Under the Dome

“Melissa,” Barbie corrected. It suddenly seemed important to him that Cox understand these were people under the Dome, not just a few thousand anonymous taxpayers. “Melissa Jamieson. Lissa to her friends. She’s the town librarian. She’s also the middle-school guidance counselor, and teaches yoga classes, I believe.”

“I had to give that up,” Lissa said with a fretful smile. “Too many other things to do.”

“Very nice to make your acquaintance, Ms. Jamieson,” Cox said. “Look—this is a chance worth taking.”

“If we felt differently, could we stop you?” she asked.

This Cox did not answer directly. “There’s no sign that this thing, whatever it is, is weakening or biodegrading. Unless we’re able to breach it, we believe you’re in for the long haul.”

“Do you have any idea what caused it? Any at all?”

“None,” Cox said, but his eyes shifted in a way Rusty Everett would have recognized from his conversation with Big Jim.

Barbie thought, Why are you lying? Just that knee-jerk reaction again? Civilians are like mushrooms, keep them in the dark and feed them shit? Probably that was all it was. But it made him nervous.

“It’s strong?” Lissa asked. “Your acid—is it strong?”

“The most corrosive in existence, as far as we know,” Cox replied, and Lissa took two large steps back.

Cox turned to the men in the space-suits. “Are you boys about ready?”

They gave him a pair of gloved thumbs-up. Behind them, all activity had stopped. The soldiers stood watching, with their hands on their gas masks.

“Here we go,” Cox said. “Barbie, I suggest you escort those two beautiful ladies at least fifty yards back from—”

“Look at the stars, ” Julia said. Her voice was soft, awestruck. Her head was tilted upward, and in her wondering face Barbie saw the child she had been thirty years ago.

He looked up and saw the Big Dipper, the Great Bear, Orion. All where they belonged… except they had smeared out of clear focus and turned pink. The Milky Way had turned into a bubblegum spill across the greater dome of the night.

“Cox,” he said. “Do you see that?”

Cox looked up.

“See what? The stars?”

“What do they look like to you?”

“Well… very bright, of course—no light pollution to speak of in these parts—” Then a thought occurred to him, and he snapped his fingers. “What are you seeing? Have they changed color?”

“They’re beautiful,” Lissa said. Her eyes were wide and shining. “But scary, too.”

“They’re pink,” Julia said. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” Cox said, but he sounded oddly reluctant.

“What?” Barbie asked. “Spill it.” And added, without thinking: “Sir.”

“We got the meteorological report at nineteen hundred hours,” Cox said. “Special emphasis on winds. Just in case… well, just in case. Leave it at that. The jet stream’s currently coming west as far as Nebraska or Kansas, dipping south, then coming up the Eastern Seaboard. Pretty common pattern for late October.”

“What’s that got to do with the stars?”

“As it comes north, the jet passes over a lot of cities and manufacturing towns. What it picks up over those locations is collecting on the Dome instead of being whisked north to Canada and the Arctic. There’s enough of it now to have created a kind of optical filter. I’m sure it’s not dangerous….”

“Not yet, ” Julia said. “What about in a week, or a month? Are you going to hose down our airspace at thirty thousand feet when it starts getting dark in here?”

Before Cox could reply, Lissa Jamieson screamed and pointed into the sky. Then she covered her face.

The pink stars were falling, leaving bright contrails behind them.

15

“More dope,” Piper said dreamily as Rusty listened to her heartbeat.

Rusty patted Piper’s right hand—the left one was badly scraped.

“No more dope,” he said. “You’re officially stoned.”

“Jesus wants me to have more dope,” she said in that same dreamy voice. “I want to get as high as a mockingbird pie.”

“I believe that’s ‘elephant’s eye,’ but I’ll take it under consideration.”

She sat up. Rusty tried to push her back down, but he dared push on only her right shoulder, and that wasn’t enough. “Will I be able to get out of here tomorrow? I have to see Chief Randolph. Those boys raped Sammy Bushey.”

“And could have killed you,” he said. “Dislocation or not, you fell extremely lucky. Let me worry about Sammy.”

“Those cops are dangerous.” She put her right hand on his wrist. “They can’t go on being police. They’ll hurt someone else.” She licked her lips. “My mouth is so dry.”

“I can fix that, but you’ll have to lie down.”

“Did you take sperm samples from Sammy? Can you match them to the boys? If you can, I’ll hound Peter Randolph until he makes them give DNA samples. I’ll hound him day and night.”