Stephen King - Under the Dome

“I wasn’t aware you had anyone’s permission to go poking around in our supply shed,” Big Jim remarked to the ceiling. His hammy fingers were still laced together behind his head. “Perhaps you’re a town official, and I wasn’t aware of it? If so, my mistake—my bad, as Junior says. I thought you were basically a nurse with a prescription pad.”

Rusty thought this was mostly technique—Rennie trying to piss him off. To divert him.

“I’m not a town official,” he said, “but I am a hospital employee. And a taxpayer.”

“So?”

Rusty could feel blood rushing to his face.

“So those things make it partly my supply shed.” He waited to see if Big Jim would respond to this, but the man behind the desk remained impassive. “Besides, it was unlocked. Which is all beside the point, isn’t it? I saw what I saw, and I’d like an explanation. As a hospital employee.”

“And a taxpayer. Don’t forget that.”

Rusty sat looking at him, not even nodding.

“I can’t give you one,” Rennie said.

Rusty raised his eyebrows. “Really? I thought you had your fingers on the pulse of this town. Isn’t that what you said the last time you ran for Selectman? And now you’re telling me you can’t explain where the town’s propane went? I don’t believe it.”

For the first time, Rennie looked nettled. “I don’t care if you believe it or not. This is news to me.” But his eyes darted fractionally to one side as he said it, as if to check that his autographed photo of Tiger Woods was still there; the classic liar’s tell.

Rusty said, “The hospital’s almost out of LP. Without it, the few of us who are still on the job might as well be working in a Civil War battlefield surgery tent. Our current patients—including a postcoronary and a serious case of diabetes that may warrant amputation—will be in serious trouble if the power goes out. The possible amp is Jimmy Sirois. His car is in the parking lot. It’s got a sticker on the bumper that says ELECT BIG JIM.”

“I’ll investigate,” Big Jim said. He spoke with the air of a man conferring a favor. “The town’s propane is probably stored in some other town facility. As for yours, I’m sure I can’t say.”

“ What other town facilities? There’s the FD, and the sand-and-salt pile out on God Creek Road—not even a shed there—but those are the only ones I’m aware of.”

“Mr. Everett, I’m a busy man. You’ll have to excuse me now.”

Rusty stood. His hands wanted to ball into fists, but he wouldn’t let them. “I’m going to ask you one more time,” he said. “Straight out and straight up. Do you know where those missing tanks are?”

“No.” This time it was Dale Earnhardt Rennie’s eyes flickered to. “And I’m not going to read any implication into that question, son, because if I did I’d have to resent it. Now why don’t you run along and check on Jimmy Sirois? Tell him Big Jim sends his best, and he’ll stop by as soon as the nitpickery slows down a little.”

Rusty was still battling to hold onto his temper, but this was a fight he was losing. “ Run along? I think you forgot that you’re a public servant, not a private dictator. For the time being I’m this town’s chief medical officer, and I want some an—”

Big Jim’s cell rang. He snared it. Listened. The lines around his drawn-down mouth grew grimmer. “Gosh darn it! Every time I turn my darn back …” He listened some more, then said: “If you’ve got people with you in the office, Pete, shut your trap before you open it too wide and fall right the heck in. Call Andy. I’ll be right there, and the three of us’ll clean this up.”

He killed the phone and got to his feet.

“I have to go to the police station. It’s either an emergency or more nitpickery, I won’t be able to tell which until I get there. And you’ll be wanted at either the hospital or the Health Center, I believe. There seems to be a problem with the Reverend Libby.”

“Why? What happened to her?”

Big Jim’s cold eyes surveyed him from hard little sockets. “I’m sure you’ll hear her story. I don’t know how true it’ll be, but I’m sure you’ll hear it. So go do your job, young fella, and let me do mine.”

Rusty walked down the front hall and out of the house, his temples throbbing. In the west, the sunset was a lurid bloodshow. The air was almost completely still, but bore a smoky stench just the same. At the foot of the steps, Rusty raised a finger and pointed it at the public servant waiting for him to leave his property before he, Rennie, left himself. Rennie scowled at the finger, but Rusty did not drop it.

“Nobody needs to tell me to do my job. And I’m going to make looking for that propane part of it. If I find it in the wrong place, someone else is going to be doing your job, Selectman Rennie. That’s a promise.”

Big Jim flapped a contemptuous hand at him. “Get out of here, son. Go to work.”

During the first fifty-five hours of the Dome’s existence, over two dozen children suffered seizures. Some, like those of the Everett girls, were noted. Many more were not, and in the days ahead, the seizure activity would rapidly taper down to nothing. Rusty would compare this to the minor shocks people experienced when they came too close to the Dome. The first time, you got that almost electric frisson that stiffened the hair on the back of your neck; after that, most people felt nothing. It was as if they had been inoculated.

“Are you saying the Dome is like chickenpox?” Linda asked him later. “Catch it once and you’re set for life?”

Janelle had two seizures, and so did a little kid named Norman Sawyer, but in both cases the second seizure was milder than the first, and not accompanied by any babble. Most of the kids Rusty saw had only the one, and there seemed to be no after-effects.

Only two adults had seizures during those first fifty-five hours. Both came around sunset on Monday evening, and both had easily traceable causes.

With Phil Bushey, aka The Chef, the cause was too much of his own product. Around the time Rusty and Big Jim parted company, Chef Bushey was sitting outside the storage barn behind WCIK, looking dreamily at the sunset (this close to the missile strikes, the scarlet in the sky was further darkened by soot on the Dome), his hitty-pipe clasped loosely in one hand. He was tweeked at least to the ionosphere; maybe a hundred miles beyond. In the few low-lying clouds which floated on that bloody light, he saw the faces of his mother, his father, his grandfather; he saw Sammy and Little Walter as well.

All the cloud-faces were bleeding.

When his right foot began to twitch and then his left foot picked up the beat, he ignored it. Twitchin was part of tweekin, everyone knew that. But then his hands began to tremble and his pipe fell into the long grass (yellow and sere as a result of the factory work that went on out here). A moment later his head began to jerk from side to side.

This is it, he thought with a calm that was partly relief. I finally overdid it. I’m checking out. Probably for the best.

But he didn’t check out, didn’t even pass out. He slid slowly sideways, twitching and watching as a black marble rose in the red sky. It expanded to a bowling ball, then an overinflated beachball. It went on growing until it had eaten up the red sky.

The end of the world, he thought. Probably for the best.

For a moment he thought he was wrong, because the stars came out. Only they were the wrong color. They were pink. And then, oh God, they began to fall down, leaving long pink trails behind them.