Under the Dome

“Word,” Norrie said. She was a tough kid, a smalltown riot grrrl with a modified Tennessee Tophat mullet ’do, but now she only looked pale and sad and scared. She took Benny’s hand. Scarecrow Joe’s heart broke, then remended itself in an instant when she took his as well.

“There goes the guy who almost got arrested,” Benny said, pointing with his free hand. Barbie and the newspaper lady were trudging across the field toward the makeshift parking lot with sixty or eighty other people, some dragging their protest signs dispiritedly behind them.

“Nancy Newspaper wasn’t taking pictures at all, y’know,” Scarecrow Joe said. “I was standing right behind her. Pretty foxy.”

“Yeah,” Benny said, “but I still wouldn’t want to be him. Until this shit ends, the cops can do pretty much what they want.”

That was true, Joe reflected. And the new cops weren’t particularly nice guys. Junior Rennie, for example. The story of Sloppy Sam’s arrest was already making the rounds.

“What are you saying?” Norrie asked Benny.

“Nothing right now. It’s still cool right now.” He considered. “Fairly cool. But if this goes on… remember Lord of the Flies?” They had read it for honors English.

Benny intoned: “‘Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in.’ People call cops pigs, but I’ll tell you what I think, I think cops find pigs when the shit gets deep. Maybe because they get scared, too.”

Norrie Calvert burst into tears. Scarecrow Joe put an arm around her. He did it carefully, as if he thought doing such a thing might cause them both to explode, but she turned her face against his shirt and hugged him. It was a one-armed hug, because she was still holding onto Benny with her other hand. Joe thought he had felt nothing in his whole life as weirdly thrilling as her tears dampening his shirt. Over the top of her head, he looked at Benny reproachfully.

“Sorry, dude,” Benny said, and patted her back. “No fear.”

“His eye was gone!” she cried. The words were muffled against Joe’s chest. Then she let go of him. “This isn’t fun anymore. This is not fun.”

“No.” Joe spoke as if discovering a great truth. “It isn’t.”

“Look,” Benny said. It was the ambulance. Twitch was bumping across Dinsmore’s field with the red roof lights flashing. His sister, the woman who owned Sweetbriar Rose, was walking ahead of him, guiding him around the worst potholes. An ambulance in a hayfield, under a bright afternoon sky in October: it was the final touch.

Suddenly, Scarecrow Joe no longer wanted to protest. Nor did he exactly want to go home.

At that moment, the only thing in the world he wanted was to get out of town.

6

Julia slid behind the wheel of her car but didn’t start it; they were going to be here awhile, and there was no sense in wasting gas. She leaned past Barbie, opened the glove compartment, and brought out an old pack of American Spirits. “Emergency supplies,” she told him apologetically. “Do you want one?”

He shook his head.

“Do you mind? Because I can wait.”

He shook his head again. She lit up, then blew smoke out her open window. It was still warm—a real Indian summer day for sure—but it wouldn’t stay that way. Another week or so and the weather would turn wrong, as the oldtimers said. Or maybe not, she thought. Who in the hell knows? If the Dome stayed in place, she had no doubt that plenty of meteorologists would weigh in on the subject of the weather inside, but so what? The Weather Channel Yodas couldn’t even predict which way a snowstorm would turn, and in Julia’s opinion they deserved no more credence than the political geniuses who blabbed their days away at the Sweetbriar Rose bullshit table.

“Thanks for speaking up back there,” he said. “You saved my bacon.”

“Here’s a newsflash, honey—your bacon’s still hanging in the smokehouse. What are you going to do next time? Have your friend Cox call the ACLU? They might be interested, but I don’t think anyone from the Portland office is going to be visiting Chester’s Mill soon.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic. The Dome might blow out to sea tonight. Or just dissipate. We don’t know.”

“Fat chance. This is a government job—some government’s—and I’ll bet your Colonel Cox knows it.”

Barbie was silent. He had believed Cox when Cox said the U.S. hadn’t been responsible for the Dome. Not because Cox was necessarily trustworthy, but because Barbie just didn’t think America had the technology. Or any other country, for that matter. But what did he know? His last service job had been threatening scared Iraqis. Sometimes with a gun to their heads.

Junior’s friend Frankie DeLesseps was out on Route 119, helping to direct traffic. He was wearing a blue uniform shirt over jeans—there probably hadn’t been any uniform pants in his size at the station. He was a tall sonofabitch. And, Julia saw with misgivings, he was wearing a gun on his hip. Smaller than the Glocks the regular Mill police carried, probably his own property, but it was a gun, all right.