Under the Dome

Janelle had two seizures, and so did a little kid named Norman Sawyer, but in both cases the second seizure was milder than the first, and not accompanied by any babble. Most of the kids Rusty saw had only the one, and there seemed to be no after-effects.

Only two adults had seizures during those first fifty-five hours. Both came around sunset on Monday evening, and both had easily traceable causes.

With Phil Bushey, aka The Chef, the cause was too much of his own product. Around the time Rusty and Big Jim parted company, Chef Bushey was sitting outside the storage barn behind WCIK, looking dreamily at the sunset (this close to the missile strikes, the scarlet in the sky was further darkened by soot on the Dome), his hitty-pipe clasped loosely in one hand. He was tweeked at least to the ionosphere; maybe a hundred miles beyond. In the few low-lying clouds which floated on that bloody light, he saw the faces of his mother, his father, his grandfather; he saw Sammy and Little Walter as well.

All the cloud-faces were bleeding.

When his right foot began to twitch and then his left foot picked up the beat, he ignored it. Twitchin was part of tweekin, everyone knew that. But then his hands began to tremble and his pipe fell into the long grass (yellow and sere as a result of the factory work that went on out here). A moment later his head began to jerk from side to side.

This is it, he thought with a calm that was partly relief. I finally overdid it. I’m checking out. Probably for the best.

But he didn’t check out, didn’t even pass out. He slid slowly sideways, twitching and watching as a black marble rose in the red sky. It expanded to a bowling ball, then an overinflated beachball. It went on growing until it had eaten up the red sky.

The end of the world, he thought. Probably for the best.

For a moment he thought he was wrong, because the stars came out. Only they were the wrong color. They were pink. And then, oh God, they began to fall down, leaving long pink trails behind them.

Next came fire. A roaring furnace, as if someone had opened a hidden trapdoor and loosed Hell itself on Chester’s Mill.

“It’s our treat,” he muttered. His pipe pressed against his arm, making a burn he would see and feel later. He lay twitching in the yellow grass with his eyes turned up to glabrous whites that reflected the lurid sunset. “Our Halloween treat. First the trick… then the treat.”

The fire was becoming a face, an orange version of the bloody ones he’d been looking at in the clouds just before the fit fell on him. It was the face of Jesus. Jesus was scowling at him.

And talking. Talking to him. Telling him that bringing the fire was his responsibility. His. The fire and the… the…

“The purity,” he muttered as he lay in the grass. “No… the purification. ”

Jesus didn’t look so mad now. And He was fading. Why? Because The Chef had understood. First came the pink stars; then came the purifying fire; then the trial would end.

The Chef stilled as the seizure passed into the first real sleep he’d had in weeks, perhaps months. When he woke up, it was full dark—every trace of red gone from the sky. He was chilled to the bone, but not damp.

Under the Dome, dew no longer fell.

12

While The Chef was observing the face of Christ in that evening’s infected sunset, Third Selectman Andrea Grinnell was sitting on her couch and trying to read. Her generator had quit—or had it ever run at all? She couldn’t 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.