Under the Dome

1

When Linda and Jackie came back from the PD, Rusty and the girls were sitting on the front step waiting for them. The Js were still in their nighties—light cotton ones, not the flannels they were used to at this time of year. Although it was still not quite seven AM, the thermometer outside the kitchen window had the temperature at sixty-six degrees.

Ordinarily, the two girls would have flown down the walk to embrace their mother far in advance of Rusty, but this morning he beat them by several yards. He seized Linda around the waist and she wrapped her arms around his neck with almost painful tight-ness—not a hello-handsome hug, but a drowner’s grip.

“Are you all right?” he whispered in her ear.

Her hair brushed up and down against his cheek as she nodded. Then she drew back. Her eyes were shining. “I was sure Thibodeau would look in the cereal, it was Jackie’s idea to spit in it, that was genius, but I was certain—”

“Why is mommy crying?” Judy asked. She sounded ready to cry herself.

“I’m not,” she said, then wiped her eyes. “Well, maybe a little. Because I’m so happy to see your dad.”

“We’re all happy to see him!” Janelle told Jackie. “Because my Daddy, HE’S THE BOSS! ”

“News to me,” Rusty said, then kissed Linda on the mouth, hard.

“Lips-kissin!” Janelle said, fascinated. Judy covered her eyes and giggled.

“Come on, girls, swings,” Jackie said. “Then you get dressed for school.”

“I WANT TO LOOPIE DA LOOP!” Janelle screamed, leading the way.

“School?” Rusty asked. “Really?”

“Really,” Linda said. “Just the little ones, at East Street Grammar. Half a day. Wendy Goldstone and Ellen Vanedestine volunteered to take classes. K through three in one room, four through six in another. I don’t know if any actual learning will happen, but it’ll give the kids a place to go, and a sense of normalcy. Maybe.” She looked up at the sky, which was cloudless but had a yellowish tinge all the same. Like a blue eye with a cataract growing on it, she thought. “I could use some normalcy myself. Look at that sky.”

Rusty glanced up briefly, then held his wife at arm’s length so he could study her. “You got away with it? You’re sure?”

“Yes. But it was close. This kind of thing may be fun in spy movies, but in real life it’s awful. I won’t break him out, honey. Because of the girls.”

“Dictators always hold the children hostage,” Rusty said. “At some point people have to say that no longer works.”

“But not here and not yet. This is Jackie’s idea, so let her handle it. I won’t be a part of it, and I won’t let you be a part of it.” Yet he knew that if he demanded this of her, she would do as he asked; it was the expression under her expression. If that made him the boss, he didn’t want to be.

“You’re going in to work?” he asked.

“Of course. Kids go to Marta, Marta takes kids to school, Linda and Jackie report for another day of police work under the Dome. Anything else would look funny. I hate having to think this way.” She blew out a breath. “Also, I’m tired.” She glanced to make sure the kids were out of earshot. “Fucking exhausted. I hardly slept at all. Are you going in to the hospital?”

Rusty shook his head. “Ginny and Twitch are going to be on their own at least until noon… although with the new guy to help them out, I think they’ll be okay. Thurston’s kind of New Age-y, but he’s good. I’m going over to Claire McClatchey’s. I need to talk to those kids, and I need to go out to where they got the radiation spike on the Geiger counter.”

“What do I tell people who ask where you are?”

Rusty considered this. “The truth, I guess. Some of it, anyway. Say I’m investigating a possible Dome generator. That might make Rennie think twice about whatever next step he’s planning.”

“And when I’m asked about the location? Because I will be.”

“Say you don’t know, but you think it’s on the western side of town.”

“Black Ridge is north.”

“Yep. If Rennie tells Randolph to send out some of his Mounties, I want them to go to the wrong place. If someone calls you on it later, just say you were tired and must have gotten mixed up. And listen, hon—before you go in to the PD, make a list of people who may believe Barbie’s innocent of the murders.” Thinking again, Us and them. “We need to talk to those people before the town meeting tomorrow. Very discreetly.”

“Rusty, are you sure about this? Because after the fire last night, this whole town is going to be on the lookout for the Friends of Dale Barbara.”

“Am I sure? Yes. Do I like it? Most assuredly not.”

She looked up again at the yellow-tinged sky, then at the two oaks in their front yard, the leaves hanging limp and moveless, their bright colors fading to drab brown. She sighed. “If Rennie framed Barbara, then he probably had the newspaper burned down. You know that, right?”

“I do.”

“And if Jackie can get Barbara out of jail, where will she put him? Where in town is safe?”

“I’ll have to think about that.”

“If you can find the generator and turn it off, all this I Spy crap becomes unnecessary.”

“You pray that happens.”

“I will. What about radiation? I don’t want you coming down with leukemia, or something.”

“I have an idea about that.”

“Should I ask?”

He smiled. “Probably not. It’s pretty crazy.”

She twined her fingers through his. “Be careful.”

He kissed her lightly. “You too.”

They looked at Jackie pushing the girls on the swings. They had a lot to be careful for. All the same, Rusty thought that risk was coming into his life as a major factor. If, that was, he wanted to be able to continue looking at his reflection when he took his morning shave.

2

Horace the Corgi liked peoplefood.

In fact, Horace the Corgi loved peoplefood. Being a little over-weight (not to mention a little gray about the muzzle in these latter years), he wasn’t supposed to have it, and Julia had been good about stopping the table feeding after the vet had told her bluntly that her generosity was shortening her housemate’s life. That conversation had taken place sixteen months ago; since then Horace had been restricted to Bil-Jac and the occasional dietetic dog treat. The treats resembled Styrofoam packing-poppers, and judging from the reproachful way Horace looked at her before eating them, she guessed they probably tasted like packing-poppers, too. But she stuck to her guns: no more fried chicken skin, no more Cheez Doodles, no more bites of her morning doughnut.

This limited Horace’s intake of verboten comestibles, but did not entirely end it; the imposed diet simply reduced him to foraging, which Horace rather enjoyed, returning him as it did to the hunting nature of his foxy forebears. His morning and evening walks were especially rich in culinary delights. It was amazing what people left in the gutters along Main Street and West Street, which formed his usual walkie-walk route. There were french fries, potato chips, discarded peanut butter crackers, the occasional ice cream bar wrapper with some chocolate still adhering to it. Once he came upon an entire Table Talk pie. It was out of its dish and in his stomach before you could say cholesterol.

He didn’t succeed in snarking all the goodies he came upon; sometimes Julia saw what he was after and jerked him along on his leash before he could ingest it. But he got a lot, because Julia often walked him with a book or a folded copy of the New York Times in one hand. Being ignored in favor of the Times wasn’t always good—when he wanted a thorough belly-scratch, for instance—but during walkies, ignorance was bliss. For small yellow Corgis, ignorance meant snacks.

He was being ignored this morning. Julia and the other woman—the one who owned this house, because her smell was all over it, especially in the vicinity of the room where humans went to drop their scat and mark their territory—were talking. Once the other woman cried, and Julia hugged her.

“I’m better, but not all better,” Andrea said. They were in the kitchen. Horace could smell the coffee they were drinking. Cold coffee, not hot. He could also smell pastries. The kind with icing. “I still want it.” If she was talking about pastries with icing, so did Horace.

“The craving may go on for a long time,” Julia said, “and that’s not even the important part. I salute your courage, Andi, but Rusty was right—cold turkey is foolish and dangerous. You’re damn lucky you haven’t had a convulsion.”

“For all I know, I have.” Andrea drank some of her coffee. Horace heard the slurp. “I’ve been having some damned vivid dreams. One was about a fire. A big one. On Halloween.”

“But you’re better.”

“A little. I’m starting to think I can make it. Julia, you’re welcome to stay here with me, but I think you could find a better place. The smell—”

“We can do something about the smell. We’ll get a battery-powered fan from Burpee’s. If room and board is a firm offer—one that includes Horace—I’ll take you up on it. No one trying to kick an addiction should have to do it on her own.”

“I don’t think there’s any other way, hon.”

“You know what I mean. Why did you do it?”

“Because for the first time since I got elected, this town might need me. And because Jim Rennie threatened to withhold my pills if I objected to his plans.”

Horace tuned the rest of this out. He was more interested in a smell wafting to his sensitive nose from the space between the wall and one end of the couch. It was on this couch that Andrea liked to sit in better (if considerably more medicated) days, sometimes watching shows like The Hunted Ones (a clever sequel to Lost) and Dancing with the Stars, sometimes a movie on HBO. On movie nights she often had microwave popcorn. She’d put the bowl on the endtable. Because stoners are rarely neat, there was a scattering of popcorn down there below the table. This was what Horace had smelled.

Leaving the women to their blah, he worked his way under the little table and into the gap. It was a narrow space, but the endtable formed a natural bridge and he was a fairly narrow dog, especially since going on the Corgi version of WeightWatchers. The first kernels were just beyond the VADER file, lying there in its manila envelope. Horace was actually standing on his mistress’s name (printed in the late Brenda Perkins’s neat hand) and hoovering up the first bits of a surprisingly rich treasure trove, when Andrea and Julia walked back into the living room.

A woman said, Take that to her.

Horace looked up, his ears pricking. That was not Julia or the other woman; it was a deadvoice. Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners. The dead were all around, but living people saw them no more than they could smell most of the ten thousand aromas that surrounded them every minute of every day.

Take that to Julia, she needs it, it’s hers.

That was ridiculous. Julia would never eat anything that had been in his mouth, Horace knew this from long experience. Even if he pushed it out with his snout she wouldn’t eat it. It was peoplefood, yes, but now it was also floorfood.

Not the popcorn. The—

“Horace?” Julia asked in that sharp voice that said he was being bad—as in Oh you bad dog, you know better, blah-blah-blah. “What are you doing back there? Come out.”

Horace threw it in reverse. He gave her his most charming grin—gosh, Julia, how I love you—hoping that no popcorn was stuck to the end of his nose. He’d gotten a few pieces, but he sensed the real motherlode had escaped him.

“Have you been foraging?”

Horace sat, looking up at her with the proper expression of adoration. Which he did feel; he loved Julia very much.

“A better question would be what have you been foraging?” She bent to look into the gap between the couch and the wall.

Before she could, the other woman began to make a gagging noise. She wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to stop a shivering fit, but was unsuccessful. Her smell changed, and Horace knew she was going to yark. He watched closely. Sometimes peopleyark had good things in it.

“Andi?” Julia asked. “Are you okay?”

Stupid question, Horace thought. Can’t you smell her? But that was a stupid question, too. Julia could hardly smell herself when she was sweaty.

“Yes. No. I shouldn’t have eaten that raisin bun. I’m going to—” She hurried out of the room. To add to the smells coming from the piss-and-scat place, Horace assumed. Julia followed. For a moment Horace debated squeezing back under the table, but he smelled worry on Julia and hurried at her heels instead.

He had forgotten all about the deadvoice.

3

Rusty called Claire McClatchey from the car. It was early, but she answered on the first ring, and he wasn’t surprised. No one in Chester’s Mill was getting much sleep these days, at least not without pharmacological assistance.

She promised to have Joe and his friends at the house by eight thirty at the latest, would pick them up herself, if necessary. Lowering her voice, she said, “I think Joe is crushing on the Calvert girl.”

“He’d be a fool not to,” Rusty said.

“Will you have to take them out there?”

“Yes, but not into a high radiation zone. I promise you that, Mrs. McClatchey.”

“Claire. If I’m going to allow my son to go with you to an area where the animals apparently commit suicide, I think we should be on a first-name basis.”

“You get Benny and Norrie to your house and I promise to take care of them on the field trip. That work for you?”

Claire said it did. Five minutes after hanging up on her, Rusty was turning off an eerily deserted Motton Road and onto Drummond Lane, a short street lined with Eastchester’s nicest homes. The nicest of the nice was the one with BURPEE on the mailbox. Rusty was soon in the Burpee kitchen, drinking coffee (hot; the Burpee generator was still working) with Romeo and his wife, Michela. Both of them looked pale and grim. Rommie was dressed, Michela still in her housecoat.

“You t’ink dat guy Barbie really killed Bren?” Rommie asked. “Because if he did, my friend, I’m gonna kill him myself.”

Michela put a hand on his arm. “You ain’t that dumb, honey.”

“I don’t think so,” Rusty said. “I think he was framed. But if you tell people I said that, we could all be in trouble.”

“Rommie always loved that woman.” Michela was smiling, but there was frost in her voice. “More than me, I sometimes think.”

Rommie neither confirmed nor denied this—seemed, in fact, not to hear it at all. He leaned toward Rusty, his brown eyes intent. “What you talking ’bout, doc? Framed how?”

“Nothing I want to go into now. I’m here on other business. And I’m afraid this is also secret.”

“Then I don’t want to hear it,” Michela said. She left the room, taking her coffee cup with her.

“Ain’t gonna be no lovin from dat woman tonight,” Rommie said.

“I’m sorry.”

Rommie shrugged. “I got ’nother one, crosstown. Misha knows, although she don’t let on. Tell me what your other bi’ness is, doc.”

“Some kids think they may have found what’s generating the Dome. They’re young but smart. I trust them. They had a Geiger counter, and they got a radiation spike out on Black Ridge Road. Not into the danger zone, but they didn’t get all that close.”

“Close to what? What’d they see?”

“A flashing purple light. You know where the old orchard is?”

“Hell, yeah. The McCoy place. I used to take girls parkin dere. You can see the whole town. I had dis ole Willys….” He looked momentarily wistful. “Well, never mind. Just a flashin light?”

“They also came across a lot of dead animals—some deer, a bear. Looked to the kids like they committed suicide.”

Rommie regarded him gravely. “I’m going wit you.”

“That’s fine… up to a point. One of us has got to go all the way, and that should be me. But I need a radiation suit.”

“What you got in mind, doc?”

Rusty told him. When he had finished, Rommie produced a package of Winstons and offered the pack across the table.

“My favorite OPs,” Rusty said, and took one. “So what do you think?”

“Oh, I can help you,” Rommie said, lighting them up. “I got ever-thin in dat store of mine, as everyone in dis town well know.” He pointed his cigarette at Rusty. “But you ain’t gonna want any pictures of yourself in the paper, because gonna look damn funny, you.”

“Not worried about dat, me,” Rusty said. “Newspaper burned down last night.”

“I heard,” Rommie said. “Dat guy Barbara again. His friens.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Oh, I’m a believin soul. When Bush said there was nukes an such in Iraq, I believed dat. I tell people, ‘He’s the guy who knows.’ Also b’lieve dat Oswal’ act alone, me.”

From the other room, Michela called: “Stop talking that fake French shit.”

Rommie gave Rusty a grin that said, You see what I have to put up with. “Yes, my dear,” he said, and with absolutely no trace of his Lucky Pierre accent. Then he faced Rusty again. “Leave your car here. We’ll take my van. More space. Drop me off at the store, then get those kids. I’ll put together your radiation suit. But as for gloves… I don’t know.”

“We’ve got lead-lined gloves in the X-ray room closet at the hospital. Go all the way up to the elbow. I can grab one of the aprons—”

“Good idea, hate to see you risk your sperm count—”

“Also there might be a pair or two of the lead-lined goggles the techs and radiologists used to wear back in the seventies. Although they could have been thrown out. What I’m hoping is that the radiation count doesn’t go much higher than the last reading the kids got, which was still in the green.”

“Except you said they didn’t get all dat close.”

Rusty sighed. “If the needle on that Geiger counter hits eight hundred or a thousand counts per second, my continued fertility is going to be the least of my worries.”

Before they left, Michela—now dressed in a short skirt and a spectacularly cozy sweater—swept back into the kitchen and berated her husband for a fool. He’d get them in trouble. He’d done it before and would do it again. Only this might be worse trouble than he knew.

Rommie took her in his arms and spoke to her in rapid French. She replied in the same language, spitting the words. He responded. She beat a fist twice against his shoulder, then cried and kissed him. Outside, Rommie turned to Rusty apologetically and shrugged.

“She can’t help it,” he said. “She’s got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.”

4

When Rusty and Romeo Burpee got to the department store, Toby Manning was already there, waiting to open up and serve the public, if that was Rommie’s pleasure. Petra Searles, who worked across the street in the drugstore, was sitting with him. They were in lawn chairs with tags reading END OF SUMMER BLOWOUT SALE hanging from the arms.

“Sure you don’t want to tell me about this radiation suit you’re going to build before”—Rusty looked at his watch—“ten o’clock?”

“Better not,” Rommie said. “You’d call me crazy. Go on, Doc. Get those gloves and goggles and the apron. Talk to the kids. Gimme some time.”

“We opening, boss?” Toby asked when Rommie got out.

“Dunno. Maybe this afternoon. Gonna be a l’il busy dis mornin, me.”

Rusty drove away. He was on Town Common Hill before he realized that both Toby and Petra had been wearing blue armbands.

5

He found gloves, aprons, and one pair of lead-lined goggles in the back of the X-ray closet, about two seconds before he was ready to give up. The goggles’ strap was busted, but he was sure Rommie could staple it back together. As a bonus, he didn’t have to explain to anyone what he was doing. The whole hospital seemed to be sleeping.

He went back out, sniffed at the air—flat, with an unpleasant smoky undertang—and looked west, at the hanging black smear where the missiles had struck. It looked like a skin tumor. He knew he was concentrating on Barbie and Big Jim and the murders because they were the human element, things he sort of understood. But ignoring the Dome would be a mistake—a potentially catastrophic one. It had to go away, and soon, or his patients with asthma and COPD were going to start having problems. And they were really just the canaries in the coal mine.

That nicotine-stained sky.

“Not good,” he muttered, and threw his salvage into the back of the van. “Not good at all.”

6

All three children were at the McClatchey house when he got there, and oddly subdued for kids who might be acclaimed national heroes by the end of this Wednesday in October, if fortune favored them.

“You guys ready?” Rusty asked, more heartily than he felt. “Before we go out there we have to stop at Burpee’s, but that shouldn’t take l—”

“They’ve got something to tell you first,” Claire said. “I wish to God they didn’t. This just keeps getting worse and worse. Would you like a glass of orange juice? We’re trying to drink it up before it goes spunky.”

Rusty held his thumb and forefinger close together to indicate just a little. He’d never been much of an OJ man, but he wanted her out of the room and sensed she wanted to go. She looked pale and sounded scared. He didn’t think this was about what the kids had found out on Black Ridge; this was something else.

Just what I need, he thought.

When she was gone he said, “Spill it.”

Benny and Norrie turned to Joe. He sighed, brushed his hair off his forehead, sighed again. There was little resemblance between this serious young adolescent and the sign-waving, hell-raising kid in Alden Dinsmore’s field three days ago. His face was as pale as his mother’s, and a few pimples—maybe his first—had appeared on his forehead. Rusty had seen such sudden outbreaks before. They were stress-pimples.

“What is it, Joe?”

“People say I’m smart,” Joe said, and Rusty was alarmed to see the kid was on the verge of tears. “I guess I am, but sometimes I wish I wasn’t.”

“Don’t worry,” Benny said, “you’re stupid in lots of important ways.”

“Shut up, Benny,” Norrie said kindly.

Joe took no notice. “I could beat my dad at chess when I was six, and my mom by the time I was eight. Get A’s in school. Always won the Science Fair. Been writing my own computer programs for two years. I’m not bragging. I know I’m a geek.”

Norrie smiled and put her hand on his. He held it.

“But I just make connections, see? That’s all it is. If A, then B. If not A, then B is out to lunch. And probably the whole alphabet.”

“What exactly are we talking about, Joe?”

“I don’t think the cook did those murders. That is, we don’t.”

He seemed relieved when Norrie and Benny both nodded. But that was nothing to the look of gladness (mixed with incredulity) that came over his face when Rusty said, “Neither do I.”

“Told you he had major chops,” Benny said. “Gives awesome stitches, too.”

Claire came back with juice in a tiny glass. Rusty sipped. Warm but drinkable. With no gennie, by tomorrow it wouldn’t be.

“Why don’t you think he did it?” Norrie asked.

“You guys first.” The generator on Black Ridge had momentarily slipped to the back of Rusty’s mind.

“We saw Mrs. Perkins yesterday morning,” Joe said. “We were on the Common, just starting to prospect with the Geiger counter. She was going up Town Common Hill.”

Rusty put his glass on the table next to his chair and sat forward with his hands clasped between his knees. “What time was this?”

“My watch stopped out at the Dome on Sunday, so I can’t say exactly, but the big fight at the supermarket was going on when we saw her. So it had to be, like, quarter past nine. No later than that.”

“And no earlier. Because the riot was going on. You heard it.”

“Yeah,” Norrie said. “It was really loud.”

“And you’re positive it was Brenda Perkins? It couldn’t have been some other woman?” Rusty’s heart was thumping. If she had been seen alive during the riot, then Barbie was indeed in the clear.

“We all know her,” Norrie said. “She was even my leader in Girl Scouts before I quit.” The fact that she’d actually been kicked out for smoking did not seem relevant, so she omitted it.

“And I know from Mom what people are saying about the murders,” Joe said. “She told me all she knew. You know, the dog tags.”

“Mom did not want to tell all she knew,” Claire said, “but my son can be very insistent and this seemed important.”

“It is,” Rusty said. “Where did Mrs. Perkins go?”

Benny answered this one. “First to Mrs. Grinnell’s, but whatever she said must not have been cool, because Mrs. Grinnell slammed the door in her face.”

Rusty frowned.

“It’s true,” Norrie said. “I think Mrs. Perkins was delivering her mail or something. She gave an envelope to Mrs. Grinnell. Mrs. Grinnell took it, then slammed the door. Like Bennie said.”

“Huh,” Rusty said. As if there’d been any delivery in Chester’s Mill since last Friday. But what seemed important was that Brenda had been alive and running errands at a time when Barbie was alibied. “Then where did she go?”

“Crossed Main and walked up Mill Street,” Joe said.

“This street.”

“Right.”

Rusty switched his attention to Claire. “Did she—”

“She didn’t come here,” Claire said. “Unless it was while I was down cellar, seeing what I have left for canned goods. I was down there for half an hour. Maybe forty minutes. I… I wanted to get away from the noise at the market.”

Benny said what he’d said the day before: “Mill Street’s four blocks long. Lot of houses.”

“To me that’s not the important part,” Joe said. “I called Anson Wheeler. He used to be a thrasher himself, and he sometimes still takes his board to The Pit over in Oxford. I asked him if Mr. Barbara was at work yesterday morning, and he said yes. He said Mr. Barbara went down to Food City when the riot started. He was with Anson and Miz Twitchell from then on. So Mr. Barbara’s alibied for Miz Perkins, and remember what I said about if not A, then not B? Not the whole alphabet?”

Rusty thought the metaphor was a little too mathematical for human affairs, but he understood what Joe was saying. There were other victims for whom Barbie might not have an alibi, but the same body-dump argued strongly for the same killer. And if Big Jim had done at least one of the victims—as the stitch marks on Coggins’s face suggested—then he had likely done them all.

Or it might have been Junior. Junior who was now wearing a gun and carrying a badge.

“We need to go to the police, don’t we?” Norrie said.

“I’m scared about that,” Claire said. “I’m really, really scared about that. What if Rennie killed Brenda Perkins? He lives on this street, too.”

“That’s what I said, yesterday,” Norrie told her.

“And doesn’t it seem likely that if she went to see one selectman and got the door slammed in her face, she’d then go on and try the next one in the neighborhood?”

Joe said (rather indulgently), “I doubt if there’s any connection, Mom.”

“Maybe not, but she still could have been going to see Jim Rennie. And Peter Randolph…” She shook her head. “When Big Jim says jump, Peter asks how high.”

“Good one, Mrs. McClatchey!” Benny cried. “You rule, o mother of my—”

“Thank you, Benny, but in this town, Jim Rennie rules.”

“What do we do?” Joe was looking at Rusty with troubled eyes.

Rusty thought of the smudge again. The yellow sky. The smell of smoke in the air. He also spared a thought for Jackie Wettington’s determination to break Barbie out. Dangerous as it might be, it was probably a better chance for the guy than the testimony of three kids, especially when the Police Chief receiving it was just about capable of wiping his ass without an instruction booklet.

“Right now, nothing. Dale Barbara’s safe right where he is.” Rusty hoped this was true. “We’ve got this other thing to deal with. If you really found the Dome generator, and we can turn it off—”

“The rest of the problems will just about solve themselves,” Norrie Calvert said. She looked profoundly relieved.

“They actually might,” Rusty said.

7

After Petra Searles went back to the drugstore (to do inventory, she said), Toby Manning asked Rommie if he could help with anything. Rommie shook his head. “Go on home. See what you can do for your dad and mom.”

“It’s just Dad,” Toby said. “Mom went to the supermarket over in Castle Rock Saturday morning. She says the prices at Food City are too high. What are you going to do?”

“Nothin much,” Rommie said vaguely. “Tell me somethin, Tobes—why you an Petra wearin those blue rags around your arms?”

Toby glanced at it as if he’d forgotten it was there. “Just showing solidarity,” he said. “After what happened last night at the hospital… after everything that’s been happening…”

Rommie nodded. “You ain’t deputized, nor nothin?”

“Heck, no. It’s more… you remember after nine-eleven, when it seemed like everybody had a New York Fire Department or Police Department hat and shirt? It’s like that.” He considered. “I guess if they needed help, I’d be glad to pitch in, but it seems like they’re doing fine. You sure you don’t need help?”

“Yuh. Now scat. I’ll call you if I decide to open this afternoon.”

“Okay.” Toby’s eyes gleamed. “Maybe we could have a Dome Sale. You know what they say—when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”

“Maybe, maybe,” Rommie said, but he doubted there would be any such sale. This morning he was much less interested than he had been in unloading shoddy goods at prices that looked like bargains. He felt that he had undergone big changes in the last three days—not so much of character as of perspective. Some of it had to do with fighting the fire and the camaraderie afterward. That had been the real town at work, he thought. The town’s better nature. And a lot of it had to do with the murder of his once-upon-a-time lover, Brenda Perkins… whom Rommie still thought of as Brenda Morse. One hot ticket she’d been, and if he discovered who had cooled her off—assuming that Rusty was right about it not being Dale Barbara—that person would pay. Rommie Burpee would see to that personally.

At the back of his cavernous store was the Home Repairs section, conveniently located next to the Do-It-Yourself section. Rommie grabbed a set of heavy-duty metal snips from the latter, then entered the former and proceeded to the farthest, darkest, and dustiest corner of his retail kingdom. Here he found two dozen fifty-pound rolls of Santa Rosa lead sheeting, ordinarily used for roofing, flashing, and chimney insulation. He loaded two of the rolls (and the metal snips) into a shopping cart and rolled the cart back through the store until he reached the sports department. Here he set to work picking and choosing. Several times he burst out laughing. It was going to work, but yes, Rusty Everett was going to look très amusant.

When he was done, he straightened up to stretch the kinks out of his back and caught sight of a deer-in-the-crosshairs poster on the far side of the sports department. Printed above the deer was this reminder: HUNTING SEASON’S ALMOST HERE—TIME TO GUN UP!

Given the way things were going, Rommie thought that gunning up might be a good idea. Especially if Rennie or Randolph decided that confiscating any weapons but those belonging to the cops would be a good idea.

He rolled another shopping cart over to the locked rifle cases, working through the considerable ring of keys hanging from his belt by touch alone. Burpee’s sold exclusively Winchester products, and given that deer season was only a week away, Rommie thought he could justify a few holes in his stock if he were asked. He selected a Wildcat.22, a speed-pump Black Shadow, and two Black Defenders, also with the speed-pump feature. To this he added a Model 70 Extreme Weather (with scope) and a 70 Featherweight (without). He took ammo for all the guns, then pushed the cart down to his office and stowed the guns in his old green Defender floor-safe.

This is paranoid, you know, he thought as he twirled the dial.

But it didn’t feel paranoid. And as he went back out to wait for Rusty and the kids, he reminded himself to tie a blue rag around his arm. And to tell Rusty to do the same. Camouflage wasn’t a bad idea.

Any deer hunter knew that.

8

At eight o’clock that morning, Big Jim was back in his home study. Carter Thibodeau—now his personal bodyguard for the duration, Big Jim had decided—was deep in an issue of Car and Driver, reading a comparison of the 2012 BMW H-car and the 2011 Ford Vesper R/T. They both looked like awesome cars, but anybody who didn’t know that BMWs ruled was insane. The same was true, he thought, of anyone who didn’t understand that Mr. Rennie was now the BMW H-car of Chester’s Mill.

Big Jim was feeling quite well, partly because he’d gotten another hour of sleep after visiting Barbara. He was going to need lots of power naps in the days ahead. He had to stay sharp, on top. He would not quite admit to himself that he was also worried about more arrhythmias.

Having Thibodeau on hand eased his mind considerably, especially with Junior behaving so erratically (That’s one way to put it, he thought). Thibodeau looked like a thug, but he seemed to have a feel for the aide-de-camp role. Big Jim wasn’t completely sure yet, but he thought Thibodeau might actually turn out to be smarter than Randolph.

He decided to test that.

“How many men guarding the supermarket, son? Do you know?”

Carter put his magazine aside and drew a battered little notebook from his back pocket. Big Jim approved.

After thumbing through it a little, Carter said: “Five last night, three regular guys and two new ones. No problems. Today there’s only gonna be three. All new ones. Aubrey Towle—his brother owns the bookshop, y’know—Todd Wendlestat, and Lauren Conree.”

“And do you concur that that should be enough?”

“Huh?”

“Do you agree, Carter. Concur means agree.”

“Yeah, that should do it. Daylight and all.”

No pause to calculate what the boss might want to hear. Rennie liked that a bunch.

“Okay. Now listen. I want you to get with Stacey Moggin this morning. Tell her to call every officer we’ve got on our roster. I want them all at Food City tonight at seven. I’m going to talk to them.”

Actually he was going to make another speech, this time with all the stops out. Wind them up like Granddad’s pocketwatch.

“Okay.” Carter made a note in his little aide-de-camp book.

“And tell each of them to try and bring one more.”

Carter was running his gnawed-upon pencil down the list in his book. “We’ve already got… lemme see… twenty-six.”

“That still might not be enough. Remember the market yesterday morning, and the Shumway woman’s newspaper last night. It’s us or anarchy, Carter. Do you know the meaning of that word?”

“Uh, yessir.” Carter Thibodeau was pretty sure it meant an archery range, and he supposed his new boss was saying that The Mill could become a shooting gallery or something if they didn’t take a good hard hold. “Maybe we ought to make a weapons sweep, or something.”

Big Jim grinned. Yes, in many ways a delightful boy. “That’s on the docket, probably starting next week.”

“If the Dome’s still up. You think it will be?”

“I think so.” It had to be. There was still so much to do. He had to see that the propane cache was disseminated back into town. All traces of the meth lab behind the radio station had to be erased. Also—and this was crucial—he hadn’t achieved his greatness yet. Although he was well on his way.

“In the meantime, have a couple of the officers—the regular officers—go on over to Burpee’s and confiscate the guns there. If Romeo Burpee gives the officers any grief, they’re to say we want to keep them out of the hands of Dale Barbara’s friends. Have you got that?”

“Yep.” Carter made another note. “Denton and Wettington? They okay?”

Big Jim frowned. Wettington, the gal with the big tiddies. He didn’t trust her. He wasn’t sure he would have liked any cop with tiddies, gals had no business in law enforcement, but it was more than that. It was the way she looked at him.

“Freddy Denton yes, Wettington no. Not Henry Morrison, either. Send Denton and George Frederick. Tell them to put the guns in the PD strong room.”

“Got it.”

Rennie’s phone rang, and his frown deepened. He picked it up and said, “Selectman Rennie.”

“Hello, Selectman. This is Colonel James O. Cox. I’m in charge of what’s being called the Dome Project. I thought it was time we spoke.”

Big Jim leaned back in his chair, smiling. “Well then you just go on then, Colonel, and God bless you.”

“My information is that you’ve arrested the man the President of the United States tapped to take charge of matters in Chester’s Mill.”

“That would be correct, sir. Mr. Barbara is charged with murder. Four counts. I hardly think the President would want a serial killer in charge of things. Wouldn’t do much for his standing in the polls.”

“Which puts you in charge.”

“Oh, no,” Rennie said, smiling more widely. “I’m nothing but a humble Second Selectman. Andy Sanders is the man in charge, and Peter Randolph—our new Police Chief, as you may know—was the arresting officer.”

“Your hands are clean, in other words. That’s going to be your position once the Dome is gone and the investigation starts.”

Big Jim enjoyed the frustration he heard in the cotton-picker’s voice. Pentagon son-of-a-buck was used to riding; being rode was a new experience for him.

“Why would they be dirty, Colonel Cox? Barbara’s dog tags were found with one of the victims. Can’t get much more cut-and-dried than that.”

“Convenient.”

“Call it what you want.”

“If you tune in the cable news networks,” Cox said, “you’ll see that serious questions are being raised about Barbara’s arrest, especially in light of his service record, which is exemplary. Questions are also being raised about your own record, which is not so exemplary.”

“Do you think any of that surprises me? You fellows are good at managing the news. You’ve been doing it since Vietnam.”

“CNN’s got a story about you being investigated for shady bait-and-switch practices back in the late nineties. NBC’s reporting that you were investigated for unethical loan practices in 2008. I believe you were accused of charging illegal rates of interest? Somewhere in the forty percent area? Then repo’ing cars and trucks that had already been paid for twice and sometimes three times over? Your constituents are probably seeing this on the news for themselves.”

All those charges had gone away. He had paid good money to make them go away. “The people in my town know those news shows will put on any ridiculous thing if it sells a few more tubes of hemorrhoid cream and a few more bottles of sleeping pills.”

“There’s more. According to the State of Maine Attorney General, the previous Police Chief—the one who died last Saturday—was investigating you for tax fraud, misappropriation of town funds and town property, and involvement in illegal drug activity. We have released none of this latest stuff to the press, and have no intention of doing so… if you’ll compromise. Step down as Town Selectman. Mr. Sanders should likewise step down. Name Andrea Grinnell, the Third Selectman, as the officer in charge, and Jacqueline Wettington as the President’s representative in Chester’s Mill.”

Big Jim was startled out of what remained of his good temper. “Man, are you insane? Andi Grinnell is a drug addict—hooked on OxyContin—and the Wettington woman doesn’t have a brain in her cotton-picking head!”

“I assure you that’s not true, Rennie.” No more Mister ; the Era of Good Feelings seemed to be over. “Wettington was given a citation for helping to break up an illegal drug ring operating out of the Sixty-seventh Combat Support Hospital in Würzburg, Germany, and was personally recommended by a man named Jack Reacher, the toughest goddam Army cop that ever served, in my humble opinion.”

“There’s nothing humble about you, sir, and your sacrilegious language doesn’t go down well with me. I am a Christian.”

“A drug-selling Christian, according to my information.”

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Especially under the Dome, Big Jim thought, and smiled. “Do you have any actual proof?”

“Come on, Rennie—as one hardass to another, does it matter? The Dome is a bigger press event than nine-eleven. And it’s sympathetic big press. If you don’t start compromising, I’ll tar you so thick you’ll never get it off. Once the Dome breaks, I’ll see you before a Senate subcommittee, a grand jury, and in jail. I promise you that. But step down and it all goes away. I promise you that, too.”

“Once the Dome breaks,” Rennie mused. “And when will that be?”

“Maybe sooner than you think. I plan to be the first one inside, and my first order of business will be to snap handcuffs on you and escort you to an airplane which will fly you to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where you will be held as a guest of the United States pending trial.”

Big Jim was rendered momentarily speechless by the boldfaced audacity of this. Then he laughed.

“If you really wanted what’s best for the town, Rennie, you’d step down. Look what’s happened on your watch: six murders—two at the hospital last night, we understand—a suicide, and a food riot. You’re not up to this job.”

Big Jim’s hand closed on the gold baseball and squeezed. Carter Thibodeau was looking at him with a worried frown.

If you were here, Colonel Cox, I’d give you a taste of what I gave Coggins. With God as my witness, I would.

“Rennie?”

“I’m here.” He paused. “And you’re there.” Another pause. “And the Dome isn’t coming down. I think we both know that. Drop the biggest A-bomb you’ve got on it, render the surrounding towns uninhabitable for two hundred years, kill everybody in Chester’s Mill with the radiation if the radiation goes through, and still it won’t come down.” He was breathing fast now, but his heart was beating strong and steady in his chest. “Because the Dome is God’s will.”

Which was, in his deepest heart, what he believed. As he believed it was God’s will that he take this town and carry it through the weeks, months, and years ahead.

“What?”

“You heard me.” Knowing he was wagering everything, his entire future, on the continued existence of the Dome. Knowing some people would think he was crazy for doing so. Also knowing those people were unbelieving heathens. Like Colonel James O. Cotton-Picker Cox.

“Rennie, be reasonable. Please.”

Big Jim liked that please ; it brought his good humor back in a rush. “Let’s recap, shall we, Colonel Cox? Andy Sanders is in charge here, not me. Although I appreciate the courtesy call from such a high mucky-muck as yourself, naturally. And while I’m sure Andy will appreciate your offer to manage things—by remote control, as it were—I think I can speak for him when I say you can take your offer and tuck it away where the sun doesn’t shine. We’re on our own in here, and we’re going to handle it on our own.”

“You’re crazy,” Cox said wonderingly.

“So unbelievers always call the religious. It’s their final defense against faith. We’re used to it, and I don’t hold it against you.” This was a lie. “May I ask a question?”

“Go on.”

“Are you going to cut off our phones and computers?”

“You’d sort of like that, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course not.” Another lie.

“The phones and Internet stay. So does the press conference on Friday. At which you’ll be asked some difficult questions, I assure you.”

“I won’t be attending any press conferences in the foreseeable future, Colonel. Neither will Andy. And Mrs. Grinnell wouldn’t make much sense, poor thing. So you can just cancel your—”

“Oh, no. Not at all.” Was that a smile in Cox’s voice? “The press conference will be held at noon on Friday, in plenty of time to sell lots of hemorrhoid cream on the evening news.”

“And who do you expect will be attending from our town?”

“Everyone, Rennie. Absolutely everyone. Because we’re going to allow their relatives to come to the Dome at the Motton town line—site of the airplane crash in which Mr. Sanders’s wife died, you may remember. The press will be there to record the whole thing. It’s going to be like visiting day at the state prison, only no one’s guilty of anything. Except maybe you.”

Rennie was infuriated all over again. “You can’t do that!”

“Oh, but I can.” The smile was there. “You can sit on your side of the Dome and thumb your nose at me; I can sit on mine and do the same. The visitors will be lined up, and as many as will agree to do so will be wearing tee-shirts reading DALE BARBARA IS INNOCENT and FREE DALE BARBARA and IMPEACH JAMES RENNIE. There will be tearful reunions, hands pressing against hands with the Dome in between, maybe even attempts to kiss. It will make excellent TV footage, and it will make excellent propaganda. Most of all, it’s going to make people in your town wonder what they’re doing with an incompetent like you at the controls.”

Big Jim’s voice descended to a thick growl. “I won’t allow it.”

“How are you going to stop it? Over a thousand people. You couldn’t shoot them all.” When he spoke again, his voice was calm and reasonable. “Come on, Selectman, let’s work this out. You can still come out of it clean. You only need to let go of the controls.”

Big Jim saw Junior drifting down the hall toward the front door like a ghost, still wearing his pajama pants and slippers, and barely noticed. Junior could have dropped dead in the hallway and Big Jim would have remained hunched over his desk, the gold baseball clutched in one hand and the telephone in the other. One thought beat in his head: putting Andrea Grinnell in charge, with Officer Tiddies as her second.

It was a joke.

A bad joke.

“Colonel Cox, you can go fuck yourself.”

He hung up, swiveled his desk chair, and hurled the gold baseball. It hit the signed photo of Tiger Woods. The glass shattered, the frame fell to the floor, and Carter Thibodeau, who was used to striking fear into hearts but who rarely had fear struck into his own, jumped to his feet.

“Mr. Rennie? Are you all right?”

He didn’t look all right. Irregular purple patches flared on his cheeks. His small eyes were wide and bulging from their sockets of hard fat. The vein in his forehead pulsed.

“They will never take this town from me,” Big Jim whispered.

“Course they won’t,” Carter said. “Without you, we’re sunk.”

This relaxed Big Jim to some degree. He reached for the telephone, then remembered Randolph had gone home to bed. The new Chief had gotten precious little rack-time since the crisis began, and had told Carter that he intended to sleep until at least noon. And that was okay. The man was useless, anyway.

“Carter, make a note. Show it to Morrison, if he’s running things at the PD this morning, then leave it on Randolph’s desk. After that, come right back here.” He paused to consider for a moment, frowning. “And see if Junior’s headed there. He went out while I was talking to Colonel Do-What-I-Want on the telephone. Don’t go looking for him if he’s not, but if he is, make sure he’s all right.”

“Sure. What’s the message?”

“ ‘Dear Chief Randolph: Jacqueline Wettington is to be severed from the Chester’s Mill PD immediately.’”

“Does that mean fired?”

“Yes indeed.”

Carter was scribbling in his book, and Big Jim gave him time to catch up. He was okay again. Better than okay. He was feeling it. “Add, ‘Dear Officer Morrison: When Wettington comes in today, please inform her she is relieved of duty and tell her to clean out her locker. If she asks you for cause, tell her we are reorganizing the department and her services will no longer be required.’”

“Does required have a c in it, Mr. Rennie?”

“The spelling doesn’t matter. The message matters.”

“Okay. Right.”

“If she has further questions, she can see me.”

“Got it. Is that all?”

“No. Tell whichever one sees her first to take her badge and gun. If she gets poopy and says the gun’s her personal property, they can give her a receipt and tell her it will either be returned or she’ll be reimbursed when this crisis is over.”

Carter scribbled some more, then looked up. “What do you think is wrong with Junes, Mr. Rennie?”

“I don’t know. Just megrims, I imagine. Whatever it is, I don’t have time to deal with it right now. There are more pressing matters at hand.” He pointed at the notebook. “Bring me that.”

Carter did. His handwriting was the looping scrawl of a third-grader, but everything was there. Rennie signed it.

9

Carter took the fruits of his secretarial labor to the PD. Henry Morrison greeted them with an incredulity that fell just short of mutiny. Carter also looked around for Junior, but Junior wasn’t there, and no one had seen him. He asked Henry to keep an eye out.

Then, on impulse, he went downstairs to visit Barbie, who was lying on his bunk with his hands behind his head.

“Your boss called,” he said. “That guy Cox. Mr. Rennie calls him Colonel Do-What-I-Want.”

“I’ll bet he does,” Barbie said.

“Mr. Rennie gave him the big fuck you. And you know what? Your Army pal had to eat it and smile. What do you think of that?”

“I’m not surprised.” Barbie kept looking at the ceiling. He sounded calm. It was irritating. “Carter, have you thought about where all this is going? Have you tried taking the long view?”

“There isn’t any long view, Baaarbie. Not anymore.”

Barbie just kept looking at the ceiling with a little smile dimpling the corners of his mouth. As if he knew something Carter did not. It made Carter want to unlock the cell door and punch the shitlicker’s lights out. Then he remembered what had happened in Dipper’s parking lot. Let Barbara see if he could fight a firing squad with his dirty tricks. Let him try that.

“I’ll see you around, Baaaarbie. ”

“I’m sure,” Barbie said, still not bothering to look at him. “It’s a small town, son, and we all support the team.”

10

When the parsonage doorbell rang, Piper Libby was still in the Bruins tee-shirt and shorts that served as her nightwear. She opened the door, assuming her visitor would be Helen Roux, an hour early for her ten o’clock appointment to discuss Georgia’s funeral and burial arrangements. But it was Jackie Wettington. She was wearing her uniform, but there was no badge over her left breast and no gun on her hip. She looked stunned.

“Jackie? What’s wrong?”

“I’ve been fired. That bastard has had it in for me since the PD Christmas party, when he tried to cop a feel and I slapped his hand, but I doubt if that was all of it, or even most of it—”

“Come in,” Piper said. “I found a little gas-operated hotplate—from the last minister, I think—in one of the pantry cupboards, and for a wonder, it still works. Doesn’t a cup of hot tea sound good?”

“Wonderful,” Jackie said. Tears welled in her eyes and over-spilled. She wiped them off her cheeks almost angrily.

Piper led her into the kitchen and lit the single-burner Brinkman camp-grill on the counter. “Now tell me everything.”

Jackie did, not failing to include Henry Morrison’s condolences, which had been clumsy but sincere. “He whispered that part,” she said, taking the cup Piper gave her. “It’s like the goddam Gestapo over there now. Excuse my language.”

Piper waved this away.

“Henry says that if I protest at the town meeting tomorrow, I’ll only make things worse—Rennie’ll whip out a bunch of trumped-up incompetency charges. He’s probably right. But the biggest incompetent in the department this morning is the one running the place. As for Rennie… he’s packing the PD with officers who’ll be loyal to him in case of any organized protest to the way he’s doing things.”

“Of course he is,” Piper said.

“Most of the new hires are too young to buy a legal beer, but they’re carrying guns. I thought of telling Henry he’d be the next to go—he’s said things about the way Randolph’s running the department, and of course the bootlickers will have passed his comments on—but I could see by his face that he already knows it.”

“Do you want me to go see Rennie?”

“It wouldn’t do any good. I’m actually not sorry to be out, I just hate to be fired. The big problem is that I’ll look very good for what’s going to happen tomorrow night. I may have to disappear with Barbie. Always assuming we can find a place to disappear to. ”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“I know, but I’m going to tell you. And this is where the risks start. If you don’t keep this to yourself, I’ll wind up in the Coop myself. Maybe even standing next to Barbara when Rennie lines up his firing squad.”

Piper regarded her gravely. “I’ve got forty-five minutes before Georgia Roux’s mother shows up. Is that time enough for you to say what you have to say?”

“Plenty.”

Jackie began with the examination of the bodies at the funeral home. Described the stitch marks on Coggins’s face and the golden baseball Rusty had seen. She took a deep breath and next spoke of her plan to break Barbie out during the special town meeting the following night. “Although I have no idea where we can put him if we do get him out.” She sipped her tea. “So what do you think?”

“That I want another cuppa. You?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

From the counter, Piper said: “What you’re planning is terribly dangerous—I doubt if you need me to tell you that—but there may be no other way to save an innocent man’s life. I never believed for a second that Dale Barbara was guilty of those murders, and after my own close encounter with our local law enforcement, the idea that they’d execute him to keep him from taking over doesn’t surprise me much.” Then, following Barbie’s train of thought without knowing it: “Rennie isn’t taking the long view, and neither are the cops. All they care about is who’s boss of the treehouse. That kind of thinking is a disaster waiting to happen.”

She came back to the table.

“I’ve known almost from the day I came back here to take up the pastorate—which was my ambition ever since I was a little girl—that Jim Rennie was a monster in embryo. Now—if you’ll pardon the melodramatic turn of phrase—the monster has been born.”

“Thank God,” Jackie said.

“Thank God the monster has been born?” Piper smiled and raised her eyebrows.

“No—thank God you’re down with this.”

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

“Yes. Unless you don’t want to be a part of it.”

“Honey, I’m already a part of it. If you can be jailed for plotting, I could be jailed for listening and not reporting. We’re now what our government likes to call ‘homegrown terrorists.’ ”

Jackie received this idea in glum silence.

“It isn’t just Free Dale Barbara you’re talking about, is it? You want to organize an active resistance movement.”

“I suppose I do,” Jackie said, and gave a rather helpless laugh. “After six years with the U.S. Army, I never would have expected it—I’ve always been a my-country-right-or-wrong sort of girl—but… has it occurred to you that the Dome might not break? Not this fall, not this winter? Maybe not next year or even in our lifetimes?”

“Yes.” Piper was calm, but most of the color had left her cheeks. “It has. I think it’s occurred to everyone in The Mill, if only in the backs of their minds.”

“Then think about this. Do you want to spend a year or five years in a dictatorship run by a homicidal idiot? Assuming we have five years?”

“Of course not.”

“Then the only time to stop him might be now. He may no longer be in embryo, but this thing he’s building—this machine—is still in its infancy. It’s the best time.” Jackie paused. “If he orders the police to start collecting guns from ordinary citizens, it might be the only time.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Let us have a meeting here at the parsonage. Tonight. These people, if they’ll all come.” From her back pocket she took the list she and Linda Everett had labored over.

Piper unfolded the sheet of notebook paper and studied it. There were eight names. She looked up. “Lissa Jamieson, the librarian with the crystals? Ernie Calvert? Are you sure about those two?”

“Who better to recruit than a librarian when you’re dealing with a fledgling dictatorship? As for Ernie… my understanding is that after what happened at the supermarket yesterday, if he came across Jim Rennie flaming in the street, he wouldn’t piss on him to put him out.”

“Pronounally vague but otherwise colorful.”

“I was going to have Julia Shumway sound Ernie and Lissa out, but now I’ll be able to do it myself. I seem to have come into a lot of free time.”

The doorbell rang. “That may be the bereaved mother,” Piper said, getting to her feet. “I imagine she’ll be half-shot already. She enjoys her coffee brandy, but I doubt if it dulls the pain much.”

“You haven’t told me how you feel about the meeting,” Jackie said.

Piper Libby smiled. “Tell our fellow homegrown terrorists to arrive between nine and nine thirty tonight. They should come on foot, and by ones—standard French Resistance stuff. No need to advertise what we’re doing.”

“Thank you,” Jackie said. “So much.”

“Not at all. It’s my town, too. May I suggest you slip out by the back door?”

11

There was a pile of clean rags in the back of Rommie Burpee’s van. Rusty knotted two of them together, fashioning a bandanna he tied over the lower half of his face, but still his nose, throat, and lungs were thick with the stench of dead bear. The first maggots had hatched in its eyes, open mouth, and the meat of its exposed brain.

He stood up, backed away, then reeled a little bit. Rommie grabbed him by the elbow.

“If he passes out, catch him,” Joe said nervously. “Maybe that thing hits adults further out.”

“It’s just the smell,” Rusty said. “I’m okay now.”

But even away from the bear, the world smelled bad: smoky and heavy, as if the entire town of Chester’s Mill had become a large closed room. In addition to the odors of smoke and decaying animal, he could smell rotting plant life and a swampy stench that no doubt arose from the drying bed of the Prestile. If only there was a wind, he thought, but there was just an occasional pallid puff of breeze that brought more bad smells. To the far west there were clouds—it was probably raining a bitch over in New Hampshire—but when they reached the Dome, the clouds parted like a river dividing at a large outcropping of rock. Rusty had become increasingly doubtful about the possibility of rain under the Dome. He made a note to check some meteorological websites… if he ever got a free moment. Life had become appallingly busy and unsettlingly unstructured.

“Did Br’er Bear maybe die of rabies, doc?” Rommie asked.

“I doubt it. I think it’s exactly what the kids said: plain suicide.”

They piled into the van, Rommie behind the wheel, and drove slowly up Black Ridge Road. Rusty had the Geiger counter in his lap. It clucked steadily. He watched the needle rise toward the +200 mark.

“Stop here, Mr. Burpee!” Norrie cried. “Before you come out of the woods! If you’re gonna pass out, I’d just as soon you didn’t do it while you were driving, even at ten miles an hour.”

Rommie obediently pulled the van over. “Jump out, kids. I’m gonna babysit you. The doc’s going on by himself.” He turned to Rusty. “Take the van, but drive slow and stop the second the radiation count gets too high to be safe. Or if you start to feel woozy. We’ll walk behind you.”

“Be careful, Mr. Everett,” Joe said.

Benny added, “Don’t worry if you pass out and Wilson the van. We’ll push you back onto the road when you come to.”

“Thanks,” Rusty said. “You’re all heart and a mile wide.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.”

Rusty got behind the wheel and closed the driver’s-side door. On the passenger bucket, the Geiger counter clicked. He drove—very slowly—out of the woods. Up ahead, Black Ridge Road rose toward the orchard. At first he didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, and had a moment of bone-deep disappointment. Then a bright purple flash hit him in the eyes and he jammed on the brakes in a hurry. Something up there, all right, a bright something amid the scrabble of untended apple trees. Just behind him, in the van’s outside mirror, he saw the others stop walking.

“Rusty?” Rommie called. “Okay?”

“I see it.”

He counted to fifteen, and the purple light flashed again. He was reaching for the Geiger counter when Joe looked in at him through the driver’s-side window. The new pimples stood out on his skin like stigmata. “Do you feel anything? Woozy? Swimmy in the head?”

“No,” Rusty said.

Joe pointed ahead. “That’s where we blacked out. Right there.” Rusty could see scuff-marks in the dirt at the left side of the road.

“Walk that far,” Rusty said. “All four of you. Let’s see if you pass out again.”

“Cheesus,” Benny said, joining Joe. “What am I, a guinea pig?”

“Actually, I think Rommie’s the guinea pig. You up for it, Rommie?”

“Yuh.” He turned to the kids. “If I pass out and you don’t, drag me back here. It seems to be out of range.”

The quartet walked to the scuff-marks, Rusty watching intently from behind the wheel of the van. They had almost reached them when Rommie first slowed, then staggered. Norrie and Benny reached out on one side to steady him, Joe on the other. But Rommie didn’t fall. After a moment he straightened up again.

“Dunno if it was somethin real or only… what do you call it… the power of suggestion, but I’m okay now. Was just a little light-headed for a second, me. You kids feel anything?”

They shook their heads. Rusty wasn’t surprised. It was like chick-enpox: a mild sickness mostly suffered by children, who only caught it once.

“Drive ahead, Doc,” Rommie said. “You don’t want to be carryin all those pieces of lead sheet up there if you don’t have to, but be careful.”

Rusty drove slowly forward. He heard the accelerating pace of clicks from the Geiger counter, but felt absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. From the ridge, the light flashed out at fifteen-second intervals. He reached Rommie and the children, then passed them.

“I don’t feel anyth—” he began, and then it came: not light-headedness, exactly, but a sense of strangeness and peculiar clarity. While it lasted he felt as if his head were a telescope and he could see anything he wanted to see, no matter how far. He could see his brother making his morning commute in San Diego, if he wanted to.

Somewhere, in an adjacent universe, he heard Benny call out: “Whoa, Dr. Rusty’s losin it!”

But he wasn’t; he could still see the dirt road perfectly well. Divinely well. Every stone and chip of mica. If he had swerved—and he supposed he had—it was to avoid the man who was suddenly standing there. The man was skinny, and made taller by an absurd red, white, and blue stovepipe hat, comically crooked. He was wearing jeans and a tee-shirt that read SWEET HOME ALABAMA PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG.

That’s not a man, it’s a Halloween dummy.

Yes, sure. What else could it be, with green garden trowels for hands and a burlap head and stitched white crosses for eyes?

“Doc! Doc! ” It was Rommie.

The Halloween dummy burst into flames.

A moment later it was gone. Now there was just the road, the ridge, and the purple light, flashing at fifteen-second intervals, seeming to say Come on, come on, come on.

12

Rommie pulled open the driver’s door. “Doc… Rusty… you okay?”

“Fine. It came, it went. I assume it was the same for you. Rommie, did you see anything?”

“No. For a minute I t’ought I smelled fire. But I think that’s cause the air smells so smoky.”

“I saw a bonfire of burning pumpkins,” Joe said. “I told you that, right?”

“Yes.” Rusty hadn’t attached enough significance to it, in spite of what he’d heard from his own daughter’s mouth. Now he did.

“I heard screaming,” Benny said, “but I forget the rest.”

“I heard it too,” Norrie said. “It was daytime, but still dark. There was that screaming. And—I think—there was soot falling on my face.”

“Doc, maybe we better go back,” Rommie said.

“Isn’t gonna happen,” Rusty said. “Not if there’s a chance I can get my kids—and everyone else’s kids—out of here.”

“Bet some adults would like to go too,” Benny remarked. Joe threw him an elbow.

Rusty looked at the Geiger counter. The needle was pegged on +200. “Stay here,” he said.

“Doc,” Joe said, “what if the radiation gets heavy and you pass out? What do we do then?”

Rusty considered this. “If I’m still close, drag me out of there. But not you, Norrie. Only the guys.”

“Why not me?” she asked.

“Because you might like to have kids someday. Ones with only two eyes and all the limbs attached in the right places.”

“Right. I’m totally here,” Norrie said.

“For the rest of you, short-term exposure should be okay. But I mean very short term. If I should go down halfway up the ridge or actually in the orchard, leave me.”

“Dat’s harsh, Doc.”

“I don’t mean for good,” Rusty said. “You’ve got more lead roll back at the store, don’t you?”

“Yeah. We should have brought it.”

“I agree, but you can’t think of everything. If worst comes to worst, get the rest of the lead roll, stick pieces in the windows of whatever you’re driving, and scoop me up. Hell, by then I might be on my feet again and walking toward town.”

“Yeah. Or still layin knocked out an’ gettin a lethal dose.”

“Look, Rommie, we’re probably worrying about nothing. I think the wooziness—the actual passing-out, if you’re a kid—is like the other Dome-related phenomena. You feel it once, then you’re okay.”

“You could be bettin your life on dat.”

“We’ve got to start placing bets at some point.”

“Good luck,” Joe said, and extended his fist through the window.

Rusty pounded it lightly, then did the same with Norrie and Benny. Rommie also extended his fist. “What’s good for the kids is good enough for me.”

13

Twenty yards beyond the place where Rusty had had the vision of the dummy in the stovepipe hat, the clicks from the Geiger counter mounted to a staticky roar. He saw the needle standing at +400, just into the red.

He pulled over and hauled out gear he would have preferred not to put on. He looked back at the others. “A word of warning,” he said. “And I’m talking to you in particular, Mr. Benny Drake. If you laugh, you’re walking home.”

“I won’t laugh,” Benny said, but in short order they were all laughing, including Rusty himself. He took off his jeans, then pulled a pair of football practice pants up over his undershorts. Where pads on the thighs and buttocks should have gone, he stuffed precut pieces of lead roll. Then he donned a pair of catcher’s shinguards and curved more lead roll over them. This was followed by a lead collar to shield his thyroid gland, and a lead apron to shield his testes. It was the biggest one they had, and hung all the way down to the bright orange shinguards. He had considered hanging another apron over his back (looking ridiculous was better than dying of lung cancer, in his view), and had decided against it. He had already pushed his weight to over three hundred pounds. And radiation didn’t curve. If he faced the source, he thought he’d be okay.

Well. Maybe.

To this point, Rommie and the kids had managed to restrict themselves to discreet chuckles and a few strangulated giggles. Control wavered when Rusty stuffed a size XL bathing cap with two pieces of lead roll and pulled it down over his head, but it wasn’t until he yanked on the elbow-length gloves and added the goggles that they lost it entirely.

“It lives!” Benny cried, striding around with his arms outstretched like Frankenstein’s monster. “Master, it lives!”

Rommie staggered to the side of the road and sat on a rock, bellowing with laughter. Joe and Norrie collapsed on the road itself, rolling around like chickens taking a dustbath.

“Walking home, every one of you,” Rusty said, but he was smiling as he climbed (not without difficulty) back into the van.

Ahead of him, the purple light flashed out like a beacon.

14

Henry Morrison left the PD when the raucous, locker-room-at halftime banter of the new recruits finally became too much to bear. It was going wrong, all of it. He supposed he’d known that even before Thibodeau, the thug who was now guarding Selectman Rennie, showed up with a signed order to can Jackie Wetting-ton—a fine officer and an even finer woman.

Henry regarded this as the first move in what would probably be a comprehensive effort to remove the older officers, the ones Rennie would see as Duke Perkins partisans, from the force. He himself would be next. Freddy Denton and Rupert Libby would probably stay; Rupe was a moderate asshole, Denton severe. Linda Everett would go. Probably Stacey Moggin, too. Then, except for that dim-bulb Lauren Conree, the Chester’s Mill PD would be an all-boys’ club again.

He cruised slowly down Main Street, which was almost entirely empty—like a ghost-town street in a Western. Sloppy Sam Verdreaux was sitting under the marquee of the Globe, and that bottle between his knees probably did not contain Pepsi-Cola, but Henry didn’t stop. Let the old sot have his tipple.

Johnny and Carrie Carver were boarding up the front windows of the Gas & Grocery. They were both wearing the blue armbands that had started to pop up all over town. They gave Henry the creeps.

He wished he’d taken the slot on the Orono police when it had been offered the previous year. It wasn’t a step up careerwise, and he knew college kids could be shits to deal with when drunk or stoned, but the money was better, and Frieda said the Orono schools were top-of-the-line.

In the end, though, Duke had persuaded him to stay by promising to ram through a five-grand raise at the next town meeting, and by telling Henry—in absolute confidence—that he was going to fire Peter Randolph if Randolph wouldn’t retire voluntarily. “You’d move up to APC, and that’s another ten grand a year,” Duke had said. “When I retire, you can move all the way up to the top job, if you want to. The alternative, of course, is driving UMO kids with puke drying on their pants back to their dorms. Think ’er over.”

It had sounded good to him, it had sounded good (well… fairly good) to Frieda, and of course it relieved the kids, who had hated the idea of moving. Only now, Duke was dead, Chester’s Mill was under the Dome, and the PD was turning into something that felt bad and smelled worse.

He turned onto Prestile Street and saw Junior standing outside the yellow police tape strung around the McCain house. Junior was wearing pajama pants and slippers and nothing else. He was swaying noticeably, and Henry’s first thought was that Junior and Sloppy Sam had a lot in common today.

His second thought was of—and for—the PD. He might not be a part of it for much longer, but he was now, and one of Duke Perkins’s firmest rules had been Never let me see the name of a Chester’s Mill PD officer in the Democrat’s Court Beat column. And Junior, whether Henry liked it or not, was an officer.

He pulled unit Three to the curb and went to where Junior was rocking back and forth. “Hey, Junes, let’s get you back to the station, pour some coffee into you and…” Sober you up was how he intended to finish this, but then he observed that the kid’s pajama pants were soaked. Junior had pissed himself.

Alarmed as well as disgusted—no one must see this, Duke would spin in his grave—Henry reached out and grasped Junior’s shoulder. “Come on, son. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”

“They were my goolfreds,” Junior said without turning. He rocked faster. His face—what Henry could see of it—was dreamy and rapt. “I shilled them so I could fill them. No gooby. French.” He laughed, then spat. Or tried to. A thick white string hung down from his chin, swinging like a pendulum.

“That’s enough. I’m taking you home.”

This time Junior turned, and Henry saw he wasn’t drunk. His left eye was bright red. Its pupil was too big. The left side of his mouth was pulled down, exposing some of his teeth. That frozen glare made Henry think momentarily of Mr. Sardonicus, a movie that had scared him as a kid.

Junior didn’t need to go to the station for coffee, and he didn’t need to go home to sleep it off. Junior needed to go to the hospital.

“Come on, kid,” he said. “Walk.”

At first, Junior seemed willing enough. Henry escorted him most of the way to the car before Junior stopped again. “They smelled alike and I liked it,” he said. “Horry horry horry, the snow is about to start.”

“Right, absolutely.” Henry had hoped to get Junior around the hood of the cruiser and into the front seat, but now this seemed impractical. The rear would have to do, even though the backseats of their cruisers usually smelled pretty fragrant. Junior looked back over his shoulder at the McCain house, and an expression of longing came over his partially frozen face.

“Goolfreds!” Junior cried. “Extendable! No gooby, French! All French, you fum-nuck!” He stuck out his tongue and flapped it rapidly against his lips. The noise was similar to the one Roadrunner makes before speeding away from Wile E. Coyote in a cloud of dust. Then he laughed and started back to the house.

“No, Junior,” Henry said, and grabbed him by the waistband of his pajama pants. “We have to—”

Junior wheeled around with surprising speed. No laughter now; his face was a twitching cat’s cradle of hate and rage. He rushed at Henry, flailing his fists. He stuck out his tongue and bit it with his champing teeth. He was gobbling in some strange language that seemed to have no vowels.

Henry did the only thing he could think of: stood aside. Junior plunged past him and began to hammer punches at the jackpot lights on top of the cruiser, smashing one of them and lacerating his knuckles. Now people were coming out of their houses to see what was happening.

“Gthn bnnt mnt!” Junior raved. “Mnt! Mnt! Gthn! Gthn!”

One foot slipped off the curb and into the gutter. He staggered but kept his feet. There was blood as well as spit hanging from his chin now; both hands were badly cut and dripping.

“She just made me so franning mad!” Junior screamed. “I kit her with my knee to shed her ump, and she frew a tit! Shit everywhere! I… I…” He quit. Appeared to consider. Said: “I need help.” Then popped his lips—the sound as loud as the report of a.22 pistol in the still air—and fell forward between the parked police car and the sidewalk.

Henry drove him to the hospital, using lights and siren. What he didn’t do was think about the last things Junior had said, things that almost made sense. He wouldn’t go there.

He had problems enough.

15

Rusty drove slowly up Black Ridge, looking frequently at the Geiger counter, which was now roaring like an AM radio set between stations. The needle rose from +400 to the +1K mark. Rusty was betting it would be swung all the way over to the +4K post by the time he topped the ridge. He knew this couldn’t be good news—his “radiation suit” was makeshift at best—but he kept going, reminding himself that rads were cumulative; if he moved fast, he wouldn’t pick up a lethal dose. I might temporarily lose some hair, but no way I’ll get a lethal dose. Think of it as a bombing run: get in, do your business, and get back out again.

He turned on the radio, got the Mighty Clouds of Joy on WCIK, and immediately turned it off again. Sweat rolled into his eyes and he blinked it away. Even with the air-conditioner blasting, it was devilishly hot in the van. He looked into the rearview mirror and saw his fellow explorers clustered together. They looked very small.

The roaring from the Geiger counter quit. He looked. The needle had dropped back to zero.

Rusty almost stopped, then realized if he did, Rommie and the kids would think he was in trouble. Besides, it was probably just the battery. But when he looked again, he saw that the power lamp was still glowing brightly.

At the top of the hill the road ended in a turnaround in front of a long red barn. An old truck and an even older tractor stood in front of it, the tractor leaning on a single wheel. The barn looked to be in pretty good condition, although some of the windows were broken. Behind it stood a deserted farmhouse with part of the roof crushed in, probably by the weight of winter snow.

The end of the barn was standing open, and even with the windows shut and the air-conditioning running full tilt, Rusty could smell the cidery aroma of old apples. He stopped next to the steps leading up to the house. There was a chain across these with a sign hanging from it: TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. The sign was old, rusty, and obviously ineffective. Beer cans were scattered the length of the porch where the McCoy family must once have sat on summer evenings, catching the breeze and looking over long vistas: the entire town of Chester’s Mill to the right, all the way into New Hampshire if you looked left. Someone had spray-painted WILDCATS RULE on a wall that had once been red and was now a faded pink. On the door, in spray paint of a different color, was ORGY DEPOT. Rusty guessed that was wishful thinking on the part of some sex-starved teenager. Or maybe it was the name of a heavy-metal band.

He picked up the Geiger counter and tapped it. The needle jumped and the instrument clucked a few times. It seemed to be working fine; it just wasn’t picking up any major radiation.

He got out of the van and—after a brief interior debate—stripped off most of his makeshift shielding, leaving only the apron, gloves, and goggles. Then he walked down the length of the barn, holding the sensor tube of the Geiger counter out in front of him and promising himself he’d go back for the rest of his “suit” the second the needle jumped.

But when he emerged from the side of the barn and the light flashed out no more than forty yards away, the needle didn’t stir. It seemed impossible—if, that was, the radiation was related to the light. Rusty could think of only one possible explanation: the generator had created a radiation belt to discourage explorers such as himself. To protect itself. The same could be true of the lightheadedness he’d felt, actual unconsciousness in the case of the kids. Protection, like a porcupine’s quills or a skunk’s perfume.

Isn’t it more likely that the counter’s malfunctioning? You could be giving yourself a lethal dose of gamma rays at this very second. The damn thing’s a cold war relic.

But as he approached the edge of the orchard, Rusty saw a squirrel dart through the grass and run up one of the trees. It paused on a branch weighted down with unpicked fruit and stared at the two-legs intruder below, its eyes bright, its tail bushed out. To Rusty it looked fine as fiddlesticks, and he saw no animal corpses in the grass,or on the overgrown lanes between the trees: no suicides, and no probable radiation victims, either.

Now he was very close to the light, its timed flashes so brilliant that he squeezed his eyes nearly shut each time it came. To his right, the whole world seemed to lie at his feet. He could see the town, toy-like and perfect, four miles away. The grid of the streets; the steeple of the Congo church; the twinkle of a few cars on the move. He could see the low brick structure of Catherine Russell Hospital, and, far to the west, the black smudge where the missiles had struck. It hung there, a beauty mark on the cheek of the day. The sky overhead was a faded blue, almost its normal color, but at the horizon the blue became a poison yellow. He felt quite sure some of that color had been caused by pollution—the same crap that had turned the stars pink—but he suspected most of it was nothing more sinister than autumn pollen sticking to the Dome’s unseen surface.

He got moving again. The longer he was up here—especially up here and out of view—the more nervous his friends would become. He wanted to go directly to the source of the light, but first he walked out of the orchard and to the edge of the slope. From here he could see the others, although they were little more than specks. He set the Geiger counter down, then waved both hands slowly back and forth over his head to show he was okay. They waved back.

“Okay,” he said. Inside the heavy gloves, his hands were slick with sweat. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

16

It was snack-time at East Street Grammar School. Judy and Janelle Everett sat at the far end of the play-yard with their friend Deanna Carver, who was six—thus fitting neatly between the Little Js, age-wise. Deanna was wearing a small blue armband around the left sleeve of her tee-shirt. She had insisted that Carrie tie it on her before she went to school, so she could be like her parents.

“What’s it for?” Janelle asked.

“It means I like the police,” Deanna said, and munched on her Fruit Roll-Up.

“I want one,” Judy said, “only yellow.” She pronounced this word very carefully. Back when she was a baby she’d said lello, and Jannie had laughed at her.

“They can’t be yellow,” Deanna said, “only blue. This Roll-Up is good. I wish I had a billion.”

“You’d get fat,” Janelle said. “You’d bust. ”

They giggled at this, then fell silent for a little while and watched the bigger kids, the Js nibbling on their homemade peanut butter crackers. Some girls were playing hopscotch. Boys were climbing on the monkey bars, and Miss Goldstone was pushing the Pruitt twins on the swing-glider. Mrs. Vanedestine had organized a kickball game.

It all looked pretty normal, Janelle thought, but it wasn’t normal. Nobody was shouting, nobody was wailing with a scraped knee, Mindy and Mandy Pruitt weren’t begging Miss Goldstone to admire their matching hair-dos. They all looked like they were just pretending snack-time, even the grownups. And everyone—including her—kept stealing glances up at the sky, which should have been blue and wasn’t, quite.

None of that was the worst, though. The worst—ever since the seizures—was the suffocating certainty that something bad was going to happen.

Deanna said, “I was going to be the Little Mermaid on Halloween, but now I en’t. I en’t going to be nothing. I don’t want to go out. I’m scared of Halloween.”

“Did you have a bad dream?” Janelle asked.

“Yes.” Deanna held out her Fruit Roll-Up. “Do you want the rest of this. I en’t so hungry as I thought.”

“No,” Janelle said. She didn’t even want the rest of her peanut butter crackers, and that wasn’t a bit like her. And Judy had eaten just half a cracker. Janelle remembered once how she’d seen Audrey corner a mouse in their garage. She remembered how Audrey had barked, and lunged at the mouse when it tried to scurry from the corner it was in. That had made her feel sad, and she called her mother to take Audrey away so she wouldn’t eat the mousie. Mummy laughed, but she did it.

Now they were the mice. Jannie had forgotten most of the dreams she’d had during the seizures, but still she knew this much.

Now they were the ones in the corner.

“I’m just going to stay home,” Deanna said. A tear stood in her left eye, bright and clear and perfect. “Stay home all Halloween. En’t even coming to school. Won’t. Can’t nobody make me.”

Mrs. Vanedestine left the kickball game and began ringing the all-in bell, but none of the three girls stood up at first.

“It’s Halloween already,” Judy said. “Look.” She pointed across the street to where a pumpkin stood on the porch of the Wheelers’ house. “And look.” This time she pointed to a pair of cardboard ghosts flanking the post office doors. “And look. ”

This last time she pointed at the library lawn. Here was a stuffed dummy that had been put up by Lissa Jamieson. She had undoubtedly meant it to be amusing, but what amuses adults often scares children, and Janelle had an idea the dummy on the library lawn might be back to visit her that night while she was lying in the dark and waiting to go to sleep.

The head was burlap with eyes that were white crosses made from thread. The hat was like the one the cat wore in the Dr. Seuss story. It had garden trowels for hands (bad old clutchy-grabby hands, Janelle thought) and a shirt with something written on it. She didn’t understand what it meant, but she could read the words: SWEET HOME ALABAMA PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG.

“See?” Judy wasn’t crying, but her eyes were wide and solemn, full of some knowledge too complex and too dark to be expressed. “Halloween already.”

Janelle took her sister’s hand and pulled her to her feet. “No it’s not,” she said… but she was afraid it was. Something bad was going to happen, something with a fire in it. No treats, only tricks. Mean tricks. Bad tricks.

“Let’s go inside,” she told Judy and Deanna. “We’ll sing songs and stuff. That’ll be nice.”

It usually was, but not that day. Even before the big bang in the sky, it wasn’t nice. Janelle kept thinking about the dummy with the white-cross eyes. And the somehow awful shirt: PLAY THAT DEAD BAND SONG.

17

Four years before the Dome dropped down, Linda Everett’s grandfather had died and left each of his grandchildren a small but tidy sum of money. Linda’s check had come to $17,232.04. Most of it went into the Js’ college fund, but she had felt more than justified in spending a few hundred on Rusty. His birthday was coming up, and he’d wanted an Apple TV gadget since they’d come on the market some years earlier.

She had bought him more expensive presents during the course of their marriage, but never one which pleased him more. The idea that he could download movies from the Net, then watch them on TV instead of being chained to the smaller screen of his computer, tickled him to death. The gadget was a white plastic square, about seven inches on a side and three-quarters of an inch thick. The object Rusty found on Black Ridge looked so much like his Apple TV addon that he at first thought it actually was one… only modified, of course, so it could hold an entire town prisoner as well as broadcast The Little Mermaid to your television via Wi-Fi and in HD.

The thing on the edge of the McCoy Orchard was dark gray instead of white, and rather than the familar apple logo stamped on top of it, Rusty observed this somehow troubling symbol:

Above the symbol was a hooded excrescence about the size of the knuckle on his little finger. Inside the hood was a lens made of either glass or crystal. It was from this that the spaced purple flashes were coming.

Rusty bent and touched the surface of the generator—if it was a generator. A strong shock immediately surged up his arm and through his body. He tried to pull back and couldn’t. His muscles were locked up tight. The Geiger counter gave a single bray, then fell silent. Rusty had no idea whether or not the needle swung into the danger zone, because he couldn’t move his eyes, either. The light was leaving the world, funneling out of it like water going down a bathtub drain, and he thought with sudden calm clarity: I’m going to die. What a stupid way to g—

Then, in that darkness, faces arose—only they weren’t human faces, and later he would not be sure they were faces at all. They were geometric solids that seemed to be padded in leather. The only parts of them that looked even vaguely human were diamond shapes on the sides. They could have been ears. The heads—if they were heads—turned to each other, either in discussion or something that could have been mistaken for it. He thought he heard laughter. He thought he sensed excitement. He pictured children in the play-yard at East Street Grammar—his girls, perhaps, and their friend Deanna Carver—exchanging snacks and secrets at recess.

All of this happened in a space of seconds, surely no more than four or five. Then it was gone. The shock dissipated as suddenly and completely as it did when people first touched the surface of the Dome; as quickly as his lightheadedness and the accompanying vision of the dummy in the crooked tophat. He was just kneeling at the top of the ridge overlooking the town, and sweltering in his leaden accessories.

Yet the image of those leatherheads remained. Leaning together and laughing in obscenely childish conspiracy.

The others are down there watching me. Wave. Show them you’re all right.

He raised both hands over his head—now they moved smoothly—and waved them slowly back and forth, just as if his heart were not pounding like a jackrabbit in his chest, as if sweat weren’t running down his chest in sharply aromatic rivulets.

Below, on the road, Rommie and the kids waved back.

Rusty took several deep breaths to calm himself, then held the Geiger counter’s sensor tube out to the flat gray square, which sat on a spongy mat of grass. The needle wavered just below the +5 mark. A background count, no more.

Rusty had little doubt that this flat square object was the source of their troubles. Creatures—not human beings, creatures—were using it to keep them prisoner, but that wasn’t all. They were also using it to observe.

And having fun. The bastards were laughing. He had heard them.

Rusty stripped off the apron, draped it over the box with its slightly protruding lens, got up, backed away. For a moment nothing happened. Then the apron caught fire. The smell was pungent and nasty. He watched the shiny surface blister and bubble, watched the flames erupt. Then the apron, which was essentially no more than a plastic-coated sheet of lead, simply fell apart. For a moment there were burning pieces, the biggest one still lying on top of the box. A moment later, the apron—or what remained of it—disinte-grated. A few swirling bits of ash remained—and the smell—but otherwise… poof. Gone.

Did I see that? Rusty asked himself, then said it aloud, asking the world. He could smell roasted plastic and a heavier smell that he supposed was smelted lead—insane, impossible—but the apron was gone nonetheless.

“Did I actually see that?”

As if in answer, the purple light flashed out of the hooded knuckle on top of the box. Were those pulses renewing the Dome, the way the touch of a finger on a computer keyboard could refresh the screen? Were they allowing the leatherheads to watch the town? Both? Neither?

He told himself not to approach the flat square again. He told himself the smartest thing he could do would be to run back to the van (without the weight of the apron, he could run) and then drive like hell, slowing only to pick up his companions waiting below.

Instead he approached the box again and dropped to his knees before it, a posture too much like worship for his liking.

He stripped off one of the gloves, touched the ground beside the thing, then snatched his hand back. Hot. Bits of burning apron had scorched some of the grass. Next he reached for the box itself, steeling himself for another burn or another shock… although neither was what he was most afraid of; he was afraid of seeing those leather shapes again, those not-quite-heads bent together in some laughing conspiracy.

But there was nothing. No visions and no heat. The gray box was cool to the touch, even though he’d seen the lead apron on top of it bubbling up and then actually catching fire.

The purple light flashed out. Rusty was careful not to put his hand in front of it. Instead, he gripped the thing’s sides, mentally saying goodbye to his wife and girls, telling them he was sorry for being such a damn fool. He waited to catch fire and burn. When he didn’t, he tried to lift the box. Although it had the surface area of a dinner plate and wasn’t much thicker, he couldn’t budge it. The box might as well have been welded to the top of a pillar planted in ninety feet of New England bedrock—except it wasn’t. It was sitting on top of a grassy mat, and when he wriggled his fingers deeper beneath, they touched. He laced them together and tried again to lift the thing. No shock, no visions, no heat; no movement, either. Not so much as a wiggle.

He thought: My hands are gripping some sort of alien artifact. A machine from another world. I may have even caught a glimpse of its operators.

The idea was intellectually amazing—flabbergasting, even—but it had no emotional gradient, perhaps because he was too stunned, too overwhelmed with information that did not compute.

So what next? Just what the hell next?

He didn’t know. And it seemed he wasn’t emotionally flat after all, because a wave of despair rolled through him, and he was only just able to stop from vocalizing that despair in a cry. The four people down below might hear it and think he was in trouble. Which, of course, he was. Nor was he alone.

He got to his feet on legs that trembled and threatened to give out beneath him. The hot, close air seemed to lie on his skin like oil. He made his way slowly back toward the van through the apple-heavy trees. The only thing he was sure of was that under no circumstances could Big Jim Rennie learn of the generator. Not because he would try to destroy it, but because he’d very likely set a guard around it to make sure it wasn’t destroyed. To make sure it kept right on doing what it was doing, so he could keep on doing what he was doing. For the time being, at least, Big Jim liked things just the way they were.

Rusty opened the door of the van and that was when, less than a mile north of Black Ridge, a huge explosion rocked the day. It was as if God had leaned down and fired a heavenly shotgun.

Rusty shouted in surprise and looked up. He immediately shielded his eyes from the fierce temporary sun burning in the sky over the border between TR-90 and Chester’s Mill. Another plane had crashed into the Dome. Only this time it had been no mere Seneca V. Black smoke billowed up from the point of impact, which Rusty estimated as being at least twenty thousand feet. If the black spot left by the missle strikes was a beauty mark on the cheek of the day, then this new mark was a skin tumor. One that had been allowed to run wild.

Rusty forgot about the generator. He forgot about the four people waiting for him. He forgot about his own children, for whom he had just risked being burned alive and then discorporated. For a space of two minutes, there was no room for anything in his mind but black awe.

Rubble was falling to earth on the other side of the Dome. The smashed forward quarter of the jetliner was followed by a flaming motor; the motor was followed by a waterfall of blue airline seats, many with passengers still strapped into them; the seats were followed by a vast shining wing, seesawing like a sheet of paper in a draft; the wing was followed by the tail of what was probably a 767. The tail was painted dark green. A lighter green shape had been superimposed on it. It looked to Rusty like a clover.

Not a clover, a shamrock.

Then the body of the plane crashed to earth like a defective arrow and lit the woods on fire.

18

The blast rocks the town and they all come out to see. All over Chester’s Mill, they come out to see. They stand in front of their houses, in driveways, on sidewalks, in the middle of Main Street. And although the sky north of their prison is mostly cloudy, they have to shield their eyes from the glare—what looked to Rusty, from his place atop Black Ridge, like a second sun.

They see what it is, of course; the sharper-eyed among them can even read the name on the body of the plummeting plane before it disappears below the treeline. It is nothing supernatural; it has even happened before, and just this week (although on a smaller scale, admittedly). But in the people of Chester’s Mill, it inspires a kind of sullen dread that will hold sway over the town from then until the end.

Anyone who has ever cared for a terminal patient will tell you that there comes a tipping point when denial dies and acceptance finds its way in. For most people in Chester’s Mill, the tipping point came at midmorning on October twenty-fifth, while they stood either alone or with their neighbors, watching as more than three hundred people plunged into the woods of TR-90.

Earlier that morning, perhaps fifteen percent of the town was wearing blue “solidarity” armbands; by sundown on this Wednesday in October, it will be twice that. When the sun comes up tomorrow, it will be over fifty percent of the population.

Denial gives way to acceptance; acceptance breeds dependence. Anyone who’s ever cared for a terminal patient will tell you that, too. Sick people need someone who will bring them their pills and glasses of cold sweet juice to wash them down with. They need someone to soothe their aching joints with arnica gel. They need someone to sit with them when the night is dark and the hours stretch out. They need someone to say, Sleep now, it will be better in the morning. I’m here, so sleep. Sleep now. Sleep and let me take care of everything.

Sleep.

19

Officer Henry Morrison got Junior to the hospital—by then the kid had regained a soupy semblance of consciousness, although he was still talking gibberish—and Twitch wheeled him away on a gurney. It was a relief to see him go.

Henry got Big Jim’s home and Town Hall office numbers from directory assistance, but there was no answer at either—they were landlines. He was listening to a robot tell him that James Rennie’s cell-phone number was unlisted when the jetliner exploded. He rushed out with everyone else who was ambulatory and stood in the turnaround, looking at the new black mark on the Dome’s invisible surface. The last of the debris was still fluttering down.

Big Jim was indeed in his Town Hall office, but he had killed the phone so he could work on both speeches—the one to the cops tonight, the one to the entire town tomorrow night—without interruption. He heard the explosion and rushed outside. His first thought was that Cox had set off a nuke. A cotton-picking nuke! If it broke through the Dome, it would ruin everything!

He found himself standing next to Al Timmons, the Town Hall janitor. Al pointed north, high in the sky, where smoke was still rising. It looked to Big Jim like an antiaircraft burst in an old World War II movie.

“It was an airplane!” Al shouted. “And a big one! Christ! Didn’t they get the word?”

Big Jim felt a cautious sense of relief, and his triphammering heart slowed a bit. If it was a plane… just a plane and not a nuke or some kind of super-missile…

His cell phone tweeted. He snatched it from the pocket of his suit coat and snapped it open. “Peter? Is that you?”

“No, Mr. Rennie. Colonel Cox here.”

“What did you do?” Rennie shouted. “What in God’s name did you people do now?”

“Nothing.” There was none of the former crisp authority in Cox’s voice; he sounded stunned. “It was nothing to do with us. It was… hold on a minute.”

Rennie waited. Main Street was full of people staring up into the sky with their mouths gaped open. To Rennie they looked like sheep dressed in human clothing. Tomorrow night they would crowd into the Town Hall and go baaa baaa baaa, when’ll it get better? And baaa baaa baaa, take care of us until it does. And he would. Not because he wanted to, but because it was God’s will.

Cox came back on. Now he sounded weary as well as stunned. Not the same man who had hectored Big Jim about stepping down. And that’s the way I want you to sound, pal, Rennie thought. Exactly the way.

“My initial information is that Air Ireland flight 179 has struck the Dome and exploded. It originated in Shannon and was bound for Boston. We already have two independent witnesses who claim to have seen a shamrock on the tail, and an ABC crew that was filming just outside the quarantine zone in Harlow may have gotten… one more second.”

It was much more than a second; more than a minute. Big Jim’s heart had been slowing toward its normal speed (if a hundred and twenty beats per minute can be so characterized), but now it sped up again and took one of those looping misbeats. He coughed and pounded at his chest. His heart seemed almost to settle, then went into a full-blown arrhythmia. He felt sweat pop on his brow. The day, formerly dull, all at once seemed too bright.

“Jim?” It was Al Timmons, and although he was standing right beside Big Jim, his voice seemed to be coming from a galaxy far, far away. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Big Jim said. “Stay right there. I may want you.”

Cox was back. “It was indeed the Air Ireland flight. I just watched ABC’s streamed footage of the crash. A reporter was doing a stand-up, and it occurred right behind her. They caught the whole thing.”

“I’m sure their ratings will go up.”

“Mr. Rennie, we may have had our differences, but I hope you’ll convey to your constituents that this is nothing for them to worry about.”

“Just tell me how a thing like that—” His heart looped again. His breath tore in, then stopped. He pounded his chest a second time—harder—and sat down on a bench beside the brick path which ran from the Town Hall to the sidewalk. Al was looking at him instead of at the crash scar on the Dome now, his forehead furrowed with concern—and, Big Jim thought, fright. Even now, with all this happening, he was glad to see that, glad to know he was seen as indispensable. Sheep need a shepherd.

“Rennie? Are you there?”

“I’m here.” And so was his heart, but it was far from right. “How did it happen? How could it? I thought you people got the word out.”

“We’re not positive and won’t be until we recover the black box, but we’ve got a pretty good idea. We sent out a directive warning all commercial air carriers away from the Dome, but this is 179’s usual flight path. We think someone neglected to reprogram the autopilot. Simple as that. I’ll get you further details as soon as we get them here, but right now the important thing is to quell any panic in town before it can take hold.”

But under certain circumstances, panic could be good. Under certain circumstances, it could—like food riots and acts of arson—have a beneficial effect.

“This was stupidity on a grand scale, but still just an accident,” Cox was saying. “Make sure your people know that.”

They’ll know what I tell them and believe what I want them to, Rennie thought.

His heart skittered like grease on a hot griddle, settled briefly into a more normal rhythm, then skittered again. He pushed the red END CALL button without responding to Cox and dropped the phone back into his pocket. Then he looked at Al.

“I need you to take me to the hospital,” he said, speaking as calmly as he could manage. “I seem to be in some discomfort here.”

Al—who was wearing a Solidarity Armband—looked more alarmed than ever. “Accourse, Jim. You just sit right there while I get my car. We can’t let anything happen to you. The town needs you.”

Don’t I know it, Big Jim thought, sitting on the bench and looking at the great black smear on the sky.

“Find Carter Thibodeau and tell him to meet me there. I want him on hand.”

There were other instructions he wanted to give, but just then his heart stopped completely. For a moment forever yawned at his feet, a clear dark chasm. Rennie gasped and pounded his chest. It burst into a full gallop. He thought at it: Don’t you quit on me now, I’ve got too much to do. Don’t you dare, you cotton-picker. Don’t you dare.

20

“What was it?” Norrie asked in a high, childish voice, and then answered her own question. “It was an airplane, wasn’t it? An airplane full of people.” She burst into tears. The boys tried to hold their own tears back, and couldn’t. Rommie felt like crying himself.

“Yuh,” he said. “I think that’s what it was.”

Joe turned to look at the van, now heading back toward them. When it got to the foot of the ridge it sped up, as if Rusty couldn’t wait to get back. When he arrived and jumped out, Joe saw he had another reason for hurry: the lead apron was gone.

Before Rusty could say anything, his cell phone rang. He flipped it open, looked at the number, and took the call. He expected Ginny, but it was the new guy, Thurston Marshall. “Yes, what? If it’s about the plane, I saw—” He listened, frowning a little, then nodding. “Okay, yes. Right. I’m coming now. Tell Ginny or Twitch to give him two milligrams of Valium, IV push. No, better make it three. And tell him to be calm. That’s foreign to his nature, but tell him to try. Give his son five milligrams.”

He closed his phone and looked at them. “Both Rennies are in the hospital, the elder with heartbeat arrhythmia, which he’s had before. The damn fool has needed a pacemaker for two years. Thurston says the younger has symptoms that look to him like a glioma. I hope he’s wrong.”

Norrie turned her tearstained face up to Rusty’s. She had her arm around Benny Drake, who was furiously wiping at his eyes. When Joe came and stood next to her, she put her other arm around him.

“That’s a brain tumor, right?” she said. “A bad one.”

“When they hit kids Junior Rennie’s age, almost all of them are bad.”

“What did you find up there?” Rommie asked.

“And what happened to your apron?” Benny added.

“I found what Joe thought I’d find.”

“The generator?” Rommie said. “Doc, are you sure?”

“Yeah. It’s like nothing I ever saw before. I’m pretty sure no one on Earth’s seen anything like it before.”

“Something from another planet,” Joe said in a voice so low it was a whisper. “I knew. ”

Rusty looked at him hard. “You can’t talk about it. None of us can. If you’re asked, say we looked and found nothing.”

“Even to my mom?” Joe asked plaintively.

Rusty almost relented on that score, then hardened his heart. This was a secret now shared among five people, and that was far too many. But the kids had deserved to know, and Joe McClatchey had guessed anyway.

“Even her, at least for now.”

“I can’t lie to her,” Joe said. “It doesn’t work. She’s got Mom Vision.”

“Then just say I swore you to secrecy and it’s better for her that way. If she presses, tell her to talk to me. Come on, I need to get back to the hospital. Rommie, you drive. My nerves are shot.”

“Aren’t you gonna—” Rommie began.

“I’ll tell you everything. On the way back. Maybe we can even figure out what the hell to do about it.”

21

An hour after the Air Ireland 767 crashed into the Dome, Rose Twitchell marched into the Chester’s Mill PD with a napkin-covered plate. Stacey Moggin was back on the desk, looking as tired and distracted as Rose felt.

“What’s that?” Stacey asked.

“Lunch. For my cook. Two toasted BLTs.”

“Rose, I’m not supposed to let you go down there. I’m not supposed to let anyone go down there.”

Mel Searles had been talking with two of the new recruits about a monster truck show he’d seen at the Portland Civic Center last spring. Now he looked around. “I’ll take em to him, Miz Twitchell.”

“You will not, ” Rose said.

Mel looked surprised. And a little hurt. He had always liked Rose, and thought she liked him.

“I don’t trust you not to drop the plate,” she explained, although this wasn’t the exact truth; the fact was, she didn’t trust him at all. “I watched you play football, Melvin.”

“Aw, come on, I ain’t that clumsy.”

“Also because I want to see if he’s all right.”

“He’s not supposed to have any visitors,” Mel said. “That’s from Chief Randolph, and he got it direct from Selectman Rennie.”

“Well, I’m going down. You’ll have to use your Taser to stop me, and if you do that, I’ll never make you another strawberry waffle the way you like them, with the batter all runny in the middle.” She looked around and sniffed. “Besides, I don’t see either of those men here right now. Or am I missing something?”

Mel considered getting tough, if only to impress the fresh fish, and then decided not to. He really did like Rose. And he liked her waffles, especially when they were a little gooshy. He hitched up his belt and said, “Okay. But I hafta to go with you, and you ain’t taking him nothing until I look under that napkin.”

She raised it. Underneath were two BLTs, and a note written on the back of a Sweetbriar Rose customer check. Stay strong, it said. We believe in you.

Mel took the note, crumpled it, and threw it toward the waste-basket. It missed, and one of the recruits scurried to pick it up. “Come on,” he said, then stopped, took half a sandwich, and tore out a monster bite. “He couldn’t eat all that, anyway,” he told Rose.

Rose said nothing, but as he led her downstairs, she did briefly consider braining him with the plate.

She got halfway down the lower corridor before Mel said, “That’s as close as you go, Miz Twitchell. I’ll take it the rest of the way.”

She handed the plate over and watched unhappily as Mel knelt, pushed the plate through the bars, and announced: “Lunch is served, mon-sewer.”

Barbie ignored him. He was looking at Rose. “Thank you. Although if Anson made those, I don’t know how grateful I’ll be after the first bite.”

“I made them,” she said. “Barbie—why did they beat you up? Were you trying to get away? You look awful. ”

“Not trying to get away, resisting arrest. Wasn’t I, Mel?”

“You want to quit the smart talk, or I’ll come in there and take them samwidges away from you.”

“Well, you could try,” Barbie said. “We could contest the matter.” When Mel showed no inclination to take him up on this offer, Barbie turned his attention to Rose once more. “Was it an airplane? It sounded like an airplane. A big one.”

“ABC says it was an Air Ireland jetliner. Fully loaded.”

“Let me guess. It was on its way to Boston or New York and some not-so-bright spark forgot to reprogram the autopilot.”

“I don’t know. They’re not saying about that part yet.”

“Come on.” Mel came back and took her arm. “That’s enough chitter-chatter. You need to leave before I get in trouble.”

“Are you okay?” Rose asked Barbie, resisting this command—at least for a moment.

“Yeah,” Barbie said. “How about you? Did you patch it up with Jackie Wettington yet?”

And what was the correct answer to that one? So far as Rose knew, she had nothing to patch up with Jackie. She thought she saw Barbie give a tiny shake of the head, and hoped it wasn’t just her imagination.

“Not yet,” she said.

“You ought to. Tell her to stop being a bitch.”

“As if,” Mel muttered. He locked onto Rose’s arm. “Come on, now; don’t make me drag you.”

“Tell her I said you’re all right,” Barbie called as she went up the stairs, this time leading the way with Mel at her heels. “You two really should talk. And thanks for the sandwiches.”

Tell her I said you’re all right.

That was the message, she was quite sure of it. She didn’t think Mel had caught it; he’d always been dull, and life under the Dome did not seem to have smartened him up any. Which was probably why Barbie had taken the risk.

Rose made up her mind to find Jackie as soon as possible, and pass on the message: Barbie says I’m all right. Barbie says you can talk to me.

“Thank you, Mel,” she said when they were back in the ready room. “It was kind of you to let me do that.”

Mel looked around, saw no one of greater authority than himself, and relaxed. “No problem-o, but don’t think you’re gettin down there again with supper, because it ain’t happenin.” He considered, then waxed philosophical. “He deserves somethin nice though, I guess. Because come next week this time, he’s gonna be as toasty as those samwidges you made im.”

We’ll see about that, Rose thought.

22

Andy Sanders and The Chef sat beside the WCIK storage barn, smoking glass. Straight ahead of them, in the field surrounding the radio tower, was a mound of earth marked with a cross made out of crate-slats. Beneath the mound lay Sammy Bushey, torturer of Bratz, rape victim, mother of Little Walter. Chef said that later on he might steal a regular cross from the cemetery by Chester Pond. If there was time. There might not be.

He lifted his garage door opener as if to emphasize this point.

Andy felt sorry for Sammy, just as he felt sorry about Claudette and Dodee, but now it was a clinical sorrow, safely stored inside its own Dome: you could see it, could appreciate its existence, but you couldn’t exactly get in there with it. Which was a good thing. He tried to explain this to Chef Bushey, although he got a little lost in the middle—it was a complex concept. Chef nodded, though, then passed Andy a large glass bong. Etched on the side were the words NOT LEGAL FOR TRADE.

“Good, ain’t it?” Chef said.

“Yes!” Andy said.

For a little while then they discussed the two great texts of born-again dopers: what good shit this was, and how fucked up they were getting on this good shit. At some point there was a huge explosion to the north. Andy shielded his eyes, which were burning from all the smoke. He almost dropped the bong, but Chef rescued it.

“Holy shit, that’s an airplane!” Andy tried to get up, but his legs, although buzzing with energy, wouldn’t hold him. He settled back.

“No, Sanders,” Chef said. He puffed at the bong. Sitting with legs akimbo as he was, he looked to Andy like an Indian with a peace pipe.

Leaning on the side of the shed between Andy and Chef were four full-auto AK-47s, Russian in manufacture but imported—like many other fine items stocked in the storage facility—from China. There were also five stacked crates filled with thirty-round clips and a box of RGD-5 grenades. Chef had offered Andy a translation of the ideograms on the box of grenades: Do Not Drop This Motherfucker.

Now Chef took one of the AKs and laid it across his knees. “That was not an airplane,” he amplified.

“No? Then what was it?”

“A sign from God.” Chef looked at what he had painted on the side of the storage barn: two quotes (liberally interpreted) from the Book of Revelation with the number 31 featured prominently. Then he looked back at Andy. To the north, the plume of smoke in the sky was dissipating. Below it, fresh smoke was rising from where the plane had impacted in the woods. “I got the date wrong,” he said in a brooding voice. “Halloween really is coming early this year. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow.”

“Or the day after that,” Andy added helpfully.

“Maybe,” Chef allowed, “but I think it’ll be sooner. Sanders!”

“What, Chef?”

“Take you a gun. You’re in the Lord’s army now. You’re a Christian soldier. Your days of licking that apostate son of a bitch’s ass are over.”

Andy took an AK and laid it across his bare thighs. He liked the weight of it and the warmth of it. He checked to make sure the safety was on. It was. “What apostate son of a bitch are you talking about, Chef?”

Chef fixed him with a look of utter contempt, but when Andy reached for the bong, he handed it over willingly enough. There was plenty for both of them, would be from now until the end, and yea, verily, the end would not be long. “Rennie. That apostate son of a bitch.”

“He’s my friend—my pal—but he can be a hardass, all right,” Andy admitted. “My goodness but this is good shit.”

“It is,” Chef agreed moodily, and took the bong (which Andy now thought of as the Smokeum Peace Pipe) back. “It’s the longest of long glass, the purest of the pure, and what is it, Sanders?”

“A medicine for melancholy!” Andy returned smartly.

“And what is that?” Pointing at the new black mark on the Dome.

“A sign! From God!”

“Yes,” Chef said, mollified. “That’s exactly what it is. We’re on a God-trip now, Sanders. Do you know what happened when God opened the seventh seal? Have you read Revelation?”

Andy had a memory, from the Christian camp he’d attended as a teenager, of angels popping out of that seventh seal like clowns from the little car at the circus, but he didn’t want to say it that way. Chef might consider it blasphemous. So he just shook his head.

“Thought not,” Chef said. “You might have gotten preaching at Holy Redeemer, but preaching is not education. Preaching is not the true visionary shit. Do you understand that?”

What Andy understood was that he wanted another hit, but he nodded his head.

“When the seventh seal was opened, seven angels appeared with seven trumpets. And each time one blew the boogie, a plague smote down on the earth. Here, toke this shit, it’ll help your concentration.”

How long had they been out here smoking? It seemed like hours. Had they really seen a plane crash? Andy thought so, but now he wasn’t completely sure. It seemed awfully farfetched. Maybe he should take a nap. On the other hand, it was wonderful to the point of ecstasy just to be out here with Chef, getting stoned and educated. “I almost killed myself, but God saved me,” he told Chef. The thought was so wonderful that tears filled his eyes.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s obvious. This other stuff isn’t. So listen.”

“I am.”

“First angel blew and hailed down blood on the earth. Second angel blew and a mountain of fire was cast into the sea. That’s your volcanoes and shit.”

“Yes!” Andy shouted, and inadvertently squeezed the trigger of the AK-47 lying across his lap.

“You want to watch that,” Chef said. “If the safety hadn’t been on, you would have blown my tickle-stick into yonder pine tree. Hit on this shit.” He handed Andy the bong. Andy couldn’t even remember giving it back to him, but he must have done. And what time was it? It looked like midafternoon, but how could that be? He hadn’t gotten hungry for lunch and he always got hungry for lunch, it was his best meal.

“Now listen, Sanders, because this is the important part.”

Chef was able to quote from memory because he had made quite a study of the book of Revelations since moving out here to the radio station; he read and reread it obsessively, sometimes until dawn streaked the horizon. “ ‘And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven! Burning as if it were a lamp!’ ”

“We just saw that!”

Chef nodded. His eyes were fixed on the black smutch where Air Ireland 179 had met her end. “ ‘And the name of the star is called Wormwood, and many men died because they were made bitter.’ Are you bitter, Sanders?”

“No!” Andy assured him.

“No. We’re mellow. But now that Star Wormwood has blazed in the sky, bitter men will come. God has told me this, Sanders, and it’s no bullshit. Check me out and you find I’m all about zero bullshit. They’re gonna try to take all this away from us. Rennie and his bull-shit cronies.”

“No way!” Andy cried. A sudden and horribly intense paranoia swept over him. They could be here already! Bullshit cronies creeping through those trees! Bullshit cronies driving down Little Bitch Road in a line of trucks! Now that Chef had brought it up, he even saw why Rennie would want to do it. He’d call it “getting rid of the evidence.”

“Chef!” He gripped his new friend’s shoulder.

“Let up a little, Sanders. That hurts.”

He let up a little. “Big Jim’s already talked about coming up and getting the propane tanks—that’s the first step!”

Chef nodded. “They’ve already been here once. Took two tanks. I let em.” He paused, then patted the grenades. “I won’t let em again. Are you down with that?”

Andy thought of the pounds of dope inside the building they were leaning against, and gave the answer Chef had expected. “My brother,” he said, and embraced Chef.

Chef was hot and stinky, but Andy hugged with enthusiasm. Tears were rolling down his face, which he had neglected to shave on a weekday for the first time in over twenty years. This was great. This was… was…

Bonding!

“My brother,” he sobbed into Chef’s ear.

Chef thrust him back and looked at him solemnly. “We are agents of the Lord,” he said.

And Andy Sanders—now all alone in the world except for the scrawny prophet beside him—said amen.

23

Jackie found Ernie Calvert behind his house, weeding his garden. She was a little worried about approaching him in spite of what she’d told Piper, but she needn’t have been. He gripped her shoulders with hands that were surprisingly strong for such a portly little man. His eyes shone.

“Thank God someone sees what that windbag’s up to!” He dropped his hands. “Sorry. I smudged your blouse.”

“That’s all right.”

“He’s dangerous, Officer Wettington. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And clever. He set up that damned food riot the way a terrorist would plant a bomb.”

“I have no doubt of it.”

“But he’s also stupid. Clever and stupid is a terrible combination. You can persuade people to go with you, you see. All the way to hell. Look at that fellow Jim Jones, remember him?”

“The one who got all his followers to drink poison. So you’ll come to the meeting?”

“You bet. And mum’s the word. Unless you want me to talk to Lissa Jamieson, that is. Glad to do it.”

Before Jackie could answer, her cell phone rang. It was her personal; she had turned in the one issued to her by the PD along with her badge and gun.

“Hello, this is Jackie.”

“Mihi portatoe vulneratos, Sergeant Wettington,” an unfamiliar voice said.

The motto of her old unit in Würzburg—bring us your wounded—and Jackie responded without even thinking: “On stretchers, crutches, or in bags, we put em together with spit and rags. Who the hell is this?”

“Colonel James Cox, Sergeant.”

Jackie moved the phone away from her mouth. “Give me a minute, Ernie?”

He nodded and went back to his garden. Jackie strolled toward the shakepole fence at the foot of the yard. “What can I do for you, Colonel? And is this line secure?”

“Sergeant, if your man Rennie can tap cell phone calls made from beyond the Dome, we’re in a world of hurt.”

“He’s not my man.”

“Good to know.”

“And I’m no longer in the Army. The Sixty-seventh isn’t even in my rearview mirror these days, sir.”

“Well, that’s not exactly true, Sarge. By order of the President of the United States, you’ve been stop-lossed. Welcome back.”

“Sir, I don’t know whether to say thank you or fuck you very much.”

Cox laughed without much humor. “Jack Reacher says hello.”

“Is that where you got this number?”

“That and a recommendation. A recommendation from Reacher goes a long way. You asked what you can do for me. The answer is twofold, both parts simple. One, get Dale Barbara out of the mess he’s in. Unless you think he’s guilty of the charges?”

“No, sir. I’m sure he’s not. That is to say, we are. There are several of us.”

“Good. Very good.” There was no mistaking the relief in the man’s voice. “Number two, you can knock that bastard Rennie off his perch.”

“That would be Barbie’s job. If… you’re positive this line’s secure?”

“Positive.”

“If we can get him out.”

“That’s in work, is it?”

“Yes, sir, I believe so.”

“Excellent. How many brownshirts does Rennie have?”

“Currently about thirty, but he’s still hiring. And here in The Mill they’re blueshirts, but I take your meaning. Don’t sell him short, Colonel. He’s got most of this town in his pocket. We’re going to try to get Barbie out, and you better hope we succeed, because I can’t do much about Big Jim on my own. Toppling dictators with no help from the outside world is about six miles above my pay grade. And just FYI, my own days on the Chester’s Mill PD are over. Rennie shitcanned me.”

“Keep me informed when and as you can. Spring Barbara and turn your resistance operation over to him. We’ll see who ends up getting shitcanned.”

“Sir, you sort of wish you were in here, don’t you?”

“With all my heart.” No hesitation. “I’d dewheel that sonofabitch’s little red wagon in about twelve hours.”

Jackie doubted that, actually; things were different under the Dome. Outsiders couldn’t understand. Even time was different. Five days ago, everything had been normal. Now look.

“One other thing,” Colonel Cox said. “Take some time out of your busy schedule to look at the TV. We’re going to do our level best to make Rennie’s life uncomfortable.”

Jackie said goodbye and broke the connection. Then she walked back to where Ernie was gardening. “Got a generator?” she asked.

“Died last night,” he said with sour good cheer.

“Well, let’s go someplace where there’s a working TV. My friend says we should check out the news.”

They headed for Sweetbriar Rose. On their way they met Julia Shumway and brought her along.