Under the Dome

Rusty watched the limping legs descend the metal stairs. He could smell gunsmoke, he could smell blood, and he understood perfectly well that his time of dying had come round. The limping man was here for Barbie, but he would almost certainly not neglect a certain caged physician’s assistant on his way by. He was never going to see Linda or the Js again.

Junior’s chest came into view, then his neck, then his head. Rusty took one look at the mouth, which was dragged down on the left in a frozen leer, and at the left eye, which was weeping blood, and thought: Very far gone. A wonder he’s still on his feet and a pity he didn’t wait just a little longer. A little longer and he wouldn’t have been capable of crossing the street.

Faintly, in another world, he heard a bullhorn-amplified voice from the Town Hall: “DO NOT RUN! DO NOT PANIC! THE DANGER IS OVER! THIS IS OFFICER HENRY MORRISON, AND I REPEAT: THE DANGER IS OVER!”

Junior slipped, but by then he was on the last stair. Instead of falling and breaking his neck, he only went to one knee. He rested that way for a few moments, looking like a prizefighter waiting for the mandatory eight-count to rise and resume the bout. To Rusty everything seemed clear, near, and very dear. The precious world, suddenly grown thin and insubstantial, was now only a single gauze wrapping between him and whatever came next. If anything.

Go all the way down, he thought at Junior. Fall on your face. Pass out, you motherfucker.

But Junior laboriously rose to his feet, gazed at the gun in his hand as if he had never seen such a thing before, then looked down the corridor to the cell at the end, where Barbie stood with his hands wrapped around the bars, looking back.

“Baaarbie,” Junior said in a crooning whisper, and started forward.

Rusty stepped backward, thinking that perhaps Junior would miss him on his way by. And perhaps kill himself after finishing with Barbie. He knew these were craven thoughts, but he also knew they were practical thoughts. He could do nothing for Barbie, but he might be able to survive himself.

And it could have worked, had he been in one of the cells on the left side of the corridor, because that was Junior’s blind side. But he had been put in one on the right, and Junior saw him move. He stopped and peered in at Rusty, his half-frozen face simultaneously bewildered and sly.

“Fusty,” he said. “Is that your name? Or is it Berrick? I can’t remember.”

Rusty wanted to beg for his life, but his tongue was pasted to the roof of his mouth. And what good would begging do? The young man was already raising the gun. Junior was going to kill him. No power on earth would stop him.

Rusty’s mind, in its last extremity, sought an escape many other minds had found in their last moments of consciousness—before the switch was pulled, before the trap opened, before the pistol pressed against the temple spat fire. This is a dream, he thought. All of it. The Dome, the craziness in Dinsmore’s field, the food riot; this young man, too. When he pulls the trigger the dream will end and I’ll wake up in my own bed, on a cool and crisp fall morning. I’ll turn to Linda and say, “What a nightmare I had, you won’t believe it.”

“Close your eyes, Fusty,” Junior said. “It’ll be better that way.”

28

Jackie Wettington’s first thought upon entering the PD lobby was Oh my dear God, there’s blood everywhere.

Stacey Moggin lay against the wall below the community out-reach bulletin board with her cloud of blond hair spread around her and her empty eyes staring up at the ceiling. Another cop—she couldn’t make out which one—was sprawled on his face in front of the overturned reception desk, his legs spread out to either side in an impossibly deep split. Beyond him, in the ready room, a third cop lay dead on his side. That one had to be Wardlaw, one of the new kids on the block. He was too big to be anyone else. The sign over the coffee-station table was spattered with the kid’s blood and brains. It now read C FEE AND DO ARE OT FREE.

There was a faint clacking sound from behind her. She whirled, unaware that she had raised her gun until she saw Rommie Burpee in the front sight. Rommie didn’t even notice her; he was staring at the bodies of the three dead cops. The clack had been his Dick Cheney mask. He had taken it off and dropped it on the floor.

“Christ, what happened here?” he asked. “Is this—”