Under the Dome

They got out. Julia’s original intention was to leave Horace behind, but when he uttered another of those small, bereft howls—as if he knew, as if he really knew—she fished under the passenger seat for his leash, opened the rear door for him to jump out, and then clipped the leash to his collar. She grabbed her personal camera, a pocket-sized Casio, from the seat pocket before closing the door. They pushed through the crowd of bystanders on the sidewalk, Horace leading the way, straining at his leash.

Piper Libby’s cousin Rupe, a part-time cop who’d come to The Mill five years ago, tried to stop them. “No one beyond this point, ladies.”

“That’s my place,” Julia said. “Up top is everything I own in the world—clothes, books, personal possessions, the lot. Underneath is the newspaper my great-grandfather started. It’s only missed four press dates in over a hundred and twenty years. Now it’s going up in smoke. If you want to stop me from watching it happen—at close range—you’ll have to shoot me.”

Rupe looked unsure, but when she started forward again (Horace now at her knee and looking up at the balding man mistrustfully), Rupe stood aside. But only momentarily.

“Not you,” he told Rose.

“Yes, me. Unless you want ex-lax in the next chocolate frappe you order.”

“Ma’am… Rose… I have my orders.”

“Devil take your orders,” Julia said, with more weariness than defiance. She took Rose by the arm and led her down the sidewalk, stopping only when she felt the shimmer against her face rise from preheat to bake.

The Democrat was an inferno. The dozen or so cops weren’t even trying to put it out, but they had plenty of Indian pumps (some still bearing stickers she could read easily in the firelight: ANOTHER BURPEE’S SALE DAYS SPECIAL!) and they were wetting down the drugstore and the bookstore. Given the windless conditions, Julia thought they might save both… and thus the rest of the business buildings on the east side of Main.

“Wonderful that they turned out so quick,” Rose said.

Julia said nothing, only watched the flames whooshing up into the dark, blotting out the pink stars. She was too shocked to cry.

Everything, she thought. Everything.

Then she remembered the one bundle of newspapers she had tossed in her trunk before leaving to meet with Cox and amended that to Almost everything.

Pete Freeman pushed through the ring of police who were currently dousing the front and north side of Sanders Hometown Drug. The only clean spots on his face were where tears had cut through the soot.

“Julia, I’m so sorry!” He was nearly wailing. “We almost had it stopped… would have had it stopped… but then the last one… the last bottle the bastards threw landed on the papers by the door and…” He wiped his remaining shirtsleeve across his face, smearing the soot there. “I’m so goddam sorry!”

She took him in her arms as if he were a baby, although Pete was six inches taller and outweighed her by a hundred pounds. She hugged him, trying to mind his hurt arm, and said: “What happened?”

“Firebombs,” he sobbed. “That fucking Barbara.”

“He’s in jail, Pete.”

“His friends! His goddam friends! They did it!”

“What? You saw them?”

“Heard em,” he said, pulling back to look at her. “Would’ve been hard not to. They had a bullhorn. Said if Dale Barbara wasn’t freed, they’d burn the whole town.” He grinned bitterly. “Free him? We ought to hang him. Give me a rope and I’ll do it myself.”

Big Jim came strolling up. The fire painted his cheeks orange. His eyes glittered. His smile was so wide that it stretched almost to his earlobes.

“How do you like your friend Barbie now, Julia?”

Julia stepped toward him, and there must have been something on her face, because Big Jim fell back a step, as if afraid she might take a swing at him. “This makes no sense. None. And you know it.”

“Oh, I think it does. If you can bring yourself to consider the idea that Dale Barbara and his friends were the ones who set up the Dome in the first place, I think it makes perfect sense. It was an act of terrorism, pure and simple.”

“Bullshit. I was on his side, which means the newspaper was on his side. He knew that.”

“But they said—” Pete began.

“Yes,” she said, but she didn’t look at him. Her eyes were still fixed on Rennie’s firelit face. “They said, they said, but who the hell is they? Ask yourself that, Pete. Ask yourself this: if it wasn’t Barbie—who had no motive—then who did have a motive? Who benefits by shutting Julia Shumway’s troublesome mouth?”

Big Jim turned and motioned to two of the new officers—identifiable as cops only by the blue bandannas knotted around their biceps. One was a tall, hulking bruiser whose face suggested he was still little more than a child, no matter his size. The other could only be a Killian; that bullet head was as distinctive as a commemorative stamp. “Mickey. Richie. Get these two women off the scene.”