Under the Dome

Henry Morrison turns, walks to the Colonel’s position, and braces his hands on a hard and mystic surface he can’t see. Breathing has become difficult; bad wind pushed by the firestorm hits the Dome, swirls, then backdrafts toward the hungry thing that’s coming: a black wolf with red eyes. Here, on the Motton town line, is the lambfold where it will feed.

“Help us,” Henry says.

Cox looks at the firestorm and estimates it will reach the crowd’s current position in no more than fifteen minutes, perhaps as few as three. It’s not a fire or an explosion; in this closed and already polluted environment, it is a cataclysm.

“Sir, I cannot,” he says.

Before Henry can reply, Joe Boxer grabs his arm. He is gibbering.

“Quit it, Joe,” Henry says. “There’s nowhere to run and nothing to do but pray.”

But Joe Boxer does not pray. He is still holding his stupid little hockshop pistol, and after a final crazed look at the oncoming inferno, he puts the gun to his temple like a man playing Russian roulette. Henry makes a grab for it, but is too late. Boxer pulls the trigger. Nor does he die at once, although a gout of blood flies from the side of his head. He staggers away, waving the stupid little pistol like a handkerchief, screaming. Then he falls to his knees, throws his hands up once to the darkening sky like a man in the grip of a godhead revelation, and collapses face-first on the broken white line of the highway.

Henry turns his stunned face back to Colonel Cox, who is simultaneously three feet and a million miles away. “I’m so sorry, my friend,” Cox says.

Pamela Chen stumbles up. “The bus!” she screams to Henry over the building roar. “We have to take the bus and drive straight through it! It’s our only chance!”

Henry knows this is no chance at all, but he nods, gives Cox a final look (Cox will never forget the cop’s hellish, despairing eyes), takes Pammie Chen’s hand, and follows her to Bus 19 as the smoky blackness races toward them.

The fire reaches downtown and explodes along Main Street like a blowtorch in a pipe. The Peace Bridge is vaporized. Big Jim and Carter cringe in the fallout shelter as the Town Hall implodes above them. The PD sucks its brick walls in, then spews them high into the sky. The statue of Lucien Calvert is uprooted from its base in War Memorial Plaza. Lucien flies into the burning black with his rifle bravely raised. On the library lawn, the Halloween dummy with the jolly top hat and the garden trowel hands goes up in a sheet of flame. A great whooshing noise—it sounds like God’s own vacuum cleaner—has arisen as the oxygen-hungry fire sucks in good air to fill its single poisonous lung. The buildings along Main Street explode one after another, tossing their boards and goods and shingles and glass into the air like confetti on New Year’s Eve: the abandoned moviehouse, Sanders Hometown Drug, Burpee’s Department Store, the Gas & Grocery, the bookstore, the flower shop, the barber-shop. In the funeral parlor, the most recent additions to the roll of the dead begin roasting in their metal lockers like chickens in a Dutch oven. The fire finishes its triumphant run down Main Street by engulfing Food City, then rolls onward toward Dipper’s, where those still in the parking lot scream and clutch at each other. Their last sight on earth is of a firewall a hundred yards high running eagerly to meet them, like Albion to his beloved. Now the flames are rolling down the main roads, boiling their tar into soup. At the same time it is spreading into Eastchester, snacking on both yuppie homes and the few yuppies cowering inside. Michela Burpee will soon run for her cellar, but too late; her kitchen will explode around her and her last sight on earth will be her Amana refrigerator, melting.

The soldiers standing by the Tarker-Chester border—closest to the origin of this catastrophe—stumble backward as the fire beats impotent fists against the Dome, turning it black. The soldiers feel the heat bake through, raising the temperature twenty degrees in seconds, crisping the leaves on the nearest trees. One of them will later say, “It was like standing outside a glass ball with a nuclear explosion inside of it.”

Now the people cowering against the Dome begin to be bombarded by dead and dying birds as the fleeing sparrows, robins, grackles, crows, gulls, and even geese slam against the Dome they so quickly learned to avoid. And across Dinsmore’s field comes a stampede of the town’s dogs and cats. There are also skunks, woodchucks, porcupines. Deer leap among them, and several clumsily galloping moose, and of course Alden Dinsmore’s cattle, eyes rolling and mooing their distress. When they reach the Dome they crash against it. The lucky animals die. The unlucky ones lie sprawled on pincushions of broken bones, barking and squealing and miaowing and bellowing.