THIS ISNOTAS BAD AS IT GETS

What Rusty Everett would recall later was confusion. The only image that stuck out with complete clarity was Pastor Coggins’s naked upper body: fishbelly-white skin and stacked ribs.

Barbie, however—perhaps because he’d been tasked by Colonel Cox to put on his investigator’s hat again —saw everything. And his clearest memory wasn’t of Coggins with his shirt off; it was of Melvin Searles pointing a finger at him and then tilting his head slightly—sign language any man recognizes as meaning We ain’t done yet, Sunshine.

What everyone else remembered—what brought the town’s situation home to them as perhaps nothing else could—were the father’s cries as he held his wretched, bleeding boy in his arms, and the mother screaming “Is he all right, Alden? IS HE ALL RIGHT?” as she labored her sixty-pounds-overweight bulk toward the scene.

Barbie saw Rusty Everett push through the circle gathering around the boy and join the two kneeling men —Alden and Lester. Alden was cradling his son in his arms as Pastor Coggins stared with his mouth sagging like a gate with a busted hinge. Rusty’s wife was right behind him. Rusty fell on his knees between Alden and Lester and tried to pull the boy’s hands away from his face. Alden—not surprisingly, in Barbie’s opinion —promptly socked him one. Rusty’s nose started to bleed.

“No! Let him help!” the PA’s wife yelled.

Linda, Barbie thought. Her name is Linda, and she’s a cop.

“No, Alden! No!” Linda put her hand on the farmer’s shoulder and he turned, apparently ready to sock her. All sense had departed his face; he was an animal protecting a cub. Barbie moved forward to catch his fist if the farmer let it fly, then had a better idea.

“Medic here!” he shouted, bending into Alden’s face and trying to block Linda from his field of vision. “Medic! Medic, med—”

Barbie was yanked backward by the collar of his shirt and spun around. He had just time enough to register Mel Searles—one of Junior’s buddies—and to realize that Searles was wearing a blue uniform shirt and a badge. This is as bad as it gets, Barbie thought, but as if to prove him wrong, Searles socked him in the face, just as he had that night in Dipper’s parking lot. He missed Barbie’s nose, which had probably been his target, but mashed Barbie’s lips back against his teeth.

Searles drew back his fist to do it again, but Jackie Wettington—Mel’s unwilling partner that day—grabbed his arm before he could. “Don’t do it!” she shouted. “Officer, don’t do it !”

For a moment the issue was in doubt. Then Ollie Dinsmore, closely followed by his sobbing, gasping mother, passed between them, knocking Searles back a step.

Searles lowered his fist. “Okay,” he said. “But you’re on a crime scene, asshole. Police investigation scene. Whatever.”

Barbie wiped his bleeding mouth with the heel of his hand and thought, This is not as bad as it gets. That’s the hell of it—it’s not.

The only part of this Rusty heard was Barbie shouting medic. Now he said it himself. “Medic, Mr. Dinsmore.

Rusty Everett. You know me. Let me look at your boy.”

“Let him, Alden!” Shelley cried. “Let him take care of Rory!”

Alden relaxed his grip on the kid, who was swaying back and forth on his knees, his bluejeans soaked with blood. Rory had covered his face with his hands again. Rusty took hold of them—gently, gently does it —and pulled them down. He had hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as he feared, but the socket was raw and empty, pouring blood. And the brain behind that socket was hurt plenty. The news was in how the remaining eye cocked senselessly skyward, bulging at nothing.

Rusty started to pull his shirt off, but the preacher was already holding out his own. Coggins’s upper body, thin and white in front, striped with crisscrossing red welts in back, was running with sweat. He held the shirt out.

“No,” Rusty said. “Rip it, rip it.”

For a moment Lester didn’t get it. Then he tore the shirt down the middle. The rest of the police contingent was arriving now, and some of the regular cops—Henry Morrison, George Frederick, Jackie Wettington, Freddy Denton—were yelling at the new Special Deputies to help move the crowd back, make some space. The new hires did so, and enthusiastically. Some of the rubberneckers were knocked down, including that famous Bratz-torturer Samantha Bushey. Sammy had Little Walter in a Papoose carrier, and when she went on her ass, both of them began to squall. Junior Rennie stepped over her without so much as a look and grabbed Rory’s mom, almost pulling the wounded boy’s mother off her feet before Freddy Denton stopped him.

“No, Junior, no! It’s the kid’s mother! Let her loose!”

“Police brutality!” Sammy Bushey yelled from where she lay in the grass. “Police brutal—”

Georgia Roux, the newest hire in what had become Peter Randolph’s police department, arrived with Carter Thibodeau (holding his hand, actually). Georgia pressed her boot against one of Sammy’s breasts—it wasn’t quite a kick—and said, “Yo, dyke, shut up.”

Junior let go of Rory’s mother and went to stand with Mel, Carter, and Georgia. They were staring at Barbie. Junior added his eyes to theirs, thinking that the cook was like a bad goddamned penny that kept turning up. He thought Baarbie would look awfully good in a cell right next to Sloppy Sam’s. Junior also thought that being a cop had been his destiny all along; it had certainly helped with his headaches.

Rusty took half of Lester’s torn shirt and ripped it again. He folded a piece, started to put it over the gaping wound in the boy’s face, then changed his mind and gave it to the father. “Hold it to the—”

The words barely came out; his throat was full of blood from his mashed nose. Rusty hawked it back, turned his head, spat a half-clotted loogie into the grass, and tried again. “Hold it to the wound, Dad. Apply pressure. Hand to the back of his neck and squeeze. ”

Dazed but willing, Alden Dinsmore did as he was told. The makeshift pad immediately turned red, but the man seemed calmer nonetheless. Having something to do helped. It usually did.

Rusty flung the remaining piece of shirt at Lester. “More!” he said, and Lester began ripping the shirt into smaller pieces. Rusty lifted Dinsmore’s hand and removed the first pad, which was now soaked and useless. Shelley Dinsmore shrieked when she saw the empty socket. “Oh, my boy! My boy! ”

Peter Randolph arrived at a jog, huffing and puffing. Still, he was far ahead of Big Jim, who—mindful of his substandard ticker—was plodding down the slope of the field on grass the rest of the crowd had trampled into a broad path. He was thinking of what a cluster-mug this had turned out to be. Town gatherings would have to be by permit only in the future. And if he had anything to do with it (he would; he always did), permits would be hard to come by.

“Move these people back further!” Randolph snarled at Officer Morrison. And, as Henry turned to do so: “Move it back, folks! Give em some air!”

Morrison bawled: “Officers, form a line! Push em back! Anyone who resists, put em in cuffs!”

The crowd began a slow reverse shuffle. Barbie lingered. “Mr. Everett … Rusty … do you need any help? Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Rusty said, and his face told Barbie everything he needed to know: the PA was all right, just a bloody nose. The kid wasn’t and never would be again, even if he lived. Rusty applied a fresh pad to the kid’s bleeding eyesocket and put the father’s hand over it again. “Nape of the neck,” he said. “Press hard. Hard. ”

Barbie started to step back, but then the kid spoke.

“It’s Halloween. You can’t … we can’t …”

Rusty froze in the act of folding another piece of shirt into a compression pad. Suddenly he was back in his daughters’ bedroom, listening to Janelle scream, It’s the Great Pumpkin’s fault!

He looked up at Linda. She had heard, too. Her eyes were big, the color fleeing her previously flushed cheeks.

“Linda!” Rusty snapped at her. “Get on your walkie! Call the hospital! Tell Twitch to get the ambulance—”

“The fire!” Rory Dinsmore screamed in a high, trembling voice. Lester was staring at him as Moses might have stared at the burning bush. “The fire! The bus is in the fire! Everyone’s screaming! Watch out for Halloween!”

The crowd was silent now, listening to the child rant. Even Jim Rennie heard as he reached the back of the mob and began to elbow his way through.

“Linda!” Rusty shouted. “Get on your walkie! We need the ambulance! ”

She started visibly, as if someone had just clapped his hands in front of her face. She pulled the walkie­talkie off her belt.

Rory tumbled forward into the flattened grass and began to seize.

“What’s happening?” That was the father.

“Oh dear-to-Jesus, he’s dying!” That was the mother.

Rusty turned the trembling, bucking child over (trying not to think of Jannie as he did it, but that, of course, was impossible) and tilting his chin up to create an airway.

“Come on, Dad,” he told Alden. “Don’t quit on me now. Squeeze the neck. Compression on the wound. Let’s stop the bleeding.”

Compression might drive the fragment that had taken the kid’s eye deeper in, but Rusty would worry about that later. If, that was, the kid didn’t die right out here on the grass.

From nearby—but oh so far—one of the soldiers finally spoke up. Barely out of his teens, he looked terrified and sorry. “We tried to stop him. Boy didn’t listen. There wasn’t nothing we could do.”

Pete Freeman, his Nikon dangling by his knee on its strap, favored this young warrior with a smile of singular bitterness. “I think we know that. If we didn’t before, we sure do now.”

Before Barbie could melt into the crowd, Mel Searles grabbed him by the arm.

“Take your hand off me,” Barbie said mildly.

Searles showed his teeth in his version of a grin. “In your dreams, Fucko.” Then he raised his voice. “Chief! Hey, Chief!”

Peter Randolph turned toward him impatiently, frowning.

“This guy interfered with me while I was trying to secure the scene. Can I arrest him?”

Randolph opened his mouth, possibly to say Don’t waste my time. Then he looked around. Jim Rennie had finally joined the little group watching Everett work on the boy. Rennie gave Barbie the flat stare of a reptile on a rock, then looked back at Randolph and nodded slightly.

Mel saw it. His grin widened. “Jackie? Officer Wettington, I mean? Can I borrow a pair of your cuffs?”

Junior and the rest of his crew were also grinning. This was better than watching some bleeding kid, and a lot better than policing a bunch of holy rollers and dumbbells with signs. “Payback’s a bitch, Baaaar -bie,” Junior said.

Jackie looked dubious. “Pete—Chief, I mean—I think the guy was only trying to h—”

“Cuff him up,” Randolph said. “We’ll sort out what he was or wasn’t trying to do later. In the meantime, I want this mess shut down.” He raised his voice. “It’s over, folks! You’ve had your fun, and see what it’s come to! Now go home! ”

Jackie was removing a set of plasticuffs from her belt (she had no intention of handing them to Mel Searles, would put them on herself) when Julia Shumway spoke up. She was standing just behind Randolph and Big Jim (in fact, Big Jim had elbowed her aside on his way to where the action was).

“I wouldn’t do that, Chief Randolph, unless you want the PD embarrassed on the front page of the Democrat. ” She was smiling her Mona Lisa smile. “With you so new to the job and all.”

“What are you talking about?” Randolph asked. His frown was deeper now, turning his face into a series of unlovely crevices.

Julia held up her camera—a slightly older version of Pete Free-man’s. “I have quite a few pictures of Mr. Barbara assisting Rusty Everett with that wounded child, a couple of Officer Searles hauling Mr. Barbara off for no discernible reason … and one of Officer Sear-les punching Mr. Barbara in the mouth. Also for no discernible reason. I’m not much of a photographer, but that one is really quite good. Would you like to see it, Chief Randolph? You can; the camera’s digital.”

Barbie’s admiration for her deepened, because he thought she was running a bluff. If she’d been taking pictures, why was she holding the lenscap in her left hand, as if she’d just taken it off?

“It’s a lie, Chief,” Mel said. “He tried to take a swing at me. Ask Junior.”

“I think my pictures will show that young Mr. Rennie was involved in crowd control and had his back turned when the punch landed,” Julia said.

Randolph was glowering at her. “I could take your camera away,” he said. “Evidence.”

“You certainly could,” she agreed cheerily, “and Pete Freeman would take a picture of you doing it. Then you could take Pete’s camera … but everyone here would see you do it.”

“Whose side are you on here, Julia?” Big Jim asked. He was smiling his fierce smile—the smile of a shark about to take a bite out of some plump swimmer’s ass.

Julia turned her own smile on him, the eyes above it as innocent and enquiring as a child’s. “Are there sides, James? Other than over there”—she pointed at the watching soldiers—“and in here?”

Big Jim considered her, his lips now bending the other way, a smile in reverse. Then he flapped one disgusted hand at Randolph.

“I guess we’ll let it slide, Mr. Barbara,” Randolph said. “Heat of the moment.”

“Thanks,” Barbie said.

Jackie took her glowering young partner’s arm. “Come on, Officer Searles. This part’s over. Let’s move these people back.”

Searles went with her, but not before turning to Barbie and making the gesture: finger pointing, head cocked slightly. We ain’t done yet, Sunshine.

Rommie’s assistant Toby Manning and Jack Evans appeared, carrying a makeshift stretcher made out of canvas and tent poles. Rommie opened his mouth to ask what the hell they thought they were doing, then closed it again. The field day had been canceled anyway, so what the hell.

Those with cars got into them. Then they all tried to drive away at the same time.

Predictable, Joe McClatchey thought. Totally predictable.

Most of the cops worked to unclog the resulting traffic jam, although even a bunch of kids (Joe was standing with Benny Drake and Norrie Calvert) could tell that the new and improved Five-O had no idea what it was doing. The sound of po-po curses came clear on the summery air (“Can’t you back that sonofawhore UP!” ). In spite of the mess, nobody seemed to be laying on their horns. Most folks were probably too bummed to beep.

Benny said, “Look at those idiots. How many gallons of gas do you think they’re blowing out their tailpipes? Like they think the supply’s endless.”

“Word,” Norrie said. She was a tough kid, a smalltown riot grrrl with a modified Tennessee Tophat mullet ’do, but now she only looked pale and sad and scared. She took Benny’s hand. Scarecrow Joe’s heart broke, then remended itself in an instant when she took his as well.

“There goes the guy who almost got arrested,” Benny said, pointing with his free hand. Barbie and the newspaper lady were trudging across the field toward the makeshift parking lot with sixty or eighty other people, some dragging their protest signs dispiritedly behind them.

“Nancy Newspaper wasn’t taking pictures at all, y’know,” Scarecrow Joe said. “I was standing right behind her. Pretty foxy.”

“Yeah,” Benny said, “but I still wouldn’t want to be him. Until this shit ends, the cops can do pretty much what they want.”

That was true, Joe reflected. And the new cops weren’t particularly nice guys. Junior Rennie, for example. The story of Sloppy Sam’s arrest was already making the rounds.

“What are you saying?” Norrie asked Benny.

“Nothing right now. It’s still cool right now.” He considered. “Fairly cool. But if this goes on … remember Lord of the Flies ?” They had read it for honors English.

Benny intoned: “‘Kill the pig. Cut her throat. Bash her in.’ People call cops pigs, but I’ll tell you what I think, I think cops find pigs when the shit gets deep. Maybe because they get scared, too.”

Norrie Calvert burst into tears. Scarecrow Joe put an arm around her. He did it carefully, as if he thought doing such a thing might cause them both to explode, but she turned her face against his shirt and hugged him. It was a one-armed hug, because she was still holding onto Benny with her other hand. Joe thought he had felt nothing in his whole life as weirdly thrilling as her tears dampening his shirt. Over the top of her head, he looked at Benny reproachfully.

“Sorry, dude,” Benny said, and patted her back. “No fear.”

“His eye was gone!” she cried. The words were muffled against Joe’s chest. Then she let go of him. “This isn’t fun anymore. This is not fun.”

“No.” Joe spoke as if discovering a great truth. “It isn’t.”

“Look,” Benny said. It was the ambulance. Twitch was bumping across Dinsmore’s field with the red roof lights flashing. His sister, the woman who owned Sweetbriar Rose, was walking ahead of him, guiding him around the worst potholes. An ambulance in a hayfield, under a bright afternoon sky in October: it was the final touch.

Suddenly, Scarecrow Joe no longer wanted to protest. Nor did he exactly want to go home.

At that moment, the only thing in the world he wanted was to get out of town.

Julia slid behind the wheel of her car but didn’t start it; they were going to be here awhile, and there was no sense in wasting gas. She leaned past Barbie, opened the glove compartment, and brought out an old pack of American Spirits. “Emergency supplies,” she told him apologetically. “Do you want one?”

He shook his head.

“Do you mind? Because I can wait.”

He shook his head again. She lit up, then blew smoke out her open window. It was still warm—a real Indian summer day for sure—but it wouldn’t stay that way. Another week or so and the weather would turn wrong, as the oldtimers said. Or maybe not, she thought. Who in the hell knows? If the Dome stayed in place, she had no doubt that plenty of meteorologists would weigh in on the subject of the weather inside, but so what? The Weather Channel Yodas couldn’t even predict which way a snowstorm would turn, and in Julia’s opinion they deserved no more credence than the political geniuses who blabbed their days away at the Sweetbriar Rose bullshit table.

“Thanks for speaking up back there,” he said. “You saved my bacon.”

“Here’s a newsflash, honey—your bacon’s still hanging in the smokehouse. What are you going to do next time? Have your friend Cox call the ACLU? They might be interested, but I don’t think anyone from the Portland office is going to be visiting Chester’s Mill soon.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic. The Dome might blow out to sea tonight. Or just dissipate. We don’t know.”

“Fat chance. This is a government job—some government’s—and I’ll bet your Colonel Cox knows it.”

Barbie was silent. He had believed Cox when Cox said the U.S. hadn’t been responsible for the Dome. Not because Cox was necessarily trustworthy, but because Barbie just didn’t think America had the technology. Or any other country, for that matter. But what did he know? His last service job had been threatening scared Iraqis. Sometimes with a gun to their heads.

Junior’s friend Frankie DeLesseps was out on Route 119, helping to direct traffic. He was wearing a blue uniform shirt over jeans—there probably hadn’t been any uniform pants in his size at the station. He was a tall sonofabitch. And, Julia saw with misgivings, he was wearing a gun on his hip. Smaller than the Glocks the regular Mill police carried, probably his own property, but it was a gun, all right.

“What will you do if the Hitler Youth comes after you?” she asked, lifting her chin in Frankie’s direction. “Good luck hollering police brutality if they jug you and decide to finish what they started. There’s only two lawyers in town. One’s senile and the other drives a Boxster Jim Rennie got him at discount. Or so I’ve heard.”

“I can take care of myself.”

“Oooh, macho.”

“What’s up with your paper? It looked ready when I left last night.”

“Technically speaking, you left this morning. And yes, it’s ready. Pete and I and a few friends will make sure it gets distributed. I just didn’t see any point in starting while the town was three-quarters empty. Want to be a volunteer newsboy?”

“I would, but I’ve got a zillion sandwiches to make. Strictly cold food at the restaurant tonight.”

“Maybe I’ll drop by.” She tossed her cigarette, only half-smoked, from the window. Then, after a moment’s consideration, she got out and stepped on it. Starting a grassfire out here would not be cool, not with the town’s new firetrucks stranded in Castle Rock.

“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.”

“Why would you think that?” Barbie asked. “Don’t you guys know that if you let us stay on the Net, Aunt Sarah’s cranberry bread recipe is sure to get out sooner or later?”

Julia sat up straight and mouthed, They’re trying to cut the Internet? Barbie raised one finger toward her —Wait.

“Just hear me out, Barbie. Suppose we call this Rennie and tell him the Internet’s got to go, so sorry, crisis situation, extreme measures, et cetera, et cetera. Then you can convince him of your usefulness by changing our minds.”

Barbie considered. It might work. For a while, anyway. Or it might not.

“Plus,” Cox said brightly, “you’ll be giving them this other information. Maybe saving some lives, but saving people the scare of their lives, for sure.”

Barbie said, “Phones stay up as well as Internet.”

“That’s hard. I might be able to keep the Net for you, but … listen, man. There are at least five Curtis LeMay types sitting on the committee presiding over this mess, and as far as they’re concerned, everyone in Chester’s Mill is a terrorist until proved otherwise.”

“What can these hypothetical terrorists do to harm America? Suicide-bomb the Congo Church?”

“Barbie, you’re preaching to the choir.”

Of course that was probably the truth.

“Will you do it?”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that. Wait for my call before you do anything. I have to talk to the late Police Chief’s widow first.”

Cox persisted. “Will you keep the horse-trading part of this conversation to yourself?”

Again, Barbie was struck by how little even Cox—a freethinker, by military standards—understood about the changes the Dome had already wrought. In here, the Cox brand of secrecy no longer mattered.

Us against them, Barbie thought. Now it’s us against them. Unless their crazy idea works, that is.

“Sir, I really will have to get back to you on that; this phone is suffering a bad case of low battery.” A lie he told with no remorse. “And you need to wait to hear from me before you talk to anybody else.”

“Just remember, the big bang’s scheduled for thirteen hundred tomorrow. If you want to maintain viability on this, you better stay out front.”

Maintain viability. Another meaningless phrase under the Dome. Unless it applied to keeping your gennie supplied with propane.

“We’ll talk,” Barbie said. He closed the phone before Cox could say more. 119 was almost clear now, although DeLesseps was still there, leaning against his vintage muscle car with his arms folded. As Julia drove past the Nova, Barbie noted a sticker reading ASS, GAS, OR GRASS—NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE. Also a police bubblegum light on the dash. He thought the contrast summed up everything that was now wrong in Chester’s Mill.

As they rode, Barbie told her everything Cox had said.

“What they’re planning is really no different than what that kid just tried,” she said, sounding appalled.

“Well, a little different,” Barbie said. “The kid tried it with a rifle. They’ve got a Cruise missile lined up. Call it the Big Bang theory.”

She smiled. It wasn’t her usual one; wan and bewildered, it made her look sixty instead of forty-three. “I think I’m going to be putting out another paper sooner than I thought.”

Barbie nodded. “Extra, extra, read all about it.”

“Hello, Sammy,” someone said. “How are you?”

Samantha Bushey didn’t recognize the voice and turned toward it warily, hitching up the Papoose carrier as she did. Little Walter was asleep and he weighed a ton. Her butt hurt from falling on it, and her feelings were hurt, too—that damn Georgia Roux, calling her a dyke. Georgia Roux, who had come whining around Sammy’s trailer more than once, looking to score an eightball for her and the musclebound freak she went around with.

It was Dodee’s father. Sammy had spoken with him thousands of times, but she hadn’t recognized his voice; she hardly recognized him. He looked old and sad—broken, somehow. He didn’t even scope out her boobs, which was a first.

“Hi, Mr. Sanders. Gee, I didn’t even see you at the—” She flapped her hand back toward the flattened-down field and the big tent, now half collapsed and looking forlorn. Although not as forlorn as Mr. Sanders.

“I was sitting in the shade.” That same hesitant voice, coming through an apologetic, hurting smile that was hard to look at. “I had something to drink, though. Wasn’t it warm for October? Golly, yes. I thought it was a good afternoon—a real town afternoon—until that boy …”

Oh crispy crackers, he was crying.

“I’m awful sorry about your wife, Mr. Sanders.”

“Thank you, Sammy. That’s very kind. Can I carry your baby back to your car for you? I think you can go now—the road’s almost clear.”

That was an offer Sammy couldn’t refuse even if he was crying. She scooped Little Walter out of the Papoose—it was like picking up a big clump of warm bread dough—and handed him over. Little Walter opened his eyes, smiled glassily, belched, then went back to sleep.

“I think he might have a package in his diaper,” Mr. Sanders said.

“Yeah, he’s a regular shit machine. Good old Little Walter.”

“Walter’s a very nice old-fashioned name.”

“Thanks.” Telling him that her baby’s first name was actually Little didn’t seem worth the trouble … and she was sure she’d had that conversation with him before, anyway. He just didn’t remember. Walking with him like this—even though he was carrying the baby—was the perfect bummer end to a perfect bummer afternoon. At least he was right about the traffic; the automotive mosh pit had finally cleared out. Sammy wondered how long it would be before the whole town was riding bicycles again.

“I never liked the idea of her in that plane,” Mr. Sanders said. He seemed to be picking up the thread of some interior conversation. “Sometimes I even wondered if Claudie was sleeping with that guy.”

Dodee’s Mom sleeping with Chuck Thompson? Sammy was both shocked and intrigued.

“Probably not,” he said, and sighed. “In any case, it doesn’t matter now. Have you seen Dodee? She didn’t come home last night.”

Sammy almost said Sure, yesterday afternoon. But if the Dodester hadn’t slept at home last night, saying that would only worry the Dodester’s dadster. And let Sammy in for a long conversation with a guy who had tears streaming down his face and a snotrunner hanging from one nostril. That would not be cool.

They had reached her car, an old Chevrolet with cancer of the rocker panels. She took Little Walter and grimaced at the smell. That wasn’t just mail in his diaper, that was UPS and Federal Express combined.

“No, Mr. Sanders, haven’t seen her.”

He nodded, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. The snotrunner disappeared, or at least went somewhere else. That was a relief. “She probably went to the mall with Angie McCain, then to her aunt Peg’s in Sabattus when she couldn’t get back into town.”

“Yeah, that’s probably it.” And when Dodee turned up right here in The Mill, he’d have a pleasant surprise. God knew he deserved one. Sammy opened the car door and laid Little Walter on the passenger side. She’d given up on the child-restraint seat months ago. Too much of a pain in the ass. And besides, she was a very safe driver.

“Good to see you, Sammy.” A pause. “Will you pray for my wife?”

“Uhhh … sure, Mr. Sanders, no prob.”

She started to get in the car, then remembered two things: that Georgia Roux had shoved her tit with her goddam motorcycle boot—probably hard enough to leave a bruise—and that Andy Sanders, brokenhearted or not, was the town’s First Selectman.

“Mr. Sanders?”

“Yes, Sammy?”

“Some of those cops were kinda rough out there. You might want to do something about that. Before it, you know, gets out of hand.”

His unhappy smile didn’t change. “Well, Sammy, I understand how you young people feel about police—I was young myself once—but we’ve got a pretty bad situation here. And the quicker we establish a little authority, the better off everyone will be. You understand that, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Sammy said. What she understood was that grief, no matter how genuine, did not seem to impede a politician’s flow of bull-shit. “Well, I’ll see you.”

“They’re a good team,” Andy said vaguely. “Pete Randolph will see they all pull together. Wear the same hat. Do … uh … the same dance. Protect and serve, you know.”

“Sure,” Samantha said. The protect-and-serve dance, with the occasional tit-kick thrown in. She pulled away with Little Walter once more snoring on the seat. The smell of babyshit was terrific. She unrolled the windows, then looked in the rearview mirror. Mr. Sanders was still standing in the makeshift parking lot, which was now almost entirely deserted. He raised a hand to her.

Sammy raised her own in turn, wondering just where Dodee had stayed last night if she hadn’t gone home. Then she dismissed it—it was really none of her concern—and flipped on the radio. The only thing she could get clearly was Jesus Radio, and she turned it off again.

When she looked up, Frankie DeLesseps was standing in the road in front of her with his hand up, just like a real cop. She had to stomp the brake to keep from hitting him, then put her hand on the baby to keep him from falling. Little Walter awoke and began to blat.

“Look what you did!” she yelled at Frankie (with whom she’d once had a two-day fling back in high school, when Angie was at band camp). “The baby almost went on the floor!”

“Where’s his seat?” Frankie leaned in her window, biceps bulging. Big muscles, little dick, that was Frankie DeLesseps. As far as Sammy was concerned, Angie could have him.

“None of your beeswax.”

A real cop might have written her up—for the lip as much as the child-restraint law—but Frankie only smirked. “You seen Angie?”

“No.” This time it was the truth. “She probably got caught out of town.” Although it seemed to Sammy that the ones in town were the ones who’d gotten caught.

“What about Dodee?”

Sammy once again said no. She practically had to, because Frankie might talk to Mr. Sanders.

“Angie’s car is at her house,” Frankie said. “I looked in the garage.”

“Big whoop. They probably went off somewhere in Dodee’s Kia.”

He seemed to consider this. They were almost alone now. The traffic jam was just a memory. Then he said, “Did Georgia hurt your booby, baby?” And before she could answer, he reached in and grabbed it. Not gently, either. “Want me to kiss it all better?”

She slapped his hand. On her right, Little Walter blatted and blatted. Sometimes she wondered why God had made men in the first place, she really did. Always blatting or grabbing, grabbing or blatting.

Frankie wasn’t smiling now. “You want to watch that shit,” he said. “Things are different now.”

“What are you going to do? Arrest me?”

“I’d think of something better than that,” he said. “Go on, get out of here. And if you do see Angie, tell her I want to see her.”

She drove away, mad and—she didn’t like to admit this to herself, but it was true—a little frightened. Half a mile down the road she pulled over and changed Little Walter’s diaper. There was a used diaper bag in back, but she was too mad to bother. She threw the shitty Pamper onto the shoulder of the road instead, not far from the big sign reading:

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 654