Under the Dome

  She offered a weak smile.

  "Chief," Rennie said, "I really think we ought to call someone on this. If not Homeland Security--on more mature reflection that seems a little radical--then perhaps the State Police--"

  Duke moved him aside. It was gentle but unequivocal. Almost a push. Rennie balled his hands into fists, then unrolled them again. He had built a life in which he was a pusher rather than a pushee, but that didn't alter the fact that fists were for idiots. Witness his own son. All the same, slights needed to be noted and addressed. Usually at some later date ... but sometimes later was better.

  Sweeter.

  "Peter!" Duke called to Randolph. "Give the Health Center a shout and ask where the hell our ambulance is! I want it out here!"

  "Morrison can do that," Randolph said. He had grabbed the camera from his car and was turning to snap pictures of the scene.

  "You can do it, and right now."

  "Chief, I don't think Jackie's too banged up, and no one else--"

  "When I want your opinion I'll ask for it, Peter."

  Randolph started to give him a look, then saw the expression on Duke's face. He tossed the camera back onto the front seat of his shop and grabbed his cell phone.

  "What was it, Jackie?" Duke asked.

  "I don't know. First there was a buzzy feeling like you get if you accidentally touch the prongs of a plug when you're sticking it into the wall. It passed, but then I hit ... jeez, I don't know what I hit."

  An ahhh sound went up from the spectators. The firemen had trained their hoses on the burning pulp-truck, but beyond it, some of the spray was rebounding. Striking something and splattering back, creating rainbows in the air. Duke had never seen anything like it in his life ... except maybe when you were in a car wash, watching the high-pressure jets hit your windshield.

  Then he saw a rainbow on the Mill side as well: a small one. One of the spectators--Lissa Jamieson, the town librarian--walked toward it.

  "Lissa, get away from there!" Duke shouted.

  She ignored him. It was as if she were hypnotized. She stood inches from where a jet of high-pressure water was striking thin air and splashing back, her hands spread. He could see drops of mist sparkling on her hair, which was pulled away from her face and bunned at the back. The little rainbow broke up, then reformed behind her.

  "Nothing but mist!" she called, sounding rapturous. "All that water over there and nothing but mist over here! Like from a humidifier."

  Peter Randolph held up his cell phone and shook his head. "I get a signal, but I'm not getting through. My guess is that all these spectators"--he swept his arm in a big arc--"have got everything jammed up."

  Duke didn't know if that were possible, but it was true that almost everyone he could see was either yakking or taking pictures. Except for Lissa, that was, who was still doing her wood-nymph imitation.

  "Go get her," Duke told Randolph. "Pull her back before she decides to haul out her crystals or something."

  Randolph's face suggested that such errands were far below his pay grade, but he went. Duke uttered a laugh. It was short but genuine.

  "What in the goodness sakes do you see that's worth laughing about?" Rennie asked. More Castle County cops were pulling up on the Motton side. If Perkins didn't look out, The Rock would end up taking control of this thing. And getting the gosh-darn credit.

  Duke stopped laughing, but he was still smiling. Unabashed. "It's a clustermug," he said. "Isn't that your word, Big Jim? And in my experience, sometimes laughing is the only way to deal with a clustermug."

  "I have no idea what you're talking about!" Rennie almost shouted. The Dinsmore boys stepped back from him and stood beside their father.

  "I know." Duke spoke gently. "And that's okay. All you need to understand right now is that I'm the chief law enforcement officer on the scene, at least until the County Sheriff gets here, and you're a town selectman. You have no official standing, so I'd like you to move back."

  Duke raised his voice and pointed to where Officer Henry Morrison was stringing yellow tape, stepping around two largeish pieces of airplane fuselage to do it. "I'd like everyone to move back and let us do our job! Follow Selectman Rennie. He's going to lead you behind the yellow tape."

  "I don't appreciate this, Duke," Rennie said.

  "God bless you, but I don't give a shit," Duke said. "Get off my scene, Big Jim. And be sure to go around the tape. No need for Henry to have to string it twice."

  "Chief Perkins, I want you to remember how you spoke to me today. Because I will."

  Rennie stalked toward the tape. The other spectators followed, most looking over their shoulders to watch the water spray off the diesel-smudged barrier and form a line of wetness on the road. A couple of the sharper ones (Ernie Calvert, for instance) had already noticed that this line exactly mimicked the border between Motton and The Mill.

  Rennie felt a childish temptation to snap Hank Morrison's carefully strung tape with his chest, but restrained himself. He would not, however, go around and get his Land's End slacks snagged in a mess of burdocks. They had cost him sixty dollars. He shuffled under, holding up the tape with one hand. His belly made serious ducking impossible.

  Behind him, Duke walked slowly toward the place where Jackie had suffered her collision. He held one hand outstretched before him like a blind man prospecting his way across an unfamiliar room.

  Here was where she had fallen down ... and here ...

  He felt the buzzing she had described, but instead of passing, it deepened to searing pain in the hollow of his left shoulder. He had just enough time to remember the last thing Brenda had said--Take care of your pacemaker--and then it exploded in his chest with enough force to blow open his Wildcats sweatshirt, which he'd donned that morning in honor of this afternoon's game. Blood, scraps of cotton, and bits of flesh struck the barrier.

  The crowd aaah ed.

  Duke tried to speak his wife's name and failed, but he saw her face clearly in his mind. She was smiling.

  Then, darkness.

  4

  The kid was Benny Drake, fourteen, and a Razor. The Razors were a small but dedicated skateboarding club, frowned on by the local constabulary but not actually outlawed, in spite of calls from Selectmen Rennie and Sanders for such action (at last March's town meeting, this same dynamic duo had succeeded in tabling a budget item that would have funded a safe-skateboarding area on the town common behind the bandstand).

  The adult was Eric "Rusty" Everett, thirty-seven, a physician's assistant working with Dr. Ron Haskell, whom Rusty often thought of as The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Because, Rusty would have explained (if he'd anyone other than his wife he could trust with such disloyalty), he so often remains behind the curtain while I do the work.

  Now he checked the state of young Master Drake's last tetanus shot. Fall of 2009, very good. Especially considering that young Master Drake had done a Wilson while cement-shooting and torn up his calf pretty good. Not a total jake, but a lot worse than simple roadrash.

  "Power's back on, dude," young Master Drake offered.

  "Generator, dude," Rusty said. "Handles the hospital and the Health Center. Radical, huh?"

  "Old-school," young Master Drake agreed.

  For a moment the adult and the adolescent regarded the six-inch gash in Benny Drake's calf without speaking. Cleaned of dirt and blood, it looked ragged but no longer downright awful. The town whistle had quit, but far in the distance, they could hear sirens. Then the fire whistle went off, making them both jump.

  Ambulance is gonna roll, Rusty thought. Sure as shit. Twitch and Everett ride again. Better hurry this up.

  Except the kid's face was pretty white, and Rusty thought there were tears standing in his eyes.

  "Scared?" Rusty asked.

  "A little," Benny Drake said. "Ma's gonna ground me."

  "Is that what you're scared of?" Because he guessed that Benny Drake had been grounded a few times before. Like often, dude.

  "Well ... how m
uch is it gonna hurt?"

  Rusty had been hiding the syringe. Now he injected three cc's of Xylocaine and epinephrine--a deadening compound he still called Novocain. He took his time infiltrating the wound, so as not to hurt the kid any more than he had to. "About that much."

  "Whoa," Benny said. "Stat, baby. Code blue."

  Rusty laughed. "Did you full-pipe before you Wilsoned?" As a long-retired boarder, he was honestly curious.

  "Only half, but it was toxic!" Benny said, brightening. "How many stitches, do you think? Norrie Calvert took twelve when she ledged out in Oxford last summer."

  "Not that many," Rusty said. He knew Norrie, a mini-goth whose chief aspiration seemed to be killing herself on a skateboard before bearing her first woods colt. He pressed near the wound with the needle end of the syringe. "Feel that?"

  "Yeah, dude, totally. Did you hear, like, a bang out there?" Benny pointed vaguely south as he sat on the examining table in his undershorts, bleeding onto the paper cover.

  "Nope," Rusty said. He had actually heard two: not bangs but, he was afraid, explosions. Had to make this fast. And where was The Wizard? Doing rounds, according to Ginny. Which probably meant snoozing in the Cathy Russell doctors' lounge. It was where The Wonderful Wiz did most of his rounds these days.

  "Feel it now?" Rusty poked again with the needle. "Don't look, looking is cheating."

  "No, man, nothin. You're goofin wit me."

  "I'm not. You're numb." In more ways than one, Rusty thought. "Okay, here we go. Lie back, relax, and enjoy flying Cathy Russell Airlines." He scrubbed the wound with sterile saline, debrided, then trimmed with his trusty no. 10 scalpel. "Six stitches with my very best four-oh nylon."

  "Awesome," the kid said. Then: "I think I may hurl."

  Rusty handed him an emesis basin, in these circumstances known as a puke pan. "Hurl in this. Faint and you're on your own."

  Benny didn't faint. He didn't hurl, either. Rusty was placing a sterile gauze sponge on the wound when there was a perfunctory knock at the door, followed by Ginny Tomlinson's head. "Can I speak to you for a minute?"

  "Don't worry about me," Benny said. "I'm like, freely radical." Cheeky little bugger.

  "In the hall, Rusty?" Ginny said. She didn't give the kid a glance.

  "I'll be right back, Benny. Sit there and take it easy."

  "Chillaxin'. No prob."

  Rusty followed Ginny out into the hall. "Ambulance time?" he asked. Beyond Ginny, in the sunny waiting room, Benny's mother was looking grimly down at a paperback with a sweet-savage cover.

  Ginny nodded. "119, at the Tarker's town line. There's another accident on the other town line--Motton--but I'm hearing everyone involved in that one is DATS." Dead at the scene. "Truck-plane collision. The plane was trying to land."

  "Are you shitting me?"

  Alva Drake looked around, frowning, then went back to her paperback. Or at least to looking at it while she tried to decide if her husband would support her in grounding Benny until he was eighteen.

  "This is an authentic no-shit situation," Ginny said. "I'm getting reports of other crashes, too--"

  "Weird."

  "--but the guy out on the Tarker's town line is still alive. Rolled a delivery truck, I believe. Buzz, cuz. Twitch is waiting."

  "You'll finish the kid?"

  "Yes. Go on, go."

  "Dr. Rayburn?"

  "Had patients in Stephens Memorial." This was the Norway-South Paris hospital. "He's on his way, Rusty. Go."

  He paused on his way out to tell Mrs. Drake that Benny was fine. Alva did not seem overjoyed at the news, but thanked him. Dougie Twitchell--Twitch--was sitting on the bumper of the out-of-date ambulance Jim Rennie and his fellow selectmen kept not replacing, smoking a cigarette and taking some sun. He was holding a portable CB, and it was lively with talk: voices popping like corn and jumping all over each other.

  "Put out that cancer-stick and let's get rolling," Rusty said. "You know where we're going, right?"

  Twitch flipped the butt away. Despite his nickname, he was the calmest nurse Rusty had ever encountered, and that was saying a lot. "I know what Gin-Gin told you--Tarker's-Chester's town line, right?"

  "Yes. Overturned truck."

  "Yeah, well, plans have changed. We gotta go the other way." He pointed to the southern horizon, where a thick black pillar of smoke was rising. "Ever had a desire to see a crashed plane?"

  "I have," Rusty said. "In the service. Two guys. You could have spread what was left on bread. That was plenty for me, pilgrim. Ginny says they're all dead out there, so why--"

  "Maybe so, maybe no," Twitch said, "but now Perkins is down, and he might not be."

  "Chief Perkins?"

  "The very same. I'm thinking the prognosis ain't good if the pacemaker blew right out of his chest--which is what Peter Randolph is claiming--but he is the Chief of Police. Fearless Leader."

  "Twitch. Buddy. A pacemaker can't blow like that. It's perfectly unpossible."

  "Then maybe he is still alive, and we can do some good," Twitch said. Halfway around the hood of the ambo, he took out his cigarettes.

  "You're not smoking in the ambulance," Rusty said.

  Twitch looked at him sadly.

  "Unless you share, that is."

  Twitch sighed and handed him the pack.

  "Ah, Marlboros," Rusty said. "My very favorite OPs."

  "You slay me," Twitch said.

  5

  They blew through the stoplight where Route 117 T'd into 119 at the center of town, siren blaring, both of them smoking like fiends (with the windows open, which was SOP), listening to the chatter from the radio. Rusty understood little of it, but he was clear on one thing: he was going to be working long past four o'clock.

  "Man, I don't know what happened," Twitch said, "but there's this: we're gonna see a genuine aircraft crash site. Post-crash, true, but beggars cannot be choosers."

  "Twitch, you're one sick canine."

  There was a lot of traffic, mostly headed south. A few of these folks might have legitimate errands, but Rusty thought most were human flies being drawn to the smell of blood. Twitch passed a line of four with no problem; the northbound lane of 119 was oddly empty.

  "Look!" Twitch said, pointing. "News chopper! We're gonna be on the six o'clock news, Big Rusty! Heroic paramedics fight to--"

  But that was where Dougie Twitchell's flight of fancy ended. Ahead of them--at the accident site, Rusty presumed--the helicopter did a buttonhook. For a moment he could read the number 13 on its side and see the CBS eye. Then it exploded, raining down fire from the cloudless early afternoon sky.

  Twitch cried out: "Jesus, I'm sorry! I didn't mean it!" And then, childishly, hurting Rusty's heart even in his shock: "I take it back!"

  6

  "I gotta go back," Gendron said. He took off his Sea Dogs cap and wiped his bloody, grimy, pallid face with it. His nose had swollen until it looked like a giant's thumb. His eyes peered out of dark circles. "I'm sorry, but my schnozz is hurting like hell, and ... well, I ain't as young as I used to be. Also ..." He raised his arms and dropped them. They were facing each other, and Barbie would have taken the guy in his arms and given him a pat on the back, if it were possible.

  "Shock to the system, isn't it?" he asked Gendron.

  Gendron gave a bark of laughter. "That copter was the final touch." And they both looked toward the fresh column of smoke.

  Barbie and Gendron had gone on from the accident site on 117 after making sure that the witnesses were getting help for Elsa Andrews, the sole survivor. At least she didn't seem badly hurt, although she was clearly heartbroken over the loss of her friend.

  "Go on back, then. Slow. Take your time. Rest when you need to."

  "Pushing on?"

  "Yes."

  "Still think you're gonna find the end of it?"

  Barbie was silent for a moment. At first he'd been sure, but now--

  "I hope so," he said.

  "Well, good luck." Gendron tipped his c
ap to Barbie before putting it back on. "I hope to shake your hand before the day's out."

  "Me, too," Barbie said. He paused. He had been thinking. "Can you do something for me, if you can get to your cell phone?"

  "Sure."

  "Call the Army base at Fort Benning. Ask for the liaison officer and tell them you need to get in touch with Colonel James O. Cox. Tell them it's urgent, that you're calling for Captain Dale Barbara. Can you remember that?"

  "Dale Barbara. That's you. James Cox, that's him. Got it."

  "If you reach him ... I'm not sure you will, but if ... tell him what's going on here. Tell him if no one's gotten in touch with Homeland Security, he's the man. Can you do that?"

  Gendron nodded. "If I can, I will. Good luck, soldier."

  Barbie could have done without ever having been called that again, but he touched a finger to his forehead. Then he went on, looking for what he no longer thought he would find.

  7

  He found a woods road that roughly paralleled the barrier. It was overgrown and disused, but much better than pushing through the puckerbrush. Every now and then he diverted to the west, feeling for the wall between Chester's Mill and the outside world. It was always there.

  When Barbie came to where 119 crossed into The Mill's sister town of Tarker's Mills, he stopped. The driver of the overturned delivery truck had been taken away by some good Samaritan on the other side of the barrier, but the truck itself lay blocking the road like a big dead animal. The back doors had sprung open on impact. The tar was littered with Devil Dogs, Ho Hos, Ring Dings, Twinkies, and peanut butter crackers. A young man in a George Strait tee-shirt sat on a stump, eating one of the latter. He had a cell phone in hand. He looked up at Barbie. "Yo. Did you come from ..." He pointed vaguely behind Barbie. He looked tired and scared and disillusioned.

  "From the other side of town," Barbie said. "Right."

  "Invisible wall the whole way? Border closed?"

  "Yes."

  The young man nodded and hit a button on his cell. "Dusty? You there yet?" He listened some more, then said: "Okay." He ended the call. "My friend Dusty and I started east of here. Split up. He went south. We've been staying in touch by phone. When we can get through, that is. He's where the copter crashed now. Says it's getting crowded there."