A/N: Finally! I haven't written a fic in forever! But I've started a couple new shows so now I have new material. This is a what-if from around season 2 of Under the Dome, told from the POV of Joe and Angie McAlister's mother. I haven't finished season 2 yet, so DON'T TELL ME SPOILERS.
Title is (paraphrased) from the My Chemical Romance Song "Na Na Na"
Hands Like Daggers Up to Heaven
She walks over the ruins of Chester's Mill. She hates it more with each step.
Dust is everywhere. Storefront banners flutter weakly in the stale breeze. Cars are parked haphazardly in the street. Some sidewalks and building fronts are marked with streaks of soot or blood, as if boasting of their role in the downfall.
The town had fallen apart. She had watched the news, seen a fresh story every day about the bizarre horrors faced by those trapped under the dome. She had watched, and she had prayed for her children, because that was all she could do.
She had been in the hotel room that day. The town of Westlake had been kind enough to provide rooms to families of those stuck under the dome, and she had been sitting at the hotel room, the TV on in the background, and her husband Henry had been talking to her. He had pointed to some job postings on a site on his laptop. Said they should get jobs for a while, to take their minds of things. Save money, so that when Angie and Joe were free they could all move somewhere else, somewhere far, far away from Chester's Mill and its reminders of the dome. She had been unsure; Chester's Mill had been her home all her life…
It had been breaking news on TV, as most of news concerning the dome was. Townspeople in a frenzy, the alarmed blonde newswoman had said. The camera footage—taken by a helicopter that couldn't get close enough to the dome to provide very clear images—had panned over the center of the town. Zoomed in. It was hard to miss them, that roiling crowd of half-starved ragged Millers, swelling and rolling forward like a great groaning wave, arms outstretched and faces distorted. Hard to miss that they were after something.
They were after four somethings, actually. Four fleeing young bodies: two boys and two girls. And she had known the boys as soon as she saw them, though the camera was too far away to show their faces. The larger boy was James "Junior" Rennie, and the skinnier one, holding one of the girl's hands as they ran, was her own son. Joe.
She hadn't seen him in so long.
Junior had fired a gun at the maddening crowd. No sound could be heard through the dome's walls, but surely there had been screaming then. A couple people had fallen. Maybe they had been alive when they fell, and maybe they hadn't, but the crowd trampled them either way, crushed them underfoot like so much garbage. The crowd had surged, closed around the four youths, overwhelmed them there in the center of the town as the jittery helicopter camera watched.
She had watched. Everybody had watched, and no one could do a thing as the townspeople tore the four children to pieces.
She doesn't quite remember how it happened. It was like she had seen Joe go under that awful living wave, and he hadn't come back up, and then she was on the stiff hotel bed and the newscaster was proclaiming "The dome is gone! I repeat, the dome has disappeared!" She is sure something happened between those two events but she can't remember what.
She had looked at the footage later, trying to make sense of it all. But there was nothing to make sense of, because no one seemed to understand anything about it. The surviving citizens of Chester's Mill had killed her son and three others, and then the dome had lifted as suddenly as it had lowered, been sucked right up into the clouds. The townspeople had blinked dazedly, looked down at their bloodied hands and at the torn-up bodies, and they had looked up at the sky. Blinked another silent question.
It had started to rain then. Cool rain that washed away her son's blood from the hands and the street, and the people had turned from the bodies and lifted their arms to the sky. They rejoiced.
They said they didn't remember what had happened, why exactly they had attacked those children. A few bit their lips, shifted their eyes and said, "The dome wanted us to do it. It made us." They said that the children had to die for the dome to go away.
"Maybe they were bad," one man had said. "Maybe they were going to do something evil, so they had to die." The others around him had nodded. Look at the evidence, they had said. The dome lifted as soon as they were killed. And suddenly, her son's death was justice, a good thing, and people began looking at her and her husband with sliding, distrusting eyes. You raised an evil child, those eyes seemed to say. He brought the dome down.
She wonders if this is how the mothers of school shooters feel. She thinks of sobbing women saying, "He was so good, I didn't think he could ever hurt anyone." But she knows her son. He hadn't hurt anyone. Wouldn't have hurt anyone even if he'd been allowed to live.
It didn't help when she found out that Angie was dead too, had been murdered alone in the school at night. So that was both her children killed under the dome. She hates the dome. Hates it for coming down when she wasn't home and couldn't be there for her children. Hates it for lifting when it did. She wonders if Jim Rennie or the parents of the dead girls feel the same way. She doesn't know the girls. She wishes she knew the one who had been holding Joe's hand at the end.
None of the townspeople are jailed for the televised murders. The extraordinary circumstances exonerated them. How could they be blamed for doing crazy things when they had been trapped under a dome for weeks, running low on food and water, and living in constant fear?
She blames them. She hates them too.
The ruins of Chester's Mill crouch around her. She had been allowed in, ostensibly to recover any family possessions from the house, and then she had found that even the house had fallen. So she had gone to the town center, in the shadow of the town hall, to say a private goodbye to her children.
She wonders if they will build over the ruins of Chester's Mill someday. Maybe they will build a new town to cover up the atrocities carried out here. Wipe it away like it never happened and cover it up with painted smiles and a cheery town sign. She hopes not. She hopes they raze it to the ground and mark it off as a dead zone forever, that they wipe it off the face of the earth.
She walks over the ruins of Chester's Mill. She hates it more with each step.