Under the Dome

“Fuckin right,” Georgia says. She has moved a little closer to Carter. He ignores her. He is surveying the crowd. And that’s what it is now. If fifty people make a crowd, then this is one. More coming, too. Carter wishes he had his gun. He doesn’t like the hostility he’s seeing.

Velma Winter, who runs Brownie’s (or did, before it closed), arrives with Tommy and Willow Anderson. Velma is a big, burly woman who combs her hair like Bobby Darin and looks like she could be the warrior queen of Dyke Nation, but she has buried two husbands and the story you can hear at the bullshit table in Sweet-briar is that she fucked them both to death and is looking for number three at Dipper’s on Wednesdays; that’s Country Karaoke Night, and draws an older crowd. Now she plants herself in front of Carter, hands on her meaty hips.

“Closed, huh?” she says in a businesslike voice. “Let’s see your paperwork.”

Carter is confused, and being confused makes him angry. “Back off, bitch. I don’t need no paperwork. The Chief sent us down here. The Selectmen ordered it. It’s gonna be a food depot.”

“Rationing? That what you mean?” She snorts. “Not in my town.” She shoves between Mel and Frank and starts hammering on the door. “Open up! Open up in there! ”

“Nobody home,” Frank says. “You might as well quit it.”

But Ernie Calvert hasn’t left. He comes down the pasta-flour-and-sugar aisle. Velma sees him and starts hammering louder. “Open up, Ernie! Open up!”

“Open up!” voices from the crowd agree.

Frank looks at Mel and nods. Together they grab Velma and muscle her two hundred pounds away from the door. Georgia Roux has turned and is waving Ernie back. Ernie doesn’t go. Numb fuck just stands there.

“Open up!” Velma bawls. “Open up! Open up!”

Tommy and Willow join her. So does Bill Wicker, the postman. So does Lissa, her face shining—all her life she has hoped to be part of a spontaneous demonstration, and here’s her chance. She raises a clenched fist and begins to shake it in time—two small shakes on open and a big one on up. Others imitate her. Open up becomes Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Now they are all shaking their fists in that two-plus-one rhythm—maybe seventy people, maybe eighty, and more arriving all the time. The thin blue line in front of the market looks thinner than ever. The four younger cops look toward Freddy Denton for ideas, but Freddy has no ideas.

He does, however, have a gun. You better fire it into the air pretty soon, Baldy, Carter thinks, or these people are gonna run us down.

Two more cops—Rupert Libby and Toby Whelan—drive down Main Street from the PD (where they’ve been drinking coffee and watching CNN), blowing past Julia Shumway, who is jogging along with a camera slung over her shoulder.

Jackie Wettington and Henry Morrison also start toward the supermarket, but then the walkie-talkie on Henry’s belt crackles. It’s Chief Randolph, saying that Henry and Jackie should hold their station at the Gas & Grocery.

“But we hear—” Henry begins.

“Those are your orders,” Randolph says, not adding that they are orders he is just passing on—from a higher power, as it were.

“Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP! Oh-pun UP!” The crowd shaking fisted power-salutes in the warm air. Still scared, but excited, too. Getting into it. The Chef would have looked at them and seen a bunch of tyro tweekers, needing only a Grateful Dead tune on the soundtrack to make the picture complete.

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.”