Under the Dome

reached the top, he groped in his pocket for the apartment key Andy Sanders had given him. At first he couldn’t find it and thought he might have lost it, but at last his fingers came upon it, hiding under some loose change.

He glanced around. A few people were still walking back from Dipper’s, but no one looked at him up here on the landing outside Barbie’s apartment. The key turned in the lock, and he slipped inside.

He didn’t turn on the lights, although Sanders’s generator was probably sending juice to the apartment. The dimness made the pulsing spot in front of his eye less visible. He looked around curiously. There were books: shelves and shelves of them. Had Baaarbie been planning on leaving them behind when he blew town? Or had he made arrangements—possibly with Petra Searles, who worked downstairs—to ship them someplace? If so, he’d probably made similar arrangements to ship the rug on the living room floor—some camel- jockey-looking artifact Barbie had probably picked up in the local bazaar when there were no suspects to waterboard or little boys to bugger.

He hadn’t made arrangements to have the stuff shipped, Junior decided. He hadn’t needed to, because he had never planned to leave at all. Once the idea occurred, Junior wondered why he hadn’t seen it before. Baaarbie liked it here; would never leave of his own free will. He was as happy as a maggot in dog-puke.

Find something he can’t talk away, Big Jim had instructed. Something that can only be his. Do you understand me?

What do you think I am, Dad, stupid? Junior thought now. If I’m stupid, how come it was me who saved your ass last night?

But his father had a mighty swing on him when he got his mad on, that much was undeniable. He had never slapped or spanked Junior as a child, something Junior had always attributed to his late mother’s ameliorating influence. Now he suspected it was because his father understood, deep in his heart, that once he started, he might not be able to stop.

“Like father, like son,” Junior said, and giggled. It hurt his head, but he giggled, anyway. What was that old saying about laughter being the best medicine?

He went into Barbie’s bedroom, saw the bed was neatly made, and thought briefly of how wonderful it would be to take a big shit right in the middle of it. Yes, and then wipe himself with the pillow-case. How would you like that, Baaarbie?

He went to the dresser instead. Three or four pairs of jeans in the top drawer, plus two pairs of khaki shorts. Under the shorts was a cell phone, and for a moment he thought that was what he wanted. But no. It was a discount store special; what the kids at college called a burner or a throw-away. Barbie could always say it wasn’t his.

There were half a dozen pairs of skivvies and another four or five pairs of plain white athletic socks in the second drawer. Nothing at all in the third drawer.

He looked under the bed, his head thudding and whamming—not better after all, it seemed. And nothing under there, not even dust-kitties. Baaarbie was a neatnik. Junior considered taking the Imitrex in his watch-pocket, but didn’t. He’d taken two already, with absolutely no effect except for the metallic aftertaste in the back of his throat. He knew what medicine he needed: the dark pantry on Prestile Street. And the company of his girlfriends.

Meantime, he was here. And there had to be something.

“Sumpin,” he whispered. “Gotta have a little sumpin-sumpin.”

He started back to the living room, wiping water from the corner of his throbbing left eye (not noticing it was tinged with blood), then stopped, struck by an idea. He returned to the dresser, opened the sock-and-underwear drawer again. The socks were balled. When he was in high school, Junior had sometimes hidden a little weed or a couple of uppers in his balled-up socks; once one of Adriette Nedeau’s thongs. Socks were a good hiding place. He took out the neatly made bundles one at a time, feeling them up.

He hit paydirt on the third ball, something that felt like a flat piece of metal. No, two of them. He unrolled the socks and shook the heavy one over the top of the dresser.

What fell out were Dale Barbara’s dog tags. And in spite of his terrible headache, Junior smiled.

In the frame, Baaarbie, he thought. You are in the fucking frame.

11

On the Tarker’s Mills side of Little Bitch Road, the fires set by the Fasthawk missiles were still raging, but would be out by dark; fire departments from four towns, augmented by a mixed detachment of Marine and Army grunts, were working on it, and gaining. It would have been out even sooner, Brenda Perkins judged, if the firefighters over there hadn’t had a brisk wind to contend with. On The Mill side, they’d had no such problem. It was a blessing today. Later on, it might be a curse. There was no way to know.

Brenda wasn’t going to let the question bother her this afternoon, because she felt good. If someone had asked her this morning when she thought she might feel good again, Brenda would have said, Maybe next year. Maybe never. And she was wise enough to know this feeling probably wouldn’t last. Ninety minutes of hard exercise had a lot to do with it; exercise released endorphins whether the exercise was jogging or pounding out brushfires with the flat of a spade. But this was more than endorphins. It was being in charge of a job that was important, one that she could do.

Other volunteers had come to the smoke. Fourteen men and three women stood on either side of Little Bitch, some still holding the spades and rubber mats they’d been using to put out the creeping flames, some with the Indian pumps they’d been wearing on their backs now unslung and sitting on the unpaved hardpack of the road. Al Timmons, Johnny Carver, and Nell Toomey were coiling hoses and tossing them into the back of the Burpee’s truck. Tommy Anderson from Dipper’s and Lissa Jamieson—a little New Age-y but also as strong as a horse—were carrying the sump pump they’d used to draw water from Little Bitch Creek to one of the other trucks. Brenda heard laughter, and realized she wasn’t the only one currently enjoying an endorphin rush.

The brush on both sides of the road was blackened and still smoldering, and several trees had gone up, but that was all. The Dome had blocked the wind and had helped them in another way, as well, partially damming the creek and turning the area on this side into a marsh-in-progress. The fire on the other side was a different story. The men fighting it over there were shimmering wraiths seen through the heat and the accumulating soot on the Dome.

Romeo Burpee sauntered up to her. He was holding a soaked broom in one hand and a rubber floormat in the other. The price tag was still clinging to the underside of the mat. The words on it were charred but readable: EVERY DAY IS SALE DAY AT BURPEE’S! He dropped it and stuck out a grimy hand.

Brenda was surprised but willing. She shook firmly. “What’s that for, Rommie?”

“For you doin one damn fine job out here,” he said.

She laughed, embarrassed but pleased. “Anybody could have done it, given the conditions. It was only a contact fire, and the ground’s so squelchy it probably would have put itself out by sunset.”

“Maybe,” he said, then pointed through the trees to a raggedy clearing with a tumbledown rock wall meandering across it. “Or maybe it would’ve gotten into that high grass, then the trees on the other side, and then Katy bar the door. It could have burned for a week or a month. Especially with no damn fire department.” He turned his head aside and spat. “Even widdout wind, a fire will burn if it gets a foothold. They got mine fires down south that have burned for twenty, thirty years. I read it in National Geographic. No wind underground. And how do we know a good wind won’t come up? We don’t know jack about what that thing does or don’t do.”

They both looked toward the Dome. The soot and ash had rendered it visible—sort of—to a height of almost a hundred feet. It had also dimmed their view of the Tarker’s side, and Brenda didn’t like that. It wasn’t anything she wanted to consider deeply, not when it might rob some of her good feelings about the afternoon’s work, but no—she didn’t like it at all. It made her think of last night’s weird, smeary sunset.

“Dale Barbara needs to call his friend in Washington,” she said. “Tell him when they get the fire out on their