Under the Dome

“Not that many,” Rusty said. He knew Norrie, a mini-goth whose chief aspiration seemed to be killing herself on a skateboard before bearing her first woods colt. He pressed near the wound with the needle end of the syringe. “Feel that?”

“Yeah, dude, totally. Did you hear, like, a bang out there?” Benny pointed vaguely south as he sat on the examining table in his undershorts, bleeding onto the paper cover.

“Nope,” Rusty said. He had actually heard two: not bangs but, he was afraid, explosions. Had to make this fast. And where was The Wizard? Doing rounds, according to Ginny. Which probably meant snoozing in the Cathy Russell doctors’ lounge. It was where The Wonderful Wiz did most of his rounds these days.

“Feel it now?” Rusty poked again with the needle. “Don’t look, looking is cheating.”

“No, man, nothin. You’re goofin wit me.”

“I’m not. You’re numb.” In more ways than one, Rusty thought. “Okay, here we go. Lie back, relax, and enjoy flying Cathy Russell Airlines.” He scrubbed the wound with sterile saline, debrided, then trimmed with his trusty no. 10 scalpel. “Six stitches with my very best four-oh nylon.”

“Awesome,” the kid said. Then: “I think I may hurl.”

Rusty handed him an emesis basin, in these circumstances known as a puke pan. “Hurl in this. Faint and you’re on your own.”

Benny didn’t faint. He didn’t hurl, either. Rusty was placing a sterile gauze sponge on the wound when there was a perfunctory knock at the door, followed by Ginny Tomlinson’s head. “Can I speak to you for a minute?”

“Don’t worry about me,” Benny said. “I’m like, freely radical.” Cheeky little bugger.

“In the hall, Rusty?” Ginny said. She didn’t give the kid a glance.

“I’ll be right back, Benny. Sit there and take it easy.”

“Chillaxin’. No prob.”

Rusty followed Ginny out into the hall. “Ambulance time?” he asked. Beyond Ginny, in the sunny waiting room, Benny’s mother was looking grimly down at a paperback with a sweet-savage cover.

Ginny nodded. “119, at the Tarker’s town line. There’s another accident on the other town line—Motton—but I’m hearing everyone involved in that one is DATS.” Dead at the scene. “Truck-plane collision. The plane was trying to land.”

“Are you shitting me?”

Alva Drake looked around, frowning, then went back to her paperback. Or at least to looking at it while she tried to decide if her husband would support her in grounding Benny until he was eighteen.

“This is an authentic no-shit situation,” Ginny said. “I’m getting reports of other crashes, too—”

“Weird.”

“—but the guy out on the Tarker’s town line is still alive. Rolled a delivery truck, I believe. Buzz, cuz. Twitch is waiting.”

“You’ll finish the kid?”

“Yes. Go on, go.”

“Dr. Rayburn?”

“Had patients in Stephens Memorial.” This was the Norway–South Paris hospital. “He’s on his way, Rusty. Go.”

He paused on his way out to tell Mrs. Drake that Benny was fine. Alva did not seem overjoyed at the news, but thanked him. Dougie Twitchell—Twitch—was sitting on the bumper of the out-of-date ambulance Jim Rennie and his fellow selectmen kept not replacing, smoking a cigarette and taking some sun. He was holding a portable CB, and it was lively with talk: voices popping like corn and jumping all over each other.

“Put out that cancer-stick and let’s get rolling,” Rusty said. “You know where we’re going, right?”

Twitch flipped the butt away. Despite his nickname, he was the calmest nurse Rusty had ever encountered, and that was saying a lot. “I know what Gin-Gin told you—Tarker’s-Chester’s town line, right?”

“Yes. Overturned truck.”

“Yeah, well, plans have changed. We gotta go the other way.” He pointed to the southern horizon, where a thick black pillar of smoke was rising. “Ever had a desire to see a crashed plane?”

“I have,” Rusty said. “In the service. Two guys. You could have spread what was left on bread. That was plenty for me, pilgrim. Ginny says they’re all dead out there, so why—”

“Maybe so, maybe no,” Twitch said, “but now Perkins is down, and he might not be.”

“Chief Perkins?”

“The very same. I’m thinking the prognosis ain’t good if the pacemaker blew right out of his chest—which is what Peter Randolph is claiming—but he is the Chief of Police. Fearless Leader.”

“Twitch. Buddy. A pacemaker can’t blow like that. It’s perfectly unpossible.”

“Then maybe he is still alive, and we can do some good,” Twitch said. Halfway around the hood of the ambo, he took out his cigarettes.

“You’re not smoking in the ambulance,” Rusty said.

Twitch looked at him sadly.

“Unless you share, that is.”

Twitch sighed and handed him the pack.

“Ah, Marlboros,” Rusty said. “My very favorite OPs.”

“You slay me,” Twitch said.

5

They blew through the stoplight where Route 117 T’d into 119 at the center of town, siren blaring, both of them smoking like fiends (with the windows open, which was SOP), listening to the chatter from the radio. Rusty understood little of it, but he was clear on one thing: he was going to be working long past four o’clock.