by Stephen King
For the first time, Rennie looked nettled. “I don’t care if you believe it or not. This is news to me.” But his eyes darted fractionally to one side as he said it, as if to check that his autographed photo of Tiger Woods was still there; the classic liar’s tell.
Rusty said, “The hospital’s almost out of LP. Without it, the few of us who are still on the job might as well be working in a Civil War battlefield surgery tent. Our current patients—including a postcoronary and a serious case of diabetes that may warrant amputation—will be in serious trouble if the power goes out. The possible amp is Jimmy Sirois. His car is in the parking lot. It’s got a sticker on the bumper that says ELECT BIG JIM.”
“I’ll investigate,” Big Jim said. He spoke with the air of a man conferring a favor. “The town’s propane is probably stored in some other town facility. As for yours, I’m sure I can’t say.”
“What other town facilities? There’s the FD, and the sand-and-salt pile out on God Creek Road—not even a shed there—but those are the only ones I’m aware of.”
“Mr. Everett, I’m a busy man. You’ll have to excuse me now.”
Rusty stood. His hands wanted to ball into fists, but he wouldn’t let them. “I’m going to ask you one more time,” he said. “Straight out and straight up. Do you know where those missing tanks are?”
“No.” This time it was Dale Earnhardt Rennie’s eyes flickered to. “And I’m not going to read any implication into that question, son, because if I did I’d have to resent it. Now why don’t you run along and check on Jimmy Sirois? Tell him Big Jim sends his best, and he’ll stop by as soon as the nitpickery slows down a little.”
Rusty was still battling to hold onto his temper, but this was a fight he was losing. “Run along? I think you forgot that you’re a public servant, not a private dictator. For the time being I’m this town’s chief medical officer, and I want some an—”
Big Jim’s cell rang. He snared it. Listened. The lines around his drawn-down mouth grew grimmer. “Goshdarn it! Every time I turn my darn back …” He listened some more, then said: “If you’ve got people with you in the office, Pete, shut your trap before you open it too wide and fall right the heck in. Call Andy. I’ll be right there, and the three of us’ll clean this up.”
He killed the phone and got to his feet.
“I have to go to the police station. It’s either an emergency or more nitpickery, I won’t be able to tell which until I get there. And you’ll be wanted at either the hospital or the Health Center, I believe. There seems to be a problem with the Reverend Libby.”
“Why? What happened to her?”
Big Jim’s cold eyes surveyed him from hard little sockets. “I’m sure you’ll hear her story. I don’t know how true it’ll be, but I’m sure you’ll hear it. So go do your job, young fella, and let me do mine.”
Rusty walked down the front hall and out of the house, his temples throbbing. In the west, the sunset was a lurid bloodshow. The air was almost completely still, but bore a smoky stench just the same. At the foot of the steps, Rusty raised a finger and pointed it at the public servant waiting for him to leave his property before he, Rennie, left himself. Rennie scowled at the finger, but Rusty did not drop it.
“Nobody needs to tell me to do my job. And I’m going to make looking for that propane part of it. If I find it in the wrong place, someone else is going to be doing your job, Selectman Rennie. That’s a promise.”
Big Jim flapped a contemptuous hand at him. “Get out of here, son. Go to work.”
11
During the first fifty-five hours of the Dome’s existence, over two dozen children suffered seizures. Some, like those of the Everett girls, were noted. Many more were not, and in the days ahead, the seizure activity would rapidly taper down to nothing. Rusty would compare this to the minor shocks people experienced when they came too close to the Dome. The first time, you got that almost electric frisson that stiffened the hair on the back of your neck; after that, most people felt nothing. It was as if they had been inoculated.
“Are you saying the Dome is like chickenpox?” Linda asked him later. “Catch it once and you’re set for life?”
Janelle had two seizures, and so did a little kid named Norman Sawyer, but in both cases the second seizure was milder than the first, and not accompanied by any babble. Most of the kids Rusty saw had only the one, and there seemed to be no after-effects.
Only two adults had seizures during those first fifty-five hours. Both came around sunset on Monday evening, and both had easily traceable causes.
With Phil Bushey, aka The Chef, the cause was too much of his own product. Around the time Rusty and Big Jim parted company, Chef Bushey was sitting outside the storage barn behind WCIK, looking dreamily at the sunset (this close to the missile strikes, the scarlet in the sky was further darkened by soot on the Dome), his hitty-pipe clasped loosely in one hand. He was tweeked at least to the ionosphere; maybe a hundred miles beyond. In the few low-lying clouds which floated on that bloody light, he saw the faces of his mother, his father, his grandfather; he saw Sammy and Little Walter as well.
All the cloud-faces were bleeding.
When his right foot began to twitch and then his left foot picked up the beat, he ignored it. Twitchin was part of tweekin, everyone knew that. But then his hands began to tremble and his pipe fell into the long grass (yellow and sere as a result of the factory work that went on out here). A moment later his head began to jerk from side to side.
This is it, he thought with a calm that was partly relief. I finally overdid it. I’m checking out. Probably for the best.
But he didn’t check out, didn’t even pass out. He slid slowly sideways, twitching and watching as a black marble rose in the red sky. It expanded to a bowling ball, then an overinflated beachball. It went on growing until it had eaten up the red sky.
The end of the world, he thought. Probably for the best.
For a moment he thought he was wrong, because the stars came out. Only they were the wrong color. They were pink. And then, oh God, they began to fall down, leaving long pink trails behind them.
Next came fire. A roaring furnace, as if someone had opened a hidden trapdoor and loosed Hell itself on Chester’s Mill.
“It’s our treat,” he muttered. His pipe pressed against his arm, making a burn he would see and feel later. He lay twitching in the yellow grass with his eyes turned up to glabrous whites that reflected the lurid sunset. “Our Halloween treat. First the trick … then the treat.”
The fire was becoming a face, an orange version of the bloody ones he’d been looking at in the clouds just before the fit fell on him. It was the face of Jesus. Jesus was scowling at him.
And talking. Talking to him. Telling him that bringing the fire was his responsibility. His. The fire and the … the …
“The purity,” he muttered as he lay in the grass. “No … the purification. ”
Jesus didn’t look so mad now. And He was fading. Why? Because The Chef had understood. First came the pink stars; then came the purifying fire; then the trial would end.
The Chef stilled as the seizure passed into the first real sleep he’d had in weeks, perhaps months. When he woke up, it was full dark—every trace of red gone from the sky. He was chilled to the bone, but not damp.
Under the Dome, dew no longer fell.
12
While The Chef was observing the face of Christ in that evening’s infected sunset, Third Selectman Andrea Grinnell was sitting on her couch and trying to read. Her generator had quit—or had it ever run at all? She couldn’t remember. But she had a gadget called a Mighty Brite light that her sister Rose had tucked into her Christmas stocking last year. She’d never had occasion to use it until now, but it worked just fine. You clamped it to your book and turned it on. Easy-peasy. So light wasn’t a problem. The words, unfortunately, were. The words kept squirming around on the page, sometimes even changing places with each other, and Nora Roberts’s prose, ordinarily crystal
clear, made absolutely no sense. Yet Andrea kept trying, because she could think of nothing else to do.
The house stank, even with the windows open. She was suffering diarrhea and the toilet would no longer flush. She was hungry but couldn’t eat. She had tried a sandwich around five PM—just an inoffensive cheese sandwich—and had thrown it up in the kitchen wastebasket minutes after it was down. A shame, because eating that sandwich had been hard work. She was sweating heavily—had already changed her clothes once, probably should change them again, if she could manage to do it—and her feet kept jittering and jerking.
They don’t call it kicking the habit for nothing, she thought. And I’ll never make the emergency meeting tonight, if Jim still means to have one.
Considering how her last conversation with Big Jim and Andy Sanders had gone, maybe that was good; if she showed up, they’d just bully her some more. Make her do things she didn’t want to do. Best she stay away until she was clear of this … this …
“This shit, ” she said, and brushed her damp hair out of her eyes. “This fucking shit in my system.”
Once she was herself again, she would stand up to Jim Rennie. It was long overdue. She would do it in spite of her poor aching back, which was such a misery without her OxyContin (but not the white-hot agony she had expected—that was a welcome surprise). Rusty wanted her to take methadone. Methadone, for God’s sake! Heroin under an alias!
If you’re thinking about going cold turkey, don’t, he had told her. You’re apt to have seizures.
But he’d said it could take ten days his way, and she didn’t think she could wait that long. Not with this awful Dome over the town. Best to get it over with. Having come to this conclusion, she had flushed all of her pills—not just the methadone but a few last Oxy-Contin pills she’d found in the back of her nightstand drawer—down the toilet. That had been just two flushes before the toilet gave up the ghost, and now she sat here shivering and trying to convince herself she’d done the right thing.
It was the only thing, she thought. That kind of takes the right and wrong out of it.
She tried to turn the page of her book and her stupid hand struck the Mighty Brite gadget. It went tumbling to the floor. The spot of brilliance it threw went up to the ceiling. Andrea looked at it and was suddenly rising out of herself. And fast. It was like riding an invisible express elevator. She had just a moment to look down and see her body still on the couch, twitching helplessly. Foamy drool was slipping down her chin from her mouth. She saw the wetness spreading around the crotch of her jeans and thought, Yep—I’ll have to change again, all right. If I live through this, that is.
Then she passed through the ceiling, through the bedroom above it, through the attic with its dark stacked boxes and retired lamps, and from there out into the night. The Milky Way sprawled above her, but it was wrong. The Milky Way had turned pink.
And then began to fall.
Somewhere—far, far below her—Andrea heard the body she had left behind. It was screaming.
13
Barbie thought he and Julia would discuss what had happened to Piper Libby on their ride out of town, but they were mostly silent, lost in their own thoughts. Neither of them said they were relieved when the unnatural red sunset finally began to fade, but both of them were.
Julia tried the radio once, found nothing but WCIK booming out “All Prayed Up,” and snapped it off again.
Barbie spoke only once, this just after they turned off Route 119 and began to drive west along the narrower blacktop of the Motton Road, where woods bulked up close on either side. “Did I do the right thing?”
In Julia’s opinion he had done a great many right things during the confrontation in the Chief’s office—including the successful treatment of two patients with dislocations—but she knew what he was talking about.
“Yes. It was the exquisitely wrong time to try asserting command.”
He agreed, but felt tired and dispirited and not equal to the job he was beginning to see before him. “I’m sure the enemies of Hitler said pretty much the same thing. They said it in nineteen thirty-four, and they were right. In thirty-six, and they were right. Also in thirty-eight. ‘The wrong time to challenge him,’ they said. And when they realized the right time had finally come, they were protesting in Auschwitz or Buchenwald.”
“This is not the same,” she said.
“You think not?”
She made no reply to this, but saw his point. Hitler had been a paperhanger, or so the story went; Jim Rennie was a used car dealer. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Up ahead, fingers of brilliance shone through the trees. They printed an intaglio of shadows on the patched tar of Motton Road.
There were a number of military trucks parked on the other side of the Dome—it was Harlow over there at this edge of town—and thirty or forty soldiers moved hither and yon with a purpose. All had gas masks hooked to their belts. A silver tanker-truck bearing the legend EXTREME DANGER KEEP BACK had been backed up until it almost touched a door-size shape that had been spray-painted on the Dome’s surface. A plastic hose was clamped to a valve on the back of tanker. Two men were handling the hose, which ended in a wand no bigger than the barrel of a Bic pen. These men were wearing shiny all-over suits and helmets. There were air tanks on their backs.
On the Chester’s Mill side, there was only one spectator. Lissa Jamieson, the town librarian, stood beside an old-fashioned ladies’ Schwinn with a milk-box carrier on the rear fender. On the back of the box was a sticker reading WHEN THE POWER OF LOVE IS STRONGER THAN THE LOVE OF POWER, THE WORLD WILL KNOW PEACE—JIMI HENDRIX.
“What are you doing here, Lissa?” Julia asked, getting out of her car. She held up a hand to shield her eyes from the bright lights.
Lissa was nervously fiddling with the ankh she wore around her neck on a silver chain. She looked from Julia to Barbie, then back to Julia again. “I go for a ride on my bike when I’m upset or worried. Sometimes I ride until midnight. It soothes my pneuma. I saw the lights and came to the lights.” She said this in an incantatory way, and let go of her ankh long enough to trace some kind of complicated symbol in the air. “What are you doing out here?”
“Came to watch an experiment,” Barbie said. “If it works, you can be the first one to leave Chester’s Mill.”
Lissa smiled. It looked a little forced, but Barbie liked her for the effort. “If I did that, I’d miss the Tuesday night special at Sweetbriar. Isn’t it usually meatloaf?”
“Meatloaf’s the plan,” he agreed, not adding that if the Dome was still in place the following Tuesday, the spécialité de la maison was apt to be zucchini quiche.
“They won’t talk,” Lissa said. “I tried.”
A squat fireplug of a man came out from behind the tanker and into the light. He was dressed in khakis, a poplin jacket, and a hat with the logo of the Maine Black Bears on it. The first thing to strike Barbie was that James O. Cox had put on weight. The second was his heavy jacket, zipped to what was now dangerously close to a double chin. Nobody else—Barbie, Julia, or Lissa—was wearing a jacket. There was no need of them on their side of the Dome.
Cox saluted. Barbie gave it back, and it actually felt pretty good to snap one off.
“Hello, Barbie,” Cox said. “How’s Ken?”
“Ken’s fine,” Barbie said. “And I continue to be the bitch that gets all the good shit.”
“Not this time, Colonel,” Cox said. “This time it appears you got fucked at the drive-thru.”
14
“Who’s he?” Lissa whispered. She was still working at the ankh. Julia thought she’d snap the chain soon, if she kept at it. “And what are they doing over there?”
“Trying to get us out,” Julia said. “And after the rather spectacular failure earlier in the day, I’d have to say they’re wise to do it on the quiet.” She started forward. “Hello, Colonel Cox—I’m your favorite newspaper editor. Good evening.”
Cox’s smile was—to
his credit, she thought—only slightly sour. “Ms. Shumway. You’re even prettier than I imagined.”
“I’ll say one thing for you, you’re handy with the bullsh—”
Barbie intercepted her three yards from where Cox was standing and took her by the arms.
“What?” she asked.
“The camera.” She had almost forgotten she had it around her neck until he pointed to it. “Is it digital?”
“Sure, Pete Freeman’s extra.” She started to ask why, then got it. “You think the Dome will fry it.”
“That’d be the best-case scenario,” Barbie said. “Remember what happened to Chief Perkins’s pacemaker.”
“Shit,” she said. “Shit! Maybe I’ve got my old Kodak in the trunk.”
Lissa and Cox were looking at each other with what Barbie thought was equal fascination. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Is there going to be another bang?”
Cox hesitated. Barbie said, “Might as well come clean, Colonel. If you don’t tell her, I will.”
Cox sighed. “You insist on total transparency, don’t you?”
“Why not? If this thing works, the people of Chester’s Mill will be singing your praises. The only reason you’re playing em close is force of habit.”
“No. It’s what my superiors have ordered.”
“They’re in Washington,” Barbie said. “And the press is in Castle Rock, most of em probably watching Girls Gone Wild on pay-per-view. Out here it’s just us chickens.”
Cox sighed and pointed to the spray-painted door shape. “That’s where the men in the protective suits will apply our experimental compound. If we’re lucky, the acid will eat through and we’ll then be able to knock that piece of the Dome out the way you can knock a piece of glass out of a window after you’ve used a glass-cutter.”
“And if we’re unlucky?” Barbie asked. “If the Dome decomposes, giving off some poison gas that kills us all? Is that what the gas masks are for?”