Under the Dome

remember. But she had a gadget called a Mighty Brite light that her sister Rose had tucked into her Christmas stocking last year. She’d never had occasion to use it until now, but it worked just fine. You clamped it to your book and turned it on. Easy-peasy. So light wasn’t a problem. The words, unfortunately, were. The words kept squirming around on the page, sometimes even changing places with each other, and Nora Roberts’s prose, ordinarily crystal clear, made absolutely no sense. Yet Andrea kept trying, because she could think of nothing else to do.

The house stank, even with the windows open. She was suffering diarrhea and the toilet would no longer flush. She was hungry but couldn’t eat. She had tried a sandwich around five PM—just an inoffensive cheese sandwich—and had thrown it up in the kitchen wastebasket minutes after it was down. A shame, because eating that sandwich had been hard work. She was sweating heavily—had already changed her clothes once, probably should change them again, if she could manage to do it—and her feet kept jittering and jerking.

They don’t call it kicking the habit for nothing, she thought. And I’ll never make the emergency meeting tonight, if Jim still means to have one.

Considering how her last conversation with Big Jim and Andy Sanders had gone, maybe that was good; if she showed up, they’d just bully her some more. Make her do things she didn’t want to do. Best she stay away until she was clear of this… this…

“This shit, ” she said, and brushed her damp hair out of her eyes. “This fucking shit in my system.”

Once she was herself again, she would stand up to Jim Rennie. It was long overdue. She would do it in spite of her poor aching back, which was such a misery without her OxyContin (but not the white-hot agony she had expected—that was a welcome surprise). Rusty wanted her to take methadone. Methadone, for God’s sake! Heroin under an alias!

If you’re thinking about going cold turkey, don’t, he had told her. You’re apt to have seizures.

But he’d said it could take ten days his way, and she didn’t think she could wait that long. Not with this awful Dome over the town. Best to get it over with. Having come to this conclusion, she had flushed all of her pills—not just the methadone but a few last Oxy-Contin pills she’d found in the back of her nightstand drawer—down the toilet. That had been just two flushes before the toilet gave up the ghost, and now she sat here shivering and trying to convince herself she’d done the right thing.

It was the only thing, she thought. That kind of takes the right and wrong out of it.

She tried to turn the page of her book and her stupid hand struck the Mighty Brite gadget. It went tumbling to the floor. The spot of brilliance it threw went up to the ceiling. Andrea looked at it and was suddenly rising out of herself. And fast. It was like riding an invisible express elevator. She had just a moment to look down and see her body still on the couch, twitching helplessly. Foamy drool was slipping down her chin from her mouth. She saw the wetness spreading around the crotch of her jeans and thought, Yep—I’ll have to change again, all right. If I live through this, that is.

Then she passed through the ceiling, through the bedroom above it, through the attic with its dark stacked boxes and retired lamps, and from there out into the night. The Milky Way sprawled above her, but it was wrong. The Milky Way had turned pink.

And then began to fall.

Somewhere—far, far below her—Andrea heard the body she had left behind. It was screaming.

13

Barbie thought he and Julia would discuss what had happened to Piper Libby on their ride out of town, but they were mostly silent, lost in their own thoughts. Neither of them said they were relieved when the unnatural red sunset finally began to fade, but both of them were.

Julia tried the radio once, found nothing but WCIK booming out “All Prayed Up,” and snapped it off again.

Barbie spoke only once, this just after they turned off Route 119 and began to drive west along the narrower blacktop of the Motton Road, where woods bulked up close on either side. “Did I do the right thing?”

In Julia’s opinion he had done a great many right things during the confrontation in the Chief’s office— including the successful treatment of two patients with dislocations—but she knew what he was talking about.

“Yes. It was the exquisitely wrong time to try asserting command.”

He agreed, but felt tired and dispirited and not equal to the job he was beginning to see before him. “I’m sure the enemies of Hitler said pretty much the same thing. They said it in nineteen thirty-four, and they were right. In thirty-six, and they were right. Also in thirty-eight. ‘The wrong time to challenge him,’ they said. And when they realized the right time had finally come, they were protesting in Auschwitz or Buchenwald.”

“This is not the same,” she said.

“You think not?”

She made no reply to this, but saw his point. Hitler had been a paperhanger, or so the story went; Jim Rennie was a used car dealer. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.

Up ahead, fingers of brilliance shone through the trees. They printed an intaglio of shadows on the patched tar of Motton Road.

There were a number of military trucks parked on the other side of the Dome—it was Harlow over there at this edge of town—and thirty or forty soldiers moved hither and yon with a purpose. All had gas masks hooked to their belts. A silver tanker-truck bearing the legend EXTREME DANGER KEEP BACK had been backed up until it almost touched a door-size shape that had been spray-painted on the Dome’s surface. A plastic hose was clamped to a valve on the back of tanker. Two men were handling the hose, which ended in a wand no bigger than the barrel of a Bic pen. These men were wearing shiny all-over suits and helmets. There were air tanks on their backs.

On the Chester’s Mill side, there was only one spectator. Lissa Jamieson, the town librarian, stood beside an old-fashioned ladies’ Schwinn with a milk-box carrier on the rear fender. On the back of the box was a sticker reading WHEN THE POWER OF LOVE IS STRONGER THAN THE LOVE OF POWER, THE WORLD WILL KNOW PEACE—JIMI HENDRIX.

“What are you doing here, Lissa?” Julia asked, getting out of her car. She held up a hand to shield her eyes from the bright lights.

Lissa was nervously fiddling with the ankh she wore around her neck on a silver chain. She looked from Julia to Barbie, then back to Julia again. “I go for a ride on my bike when I’m upset or worried. Sometimes I ride until midnight. It soothes my pneuma. I saw the lights and came to the lights.” She said this in an incantatory way, and let go of her ankh long enough to trace some kind of complicated symbol in the air. “What are you doing out here?”

“Came to watch an experiment,” Barbie said. “If it works, you can be the first one to leave Chester’s Mill.”

Lissa smiled. It looked a little forced, but Barbie liked her for the effort. “If I did that, I’d miss the Tuesday night special at Sweetbriar. Isn’t it usually meatloaf?”

“Meatloaf’s the plan,” he agreed, not adding that if the Dome was still in place the following Tuesday, the specialite de la maison was apt to be zucchini quiche.

“They won’t talk,” Lissa said. “I tried.”

A squat fireplug of a man came out from behind the tanker and into the light. He was dressed in khakis, a poplin jacket, and a hat with the logo of the Maine Black Bears on it. The first thing to strike Barbie was that James O. Cox had put on weight. The second was his heavy jacket, zipped to what was now dangerously close to a double chin. Nobody else—Barbie, Julia, or Lissa—was wearing a jacket. There was no need of them on their side of the Dome.

Cox saluted. Barbie gave it back, and it actually felt pretty good to snap one off.

“Hello, Barbie,” Cox said. “How’s Ken?”

“Ken’s fine,” Barbie said. “And I continue to be the bitch that gets all the good shit.”