Under the Dome

“Who do you think is feeding this town, Fred?” Rose asks. Anson puts a hand on her shoulder. Rose shakes it off. She knows Freddy is seeing rage instead of the deep distress she feels, but she can’t help it. “Do you think a Sysco truck full of supplies is just going to parachute down from the sky?”

“Ma’am—”

“Oh, can it! Since when am I a ma’am to you? You’ve been eating blueberry pancakes and that nasty limp bacon you like at my place four and five days a week for twenty years, and calling me Rosie while you did it. But you won’t be eating pancakes tomorrow unless I get some flour and some shortening and some syrup and…” She breaks off. “Finally! Sense! Thank You, God!”

Jack Cale is opening one of the double doors. Mel and Frank have taken up station in front of it, and he has just room to squeeze between them. The prospective shoppers—there are nearly two dozen now, even though the market’s official opening time of nine AM is still a minute away—surge forward, only to stop when Jack selects a key from the bunch on his belt, and locks up again. There’s a collective groan.

“Why the hell’d you do that?” Bill Wicker calls out indignantly. “My wife sent me down for aigs!”

“Take it up with the Selectmen and Chief Randolph,” Jack responds. His hair is raring every whichway. He throws Frank DeLesseps a black look and fires an even blacker one at Mel Searles, who is trying unsuccessfully to suppress a grin, perhaps even his famous nyuck-nyuck-nyuck. “I know I will. But for now, I’ve had enough of this shit. I’m done.” He strides off through the crowd with his head down and his cheeks burning even brighter than his hair. Lissa Jamieson, just arriving on her bicycle (everything on her list will fit into the milk box perched on the rear fender; her wants are small-going-on-minuscule), has to swerve to avoid him.

Carter, Georgia, and Freddy are ranged in front of the large plate-glass window, where Jack would have set out wheelbarrows and fertilizer on an ordinary day. Carter’s fingers are Band-Aided, and a thicker bandage bulks under his shirt. Freddy has his hand on his gun-butt as Rose Twitchell continues to chew on him, and Carter wishes he could backhand her one. His fingers are okay, but his shoulder aches a bitch. The small cluster of would-be shoppers has become a large cluster, and more cars are turning into the parking lot.

Before Officer Thibodeau can really study the crowd, however, Alden Dinsmore gets into his personal space. Alden looks haggard, and seems to have lost twenty pounds since the death of his son. He’s wearing a black mourning band on his left arm and seems dazed.

“Need to go in, son. My wife sent me to stock up on the canned.” Alden doesn’t say the canned what. Probably the canned everything. Or maybe he just got thinking about the empty bed upstairs, the one that will never be filled again, and the Foo Fighters poster that will never be looked at again, and the model airplane on the desk that will never be finished, and clean forgot.

“Sorry, Mr. Dimmesdale,” Carter says. “You can’t do that.”

“It’s Dinsmore,” Alden says in a dazed voice. He starts toward the doors. They are locked, no way he can get in, but Carter still gives the farmer a good hearty shove backward. For the first time, Carter has some sympathy for the teachers who used to send him to detention back in high school; it is irritating not to be minded.

Also it’s hot and his shoulder aches in spite of the two Percocet his mother gave him. Seventy-five at nine AM is rare in October, and the faded blue color of the sky says it will be hotter by noon, hotter still by three PM.

Alden stumbles backward into Gina Buffalino, and they both would fall if not for Petra Searles—no lightweight she—steadying them. Alden doesn’t look angry, only puzzled. “M’wife sent me for the canned,” he explains to Petra.

A mutter comes from the gathering people. It’s not an angry sound—not quite yet. They came for groceries and the groceries are there but the door is locked. Now a man has been shoved by a high-school dropout who was a car mechanic last week.

Gina is looking at Carter, Mel, and Frank DeLesseps with widening eyes. She points. “Those are the guys that raped her!” she tells her friend Harriet without lowering her voice. “Those are the guys that raped Sammy Bushey!”

The smile disappears from Mel’s face; the urge to nyuck-nyuck has left him. “Shut up,” he says.

At the back of the crowd, Ricky and Randall Killian have arrived in a Chevrolet Canyon pickemup. Sam Verdreaux is not far behind, walking, of course; Sam lost his license to drive for good in ’07.

Gina takes a step backward, staring at Mel with wide eyes. Beside her, Alden Dinsmore hulks like a farmer-robot with a dead battery. “You guys are supposed to be police? Hel-lo?”

“That rape stuff was nothing but a whore lie,” Frank says. “And you better quit yelling about it before you get arrested for disturbing the peace.”