Under the Dome: A Novel (6 page)

But he heard the first siren when it cut through the day; his ears were attuned to that sound just as a mother’s are to the cries of her children. Howard Perkins even knew which car it was, and who was driving. Only Three and Four still had the old warblers, but Johnny Trent had taken Three over to Castle Rock with the FD, to that damned training exercise. A “controlled burn,” they called it, although what it really amounted to was grown men having fun. So it was car Four, one of their two remaining Dodges, and Henry Morrison would be driving.

He stopped raking and stood, head cocked. The siren started to fade, and he started raking again. Brenda came out on the stoop. Almost everyone in The Mill called him Duke—the nickname a holdover from his high school days, when he had never missed a John Wayne picture down at the Star—but Brenda had quit that soon after they were married in favor of the other nickname. The one he disliked.

“Howie, the power’s out. And there were
bangs.
”

Howie. Always Howie. As in
Here’s Howie
and
Howie’s tricks
and
Howie’s life treatin you.
He tried to be a Christian about it—hell, he
was
a Christian about it—but sometimes he wondered if that nickname wasn’t at least partially responsible for the little gadget he now carried around in his chest.

“What?”

She rolled her eyes, marched to the radio on the hood of her car, and pushed the power button, cutting off the Norman Luboff Choir in the middle of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

“How many times have I told you not to stick this thing on the hood of my car? You’ll scratch it and the resale value will go down.”

“Sorry, Bren. What did you say?”

“The
power’s
out! And something
boomed.
That’s probably what Johnny Trent’s rolling on.”

“It’s Henry,” he said. “Johnny’s over in The Rock with the FD.”

“Well, whoever it is—”

Another siren started up, this one of the newer kind that Duke Perkins thought of as Tweety Birds. That would be Two, Jackie Wettington. Had to be Jackie, while Randolph sat minding the store, rocked back in his chair with his feet cocked up on his desk, reading the
Democrat.
Or sitting in the crapper. Peter Randolph was a fair cop, and he could be just as hard as he needed to be, but Duke didn’t like him. Partly because he was so clearly Jim Rennie’s man, partly because Randolph was sometimes harder than he needed to be, but mostly because he thought Randolph was lazy, and Duke Perkins could not abide a lazy policeman.

Brenda was looking at him with large eyes. She had been a policeman’s wife for forty-three years, and she knew that two booms, two sirens, and a power failure added up to nothing good. If the lawn got raked this weekend—or if Howie got to listen to his beloved Twin Mills Wildcats take on Castle Rock’s football team—she would be surprised.

“You better go on in,” she said. “Something got knocked down. I just hope no one’s dead.”

He took his cell phone off his belt. Goddam thing hung there like
a leech from morning til night, but he had to admit it was handy. He didn’t dial it, just stood looking down at it, waiting for it to ring.

But then another Tweety Bird siren went off: car One. Randolph rolling after all. Which meant something very serious. Duke no longer thought the phone would ring and moved to put it back on his belt, but then it did. It was Stacey Moggin.

“Stacey?”
He knew he didn’t have to bellow into the goddam thing, Brenda had told him so a hundred times, but he couldn’t seem to help it.
“What are you doing at the station on Saturday m—”

“I’m not, I’m at home. Peter called me and said to tell you it’s out on 119, and it’s bad. He said … an airplane and a pulp-truck collided.” She sounded dubious. “I don’t see how that can be, but—”

A plane. Jesus. Five minutes ago, or maybe a little longer, while he’d been raking leaves and singing along with “How Great Thou Art”—

“Stacey, was it Chuck Thompson? I saw that new Piper of his flying over. Pretty low.”

“I don’t know, Chief, I’ve told you everything Peter told me.”

Brenda, no dummy, was already moving her car so he could back the forest-green Chief’s car down the driveway. She had set the portable radio beside his small pile of raked leaves.

“Okay, Stace. Power out on your side of town, too?”

“Yes, and the landlines. I’m on my cell. It’s probably bad, isn’t it?”

“I hope not. Can you go in and cover? I bet the place is standing there empty and unlocked.”

“I’ll be there in five. Reach me on the base unit.”

“Roger that.”

As Brenda came back up the driveway, the town whistle went off, its rise and fall a sound that never failed to make Duke Perkins feel tight in the gut. Nevertheless, he took time to put an arm around Brenda. She never forgot that he took the time to do that. “Don’t let it worry you, Brennie. It’s programmed to do that in a general power outage. It’ll stop in three minutes. Or four. I forget which.”

“I know, but I still hate it. That idiot Andy Sanders blew it on
nine-eleven, do you remember? As if they were going to suicide-bomb
us
next.”

Duke nodded. Andy Sanders
was
an idiot. Unfortunately, he was also First Selectman, the cheery Mortimer Snerd dummy that sat on Big Jim Rennie’s lap.

“Honey, I have to go.”

“I know.” But she followed him to the car. “What is it? Do you know yet?”

“Stacy said a truck and an airplane collided out on 119.”

Brenda smiled tentatively. “That’s a joke, right?”

“Not if the plane had engine trouble and was trying to land on the highway,” Duke said. Her little smile faded and her fisted right hand came to rest just between her breasts, body language he knew well. He climbed behind the wheel, and although the Chief’s cruiser was relatively new, he still settled into the shape of his own butt. Duke Perkins was no lightweight.

“On your day off!” she cried. “Really, it’s a shame! And when you could retire on a full P!”

“They’ll just have to take me in my Saturday slops,” he said, and grinned at her. It was work, that grin. This felt like it was going to be a long day. “Just as I am, Lord, just as I am. Stick me a sandwich or two in the fridge, will you?”

“Just one. You’re getting too heavy. Even Dr. Haskell said so and he never scolds
anybody.
”

“One, then.” He put the shift in reverse … then put it back in park. He leaned out the window, and she realized he wanted a kiss. She gave him a good one with the town whistle blowing across the crisp October air, and he caressed the side of her throat while their mouths were together, a thing that always gave her the shivers and he hardly ever did anymore.

His touch there in the sunshine: she never forgot that, either.

As he rolled down the driveway, she called something after him. He caught part of it but not all. He really was going to have to get his ears checked. Let them fit him with a hearing aid if necessary.
Although that would probably be the final thing Randolph and Big Jim needed to kick him out on his aging ass.

Duke braked and leaned out again. “Take care of my
what
?”

“Your pacemaker!”
she practically screamed. Laughing. Exasperated. Still feeling his hand on her throat, stroking skin that had been smooth and firm—so it seemed to her—only yesterday. Or maybe it had been the day before, when they had listened to KC and the Sunshine Band instead of Jesus Radio.

“Oh, you bet!” he called back, and drove away. The next time she saw him, he was dead.

2

Billy and Wanda Debec never heard the double boom because they were on Route 117, and because they were arguing. The fight had started simply enough, with Wanda observing it was a beautiful day and Billy responding he had a headache and didn’t know why they had to go to the Saturday flea market in Oxford Hills, anyway; it would just be the usual pawed-over crap.

Wanda said that he wouldn’t have a headache if he hadn’t sunk a dozen beers the night before.

Billy asked her if she had counted the cans in the recycling bin (no matter how loaded he got, Billy did his drinking at home and always put the cans in the recycling bin—these things, along with his work as an electrician, were his pride).

She said yes she had, you bet she had. Furthermore—

They got as far as Patel’s Market in Castle Rock, having progressed through
You drink too much, Billy
and
You nag too much, Wanda
to
My mother told me not to marry you
and
Why do you have to be such a bitch.
This had become a fairly well-worn call-and-response during the last two years of their four-year marriage, but this morning Billy suddenly felt he had reached his limit. He swung into the market’s wide hot-topped parking lot without signaling or slowing,
and then back out onto 117 without a single glance into his rearview mirror, let alone over his shoulder. On the road behind him, Nora Robichaud honked. Her best friend, Elsa Andrews, tutted. The two women, both retired nurses, exchanged a glance but not a single word. They had been friends too long for words to be necessary in such situations.

Meanwhile, Wanda asked Billy where he thought he was going.

Billy said back home to take a nap. She could go to the shitfair on her own.

Wanda observed that he had almost hit those two old ladies (said old ladies now dropping behind fast; Nora Robichaud felt that, lacking some damned good reason, speeds over forty miles an hour were the devil’s work).

Billy observed that Wanda both looked and sounded like her mother.

Wanda asked him to elucidate just what he meant by that.

Billy said that both mother and daughter had fat asses and tongues that were hung in the middle and ran on both ends.

Wanda told Billy he was hungover.

Billy told Wanda she was ugly.

It was a full and fair exchange of feelings, and by the time they crossed from Castle Rock into Motton, headed for an invisible barrier that had come into being not long after Wanda had opened this spirited discussion by saying it was a beautiful day, Billy was doing better than sixty, which was almost top end for Wanda’s little Chevy shitbox.

“What’s that smoke?” Wanda asked suddenly, pointing northeast, toward 119.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Did my mother-in-law fart?” This cracked him up and he started laughing.

Wanda Debec realized she had finally had enough. This clarified the world and her future in a way that was almost magical. She was turning to him, the words
I want a divorce
on the tip of her tongue, when they reached the Motton–Chester’s Mill town line and struck the barrier. The Chevy shitbox was equipped with airbags, but
Billy’s did not deploy and Wanda’s didn’t pop out completely. The steering wheel collapsed Billy’s chest; the steering column smashed his heart; he died almost instantly.

Wanda’s head collided with the dashboard, and the sudden, catastrophic relocation of the Chevy’s engine block broke one of her legs (the left) and one of her arms (the right). She was not aware of any pain, only that the horn was blaring, the car was suddenly askew in the middle of the road with its front end smashed almost flat, and her vision had come over all red.

When Nora Robichaud and Elsa Andrews rounded the bend just to the south (they had been animatedly discussing the smoke rising to the northeast for several minutes now, and congratulating themselves on having taken the lesser traveled highway this forenoon), Wanda Debec was dragging herself up the white line on her elbows. Blood gushed down her face, almost obscuring it. She had been half scalped by a piece of the collapsing windshield and a huge flap of skin hung down over her left cheek like a misplaced jowl.

Nora and Elsa looked at each other grimly.

“Shit-my-pajamas,” Nora said, and that was all the talk between them there was. Elsa got out the instant the car stopped and ran to the staggering woman. For an elderly lady (Elsa had just turned seventy), she was remarkably fleet.

Nora left the car idling in park and joined her friend. Together they supported Wanda to Norma’s old but perfectly maintained Mercedes. Wanda’s jacket had gone from brown to a muddy roan color; her hands looked as if she had dipped them in red paint.

“Whe’ Billy?” she asked, and Nora saw that most of the poor woman’s teeth had been knocked out. Three of them were stuck to the front of her bloody jacket. “Whe’ Billy, he arri’? Wha’ happen?”

“Billy’s fine and so are you,” Nora said, then looked a question at Elsa. Elsa nodded and hurried toward the Chevy, now partly obscured by the steam escaping its ruptured radiator. One look through the gaping passenger door, which hung on one hinge, was enough to tell Elsa, who had been a nurse for almost forty years (final employer: Ron Haskell, MD—the MD standing for Medical Doofus),
that Billy was not fine at all. The young woman with half her hair hanging upside down beside her head was now a widow.

Elsa returned to the Mercedes and got into the backseat next to the young woman, who had slipped into semiconsciousness. “He’s dead and she will be, too, if you don’t get us to Cathy Russell hurry-up-chop-chop,” she told Nora.

“Hang on, then,” Nora said, and floored it. The Mercedes had a big engine, and it leaped forward. Nora swerved smartly around the Debec Chevrolet and crashed into the invisible barrier while still accelerating. For the first time in twenty years Nora had neglected to fasten her seat belt, and she went out through the windshield, where she broke her neck on the invisible barrier just as Bob Roux had. The young woman shot between the Mercedes’s front bucket seats, out through the shattered windshield, and landed facedown on the hood with her bloodspattered legs splayed. Her feet were bare. Her loafers (bought at the last Oxford Hills flea market she had attended) had come off in the first crash.

Elsa Andrews hit the back of the driver’s seat, then rebounded, dazed but essentially unhurt. Her door stuck at first, but popped open when she put her shoulder against it and rammed. She got out and looked around at the littered wreckage. The puddles of blood. The smashed-up Chevy shitbox, still gently steaming.