Under the Dome

impossible.

Behind him, Duke walked slowly toward the place where Jackie had suffered her collision. He held one hand outstretched before him like a blind man prospecting his way across an unfamiliar room.

Here was where she had fallen down… and here…

He felt the buzzing she had described, but instead of passing, it deepened to searing pain in the hollow of his left shoulder. He had just enough time to remember the last thing Brenda had said—Take care of your pacemaker—and then it exploded in his chest with enough force to blow open his Wildcats sweatshirt, which he’d donned that morning in honor of this afternoon’s game. Blood, scraps of cotton, and bits of flesh struck the barrier.

The crowd aaah ed.

Duke tried to speak his wife’s name and failed, but he saw her face clearly in his mind. She was smiling.

Then, darkness.

4

The kid was Benny Drake, fourteen, and a Razor. The Razors were a small but dedicated skateboarding club, frowned on by the local constabulary but not actually outlawed, in spite of calls from Selectmen Rennie and Sanders for such action (at last March’s town meeting, this same dynamic duo had succeeded in tabling a budget item that would have funded a safe-skateboarding area on the town common behind the bandstand).

The adult was Eric “Rusty” Everett, thirty-seven, a physician’s assistant working with Dr. Ron Haskell, whom Rusty often thought of as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Because, Rusty would have explained (if he’d anyone other than his wife he could trust with such disloyalty), he so often remains behind the curtain while I do the work.

Now he checked the state of young Master Drake’s last tetanus shot. Fall of 2009, very good. Especially considering that young Master Drake had done a Wilson while cement-shooting and torn up his calf pretty good. Not a total jake, but a lot worse than simple roadrash.

“Power’s back on, dude,” young Master Drake offered.

“Generator, dude,” Rusty said. “Handles the hospital and the Health Center. Radical, huh?”

“Old-school,” young Master Drake agreed.

For a moment the adult and the adolescent regarded the six-inch gash in Benny Drake’s calf without speaking. Cleaned of dirt and blood, it looked ragged but no longer downright awful. The town whistle had quit, but far in the distance, they could hear sirens. Then the fire whistle went off, making them both jump.

Ambulance is gonna roll, Rusty thought. Sure as shit. Twitch and Everett ride again. Better hurry this up.

Except the kid’s face was pretty white, and Rusty thought there were tears standing in his eyes.

“Scared?” Rusty asked.

“A little,” Benny Drake said. “Ma’s gonna ground me.”

“Is that what you’re scared of?” Because he guessed that Benny Drake had been grounded a few times before. Like often, dude.

“Well… how much is it gonna hurt?”

Rusty had been hiding the syringe. Now he injected three cc’s of Xylocaine and epinephrine—a deadening compound he still called Novocain. He took his time infiltrating the wound, so as not to hurt the kid any more than he had to. “About that much.”

“Whoa,” Benny said. “Stat, baby. Code blue.”

Rusty laughed. “Did you full-pipe before you Wilsoned?” As a long-retired boarder, he was honestly curious.

“Only half, but it was toxic!” Benny said, brightening. “How many stitches, do you think? Norrie Calvert took twelve when she ledged out in Oxford last summer.”

“Not that many,” Rusty said. He knew Norrie, a mini-goth whose chief aspiration seemed to be killing herself on a skateboard before bearing her first woods colt. He pressed near the wound with the needle end of the syringe. “Feel that?”

“Yeah, dude, totally. Did you hear, like, a bang out there?” Benny pointed vaguely south as he sat on the examining table in his undershorts, bleeding onto the paper cover.

“Nope,” Rusty said. He had actually heard two: not bangs but, he was afraid, explosions. Had to make this fast. And where was The Wizard? Doing rounds, according to Ginny. Which probably meant snoozing in the Cathy Russell doctors’ lounge. It was where The Wonderful Wiz did most of his rounds these days.

“Feel it now?” Rusty poked again with the needle. “Don’t look, looking is cheating.”

“No, man, nothin. You’re goofin wit me.”

“I’m not. You’re numb.” In more ways than one, Rusty thought. “Okay, here we go. Lie back, relax, and enjoy flying Cathy Russell Airlines.” He scrubbed the wound with sterile saline, debrided, then trimmed with his trusty no. 10 scalpel. “Six stitches with my very best four-oh nylon.”

“Awesome,” the kid said. Then: “I think I may hurl.”

Rusty handed him an emesis basin, in these circumstances known as a puke pan. “Hurl in this. Faint and you’re on your own.”

Benny didn’t faint. He didn’t hurl, either. Rusty was placing a sterile gauze sponge on the wound when there was a perfunctory knock at the door, followed by Ginny Tomlinson’s head. “Can I speak to you for a minute?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Benny said. “I’m like, freely radical.” Cheeky little bugger.

“In the hall, Rusty?” Ginny said. She didn’t give the kid a glance.

“I’ll be right back, Benny. Sit there and take it easy.”

“Chillaxin’. No prob.”

Rusty followed Ginny out into the hall. “Ambulance time?” he asked. Beyond Ginny, in the sunny waiting room, Benny’s mother was looking grimly down at a paperback with a sweet-savage cover.

Ginny nodded. “119, at the Tarker’s town line. There’s another accident on the other town line—Motton—but I’m hearing everyone involved in that one is DATS.” Dead at the scene. “Truck-plane collision. The plane was trying to land.”

“Are you shitting me?”

Alva Drake looked around, frowning, then went back to her paperback. Or at least to looking at it while she tried to decide if her husband would support her in grounding Benny until he was eighteen.

“This is an authentic no-shit situation,” Ginny said. “I’m getting reports of other crashes, too—”

“Weird.”

“—but the guy out on the Tarker’s town line is still alive. Rolled a delivery truck, I believe. Buzz, cuz. Twitch is waiting.”

“You’ll finish the kid?”

“Yes. Go on, go.”

“Dr. Rayburn?”

“Had patients in Stephens Memorial.” This was the Norway–South Paris hospital. “He’s on his way, Rusty. Go.”

He paused on his way out to tell Mrs. Drake that Benny was fine. Alva did not seem overjoyed at the news, but thanked him. Dougie Twitchell—Twitch—was sitting on the bumper of the out-of-date ambulance Jim Rennie and his fellow selectmen kept not replacing, smoking a cigarette and taking some sun. He was holding a portable CB, and it was lively with talk: voices popping like corn and jumping all over each other.

“Put out that cancer-stick and let’s get rolling,” Rusty said. “You know where we’re going, right?”

Twitch flipped the butt away. Despite his nickname, he was the calmest nurse Rusty had ever encountered, and that was saying a lot. “I know what Gin-Gin told you—Tarker’s-Chester’s town line, right?”

“Yes. Overturned truck.”