Under the Dome

The Killian boys and Sam Verdreaux are working their way through the crowd. They chant—not as protective coloration but because that crowd-molting-into-mob vibe is just too strong to resist—but don't bother shaking their fists; they have work to do. No one pays them any particular mind. Later, only a few people will remember seeing them at all.

Nurse Ginny Tomlinson is also working her way through the crowd. She has come to tell the girls they are needed at Cathy Russell; there are new patients, one a serious case. That would be Wanda Crumley from Eastchester. The Crumleys live next to the Evanses, out near the Motton town line. When Wanda went over this morning to check on Jack, she found him dead not twenty feet from where the Dome cut off his wife's hand. Jack was sprawled on his back with a bottle beside him and his brains drying on the grass. Wanda ran back to her house, crying her husband's name, and she had no more than reached him when she was felled by a coronary.Wendell Crumley was lucky not to crash his little Subaru wagon on his way to the hospital—he did eighty most of the way. Rusty is with Wanda now, but Ginny doesn't think Wanda—fifty, overweight, a heavy smoker—is going to make it.

'Girls,' she says. 'We need you at the hospital.'

'Those are the ones, Mrs Tomlinson!' Gina shouts. She has to shout to be heard over the chanting crowd. She's pointing at the cops and beginning to cry—partly from fear and tiredness, mostly from outrage. 'Those are the ones who raped her!'

This time Ginny looks beyond the uniforms, and realizes Gina's right. Ginny Tomlinson isn't afflicted with Piper Libby's admittedly vile temper, but she has a temper^ and there's an aggravating factor at work here: unlike Piper, Ginny saw the Bushey girl with her pants off. Her vagina lacerated and swelled. Huge bruises on her thighs that couldn't be seen until the blood was washed off. Such a lot of blood.

Ginny forgets about the girls being needed at the hospital. She forgets about getting them out of a dangerous and volatile situation. She even forgets about Wanda Crumley's heart attack. She strides forward, elbowing someone out of her way (it happens to be Bruce Yardley, the cashier-cum-bagboy who is shaking his fist like everyone else), and approaches Mel and Frank.They are both studying the ever more hostile crowd, and they don't see her coming.

Ginny raises both hands, looking for a moment like the bad guy-surrendering to the sheriff in a Western. Then she brings both hands around and slaps both young men at the same time. 'You bastards!' she shouts. 'How could you? How could you be so cowardly? So catdirt mean? You'll go to jail for this, all of y—'

Mel doesn't think, just reacts. He punches her in the center of her face, breaking her glasses and her nose. She goes stumbling backward, bleeding, crying out. Her old-fashioned RN cap, shocked free of the bobbypins holding it, tumbles from her head. Bruce Yardley, the young cashier, tries to grab her and misses. Ginny hits a line of shopping carts. They go rolling like a little train. She drops to her hands and knees, crying in pain and shock. Bright drops of blood from her nose—not just broken but shattered—begin falling on the big yeUow RK of NO PARKING ZONE.

The crowd goes temporarily silent, shocked, as Gina and Harriet rush to where Ginny crouches.

Then Lissa Jamieson's voice rises, a clear perfect soprano: 'YOU PIG BASTARDS!'

That's when the chunk of rock flies. The first rock-thrower is never identified. It may be the only crime Sloppy SamVerdreaux ever got away with.

Junior dropped him off at the upper end of town, and Sam, with visions of whiskey dancing in his head, went prospecting on the east bank of Prestile Stream for just the right rock. Had to be big but not too big, or he wouldn't be able to throw it with any accuracy, even though once—a century ago, it seems sometimes; at others it seems very close—he was the starting pitcher for the Mills Wildcats in the first game of the Maine state tourney. He had found it at last, not far from the Peace Bridge: a pound, pound and a half, and as smooch as a goose egg.

One more thing, Junior had said as he dropped Sloppy Sam off. It wasn't Junior's one more thing, but Junior did not tell Sam this any more than Chief Randolph had told Wettington and Morrison, who had ordered them to stay on station. Wouldn't have been politic.

Aim for the chick. That was Junior's final word to Sloppy Sam before leaving him. She deserves it, so don't miss.

As Gina and Harriet in their white uniforms kneel beside the sobbing, bleeding RN on her hands and knees (and while everyone else's attention is there too), Sam winds up just as he did on that long-ago day in 1970, lets fly, and throws his first strike in over forty years.