Stephen King - Under the Dome

“Jackie? What’s wrong?”

“I’ve been fired. That bastard has had it in for me since the PD Christmas party, when he tried to cop a feel and I slapped his hand, but I doubt if that was all of it, or even most of it—”

“Come in,” Piper said. “I found a little gas-operated hotplate—from the last minister, I think—in one of the pantry cupboards, and for a wonder, it still works. Doesn’t a cup of hot tea sound good?”

“Wonderful,” Jackie said. Tears welled in her eyes and over-spilled. She wiped them off her cheeks almost angrily.

Piper led her into the kitchen and lit the single-burner Brinkman camp-grill on the counter. “Now tell me everything.”

Jackie did, not failing to include Henry Morrison’s condolences, which had been clumsy but sincere. “He whispered that part,” she said, taking the cup Piper gave her. “It’s like the goddam Gestapo over there now. Excuse my language.”

Piper waved this away.

“Henry says that if I protest at the town meeting tomorrow, I’ll only make things worse—Rennie’ll whip out a bunch of trumped-up incompetency charges. He’s probably right. But the biggest incompetent in the department this morning is the one running the place. As for Rennie… he’s packing the PD with officers who’ll be loyal to him in case of any organized protest to the way he’s doing things.”

“Of course he is,” Piper said.

“Most of the new hires are too young to buy a legal beer, but they’re carrying guns. I thought of telling Henry he’d be the next to go—he’s said things about the way Randolph’s running the department, and of course the bootlickers will have passed his comments on—but I could see by his face that he already knows it.”

“Do you want me to go see Rennie?”

“It wouldn’t do any good. I’m actually not sorry to be out, I just hate to be fired. The big problem is that I’ll look very good for what’s going to happen tomorrow night. I may have to disappear with Barbie. Always assuming we can find a place to disappear to. ”

“I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

“I know, but I’m going to tell you. And this is where the risks start. If you don’t keep this to yourself, I’ll wind up in the Coop myself. Maybe even standing next to Barbara when Rennie lines up his firing squad.”

Piper regarded her gravely. “I’ve got forty-five minutes before Georgia Roux’s mother shows up. Is that time enough for you to say what you have to say?”

“Plenty.”

Jackie began with the examination of the bodies at the funeral home. Described the stitch marks on Coggins’s face and the golden baseball Rusty had seen. She took a deep breath and next spoke of her plan to break Barbie out during the special town meeting the following night. “Although I have no idea where we can put him if we do get him out.” She sipped her tea. “So what do you think?”

“That I want another cuppa. You?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

From the counter, Piper said: “What you’re planning is terribly dangerous—I doubt if you need me to tell you that—but there may be no other way to save an innocent man’s life. I never believed for a second that Dale Barbara was guilty of those murders, and after my own close encounter with our local law enforcement, the idea that they’d execute him to keep him from taking over doesn’t surprise me much.” Then, following Barbie’s train of thought without knowing it: “Rennie isn’t taking the long view, and neither are the cops. All they care about is who’s boss of the treehouse. That kind of thinking is a disaster waiting to happen.”

She came back to the table.

“I’ve known almost from the day I came back here to take up the pastorate—which was my ambition ever since I was a little girl—that Jim Rennie was a monster in embryo. Now—if you’ll pardon the melodramatic turn of phrase—the monster has been born.”

“Thank God,” Jackie said.

“Thank God the monster has been born?” Piper smiled and raised her eyebrows.

“No—thank God you’re down with this.”

“There’s more, isn’t there?”

“Yes. Unless you don’t want to be a part of it.”

“Honey, I’m already a part of it. If you can be jailed for plotting, I could be jailed for listening and not reporting. We’re now what our government likes to call ‘homegrown terrorists.’ ”

Jackie received this idea in glum silence.

“It isn’t just Free Dale Barbara you’re talking about, is it? You want to organize an active resistance movement.”

“I suppose I do,” Jackie said, and gave a rather helpless laugh. “After six years with the U.S. Army, I never would have expected it—I’ve always been a my-country-right-or-wrong sort of girl—but… has it occurred to you that the Dome might not break? Not this fall, not this winter? Maybe not next year or even in our lifetimes?”

“Yes.” Piper was calm, but most of the color had left her cheeks. “It has. I think it’s occurred to everyone in The Mill, if only in the backs of their minds.”

“Then think about this. Do you want to spend a year or five years in a dictatorship run by a homicidal idiot? Assuming we have five years?”

“Of course not.”

“Then the only time to stop him might be now. He may no longer be in embryo, but this thing he’s building—this machine—is still in its infancy. It’s the best time.” Jackie paused. “If he orders the police to start collecting guns from ordinary citizens, it might be the only time.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Let us have a meeting here at the parsonage. Tonight. These people, if they’ll all come.” From her back pocket she took the list she and Linda Everett had labored over.

Piper unfolded the sheet of notebook paper and studied it. There were eight names. She looked up. “Lissa Jamieson, the librarian with the crystals? Ernie Calvert? Are you sure about those two?”

“Who better to recruit than a librarian when you’re dealing with a fledgling dictatorship? As for Ernie… my understanding is that after what happened at the supermarket yesterday, if he came across Jim Rennie flaming in the street, he wouldn’t piss on him to put him out.”

“Pronounally vague but otherwise colorful.”

“I was going to have Julia Shumway sound Ernie and Lissa out, but now I’ll be able to do it myself. I seem to have come into a lot of free time.”

The doorbell rang. “That may be the bereaved mother,” Piper said, getting to her feet. “I imagine she’ll be half-shot already. She enjoys her coffee brandy, but I doubt if it dulls the pain much.”

“You haven’t told me how you feel about the meeting,” Jackie said.

Piper Libby smiled. “Tell our fellow homegrown terrorists to arrive between nine and nine thirty tonight. They should come on foot, and by ones—standard French Resistance stuff. No need to advertise what we’re doing.”

“Thank you,” Jackie said. “So much.”

“Not at all. It’s my town, too. May I suggest you slip out by the back door?”

There was a pile of clean rags in the back of Rommie Burpee’s van. Rusty knotted two of them together, fashioning a bandanna he tied over the lower half of his face, but still his nose, throat, and lungs were thick with the stench of dead bear. The first maggots had hatched in its eyes, open mouth, and the meat of its exposed brain.

He stood up, backed away, then reeled a little bit. Rommie grabbed him by the elbow.

“If he passes out, catch him,” Joe said nervously. “Maybe that thing hits adults further out.”

“It’s just the smell,” Rusty said. “I’m okay now.”