Under the Dome

“Get a grip,” he muttered. Yes, he had to, but it was hard. Especially in the dark. Besides, in the Bible stuff like that happened all the time. In the Bible, people sometimes returned to life like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.

“Anybody home?”

Zip. Nada.

His eyes had adjusted to the gloom, but not enough. He needed a light. He should’ve brought a flashlight from the house, but it was easy to forget stuff like that when you were used to just flipping a switch. Junior crossed the kitchen, stepping over Angie’s body, and opened the first of two doors on the far side. It was a pantry. He could just make out the shelves of bottled and canned goods. He tried the other door and had better luck. It was the laundry. And unless he was mistaken about the shape of the thing standing on the shelf just to his right, he was still on a roll.

He wasn’t mistaken. It was a flashlight, a nice bright one. He’d have to be careful about shining it around the kitchen—easing down the shades would be an excellent idea—but in the laundry room he could shine it around to his heart’s content. In here he was fine.

Soap powder. Bleach. Fabric softener. A bucket and a Swiffer. Good. With no generator there’d only be cold water, but there would probably be enough to fill one bucket from the taps, and then, of course, there were the various toilet tanks. And cold was what he wanted. Cold for blood.

He would clean like the demon housekeeper his mother had once been, mindful of her husband’s exhortation: “Clean house, clean hands, clean heart.” He would clean up the blood. Then he’d wipe everything he could remember touching and everything he might have touched without remembering. But first…

The body. He had to do something with the body.

Junior decided the pantry would do for the time being. He dragged her in by the arms, then let them go: flump. After that he set to work. He sang under his breath as he first replaced the fridge magnets, then drew the shades. He had filled the bucket almost to the top before the faucet started spitting. Another bonus.

He was still scrubbing, the work well begun but nowhere near done, when the knock came at the front door.

Junior looked up, eyes wide, lips drawn back in a humorless grin of horror.

“Angie?” It was a girl, and she was sobbing. “Angie, are you there?” More knocking, and then the door opened. His roll, it seemed, was over. “Angie, please be here. I saw your car in the garage…”

Shit. The garage! He never checked the fucking garage!

“Angie?” Sobbing again. Someone he knew. Oh God, was it that idiot Dodee Sanders? It was. “Angie, she said my mom’s dead! Mrs. Shumway said that she died!”

Junior hoped she’d go upstairs first, check Angie’s room. But she came down the hall toward the kitchen instead, moving slowly and tentatively in the dark.

“Angie? Are you in the kitchen? I thought I saw a light.”

Junior’s head was starting to ache again, and it was this interfering dope-smoking cunt’s fault. Whatever happened next… that would be her fault, too.

5

Dodee Sanders was still a little stoned and a little drunk; she was hungover; her mother was dead; she was fumbling up the hall of her best friend’s house in the dark; she stepped on something that slid away under her foot and almost went ass over teapot. She grabbed at the stair railing, bent two of her fingers painfully back, and cried out. She sort of understood all this was happening to her, but at the same time it was impossible to believe. She felt as if she’d wandered into some parallel dimension, like in a science fiction movie.

She bent to see what had nearly spilled her. It looked like a towel. Some fool had left a towel on the front hall floor. Then she thought she heard someone moving in the darkness up ahead. In the kitchen.

“Angie? Is that you?”

Nothing. She still felt someone was there, but maybe not.

“Angie?” She shuffled forward again, holding her throbbing right hand—her fingers were going to swell, she thought they were swelling already—against her side. She held her left hand out before her, feeling the dark air. “Angie, please be there! My mother’s dead, it’s not a joke, Mrs. Shumway told me and she doesn’t joke, I need you!”