Under the Dome: A Novel

by Stephen King

  “Down the hatch,” he said … but didn’t drink. His hand was on the glass, but that cowardly part of him—that part that didn’t want to die even though any meaningful life was over—held it where it was.

  “No, you don’t win this time,” he said, but he let go of the glass so he could wipe his streaming face with the coverlet again. “Not every time and not this time.”

  He raised the glass to his lips. Sweet pink oblivion swam inside. But again he put it down on the bed table.

  The cowardly part, still ruling him. God damn that cowardly part.

  “Lord, send me a sign,” he whispered. “Send me a sign that it’s all right to drink this. If for no other reason than because it’s the only way I can get out of this town.”

  Next door, the roof of the Democrat went down in a stew of sparks. Above him, someone—it sounded like Romeo Burpee—shouted: “Be ready, boys, be on the goddam ready!”

  Be ready. That was the sign, surely. Andy Sanders lifted the glassful of death again, and this time the cowardly part didn’t hold his arm down. The cowardly part seemed to have given up.

  In his pocket, his cell phone played the opening phrases of “You’re Beautiful,” a sentimental piece of crap that had been Claudie’s choice. For a moment he almost drank, anyway, but then a voice whispered that this could be a sign, too. He couldn’t tell if that was the voice of the cowardly part, or of Coggins, or of his own true heart. And because he couldn’t, he answered the phone.

  “Mr. Sanders?” A woman’s voice, tired and unhappy and frightened. Andy could relate. “This is Virginia Tomlinson, up at the hospital?”

  “Ginny, sure!” Sounding like his old cheery, helpful self. It was bizarre.

  “We have a situation here, I’m afraid. Can you come?”

  Light pierced the confused darkness in Andy’s head. It filled him with amazement and gratitude. To have someone say Can you come. Had he forgotten how fine that felt? He supposed he had, although it was why he’d stood for Selectman in the first place. Not to wield power; that was Big Jim’s thing. Only to lend a helping hand. That was how he’d started out; maybe it was how he could finish up.

  “Mr. Sanders? Are you there?”

  “Yes. You hang in, Ginny. I’ll be right there.” He paused. “And none of that Mr. Sanders stuff. It’s Andy. We’re all in this together, you know.”

  He hung up, took the glass into the bathroom, and poured its pink contents into the commode. His good feeling—that feeling of light and amazement—lasted until he pushed the flush-lever. Then depression settled over him again like a smelly old coat. Needed? That was pretty funny. He was just stupid old Andy Sanders, the dummy who sat on Big Jim’s lap. The mouthpiece. The gabbler. The man who read Big Jim’s motions and proposals as if they were his own. The man who came in handy every two years or so, electioneering and laying on the cornpone charm. Things of which Big Jim was either incapable or unwilling.

  There were more pills in the bottle. There was more Dasani in the cooler downstairs. But Andy didn’t seriously consider these things; he had made Ginny Tomlinson a promise, and he was a man who kept his word. But suicide hadn’t been rejected, only put on the back burner. Tabled, as they said in the smalltown political biz. And it would be good to get out of this bedroom, which had almost been his death chamber.

  It was filling up with smoke.

  11

  The Bowies’ mortuary workroom was belowground, and Linda felt safe enough turning on the lights. Rusty needed them for his examination.

  “Look at this mess,” he said, waving an arm at the dirty, foot-tracked tile floor, the beer and soft drink cans on the counters, an open trashcan in one corner with a few flies buzzing over it. “If the State Board of Funeral Service saw this—or the Department of Health—it’d be shut down in a New York minute.”

  “We’re not in New York,” Linda reminded him. She was looking at the stainless steel table in the center of the room. The surface was cloudy with substances probably best left unnamed, and there was a balled-up Snickers wrapper in one of the runoff gutters. “We’re not even in Maine anymore, I don’t think. Hurry up, Eric, this place stinks.”

  “In more ways than one,” Rusty said. The mess offended him—hell, outraged him. He could have punched Stewart Bowie in the mouth just for the candy wrapper, discarded on the table where the town’s dead had the blood drained from their bodies.

  On the far side of the room were six stainless steel body-lockers. From somewhere behind them, Rusty could hear the steady rumble of refrigeration equipment. “No shortage of propane here,” he muttered. “The Bowie brothers are livin large in the hood.”

  There were no names in the card slots on the fronts of the lock-ers—another sign of sloppiness—so Rusty pulled the whole sixpack. The first two were empty, which didn’t surprise him. Most of those who had so far died under the Dome, including Ron Haskell and the Evanses, had been buried quickly. Jimmy Sirois, with no close relatives, was still in the small morgue at Cathy Russell.

  The next four contained the bodies he had come to see. The smell of decomposition bloomed as soon as he pulled out the rolling racks. It overwhelmed the unpleasant but less aggressive smells of preservatives and funeral ointments. Linda retreated farther, gagging.

  “Don’t you vomit, Linny,” Rusty said, and went across to the cabinets on the far side of the room. The first drawer he opened contained nothing but stacked back issues of Field & Stream, and he cursed. The one under it, however, had what he needed. He reached beneath a trocar that looked as if it had never been washed and pulled out a pair of green plastic face masks still in their wrappers. He handed one mask to Linda, donned the other himself. He looked into the next drawer and appropriated a pair of rubber gloves. They were bright yellow, hellishly jaunty.

  “If you think you’re going to throw up in spite of the mask, go upstairs with Stacey.”

  “I’ll be all right. I should witness.”

  “I’m not sure how much your testimony would count for; you’re my wife, after all.”

  She repeated, “I should witness. Just be as quick as you can.”

  The body-racks were filthy. This didn’t surprise him after seeing the rest of the prep area, but it still disgusted him. Linda had thought to bring an old cassette recorder she’d found in the garage. Rusty pushed RECORD, tested the sound, and was mildly surprised to find it was not too bad. He placed the little Panasonic on one of the empty racks. Then he pulled on the gloves. It took longer than it should have; his hands were sweating. There was probably talcum or Johnson’s Baby Powder here somewhere, but he had no intention of wasting time looking for it. He already felt like a burglar. Hell, he was a burglar.

  “Okay, here we go. It’s ten forty-five PM, October twenty-fourth. This examination is taking place in the prep room of the Bowie Funeral Home. Which is filthy, by the way. Shameful. I see four bodies, three women and a man. Two of the women are young, late teens or early twenties. Those are Angela McCain and Dodee Sanders.”

  “Dorothy,” Linda said from the far side of the prep table. “Her name is … was … Dorothy.”

  “I stand corrected. Dorothy Sanders. The third woman is in late middle age. That’s Brenda Perkins. The man is about forty. He’s the Reverend Lester Coggins. For the record, I can identify all these people.”

  He beckoned his wife and pointed at the bodies. She looked, and her eyes welled with tears. She raised the mask long enough to say, “I’m Linda Everett, of the Chester’s Mill Police Department. My badge number is seven-seven-five. I also recognize these four bodies.” She put her mask back in place. Above it, her eyes pleaded.

  Rusty motioned her back. It was all a charade, anyway. He knew it, and guessed Linda did, too. Yet he didn’t feel depressed. He had wanted a medical career ever since boyhood, would certainly have been a doctor if he hadn’t had to leave school to take care of his parents, and what had driven him as a high school sophomore dissecting frogs and cows’ eyes in biology class was what dr
ove him now: simple curiosity. The need to know. And he would know. Maybe not everything, but at least some things.

  This is where the dead help the living. Did Linda say that?

  Didn’t matter. He was sure they would help if they could. “There has been no cosmeticizing of the bodies that I can see, but all four have been embalmed. I don’t know if the process has been completed, but I suspect not, because the femoral artery taps are still in place.

  “Angela and Dodee—excuse me, Dorothy—have been badly beaten and are well into decomposition. Coggins has also been beaten—savagely, from the look—and is also into decomp, although not as far; the musculature on his face and arms has just begun to sag. Brenda—Brenda Perkins, I mean …” He trailed off and bent over her.

  “Rusty?” Linda asked nervously. “Honey?”

  He reached out a gloved hand, thought better of it, removed the glove, and cupped her throat. Then he lifted Brenda’s head and felt the grotesquely large knot just below the nape. He eased her head down, then rotated her body onto one hip so he could look at her back and buttocks.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “Rusty? What?”

  For one thing, she’s still caked with shit, he thought … but that wouldn’t go on the record. Not even if Randolph or Rennie only listened to the first sixty seconds before crushing the tape under a shoe heel and burning whatever remained. He would not add that detail of her defilement.

  But he would remember.

  “What?”

  He wet his lips and said, “Brenda Perkins shows livor mortis on the buttocks and thighs, indicating she’s been dead at least twelve hours, probably more like fourteen. There’s significant bruising on both cheeks. They’re handprints. There’s no doubt in my mind of that. Someone took hold of her face and snapped her head hard to the left, fracturing the atlas and axis cervical vertebrae, C1 and C2. Probably severed her spine as well.”

  “Oh, Rusty,” Linda moaned.

  Rusty thumbed up first one of Brenda’s eyelids, then the other. He saw what he had feared.

  “Bruising to the cheeks and scleral petechiae—bloodspots in the whites of this woman’s eyes—suggest death wasn’t instantaneous. She was unable to draw breath and asphyxiated. She may or may not have been conscious. We’ll hope not. That’s all I can tell, unfortunately. The girls—Angela and Dorothy—have been dead the longest. The state of decomposition suggests they were stored in a warm place.”

  He snapped off the recorder.

  “In other words, I see nothing that absolutely exonerates Barbie and nothing we didn’t goddam know already.”

  “What if his hands don’t match the bruises on Brenda’s face?”

  “The marks are too diffuse to be sure. Lin, I feel like the stupidest man on earth.”

  He rolled the two girls—who should have been cruising the Auburn Mall, pricing earrings, buying clothes at Deb, comparing boyfriends—back into darkness. Then he turned to Brenda.

  “Give me a cloth. I saw some stacked beside the sink. They even looked clean, which is sort of a miracle in this pigsty.”

  “What are you—”

  “Just give me a cloth. Better make it two. Wet them.”

  “Do we have time to—”

  “We’re going to make time.”

  Linda watched silently as her husband carefully washed Brenda Perkins’s buttocks and the backs of her thighs. When he was done, he flung the dirty rags into the corner, thinking that if the Bowie brothers had been here, he would have stuffed one into Stewart’s mouth and the other into fucking Fernald’s.

  He kissed Brenda on her cool brow and rolled her back into the refrigerated locker. He started to do the same with Coggins, then stopped. The Reverend’s face had been given only the most cursory of cleanings; there was still blood in his ears, his nostrils, and grimed into his brow.

  “Linda, wet another cloth.”

  “Honey, it’s been almost ten minutes. I love you for showing respect to the dead, but we’ve got the living to—”

  “We may have something here. This wasn’t the same kind of beating. I can see that even without … wet a cloth.”

  She made no further argument, only wet another cloth, wrung it out, and handed it to him. Then she watched as he cleansed the remaining blood from the dead man’s face, working gently but without the love he’d shown Brenda.

  She had been no fan of Lester Coggins (who had once claimed on his weekly radio broadcast that kids who went to see Miley Cyrus were risking hell), but what Rusty was uncovering still hurt her heart. “My God, he looks like a scarecrow after a bunch of kids used rocks on it for target practice.”

  “I told you. Not the same kind of beating. This wasn’t done with fists, or even feet.”

  Linda pointed. “What’s that on his temple?”

  Rusty didn’t answer. Above his mask, his eyes were bright with amazement. Something else, too: understanding, just starting to dawn.

  “What is it, Eric? It looks like … I don’t know … stitches. ”

  “You bet.” His mask bobbed as the mouth beneath it broke into a smile. Not happiness; satisfaction. And of the grimmest kind. “On his forehead, too. See? And his jaw. That one broke his jaw.”

  “What sort of weapon leaves marks like that?”

  “A baseball,” Rusty said, rolling the drawer shut. “Not an ordinary one, but one that was gold-plated? Yes. If swung with enough force, I think it could. I think it did. ”

  He lowered his forehead to hers. Their masks bumped. He looked into her eyes.

  “Jim Rennie has one. I saw it on his desk when I went to talk to him about the missing propane. I don’t know about the others, but I think we know where Lester Coggins died. And who killed him.”

  12

  After the roof collapsed, Julia couldn’t bear to watch anymore. “Come home with me,” Rose said. “The guest room is yours as long as you want it.”

  “Thanks, but no. I need to be by myself now, Rosie. Well, you know … with Horace. I need to think.”

  “Where will you stay? Will you be all right?”

  “Yes.” Not knowing if she would be or not. Her mind seemed okay, thinking processes all in order, but she felt as if someone had given her emotions a big shot of Novocaine. “Maybe I’ll come by later.”

  When Rosie was gone, walking up the other side of the street (and turning to give Julia a final troubled wave), Julia went back to the Prius, ushered Horace into the front seat, then got behind the wheel. She looked for Pete Freeman and Tony Guay and didn’t see them anywhere. Maybe Tony had taken Pete up to the hospital to get some salve for his arm. It was a miracle neither of them had been hurt worse. And if she hadn’t taken Horace with her when she drove out to see Cox, her dog would have been incinerated along with everything else.

  When that thought came, she realized her emotions weren’t numb after all, but only hiding. A sound—a kind of keening—began to come from her. Horace pricked up his considerable ears and looked at her anxiously. She tried to stop and couldn’t.

  Her father’s paper.

  Her grandfather’s paper.

  Her great-grandfather’s.

  Ashes.

  She drove down to West Street, and when she came to the abandoned parking lot behind the Globe, she pulled in. She turned off the engine, drew Horace to her, and wept against one furry, muscular shoulder for five minutes. To his credit, Horace bore this patiently.

  When she was cried out, she felt better. Calmer. Perhaps it was the calmness of shock, but at least she could think again. And what she thought of was the one remaining bundle of papers in the trunk. She leaned past Horace (who gave her neck a companionable lick) and opened the glove compartment. It was jammed with rick-rack, but she thought somewhere … just possibly …

  And like a gift from God, there it was. A little plastic box filled with Push Pins, rubber bands, thumbtacks, and paper clips. Rubber bands and paper clips would be no good for what she had in mind, but the tacks and Push Pins …


  “Horace,” she said. “Do you want to go walkie-walk?”

  Horace barked that he did indeed want to go walkie-walk.

  “Good,” she said. “So do I.”

  She got the newspapers, then walked back to Main Street. The Democrat building was now just a blazing heap of rubble with cops pouring on the water (from those oh-so-convenient Indian pumps, she thought, all loaded up and ready to go ). Looking at it hurt Julia’s heart—of course it did—but not so badly, now that she had something to do.

  She walked down the street with Horace pacing in state beside her, and on every telephone pole she put up a copy of the Democrat ’s last issue. The headline—RIOT AND MURDERS AS CRISIS DEEPENS—seemed to glare out in the light of the fire. She wished now she had settled for a single word: BEWARE.

  She went on until they were all gone.

  13

  Across the street, Peter Randolph’s walkie-talkie crackled three times: break-break-break. Urgent. Dreading what he might hear, he thumbed the transmit button, and said: “Chief Randolph. Go.”

  It was Freddy Denton, who, as commanding officer of the night shift, was now the de facto Assistant Chief. “Just got a call from the hospital, Pete. Double murder—”

  “WHAT?” Randolph screamed. One of the new officers—Mickey Wardlaw—was gawking at him like a Mongolian ijit at his first county fair.

  Denton continued, sounding either calm or smug. If it was the latter, God help him. “—and a suicide. Shooter was that girl who cried rape. Victims were ours, Chief. Roux and DeLesseps.”

  “You … are … SHITTING ME!”

  “I sent Rupe and Mel Searles up there,” Freddy said. “Bright side, it’s all over and we don’t have to jug her down in the Coop with Barb—”