Under the Dome

“We can do something about the smell. We’ll get a battery-powered fan from Burpee’s. If room and board is a firm offer—one that includes Horace—I’ll take you up on it. No one trying to kick an addiction should have to do it on her own.”

“I don’t think there’s any other way, hon.”

“You know what I mean. Why did you do it?”

“Because for the first time since I got elected, this town might need me. And because Jim Rennie threatened to withhold my pills if I objected to his plans.”

Horace tuned the rest of this out. He was more interested in a smell wafting to his sensitive nose from the space between the wall and one end of the couch. It was on this couch that Andrea liked to sit in better (if considerably more medicated) days, sometimes watching shows like The Hunted Ones (a clever sequel to Lost) and Dancing with the Stars, sometimes a movie on HBO. On movie nights she often had microwave popcorn. She’d put the bowl on the endtable. Because stoners are rarely neat, there was a scattering of popcorn down there below the table. This was what Horace had smelled.

Leaving the women to their blah, he worked his way under the little table and into the gap. It was a narrow space, but the endtable formed a natural bridge and he was a fairly narrow dog, especially since going on the Corgi version of WeightWatchers. The first kernels were just beyond the VADER file, lying there in its manila envelope. Horace was actually standing on his mistress’s name (printed in the late Brenda Perkins’s neat hand) and hoovering up the first bits of a surprisingly rich treasure trove, when Andrea and Julia walked back into the living room.

A woman said, Take that to her.

Horace looked up, his ears pricking. That was not Julia or the other woman; it was a deadvoice. Horace, like all dogs, heard dead-voices quite often, and sometimes saw their owners. The dead were all around, but living people saw them no more than they could smell most of the ten thousand aromas that surrounded them every minute of every day.

Take that to Julia, she needs it, it’s hers.

That was ridiculous. Julia would never eat anything that had been in his mouth, Horace knew this from long experience. Even if he pushed it out with his snout she wouldn’t eat it. It was peoplefood, yes, but now it was also floorfood.

Not the popcorn. The—

“Horace?” Julia asked in that sharp voice that said he was being bad—as in Oh you bad dog, you know better, blah-blah-blah. “What are you doing back there? Come out.”

Horace threw it in reverse. He gave her his most charming grin—gosh, Julia, how I love you—hoping that no popcorn was stuck to the end of his nose. He’d gotten a few pieces, but he sensed the real motherlode had escaped him.

“Have you been foraging?”

Horace sat, looking up at her with the proper expression of adoration. Which he did feel; he loved Julia very much.

“A better question would be what have you been foraging?” She bent to look into the gap between the couch and the wall.

Before she could, the other woman began to make a gagging noise. She wrapped her arms around herself in an effort to stop a shivering fit, but was unsuccessful. Her smell changed, and Horace knew she was going to yark. He watched closely. Sometimes peopleyark had good things in it.

“Andi?” Julia asked. “Are you okay?”

Stupid question, Horace thought. Can’t you smell her? But that was a stupid question, too. Julia could hardly smell herself when she was sweaty.

“Yes. No. I shouldn’t have eaten that raisin bun. I’m going to—” She hurried out of the room. To add to the smells coming from the piss-and-scat place, Horace assumed. Julia followed. For a moment Horace debated squeezing back under the table, but he smelled worry on Julia and hurried at her heels instead.

He had forgotten all about the deadvoice.

3

Rusty called Claire McClatchey from the car. It was early, but she answered on the first ring, and he wasn’t surprised. No one in Chester’s Mill was getting much sleep these days, at least not without pharmacological assistance.

She promised to have Joe and his friends at the house by eight thirty at the latest, would pick them up herself, if necessary. Lowering her voice, she said, “I think Joe is crushing on the Calvert girl.”

“He’d be a fool not to,” Rusty said.

“Will you have to take them out there?”

“Yes, but not into a high radiation zone. I promise you that, Mrs. McClatchey.”

“Claire. If I’m going to allow my son to go with you to an area where the animals apparently commit suicide, I think we should be on a first-name basis.”

“You get Benny and Norrie to your house and I promise to take care of them on the field trip. That work for you?”