Stephen King - Under the Dome

Big Jim is less interested in a bunch of meaningless lights in the sky than he is in how people will interpret those lights. Tonight, he expects they’ll just go home. Tomorrow, though, things may be different. And the fear he sees on most faces may not be such a bad thing. Fearful people need strong leaders, and if there’s one thing Big Jim Rennie knows he can provide, it’s strong leadership.

He’s outside the police station doors with Chief Randolph and Andy Sanders. Standing below them, crowded together, are his problem children: Thibodeau, Searles, the Roux chippie, and Junior’s friend, Frank. Big Jim descends the steps that Libby fell down earlier ( she could have done us all a favor if she’d broken her neck, he thinks) and taps Frankie on the shoulder. “Enjoying the show, Frankie?”

The boy’s big scared eyes make him look twelve instead of twenty-two or whatever he is. “What is it, Mr. Rennie? Do you know?”

“Meteor shower. Just God saying hello to His people.”

Frank DeLesseps relaxes a little.

“We’re going back inside,” Big Jim says, jerking his thumb at Randolph and Andy, who are still watching the sky. “We’ll talk for a while, then I’ll call you four in. I want you all to tell the same cotton-picking story when I do. Have you got that?”

“Yes, Mr. Rennie,” Frankie says.

Mel Searles looks at Big Jim, his eyes like saucers and his mouth hanging loose. Big Jim thinks the boy looks like his IQ might reach all the way up to seventy. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, either. “It looks like the end of the world, Mr. Rennie,” he says.

“Nonsense. Are you Saved, son?”

“I guess so,” Mel says.

“Then you have nothing to worry about.” Big Jim surveys them one by one, ending with Carter Thibodeau. “And the way to salvation tonight, young men, is all of you telling the same story.”

Not everyone sees the pink stars. Like the Appleton kids, Rusty Everett’s Little Js are fast asleep. So is Piper. So is Andrea Grinnell. So is The Chef, sprawled on the dead grass beside what might be America’s biggest methamphetamine lab. Ditto Brenda Perkins, who cried herself to sleep on her couch with the VADER printout scattered on the coffee table before her.

The dead also do not see, unless they look from a brighter place than this darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night. Myra Evans, Duke Perkins, Chuck Thompson, and Claudette Sanders are tucked away in the Bowie Funeral Home; Dr. Haskell, Mr. Carty, and Rory Dinsmore are in the morgue of Catherine Russell Hospital; Lester Coggins, Dodee Sanders, and Angie McCain are still hanging out in the McCain pantry. So is Junior. He is between Dodee and Angie, holding their hands. His head aches, but only a little. He thinks he might sleep the night here.

On Motton Road, in Eastchester (not far from the place where the attempt to breach the Dome with an experimental acid compound is even then going on beneath the strange pink sky), Jack Evans, husband of the late Myra, is standing in his backyard with a bottle of Jack Daniels in one hand and his home protection weapon of choice, a Ruger SR9, in the other. He drinks and watches the pink stars fall. He knows what they are, and he wishes on every one, and he wishes for death, because without Myra, the bottom has dropped out of his life. He might be able to live without her, and he might be able to live like a rat in a glass cage, but he cannot manage both. When the falling meteors become more intermittent—this is around quarter after ten, about forty-five minutes after the shower began—he swallows the last of the Jack, casts the bottle onto the grass, and blows his brains out. He is The Mill’s first official suicide.

He will not be the last.

Barbie, Julia, and Lissa Jamieson watched silently as the two spacesuited soldiers removed the thin nozzle from the end of the plastic hose. They put it into an opaque plastic bag with a ziplock top, then put the bag into a metal case stenciled with the words HAZARDOUS MATERIALS. They locked it with separate keys, then took off their helmets. They looked tired, hot, and out of spirits.

Two older men—too old to be soldiers—wheeled a complicated-looking piece of equipment away from the site of the acid experiment, which had been performed three times. Barbie guessed the older guys, possibly scientists from NSA, had been doing some sort of spectrographic analysis. Or trying to. The gas masks they had been wearing during the testing procedure were now pushed up on top of their heads like weird hats. Barbie could have asked Cox what the tests were supposed to show, and Cox might even have given him a straight answer, but Barbie was also out of spirits.

Overhead, the last few pink meteoroids were zipping down the sky.

Lissa pointed back toward Eastchester. “I heard something that sounded like a gunshot. Did you?”

“Probably a car backfiring or some kid shooting off a bottle rocket,” Julia said. She was also tired and drawn. Once, when it became clear that the experiment—the acid test, so to speak—wasn’t going to work, Barbie had caught her wiping her eyes. It hadn’t stopped her from taking pictures, with her Kodak, though.

Cox walked toward them, his shadow thrown in two different directions by the lights that had been set up. He gestured to the place where the door-shape had been sprayed on the Dome. “I’d guess this little adventure cost the American taxpayer about three-quarters of a million dollars, and that’s not counting the R&D expenses that went into developing the acid compound. Which ate the paint we sprayed on there and did absolutely fuck-all else.”

“Language, Colonel,” Julia said, with a ghost of her old smile.

“Thank you, Madam Editor,” Cox said sourly.

“Did you really think this would work?” Barbie asked.

“No, but I didn’t think I’d ever live to see a man on Mars, either, but the Russians say they’re going to send a crew of four in 2020.”

“Oh, I get it,” Julia said. “The Martians got wind of it, and they’re pissed.”

“If so, they retaliated on the wrong country,” Cox said… and Barbie saw something in his eyes.

“How sure are you, Jim?” he asked softly.

“I beg pardon?”

“That the Dome was put in place by extraterrestrials.”

Julia took two steps forward. Her face was pale, her eyes blazing. “Tell us what you know, goddammit!”

Cox raised his hand. “Stop. We don’t know anything. There is a theory, however. Yes. Marty, come over here.”

One of the older gentlemen who had been running tests approached the Dome. He was holding his gas mask by the strap.

“Your analysis?” Cox asked, and when he saw the older gentle-man’s hesitation: “Speak freely.”

“Well…” Marty shrugged. “Trace minerals. Soil and airborne pollutants. Otherwise, nothing. According to spectrographic analysis, that thing isn’t there.”

“What about the HY-908?” And, to Barbie and the women: “The acid.”

“It’s gone,” Marty said. “The thing that isn’t there ate it up.”

“Is that possible, according to what you know?”

“No. But the Dome isn’t possible, according to what we know.”

“And does that lead you to believe that the Dome may be the creation of some life-form with more advanced knowledge of physics, chemistry, biology, whatever?” When Marty hesitated again, Cox repeated what he’d said earlier. “Speak freely.”

“It’s one possibility. It’s also possible that some earthly supervillain set it up. A real-world Lex Luthor. Or it could be the work of a renegade country, like North Korea.”

“Who hasn’t taken credit for it?” Barbie asked skeptically.