Under the Dome: A Novel by Stephen King Page A

town common, where there were as many as fifty people gathered and talking among themselves. They were facing south, where a great white light formed a bubble over 119. Not TV lights, Barbie judged; that was the U.S. Army, creating and securing a perimeter. And how did you secure a perimeter at night? Why, by posting sentries and lighting the dead zone, of course.
    Dead zone.
He didn’t like the sound of that.
    Main Street, on the other hand, was unnaturally dark. There were electric lights shining in some of the buildings—where there were gennies at work—and battery-powered emergency lights shining in Burpee’s Department Store, the Gas & Grocery, Mill New & Used Books, Food City at the foot of Main Street Hill, and half a dozen others, but the streetlights were dark and there were candles shining in the windows of most of Main Street’s second-floor windows, where there were apartments.
    Rose sat at a table in the middle of the room, smoking a cigarette (illegal in public buildings, but Barbie would never tell). She pulled the net off her head and gave Barbie a wan smile as he sat down across from her. Behind them Anson was swabbing the counter, his own shoulder-length hair now liberated from its Red Sox cap.
    “I thought Fourth of July was bad, but this was worse,” Rose said. “If you hadn’t turned up, I’d be curled in the corner, screaming for my mommy.”
    “There was a blonde in an F-150,” Barbie said, smiling at the memory. “She almost gave me a ride. If she had, I might’ve been out. On the other hand, what happened to Chuck Thompson and the woman in that airplane with him might have happened to me.” Thompson’s name had been part of CNN’s coverage; the woman hadn’t been identified.
    But Rose knew. “It was Claudette Sanders. I’m almost sure it was. Dodee told me yesterday that her mom had a lesson today.”
    There was a plate of french fries between them on the table. Barbie had been reaching for one. Now he stopped. All at once he didn’t want any more fries. Any more of anything. And the red puddle on the side of the plate looked more like blood than ketchup.
    “So that’s why Dodee didn’t come in.”
    Rose shrugged. “Maybe. I can’t say for sure. I haven’t heard from her. Didn’t really expect to, with the phones out.”
    Barbie assumed she meant the landlines, but even from the kitchen he’d heard people complaining about trouble getting through on their cells. Most assumed it was because everyone was trying to use them at the same time, jamming the band. Somethought the influx of TV people—probably hundreds by this time, toting Nokias, Motorolas, iPhones, and BlackBerries—was causing the problem. Barbie had darker suspicions; this was a national security situation, after all, in a time when the whole country was paranoid about terrorism. Some calls were getting through, but fewer and fewer as the evening went on.
    “Of course,” Rose said, “Dodes might also have taken it into that air head of hers to blow off work and go to the Auburn Mall.”
    “Does Mr. Sanders know it was Claudette in the plane?”
    “I can’t say for sure, but I’d be awfully surprised if he doesn’t by now.” And she sang, in a small but tuneful voice: “It’s a small town, you know what I mean?”
    Barbie smiled a little and sang the next line back to her: “Just a small town, baby, and we all support the team.” It was from an old James McMurtry song that had the previous summer gained a new and mysterious two-month vogue on a couple of western Maine c&w stations. Not WCIK, of course; James McMurtry was not the sort of artist Jesus Radio supported.
    Rose pointed to the french fries. “You going to eat any more of those?”
    “Nope. Lost my appetite.”
    Barbie had no great love for either the endlessly grinning Andy Sanders or for Dodee the Dim, who had almost certainly helped her good friend Angie spread the rumor that had caused Barbie’s trouble at Dipper’s, but the idea