Under the Dome

Ask now, plead later, Julia thought.

'Fill me in, Ms Shumway,' Cox said.

'First answer a question.'

He rolled his eyes (she thought she would have slapped him for that, if she'd been able to get at him; her nerves were still jangled from the near miss on the ride out here). But he told her to ask away.

'Have we been abandoned?'

'Absolutely not.' He replied promptly, but didn't quite meet her eye. She thought that was a worse sign than the queerly empty look she now saw on his side of the Dome - as if there had been a circus, but it had moved on.

'Read this,' she said, and plastered the front page of tomorrow's paper against the Dome's unseen surface, like a woman mounting a sale notice in a department store window. There was a faint, fugitive thrum in her fingers, like the kind of static shock you could get from touching metal on a cold winter morning, when the air was dry. After that, nothing.

He read the entire paper, telling her when to turn the pages. It took him ten minutes. When he finished, she said: 'As you probably noticed, ad space is way down, but I flatter myself the quality of the writing has gone up. Fuckery seems to bring out the best in me.'

'Ms Shumway - '

'Oh, why not call me Julia. We're practically old pals.'

'Fine. You're Julia and I'm JC

'I'll try not to confuse you with the one who walked on water.'

'You believe this fellow Rennie's setting himself up as a dictator? A kind of Downeast Manuel Noriega?'

'It's the progression to Pol Pot I'm worried about.'

'Do you think that's possible?'

'Two days ago I would have laughed at the idea - he's a used-car salesman when he isn't running selectmen's meetings. But two days ago we hadn't had a food riot. Nor did we know about these murders.'

'Not Barbie,' Rose said, shaking her head with stubborn weariness. 'Never.'

Cox took no notice of this - not because he was ignoring Rose, Julia felt, but because he thought the idea was too ridiculous to warrant any attention. It warmed her toward him, at least a little. 'Do you think Rennie committed the murders, Julia?'

'I've been thinking about that. Everything he's done since the Dome appeared - from shutting down alcohol sales to appointing a complete dope as Police Chief- has been political, aimed at increasing his own clout.'

'Are you saying murder isn't in his repertoire?'

'Not necessarily. When his wife passed, there were rumors that he might have helped her along. I don't say they were true, but for rumors like that to start in the first place says something about how people see the man in question.'

Cox grunted agreement.

'But for the life of me I can't see how murdering and sexually abusing two teenage girls could be political.'

'Barbie would never,' Rose said again.

'The same with Coggins, although that ministry of his - especially the radio station part - is suspiciously well endowed. Brenda Perkins, now? That could have been political.'

'And you can't send in the Marines to stop him, can you?' Rose asked. 'All you guys can do is watch. Like kids looking into an aquarium where the biggest fish takes all the food, then starts earing the little ones.'

'I can kill the cellular service,' Cox mused. 'Also Internet. I can do that much.'

'The police have walkie-talkies,' Julia said.'He'll switch to those. And at the meeting on Thursday night, when people complain about losing their links to the outside world, he'll blame you.'

'We were planning a press conference on Friday. I could pull the plug on that.'

Julia grew cold at the thought.'Don't you dare.Then he wouldn't have to explain himself to the outside world.'

'Plus,' Rose said, 'if you kill the phones and the Internet, no one can tell you or anyone else what he's doing.'

Cox stood quiet for a moment, looking at the ground. Then he raised his head. 'What about this hypothetical generator that's maintaining the Dome? Any luck?'

Julia wasn't sure she wanted to tell Cox that they had put a middle-school kid in charge of hunting for it. As it turned out, she didn't have to, because that was when the town fire whistle went off.

22

Pete Freeman dropped the last stack of papers by the door. Then he straightened up, put his hands in the small of his back, and stretched his spine. Tony Guay heard the crackle all the way across the room. 'That sounded like it hurt.'

'Nope; feels good.'

'My wife'll be in the sack by now,' Tony said, 'and I've got a bottle ratholed in my garage. Want to come by for a nip on your way home?'

'No, I think I'll just - ' Pete began, and that was when the first bottle crashed through the window. He saw the flaming wick from the corner of his eye and took a step backward. Only one, but it saved Ihim from being seriously burned, perhaps even cooked alive.

The window and the bottle both shattered. The gasoline ignited and flared in a bright manta shape. Pete simultaneously ducked and pivoted from the hips. The fire-manta flew past him, igniting one sleeve of Ms shirt before landing on the carpet in front of Julia's desk.

"What the FU - ' Tony began, and then another bottle came arcing through the hole. This one smashed on top of Julia's desk and rolled across it, spreading fire among the papers littered there and dripping more fire down the front. The smell of burning gas was hot and rich.

Pete ran for the water cooler in the corner, beating the sleeve of his shirt against his side. He lifted the water bottle awkwardly against his middle, then held his flaming shirt (the arm beneath now felt as if it were developing a bad sunburn) under the bottle's spouting mouth.

Another Molotov cocktail flew out of the night. It fell short, shattering on the sidewalk and lighting a small bonfire on the concrete. Tendrils of flaming gasoline ran into the gutter and went out.

'Dump the water on the carpet!' Tony shouted. 'Dump it before the whole place catches fire7'