by Stephen King
Sleep.
19
Officer Henry Morrison got Junior to the hospital--by then the kid had regained a soupy semblance of consciousness, although he was still talking gibberish--and Twitch wheeled him away on a gurney. It was a relief to see him go.
Henry got Big Jim's home and Town Hall office numbers from directory assistance, but there was no answer at either--they were landlines. He was listening to a robot tell him that James Rennie's cell-phone number was unlisted when the jetliner exploded. He rushed out with everyone else who was ambulatory and stood in the turnaround, looking at the new black mark on the Dome's invisible surface. The last of the debris was still fluttering down.
Big Jim was indeed in his Town Hall office, but he had killed the phone so he could work on both speeches--the one to the cops tonight, the one to the entire town tomorrow night--without interruption. He heard the explosion and rushed outside. His first thought was that Cox had set off a nuke. A cotton-picking nuke! If it broke through the Dome, it would ruin everything!
He found himself standing next to Al Timmons, the Town Hall janitor. Al pointed north, high in the sky, where smoke was still rising. It looked to Big Jim like an antiaircraft burst in an old World War II movie.
"It was an airplane!" Al shouted. "And a big one! Christ! Didn't they get the word?"
Big Jim felt a cautious sense of relief, and his triphammering heart slowed a bit. If it was a plane ... just a plane and not a nuke or some kind of super-missile ...
His cell phone tweeted. He snatched it from the pocket of his suit coat and snapped it open. "Peter? Is that you?"
"No, Mr. Rennie. Colonel Cox here."
"What did you do?" Rennie shouted. "What in God's name did you people do now?"
"Nothing." There was none of the former crisp authority in Cox's voice; he sounded stunned. "It was nothing to do with us. It was ... hold on a minute."
Rennie waited. Main Street was full of people staring up into the sky with their mouths gaped open. To Rennie they looked like sheep dressed in human clothing. Tomorrow night they would crowd into the Town Hall and go baaa baaa baaa, when'll it get better? And baaa baaa baaa, take care of us until it does. And he would. Not because he wanted to, but because it was God's will.
Cox came back on. Now he sounded weary as well as stunned. Not the same man who had hectored Big Jim about stepping down. And that's the way I want you to sound, pal, Rennie thought. Exactly the way.
"My initial information is that Air Ireland flight 179 has struck the Dome and exploded. It originated in Shannon and was bound for Boston. We already have two independent witnesses who claim to have seen a shamrock on the tail, and an ABC crew that was filming just outside the quarantine zone in Harlow may have gotten ... one more second."
It was much more than a second; more than a minute. Big Jim's heart had been slowing toward its normal speed (if a hundred and twenty beats per minute can be so characterized), but now it sped up again and took one of those looping misbeats. He coughed and pounded at his chest. His heart seemed almost to settle, then went into a full-blown arrhythmia. He felt sweat pop on his brow. The day, formerly dull, all at once seemed too bright.
"Jim?" It was Al Timmons, and although he was standing right beside Big Jim, his voice seemed to be coming from a galaxy far, far away. "You okay?"
"Fine," Big Jim said. "Stay right there. I may want you."
Cox was back. "It was indeed the Air Ireland flight. I just watched ABC's streamed footage of the crash. A reporter was doing a stand-up, and it occurred right behind her. They caught the whole thing."
"I'm sure their ratings will go up."
"Mr. Rennie, we may have had our differences, but I hope you'll convey to your constituents that this is nothing for them to worry about."
"Just tell me how a thing like that--" His heart looped again. His breath tore in, then stopped. He pounded his chest a second time--harder--and sat down on a bench beside the brick path which ran from the Town Hall to the sidewalk. Al was looking at him instead of at the crash scar on the Dome now, his forehead furrowed with concern--and, Big Jim thought, fright. Even now, with all this happening, he was glad to see that, glad to know he was seen as indispensable. Sheep need a shepherd.
"Rennie? Are you there?"
"I'm here." And so was his heart, but it was far from right. "How did it happen? How could it? I thought you people got the word out."
"We're not positive and won't be until we recover the black box, but we've got a pretty good idea. We sent out a directive warning all commercial air carriers away from the Dome, but this is 179's usual flight path. We think someone neglected to reprogram the autopilot. Simple as that. I'll get you further details as soon as we get them here, but right now the important thing is to quell any panic in town before it can take hold."
But under certain circumstances, panic could be good. Under certain circumstances, it could--like food riots and acts of arson--have a beneficial effect.
"This was stupidity on a grand scale, but still just an accident," Cox was saying. "Make sure your people know that."
They'll know what I tell them and believe what I want them to, Rennie thought.
His heart skittered like grease on a hot griddle, settled briefly into a more normal rhythm, then skittered again. He pushed the red END CALL button without responding to Cox and dropped the phone back into his pocket. Then he looked at Al.
"I need you to take me to the hospital," he said, speaking as calmly as he could manage. "I seem to be in some discomfort here."
Al--who was wearing a Solidarity Armband--looked more alarmed than ever. "Accourse, Jim. You just sit right there while I get my car. We can't let anything happen to you. The town needs you."
Don't I know it, Big Jim thought, sitting on the bench and looking at the great black smear on the sky.
"Find Carter Thibodeau and tell him to meet me there. I want him on hand."
There were other instructions he wanted to give, but just then his heart stopped completely. For a moment forever yawned at his feet, a clear dark chasm. Rennie gasped and pounded his chest. It burst into a full gallop. He thought at it: Don't you quit on me now, I've got too much to do. Don't you dare, you cotton-picker. Don't you dare.
20
"What was it?" Norrie asked in a high, childish voice, and then answered her own question. "It was an airplane, wasn't it? An airplane full of people." She burst into tears. The boys tried to hold their own tears back, and couldn't. Rommie felt like crying himself.
"Yuh," he said. "I think that's what it was."
Joe turned to look at the van, now heading back toward them. When it got to the foot of the ridge it sped up, as if Rusty couldn't wait to get back. When he arrived and jumped out, Joe saw he had another reason for hurry: the lead apron was gone.
Before Rusty could say anything, his cell phone rang. He flipped it open, looked at the number, and took the call. He expected Ginny, but it was the new guy, Thurston Marshall. "Yes, what? If it's about the plane, I saw--" He listened, frowning a little, then nodding. "Okay, yes. Right. I'm coming now. Tell Ginny or Twitch to give him two milligrams of Valium, IV push. No, better make it three. And tell him to be calm. That's foreign to his nature, but tell him to try. Give his son five milligrams."
He closed his phone and looked at them. "Both Rennies are in the hospital, the elder with heartbeat arrhythmia, which he's had before. The damn fool has needed a pacemaker for two years. Thurston says the younger has symptoms that look to him like a glioma. I hope he's wrong."
Norrie turned her tearstained face up to Rusty's. She had her arm around Benny Drake, who was furiously wiping at his eyes. When Joe came and stood next to her, she put her other arm around him.
"That's a brain tumor, right?" she said. "A bad one."
"When they hit kids Junior Rennie's age, almost all of them are bad."
"What did you find up there?" Rommie asked.
"And what happened to your apron?" Benny added.
&nb
sp; "I found what Joe thought I'd find."
"The generator?" Rommie said. "Doc, are you sure?"
"Yeah. It's like nothing I ever saw before. I'm pretty sure no one on Earth's seen anything like it before."
"Something from another planet," Joe said in a voice so low it was a whisper. "I knew. "
Rusty looked at him hard. "You can't talk about it. None of us can. If you're asked, say we looked and found nothing."
"Even to my mom?" Joe asked plaintively.
Rusty almost relented on that score, then hardened his heart. This was a secret now shared among five people, and that was far too many. But the kids had deserved to know, and Joe McClatchey had guessed anyway.
"Even her, at least for now."
"I can't lie to her," Joe said. "It doesn't work. She's got Mom Vision."
"Then just say I swore you to secrecy and it's better for her that way. If she presses, tell her to talk to me. Come on, I need to get back to the hospital. Rommie, you drive. My nerves are shot."
"Aren't you gonna--" Rommie began.
"I'll tell you everything. On the way back. Maybe we can even figure out what the hell to do about it."
21
An hour after the Air Ireland 767 crashed into the Dome, Rose Twitchell marched into the Chester's Mill PD with a napkin-covered plate. Stacey Moggin was back on the desk, looking as tired and distracted as Rose felt.
"What's that?" Stacey asked.
"Lunch. For my cook. Two toasted BLTs."
"Rose, I'm not supposed to let you go down there. I'm not supposed to let anyone go down there."
Mel Searles had been talking with two of the new recruits about a monster truck show he'd seen at the Portland Civic Center last spring. Now he looked around. "I'll take em to him, Miz Twitchell."
"You will not, " Rose said.
Mel looked surprised. And a little hurt. He had always liked Rose, and thought she liked him.
"I don't trust you not to drop the plate," she explained, although this wasn't the exact truth; the fact was, she didn't trust him at all. "I watched you play football, Melvin."
"Aw, come on, I ain't that clumsy."
"Also because I want to see if he's all right."
"He's not supposed to have any visitors," Mel said. "That's from Chief Randolph, and he got it direct from Selectman Rennie."
"Well, I'm going down. You'll have to use your Taser to stop me, and if you do that, I'll never make you another strawberry waffle the way you like them, with the batter all runny in the middle." She looked around and sniffed. "Besides, I don't see either of those men here right now. Or am I missing something?"
Mel considered getting tough, if only to impress the fresh fish, and then decided not to. He really did like Rose. And he liked her waffles, especially when they were a little gooshy. He hitched up his belt and said, "Okay. But I hafta to go with you, and you ain't taking him nothing until I look under that napkin."
She raised it. Underneath were two BLTs, and a note written on the back of a Sweetbriar Rose customer check. Stay strong, it said. We believe in you.
Mel took the note, crumpled it, and threw it toward the waste-basket. It missed, and one of the recruits scurried to pick it up. "Come on," he said, then stopped, took half a sandwich, and tore out a monster bite. "He couldn't eat all that, anyway," he told Rose.
Rose said nothing, but as he led her downstairs, she did briefly consider braining him with the plate.
She got halfway down the lower corridor before Mel said, "That's as close as you go, Miz Twitchell. I'll take it the rest of the way."
She handed the plate over and watched unhappily as Mel knelt, pushed the plate through the bars, and announced: "Lunch is served, mon-sewer."
Barbie ignored him. He was looking at Rose. "Thank you. Although if Anson made those, I don't know how grateful I'll be after the first bite."
"I made them," she said. "Barbie--why did they beat you up? Were you trying to get away? You look awful. "
"Not trying to get away, resisting arrest. Wasn't I, Mel?"
"You want to quit the smart talk, or I'll come in there and take them samwidges away from you."
"Well, you could try," Barbie said. "We could contest the matter." When Mel showed no inclination to take him up on this offer, Barbie turned his attention to Rose once more. "Was it an airplane? It sounded like an airplane. A big one."
"ABC says it was an Air Ireland jetliner. Fully loaded."
"Let me guess. It was on its way to Boston or New York and some not-so-bright spark forgot to reprogram the autopilot."
"I don't know. They're not saying about that part yet."
"Come on." Mel came back and took her arm. "That's enough chitter-chatter. You need to leave before I get in trouble."
"Are you okay?" Rose asked Barbie, resisting this command--at least for a moment.
"Yeah," Barbie said. "How about you? Did you patch it up with Jackie Wettington yet?"
And what was the correct answer to that one? So far as Rose knew, she had nothing to patch up with Jackie. She thought she saw Barbie give a tiny shake of the head, and hoped it wasn't just her imagination.
"Not yet," she said.
"You ought to. Tell her to stop being a bitch."
"As if," Mel muttered. He locked onto Rose's arm. "Come on, now; don't make me drag you."
"Tell her I said you're all right," Barbie called as she went up the stairs, this time leading the way with Mel at her heels. "You two really should talk. And thanks for the sandwiches."
Tell her I said you're all right.
That was the message, she was quite sure of it. She didn't think Mel had caught it; he'd always been dull, and life under the Dome did not seem to have smartened him up any. Which was probably why Barbie had taken the risk.
Rose made up her mind to find Jackie as soon as possible, and pass on the message: Barbie says I'm all right. Barbie says you can talk to me.
"Thank you, Mel," she said when they were back in the ready room. "It was kind of you to let me do that."
Mel looked around, saw no one of greater authority than himself, and relaxed. "No problem-o, but don't think you're gettin down there again with supper, because it ain't happenin." He considered, then waxed philosophical. "He deserves somethin nice though, I guess. Because come next week this time, he's gonna be as toasty as those samwidges you made im."
We'll see about that, Rose thought.
22
Andy Sanders and The Chef sat beside the WCIK storage barn, smoking glass. Straight ahead of them, in the field surrounding the radio tower, was a mound of earth marked with a cross made out of crate-slats. Beneath the mound lay Sammy Bushey, torturer of Bratz, rape victim, mother of Little Walter. Chef said that later on he might steal a regular cross from the cemetery by Chester Pond. If there was time. There might not be.
He lifted his garage door opener as if to emphasize this point.
Andy felt sorry for Sammy, just as he felt sorry about Claudette and Dodee, but now it was a clinical sorrow, safely stored inside its own Dome: you could see it, could appreciate its existence, but you couldn't exactly get in there with it. Which was a good thing. He tried to explain this to Chef Bushey, although he got a little lost in the middle--it was a complex concept. Chef nodded, though, then passed Andy a large glass bong. Etched on the side were the words NOT LEGAL FOR TRADE.
"Good, ain't it?" Chef said.
"Yes!" Andy said.
For a little while then they discussed the two great texts of born-again dopers: what good shit this was, and how fucked up they were getting on this good shit. At some point there was a huge explosion to the north. Andy shielded his eyes, which were burning from all the smoke. He almost dropped the bong, but Chef rescued it.
"Holy shit, that's an airplane !" Andy tried to get up, but his legs, although buzzing with energy, wouldn't hold him. He settled back.
"No, Sanders," Chef said. He puffed at the bong. Sitting with legs akimbo as he was, he looked to Andy like an
Indian with a peace pipe.
Leaning on the side of the shed between Andy and Chef were four full-auto AK-47s, Russian in manufacture but imported--like many other fine items stocked in the storage facility--from China. There were also five stacked crates filled with thirty-round clips and a box of RGD-5 grenades. Chef had offered Andy a translation of the ideograms on the box of grenades: Do Not Drop This Motherfucker.
Now Chef took one of the AKs and laid it across his knees. "That was not an airplane," he amplified.
"No? Then what was it?"
"A sign from God." Chef looked at what he had painted on the side of the storage barn: two quotes (liberally interpreted) from the Book of Revelation with the number 31 featured prominently. Then he looked back at Andy. To the north, the plume of smoke in the sky was dissipating. Below it, fresh smoke was rising from where the plane had impacted in the woods. "I got the date wrong," he said in a brooding voice. "Halloween really is coming early this year. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after tomorrow."
"Or the day after that," Andy added helpfully.
"Maybe," Chef allowed, "but I think it'll be sooner. Sanders!"
"What, Chef?"
"Take you a gun. You're in the Lord's army now. You're a Christian soldier. Your days of licking that apostate son of a bitch's ass are over."
Andy took an AK and laid it across his bare thighs. He liked the weight of it and the warmth of it. He checked to make sure the safety was on. It was. "What apostate son of a bitch are you talking about, Chef?"
Chef fixed him with a look of utter contempt, but when Andy reached for the bong, he handed it over willingly enough. There was plenty for both of them, would be from now until the end, and yea, verily, the end would not be long. "Rennie. That apostate son of a bitch."
"He's my friend--my pal--but he can be a hardass, all right," Andy admitted. "My goodness but this is good shit."