Stephen King - Under the Dome

“What are you doing here, Lissa?” Julia asked, getting out of her car. She held up a hand to shield her eyes from the bright lights.

Lissa was nervously fiddling with the ankh she wore around her neck on a silver chain. She looked from Julia to Barbie, then back to Julia again. “I go for a ride on my bike when I’m upset or worried. Sometimes I ride until midnight. It soothes my pneuma. I saw the lights and came to the lights.” She said this in an incantatory way, and let go of her ankh long enough to trace some kind of complicated symbol in the air. “What are you doing out here?”

“Came to watch an experiment,” Barbie said. “If it works, you can be the first one to leave Chester’s Mill.”

Lissa smiled. It looked a little forced, but Barbie liked her for the effort. “If I did that, I’d miss the Tuesday night special at Sweetbriar. Isn’t it usually meatloaf?”

“Meatloaf’s the plan,” he agreed, not adding that if the Dome was still in place the following Tuesday, the spécialité de la maison was apt to be zucchini quiche.

“They won’t talk,” Lissa said. “I tried.”

A squat fireplug of a man came out from behind the tanker and into the light. He was dressed in khakis, a poplin jacket, and a hat with the logo of the Maine Black Bears on it. The first thing to strike Barbie was that James O. Cox had put on weight. The second was his heavy jacket, zipped to what was now dangerously close to a double chin. Nobody else—Barbie, Julia, or Lissa—was wearing a jacket. There was no need of them on their side of the Dome.

Cox saluted. Barbie gave it back, and it actually felt pretty good to snap one off.

“Hello, Barbie,” Cox said. “How’s Ken?”

“Ken’s fine,” Barbie said. “And I continue to be the bitch that gets all the good shit.”

“Not this time, Colonel,” Cox said. “This time it appears you got fucked at the drive-thru.”

“Who’s he?” Lissa whispered. She was still working at the ankh. Julia thought she’d snap the chain soon, if she kept at it. “And what are they doing over there?”

“Trying to get us out,” Julia said. “And after the rather spectacular failure earlier in the day, I’d have to say they’re wise to do it on the quiet.” She started forward. “Hello, Colonel Cox—I’m your favorite newspaper editor. Good evening.”

Cox’s smile was—to his credit, she thought—only slightly sour. “Ms. Shumway. You’re even prettier than I imagined.”

“I’ll say one thing for you, you’re handy with the bullsh—”

Barbie intercepted her three yards from where Cox was standing and took her by the arms.

“What?” she asked.

“The camera.” She had almost forgotten she had it around her neck until he pointed to it. “Is it digital?”

“Sure, Pete Freeman’s extra.” She started to ask why, then got it. “You think the Dome will fry it.”

“That’d be the best-case scenario,” Barbie said. “Remember what happened to Chief Perkins’s pacemaker.”

“Shit,” she said. “ Shit! Maybe I’ve got my old Kodak in the trunk.”

Lissa and Cox were looking at each other with what Barbie thought was equal fascination. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Is there going to be another bang?”

Cox hesitated. Barbie said, “Might as well come clean, Colonel. If you don’t tell her, I will.”

Cox sighed. “You insist on total transparency, don’t you?”

“Why not? If this thing works, the people of Chester’s Mill will be singing your praises. The only reason you’re playing em close is force of habit.”

“No. It’s what my superiors have ordered.”

“They’re in Washington,” Barbie said. “And the press is in Castle Rock, most of em probably watching Girls Gone Wild on pay-per-view. Out here it’s just us chickens.”

Cox sighed and pointed to the spray-painted door shape. “That’s where the men in the protective suits will apply our experimental compound. If we’re lucky, the acid will eat through and we’ll then be able to knock that piece of the Dome out the way you can knock a piece of glass out of a window after you’ve used a glass-cutter.”

“And if we’re unlucky?” Barbie asked. “If the Dome decomposes, giving off some poison gas that kills us all? Is that what the gas masks are for?”

“Actually,” Cox said, “the scientists feel it more likely that the acid might start a chemical reaction that would cause the Dome to catch fire.” He saw Lissa’s stricken expression and added, “They consider both possibilities very remote.”

“They can, ” Lissa said, twirling her ankh. “They’re not the ones who’d get gassed or roasted.”

Cox said, “I understand your concern, ma’am—”

“Melissa,” Barbie corrected. It suddenly seemed important to him that Cox understand these were people under the Dome, not just a few thousand anonymous taxpayers. “Melissa Jamieson. Lissa to her friends. She’s the town librarian. She’s also the middle-school guidance counselor, and teaches yoga classes, I believe.”

“I had to give that up,” Lissa said with a fretful smile. “Too many other things to do.”

“Very nice to make your acquaintance, Ms. Jamieson,” Cox said. “Look—this is a chance worth taking.”

“If we felt differently, could we stop you?” she asked.

This Cox did not answer directly. “There’s no sign that this thing, whatever it is, is weakening or biodegrading. Unless we’re able to breach it, we believe you’re in for the long haul.”

“Do you have any idea what caused it? Any at all?”

“None,” Cox said, but his eyes shifted in a way Rusty Everett would have recognized from his conversation with Big Jim.

Barbie thought, Why are you lying? Just that knee-jerk reaction again? Civilians are like mushrooms, keep them in the dark and feed them shit? Probably that was all it was. But it made him nervous.

“It’s strong?” Lissa asked. “Your acid—is it strong?”

“The most corrosive in existence, as far as we know,” Cox replied, and Lissa took two large steps back.

Cox turned to the men in the space-suits. “Are you boys about ready?”

They gave him a pair of gloved thumbs-up. Behind them, all activity had stopped. The soldiers stood watching, with their hands on their gas masks.

“Here we go,” Cox said. “Barbie, I suggest you escort those two beautiful ladies at least fifty yards back from—”

“Look at the stars, ” Julia said. Her voice was soft, awestruck. Her head was tilted upward, and in her wondering face Barbie saw the child she had been thirty years ago.

He looked up and saw the Big Dipper, the Great Bear, Orion. All where they belonged… except they had smeared out of clear focus and turned pink. The Milky Way had turned into a bubblegum spill across the greater dome of the night.

“Cox,” he said. “Do you see that?”

Cox looked up.

“See what? The stars?”

“What do they look like to you?”

“Well… very bright, of course—no light pollution to speak of in these parts—” Then a thought occurred to him, and he snapped his fingers. “What are you seeing? Have they changed color?”

“They’re beautiful,” Lissa said. Her eyes were wide and shining. “But scary, too.”

“They’re pink,” Julia said. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing,” Cox said, but he sounded oddly reluctant.

“What?” Barbie asked. “Spill it.” And added, without thinking: “Sir.”

“We got the meteorological report at nineteen hundred hours,” Cox said. “Special emphasis on winds. Just in case… well, just in case. Leave it at that. The jet stream’s currently coming west as far as Nebraska or Kansas, dipping south, then coming up the Eastern Seaboard. Pretty common pattern for late October.”