Under the Dome: A Novel
At sixty-seven, was anybody’s?
    But he heard the first siren when it cut through the day; his ears were attuned to that sound just as a mother’s are to the cries of her children. Howard Perkins even knew which car it was, and who was driving. Only Three and Four still had the old warblers, but Johnny Trent had taken Three over to Castle Rock with the FD, to that damned training exercise. A “controlled burn,” they called it, although what it really amounted to was grown men having fun. So it was car Four, one of their two remaining Dodges, and Henry Morrison would be driving.
    He stopped raking and stood, head cocked. The siren started to fade, and he started raking again. Brenda came out on the stoop. Almost everyone in The Mill called him Duke—the nickname a holdover from his high school days, when he had never missed a John Wayne picture down at the Star—but Brenda had quit that soon after they were married in favor of the other nickname. The one he disliked.
    “Howie, the power’s out. And there were
bangs.

    Howie. Always Howie. As in
Here’s Howie
and
Howie’s tricks
and
Howie’s life treatin you.
He tried to be a Christian about it—hell, he
was
a Christian about it—but sometimes he wondered if that nickname wasn’t at least partially responsible for the little gadget he now carried around in his chest.
    “What?”
    She rolled her eyes, marched to the radio on the hood of her car, and pushed the power button, cutting off the Norman Luboff Choir in the middle of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”
    “How many times have I told you not to stick this thing on the hood of my car? You’ll scratch it and the resale value will go down.”
    “Sorry, Bren. What did you say?”
    “The
power’s
out! And something
boomed.
That’s probably what Johnny Trent’s rolling on.”
    “It’s Henry,” he said. “Johnny’s over in The Rock with the FD.”
    “Well, whoever it is—”
    Another siren started up, this one of the newer kind that Duke Perkins thought of as Tweety Birds. That would be Two, Jackie Wettington. Had to be Jackie, while Randolph sat minding the store, rocked back in his chair with his feet cocked up on his desk, reading the
Democrat.
Or sitting in the crapper. Peter Randolph was a fair cop, and he could be just as hard as he needed to be, but Duke didn’t like him. Partly because he was so clearly Jim Rennie’s man, partly because Randolph was sometimes harder than he needed to be, but mostly because he thought Randolph was lazy, and Duke Perkins could not abide a lazy policeman.
    Brenda was looking at him with large eyes. She had been a policeman’s wife for forty-three years, and she knew that two booms, two sirens, and a power failure added up to nothing good. If the lawn got raked this weekend—or if Howie got to listen to his beloved Twin Mills Wildcats take on Castle Rock’s football team—she would be surprised.
    “You better go on in,” she said. “Something got knocked down. I just hope no one’s dead.”
    He took his cell phone off his belt. Goddam thing hung there likea leech from morning til night, but he had to admit it was handy. He didn’t dial it, just stood looking down at it, waiting for it to ring.
    But then another Tweety Bird siren went off: car One. Randolph rolling after all. Which meant something very serious. Duke no longer thought the phone would ring and moved to put it back on his belt, but then it did. It was Stacey Moggin.
    “Stacey?”
He knew he didn’t have to bellow into the goddam thing, Brenda had told him so a hundred times, but he couldn’t seem to help it.
“What are you doing at the station on Saturday m—”
    “I’m not, I’m at home. Peter called me and said to tell you it’s out on 119, and it’s bad. He said … an airplane and a pulp-truck collided.” She sounded dubious. “I don’t see how that can be, but—”
    A plane. Jesus. Five minutes ago, or maybe a little longer, while he’d been raking leaves and

Similar Books

The Leper Spy

Ben Montgomery

Mind Games

TJ Moore

Hardwired

Trisha Leaver

Pink Snowbunnies in Hell: A Flash Fiction Anthology

Debora Geary, Nichole Chase, Nathan Lowell, Barbra Annino, T. L. Haddix, Camille Laguire, Heather Marie Adkins, Julie Christensen, A. J. Braithwaite, Asher MacDonald

Saint Francis

Nikos Kazantzakis