Under the Dome

Junior shrugged sullenly. His father had told him, but he couldn’t exactly remember. Ten o’clock, maybe. But what did it matter? Let those two over there burn. And if the newspaper bitch was upstairs—perhaps relaxing with her favorite dildo after a hard day—let her burn, too. More trouble for Baaarbie.

“Let’s do it now,” he said.

“You sure, bro?”

“You see anyone on the street?”

Carter looked. Main Street was deserted and mostly dark. The gennies behind the newspaper office and the drugstore were the only ones he could hear. He shrugged. “All right. Why not?”

Junior undid the pack’s buckles and flipped back the flap. On top were two pairs of light gloves. He gave one pair to Carter and put on the other. Beneath was a bundle wrapped in a bath towel. He opened it and set four empty wine bottles on the patched asphalt. At the very bottom of the pack was a tin funnel. Junior put it in one of the wine bottles and reached for the gasoline.

“Better let me, bro,” Carter said. “Your hands are shakin.”

Junior looked at them with surprise. He didn’t feel shaky, but yes, they were trembling. “I’m not afraid, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Never said you were. It ain’t a head problem. Anybody can see that. You need to go to Everett, because you got somethin wrong with you and he’s the closest thing we got to a doctor right now.”

“I feel fi—”

“Shut up before someone hears you. Do the fuckin towel while I do this.”

Junior took his gun from its holster and shot Carter in the eye. His head exploded, blood and brains everywhere. Then Junior stood over him, shooting him again and again and ag—

“Junes?”

Junior shook his head to clear away this vision—so vivid it was hallucinatory—and realized his hand was actually gripping the butt of his pistol. Maybe that virus wasn’t quite out of his system yet.

And maybe it wasn’t a virus after all.

What, then? What?

The fragrant odor of gas smacked his nostrils hard enough to make his eyes burn. Carter had begun filling the first bottle. Glug glug glug went the gas can. Junior unzipped the side pocket of the backpack and brought out a pair of his mother’s sewing scissors. He used them to cut four strips from the towel. He stuffed one into the first bottle, then pulled it out and stuck the other end inside, letting a length of gasoline-soaked terry cloth hang. He repeated the process with the others.

His hands weren’t shaking too badly for that.

21

Barbie’s Colonel Cox had changed from the last time Julia had seen him. He had a good shave for going on half past nine, and his hair was combed, but his khakis had lost their neat press and tonight his poplin jacket seemed to be bagging on him, as if he had lost weight. He was standing in front of a few smudges of spray paint left over from the unsuccessful acid experiment, and he was frowning at the bracket shape like he thought he could walk through it if he only concentrated hard enough.

Close your eyes and click your heels three times, Julia thought. Because there’s no place like Dome.

She introduced Rose to Cox and Cox to Rose. During their brief getting-to-know-you exchange, Julia looked around, not liking what she saw. The lights were still in place, shining at the sky as if signaling a glitzy Hollwood premiere, and there was a purring generator to run them, but the trucks were gone and so was the big green HQ tent that had been erected forty or fifty yards down the road. A patch of flattened grass marked the place where it had been. There were two soldiers with Cox, but they had the not-ready-for-prime-time look she associated with aides or attaches. The sentries probably weren’t gone, but they had been moved back, establishing a perimeter beyond hailing distance of any poor slobs who might wander up on The Mill side to ask what was going on.

Ask now, plead later, Julia thought. “Fill me in, Ms. Shumway,” Cox said.

“First answer a question.”

He rolled his eyes (she thought she would have slapped him for that, if she’d been able to get at him; her nerves were still jangled from the near miss on the ride out here). But he told her to ask away.

“Have we been abandoned?”

“Absolutely not.” He replied promptly, but didn’t quite meet her eye. She thought that was a worse sign than the queerly empty look she now saw on his side of the Dome—as if there had been a circus, but it had moved on.

“Read this,” she said, and plastered the front page of tomorrow’s paper against the Dome’s unseen surface, like a woman mounting a sale notice in a department store window. There was a faint, fugitive thrum in her fingers, like the kind of static shock you could get from touching metal on a cold winter morning, when the air was dry. After that, nothing.

He read the entire paper, telling her when to turn the pages. It took him ten minutes. When he finished, she said: “As you probably noticed, ad space is way down, but I flatter myself the quality of the writing has gone up. Fuckery seem to bring out the best in me.”

“Ms. Shumway—”

“Oh, why not call me Julia. We’re practically old pals.”

“Fine. You’re Julia and I’m JC.”

“I’ll try not to confuse you with the one who walked on water.”

“You believe this fellow Rennie’s setting himself up as a dictator? A kind of Downeast Manuel Noriega?”

“It’s the progression to Pol Pot I’m worried about.”

“Do you think that’s possible?”

“Two days ago I would have laughed at the idea—he’s a used-car salesman when he isn’t running selectmen’s meetings. But two days ago we hadn’t had a food riot. Nor did we know about these murders.”

“Not Barbie,” Rose said, shaking her head with stubborn weariness. “Never.”

Cox took no notice of this—not because he was ignoring Rose, Julia felt, but because he thought the idea was too ridiculous to warrant any attention. It warmed her toward him, at least a little. “Do you think Rennie committed the murders, Julia?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. Everything he’s done since the Dome appeared—from shutting down alcohol sales to appointing a complete dope as Police Chief—has been political, aimed at increasing his own clout.”

“Are you saying murder isn’t in his repertoire?”

“Not necessarily. When his wife passed, there were rumors that he might have helped her along. I don’t say they were true, but for rumors like that to start in the first place says something about how people see the man in question.”

Cox grunted agreement.

“But for the life of me I can’t see how murdering and sexually abusing two teenage girls could be political.”

“Barbie would never, ” Rose said again.

“The same with Coggins, although that ministry of his—especially the radio station part—is suspiciously well endowed. Brenda Perkins, now? That could have been political.”

“And you can’t send in the Marines to stop him, can you?” Rose asked. “All you guys can do is watch. Like kids looking into an aquarium where the biggest fish takes all the food, then starts eating the little ones.”

“I can kill the cellular service,” Cox mused. “Also Internet. I can do that much.”

“The police have walkie-talkies,” Julia said. “He’ll switch to those. And at the meeting on Thursday night, when people complain about losing their links to the outside world, he’ll blame you.”

“We were planning a press conference on Friday. I could pull the plug on that.”

Julia grew cold at the thought. “Don’t you dare. Then he wouldn’t have to explain himself to the outside