Under the Dome: A Novel (129 page)

“Carter? Are you still with us?”

Carter moaned, tried to turn over, gave up.

“I’m going to put one high up in the back of your neck, just as you suggested. But I want to give you one final piece of advice first. Are you listening?”

Carter groaned again. Big Jim took this for assent.

“The advice is this: Never give a good politician time to pray.”

Big Jim pulled the trigger.

12

“I think he’s dying!” Private Ames shouted. “I think the kid’s dying!”

Sergeant Groh knelt beside Ames and peered through the dirty slot at the bottom of the Dome. Ollie Dinsmore was lying on his side with his lips almost pressed against a surface they could now see, thanks to the filth still clinging to it. In his best drill sergeant’s voice, Groh yelled:
“Yo! Ollie Dinsmore! Front and center!”

Slowly, the boy opened his eyes and looked at the two men crouched less than a foot away but in a colder, cleaner world. “What?” he whispered.

“Nothing, son,” Groh said. “Go back to sleep.”

Groh turned to Ames. “Unbunch your panties, Private. He’s fine.”

“He’s not. Just look at him!”

Groh took Ames by the arm and helped him—not unkindly—to his feet. “No,” he agreed in a low voice. “He’s not even slightly okay, but he’s alive and sleeping and right now that’s the best we can ask for. He’ll use up less oxygen that way. You go get yourself something to eat. Did you get any breakfast?”

Ames shook his head. The thought of breakfast hadn’t even crossed his mind. “I want to stay in case he comes back around.” He paused, then plunged. “I want to be here if he dies.”

“He’s not going to for awhile,” Groh said. He had no idea if this was true or not. “Get something out of the truck, even if it’s only a slice of bologna wrapped in a slice of bread. You look like shit, soldier.”

Ames jerked his head toward the boy sleeping on charred ground with his mouth and nose cocked to the Dome. His face was streaked with filth, and they could barely see the rise and fall of his chest. “How long do you think he’s got, Sarge?”

Groh shook his head. “Probably not long. Someone in the group on the other side already died this morning, and several of the others aren’t doing well. And it’s better over there. Cleaner. You have to prepare yourself.”

Ames felt close to tears. “Kid lost his whole family.”

“Go get yourself something to eat. I’ll watch until you come back.”

“But after that I can stay?”

“The kid wants you, Private, the kid gets you. You can stay until the end.”

Groh watched Ames double-time to the table near the helicopter, where some food was laid out. Out here, it was ten o’clock on a pretty late-fall morning. The sun was shining and melting off the last of a heavy frost. But only a few feet away there was a bubble-world of perpetual twilight, a world where the air was unbreathable and time had ceased to have any meaning. Groh remembered a pond in the local park where he’d grown up. Wilton, Connecticut, that had
been. There had been golden carp in the pond, big old things. The kids used to feed them. Until one day when one of the groundskeepers had an accident with some fertilizer, that was. Goodbye fishies. All ten or a dozen of them, floating dead on the surface.

Looking at the dirty sleeping boy on the other side of the Dome, it was impossible not to think of those carp … only a boy was not a fish.

Ames came back, eating something he obviously didn’t want. Not much of a soldier, in Groh’s opinion, but a good kid with a good heart.

Private Ames sat down. Sergeant Groh sat with him. Around noon, they got a report from the north side of the Dome that another of the survivors over there had died. A little boy named Aidan Appleton. Another kid. Groh believed he might have met his mother the day before. He hoped he was wrong about that, but didn’t think he was.

“Who did it?” Ames asked him. “Who wound this shit up, Sarge? And why?”

Groh shook his head. “No idea.”

“It makes no
sense
!” Ames cried. Beyond them, Ollie stirred, lost his air, and moved his sleeping face once more to the scant breeze seeping through the barrier.

“Don’t wake him up,” Groh said, thinking:
If he goes in his sleep, it’ll be better for all of us.

13

By two o’clock all of the exiles were coughing except—incredible but true—Sam Verdreaux, who seemed to be thriving in the bad air, and Little Walter Bushey, who did nothing but sleep and suck the occasional ration of milk or juice. Barbie sat against the Dome with his arm around Julia. Not far away, Thurston Marshall sat beside the covered corpse of little Aidan Appleton, who had died with terrifying suddenness. Thurse, now coughing steadily, was holding Alice
on his lap. She had cried herself to sleep. Twenty feet further on, Rusty was huddled with his wife and girls, who had also cried themselves to sleep. Rusty had taken Audrey’s body to the ambulance so the girls wouldn’t have to look at it. He held his breath throughout; even fifteen yards inland from the Dome, the air became choking, deadly. Once he got his wind back, he supposed he should do the same with the little boy. Audrey would be good company for him; she’d always liked kids.

Joe McClatchey plopped down beside Barbie. Now he really did look like a scarecrow. His pale face was dotted with acne and there were circles of bruised-looking purple flesh under his eyes.

“My mom’s sleeping,” Joe said.

“Julia too,” Barbie said, “so keep your voice down.”

Julia opened one eye. “Nah sleepin,” she said, and promptly closed the eye again. She coughed, stilled, then coughed some more.

“Benny’s really sick,” Joe said. “He’s running a fever, like the little boy did before he died.” He hesitated. “My mom’s pretty warm, too. Maybe it’s only because it’s so hot in here, but … I don’t think that’s it. What if
she
dies? What if we all do?”

“We won’t,” Barbie said. “They’ll figure something out.”

Joe shook his head. “They won’t. And you know it. Because they’re outside. Nobody outside can help us.” He looked over the blackened wasteland where there had been a town the day before and laughed—a hoarse, croaking sound that was worse because there was actually some amusement in it. “Chester’s Mill has been a town since 1803—we learned that in school. Over two hundred years. And a week to wipe it off the face of the earth. One fuckin week is all it took. How about that, Colonel Barbara?”

Barbie couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Joe covered his mouth, coughed. Behind them, the fans roared and roared. “I’m a smart kid. You know that? I mean, I’m not bragging, but … I’m smart.”

Barbie thought of the video feed the kid had set up near the site of the missile strike. “No argument, Joe.”

“In a Spielberg movie, it’s the smart kid who’d come up with the last-minute solution, isn’t that right?”

Barbie felt Julia stir again. Both eyes were open now, and she was regarding Joe gravely.

Tears were trickling down the boy’s cheeks. “Some Spielberg kid I turned out to be. If we were in Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs would eat us for sure.”

“If only they’d get tired,” Julia said dreamily.

“Huh?” Joe blinked at her.

“The leatherheads. The leatherhead
children.
Kids are supposed to get tired of their games and go on to something else. Or”—she coughed hard—“or their parents call them home for dinner.”

“Maybe they don’t eat,” Joe said gloomily. “Maybe they don’t have parents, either.”

“Or maybe time is different for them,” Barbie said. “In their world, maybe they only just sat down around their version of the box. For them the game might only be starting. We don’t even know for sure they’re children.”

Piper Libby joined them. She was flushed, and her hair was sticking to her cheeks. “They’re kids,” she said.

“How do you know?” Barbie asked.

“I just do.” She smiled. “They’re the God I stopped believing in about three years ago. God turned out to be a bunch of bad little kids playing Interstellar X-Box. Isn’t that funny?” Her smile widened, and then she burst into tears.

Julia was looking toward the box with its flashing purple light. Her face was thoughtful and a little dreamy.

14

It’s Saturday night in Chester’s Mill. That’s the night the Eastern Star ladies used to meet (and after the meeting they’d often go to Henrietta Clavard’s house and drink wine and break out their best dirty
jokes). It’s the night when Peter Randolph and his buddies used to play poker (and also break out their best dirty jokes). The night when Stewart and Fern Bowie often went to Lewiston to rent a couple of whores at a pussy-parlor on Lower Lisbon Street. The night when the Reverend Lester Coggins used to hold teen prayer meetings in the parsonage hall at Holy Redeemer and Piper Libby used to host teen dances in the basement of the Congo Church. The night when Dipper’s used to roar until one (and around twelve-thirty the crowd would begin chanting drunkenly for their anthem, “Dirty Water,” a song all bands from Boston know well). The night when Howie and Brenda Perkins used to walk, hand-in-hand, on the Town Common, saying hello to the other couples they knew. The night when Alden Dinsmore, his wife, Shelley, and their two sons had been known to play catch by the light of a full moon. In Chester’s Mill (as in most small towns where they all support the team), Saturday nights were usually the best nights, made for dancing and fucking and dreaming.

Not this one. This one is black and seemingly endless. The wind has died. The poisoned air hangs hot and still. Out where Route 119 used to be until the furnace heat boiled it away, Ollie Dismore lies with his face pressed to his slot in the slag, still holding stubbornly onto life, and only a foot and a half away, Private Clint Ames continues his patient watch. Some bright boy wanted to shine a spotlight on the kid; Ames (supported by Sergeant Groh, not such an ogre after all) managed to keep it from happening, arguing that shining spotlights on sleeping people was what you did to terrorists, not teenage kids who would probably be dead before the sun rose. But Ames has a flashlight, and every now and then he shines it on the kid, making sure that he’s still breathing. He is, but each time Ames uses the flashlight again, he expects it to show him that those shallow respirations have stopped. Part of him has actually started to hope for that. Part of him has started to accept the truth: no matter how resourceful Ollie Dinsmore has been or how heroically he’s struggled, he has no future. Watching him fight on is terrible. Not long before midnight, Private Ames falls asleep himself, sitting up, with the flash-light clutched loosely in one hand.

Sleepest thou?
Jesus is said to have enquired of Peter.
Couldst thou not watch one hour?

To which Chef Bushey might have added,
book of Matthew, Sanders.

At just past one o’clock, Rose Twitchell shakes Barbie awake.

“Thurston Marshall is dead,” she says. “Rusty and my brother are putting the body under the ambulance so the little girl won’t be too upset when she wakes up.” Then she adds: “
If
she wakes up. Alice is sick too.”

“We’re all sick now,” Julia says. “All except Sam and that dopey little baby.”

Rusty and Twitch hurry back from the huddle of vehicles, collapse in front of one of the fans, and begin breathing in large, whooping gasps. Twitch starts coughing and Rusty shoves him even closer to the air, so hard that Twitch’s forehead strikes the Dome. They all hear the bonk.

Rose has not quite finished her inventory. “Benny Drake’s bad too.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Ginny says he may not last until sunup. If only there was something we could
do.
”

Barbie doesn’t reply. Neither does Julia, who is once more looking in the direction of a box which, although less than fifty square inches in area and not even an inch thick, cannot be budged. Her eyes are distant, speculative.

A reddish moon finally clears the accumulated filth on the eastern wall of the Dome and shines down its bloody light. This is the end of October and in Chester’s Mill, October is the cruelest month, mixing memory with desire. There are no lilacs in this dead land. No lilacs, no trees, no grass. The moon looks down on ruination and little else.

15

Big Jim awoke in the dark, grabbing at his chest. His heart was misfiring again. He pounded at it. Then the alarm on the generator
went off as the current tank of propane reached the danger point:
AAAAAAAAAAA. Feed me, feed me.

Big Jim jumped and cried out. His poor tortured heart was lurching, missing, skipping, then running to catch up with itself. He felt like an old car with a bad carburetor, the kind of rattletrap you might take in trade but would never sell, the kind that was good for nothing but the junkheap. He gasped and pounded. This was as bad as the one that had sent him to the hospital. Maybe even worse.

AAAAAAAAAAAA
: the sound of some huge, gruesome insect—a cicada, maybe—here in the dark with him. Who knew what might have crept in here while he was sleeping?

Big Jim fumbled for the flashlight. With the other hand he alternately pounded and rubbed, telling his heart to settle down, not to be such a cotton-picking
baby,
he hadn’t gone through all of this just to die in the dark.

He found the flashlight, struggled to his feet, and stumbled over the body of his late aide-de-camp. He cried out again and went to his knees. The flashlight didn’t break but went rolling away from him, casting a moving spotlight on the lowest lefthand shelf, which was stacked with boxes of spaghetti and cans of tomato paste.

Big Jim crawled after it. As he did, Carter Thibodeau’s open eyes
moved.

“Carter?” Sweat was running down Big Jim’s face; his cheeks felt coated with some light, stinking grease. He could feel his shirt sticking to him. His heart took another of those looping larrups and then, for a wonder, settled into its normal rhythm again.

Well. No. Not exactly. But at least into something more like a normal rhythm.

“Carter? Son? Are you alive?”

Ridiculous, of course; Big Jim had gutted him like a fish on a riverbank, then shot him in the back of the head. He was as dead as Adolf Hitler. Yet he could have sworn … well,
almost
sworn … that the boy’s
eyes
—