Under the Dome

Was everyone else in The Mill having the same problems?

She should go out to the Motton town line and see for herself. If she couldn’t use her phone to buzz Pete Freeman, her best photographer, she could take some pix herself with what she called her Emergency Nikon. She had heard there was now some sort of quarantine zone in place on the Motton and Tarker’s Mills sides of the barrier—probably the other towns, as well—but surely she could get close on this side. They could warn her off, but if the barrier was as impermeable as she was hearing, warning would be the extent of it.

“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” she said. Absolutely true. If words could hurt her, Jim Rennie would have had her in ICU after the story she’d written about that joke audit the state had pulled three years ago. Certainly he’d blabbed aplenty-o about suing the paper, but blabbing was all it had been; she had even briefly considered an editorial on the subject, mostly because she had a terrific headline: SUPPOSED SUIT SLIPS FROM SIGHT.

So, yes, she had worries. They came with the job. What she wasn’t used to worrying about was her own behavior, and now, standing on the corner of Main and Comm, she was. Instead of turning left on Main, she looked back the way she had come. And spoke in the low murmur she usually reserved for Horace. “I shouldn’t have left that girl alone.”

Julia would not have done, if she’d come in her car. But she’d come on foot, and besides—Dodee had been so insistent. There had been a smell about her, too. Pot? Maybe. Not that Julia had any strong objections to that. She had smoked her own share over the years. And maybe it would calm the girl. Take the edge off her grief while it was sharpest and most likely to cut.

“Don’t worry about me,” Dodee had said, “I’ll find my dad. But first I have to dress.” And indicated the robe she was wearing.

“I’ll wait,” Julia had replied… although she didn’t want to wait. She had a long night ahead of her, beginning with her duty to her dog. Horace must be close to bursting by now, having missed his five o’clock walk, and he’d be hungry. When those things were taken care of, she really had to go out to what people were calling the barrier. See it for herself. Photograph whatever there was to be photographed.

Even that wouldn’t be the end. She’d have to see about putting out some sort of extra edition of the Democrat. It was important to her and she thought it might be important to the town. Of course, all this might be over tomorrow, but Julia had a feeling—partly in her head, partly in her heart—that it wouldn’t be.

And yet. Dodee Sanders should not have been left alone. She’d seemed to be holding herself together, but that might only have been shock and denial masquerading as calm. And the dope, of course. But she had been coherent.

“You don’t need to wait. I don’t want you to wait.”

“I don’t know if being alone right now is wise, dear.”

“I’ll go to Angie’s,” Dodee said, and seemed to brighten a little at the thought even as the tears continued to roll down her cheeks. “She’ll go with me to find Daddy.” She nodded. “Angie’s the one I want.”

In Julia’s opinion, the McCain girl had only marginally more sense than this one, who had inherited her mother’s looks but—unfortunately—her father’s brains. Angie was a friend, though, and if ever there was a friend in need who needed a friend indeed, it was Dodee Sanders tonight.

“I could go with you….” Not wanting to. Knowing that, even in her current state of fresh bereavement, the girl could probably see that.

“No. It’s only a few blocks.”

“Well…”

“Ms. Shumway… are you sure? Are you sure my mother—?”

Very reluctantly, Julia had nodded. She’d gotten confirmation of the airplane’s tail number from Ernie Calvert. She’d gotten something else from him as well, a thing that should more properly have gone to the police. Julia might have insisted that Ernie take it to them, but for the dismaying news that Duke Perkins was dead and that incompetent weasel Randolph was in charge.

What Ernie gave her was Claudette’s bloodstained driver’s license. It had been in Julia’s pocket as she stood on the Sanders stoop, and in her pocket it had stayed. She’d give it either to Andy or to this pale, mussy-haired girl when the right time came… but this was not the time.

“Thank you,” Dodee had said in a sadly formal tone of voice. “Now please go away. I don’t mean to be crappy about it, but—” She never finished the thought, only closed the door on it.

And what had Julia Shumway done? Obeyed the command of a grief-stricken twenty-year-old girl who might be too stoned to be fully responsible for herself. But there were other responsibilities tonight, hard as that was. Horace, for one. And the newspaper. People might make fun of Pete Freeman’s grainy black-and-white photos and the Democrat ’s exhaustive coverage of such local fetes as Mill Middle School’s Enchanted Night dance; they might claim its only practical use was as a cat-box liner—but they needed it, especially when something bad happened. Julia meant to see that they had it tomorrow, even if she had to stay up all night. Which, with both of her regular reporters out of town for the weekend, she probably would.

Julia found herself actually looking forward to this challenge, and Dodee Sanders’s woeful face began to slip from her mind.

3

Horace looked at her reproachfully when she came in, but there were no damp patches on the carpet and no little brown package under the chair in the hall—a magic spot he seemed to believe invisible to human eyes. She snapped his leash on, took him out, and waited patiently while he pissed by his favorite sewer, tottering as he did it; Horace was fifteen, old for a Corgi. While he went, she stared at the white bubble of light on the southern horizon. It looked to her like an image out of a Steven Spielberg science fiction movie. It was bigger than ever, and she could hear the whupapa-whuppa-whuppa of helicopters, faint but constant. She even saw one in silhouette, speeding across that tall arc of brilliance. How many Christing spotlights had they set up out there, anyway? It was as if North Motton had become an LZ in Iraq.

Horace was now walking in lazy circles, sniffing out the perfect place to finish tonight’s ritual of elimination, doing that ever-popular doggie dance, the Poop Walk. Julia took the opportunity to try her cell phone again. As had been the case all too often tonight, she got the normal series of peeping tones… and then nothing but silence.

I’ll have to Xerox the paper. Which means seven hundred and fifty copies, max.

The Democrat hadn’t printed its own paper for twenty years. Until 2002, Julia had taken each week’s dummy over to View Printing in Castle Rock, and now she didn’t even have to do that. She e- mailed the pages on Tuesday nights, and the finished papers, neatly bound in plastic, were delivered by View Printing before seven o’clock the next morning. To Julia, who’d grown up dealing with penciled corrections and typewritten copy that was “nailed” when it was finished, this seemed like magic. And, like all magic, slightly untrustworthy.

Tonight, the mistrust was justified. She might still be able to e-mail comps to View Printing, but no one would be able to deliver the finished papers in the morning. She guessed that by the morning, nobody would be able to get within five miles of The Mill’s borders. Any of its borders. Luckily for her, there was a nice big generator in the former print room, her photocopying machine was a monster, and she had over five hundred reams of paper stacked out back. If she could get Pete Freeman to help her… or Tony Guay, who covered sports…

Horace, meanwhile, had finally assumed the position. When he was done, she swung into action with a small green bag labeled Doggie Doo, wondering to herself what Horace Greeley would have thought of a world where picking up dogshit from the gutter was not just socially expected but a legal responsibility. She thought he might have shot himself.

Once the bag was filled and tied off, she tried her phone again.

Nothing.

She took Horace back inside and fed him.