Under the Dome

even the harder-to-get Mustang! Folks, I’m sitting on not one or two but three Mustangs that are like new, one the famous V6 convertible, and each comes with the famous Jim Rennie Christian Guarantee. We service what we sell, we finance, and we do it all at low low prices. And right now”—he chuckled more ruefully than ever—“we’ve just GOT to clear this LOT! So come on down! The coffeepot’s always on, neighbor, and you’ll love the feelin when Big Jim’s dealin!”

A door neither woman had noticed eased open at the back of the studio. Inside were more blinking lights—a galaxy of them. The room was little more than a cubby choked with wires, splitters, routers, and electronic boxes. You would have said there was no room for a man. But The Chef was beyond skinny; he was emaciated. His eyes were only glitters sunk deep in his skull. His skin was pale and blotchy. His lips folded loosely inward over gums that had lost most of their teeth. His shirt and pants were filthy, and his hips were naked wings; Chef’s underwear days were now just a memory. It is doubtful that Sammy Bushey would have recognized her missing husband. He had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in one hand (he could only eat soft things now) and a Glock 9 in the other.

He went to the window overlooking the parking lot, thinking he’d rush out and kill the intruders if they were still there; he had almost done it while they were inside. Only he’d been afraid. Because demons couldn’t actually be killed. When their human bodies died, they just flew into another host. When they were between bodies, the demons looked like blackbirds. Chef had seen this in vivid dreams that came on the increasingly rare occasions when he slept.

They were gone, however. His atman had been too strong for them.

Rennie had told him he had to shut down out back, and Chef Bushey had, but he might have to start up some of the cookers again, because there had been a big shipment to Boston a week ago and he was almost out of product. He needed smoke. It was what his atman fed on these days.

But for now he had enough. He had given up on the blues music that had been so important to him in his Phil Bushey stage of life—B. B. King, Koko and Hound Dog Taylor, Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf, even the immortal Little Walter—and he had given up on fucking; he had even pretty much given up on moving his bowels, had been constipated since July. But that was okay. What humiliated the body fed the atman.

He checked the parking lot and the road beyond once more to make sure the demons weren’t lurking, then tucked the automatic into his belt at the small of his back and headed for the storage shed, which was actually more of a factory these days. A factory that was shut down, but he could and would fix that if necessary.

Chef went to get his pipe.

9

Rusty Everett stood looking into the storage shed behind the hospital. He was using a flashlight, because he and Ginny Tomlinson—now the administrative head of medical services in Chester’s Mill, crazy as that was—had decided to kill the power to every part of the plant that didn’t absolutely need it. From his left, in its own shed, he could hear the big generator roaring away, eating ever deeper into the current long tank of propane.

Most of the tanks are gone, Twitch had said, and by God, they were. According to the card on the door, there’s supposed to be seven, but there’s only two. On that, Twitch was wrong. There was only one. Rusty ran the beam of his flashlight over the blue CR HOSP stenciled on the tank’s silver side below the supply company’s Dead River logo.

“Told you,” Twitch said from behind him, making Rusty jump.

“You told me wrong. There’s only one.”

“Bullshit!” Twitch stepped into the doorway. Looked while Rusty shone the beam around, highlighting boxes of supplies surrounding a large—and largely empty—center area. Said: “It’s not bullshit.”

“No.”

“Fearless leader, someone is stealing our propane.”

Rusty didn’t want to believe this, but saw no way around it.

Twitch squatted down. “Look here.”

Rusty dropped to one knee. The quarter-acre behind the hospital had been asphalted the previous summer, and without any cold weather to crack or buckle it—not yet, anyway—the area was a smooth black sheet. It made it easy to see the tire tracks in front of the shed’s sliding doors.

“That looks like it could have been a town truck,” Twitch remarked.

“Or any other big truck.”

“Nevertheless, you might want to check the storage shed behind the Town Hall. Twitch no trust-um Big Chief Rennie. Him bad medicine.”

“Why would he take our propane? The Selectmen have plenty of their own.”

They walked to the door leading into the hospital’s laundry—also shut down, at least for the time being. There was a bench beside the door. A sign posted on the bricks read SMOKING HERE WILL BE BANNED AS OF JANUARY 1^ST. QUIT NOW AND AVOID THE RUSH!

Twitch took out his Marlboros and offered them to Rusty. Rusty waved them away, then reconsidered and took one. Twitch lit them up. “How do you know?” he asked.

“How do I know what?”

“That they’ve got plenty of their own. Have you checked?”

“No,” Rusty said. “But if they were going to poach, why from us? Not only is stealing from the local hospital usually considered bad form by the better class of people, the post office is practically right next door. They must have some.”

“Maybe Rennie and his friends already snatched the post office’s gas. How much would they have, anyway? One tank? Two? Peanuts.”

“I don’t understand why they’d need any. It makes no sense.”

“Nothing about any of this makes sense,” Twitch said, and yawned so hugely that Rusty could hear his jaws creak.

“You finished rounds, I take it?” Rusty had a moment to consider the surreal quality of that question. Since Haskell’s death, Rusty had become the hospital’s head doc, and Twitch—a nurse just three days ago—was now what Rusty had been: a physician’s assistant.

“Yep.” Twitch sighed. “Mr. Carty isn’t going to live out the day.”

Rusty had thought the same thing about Ed Carty, who was suffering from end-stage stomach cancer, a week ago, and the man was still hanging in. “Comatose?”

“Roger that, sensei.”

Twitch was able to count their other patients off on the digits of one hand—which, Rusty knew, was extraordinarily lucky. He thought he might even have felt lucky, if he hadn’t been so tired and worried.

“George Werner I’d call stable.”

Werner, an Eastchester resident, sixty years old and obese, had suffered a myocardial infarction on Dome Day. Rusty thought he would pull through… this time.

“As for Emily Whitehouse…” Twitch shrugged. “It ain’t good, sensei.”

Emmy Whitehouse, forty years old and not even an ounce over-weight, had suffered her own MI an hour or so after Rory Dinsmore’s accident. It had been much worse than George Werner’s because she’d been an exercise freak and had suffered what Doc Haskell had called “a health-club blowout.”

“The Freeman girl is getting better, Jimmy Sirois is holding up, and Nora Coveland is totally cool. Out after lunch. On the whole, not so bad.”

“No,” Rusty said, “but it’ll get worse. I guarantee you. And… if you suffered a catastrophic head injury, would you want me to operate on you?”

“Not really,” Twitch said. “I keep hoping Gregory House will show up.”

Rusty butted his cigarette in the can and looked at the nearly empty supply shed. Maybe he should have a peek into the storage facility behind the Town Hall—what could it hurt?

This time he was the one who yawned.