Under the Dome

“Please, Linda.”

“Linda, may I sleep on your couch? I’d like to be here if they wake up in the night. If they don’t—I hope they don’t—I’d like them to see me when they come downstairs in the morning.”

“That’s fine. We’ll all have breakfast together. It’ll be cereal. The milk hasn’t turned yet, although it will soon.”

“That sounds good. After the kids eat, we’ll be out of your hair. Pardon me for saying this if you’re a homegirl, but I’ve had a bellyful of Chester’s Mill. I can’t secede from it entirely, but I intend to do the best I can. The only patient at the hospital in serious condition was Rennie’s son, and he checked himself out this afternoon. He’ll be back, that mess growing in his head will make him come back, but for now —”

“He’s dead.”

Thurston didn’t look particularly surprised. “A seizure, I suppose.”

“No. Shot. In the jail.”

“I’d like to say I’m sorry, but I’m not.”

“Neither am I,” Linda said. She didn’t know for sure what Junior had been doing there, but she had a good idea of how the grieving father would spin it.

“I’ll take the kids back to the pond where Caro and I were staying when this happened. It’s quiet there, and I’m sure I’ll be able to find enough comestibles to last for a while. Maybe quite a while. I may even find a place with a generator. But as far as community life goes”—he gave the words a satiric spin—“I’m quits. Alice and Aidan, too.”

“I might have a better place to go.”

“Really?” And when Linda said nothing, he stretched a hand across the table and touched hers. “You have to trust someone. It might as well be me.”

So Linda told him everything, including how they’d have to stop for lead roll behind Burpee’s before leaving town for Black Ridge. They talked until almost midnight.

10

The north end of the McCoy farmhouse was useless—thanks to the previous winter’s heavy snow, the roof was now in the parlor—but there was a country-style dining room almost as long as a railroad car on the west side, and it was there that the fugitives from Chester’s Mill gathered. Barbie first questioned Joe, Norrie, and Benny about what they had seen, or dreamed about, when they passed out on the edge of what they were now calling the glow-belt.

Joe remembered burning pumpkins. Norrie said everything had turned black, and the sun was gone. Benny at first claimed to remember nothing. Then he clapped a hand over his mouth. “There was screaming,” he said. “I heard screaming. It was bad.”

They considered this in silence. Then Ernie said, “Burnin punkins doesn’t narrow things down much, if that’s what you’re trying to do, Colonel Barbara. There’s probably a stack of em on the sunny side of every barn in town. It’s been a good season for em.” He paused. “At least it was.”

“Rusty, what about your girls?”

“Pretty much the same,” Rusty said, and told them what he could remember.

“Stop Halloween, stop the Great Pumpkin,” Rommie mused.

“Dudes, I’m seeing a pattern here,” Benny said.

“No shit, Sherlock,” Rose said, and they all laughed.

“Your turn, Rusty,” Barbie said. “How about when you passed out on your way up here?”

“I never exactly passed out,” Rusty said. “And all of this stuff could be explained by the pressure we’ve been under. Group hysteria—including group hallucinations—are common when people are under stress.”

“Thank you, Dr. Freud,” Barbie said. “Now tell us what you saw.”

Rusty got as far as the stovepipe hat with its patriotic stripes when Lissa Jamieson exclaimed, “That’s the dummy on the library lawn! He’s wearing an old tee-shirt of mine with a Warren Zevon quote on it—”

“‘Sweet home Alabama, play that dead band’s song,’” Rusty said. “And garden trowels for hands. Anyway, it caught on fire. Then, poof, it was gone. So was the lightheadedness.”

He looked around at them. Their wide eyes. “Relax, people, I probably saw the dummy before all this happened, and my subconscious just coughed it back up.” He leveled a finger at Barbie. “And if you call me Dr. Freud again, I’m apt to pop you one.”

“Did you see it before?” Piper asked. “Maybe when you went to pick up your girls at school, or something? Because the library’s right across from the playground.”

“Not that I remember, no.” Rusty didn’t add that he hadn’t picked up the girls at school since very early in the month, and he doubted that any of the town’s Halloween displays had been up then.

“Now you, Jackie,” Barbie said.

She wet her lips. “Is it really so important?”

“I think it is.”

“People burning,” she said. “And smoke, with fire shining through it whenever it shifted. The whole world seemed to be burning.”

“Yeah,” Benny said. “The people were screaming because they were on fire. Now I remember.” Abruptly he put his face against Alva Drake’s shoulder. She put her arm around him.

“Halloween’s still five days away,” Claire said.

Barbie said, “I don’t think so.”

11

The woodstove in the corner of the Town Hall conference room was dusty and neglected but still usable. Big Jim made sure the flue was open (it squeaked rustily), then removed Duke Perkins’s paperwork from the envelope with the bloody footprint on it. He thumbed through the sheets, grimaced at what he saw, then tossed them into the stove. The envelope he saved.

Carter was on the phone, talking to Stewart Bowie, telling him what Big Jim wanted for his son, telling him to get on it right away. A good boy, Big Jim thought. He may go far. As long as he remembers which side his bread’s buttered on, that is. People who forgot paid a price. Andrea Grinnell had found that out tonight.

There was a box of wooden matches on the shelf beside the stove. Big Jim scratched one alight and touched it to the corner of Duke Perkins’s “evidence.” He left the stove door open so he could watch it burn. It was very satisfying.

Carter walked over. “Stewart Bowie’s on hold. Should I tell him you’ll get back to him later?”

“Give it to me,” Big Jim said, and held out his hand for the phone.

Carter pointed at the envelope. “Don’t you want to throw that in, too?”

“No. I want you to stuff it with blank paper from the photocopy machine.”

It took a moment for Carter to get it. “She was just having a bunch of dope-ass hallucinations, wasn’t she?”

“Poor woman,” Big Jim agreed. “Go down to the fallout shelter, son. There.” He cocked his thumb at a door—unobtrusive except for an old metal plaque showing black triangles against a yellow field—not far from the woodstove. “There are two rooms. At the end of the second one there’s a small generator.”

“Okay…”

“In front of the gennie there’s a trapdoor. Hard to see, but you will if you look. Lift it and look inside. There should be eight or ten little canisters of LP snuggled down in there. At least there were the last time I looked. Check