Under the Dome

run for Selectman in the first place. “Don’t you yell at me, Jim Rennie. I’ve known you since you were cutting out Sears catalogue pictures in the first grade and pasting them on construction paper, so don’t you yell.”

“Oh gosh, she’s offended. ” The fierce smile now spread from ear to ear, lifting his upper face into an unsettling mask of jollity. “Isn’t that too cotton-picking bad. But it’s late and I’m tired and I’ve handed out about all the sweet syrup I can manage for one day. So you listen to me now, and don’t make me repeat myself.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s eleven thirty-five, and I want to be home by midnight.”

“I don’t understand what you want of me!”

He rolled his eyes as if he couldn’t believe her stupidity. “In a nutshell? I want to know you’re going to be on my side—mine and Andy’s—if this harebrained missile idea doesn’t work. Not with some dishwashing johnny-come- lately.”

She squared up her shoulders and let go of her back. She managed to meet his eyes, but her lips were trembling. “And if I think Colonel Barbara—Mr. Barbara, if you prefer—is better qualified to manage things in a crisis situation?”

“Well, I have to go with Jiminy Cricket on that one,” Big Jim said. “Let your conscience be your guide.” His voice had dropped to a murmur that was more frightening than his shout had been. “But there’s those pills you take. Those OxyContins.”

Andrea felt her skin go cold. “What about them?”

“Andy’s got a pretty good supply put aside for you, but if you were to back the wrong horse in this-here race, those pills just might disappear. Isn’t that right, Andy?”

Andy had begun washing out the coffeemaker. He looked unhappy and he wouldn’t meet Andrea’s brimming eyes, but there was no hesitation in his reply. “Yes,” he said. “In a case like that, I might have to turn them down the pharmacist’s toilet. Dangerous to have drugs like that around with the town cut off and all.”

“You can’t do that!” she cried. “I have a prescription!”

Big Jim said kindly, “The only prescription you need is sticking with the people who know this town best, Andrea. For the present, it’s the only kind of prescription that will do you any good.”

“Jim, I need my pills.” She heard the whine in her voice—so much like her mother’s during the last bad years when she’d been bedridden—and hated it. “I need them!”

“I know,” Big Jim said. “God has burdened you with a great deal of pain.” Not to mention a big old monkey on your back, he thought.

“Just do the right thing,” Andy said. His dark-circled eyes were sad and earnest. “Jim knows what’s best for the town; always has. We don’t need some outsider telling us our business.”

“If I do, will I keep getting my pain pills?”

Andy’s face lit in a smile. “You betcha! I might even take it on myself to up the dosage a little. Say a hundred milligrams more a day? Couldn’t you use it? You look awfully uncomfortable.”

“I suppose I could use a little more,” Andrea said dully. She lowered her head. She hadn’t taken a drink, not even a glass of wine, since the night of the Senior Prom when she’d gotten so sick, had never smoked a joint, had never even seen cocaine except on TV. She was a good person. A very good person. So how had she gotten into a box like this? By falling while she was going to get the mail? Was that all it took to turn someone into a drug addict? If so, how unfair. How horrible. “But only forty milligrams. Forty more would be enough, I think.”

“Are you sure?” Big Jim asked.

She didn’t feel sure at all. That was the devil of it.

“Maybe eighty,” she said, and wiped the tears from her face. And, in a whisper: “You’re blackmailing me.”

The whisper was low, but Big Jim heard it. He reached for her. Andrea flinched, but Big Jim only took her hand. Gently.

“No,” he said. “That would be a sin. We’re helping you. And all we want in return is for you to help us.”

10

There was a thud.

It brought Sammy wide awake in bed even though she’d smoked half a doob and drunk three of Phil’s beers before falling out at ten o’clock. She always kept a couple of sixes in the fridge and still thought of them as “Phil’s beers,” although he’d been gone since April. She’d heard rumors that he was still in town, but discounted them. Surely if he was still around, she would have seen him sometime during the last six months, wouldn’t she? It was a small town, just like that song said.

Thud!

That got her bolt upright, and listening for Little Walter’s wail. It didn’t come and she thought, Oh God, that damn crib fell apart! And if he can’t even cry—

She threw the covers back and ran for the door. She smacked into the wall to the left of it, instead. Almost fell down. Damn dark! Damn power company! Damn Phil, going off and leaving her like this, with no one to stick up for her when guys like Frank DeLesseps were mean to her and scared her and—

Thud!

She felt along the top of the dresser and found the flashlight. She turned it on and hurried out the door. She started to turn left, into the bedroom where Little Walter slept, but the thud came again. Not from the left, but from straight ahead, across the cluttered living room. Someone was at the trailer’s front door. And now there came muffled laughter. Whoever it was sounded like they had their drink on.

She strode across the room, the tee-shirt she slept in rippling around her chubby thighs (she’d put on a little weight since Phil left, about fifty pounds, but when this Dome shit was over she intended to get on NutriSystem, return to her high school weight) and threw open the door.

Flashlights—four of them, and high-powered—hit her in the face. From behind them came more laughter. One of those laughs was more of a nyuck-nyuck-nyuck, like Curly in the Three Stooges. She recognized that one, having heard it all through high school: Mel Searles.

“Look at you!” Mel said. “All dressed up and no one to blow.”

More laughter. Sammy raised an arm to shield her eyes, but it did no good; the people behind the flashlights were just shapes. But one of the laughers sounded female. That was probably good.

“Turn off those lights before I go blind! And shut up, you’ll wake the baby!”

More laughter, louder than ever, but three of the four lights went out. She trained her own flashlight out the door, and wasn’t comforted by what she saw: Frankie DeLesseps and Mel Searles flanking Carter Thibodeau and Georgia Roux. Georgia, the girl who’d put her foot on Sammy’s tit that afternoon and called her a dyke. A female, but not a safe female.

They were wearing their badges. And they were indeed drunk.

“What do you want? It’s late.”

“Want some dope,” Georgia said. “You sell it, so sell some to us.”

“I want to get high as apple pie in a red dirt sky,” Mel said, and then laughed: Nyuck-nyuck- nyuck.

“I don’t have any,” Sammy said.

“Bullshit, the place reeks of it,” Carter said. “Sell us some. Don’t be a bitch.”

“Yeah,” Georgia said. In the light of Sammy’s flash, her eyes had a silvery glitter. “Never mind that we’re cops.”

They all roared at this. They would wake the baby for sure.

“No!” Sammy tried to shut the door. Thibodeau pushed it open again. He did it with just the flat of his hand —easy as could be—but Sammy went stumbling backward. She tripped over Little Walter’s goddam choo-choo and went down on her ass for the second time that day. Her tee-shirt flew up.

“Ooo, pink underwear, are you expecting one of your girlfriends?” Georgia asked, and they all roared again. The flashlights that had gone out now came back on, spotlighting her.

Sammy yanked the tee-shirt down almost hard enough to rip the neck. Then she got unsteadily to her feet,