Under the Dome: A Novel (52 page)

“Sit down, Reverend Libby,” Randolph said, but Barbie knew she was already gone. He could hear it in Randolph’s voice.

“Why don’t you make me?” She gingerly lifted her left arm and the sling holding it. The arm trembled, but it was working. “I’m sure you can dislocate it again, very easily. Go on. Show these … these
boys
… that you’re just like them.”

“And I’ll put it all in the paper!” Julia said brightly. “Circulation will double!”

Barbie said, “Suggest you defer this business until tomorrow, Chief. Allow the lady to get some painkillers stronger than aspirin, and have those knee lacerations checked by Everett. Given the Dome, she’s hardly a flight risk.”

“Her dog tried to kill me,” Carter said. In spite of the pain, he sounded calm again.

“Chief Randolph, DeLesseps, Searles, and Thibodeau are guilty of rape.” Piper was swaying now—Julia put an arm around her—but her voice was firm and clear. “Roux is an accessory to rape.”

“The hell I am!” Georgia squawked.

“They need to be suspended immediately.”

“She’s lying,” Thibodeau said.

Chief Randolph looked like a man watching a tennis match. He finally settled his gaze on Barbie. “Are you telling me what to do, kiddo?”

“No, sir, just making a suggestion based on my enforcement experience in Iraq. You’ll make your own decisions.”

Randolph relaxed. “Okay, then. Okay.” He looked down, frowning in thought. They all watched him notice his fly was still
unzipped and take care of that little problem. Then he looked up again and said, “Julia, take Reverend Piper to the hospital. As for you, Mr. Barbara, I don’t care where you go but I want you out of here. I’ll take statements from my officers tonight, and from Reverend Libby tomorrow.”

“Wait,” Thibodeau said. He extended his crooked fingers to Barbie. “Can you do anything about these?”

“I don’t know,” Barbie said—pleasantly enough, he hoped. The initial ugliness was over, and now came the political aftermath, which he remembered well from dealing with Iraqi cops who were not all that different from the man on the couch and the others crowding the doorway. What it came down to was making nice with people you wished you could spit on. “Can you say
wishbone
?”

10

Rusty had turned his cell phone off before knocking on Big Jim’s door. Now Big Jim sat behind his desk, Rusty in the seat before it—the chair of supplicants and applicants.

The study (Rennie probably called it a home office on his tax returns) had a pleasant, piney smell, as if it had recently been given a good scrubbing, but Rusty still didn’t like it. It wasn’t just the picture of an aggressively Caucasian Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount, or the self-congratulatory plaques, or the hardwood floor that really should have had a rug to protect it; it was all those things and something else as well. Rusty Everett had very little use for or belief in the supernatural, but nevertheless, this room felt almost haunted.

It’s because he scares you a little,
he thought.
That’s all it is.

Hoping that how he felt didn’t show in his voice or face, Rusty told Rennie about the hospital’s missing propane tanks. About how he had found one of them in the supply shed behind the Town Hall, currently running the Town Hall’s generator. And how it was the
only
one.

“So I have two questions,” Rusty said. “How did a tank from the hospital supply wander downtown? And where did the rest go?”

Big Jim rocked back in his chair, put his hands behind his neck, and looked up at the ceiling meditatively. Rusty found himself staring at the trophy baseball sitting on Rennie’s desk. Propped in front of it was a note from Bill Lee, once of the Boston Red Sox. He could read the note because it was turned outward. Of course it was. It was for guests to see, and marvel over. Like the pictures on the wall, the baseball proclaimed that Big Jim Rennie had rubbed elbows with Famous People:
Look on my autographs, ye mighty, and despair.
To Rusty, the baseball and the note turned outward seemed to sum up his bad feelings about the room he was in. It was window-dressing, a tinny testimonial to smalltown prestige and smalltown power.

“I wasn’t aware you had anyone’s permission to go poking around in our supply shed,” Big Jim remarked to the ceiling. His hammy fingers were still laced together behind his head. “Perhaps you’re a town official, and I wasn’t aware of it? If so, my mistake—my
bad,
as Junior says. I thought you were basically a nurse with a prescription pad.”

Rusty thought this was mostly technique—Rennie trying to piss him off. To divert him.

“I’m not a town official,” he said, “but I
am
a hospital employee. And a taxpayer.”

“So?”

Rusty could feel blood rushing to his face.

“So those things make it partly
my
supply shed.” He waited to see if Big Jim would respond to this, but the man behind the desk remained impassive. “Besides, it was unlocked. Which is all beside the point, isn’t it? I saw what I saw, and I’d like an explanation. As a hospital employee.”

“And a taxpayer. Don’t forget that.”

Rusty sat looking at him, not even nodding.

“I can’t give you one,” Rennie said.

Rusty raised his eyebrows. “Really? I thought you had your fingers on the pulse of this town. Isn’t that what you said the last time
you ran for Selectman? And now you’re telling me you can’t explain where the town’s propane went? I don’t believe it.”

For the first time, Rennie looked nettled. “I don’t care if you believe it or not. This is news to me.” But his eyes darted fractionally to one side as he said it, as if to check that his autographed photo of Tiger Woods was still there; the classic liar’s tell.

Rusty said, “The hospital’s almost out of LP. Without it, the few of us who are still on the job might as well be working in a Civil War battlefield surgery tent. Our current patients—including a postcoronary and a serious case of diabetes that may warrant amputation—will be in serious trouble if the power goes out. The possible amp is Jimmy Sirois. His car is in the parking lot. It’s got a sticker on the bumper that says ELECT BIG JIM.”

“I’ll investigate,” Big Jim said. He spoke with the air of a man conferring a favor. “The town’s propane is probably stored in some other town facility. As for yours, I’m sure I can’t say.”

“
What
other town facilities? There’s the FD, and the sand-and-salt pile out on God Creek Road—not even a shed there—but those are the only ones I’m aware of.”

“Mr. Everett, I’m a busy man. You’ll have to excuse me now.”

Rusty stood. His hands wanted to ball into fists, but he wouldn’t let them. “I’m going to ask you one more time,” he said. “Straight out and straight up. Do you know where those missing tanks are?”

“No.” This time it was Dale Earnhardt Rennie’s eyes flickered to. “And I’m not going to read any implication into that question, son, because if I did I’d have to resent it. Now why don’t you run along and check on Jimmy Sirois? Tell him Big Jim sends his best, and he’ll stop by as soon as the nitpickery slows down a little.”

Rusty was still battling to hold onto his temper, but this was a fight he was losing. “
Run along?
I think you forgot that you’re a public servant, not a private dictator. For the time being I’m this town’s chief medical officer, and I want some an—”

Big Jim’s cell rang. He snared it. Listened. The lines around his drawn-down mouth grew grimmer. “Gosh
darn
it! Every time I turn my darn
back
…” He listened some more, then said: “If you’ve
got people with you in the office, Pete, shut your trap before you open it too wide and fall right the heck in. Call Andy. I’ll be right there, and the three of us’ll clean this up.”

He killed the phone and got to his feet.

“I have to go to the police station. It’s either an emergency or more nitpickery, I won’t be able to tell which until I get there. And you’ll be wanted at either the hospital or the Health Center, I believe. There seems to be a problem with the Reverend Libby.”

“Why? What happened to her?”

Big Jim’s cold eyes surveyed him from hard little sockets. “I’m sure you’ll hear her story. I don’t know how true it’ll be, but I’m sure you’ll hear it. So go do your job, young fella, and let me do mine.”

Rusty walked down the front hall and out of the house, his temples throbbing. In the west, the sunset was a lurid bloodshow. The air was almost completely still, but bore a smoky stench just the same. At the foot of the steps, Rusty raised a finger and pointed it at the public servant waiting for him to leave his property before he, Rennie, left himself. Rennie scowled at the finger, but Rusty did not drop it.

“Nobody needs to tell me to do my job. And I’m going to make looking for that propane part of it. If I find it in the wrong place, someone else is going to be doing
your
job, Selectman Rennie. That’s a promise.”

Big Jim flapped a contemptuous hand at him. “Get out of here, son. Go to work.”

11

During the first fifty-five hours of the Dome’s existence, over two dozen children suffered seizures. Some, like those of the Everett girls, were noted. Many more were not, and in the days ahead, the seizure activity would rapidly taper down to nothing. Rusty would compare this to the minor shocks people experienced when they came too close to the Dome. The first time, you got that almost electric
frisson
that stiffened the hair on the back of your neck; after that, most people felt nothing. It was as if they had been inoculated.

“Are you saying the Dome is like chickenpox?” Linda asked him later. “Catch it once and you’re set for life?”

Janelle had two seizures, and so did a little kid named Norman Sawyer, but in both cases the second seizure was milder than the first, and not accompanied by any babble. Most of the kids Rusty saw had only the one, and there seemed to be no after-effects.

Only two adults had seizures during those first fifty-five hours. Both came around sunset on Monday evening, and both had easily traceable causes.

With Phil Bushey, aka The Chef, the cause was too much of his own product. Around the time Rusty and Big Jim parted company, Chef Bushey was sitting outside the storage barn behind WCIK, looking dreamily at the sunset (this close to the missile strikes, the scarlet in the sky was further darkened by soot on the Dome), his hitty-pipe clasped loosely in one hand. He was tweeked at least to the ionosphere; maybe a hundred miles beyond. In the few low-lying clouds which floated on that bloody light, he saw the faces of his mother, his father, his grandfather; he saw Sammy and Little Walter as well.

All the cloud-faces were bleeding.

When his right foot began to twitch and then his left foot picked up the beat, he ignored it. Twitchin was part of tweekin, everyone knew that. But then his hands began to tremble and his pipe fell into the long grass (yellow and sere as a result of the factory work that went on out here). A moment later his head began to jerk from side to side.

This is it,
he thought with a calm that was partly relief.
I finally overdid it. I’m checking out. Probably for the best.

But he didn’t check out, didn’t even
pass
out. He slid slowly sideways, twitching and watching as a black marble rose in the red sky. It expanded to a bowling ball, then an overinflated beachball. It went on growing until it had eaten up the red sky.

The end of the world,
he thought.
Probably for the best.

For a moment he thought he was wrong, because the stars came out. Only they were the wrong color. They were pink. And then, oh God, they began to fall down, leaving long pink trails behind them.

Next came fire. A roaring furnace, as if someone had opened a hidden trapdoor and loosed Hell itself on Chester’s Mill.

“It’s our treat,” he muttered. His pipe pressed against his arm, making a burn he would see and feel later. He lay twitching in the yellow grass with his eyes turned up to glabrous whites that reflected the lurid sunset. “Our Halloween treat. First the trick … then the treat.”

The fire was becoming a face, an orange version of the bloody ones he’d been looking at in the clouds just before the fit fell on him. It was the face of Jesus. Jesus was scowling at him.

And talking. Talking to
him.
Telling him that bringing the fire was
his
responsibility.
His.
The fire and the … the …

“The purity,” he muttered as he lay in the grass. “No … the
purification.
”

Jesus didn’t look so mad now. And He was fading. Why? Because The Chef had understood. First came the pink stars; then came the purifying fire; then the trial would end.

The Chef stilled as the seizure passed into the first real sleep he’d had in weeks, perhaps months. When he woke up, it was full dark—every trace of red gone from the sky. He was chilled to the bone, but not damp.

Under the Dome, dew no longer fell.

12

While The Chef was observing the face of Christ in that evening’s infected sunset, Third Selectman Andrea Grinnell was sitting on her couch and trying to read. Her generator had quit—or had it ever run at all? She couldn’t remember. But she had a gadget called a Mighty Brite light that her sister Rose had tucked into her Christmas stocking last year. She’d never had occasion to use it until now, but it
worked just fine. You clamped it to your book and turned it on. Easy-peasy. So light wasn’t a problem. The words, unfortunately, were. The words kept squirming around on the page, sometimes even changing places with each other, and Nora Roberts’s prose, ordinarily crystal clear, made absolutely no sense. Yet Andrea kept trying, because she could think of nothing else to do.

The house stank, even with the windows open. She was suffering diarrhea and the toilet would no longer flush. She was hungry but couldn’t eat. She had tried a sandwich around five PM—just an inoffensive cheese sandwich—and had thrown it up in the kitchen wastebasket minutes after it was down. A shame, because eating that sandwich had been hard work. She was sweating heavily—had already changed her clothes once, probably should change them again, if she could manage to do it—and her feet kept jittering and jerking.