Under the Dome: A Novel (115 page)

“I never told on those girls, although my father was furious and grounded me until June—I could go to school but nothing else. I was even forbidden the class trip to the Portland Museum of Art, which I’d been looking forward to all year. He told me I could go on the trip and have all my privileges restored if I named the kids who had ‘abused’ me. That was his word for it. I wouldn’t, though, and not just because dummying up is the kids’ version of the Apostles’ Creed.”

“You did it because somewhere deep inside, you thought you deserved what happened to you.”

“
Deserved
is the wrong word. I thought I’d bought and paid for it, which isn’t the same thing at all. My life changed after that. I kept on getting good grades, but I stopped raising my hand so much. I never quit grade-grinding, but I stopped grade-
grubbing.
I could have been valedictorian in high school, but I backed off during the
second semester of my senior year. Just enough to make sure Carlene Plummer would win instead of me. I didn’t want it. Not the speech, not the attention that went with the speech. I made some friends, the best ones in the smoking area behind the high school.

“The biggest change was going to school in Maine instead of at Princeton … where I was indeed accepted. My father raved and thundered about how no daughter of his was going to go to a land-grant cow college, but I stood firm.”

She smiled.

“
Pretty
firm. But compromise is love’s secret ingredient, and I loved my dad plenty. I loved them both. My plan had been to go to the University of Maine at Orono, but during the summer after my senior year, I made a last-minute application to Bates—what they call a Special Circumstances application—and was accepted. My father made me pay the late fee out of my own bank account, which I was glad to do, because there was finally a modicum of peace in the family after sixteen months of border warfare between the country of Controlling Parents and the smaller but well-fortified principality of Determined Teenager. I declared a journalism major, and that finished the job of healing the breach … which had really been there ever since that day on the bandstand. My parents just never knew why. I’m not here in The Mill because of that day—my future at the
Democrat
was pretty much foreordained—but I am who I am in large part because of that day.”

She looked up at him again, her eyes shining with tears and defiance. “I am not an ant, however. I am
not
an ant.”

He kissed her again. She wrapped her arms around him tightly and gave back as good as she got. And when his hand tugged her blouse from the waistband of her slacks and then slipped up across her midriff to cup her breast, she gave him her tongue. When they broke apart, she was breathing fast.

“Want to?” he asked.

“Yes. Do you?”

He took her hand and put it on his jeans, where how much he wanted to was immediately evident.

A minute later he was poised above her, resting on his elbows. She took him in hand to guide him in. “Take it easy on me, Colonel Barbara. I’ve kind of forgotten how this thing goes.”

“It’s like riding a bicycle,” Barbie said.

Turned out he was right.

15

When it was over, she lay with her head on his arm, looking up at the pink stars, and asked what he was thinking about.

He sighed. “The dreams. The visions. The whatever-they-are. Do you have your cell phone?”

“Always. And it’s holding its charge nicely, although for how much longer I couldn’t say. Who are you planning to call? Cox, I suppose.”

“You suppose correctly. Do you have his number in memory?”

“Yes.”

Julia reached over for her discarded pants and pulled the phone off her belt. She called COX and handed the phone to Barbie, who started talking almost at once. Cox must have answered on the first ring.

“Hello, Colonel. It’s Barbie. I’m out. I’m going to take a chance and tell you our location. It’s Black Ridge. The old McCoy orchard. Do you have that on your … you do. Of course you do. And you have satellite images of the town, right?”

He listened, then asked Cox if the images showed a horseshoe of light encircling the ridge and ending at the TR-90 border. Cox replied in the negative, and then, judging from the way Barbie was listening, asked for details.

“Not now,” Barbie said. “Right now I need you to do something for me, Jim, and the sooner the better. You’ll need a couple of Chinooks.”

He explained what he wanted. Cox listened, then replied.

“I can’t go into it right now,” Barbie said, “and it probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense if I did. Just take it from me that some
very dinky-dau shit is going on in here, and I believe that worse is on the way. Maybe not until Halloween, if we’re lucky. But I don’t think we’re going to be lucky.”

16

While Barbie was speaking with Colonel James Cox, Andy Sanders was sitting against the side of the supply building behind WCIK, looking up at the abnormal stars. He was high as a kite, happy as a clam, cool as a cucumber, other similes may apply. Yet there was a deep sadness—oddly tranquil, almost comforting—running beneath, like a powerful underground river. He had never had a premonition in his whole prosy, practical, workaday life. But he was having one now. This was his last night on earth. When the bitter men came, he and Chef Bushey would go. It was simple, and not really all that bad.

“I was in the bonus round, anyway,” he said. “Have been ever since I almost took those pills.”

“What’s that, Sanders?” Chef came strolling along the path from the rear of the station, shining a flashlight beam just ahead of his bare feet. The froggy pajama pants still clung precariously to the bony wings of his hips, but something new had been added: a large white cross. It was tied around his neck on a rawhide loop. Slung over his shoulder was GOD’S WARRIOR. Two grenades swung from the stock on another length of rawhide. In the hand not holding the flashlight, he carried the garage door opener.

“Nothing, Chef,” Andy said. “I was just talking to myself. Seems like I’m the only one who listens these days.”

“That’s bullshit, Sanders. Utter and complete bullshit-aroonie.
God
listens. He’s tapped into souls the way the FBI’s tapped into phones. I listen too.”

The beauty of this—and the comfort—made gratitude well up in Andy’s heart. He offered the bong. “Hit this shit. It’ll get your boiler lit.”

Chef uttered a hoarse laugh, took a deep drag on the glasspipe, held the smoke in, then coughed it out. “Bazoom!” he said. “God’s power! Power by the
hour,
Sanders!”

“Got that right,” Andy agreed. It was what Dodee always said, and at the thought of her, his heart broke all over again. He wiped his eyes absently. “Where did you get the cross?”

Chef pointed the flashlight toward the radio station. “Coggins has got an office in there. The cross was in his desk. The top drawer was locked, but I forced it open. You know what else was in there, Sanders? Some of the
skankiest
jerk-off material I have ever seen.”

“Kids?” Andy asked. He wouldn’t be surprised. When the devil got a preacher, he was apt to fall low, indeed. Low enough to put on a tophat and crawl under a rattlesnake.

“Worse, Sanders.” He lowered his voice. “Orientals.”

Chef picked up Andy’s AK-47, which had been lying across Andy’s thighs. He shone the light on the stock, where Andy had carefully printed CLAUDETTE with one of the radio station’s Magic Markers.

“My wife,” Andy said. “She was the first Dome casualty.”

Chef gripped him by the shoulder. “You’re a good man to remember her, Sanders. I’m glad God brought us together.”

“Me too.” Andy took back the bong. “Me too, Chef.”

“You know what’s apt to happen tomorrow, don’t you?”

Andy gripped CLAUDETTE’s stock. It was answer enough.

“They’ll most likely be wearing body armor, so if we have to go to war, aim for the head. No single-shot stuff; just hose em down. And if it looks like they’re going to overrun us … you know what comes next, right?”

“Right.”

“To the end, Sanders?” Chef raised the garage door opener in front of his face and shone the flashlight on it.

“To the end,” Andy agreed. He touched the door opener with CLAUDETTE’s muzzle.

17

Ollie Dinsmore snapped awake from a bad dream, knowing something was wrong. He lay in bed, looking at the wan and somehow dirty first light peeping through the window, trying to persuade himself that it was just the dream, some nasty nightmare he couldn’t quite recall. Fire and shouting was all he could remember.

Not shouting. Screaming.

His cheap alarm clock was ticking away on the little table beside his bed. He grabbed it. Quarter of six and no sound of his father moving around in the kitchen. More telling, no smell of coffee. His father was always up and dressed by five fifteen at the very latest (“Cows won’t wait” was Alden Dinsmore’s favorite scripture), and there was always coffee brewing by five thirty.

Not this morning.

Ollie got up and pulled on yesterday’s jeans. “Dad?”

No answer. Nothing but the tick of the clock, and—distant—the lowing of one disaffected bossy. Dread settled over the boy. He told himself there was no reason for it, that his family—all together and perfectly happy only a week ago—had sustained all the tragedies God would allow, at least for awhile. He told himself, but himself didn’t believe it.

“Daddy?”

The generator out back was still running and he could see the green digital readouts on both the stove and the microwave when he went into the kitchen, but the Mr. Coffee stood dark and empty. The living room was empty, too. His father had been watching TV when Ollie turned in last night, and it was still on, although muted. Some crooked-looking guy was demonstrating the new and improved ShamWow. “You’re spending forty bucks a month on paper towels and throwing your money away,” the crooked-looking guy said from that other world where such things might matter.

He’s out feeding the cows, that’s all.

Except wouldn’t he have turned off the TV to save electricity? They had a big tank of propane, but it would only last so long.

“Dad?”

Still no answer. Ollie crossed to the window and looked out at the barn. No one there. With increasing trepidation, he went down the back hall to his parents’ room, steeling himself to knock, but there was no need. The door was open. The big double bed was messy (his father’s eye for mess seemed to fall blind once he stepped out of the barn) but empty. Ollie started to turn away, then saw something that scared him. A wedding portrait of Alden and Shelley had hung on the wall in here for as long as Ollie could remember. Now it was gone, with only a brighter square of wallpaper to mark where it had been.

That’s nothing to be scared of.

But it was.

Ollie continued on down the hall. There was one more door, and this one, which had stood open for the last year, was now closed. Something yellow had been tacked to it. A note. Even before he was close enough to read it, Ollie recognized his father’s handwriting. He should have; there had been enough notes in that big scrawl waiting for him and Rory when they came home from school, and they always ended the same way.

Sweep the barn, then go play. Weed the tomatoes and beans, then go play. Take in your mother’s washing, and mind you don’t drag it in the mud. Then go play.

Playtime’s over,
Ollie thought dismally.

But then a hopeful thought occurred to him: maybe he was dreaming. Wasn’t it possible? After his brother’s death by ricochet and his mother’s suicide, why wouldn’t he dream of waking to an empty house?

The cow lowed again, and even that was like a sound heard in a dream.

The room behind the door with the note on it had been Grampy Tom’s. Suffering the slow misery of congestive heart failure, he had come to live with them when he could no longer do for himself. For
a while he’d been able to hobble as far as the kitchen to take meals with the family, but in the end he’d been bedridden, first with a plastic thingie jammed up his nose—it was called a candelabra, or something like that—and then with a plastic mask over his face most of the time. Rory once said he looked like the world’s oldest astronaut, and Mom had smacked his face for him.

At the end they had all taken turns changing his oxygen tanks, and one night Mom found him dead on the floor, as if he’d been trying to get up and had died of it. She screamed for Alden, who came, looked, listened to the old man’s chest, then turned off the oxy. Shelley Dinsmore began to cry. Since then, the room had mostly been closed.

Sorry
was what the note on the door said.
Go to town Ollie. The Morgans or Dentons or Rev Libby will take you in.

Ollie looked at the note for a long time, then turned the knob with a hand that didn’t seem to be his own, hoping it wouldn’t be messy.

It wasn’t. His father lay on Grampy’s bed with his hands laced together on his chest. His hair was combed the way he combed it when he was going to town. He was holding the wedding picture. One of Grampy’s old green oxygen tanks still stood in the corner; Alden had hung his Red Sox cap, the one that said WORLD SERIES CHAMPS, over the valve.

Ollie shook his father’s shoulder. He could smell booze, and for a few seconds hope (always stubborn, sometimes hateful) lived in his heart again. Maybe he was only drunk.

“Dad?
Daddy?
Wake up!”

Ollie could feel no breath against his cheek, and now saw that his father’s eyes weren’t completely closed; little crescents of white peeped out between the upper and lower lids. There was a smell of what his mother called eau de pee.

His father had combed his hair, but as he lay dying he had, like his late wife, pissed his pants. Ollie wondered if knowing that might happen would have stopped him.

He backed slowly away from the bed. Now that he wanted to feel
like he was having a bad dream, he didn’t. He was having a bad
reality,
and that was something from which you could not wake. His stomach clenched and a column of vile liquid rose up his throat. He ran for the bathroom, where he was confronted by a glare-eyed intruder. He almost screamed before recognizing himself in the mirror over the sink.