Stephen King - Under the Dome

“Not now,” Barbie said. “Right now I need you to do something for me, Jim, and the sooner the better. You’ll need a couple of Chinooks.”

He explained what he wanted. Cox listened, then replied.

“I can’t go into it right now,” Barbie said, “and it probably wouldn’t make a lot of sense if I did. Just take it from me that some very dinky-dau shit is going on in here, and I believe that worse is on the way. Maybe not until Halloween, if we’re lucky. But I don’t think we’re going to be lucky.”

While Barbie was speaking with Colonel James Cox, Andy Sanders was sitting against the side of the supply building behind WCIK, looking up at the abnormal stars. He was high as a kite, happy as a clam, cool as a cucumber, other similes may apply. Yet there was a deep sadness—oddly tranquil, almost comforting—running beneath, like a powerful underground river. He had never had a premonition in his whole prosy, practical, workaday life. But he was having one now. This was his last night on earth. When the bitter men came, he and Chef Bushey would go. It was simple, and not really all that bad.

“I was in the bonus round, anyway,” he said. “Have been ever since I almost took those pills.”

“What’s that, Sanders?” Chef came strolling along the path from the rear of the station, shining a flashlight beam just ahead of his bare feet. The froggy pajama pants still clung precariously to the bony wings of his hips, but something new had been added: a large white cross. It was tied around his neck on a rawhide loop. Slung over his shoulder was GOD’S WARRIOR. Two grenades swung from the stock on another length of rawhide. In the hand not holding the flashlight, he carried the garage door opener.

“Nothing, Chef,” Andy said. “I was just talking to myself. Seems like I’m the only one who listens these days.”

“That’s bullshit, Sanders. Utter and complete bullshit-aroonie. God listens. He’s tapped into souls the way the FBI’s tapped into phones. I listen too.”

The beauty of this—and the comfort—made gratitude well up in Andy’s heart. He offered the bong. “Hit this shit. It’ll get your boiler lit.”

Chef uttered a hoarse laugh, took a deep drag on the glasspipe, held the smoke in, then coughed it out. “Bazoom!” he said. “God’s power! Power by the hour, Sanders!”

“Got that right,” Andy agreed. It was what Dodee always said, and at the thought of her, his heart broke all over again. He wiped his eyes absently. “Where did you get the cross?”

Chef pointed the flashlight toward the radio station. “Coggins has got an office in there. The cross was in his desk. The top drawer was locked, but I forced it open. You know what else was in there, Sanders? Some of the skankiest jerk-off material I have ever seen.”

“Kids?” Andy asked. He wouldn’t be surprised. When the devil got a preacher, he was apt to fall low, indeed. Low enough to put on a tophat and crawl under a rattlesnake.

“Worse, Sanders.” He lowered his voice. “Orientals.”

Chef picked up Andy’s AK-47, which had been lying across Andy’s thighs. He shone the light on the stock, where Andy had carefully printed CLAUDETTE with one of the radio station’s Magic Markers.

“My wife,” Andy said. “She was the first Dome casualty.”

Chef gripped him by the shoulder. “You’re a good man to remember her, Sanders. I’m glad God brought us together.”

“Me too.” Andy took back the bong. “Me too, Chef.”

“You know what’s apt to happen tomorrow, don’t you?”

Andy gripped CLAUDETTE’s stock. It was answer enough.

“They’ll most likely be wearing body armor, so if we have to go to war, aim for the head. No single-shot stuff; just hose em down. And if it looks like they’re going to overrun us… you know what comes next, right?”

“Right.”

“To the end, Sanders?” Chef raised the garage door opener in front of his face and shone the flashlight on it.

“To the end,” Andy agreed. He touched the door opener with CLAUDETTE’s muzzle.

Ollie Dinsmore snapped awake from a bad dream, knowing something was wrong. He lay in bed, looking at the wan and somehow dirty first light peeping through the window, trying to persuade himself that it was just the dream, some nasty nightmare he couldn’t quite recall. Fire and shouting was all he could remember.

Not shouting. Screaming.

His cheap alarm clock was ticking away on the little table beside his bed. He grabbed it. Quarter of six and no sound of his father moving around in the kitchen. More telling, no smell of coffee. His father was always up and dressed by five fifteen at the very latest (“Cows won’t wait” was Alden Dinsmore’s favorite scripture), and there was always coffee brewing by five thirty.

Not this morning.

Ollie got up and pulled on yesterday’s jeans. “Dad?”

No answer. Nothing but the tick of the clock, and—distant—the lowing of one disaffected bossy. Dread settled over the boy. He told himself there was no reason for it, that his family—all together and perfectly happy only a week ago—had sustained all the tragedies God would allow, at least for awhile. He told himself, but himself didn’t believe it.

“Daddy?”

The generator out back was still running and he could see the green digital readouts on both the stove and the microwave when he went into the kitchen, but the Mr. Coffee stood dark and empty. The living room was empty, too. His father had been watching TV when Ollie turned in last night, and it was still on, although muted. Some crooked-looking guy was demonstrating the new and improved ShamWow. “You’re spending forty bucks a month on paper towels and throwing your money away,” the crooked-looking guy said from that other world where such things might matter.

He’s out feeding the cows, that’s all.

Except wouldn’t he have turned off the TV to save electricity? They had a big tank of propane, but it would only last so long.

“Dad?”

Still no answer. Ollie crossed to the window and looked out at the barn. No one there. With increasing trepidation, he went down the back hall to his parents’ room, steeling himself to knock, but there was no need. The door was open. The big double bed was messy (his father’s eye for mess seemed to fall blind once he stepped out of the barn) but empty. Ollie started to turn away, then saw something that scared him. A wedding portrait of Alden and Shelley had hung on the wall in here for as long as Ollie could remember. Now it was gone, with only a brighter square of wallpaper to mark where it had been.

That’s nothing to be scared of.

But it was.

Ollie continued on down the hall. There was one more door, and this one, which had stood open for the last year, was now closed. Something yellow had been tacked to it. A note. Even before he was close enough to read it, Ollie recognized his father’s handwriting. He should have; there had been enough notes in that big scrawl waiting for him and Rory when they came home from school, and they always ended the same way.

Sweep the barn, then go play. Weed the tomatoes and beans, then go play. Take in your mother’s washing, and mind you don’t drag it in the mud. Then go play.

Playtime’s over, Ollie thought dismally.

But then a hopeful thought occurred to him: maybe he was dreaming. Wasn’t it possible? After his brother’s death by ricochet and his mother’s suicide, why wouldn’t he dream of waking to an empty house?

The cow lowed again, and even that was like a sound heard in a dream.

The room behind the door with the note on it had been Grampy Tom’s. Suffering the slow misery of congestive heart failure, he had come to live with them when he could no longer do for himself. For a while he’d been able to hobble as far as the kitchen to take meals with the family, but in the end he’d been bedridden, first with a plastic thingie jammed up his nose—it was called a candelabra, or something like that—and then with a plastic mask over his face most of the time. Rory once said he looked like the world’s oldest astronaut, and Mom had smacked his face for him.