Stephen King - Under the Dome

When Thurston Marshall poked his head in forty-five minutes later, the room was empty. He assumed Junior had gone down to the lounge, but when he checked there it was empty except for Emily Whitehouse, the heart attack patient. Emily was recovering nicely. Thurse asked her if she’d seen a young man with dark blond hair and a limp. She said no. Thurse went back to Junior’s room and looked in the closet. It was empty. The young man with the probable brain tumor had dressed and checked himself out without benefit of paperwork.

Junior walked home. His limp seemed to clear up entirely once his muscles were warm. In addition, the dark keyhole shape floating on the left side of his vision had shrunk to a ball the size of a marble. Maybe he hadn’t gotten a full dose of thallium after all. Hard to tell. Either way, he had to keep his promise to God. If he took care of the Appleton kids, then God would take care of him.

As he left the hospital (by the back door), killing his father had been first on his to-do list. But by the time he actually got to the house—the house where his mother had died, the house where Lester Coggins and Brenda Perkins had died—he had changed his mind. If he killed his father now, the special town meeting would be canceled. Junior didn’t want that, because the town meeting would provide good cover for his main errand. Most of the cops would be there, and that would make gaining access to the Coop easier. He only wished he had the poisoned dog tags. He’d enjoy stuffing them down Baaarbie ’s dying throat.

Big Jim wasn’t at home, anyway. The only living thing in the house was the wolf he’d seen loping across the hospital parking lot in the small hours of the morning. It was halfway down the stairs, looking at him and growling deep in its chest. Its fur was ragged. Its eyes were yellow. Around its neck hung Dale Barbara’s dog tags.

Junior closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them, the wolf was gone.

“I’m the wolf now,” he whispered to the hot and empty house. “I’m the werewolf, and I saw Lon Chaney dancing with the queen.”

He went upstairs, limping again but not noticing. His uniform was in the closet, and so was his gun—a Beretta 92 Taurus. The PD had a dozen of them, mostly paid for with federal Homeland Security money. He checked the Beretta’s fifteen-round mag and saw it was full. He put the gun into its holster, cinched the belt around his shrinking waist, and left his room.

At the top of the stairs he paused, wondering where to go until the meeting was well under way and he could make his move. He didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t even want to be seen. Then it came to him: a good hiding place that was also close to the action. He descended the stairs carefully—the goddam limp was all the way back, plus the left side of his face was so numb it might have been frozen—and lurched down the hall. He stopped briefly outside his father’s study, wondering if he should open the safe and burn the money inside. He decided it wasn’t worth the effort. He vaguely remembered a joke about bankers marooned on a desert island who’d gotten rich trading each other their clothes, and he uttered a brief yapping laugh even though he couldn’t exactly recall the punchline and had never completely gotten the joke, anyway.

The sun had gone behind the clouds to the west of the Dome and the day had grown gloomy. Junior walked out of the house and disappeared into the murk.

At quarter past five, Alice and Aidan Appleton came in from the back yard of their borrowed house. Alice said, “Caro? Will you take Aidan and I… Aidan and me … to the big meeting?”

Carolyn Sturges, who had been making PB&J sandwiches for supper on Coralee Dumagen’s counter with Coralee Dumagen’s bread (stale but edible), looked at the children with surprise. She had never heard of kids wanting to attend an adults’ meeting before; would have said, if asked, that they’d probably run the other way to avoid such a boring event. She was tempted. Because if the kids went, she could go.

“Are you sure?” she asked, bending down. “Both of you?”

Before these last few days, Carolyn would have said she had no interest in having children, that what she wanted was a career as a teacher and a writer. Maybe a novelist, although it seemed to her that writing novels was pretty risky; what if you spent all that time, wrote a thousand-pager, and it sucked? Poetry, though… going around the country (maybe on a motorcycle)… doing readings and teaching seminars, free as a bird… that would be cool. Maybe meeting a few interesting men, drinking wine and discussing Sylvia Plath in bed. Alice and Aidan had changed her mind. She had fallen in love with them. She wanted the Dome to break—of course she did—but giving these two back to their mom was going to hurt her heart. She sort of hoped it would hurt theirs a little too. Probably that was mean, but there it was.

“Ade? Is it what you want? Because grownup meetings can be awfully long and boring.”

“I want to go,” Aidan said. “I want to see all the people.”

Then Carolyn understood. It wasn’t the discussion of resources and how the town was going to use them as it went forward that interested them; why would it be? Alice was nine and Aidan was five. But wanting to see everybody gathered together, like a great big extended family? That made sense.

“Can you be good? Not squirm and whisper too much?”

“Of course,” Alice said with dignity.

“And will you both pee yourselves dry before we go?”

“Yes!” This time the girl rolled her eyes to show what an annoying stupidnik Caro was being… and Caro sort of loved it.

“Then what I’ll do is just pack these sandwiches to go,” Carolyn said. “And we’ve got two cans of soda for kids who can be good and use straws. Assuming the kids in question have peed themselves dry before dumping any more liquid down their throats, that is.”

“I use straws like mad,” Aidan said. “Any Woops?”

“He means Whoopie Pies,” Alice said.

“I know what he means, but there aren’t any. I think there might be some graham crackers, though. The kind with cinnamon sugar on them.”

“Cinnamon graham crackers rock,” Aidan said. “I love you, Caro.”

Carolyn smiled. She thought no poem she’d ever read had been so beautiful. Not even the Williams one about the cold plums.

Andrea Grinnell descended the stairs slowly but steadily while Julia stared in amazement. Andi had undergone a transformation. Makeup and a comb-out of the frizzy wreck that had been her hair had played a part, but that wasn’t all of it. Looking at her, Julia realized how long it had been since she’d seen the town’s Third Selectman looking like herself. This evening she was wearing a knockout red dress belted at the waist—it looked like Ann Taylor—and carrying a large fabric bag with a drawstring top.

Even Horace was gawking.

“How do I look?” Andi asked when she reached the bottom of the stairs. “Like I could fly to the town meeting, if I had a broom?”

“You look great. Twenty years younger.”

“Thanks, hon, but I have a mirror upstairs.”

“If it didn’t show you how much better you look, you better try one down here, where the light’s better.”

Andi switched her bag to her other arm, as if it were heavy. “Well. I guess I do. A little, anyway.”

“Are you sure you have strength enough for this?”

“I think so, but if I start to shake and shiver, I’ll slip out the side door.” Andi had no intention of slipping away, whether she shook or not.

“What’s in the bag?”