Under the Dome: A Novel (83 page)

“They were,” Rusty said. “Very nasty. You don’t want to know.”

“But Brenda wasn’t sexually assaulted,” Jackie said. “To me that suggests Coggins and Brenda were different from the girls.”

“Maybe Junior killed the girls and his old man killed Brenda and
Coggins,” Rusty said, and waited for someone to laugh. No one did. “If so, why?”

They all shook their heads. “There must have been a motive,” Rusty said, “but I doubt if it was sex.”

“You think he has something to hide,” Jackie said. “Yeah, I do. And I have an idea of someone who might know what it is. He’s locked in the Police Department basement.”

“Barbara?” Jackie asked. “Why would Barbara know?”

“Because he was talking to Brenda. They had quite a little heart-to-heart in her backyard the day after the Dome came down.”

“How in the world do you know that?” Stacey asked. “Because the Buffalinos live next door to the Perkinses and Gina Buffalino’s bedroom window overlooks the Perkins backyard. She saw them and mentioned it to me.” He saw Linda looking at him and shrugged. “What can I say? It’s a small town. We all support the team.”

“I hope you told her to keep her mouth shut,” Linda said. “I didn’t, because when she told me I didn’t have any reason to suspect Big Jim might have killed Brenda. Or bashed Lester Coggins’s head in with a souvenir baseball. I didn’t even know they were dead.”

“We still don’t know if Barbie knows anything,” Stacey said. “Other than how to make a hell of a mushroom-and-cheese omelet, that is.”

“Somebody will have to ask him,” Jackie said. “I nominate me.”

“Even if he does know something, will it do any good?” Linda asked. “This is almost a dictatorship now. I’m just realizing that. I guess that makes me slow.”

“It makes you more trusting than slow,” Jackie said, “and normally trusting’s a good way to be. As to Colonel Barbara, we won’t know what good he might do us until we ask.” She paused. “And that’s really not the point, you know. He’s innocent. That’s the point.”

“What if they kill him?” Rusty asked bluntly. “Shot while trying to escape.”

“I’m pretty sure that won’t happen,” Jackie said. “Big Jim wants a show-trial. That’s the talk at the station.” Stacey nodded. “They want to make people believe Barbara’s a spider spinning a vast web of conspiracy. Then they can execute him. But even moving at top speed, that’s days away. Weeks, if we’re lucky.”

“We won’t be that lucky,” Linda said. “Not if Rennie wants to move fast.”

“Maybe you’re right, but Rennie’s got the special town meeting to get through on Thursday first. And he’ll want to question Barbara. If Rusty knows he’s been with Brenda, then Rennie knows.”

“Of course he knows,” Stacey said. Sounding impatient. “They were together when Barbara showed Jim the letter from the President.”

They thought about this in silence for a minute.

“If Rennie’s hiding something,” Linda mused, “he’ll want time to get rid of it.”

Jackie laughed. The sound in that tense living room was almost shocking. “Good luck on that. Whatever it is, he can’t exactly put it in the back of a truck and drive it out of town.”

“Something to do with the propane?” Linda asked.

“Maybe,” Rusty said. “Jackie, you were in the service, right?”

“Army. Two tours. Military Police. Never saw combat, although I saw plenty of casualties, especially on my second tour. Würzburg, Germany, First Infantry Division. You know, the Big Red One? Mostly I stopped bar fights or stood guard outside the hospital there. I knew guys like Barbie, and I would give a great deal to have him out of that cell and on our side. There was a reason the President put him in charge. Or tried to.” She paused. “It might be possible to break him out. It’s worth considering.”

The other two women—police officers who also happened to be mothers—said nothing to this, but Linda was nibbling her nails again and Stacey was worrying her hair.

“I know,” Jackie said.

Linda shook her head. “Unless you have kids asleep upstairs and depending on you to make breakfast for them in the morning, you don’t.”

“Maybe not, but ask yourself this: If we’re cut off from the outside world, which we are, and if the man in charge is a murderous nut-ball, which he may be, are things apt to get better if we just sit back and do nothing?”

“If you broke him out,” Rusty said, “what would you do with him? You can’t exactly put him in the Witness Protection Program.”

“I don’t know,” Jackie said, and sighed. “All I know is that the President ordered him to take charge and Big Jim Fucking Rennie framed him for murder so he couldn’t.”

“You’re not going to do anything right away,” Rusty said. “Not even take the chance of talking to him. There’s something else in play here, and it could change everything.”

He told them about the Geiger counter—how it had come into his possession, to whom he had passed it on, and what Joe McClatchey claimed to have found with it.

“I don’t know,” Stacey said doubtfully. “It seems too good to be true. The McClatchey boy’s … what? Fourteen?”

“Thirteen, I think. But this is one bright kid, and if he says they got a radiation spike out on Black Ridge Road, I believe him. If they
have
found the thing generating the Dome, and we can shut it down …”

“Then this ends!” Linda cried. Her eyes were bright. “And Jim Rennie collapses like a … a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon with a hole in it!”

“Wouldn’t that be nice,” Jackie Wettington said. “If it was on TV, I might even believe it.”

17

“Phil?” Andy called.
“Phil?”

He had to raise his voice to be heard. Bonnie Nandella and The Redemption were working through “My Soul is a Witness” at top volume. All those
ooo-ooh
s and
whoa-yeah
s were a little disorienting. Even the bright light inside the WCIK broadcast facility was disori-enting;
until he stood beneath those fluorescents, Andy hadn’t really realized how dark the rest of The Mill had become. And how much he’d adapted to it. “Chef?”

No answer. He glanced at the TV (CNN with the sound off), then looked through the long window into the broadcast studio. The lights were on in there, too, and all the equipment was running (it gave him the creeps, even though Lester Coggins had explained with great pride how a computer ran everything), but there was no sign of Phil.

All at once he smelled sweat, old and sour. He turned and Phil was standing right behind him, as if he had popped out of the floor. He was holding what looked like a garage door-opener in one hand. In the other was a pistol. The pistol was pointed at Andy’s chest. The finger curled around the trigger was white at the knuckle and the muzzle was trembling slightly.

“Hello, Phil,” Andy said. “Chef, I mean.”

“What are
you
doing here?” Chef Bushey asked. The smell of his sweat was yeasty, overpowering. His jeans and WCIK tee-shirt were grimy. His feet were bare (probably accounting for his silent arrival) and caked with dirt. His hair might last have been washed a year ago. Or not. His eyes were the worst, bloody and haunted. “You better tell me quick, old hoss, or you’ll never tell anyone anything again.”

Andy, who had narrowly cheated death by pink water not long before, received Chef’s threat with equanimity, if not good cheer. “You do what you have to do, Phil. Chef, I mean.”

Chef raised his eyebrows in surprise. It was bleary but genuine. “Yeah?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why you out here?”

“I come bearing bad news. I’m very sorry.”

Chef considered this, then smiled, revealing his few surviving teeth. “There is no bad news. Christ is coming back, and that’s the good news that swallows all bad news. That’s the Good News Bonus Track. Do you agree?”

“I do, and I say hallelujah. Unfortunately—or fortunately, I guess; you’d have to say fortunately—your wife is with Him already.”

“Say what?”

Andy reached out and pushed the muzzle of the gun floorward. Chef made no effort to stop him. “Samantha’s dead, Chef. I regret to say she took her own life earlier tonight.”

“Sammy? Dead?” Chef dropped the gun into the OUT basket on a nearby desk. He also lowered the garage door-opener, but kept hold of it; for the last two days it had not left his hand, even during his increasingly infrequent periods of sleep.

“I’m sorry, Phil. Chef.”

Andy explained the circumstances of Sammy’s death as he understood them, concluding with the comforting news that “the child” was fine. (Even in his despair, Andy Sanders was a glass-half-full person.)

Chef waved away Little Walter’s wellbeing with his garage door opener. “She offed two pigs?”

Andy stiffened at that. “They were police officers, Phil. Fine human beings. She was distraught, I’m sure, but it was still a very bad thing to do. You need to take that back.”

“Say
what
?”

“I won’t have you calling our officers pigs.”

Chef considered. “Yeah-yeah, kay-kay, I take it back.”

“Thank you.”

Chef bent down from his not-inconsiderable height (it was like being bowed to by a skeleton) and peered into Andy’s face. “Brave little motherfucker, ain’t you?”

“No,” Andy said honestly. “I just don’t care.”

Chef seemed to see something that concerned him. He grasped Andy’s shoulder. “Brother, are you all right?”

Andy burst into tears and dropped onto an office chair under a sign advising that CHRIST WATCHETH EVERY CHANNEL, CHRIST LISTENETH EVERY WAVELENGTH. He rested his head on the wall below this strangely sinister slogan, crying like a
child who has been punished for stealing jam. It was the
brother
that had done it; that totally unexpected
brother.

Chef drew up a chair from behind the station manager’s desk and studied Andy with the expression of a naturalist observing some rare animal in the wild. After awhile he said, “Sanders! Did you come out here so I’d kill you?”

“No,” Andy said through his sobs. “Maybe. Yes. I can’t say. But everything in my life has gone wrong. My wife and daughter are dead. I think God might be punishing me for selling this shit—”

Chef nodded. “That could be.”

“—and I’m looking for answers. Or closure. Or something. Of course, I also wanted to tell you about your wife, it’s important to do the right thing—”

Chef patted his shoulder. “You did, bro. I appreciate it. She wasn’t much shakes in the kitchen, and she didn’t keep house no better than a hog on a shitheap, but she could throw an
unearthly
fuck when she was stoned. What did she have against those two blueboys?”

Even in his grief, Andy had no intention of bringing up the rape accusation. “I suppose she was upset about the Dome. Do you know about the Dome, Phil? Chef?”

Chef waved his hand again, apparently in the affirmative. “What you say about the meth is correct. Selling it is wrong. An affront. Making it, though—that is God’s will.”

Andy dropped his hands and peered at Chef from his swollen eyes. “Do you think so? Because I’m not sure that can be right.”

“Have you ever had any?”

“No!” Andy cried. It was as if Chef had asked him if he had ever enjoyed sexual congress with a cocker spaniel.

“Would you take medicine if the doctor prescribed it?”

“Well … yes, of course … but …”

“Meth is medicine.” Chef looked at him solemnly, then tapped Andy’s chest with a finger for emphasis. Chef had nibbled the nail all the way to the bloody quick. “
Meth
is
medicine.
Say it.”

“Meth is medicine,” Andy repeated, agreeably enough.

“That’s right.” Chef stood up. “It’s a medicine for melancholy. That’s from Ray Bradbury. You ever read Ray Bradbury?”

“No.”

“He’s a fucking
head.
He
knew.
He wrote the motherfucking
book,
say hallelujah. Come with me. I’m going to change your life.”

18

The First Selectman of Chester’s Mill took to meth like a frog to flies.

There was a ratty old couch behind the ranked cookers, and here Andy and Chef Bushey sat under a picture of Christ on a motorcycle (title:
Your Unseen Road Buddy
), passing a pipe back and forth. While burning, meth smells like three-day-old piss in an uncovered thunderjug, but after his first tentative puff, Andy felt positive that the Chef was right: selling it might be Satan’s work, but the stuff itself had to be God’s. The world jumped into an exquisite, delicately trembling focus he had never seen before. His heart rate spiked, the blood vessels in his neck swelled to throbbing cables, his gums tingled, and his balls crawled in the most delightfully adolescent way. Better than any of these things, the weariness that had lain on his shoulders and muddled up his thinking disappeared. He felt he could move mountains in a wheelbarrow.

“In the Garden of Eden there was a Tree,” Chef said, passing him the pipe. Tendrils of green smoke drifted from both ends. “The Tree of Good and Evil. Dig that shit?”

“Yes. It’s in the Bible.”

“Bet your jackdog. And on that Tree was an Apple.”

“Right, right.” Andy took a puff so small it was actually a sip. He wanted more—he wanted it
all
—but feared that if he helped himself to a deep lungful, his head would explode off his neck and fly around the lab like a rocket, shooting fiery exhaust from its stump.

“The flesh of that Apple is Truth, and the skin of that Apple is Meth,” Chef said.

Andy looked at him. “That’s amazing.”

Chef nodded. “Yes, Sanders. It is.” He took back the pipe. “Is this good shit or what?”

“
Amazing
shit.”

“Christ is coming back on Halloween,” Chef said. “Possibly a few days earlier; I can’t tell. It’s already the Halloween
season,
you know. Season of the motherfucking witch.” He handed Andy the pipe, then pointed with the hand holding the garage door opener. “Do you see that? Up at the end of the gallery. Over the door to the storage side.”

Andy looked. “What? That white lump? Looks like clay?”

“That’s not clay,” Chef said. “That’s the Body of Christ, Sanders.”

“What about those wires coming out of it?”

“Vessels with the Blood of Christ running through em.”