Under the Dome

“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