cut her nose off if she told and they all spit on her and now she is lying here and she must have cried really hard because she thinks her eye is bleeding as well as her nose and she can’t seem to catch her breath. But she doesn’t care how much she bleeds or from where. She’d rather bleed to death on the bandstand floor than walk home in her stupid baby underpants. She’d gladly bleed to death from a hundred places if it meant she didn’t have to see the soldier

(
After this Barbie tries not to think of that soldier but when he does he thinks “Hackermeyer the hackermonster.”
) pull the naked man up by the thing

(
hajib
)

he’s wearing on his head, because she knows what comes next. It’s what always comes next when you’re under the Dome.

She sees that one of the girls has come back. Kayla Bevins has come back. She’s standing there and looking down at stupid Julia Shumway who thought she was smart. Stupid little Julia Shumway in her baby pannies. Has Kayla come back to take the rest of her clothes and throw them up onto the bandstand roof, so she has to walk home naked with her hands over her woofie? Why are people so mean?

She closes her eyes against tears and when she opens them again, Kayla has changed. Now she has no face, just a kind of shifting leather helmet that shows no compassion, no love, not even hate.

Only …
interest.
Yes, that. What does it do when I do …
this
?

Julia Shumway is worthy of no more. Julia Shumway doesn’t matter; find the least of the least, then look below that, and there she is, a scurrying Shumway-bug. She is a naked prisoner-bug, too; a prisoner-bug in a gymnasium with nothing left but the unraveling hat on his head and beneath the hat a final memory of fragrant, freshly baked
khubz
held out in his wife’s hands. She is a cat with a burning tail, an ant under a microscope, a fly about to lose its wings to the curious plucking fingers of a third-grader on a rainy day, a game for bored children with no bodies and the whole universe at their feet. She is Barbie, she is Sam dying in Linda Everett’s van, she is Ollie dying in the cinders, she is Alva Drake mourning her dead son.

But mostly she is a little girl cowering on the splintery boards of the Town Common bandstand, a little girl who was punished for her innocent arrogance, a little girl who made the mistake of thinking she was big when she was small, that she mattered when she didn’t, that the world cared when in reality the world is a huge dead locomotive with an engine but no headlight. And with all her heart and mind and soul she cries out:

—
PLEASE LET US LIVE! I BEG YOU, PLEASE!

And for just one moment
she
is the leatherhead in the white room;
she
is the girl who has (for reasons she cannot even explain to
herself) come back to the bandstand. For one terrible moment Julia is the one who did it instead of the one who was done by. She is even the soldier with the gun, the hackermonster Dale Barbara still dreams about, the one he didn’t stop.

Then she is only herself again.

Looking up at Kayla Bevins.

Kayla’s family is poor. Her father cuts pulp on the TR and drinks down at Freshie’s Pub (which will, in the fullness of time, become Dipper’s). Her mother has a big old pink mark on her cheek, so the kids call her Cherry Face or Strawberry Head. Kayla doesn’t have any nice clothes. Today she is wearing an old brown sweater and an old plaid skirt and scuffed loafers and white socks with saggy tops. One knee is scraped where she fell or was pushed down on the playground. It’s Kayla Bevins, all right, but now her face is made of leather. And although it shifts through many shapes, none of them is even close to human.