Under the Dome: A Novel (78 page)

He peeped in the lounge and saw the nurse with the busted schnozz and the pretty little nurse’s aide—Harriet, her name was—asleep on the cots that had been dragged in there. The couch was vacant, and soon he’d either catch a few hours’ racktime on it or go back to the house on Highland Avenue that was now home. Probably back there.

Strange developments.

Strange world.

First, though, one more check of what he was already thinking of as his patients. It wouldn’t take long in this postage stamp of a hospital. Most of the rooms were empty, anyway. Bill Allnut, who’d been forced to stay awake until nine because of the injury he’d suffered in the Food City melee, was now fast asleep and snoring, turned on his side to take the pressure off the long laceration at the back of his head.

Wanda Crumley was two doors down. The heart monitor was beeping and her BP was a little better, but she was on five liters of oxygen and Thurse feared she was a lost cause. Too much weight; too many cigarettes. Her husband and youngest daughter were sitting with her. Thurse gave Wendell Crumley a V-for-victory (which had been the peace sign in his salad days), and Wendell, smiling gamely, gave it back.

Tansy Freeman, the appendectomy, was reading a magazine. “What’s the fire whistle blowing for?” she asked him.

“Don’t know, hon. How’s your pain?”

“A three,” she said matter-of-factly. “Maybe a two. Can I still go home tomorrow?”

“It’s up to Dr. Rusty, but my crystal ball says yes.” And the way her face lit up at that made him feel, for no reason he could understand, like crying.

“That baby’s mom is back,” Tansy said. “I saw her go by.”

“Good,” Thurse said. Although the baby hadn’t been much of a problem. He had cried once or twice, but mostly he slept, ate, or lay in his crib, staring apathetically up at the ceiling. His name was Walter (Thurse had no idea the
Little
preceding it on the door card was an actual name), but Thurston Marshall thought of him as The Thorazine Kid.

Now he opened the door of room 23, the one with the yellow BABY ON BOARD sign attached to it with a plastic sucker, and saw that the young woman—a rape victim, Gina had whispered to him—was sitting in the chair beside the bed. She had the baby in her lap and was feeding him a bottle.

“Are you all right”—Thurse glanced at the other name on the doorcard—“Ms. Bushey?”

He pronounced it
Bouchez,
but Sammy didn’t bother to correct him, or to tell him that boys called her Bushey the Tushie. “Yes, Doctor,” she said.

Nor did Thurse bother to correct her misapprehension. That undefined joy—the kind that comes with tears hidden in it—swelled a little more. When he thought of how close he’d come to not volunteering … if Caro hadn’t encouraged him … he would have missed this.

“Dr. Rusty will be glad you’re back. And so is Walter. Do you need any pain medication?”

“No.” This was true. Her privates still ached and throbbed, but that was far away. She felt as if she were floating above herself, tethered to earth by the thinnest of strings.

“Good. That means you’re getting better.”

“Yes,” Sammy said. “Soon I’ll be well.”

“When you’ve finished feeding him, climb on into bed, why don’t you? Dr. Rusty will be in to check on you in the morning.”

“All right.”

“Good night, Ms. Bouchez.”

“Good night, Doctor.”

Thurse closed the door softly and continued down the hall. At the end of the corridor was the Roux girl’s room. One peek in there and then he’d call it a night.

She was glassy but awake. The young man who’d been visiting her was not. He sat in the corner, snoozing in the room’s only chair with a sports magazine on his lap and his long legs sprawled out in front of him.

Georgia beckoned Thurse, and when he bent over her, she whispered something. Because of the low voice and her broken, mostly toothless mouth, he only got a word or two. He leaned closer.

“Doh wake im.” To Thurse, she sounded like Homer Simpson. “He’th the oney one who cay to visih me.”

Thurse nodded. Visiting hours were long over, of course, and
given his blue shirt and his sidearm, the young man would probably be gigged for not responding to the fire whistle, but still—what harm? One firefighter more or less probably wouldn’t make any difference, and if the guy was too far under for the sound of the whistle to wake him, he probably wouldn’t be much help, anyway. Thurse put a finger to his lips and blew the young woman a
shhh
to show they were conspirators. She tried to smile, then winced.

Thurston didn’t offer her pain medication in spite of that; according to the chart at the end of the bed, she was maxed until two AM. Instead he just went out, closed the door softly behind him, and walked back down the sleeping hallway. He didn’t notice that the door to the BABY ON BOARD room was once more ajar.

The couch in the lounge called to him seductively as he went by, but Thurston had decided to go back to Highland Avenue after all.

And check the kids.

4

Sammy sat by the bed with Little Walter in her lap until the new doctor went by. Then she kissed her son on both cheeks and the mouth. “You be a good baby,” she said. “Mama is going to see you in heaven, if they let her in. I think they will. She’s done her time in hell.”

She laid him in his crib, then opened the drawer of the bedtable. She had put the gun inside so Little Walter wouldn’t feel it poking into him while she held him and fed him for the last time. Now she took it out.

5

Lower Main Street was blocked off by nose-to-nose police cars with their jackpot lights flashing. A crowd, silent and unexcited—almost sullen—stood behind them, watching.

Horace the Corgi was ordinarily a quiet dog, limiting his vocal repertoire to a volley of welcome-home barks or the occasional yap to remind Julia he was still present and accounted for. But when she pulled over to the curb by Maison des Fleurs, he let out a low howl from the backseat. Julia reached back blindly to stroke his head. Taking comfort as much as giving it.

“Julia, my God,” Rose said.

They got out. Julia’s original intention was to leave Horace behind, but when he uttered another of those small, bereft howls—as if he knew, as if he really knew—she fished under the passenger seat for his leash, opened the rear door for him to jump out, and then clipped the leash to his collar. She grabbed her personal camera, a pocket-sized Casio, from the seat pocket before closing the door. They pushed through the crowd of bystanders on the sidewalk, Horace leading the way, straining at his leash.

Piper Libby’s cousin Rupe, a part-time cop who’d come to The Mill five years ago, tried to stop them. “No one beyond this point, ladies.”

“That’s my place,” Julia said. “Up top is everything I own in the world—clothes, books, personal possessions, the lot. Underneath is the newspaper my great-grandfather started. It’s only missed four press dates in over a hundred and twenty years. Now it’s going up in smoke. If you want to stop me from watching it happen—at close range—you’ll have to shoot me.”

Rupe looked unsure, but when she started forward again (Horace now at her knee and looking up at the balding man mistrustfully), Rupe stood aside. But only momentarily.

“Not you,” he told Rose.

“Yes, me. Unless you want ex-lax in the next chocolate frappe you order.”

“Ma’am … Rose … I have my orders.”

“Devil take your orders,” Julia said, with more weariness than defiance. She took Rose by the arm and led her down the sidewalk, stopping only when she felt the shimmer against her face rise from preheat to bake.

The
Democrat
was an inferno. The dozen or so cops weren’t even trying to put it out, but they had plenty of Indian pumps (some still bearing stickers she could read easily in the firelight: ANOTHER BURPEE’S SALE DAYS SPECIAL!) and they were wetting down the drugstore and the bookstore. Given the windless conditions, Julia thought they might save both … and thus the rest of the business buildings on the east side of Main.

“Wonderful that they turned out so quick,” Rose said.

Julia said nothing, only watched the flames whooshing up into the dark, blotting out the pink stars. She was too shocked to cry.

Everything,
she thought.
Everything.

Then she remembered the one bundle of newspapers she had tossed in her trunk before leaving to meet with Cox and amended that to
Almost everything.

Pete Freeman pushed through the ring of police who were currently dousing the front and north side of Sanders Hometown Drug. The only clean spots on his face were where tears had cut through the soot.

“Julia, I’m so sorry!” He was nearly wailing. “We almost had it stopped … would have had it stopped … but then the last one … the last bottle the bastards threw landed on the papers by the door and …” He wiped his remaining shirtsleeve across his face, smearing the soot there. “I’m so goddam sorry!”

She took him in her arms as if he were a baby, although Pete was six inches taller and outweighed her by a hundred pounds. She hugged him, trying to mind his hurt arm, and said: “What happened?”

“Firebombs,” he sobbed. “That fucking Barbara.”

“He’s in jail, Pete.”

“His friends! His goddam
friends
!
They
did it!”

“
What?
You saw them?”

“Heard em,” he said, pulling back to look at her. “Would’ve been hard not to. They had a bullhorn. Said if Dale Barbara wasn’t freed, they’d burn the whole town.” He grinned bitterly. “
Free
him? We ought to
hang
him. Give me a rope and I’ll do it myself.”

Big Jim came strolling up. The fire painted his cheeks orange. His eyes glittered. His smile was so wide that it stretched almost to his earlobes.

“How do you like your friend Barbie now, Julia?”

Julia stepped toward him, and there must have been something on her face, because Big Jim fell back a step, as if afraid she might take a swing at him. “This makes no sense. None. And you know it.”

“Oh, I think it does. If you can bring yourself to consider the idea that Dale Barbara and his friends were the ones who set up the Dome in the first place, I think it makes perfect sense. It was an act of terrorism, pure and simple.”

“Bullshit. I was on his side, which means the
newspaper
was on his side. He
knew
that.”

“But they said—” Pete began.

“Yes,” she said, but she didn’t look at him. Her eyes were still fixed on Rennie’s firelit face. “
They
said,
they
said, but who the hell is
they
? Ask yourself that, Pete. Ask yourself this: if it wasn’t Barbie—who had no motive—then who
did
have a motive? Who benefits by shutting Julia Shumway’s troublesome mouth?”

Big Jim turned and motioned to two of the new officers—identifiable as cops only by the blue bandannas knotted around their biceps. One was a tall, hulking bruiser whose face suggested he was still little more than a child, no matter his size. The other could only be a Killian; that bullet head was as distinctive as a commemorative stamp. “Mickey. Richie. Get these two women off the scene.”

Horace was crouched at the end of his leash, growling at Big Jim. Big Jim gave the little dog a contemptuous look.

“And if they won’t go voluntarily, you have my permission to pick them up and throw them over the hood of the nearest police car.”

“This isn’t finished,” Julia said, pointing a finger at him. Now she was beginning to cry herself, but the tears were too hot and painful to be those of sorrow. “This isn’t done, you son of a bitch.”

Big Jim’s smile reappeared. It was as shiny as the finish on his Hummer. And as black. “Yes it is,” he said. “Done deal.”

6

Big Jim started back toward the fire—he wanted to watch it until there was nothing left of the noseyparker’s newspaper but a pile of ashes—and swallowed a mouthful of smoke. His heart suddenly stopped in his chest and the world seemed to go swimming past him like some kind of special effect. Then his ticker started again, but in a flurry of irregular beats that made him gasp. He slammed a fist against the left side of his chest and coughed hard, a quick-fix for arrhythmia that Dr. Haskell had taught him.

At first his heart continued its irregular galloping (
beat
… pause …
beatbeatbeat
… pause), but then it settled back to its normal rhythm. For just a moment he saw it encased in a dense globule of yellow fat, like a living thing that has been buried alive and struggles to get free before the air is all gone. Then he pushed the image away.

I’m all right. It’s just overwork. Nothing seven hours of sleep won’t cure.

Chief Randolph came over, an Indian pump strapped to his broad back. His face was running with sweat. “Jim? You all right?”

“Fine,” Big Jim said. And he was. He was. This was the high point of his life, his chance to achieve the greatness of which he knew he’d always been capable. No dickey ticker was going to take that away from him. “Just tired. I’ve been running pretty much nonstop.”

“Go home,” Randolph advised. “I never thought I’d say thank God for the Dome, and I’m not saying it now, but at least it works as a windbreak. We’re going to be all right. I’ve got men on the roofs of the drugstore and the bookstore in case any sparks jump, so go on and—”

“Which men?” His heartbeat smoothing out, smoothing out. Good.

“Henry Morrison and Toby Whelan on the bookstore. Georgie Frederick and one of those new kids on the drug. A Killian brat, I think. Rommie Burpee volunteered to go up with em.”

“Got your walkie?”

“Course I do.”

“And Frederick’s got his?”

“All the regulars do.”

“Tell Frederick to keep an eye on Burpee.”

“Rommie? Why, for Lord sake?”

“I don’t trust him. He could be a friend of Barbara’s.” Although it wasn’t Barbara Big Jim was worried about when it came to Burpee. The man had been a friend of Brenda’s. And the man was sharp.

Randolph’s sweaty face was creased. “How many do you think there are? How many on the sonofabitch’s side?”