Under the Dome

“What did he do to you?”

“Nothing!” she hissed. “Just check to make sure he’s gone, and if he is, we are getting the holy hell out of here.”

20

Piper Libby let go of the box and sat back, looking at the town with tears welling in her eyes. She was thinking of all those late-night prayers to The Not-There. Now she knew that had been nothing but a silly, sophomoric joke, and the joke, it turned out, was on her. There was a There there. It just wasn’t God.

“Did you see them?”

She started. Norrie Calvert was standing there. She looked thinner. Older, too, and Piper saw that she was going to be beautiful. To the boys she hung with, she probably already was.

“Yes, honey, I did.”

“Are Rusty and Barbie right? Are the people looking at us just kids?”

Piper thought, Maybe it takes one to know one.

“I’m not a hundred percent sure, honey. Try it for yourself.” Norrie looked at her. “Yeah?”

And Piper—not knowing if she was doing right or doing wrong—nodded. “Yeah.”

“If I get… I don’t know… weird or something, will you pull me back?”

“Yes. And you don’t have to if you don’t want to. It’s not a dare.”

But to Norrie it was. And she was curious. She knelt in the high grass and gripped the box firmly on either side. She was immediately galvanized. Her head snapped back so hard Piper heard the verte-brae in her neck crack like knuckles. She reached for the girl, then dropped her hand as Norrie relaxed. Her chin went to her breast-bone and her eyes, which had squeezed shut when the shock hit her, opened again. They were distant and hazy.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked. “Why?”

Piper’s arms broke out in gooseflesh.

“Tell me!” A tear fell from one of Norrie’s eyes and struck the top of the box, where it sizzled and then disappeared. “Tell me!”

Silence spun out. It seemed very long. Then the girl let go and rocked backward until her butt sat on her heels. “Kids.”

“For sure?”

“For sure. I couldn’t tell how many. It kept changing. They have leather hats on. They have bad mouths. They were wearing goggles and looking at their own box. Only theirs is like a television. They see everywhere, all over town.”

“How do you know?”

Norrie shook her head helplessly. “I can’t tell you, but I know it’s true. They’re bad kids with bad mouths. I never want to touch that box again. I feel so dirty. ” She began to cry.

Piper held her. “When you asked them why, what did they say?”

“Nothing.”

“Did they hear you, do you think?”

“They heard. They just didn’t care.”

From behind them came a steady beating sound, growing louder. Two transport helicopters were coming in from the north, almost skimming the TR-90 treetops.

“They better watch out for the Dome or they’ll crash like the airplane!” Norrie cried.

The copters did not crash. They reached the edge of safe airspace some two miles distant, then began to descend.

21

Cox had told Barbie of an old supply road that ran from the McCoy orchard to the TR-90 border, and said it still looked passable. Barbie, Rusty, Rommie, Julia, and Pete Freeman drove along it around seven thirty Friday morning. Barbie trusted Cox, but not necessarily pictures of an old truck-track snapped from two hundred miles up, so they’d taken the van Ernie Calvert had stolen from Big Jim Rennie’s lot. That one Barbie was perfectly willing to lose, if it got stuck. Pete was sans camera; his digital Nikon had ceased to work when he got close to the box.

“ETs don’t like the paparazzi, broha,” Barbie said. He thought it was a moderately funny line, but when it came to his camera, Pete had no sense of humor.

The ex–phone company van made it to the Dome, and now the five of them watched as the two huge CH- 47s waddled toward an overgrown hayfield on the TR-90 side. The road continued over there, and the Chinooks’ rotors churned dust up in great clouds. Barbie and the others shielded their eyes, but that was only instinct, and unnecessary; the dust billowed as far as the Dome and then rolled off to either side.

The choppers alit with the slow decorum of overweight ladies settling into theater seats a tad too small for their bottoms. Barbie heard the hellish screeee of metal on a protruding rock, and the copter to the left lumbered thirty yards sideways before trying again.

A figure jumped from the open bay of the first one and strode through the cloud of disturbed grit, waving it impatiently aside. Barbie would have known that no-nonsense little fireplug anywhere. Cox slowed as he approached, and put out one hand like a blindman feeling for obstructions in the dark. Then he was wiping away the dust on his side.

“It’s good to see you breathing free air, Colonel Barbara.”

“Yes, sir.”

Cox shifted his gaze. “Hello, Ms. Shumway. Hello, you other Friends of Barbara. I want to hear everything, but it will have to be quick—I’ve got a little dog-and-pony show going on across town, and I want to be there for it.”

Cox jerked a thumb over his shoulder where the unloading had already begun: dozens of Air Max fans with attached generators. They were big ones, Barbie saw with relief, the kind used for drying tennis courts and racetrack pit areas after heavy rains. Each was bolted to its own two-wheeled dolly-platform. The gennies looked twenty-horsepower at most. He hoped that would be enough.

“First, I want you to tell me those aren’t going to be necessary.”

“I don’t know for sure,” Barbie said, “but I’m afraid they might be. You may want to get some more on the 119 side, where the townspeople are meeting their relatives.”

“By tonight,” Cox said. “That’s the best we can do.”

“Take some of these,” Rusty said. “If we need them all, we’ll be in extremely deep shit, anyway.”

“Can’t happen, son. Maybe if we could cut across Chester’s Mill airspace, but if we could do that, there wouldn’t be a problem, would there? And putting a line of generator-powered industrial fans where the visitors are going to be kind of defeats the purpose. Nobody would be able to hear anything. Those babies are loud. ” He glanced at his watch. “Now how much can you tell me in fifteen minutes?”

HALLOWEEN COMES EARLY