Under the Dome

Junior looked at the young woman. Great mouth. Angelina lips. He bet she could, as the saying went, suck the chrome off a trailer hitch. “If he can’t get dressed by himself, you help him. We’ve got four more cabins to check out, and when we get back here, you want to be in that Volvo of yours and on your way into town.”

“I don’t understand any of this!” Carolyn wailed.

“Not surprised,” Frankie said, and plucked the Baggie of dope out of the sink. “Didn’t you know this stuff makes you stupid?”

She began to cry.

“Don’t worry,” Frankie said. “I’m confisticating it, and in a couple of days, booya, you’ll smarten up all on your own.”

“You didn’t read us our rights,” she wept.

Junior looked astonished. Then he laughed. “You have the right to get the fuck out of here and shut the fuck up, okay? In this situation those are the only rights you have. Do you understand that?”

Frankie was examining the confisticated dope. “Junior,” he said, “there’s hardly any seeds in this. This is fucking primo. ”

Thurston had reached Carolyn. He got to his feet, farting quite loudly as he did so. Junior and Frankie looked at each other. They tried to hold it in—they were officers of the law, after all—and couldn’t. They burst out laughing simultaneously.

“Trombone Charlie is back in town!” Frankie yelled, and they gave each other a high five.

Thurston and Carolyn stood in the bedroom doorway, covering their mutual nakedness in an embrace, staring at the cackling intruders. In the background, like voices in a bad dream, loudhailers continued to announce that the area was being evacuated. Most of the amplified voices were now retreating toward Little Bitch.

“I want that car gone when we get back,” Junior said. “Or I will fuck you up.”

They left. Carolyn dressed herself, then helped Thurston—his stomach hurt too much for him to bend over and put on his own shoes. By the time they were finished, both of them were crying. In the car, on their way back down the camp lane that led to Little Bitch Road, Carolyn tried to reach her father on her cell. She got nothing but silence.

At the intersection of Little Bitch and Route 119, a town police car was pulled across the road. A stocky female cop with red hair pointed at the soft shoulder, then waved at them to use it. Carolyn pulled over instead, and got out. She held up her puffy wrist.

“We were assaulted! By two guys calling themselves cops! One named Junior and one named Frankie! They—”

“Get your ass gone or I’ll assault you myself,” Georgia Roux said. “I ain’t shittin, honeypie.”

Carolyn stared at her, stunned. The whole world had turned sideways and slipped into a Twilight Zone episode while she was asleep. That had to be it; no other explanation made even marginal sense. They’d hear the Rod Serling voice-over anytime now.

She got back into the Volvo (the sticker on the bumper, faded but still readable: OBAMA ’12! YES WE STILL CAN) and detoured around the police car. Another, older cop was sitting inside it, going over a checklist on a clipboard. She thought of appealing to him, then thought better of it.

“Try the radio,” she said. “Let’s find out if something really is going on.”

Thurston turned it on and got nothing but Elvis Presley and the Jordanaires, trudging through “How Great Thou Art.”

Carolyn snapped it off, thought of saying The nightmare is officially complete, and didn’t. All she wanted was to get out of Weirdsville as soon as possible.

2

On the map, the Chester Pond camp road was a thin hooklike thread, almost not there. After leaving the Marshall cabin, Junior and Frankie sat for a moment in Frankie’s car, studying this.

“Can’t be anybody else down there,” Frankie said. “Not at this time of the year. What do you think? Say fuck it and go back to town?” He cocked a thumb at the cabin. “They’ll be along, and if they’re not, who really gives a shit?”

Junior considered it for a moment, then shook his head. They had taken the Oath of Duty. Besides, he wasn’t anxious to get back and face his father’s pestering about what he’d done with the Reverend’s body. Coggins was now keeping his girlfriends company in the McCain pantry, but there was no need for his dad to know that. At least not until the big man figured out how to nail Barbara with it. And Junior believed his father would figure it out. If there was one thing Big Jim Rennie was good at, it was nailing people.

Now it doesn’t even matter if he finds out I left school, Junior thought, because I know worse about him. Way worse.

Not that dropping out seemed very important now; it was chump change compared to what was going on in The Mill. But he’d have to be careful, just the same. Junior wouldn’t put it past his father to nail him, if the situation seemed to call for it.

“Junior? Earth to Junior.”