Stephen King - Under the Dome

“I swung by Chief Perkins’s house earlier,” she said as she got back behind the wheel. “Except of course it’s just Brenda’s now.”

“How is she?”

“Terrible. But when I said you wanted to see her, and that it was important—although I didn’t say what it was about—she agreed. After dark might be best. I suppose your friend will be impatient—”

“Stop calling Cox my friend. He’s not my friend.”

They watched silently as the wounded boy was loaded into the back of the ambulance. The soldiers were still watching, too. Probably against orders, and that made Julia feel a little better about them. The ambulance began to buck its way back across the field, lights flashing.

“This is terrible,” she said in a thin voice.

Barbie put an arm around her shoulders. She tensed for a moment, then relaxed. Looking straight ahead—at the ambulance, which was now turning into a cleared lane in the middle of Route 119—she said: “What if they shut me down, my friend? What if Rennie and his pet police decide to shut my little newspaper down?”

“That’s not going to happen,” Barbie said. But he wondered. If this went on long enough, he supposed every day in Chester’s Mill would become Anything Can Happen Day.

“She had something else on her mind,” Julia Shumway said.

“Mrs. Perkins?”

“Yes. It was in many ways a very strange conversation.”

“She’s grieving for her husband,” Barbie said. “Grief makes people strange. I said hello to Jack Evans—his wife died yesterday when the Dome came down—and he looked at me as if he didn’t know me, although I’ve been serving him my famous Wednesday meatloaf since last spring.”

“I’ve known Brenda Perkins since she was Brenda Morse,” Julia said. “Almost forty years. I thought she might tell me what was troubling her… but she didn’t.”

Barbie pointed at the road. “I think you can go now.”

As Julia started the engine, her cell phone trilled. She almost dropped her bag in her hurry to dig it out. She listened, then handed it to Barbie with her ironic smile. “It’s for you, boss.”

It was Cox, and Cox had something to say. Quite a lot, actually. Barbie interrupted long enough to tell Cox what had happened to the boy now headed to Cathy Russell, but Cox either didn’t relate Rory Dinsmore’s story to what he was saying, or didn’t want to. He listened politely enough, then went on. When he finished, he asked Barbie a question that would have been an order, had Barbie still been in uniform and under his command.

“Sir, I understand what you’re asking, but you don’t understand the… I guess you’d call it the political situation here. And my little part in it. I had some trouble before this Dome thing, and—”

“We know all about that,” Cox said. “An altercation with the Second Selectman’s son and some of his friends. You were almost arrested, according to what I’ve got in my folder.”

A folder. Now he’s got a folder. God help me.

“That’s fine intel as far as it goes,” Barbie said, “but let me give you a little more. One, the Police Chief who kept me from being arrested died out on 119, not far from where I’m talking to you, in fact—”

Faintly, in a world he could not now visit, Barbie heard paper rattle. He suddenly felt he would like to kill Colonel James O. Cox with his bare hands, simply because Colonel James O. Cox could go out for Mickey-D’s any time he wanted, and he, Dale Barbara, could not.

“We know about that, too,” Cox said. “A pacemaker problem.”

“Two,” Barbie went on, “the new Chief, who is asshole buddies with the only powerful member of this town’s Board of Selectmen, has hired some new deputies. They’re the guys who tried to beat my head off my shoulders in the parking lot of the local nightclub.”

“You’ll have to rise above that, won’t you? Colonel?”

“Why are you calling me Colonel? You’re the Colonel.”

“Congratulations,” Cox said. “Not only have you reenlisted in your country’s service, you’ve gotten an absolutely dizzying promotion.”

“No!” Barbie shouted. Julia was looking at him with concern, but he was hardly aware of it. “No, I don’t want it!”

“Yeah, but you’ve got it,” Cox said calmly. “I’m going to e-mail a copy of the essential paperwork to your editor friend before we shut down your unfortunate little town’s Internet capacity.”

“Shut it down ? You can’t shut it down!”

“The paperwork is signed by the President himself. Are you going to say no to him? I understand he can be a tad grumpy when he’s crossed.”

Barbie didn’t reply. His mind was whirling.

“You need to visit the Selectmen and the Police Chief,” Cox said. “You need to tell them the President has invoked martial law in Chester’s Mill, and you’re the officer in charge. I’m sure you’ll encounter some initial resistance, but the information I’ve just given you should help establish you as the town’s conduit to the outside world. And I know your powers of persuasion. Saw them firsthand in Iraq.”

“Sir,” he said. “You have so misread the situation here.” He ran a hand through his hair. His ear was throbbing from the goddamned cell phone. “It’s as if you can comprehend the idea of the Dome, but not what’s happening in this town as a result of it. And it’s been less than thirty hours.”

“Help me understand, then.”

“You say the President wants me to do this. Suppose I were to call him up and tell him he can kiss my rosy red ass?”

Julia was looking at him, horrified, and this actually inspired him.

“Suppose, in fact, I said I was a sleeper Al Qaeda agent, and I was planning to kill him—pow, one to the head. How about that?”

“Lieutenant Barbara— Colonel Barbara, I mean—you’ve said enough.”

Barbie did not feel this was so. “Could he send the FBI to come and grab me? The Secret Service? The goddam Red Army? No, sir. He could not.”

“We have plans to change that, as I have just explained.” Cox no longer sounded loose and good-humored, jest one ole grunt talkin to another.

“And if it works, feel free to have the federal agency of your choice come and arrest me. But if we stay cut off, who in here’s going to listen to me? Get it through your head: this town has seceded. Not just from America but from the whole world. There’s nothing we can do about it, and nothing you can do about it either.”

Quietly, Cox said: “We’re trying to help you guys.”

“You say that and I almost believe you. Will anybody else around here? When they look to see what kind of help their taxes are buying them, they see soldiers standing guard with their backs turned. That sends a hell of a message.”

“You’re talking a whole lot for someone who’s saying no.”

“I’m not saying no. But I’m only about nine feet from being arrested, and proclaiming myself the commandant pro tem won’t help.”

“Suppose I were to call the First Selectman… what’s his name… Sanders… and tell him…”

“That’s what I mean about how little you know. It’s like Iraq all over again, only this time you’re in Washington instead of boots on the ground, and you seem as clueless as the rest of the desk soldiers. Read my lips, sir: some intelligence is worse than no intelligence at all.”

“A little learning is a dangerous thing,” Julia said dreamily.

“If not Sanders, then who?”

“James Rennie. The Second Selectman. He’s the Boss Hog around here.”

There was a pause. Then Cox said, “Maybe we can give you the Internet. Some of us are of the opinion that cutting it off’s just a knee-jerk reaction, anyway.”