Under the Dome: A Novel (124 page)

Henrietta and Petra feel the heat wash against them. So do all the hundreds pressed against the Dome. The wind lifts their hair and ruffles clothes that will soon be burning.

“Take my hand, honey,” Henrietta says, and Petra does.

They watch the big yellow bus make a wide, drunken turn. It totters along the ditch, barely missing Richie Killian, who first dodges away and then leaps nimbly forward, grabbing onto the back door as the bus goes by. He lifts his feet and squats on the bumper.

“I hope they make it,” Petra says. “So do I, honey.”

“But I don’t think they will.”

Now some of the deer leaping out of the approaching conflagration are on fire.

Henry has taken the wheel of the bus. Pamela stands beside him, holding onto a chrome pole. The passengers are about a dozen townsfolk most loaded in earlier because they were experiencing physical problems. Among them are Mabel Alston, Mary Lou Costas, and Mary Lou’s baby, still wearing Henry’s baseball cap. The redoubtable Leo Lamoine has also gotten onboard, although his problem seems to be emotional rather than physical; he is wailing in terror.

“Step on it and head north!”
Pamela shouts. The fire has almost reached them, it’s less than five hundred yards ahead, and the sound of it shakes the world.
“Drive like a motherfucker and don’t stop for anything!”

Henry knows it’s hopeless, but because he also knows he would rather go out this way than helplessly cowering with his back to the
Dome, he yanks on the headlights and gets rolling. Pamela is thrown backward into the lap of Chaz Bender, the teacher—Chaz was helped into the bus when he began to suffer heart palpitations. He grabs Pammie to steady her. There are shrieks and cries of alarm, but Henry barely hears them. He knows he is going to lose sight of the road in spite of the headlights, but so what? As a cop he has driven this stretch a thousand times.

Use the force, Luke,
he thinks, and actually laughs as he drives into the flaming darkness with the accelerator pedal jammed to the mat. Clinging to the back door of the bus, Richie Killian suddenly cannot breathe. He has time to see his arms catch fire. A moment later the temperature outside the bus pops to eight hundred degrees and he is burned off his perch like a fleck of meat off a hot barbecue grill.

The lights running down the center of the bus are on, casting a weak luncheonette-at-midnight glow over the terrified, sweat-drenched faces of the passengers, but the world outside has turned dead black. Whirlpools of ash eddy in the radically foreshortened beams of the headlights. Henry steers by memory, wondering when the tires will explode beneath him. He’s still laughing, although he can’t hear himself over the scalded-cat screech of 19’s engine. He’s keeping to the road; there’s that much. How long until they break through the other side of the firewall? Is it possible they
can
break through? He’s beginning to think it might be. Good God, how thick can it be?

“You’re doing it!” Pamela shouts. “You’re
doing
it!”

Maybe,
Henry thinks.
Maybe I am.
But Christ, the
heat
! He is reaching for the air-conditioning knob, meaning to turn it all the way to MAX COOL, and that’s when the windows implode and the bus fills with fire. Henry thinks,
No! No! Not when we’re so close!

But when the charred bus charges clear of the smoke, he sees nothing beyond but a black wasteland. The trees have been burned away to glowing stubs and the road itself is a bubbling ditch. Then an overcoat of fire drops over him from behind and Henry Morrison knows no more. 19 skids from the remains of the road and overturns
with flames spewing from every broken window. The quickly blackening message on the back reads: SLOW DOWN, FRIEND! WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN!

Ollie Dinsmore sprints to the barn. Wearing Grampy Tom’s oxygen mask around his neck and carrying two tanks with a strength he never knew he had (the second he spied as he cut through the garage), the boy runs for the stairs that will take him down to the potato cellar. There’s a ripping, snarling sound from overhead as the roof begins to burn. On the west side of the barn the pumpkins also begin to burn, the smell rich and cloying, like Thanksgiving in hell.

The fire moves toward the southern side of the Dome, racing through the last hundred yards; there is an explosion as Dinsmore’s dairy barns are destroyed. Henrietta Clavard regards the oncoming fire and thinks:
Well, I’m old. I’ve had my life. That’s more than this poor girl can say.

“Turn around, honey,” she tells Petra, “and put your head on my bosom.”

Petra Searles turns a tearstained and very young face up to Henrietta’s. “Will it hurt?”

“Only for a second, honey. Close your eyes, and when you open them, you’ll be bathing your feet in a cool stream.”

Petra speaks her last words. “That sounds nice.”

She closes her eyes. Henrietta does the same. The fire takes them. At one second they’re there, at the next … gone.

Cox is still close on the other side of the Dome, and the cameras are still rolling from their safe position at the flea-market site. Everyone in America is watching in shocked fascination. The commentators have been stunned to silence, and the only soundtrack is the fire, which has plenty to say.

For a moment Cox can still see the long human snake, although the people who make it up are only silhouettes against the fire. Most of them—like the expatriates on Black Ridge, who are at last making their way back to the farmhouse and their vehicles—are holding hands. Then the fire boils against the Dome and they are gone. As
if to make up for their disappearance, the Dome itself becomes visible: a great charred wall rearing into the sky. It holds most of the heat in, but enough flashes out to turn Cox around and send him running. He tears off his smoking shirt as he goes.

The fire has burned on the diagonal Barbie foresaw, sweeping across Chester’s Mill from northwest to southeast. When it dies, it will do so with remarkable quickness. What it has taken is oxygen; what it leaves behind is methane, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and trace gases equally noxious. Also choking clouds of particulate matter: vaporized houses, trees, and—of course—people.

What it leaves behind is poison.

22

Twenty-eight exiles and two dogs convoyed out to where the Dome bordered on TR-90, known to the oldtimers as Canton. They were crammed into three vans, two cars, and the ambulance. By the time they arrived the day had grown dark and the air had become increasingly hard to breathe.

Barbie jammed on the brakes of Julia’s Prius and ran to the Dome, where a concerned Army lieutenant colonel and half a dozen other soldiers stepped forward to meet him. The run was short, but by the time Barbie reached the red band spray-painted on the Dome, he was gasping. The good air was disappearing like water down a sink.

“The fans!” he panted at the lieutenant colonel. “Turn on the fans!”

Claire McClatchey and Joe spilled out of the department store van, both of them staggering and gasping. The phone company van came next. Ernie Calvert got out, took two steps, and went to his knees. Norrie and her mother tried to help him to his feet. Both were crying.

“Colonel Barbara, what happened?” the lieutenant colonel asked.

According to the name-strip on his fatigues, he was STRINGFELLOW. “Report.”

“Fuck your report!” Rommie shouted. He was holding a semi-conscious child—Aidan Appleton—in his arms. Thurse Marshall staggered along behind him with his arm around Alice, whose sparkle-sprinkled top was sticking to her; she’d retched down her front. “Fuck your report,
just turn on dose fans, you
!”

Stringfellow gave the order and the refugees knelt, their hands pressed against the Dome, greedily gasping in the faint breeze of clean air the huge fans were able to force through the barrier.

Behind them, the fire raged.

1

Only three hundred and ninety-seven of the The Mill’s two thousand residents survive the fire, most of them in the northeast quadrant of town. By the time night falls, rendering the smudged darkness inside the Dome complete, there will be a hundred and six.

When the sun comes up on Saturday morning, shining weakly through the only part of the Dome not charred completely black, the population of Chester’s Mill is just thirty-two.

2

Ollie slammed the door to the potato cellar before running downstairs. He also flicked the switch that turned on the lights, not knowing if they would still work. They did. As he stumbled down to the barn’s basement (chilly now but not for long; he could already feel the heat starting to push in behind him), Ollie remembered the day four years ago when the guys from Ives Electric in Castle Rock backed up to the barn to unload the new Honda generator.

“Overpriced sonofawhore better work right,” Alden had said, chewing on a piece of grass, “because I’m in hock up to my eyeballs for it.”

It
had
worked right. It was still working right, but Ollie knew it wouldn’t much longer. The fire would take it as the fire had taken
everything else. If he had as much as a minute of light left, he would be surprised.

I may not even be alive in a minute.

The potato grader stood in the middle of the dirty concrete floor, a complexity of belts and chains and gears that looked like some ancient instrument of torture. Beyond it was a huge pile of spuds. It had been a good fall for them, and the Dinsmores had finished the harvest only three days before the Dome came down. In an ordinary year, Alden and his boys would have graded them all through November to sell at the Castle Rock co-op produce market and various roadside stands in Motton, Harlow, and Tarker’s Mills. No spud-money this year. But Ollie thought they might save his life.

He ran to the edge of the pile, then stopped to examine the two tanks. The dial on the one from the house read only half full, but the needle on the one from the garage was all the way in the green. Ollie let the half-full one clang to the concrete and attached the mask to the one from the garage. He had done this many times when Grampy Tom was alive, and it was the work of seconds.

Just as he hung the mask around his neck again, the lights went out.

The air was growing warmer. He dropped to his knees and began burrowing into the cold weight of the potatoes, pushing with his feet, protecting the long tank with his body and yanking it along beneath him with one hand. With the other he made awkward swimming motions.

He heard potatoes avalanche down behind him and fought a panicky urge to back out. It was like being buried alive, and telling himself that if he
wasn’t
buried alive he’d surely die didn’t help much. He was gasping, coughing, seeming to breathe in as much potato-dirt as air. He clapped the oxygen mask over his face and … nothing.

He fumbled at the tank valve for what seemed like forever, his heart pounding in his chest like an animal in a cage. Red flowers began to open in the darkness behind his eyes. Cold vegetable weight bore down on him. He had been crazy to do this, as crazy as
Rory had been, shooting off a gun at the Dome, and he was going to pay the price. He was going to die.

Then his fingers finally found the valve. At first it wouldn’t turn, and he realized he was trying to spin it the wrong way. He reversed his fingers and a rush of cool, blessed air gusted into the mask.

Ollie lay under the potatoes, gasping. He jumped a little when the fire blew in the door at the top of the stairs; for a moment he could actually see the dirty cradle he lay in. It was getting warmer, and he wondered if the half-full tank he had left behind would blow. He also wondered how much additional time the full one had bought him, and if it was worth it.

But that was his brain. His body had only one imperative, and that was life. Ollie began to crawl deeper into the potato pile, dragging the tank along, adjusting the mask on his face each time it came askew.

3

If the Vegas bookies had given odds on those likely to survive the Visitors Day catastrophe, those on Sam Verdreaux would have been a thousand to one. But longer odds have been beaten—it’s what keeps bringing people back to the tables—and Sam was the figure Julia had spotted laboring along Black Ridge Road shortly before the expatriates ran for the vehicles at the farmhouse.

Sloppy Sam the Canned Heat Man lived for the same reason Ollie did: he had oxygen.

Four years ago, he had gone to see Dr. Haskell (The Wiz—you remember him). When Sam said he couldn’t seem to catch his breath just lately, Dr. Haskell listened to the old rumpot’s wheezing respiration and asked him how much he smoked.

“Well,” Sam had said, “I used to go through as much as four packs a day when I was in the woods, but now that I’m on disability and sociable security, I’ve cut back some.”

Dr. Haskell asked him what that meant in terms of actual consumption.
Sam said he guessed he was down to two packs a day. American Iggles. “I used to smoke Chesterfoggies, but now they only come with the filter,” he explained. “Also, they’re expensive. Iggles is cheap, and you can pick the filter off before you light up. Easy as pie.” Then he began to cough.

Dr. Haskell found no lung cancer (something of a surprise), but the X-rays seemed to show a damned fine case of emphysema, and he told Sam that he’d probably be using oxygen for the rest of his life. It was a bad diagnosis, but give the guy a break. As the doctors say, when you hear hoofbeats, you don’t think zebras. Also, folks have a tendency to see what they’re looking for, don’t they? And although Dr. Haskell died what might be called a hero’s death, no one, including Rusty Everett, ever mistook him for Gregory House. What Sam actually had was bronchitis, and it cleared up not too long after The Wiz made his diagnosis.

By then, however, Sam was signed up for oxygen deliveries every week from Castles in the Air (a company based in Castle Rock, of course), and he never canceled the service. Why would he? Like his hypertension medicine, the oxygen was covered by what he referred to as THE MEDICAL. Sam didn’t really understand THE MEDICAL, but he understood that the oxygen cost him nothing out of pocket. He also discovered that huffing pure oxygen had a way of cheering a body up.