Stephen King - Under the Dome

“You all right, Mrs. Clavard?”

“Yes, but something’s wrong at the Freemans’. Hear that?”

“Yeah.”

“Then so must they. Their cars are there, so why don’t they stop it?”

“I’ll take a look.” Twitch took a sip of his coffee, then set it down on the hood of his car. “You stay here.”

“Nonsense,” said Henrietta Clavard.

They walked down twenty yards or so of sidewalk, then up the Freemans’ driveway. The dog howled and howled. The sound of it made Henrietta’s skin cold in spite of the morning’s limp warmth.

“The air’s very bad,” she said. “It smells like Rumford used to when I was just married and all the paper mills were still running. This can’t be good for people.”

Twitch grunted and rang the Freemans’ bell. When that brought no response, he first knocked on the door and then hammered.

“See if it’s unlocked,” Henrietta said.

“I don’t know if I should, Mrs.—”

“Oh, bosh.” She pushed past him and tried the knob. It turned. She opened the door. The house beyond it was silent and full of deep early morning shadows. “Will?” she called. “Lois? Are you here?”

No one answered but more howls.

“The dog’s out back,” Twitch said.

It would have been quicker to cut straight through, but neither of them liked to do that, so they walked up the driveway and along the breezeway between the house and the garage where Will stored not his cars but his toys: two snowmobiles, an ATV, a Yamaha dirtbike and a bloated Honda Gold Wing.

There was a high privacy fence around the Freeman backyard. The gate was beyond the breezeway. Twitch pulled the gate open, and was immediately hit by seventy pounds of frantic Irish setter. He shouted in surprise and raised his hands, but the dog didn’t want to bite him; Buddy was in full please-rescue-me mode. He put his paws on the front of Twitch’s last clean tunic, smearing it with dirt, and began to slobber all over his face.

“Stop it!” Twitch shouted. He pushed Buddy, who went down but popped right back up, laying fresh tracks on Twitch’s tunic and swabbing his cheeks with a long pink tongue.

“Buddy, down!” Henrietta commanded, and Buddy shrank onto his haunches at once, whining and rolling his eyes between them. A puddle of urine began to spread out beneath him.

“Mrs. Clavard, this is not good.”

“No,” Henrietta agreed.

“Maybe you better stay with the d—”

Henrietta once more said bosh and marched into the Freemans’ backyard, leaving Twitch to catch up with her. Buddy slunk along behind them, head down and tail tucked, whining disconsolately.

There was a stone-flagged patio with a barbecue on it. The barbecue was neatly covered with a green tarp that said THE KITCHEN’S CLOSED. Beyond this, on the edge of the lawn, was a redwood platform. On top of the platform was the Freemans’ hot tub. Twitch supposed the high privacy fence was there so they could sit in it naked, maybe even pitch a little woo if the urge took them.

Will and Lois were in it now, but their woo-pitching days were done. They were wearing clear plastic bags over their heads. The bags appeared to have been cinched at the necks with either twine or brown rubber bands. They had fogged up on the inside, but not so much that Twitch couldn’t make out the empurpled faces. Sitting on the redwood apron between the earthly remains of Will and Lois Freeman was a whiskey bottle and a small medicine vial.

“Stop,” he said. He didn’t know if he was talking to himself, or Mrs. Clavard, or possibly to Buddy, who had just voiced another bereft howl. Certainly he couldn’t be talking to the Freemans.

Henrietta didn’t stop. She walked to the hot tub, marched up the two steps with her back as straight as a soldier’s, looked at the dis-colored faces of her perfectly nice (and perfectly normal, she would have said) neighbors, glanced at the whiskey bottle, saw it was Glenlivet (at least they’d gone out in style), then picked up the medicine vial with its Sanders Hometown Drug label.

“Ambien or Lunesta?” Twitch asked heavily.

“Ambien,” she said, and was gratified the voice emerging from her dry throat and mouth sounded normal. “Hers. Although I’d guess she shared it last night.”

“Is there a note?”

“Not here,” she said. “Maybe inside.”

But there wasn’t, at least not in any of the obvious places, and neither of them could think of a reason to hide a suicide note. Buddy followed them from room to room, not howling but whining deep in his throat.

“I guess I’ll bring him back t’house with me,” Henrietta said.

“You’ll have to. I can’t take him to the hospital. I’ll call Stewart Bowie to come and get… them.” He hooked a thumb back over his shoulder. His stomach was roiling, but that wasn’t the bad part; the bad part was the depression that came stealing into him, putting a shadow across his normally sunny soul.

“I don’t understand why they would do it,” Henrietta said. “If we’d been a year under the Dome… or even a month… yes, maybe. But less than a week ? This is not how stable people respond to trouble.”

Twitch thought he understood, but didn’t want to say it to Henrietta: it was going to be a month, it was going to be a year. Maybe longer. And with no rain, fewer resources, and fouler air. If the most technologically hip country in the world hadn’t been able to get a handle on what had happened to Chester’s Mill by now (let alone solve the problem), it probably wasn’t going to happen soon. Will Freeman must have understood that. Or maybe it had been Lois’s idea. Maybe when the generator had died, she’d said Let’s do it before the water in the hot tub gets cold, honey. Let’s get out from under the Dome while our bellies are still full. What do you say? One more dip, with a few drinks to see us off.

“Maybe it was the plane that pushed them over the edge,” Twitch said. “The Air Ireland that hit the Dome yesterday.”

Henrietta didn’t answer with words; she hawked back and spat snot into the kitchen sink. It was a somehow shocking gesture of repudiation. They went back outside.

“More people will do this, won’t they?” she asked when they had reached the end of the driveway. “Because suicide gets in the air sometimes. Like a cold germ.”

“Some already have.” Twitch didn’t know if suicide was painless, as the song said, but under the right circumstances, it could certainly be catching. Maybe especially catching when the situation was unprecedented and the air started to smell as foul as it did on this windless, unnaturally warm morning.

“Suicides are cowards,” Henrietta said. “A rule to which there are no exceptions, Douglas.”

Twitch, whose father had died a long and lingering death as a result of stomach cancer, wondered about that but said nothing.

Henrietta bent to Buddy with her hands on her bony knees. Buddy stretched his neck up to sniff her. “Come next door, my furry friend. I have three eggs. You may eat them before they go bad.”

She started away, then turned back to Twitch. “They are cowards,” she said, giving each word its own special emphasis.

Jim Rennie checked out of Cathy Russell, slept soundly in his own bed, and woke refreshed. Although he would not have admitted it to anyone, part of the reason was knowing Junior was out of the house.

Now, at eight o’clock, his black Hummer was parked a door or two up from Rosie’s (in front of a fire hydrant, but what the hell; currently there was no fire department). He was having breakfast with Peter Randolph, Mel Searles, Freddy Denton, and Carter Thibodeau. Carter had taken up what was becoming his usual station, at Big Jim’s right hand. He wore two guns this morning: his own on his hip, and Linda Everett’s recently returned Beretta Taurus in a shoulder rig.