Stephen King - Under the Dome

“Yeah. Or still layin knocked out an’ gettin a lethal dose.”

“Look, Rommie, we’re probably worrying about nothing. I think the wooziness—the actual passing-out, if you’re a kid—is like the other Dome-related phenomena. You feel it once, then you’re okay.”

“You could be bettin your life on dat.”

“We’ve got to start placing bets at some point.”

“Good luck,” Joe said, and extended his fist through the window.

Rusty pounded it lightly, then did the same with Norrie and Benny. Rommie also extended his fist. “What’s good for the kids is good enough for me.”

Twenty yards beyond the place where Rusty had had the vision of the dummy in the stovepipe hat, the clicks from the Geiger counter mounted to a staticky roar. He saw the needle standing at +400, just into the red.

He pulled over and hauled out gear he would have preferred not to put on. He looked back at the others. “A word of warning,” he said. “And I’m talking to you in particular, Mr. Benny Drake. If you laugh, you’re walking home.”

“I won’t laugh,” Benny said, but in short order they were all laughing, including Rusty himself. He took off his jeans, then pulled a pair of football practice pants up over his undershorts. Where pads on the thighs and buttocks should have gone, he stuffed precut pieces of lead roll. Then he donned a pair of catcher’s shinguards and curved more lead roll over them. This was followed by a lead collar to shield his thyroid gland, and a lead apron to shield his testes. It was the biggest one they had, and hung all the way down to the bright orange shinguards. He had considered hanging another apron over his back (looking ridiculous was better than dying of lung cancer, in his view), and had decided against it. He had already pushed his weight to over three hundred pounds. And radiation didn’t curve. If he faced the source, he thought he’d be okay.

Well. Maybe.

To this point, Rommie and the kids had managed to restrict themselves to discreet chuckles and a few strangulated giggles. Control wavered when Rusty stuffed a size XL bathing cap with two pieces of lead roll and pulled it down over his head, but it wasn’t until he yanked on the elbow-length gloves and added the goggles that they lost it entirely.

“It lives!” Benny cried, striding around with his arms outstretched like Frankenstein’s monster. “Master, it lives!”

Rommie staggered to the side of the road and sat on a rock, bellowing with laughter. Joe and Norrie collapsed on the road itself, rolling around like chickens taking a dustbath.

“Walking home, every one of you,” Rusty said, but he was smiling as he climbed (not without difficulty) back into the van.

Ahead of him, the purple light flashed out like a beacon.

Henry Morrison left the PD when the raucous, locker-room-at halftime banter of the new recruits finally became too much to bear. It was going wrong, all of it. He supposed he’d known that even before Thibodeau, the thug who was now guarding Selectman Rennie, showed up with a signed order to can Jackie Wetting-ton—a fine officer and an even finer woman.

Henry regarded this as the first move in what would probably be a comprehensive effort to remove the older officers, the ones Rennie would see as Duke Perkins partisans, from the force. He himself would be next. Freddy Denton and Rupert Libby would probably stay; Rupe was a moderate asshole, Denton severe. Linda Everett would go. Probably Stacey Moggin, too. Then, except for that dim-bulb Lauren Conree, the Chester’s Mill PD would be an all-boys’ club again.

He cruised slowly down Main Street, which was almost entirely empty—like a ghost-town street in a Western. Sloppy Sam Verdreaux was sitting under the marquee of the Globe, and that bottle between his knees probably did not contain Pepsi-Cola, but Henry didn’t stop. Let the old sot have his tipple.

Johnny and Carrie Carver were boarding up the front windows of the Gas & Grocery. They were both wearing the blue armbands that had started to pop up all over town. They gave Henry the creeps.

He wished he’d taken the slot on the Orono police when it had been offered the previous year. It wasn’t a step up careerwise, and he knew college kids could be shits to deal with when drunk or stoned, but the money was better, and Frieda said the Orono schools were top-of-the-line.

In the end, though, Duke had persuaded him to stay by promising to ram through a five-grand raise at the next town meeting, and by telling Henry—in absolute confidence—that he was going to fire Peter Randolph if Randolph wouldn’t retire voluntarily. “You’d move up to APC, and that’s another ten grand a year,” Duke had said. “When I retire, you can move all the way up to the top job, if you want to. The alternative, of course, is driving UMO kids with puke drying on their pants back to their dorms. Think ’er over.”

It had sounded good to him, it had sounded good (well… fairly good) to Frieda, and of course it relieved the kids, who had hated the idea of moving. Only now, Duke was dead, Chester’s Mill was under the Dome, and the PD was turning into something that felt bad and smelled worse.

He turned onto Prestile Street and saw Junior standing outside the yellow police tape strung around the McCain house. Junior was wearing pajama pants and slippers and nothing else. He was swaying noticeably, and Henry’s first thought was that Junior and Sloppy Sam had a lot in common today.

His second thought was of—and for—the PD. He might not be a part of it for much longer, but he was now, and one of Duke Perkins’s firmest rules had been Never let me see the name of a Chester’s Mill PD officer in the Democrat ’s Court Beat column. And Junior, whether Henry liked it or not, was an officer.

He pulled unit Three to the curb and went to where Junior was rocking back and forth. “Hey, Junes, let’s get you back to the station, pour some coffee into you and…” Sober you up was how he intended to finish this, but then he observed that the kid’s pajama pants were soaked. Junior had pissed himself.

Alarmed as well as disgusted—no one must see this, Duke would spin in his grave—Henry reached out and grasped Junior’s shoulder. “Come on, son. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”

“They were my goolfreds,” Junior said without turning. He rocked faster. His face—what Henry could see of it—was dreamy and rapt. “I shilled them so I could fill them. No gooby. French.” He laughed, then spat. Or tried to. A thick white string hung down from his chin, swinging like a pendulum.

“That’s enough. I’m taking you home.”

This time Junior turned, and Henry saw he wasn’t drunk. His left eye was bright red. Its pupil was too big. The left side of his mouth was pulled down, exposing some of his teeth. That frozen glare made Henry think momentarily of Mr. Sardonicus, a movie that had scared him as a kid.

Junior didn’t need to go to the station for coffee, and he didn’t need to go home to sleep it off. Junior needed to go to the hospital.

“Come on, kid,” he said. “Walk.”

At first, Junior seemed willing enough. Henry escorted him most of the way to the car before Junior stopped again. “They smelled alike and I liked it,” he said. “Horry horry horry, the snow is about to start.”

“Right, absolutely.” Henry had hoped to get Junior around the hood of the cruiser and into the front seat, but now this seemed impractical. The rear would have to do, even though the backseats of their cruisers usually smelled pretty fragrant. Junior looked back over his shoulder at the McCain house, and an expression of longing came over his partially frozen face.