Under the Dome

studio, paranoid and thinking they were Feds, probably still no problem… unless he decided to come out shooting, that was.

If he was in the storage building, though… that might be a problem.

Stewart said to his brother, “There’s some goodsize junks of wood in the back of the truck. Get you one of those. If Phil shows and starts cuttin up rough, clock im one.”

“What if he has a gun?” Roger asked, quite reasonably.

“He won’t,” Stewart said. And although he wasn’t actually sure of this, he had his orders: two tanks of propane, to be delivered to the hospital posthaste. And we’re going to move the rest of it out of there as soon as we can, Big Jim had said. We’re officially out of the meth business.

That was something of a relief; when they were shut of this Dome thing, Stewart intended to get out of the funeral business, too. Move someplace warm, like Jamaica or Barbados. He never wanted to see another dead body. But he didn’t want to be the one who told “Chef” Bushey they were closing down, and he had informed Big Jim of that.

Let me worry about The Chef, Big Jim had said.

Stewart drove the big orange truck around the building and backed it up to the rear doors. He left the engine idling to run the winch and the hoist.

“Lookit that,” Roger Killian marveled. He was staring into the west, where the sun was going down in a troubling red smear. Soon it would sink below the great black smudge left by the woods-fire and be blotted out in a dirty eclipse. “Don’t that just beat the dickens.”

“Quit gawking,” Stewart said. “I want to do this and get gone. Fernie, get you a junk. Pick out a good one.”

Fern climbed over the hoist and picked out a leftover piece of planking about as long as a baseball bat. He held it in both hands and gave it an experimental swish. “This’ll do,” he said.

“Baskin-Robbins,” Roger said dreamily. He was still shading his eyes and squinting west. The squint was not a good look for him; it made him resemble a fairy-tale troll.

Stewart paused while unlocking the back door, a complicated process that involved a touchpad and two locks. “What are you pissing about?”

“Thirty-one flavors,” Roger said. He smiled, revealing a rotting set of teeth that had never been visited by Joe Boxer or probably any dentist.

Stewart had no idea what Roger was talking about, but his brother did. “Don’t think that’s an ice cream ad on the side of the buildin,” Fern said. “Unless there’s Baskin-Robbins in the book of Revelations.”

“Shut up, both of you,” Stewart said. “Fernie, stand ready with that junk.” He pushed the door open and peered in. “Phil?”

“Call im Chef,” Roger advised. “Like that nigger cook on South Park. That’s what he likes.”

“Chef?” Stewart called. “You in there, Chef?”

No answer. Stewart fumbled into the gloom, half expecting his hand to be seized at any moment, and found the light switch. He turned it on, revealing a room that stretched about three-quarters the length of the storage building. The walls were unfinished bare wood, the spaces between the laths stuffed with pink foam insulation. The room was almost filled with LP gas tanks and canisters of all sizes and brands. He had no idea how many there were in all, but if forced to guess, he would have said between four and six hundred.

Stewart walked slowly up the center aisle, peering at the stenciling on the tanks. Big Jim had told him exactly which ones to take, had said they’d be near the back, and by God, they were. He stopped at the five municipal-size tanks with CR HOSP on the side. They were between tanks that had been filched from the post office and some with MILL MIDDLE SCHOOL on the sides.

“We’re supposed to take two,” he said to Roger. “Bring the chain and we’ll hook em up. Fernie, go you down there and try that door to the lab. If it ain’t locked, lock it.” He tossed Fern his key ring.

Fern could have done without this chore, but he was an obedient brother. He walked down the aisle between the piles of propane tanks. They ended ten feet from the door—and the door, he saw with a sinking heart, was standing ajar. Behind him he heard the clank of the chain, then the whine of the winch and the low clatter of the first tank being dragged back to the truck. It sounded far away, especially when he imagined The Chef crouching on the other side of that door, red-eyed and crazy. All smoked up and toting a TEC-9.

“Chef?” he asked. “You here, buddy?”

No answer. And although he had no business doing so—was probably crazy himself for doing so—curiosity got the better of him and he used his makeshift club to push open the door.

The fluorescents in the lab were on, but otherwise this part of the Christ Is King storage building looked empty. The twenty or so cook-ers—big electric grills, each hooked to its own exhaust fan and propane canister— were off. The pots, beakers, and expensive flasks were all on their shelves. The place stank (always had, always would, Fern thought), but the floor was swept and there was no sign of disarray. On one wall was a Rennie’s Used Cars calendar, still turned to August. Probably when the motherfucker finished losing touch with reality, Fern thought. Just flooaated away. He ventured a little farther into the lab. It had made them all rich men, but he had never liked it. It smelled too much like the funeral parlor’s downstairs prep room.

One corner had been partitioned off with a heavy steel panel. There was a door in the middle of it. This, Fern knew, was where The Chef’s product was stored, long-glass crystal meth put up not in gallon Baggies but in Hefty garbage bags. Not shitglass, either. No tweeker scruffing the streets of New York or Los Angeles in search of a fix would have been able to credit such stocks. When the place was full, it held enough to supply the entire United States for months, perhaps even a year.

Why did Big Jim let him make so fucking much? Fern wondered.And why did we go along? What were we thinking of? He could come up with no answer to this question but the obvious one: because they could. The combination of Bushey’s genius and all those cheap Chinese ingredients had intoxicated them. Also, it funded the CIK Corporation, which was doing God’s work all up and down the East Coast. When anyone questioned, Big Jim always pointed this out. And he would quote scripture: For the laborer is worthy of his hire—Gospel of Luke—and Thou shalt not muzzle the ox while he is threshing—First Timothy.

Fern had never really gotten that one about the oxes.

“Chef?” Advancing in a little farther still. “Goodbuddy?”

Nothing. He looked up and saw galleries of bare wood running along two sides of the building. These were being used for storage, and the contents of the cartons stacked there would have interested the FBI, the FDA, and the ATF a great deal. No one was up there, but Fern spied something he thought was new: white cord running along the railings of both galleries, affixed to the wood by heavy staples. An electrical cord? Running to what? Had that nutball put more cookers up there? If so, Fern didn’t see them. The cord looked too thick to be powering just a simple appliance, like a TV or a ra—

“Fern!” Stewart cried, making him jump. “If he ain’t there, come on and help us! I want to get out of here! They said there’s gonna be an update on TV at six and I want to see if they’ve figured anything out!”

In Chester’s Mill, “they” had more and more come to mean anything or anyone in the world beyond the town’s borders.

Fern went, not looking over the door and thus not seeing what the new electrical cords were attached to: a large brick of white clay-like stuff sitting on its own little shelf. It was explosive.

The Chef’s own recipe.

4

As they drove back toward town, Roger said: “Halloween. That’s a thirty-one, too.”

“You’re a regular fund of information,” Stewart said.

Roger tapped the side of his unfortunately shaped head. “I store it up,” he said. “I don’t do it on purpose. It’s