Under the Dome: A Novel (21 page)

Janelle wasn’t asleep. Nor was she awake. Rusty understood everything the moment the two flashlight beams converged on her, and cursed himself for not realizing earlier what was happening, what must have been happening since August or maybe even July. Because the behavior Audrey had been exhibiting—the Whining Thing—was well documented. He just hadn’t seen the truth when it was staring him in the face.

Janelle, eyes open but showing only whites, wasn’t convulsing—thank God for that—but she was trembling all over. She had pushed the covers down with her feet, probably at onset, and in the double flashlight beams he could see a damp patch on her pajama bottoms. Her fingertips wiggled, as if she were loosening up to play the piano.

Audrey sat by the bed, looking up at her little mistress with rapt attention.

“What’s happening to her?”
Linda screamed.

In the other bed Judy stirred and spoke. “Mumma? Is it brefkus? Did I miss the bus?”

“She’s having a seizure,” Rusty said.

“Well help her!”
Linda cried.
“Do something! Is she dying?”

“No,” Rusty said. The part of his brain that remained analytical knew this was almost certainly just petit mal—as the others must
have been, or they would have known about this already. But it was different when it was one of your own.

Judy sat bolt upright in bed, spilling stuffed animals everywhere. Her eyes were wide and terrified, nor was she much comforted when Linda tore the child out of bed and clasped her in her arms.

“Make her stop! Make her stop, Rusty!”

If it was petit mal, it would stop on its own.

Please God let it stop on its own,
he thought.

He placed his palms on the sides of Jan’s trembling, thrumming head and tried to rotate it upward, wanting to make sure her airway remained clear. At first he wasn’t able to—the goddam foam pillow was fighting him. He tossed it on the floor. It struck Audrey on the way down, but she didn’t so much as flinch, only maintained her rapt gaze.

Rusty was now able to cock Jannie’s head back a little, and he could hear her breathing. It wasn’t rapid; there was no harsh tearing for oxygen, either.

“Mommy, what’s the matter with Jan-Jan?” Judy asked, beginning to cry. “Is she mad? Is she sick?”

“Not mad and only a little sick,” Rusty was astounded at how calm he sounded. “Why don’t you let Mommy take you down to our—”

“No!”
they cried together, in perfect two-part harmony.

“Okay,” he said, “but you have to be quiet. Don’t scare her when she wakes up, because she’s apt to be scared already.

“A
little
scared,” he amended. “Audi, good girl. That’s a very
very
good girl.”

Such compliments usually sent Audrey into paroxysms of joy, but not tonight. She didn’t even wag her tail. Then, suddenly, the golden gave a small woof and lay down, dropping her muzzle onto one paw. Seconds later, Jan’s trembling ceased and her eyes closed.

“I’ll be damned,” Rusty said.

“What?” Linda was now sitting on the edge of Judy’s bed with Judy on her lap.
“What?”

“It’s over,” Rusty said.

But it wasn’t. Not quite. When Jannie opened her eyes again, they were back where they belonged, but they weren’t seeing him.

“The Great Pumpkin!” Janelle cried. “It’s the Great Pumpkin’s fault! You have to stop the Great Pumpkin!”

Rusty gave her a gentle shake. “You were having a dream, Jannie. A bad one, I guess. But it’s over and you’re all right.”

For a moment she still wasn’t completely there, although her eyes shifted and he knew she was seeing and hearing him now. “Stop Halloween, Daddy! You have to stop Halloween!”

“Okay, honey, I will. Halloween’s off. Completely.”

She blinked, then raised one hand to brush her clumped and sweaty hair off her forehead. “What?
Why?
I was going to be Princess Leia! Does everything have to go wrong with my life?” She began to cry.

Linda came over—Judy scurrying behind and holding onto the skirt of her mother’s robe—and took Janelle in her arms. “You can still be Princess Leia, honeylove, I promise.”

Jan was looking at her parents with puzzlement, suspicion, and growing fright. “What are you
doing
in here? And why is
she
up?” Pointing to Judy.

“You peed in your bed,” Judy said smugly, and when Jan realized—realized and started to cry harder—Rusty felt like smacking Judy a good one. He usually felt like a pretty enlightened parent (especially compared to those he sometimes saw creeping into the Health Center with their arm-broke or eye-blackened children), but not tonight.

“It doesn’t matter,” Rusty said, hugging Jan close. “It wasn’t your fault. You had a little problem, but it’s over now.”

“Does she have to go to the hospital?” Linda asked.

“Only to the Health Center, and not tonight. Tomorrow morning. I’ll get her fixed up with the right medicine then.”

“NO SHOTS!”
Jannie screamed, and began to cry harder than ever. Rusty loved the sound of it. It was a healthy sound. Strong.

“No shots, sweetheart. Pills.”

“Are you sure?” Lin asked.

Rusty looked at their dog, now lying peacefully with her snout on her paw, oblivious of all the drama.

“
Audrey
’s sure,” he said. “But she ought to sleep in here with the girls for tonight.”

“Yay!” Judy cried. She fell to her knees and hugged Audi extravagantly.

Rusty put an arm around his wife. She laid her head on his shoulder as if too weary to hold it up any longer.

“Why now?” she asked. “Why
now
?”

“I don’t know. Just be grateful it was only petit mal.”

On that score, his prayer had been answered.

1

Scarecrow Joe wasn’t up early; he was up late. All night, in fact.

This would be Joseph McClatchey, age thirteen, also known as King of the Geeks and Skeletor, residing at 19 Mill Street. Standing six-two and weighing one-fifty, he was indeed skeletal. And he was a bona fide brain. Joe remained in the eighth grade only because his parents were adamantly opposed to the practice of “skipping forward.”

Joe didn’t mind. His friends (he had a surprising number for a scrawny thirteen-year-old genius) were there. Also, the work was a tit and there were plenty of computers to goof with; in Maine, every middle school kid got one. Some of the better websites were blocked, of course, but it hadn’t taken Joe long to conquer such minor annoyances. He was happy to share the information with his homies, two of whom were those dauntless board-benders Norrie Calvert and Benny Drake. (Benny particularly enjoyed surfing the Blondes in White Panties site during his daily library period.) This sharing no doubt explained some of Joe’s popularity, but not all; kids just thought he was cool. The bumper sticker plastered on his backpack probably came closest to explaining why. It read
FIGHT THE POWERS THAT BE.

Joe was a straight-A student, a dependable and sometimes brilliant basketball center on the middle school team (varsity as a seventh-grader!), and a foxy-good soccer player. He could tickle the piano keys, and two years previous had won second prize in the
annual Town Christmas Talent Competition with a hilariously laid-back dance routine to Gretchen Wilson’s “Redneck Woman.” It had the adults in attendance applauding and screaming with laughter. Lissa Jamieson, the town’s head librarian, said he could make a living doing that if he wanted to, but growing up to be Napoleon Dynamite was not Joe’s ambition.

“The fix was in,” Sam McClatchey had said, gloomily fingering his son’s second-place medal. It was probably true; the winner that year had been Dougie Twitchell, who happened to be the Third Select-man’s brother. Twitch had juggled half a dozen Indian clubs while singing “Moon River.”

Joe didn’t care if the fix was in or not. He had lost interest in dancing the way he lost interest in most things once he had to some degree mastered them. Even his love of basketball, which as a fifth-grader he had assumed to be eternal, was fading.

Only his passion for the Internet, that electronic galaxy of endless possibilities, did not seem to pall for him.

His ambition, unexpressed even to his parents, was to become President of the United States.
Maybe,
he sometimes thought,
I’ll do the
Napoleon Dynamite
thing at my inaugural. That shit would be on YouTube for eternity.

Joe spent the entire first night the Dome was in place on the Internet. The McClatcheys had no generator, but Joe’s laptop was juiced and ready to go. Also, he had half a dozen spare batteries. He had urged the other seven or eight kids in his informal computer club to also keep spares on hand, and he knew where there were more if they were needed. They might not be; the school had a kick-ass generator, and he thought he could recharge there with no trouble. Even if Mill Middle went into lockdown, Mr. Allnut, the janitor, would no doubt hook him up; Mr. Allnut was also a fan of blondesinwhitepanties.com. Not to mention country music downloads, which Scarecrow Joe saw he got for free.

Joe all but wore out his Wi-Fi connection that first night, going from blog to blog with the jitter-jive agility of a toad hopping on hot rocks. Each blog was more dire than the last. The facts were thin,
the conspiracy theories lush. Joe agreed with his dad and mom, who called the weirder conspiracy theorists who lived on (and for) the Internet “the tinfoil-hat folks,” but he was also a believer in the idea that, if you were seeing a lot of horseshit, there had to be a pony in the vicinity.

As Dome Day became Day Two, all the blogs were suggesting the same thing: the pony in this case was not terrorists, invaders from space, or Great Cthulhu, but the good old military-industrial complex. The specifics varied from site to site, but three basic theories ran through all of them. One was that the Dome was some sort of heartless experiment, with the people of Chester’s Mill serving as guinea pigs. Another was that it was an experiment that had gone wrong and out of control (“Exactly like in that movie
The Mist,
” one blogger wrote). A third was that it wasn’t an experiment at all, but a coldly created pretext to justify war with America’s stated enemies. “And WE’LL WIN!” ToldjaSo87 wrote. “Because with this new weapon, WHO CAN STAND AGAINST US? My friends, WE HAVE BECOME THE NEW ENGLAND PATRIOTS OF NATIONS!!!!”

Joe didn’t know which if any of these theories was the truth. He didn’t really care. What he cared about was the expressed common denominator, which was the government.

It was time for a demonstration, which he of course would lead. Not in town, either, but out on Route 119, where they could stick it directly to The Man. It might only be Joe’s guys at first, but it would grow. He had no doubt of that. The Man was probably still keeping the press corps away, but even at thirteen, Joe was wise enough to know that didn’t necessarily matter. Because there were
people
inside those uniforms, and thinking brains behind at least some of those expressionless faces. The military presence as a whole might constitute The Man, but there would be individuals hiding in the whole, and some of them would be secret bloggers. They’d get the word out, and some would probably accompany their reports with camera-phone pictures: Joe McClatchey and his friends carrying signs reading END THE SECRECY, STOP THE EXPERIMENT, FREE CHESTER’S MILL, etc., etc.

“Need to post signs around town, too,” he murmured. But that would be no problem. All of his guys had printers. And bikes.

Scarecrow Joe began sending e-mails by the dawn’s early light. Soon he’d make the rounds on his own bike, and enlist Benny Drake to help him. Maybe Norrie Calvert, too. Ordinarily the members of Joe’s posse were late weekend risers, but Joe thought everyone in town would be up early this morning. No doubt The Man would shut down the Internet soon, as He had the phones, but for now it was Joe’s weapon, the weapon of the people.

It was time to fight the power.

2

“Fellas, raise your hands,” Peter Randolph said. He was tired and baggy-eyed as he stood in front of his new recruits, but he also felt a certain grim happiness. The green Chief’s car was parked in the motor pool parking lot, freshly gassed and ready to go. It was his now.

The new recruits—Randolph intended to call them Special Deputies in his formal report to the Selectmen—obediently raised their hands. There were actually five of them, and one was not a fella but a stocky young woman named Georgia Roux. She was an unemployed hairdresser and Carter Thibodeau’s girlfriend. Junior had suggested to his father that they probably ought to add a female just to keep everybody happy, and Big Jim had concurred at once. Randolph initially resisted the idea, but when Big Jim favored the new Chief with his fiercest smile, Randolph had given in.

And, he had to admit as he administered the oath (with some of his regular force looking on), they certainly looked tough enough. Junior had lost some pounds over the previous summer and was nowhere near his weight as a high school offensive linemen, but he still had to go one-ninety, and the others, even the girl, were authentic bruisers.

They stood repeating the words after him, phrase for phrase: Junior on the far left, next to his friend Frankie DeLesseps; then Thibodeau
and the Roux girl; Melvin Searles on the end. Searles was wearing a vacant going-to-the-county-fair grin. Randolph would have wiped
that
shit off his face in a hurry if he’d had three weeks to train these kids (hell, even one), but he didn’t.

The only thing on which he
hadn’t
caved to Big Jim was the issue of sidearms. Rennie had argued for them, insisting that these were “levelheaded, Godfearing young people,” and saying he’d be glad to provide them himself, if necessary.

Randolph had shaken his head. “The situation’s too volatile. Let’s see how they do first.”

“If one of them gets hurt while you’re seeing how they do—”

“Nobody’s gonna get hurt, Big Jim,” Randolph said, hoping he was right. “This is Chester’s Mill. If it was New York City, things might be different.”