Under the Dome

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.

SURVIVORS

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.