Under the Dome: A Novel (5 page)

“It can’t be!” he shouted to the empty kitchen where the lights were now out (although from the boombox, the band played on). “911 cannot be fucking
busy
!”

He punched redial.

Busy.

He sat in the kitchen with his back propped up against the counter, holding the tourniquet as tightly as he could, staring at the blood and the batter on the floor, periodically hitting redial on the phone, always getting the same stupid
dah-dah-dah.
Something blew up not too far distant, but he barely heard it over the music, which was really cranked (and he never heard the Seneca explosion at all). He wanted to turn the music off, but in order to reach the boombox he would have to lift Myra. Lift her or let go of the belt for two or three seconds. He didn’t want to do either one. So he sat there and “North American Scum” gave way to “Someone Great” and “Someone Great” gave way to “All My Friends,” and after a few more songs, finally the CD, which was called
Sound of Silver,
ended. When it did, when there was silence except for police sirens in the distance and the endlessly chiming computer closer by, Jack realized that his wife was no longer breathing.

But I was going to make lunch,
he thought.
A nice lunch, one you wouldn’t be ashamed of inviting Martha Stewart to.

Sitting against the counter, still holding the belt (opening his fingers again would prove exquisitely painful), the lower right leg of his own pants darkening with blood from his lacerated knee, Jack Evans cradled his wife’s head against his chest and began to weep.

4

Not too far away, on an abandoned woods road not even old Clay Brassey would have remembered, a deer was foraging tender shoots at the edge of Prestile Marsh. Her neck happened to be stretched across the Motton town line, and when the Dome dropped, her head tumbled off. It was severed so neatly that the deed might have been done with a guillotine blade.

5

We have toured the sock-shape that is Chester’s Mill and arrived back at Route 119. And, thanks to the magic of narration, not an instant has passed since the sixtyish fellow from the Toyota slammed face-first into something invisible but very hard and broke his nose. He’s sitting up and staring at Dale Barbara in utter bewilderment. A seagull, probably on its daily commute from the tasty buffet at the Motton town dump to the only slightly less tasty one at the Chester’s Mill landfill, drops like a stone and thumps down not three feet from the sixtyish fellow’s Sea Dogs baseball cap, which he picks up, brushes off, and puts back on.

Both men look up at where the bird came from and see one more incomprehensible thing in a day that will turn out to be full of them.

6

Barbie’s first thought was that he was looking at an afterimage from the exploding plane—the way you sometimes see a big blue floating dot after someone triggers a flash camera close to your face. Only this wasn’t a dot, it wasn’t blue, and instead of floating along when he looked in a different direction—in this case, at his new acquaintance—the smutch hanging in the air stayed exactly where it was.

Sea Dogs was looking up and rubbing his eyes. He seemed to have forgotten about his broken nose, swelling lips, and bleeding forehead. He got to his feet, almost losing his balance because he was craning his neck so severely.

“What’s that?” he said. “What the hell is that, mister?”

A big black smear—candleflame-shaped, if you really used your imagination—discolored the blue sky.

“Is it … a cloud?” Sea Dogs asked. His doubtful tone suggested he already knew it wasn’t.

Barbie said, “I think …” He really didn’t want to hear himself say this. “I think it’s where the plane hit.”

“Say
what
?” Sea Dogs asked, but before Barbie could reply, a good-sized grackle swooped fifty feet overhead. It struck nothing—nothing they could see, at any rate—and dropped not far from the gull.

Sea Dogs said, “Did you
see
that?”

Barbie nodded, then pointed to the patch of burning hay to his left. It and the two or three patches on the right side of the road were sending up thick columns of black smoke to join the smoke rising from the pieces of the dismembered Seneca, but the fire wasn’t going far; there had been heavy rain the day before, and the hay was still damp. Lucky thing, or there would have been grassfires racing away in both directions.

“Do you see
that
?” Barbie asked Sea Dogs.

“I’ll be dipped in shit,” Sea Dogs said after taking a good long look. The fire had burned a patch of ground about sixty feet square,
moving forward until it was almost opposite the place where Barbie and Sea Dogs were facing one another. And there it spread—west to the edge of the highway, east into some small dairy farmer’s four acres of grazeland—not raggedly, not the way grassfires normally advance, with the fire a bit ahead in one place and falling a little behind somewhere else—but as if on a straightedge.

Another gull came flying toward them, this one bound for Motton rather than The Mill.

“Look out,” Sea Dogs said. “Ware that bird.”

“Maybe it’ll be okay,” Barbie said, looking up and shading his eyes. “Maybe whatever it is only stops them if they’re coming from the south.”

“Judging by yonder busted plane, I doubt that,” Sea Dogs said. He spoke in the musing tones of a man who is deeply perplexed.

The outbound gull struck the barrier and fell directly into the largest chunk of the burning plane.

“Stops em both ways,” Sea Dogs said. He spoke in the tone of a man who has gotten confirmation of a strongly held but previously unproved conviction. “It’s some kind of force field, like in a
Star Trick
movie.”

“Trek,”
Barbie said.

“Huh?”

“Oh shit,” Barbie said. He was looking over Sea Dogs’s shoulder.

“Huh?” Sea Dogs looked over his own shoulder. “Blue
fuck
!”

A pulp-truck was coming. A big one, loaded well past the legal weight limit with huge logs. It was also rolling well above the legal limit. Barbie tried to calculate what the stopping-speed on such a behemoth might be and couldn’t even guess.

Sea Dogs sprinted for his Toyota, which he’d left parked askew on the highway’s broken white line. The guy behind the wheel of the pulper—maybe high on pills, maybe smoked up on meth, maybe just young, in a big hurry, and feeling immortal—saw him and laid on his horn. He wasn’t slowing.

“Fuck me sideways!”
Sea Dogs cried as he threw himself behind the wheel. He keyed the engine and backed the Toyota out of the road
with the driver’s door flapping. The little SUV thumped into the ditch with its square nose canted up to the sky. Sea Dogs was out the next moment. He stumbled, landed on one knee, and then took off running into the field.

Barbie, thinking of the plane and the birds—thinking of that weird black smutch that might have been the plane’s point of impact—also ran into the grazeland, at first sprinting through low, unenthusiastic flames and sending up puffs of black ash. He saw a man’s sneaker—it was too big to be a woman’s—with the man’s foot still in it.

Pilot,
he thought. And then:
I have to stop running around like this.

“
YOU IDIOT, SLOW DOWN!”
Sea Dogs cried at the pulp-truck in a thin, panicky voice, but it was too late for such instructions. Barbie, looking back over his shoulder (helpless not to), thought the pulp-wrangler might have tried to brake at the last minute. He probably saw the wreckage of the plane. In any case, it wasn’t enough. He struck the Motton side of the Dome at sixty or a little more, carrying a log-load of almost forty thousand pounds. The cab disintegrated as it stopped cold. The overloaded carrier, a prisoner of physics, continued forward. The fuel tanks were driven under the logs, shredding and sparking. When they exploded, the load was already airborne, flipping over where the cab—now a green metal accordion—had been. The logs sprayed forward and upward, struck the invisible barrier, and rebounded in all directions. Fire and black smoke boiled upward in a thick plume. There was a terrific thud that rolled across the day like a boulder. Then the logs were raining back down on the Motton side, landing on the road and the surrounding fields like enormous jackstraws. One struck the roof of Sea Dogs’s SUV and smashed it flat, spilling the windshield onto the hood in a spray of diamond crumbles. Another landed right in front of Sea Dogs himself.

Barbie stopped running and only stared.

Sea Dogs got to his feet, fell down, grasped the log that had almost smashed out his life, and got up again. He stood swaying and wild-eyed. Barbie started toward him and after twelve steps ran into something that felt like a brick wall. He staggered backward and felt
warmth cascade from his nose and over his lips. He wiped away a palmload of blood, looked at it unbelievingly, and then smeared it on his shirt.

Now cars were coming from both directions—Motton and Chester’s Mill. Three running figures, as yet still small, were cutting across the grazeland from a farmhouse at the other end. Several of the cars were honking their horns, as if that would somehow solve all problems. The first car to arrive on the Motton side pulled over to the shoulder, well back from the burning truck. Two women got out and gawked at the column of smoke and fire, shading their eyes.

7

“Fuck,” Sea Dogs said. He spoke in a small, breathless voice. He approached Barbie through the field, cutting a prudent east-tending diagonal away from the blazing pyre. The trucker might have been overloaded and moving too fast, Barbie thought, but at least he was getting a Viking funeral. “Did you see where that one log landed? I was almost kilt. Squashed like a bug.”

“Do you have a cell phone?” Barbie had to raise his voice to be heard over the furiously burning pulper.

“In my truck,” Sea Dogs said. “I’ll try for it if you want.”

“No, wait,” Barbie said. He realized with sudden relief that all this could be a dream, the irrational kind where riding your bicycle underwater or talking of your sex life in some language you never studied seems normal.

The first person to arrive on his side of the barrier was a chubby guy driving an old GMC pickup. Barbie recognized him from Sweetbriar Rose: Ernie Calvert, the previous manager of Food City, now retired. Ernie was staring at the burning clutter on the road with wide eyes, but he had his cell phone in his hand and was ratchet-jawing into it. Barbie could hardly hear him over the roar of the burning pulp-truck, but he made out “Looks like a bad one” and figured Ernie was talking to the police. Or the fire department. If it
was the FD, Barbie hoped it was the one in Castle Rock. There were two engines in the tidy little Chester’s Mill firebarn, but Barbie had an idea that if they showed up here, the most they’d be able to do was douse a grassfire that was going to putter out on its own before much longer. The burning pulp-truck was close, but Barbie didn’t think they’d be able to get to it.

It’s a dream,
he told himself.
If you keep telling yourself that, you’ll be able to operate.

The two women on the Motton side had been joined by half a dozen men, also shading their eyes. Cars were now parked on both shoulders. More people were getting out and joining the crowd. The same thing was happening on Barbie’s side. It was as if a couple of dueling flea markets, both full of juicy bargains, had opened up out here: one on the Motton side of the town line, one on the Chester’s Mill side.

The trio from the farm arrived—a farmer and his teenaged sons. The boys were running easily, the farmer redfaced and panting.

“Holy shit!” the older boy said, and his father whapped him backside of the head. The boy didn’t seem to notice. His eyes were bugging. The younger boy reached out his hand, and when the older boy took it, the younger boy started to cry.

“What happened here?” the farmer asked Barbie, pausing to whoop in a big deep breath between
happened
and
here.

Barbie ignored him. He advanced slowly toward Sea Dogs with his right hand held out in a
stop
gesture. Without speaking, Sea Dogs did the same. As Barbie approached the place where he knew the barrier to be—he had only to look at that peculiar straight-edge of burnt ground—he slowed down. He had already whammed his face; he didn’t want to do it again.

Suddenly he was swept by horripilation. The goosebumps swept up from his ankles all the way to the nape of his neck, where the hairs stirred and tried to lift. His balls tingled like tuning forks, and for a moment there was a sour metallic taste in his mouth.

Five feet away from him—five feet and closing—Sea Dogs’s already wide eyes widened some more. “Did you feel that?”

“Yes,” Barbie said. “But it’s gone now. You?”

“Gone,” Sea Dogs agreed.

Their outstretched hands did not quite meet, and Barbie again thought of a pane of glass; putting your inside hand up against the hand of some outside friend, the fingers together but not touching.

He pulled his hand back. It was the one he’d used to wipe his bloody nose, and he saw the red shapes of his own fingers hanging on thin air. As he watched, the blood began to bead. Just as it would on glass.

“Holy God, what does it mean?” Sea Dogs whispered.

Barbie had no answer. Before he could say anything, Ernie Calvert tapped him on the back. “I called the cops,” he said. “They’re coming, but no one answers at the Fire Department—I got a recording telling me to call Castle Rock.”

“Okay, do that,” Barbie said. Then another bird dropped about twenty feet away, falling into the farmer’s grazeland and disappearing. Seeing it brought a new idea into Barbie’s mind, possibly sparked by the time he’d spent toting a gun on the other side of the world. “But first, I think you better call the Air National Guard, up in Bangor.”

Ernie gaped at him. “The
Guard
?”

“They’re the only ones who can institute a no-fly zone over Chester’s Mill,” Barbie said. “And I think they better do it right away.”

1

The Mill’s Chief of Police heard neither explosion, though he was outside, raking leaves on the lawn of his Morin Street home. The portable radio was sitting on the hood of his wife’s Honda, playing sacred music on WCIK (call letters standing for
Christ Is King
and known by the town’s younger denizens as Jesus Radio). Also, his hearing wasn’t what it once had been. At sixty-seven, was anybody’s?