Under the Dome

If he had still lived out on Little Bitch road, site of the old Verdreaux home place, Sam would have burned to a crisp (as Marta Edmunds did) in the minutes after the initial explosion. But the home place and the woodlots which had once surrounded it had been taken for unpaid taxes long since (and purchased back in ’08 by one of several Jim Rennie dummy corporations… at bargain-basement rates). His baby sis owned a little patch of land out on God Creek, however, and that was where Sam was residing on the day the world blew up. The shack wasn’t much, and he had to do his business in an outhouse (the only running water was supplied by an old handpump in the kitchen), but by gorry the taxes were paid, little sis saw to that… and he had THE MEDICAL.

Sam was not proud of his part in instigating the Food City riot. He had drunk many shots and beers with Georgia Roux’s father over the years, and felt bad about hitting the man’s daughter in the face with a rock. He kept thinking about the sound that piece of quartz had made when it connected, and how Georgia’s broken jaw had sagged, making her look like a ventriloquist’s dummy with a busted mouth. He could have killed her, by the living Jesus. Was probably a miracle that he hadn’t… not that she had lasted long. And then an even sadder idea had occurred to him: if he’d left her alone, she wouldn’t have been in the hospital. And if she hadn’t been in the hospital, she’d probably still be alive.

If you looked at it that way, he had killed her.

The explosion at the radio station caused him to sit bolt upright out of a drunken sleep, clutching his chest and staring around wildly. The window above his bed had blown out. In fact, every window in the place had blown out, and his shack’s west-facing front door had been torn clean off its hinges.

He stepped over it and stood frozen in his weedy and tire-strewn front yard, staring west, where the whole world appeared to be on fire.

4

In the fallout shelter below where the Town Hall had once stood, the generator—small, old-fashioned, and now the only thing standing between the occupants and the great hereafter—ran steadily. Battery-powered lights cast a yellowish glow from the corners of the main room. Carter was sitting in the only chair, Big Jim taking up most of the elderly two-person sofa and eating sardines from a can, plucking them out one by one with his thick fingers and laying them on Saltines.

The two men had little to say to each other; the portable TV Carter had found gathering dust in the bunkroom took up all of their attention. It got only a single station—WMTW out of Poland Spring—but one was enough. Too much, really; the devastation was hard to comprehend. Downtown had been destroyed. Satellite photos showed that the woods around Chester Pond had been reduced to slag, and the Visitors Day crowd at 119 was now dust in a dying wind. To a height of twenty thousand feet, the Dome had become visible: an endless, sooty prison wall surrounding a town that was now seventy percent burned over.

Not long after the explosion, the temperature in the cellar had begun to climb appreciably. Big Jim told Carter to turn on the air-conditioning.

“Will the gennie handle that?” Carter had asked.

“If it won’t, we’ll cook,” Big Jim had replied irritably, “so what’s the difference?”

Don’t you snap at me, Carter thought. Don’t you snap at me when you were the one who made this happen. The one who’s responsible.

He’d gotten up to find the air-conditioning unit, and as he did, another thought crossed his mind: those sardines really stank. He wondered what the boss would say if he told him the stuff he was putting in his mouth smelled like old dead pussy.

But Big Jim had called him son like he meant it, so Carter kept his mouth shut. And when he turned on the air-conditioner, it had started right up. The sound of the generator had deepened a little, though, as it shouldered the extra burden. It would burn through their supply of LP that much quicker.

Doesn’t matter, he’s right, we gotta have it, Carter told himself as he watched the relentless scenes of devastation on the TV. The majority were coming from satellites or high-flying reconnaissance planes. At lower levels, most of the Dome had become opaque.

But not, he and Big Jim discovered, at the northeastern end of town. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, the coverage abruptly switched there, with video coming from just beyond a bustling Army outpost in the woods.

“This is Jake Tapper in TR-90, an unincorporated township just north of Chester’s Mill. This is as close as we’ve been allowed, but as you can see, there are survivors. I repeat, there are survivors.”

“There are survivors right here, you dummy,” Carter said.