Under the Dome

Cox’s walkie-talkie beeped three times: break-break-break. He took it off his belt. “What is it? Talk to me fast, I’m busy over here.”

They all heard the voice that returned: “We have a survivor on the south side, Colonel. Repeat: We have a survivor. ”

8

As the sun came up on the morning of October twenty-eighth, “surviving” was all the last member of the Dinsmore family could claim. Ollie lay with his body pressed against the bottom of the Dome, gasping in just enough air from the big fans on the other side to stay alive.

It had been a race just to get enough of the Dome clear on his side before the remaining oxygen in the tank ran out. It was the one he’d left on the floor when he crawled under the potatoes. He remembered wondering if it would explode. It hadn’t, and that was a very good thing for Oliver H. Dinsmore. If it had, he would now be lying dead under a burial mound of russets and long whites.

He had knelt on his side of the Dome, digging off cakes of black crud, aware that some of the stuff was all that remained of human beings. It was impossible to forget when he was being repeatedly stabbed by fragments of bone. Without Private Ames’s steady encouragement, he was sure he would have given up. But Ames wouldn’t give up, just kept hectoring him to dig, goddammit, dig that shit clear, cow-kid, you got to do it so the fans can work.

Ollie thought he hadn’t given up because Ames didn’t know his name. Ollie had lived with the kids at school calling him shitkicker and titpuller, but he was goddamned if he was going to die listening to some cracker from South Carolina call him cow-kid.

The fans had started up with a roar, and he had felt the first faint gusts of air on his overheated skin. He tore the mask off his face and pressed his mouth and nose directly against the dirty surface of the Dome. Then, gasping and coughing out soot, he continued scraping at the plated char. He could see Ames on the other side, down on his hands and knees with his head cocked like a man trying to peer into a mousehole.

“That’s it!” he shouted. “We got two more fans we’re bringin up. Don’t you give up on me, cow-kid! Don’t you quit!”

“Ollie,” he had gasped.

“What?”

“Name’s… Ollie. Stop calling me… cow-kid.”

“Ah’ll call you Ollie from now until doomsday, if you just keep clearin a space for those fans to work.”

Ollie’s lungs somehow managed to suck in just enough of what was seeping through the Dome to keep him alive and conscious. He watched the world lighten through his slot in the soot. The light helped, too, although it hurt his heart to see the rose-glow of dawn dirtied by the film of filth that still remained on his side of the Dome. The light was good, because in here everything was dark and scorched and hard and silent.

They tried to relieve Ames of duty at five AM, but Ollie screamed for him to stay, and Ames refused to leave. Whoever was in charge relented. Little by little, pausing to press his mouth to the Dome and suck in more air, Ollie told how he had survived.

“I knew I’d have to wait for the fire to go out,” he said, “so I took it real easy on the oxygen. Grampy Tom told me once that one tank could last him all night if he was asleep, so I just laid there still. For quite a while I didn’t have to use it at all, because there was air under the potatoes and I breathed that.”

He put his lips to the surface, tasting the soot, knowing it might be the residue of a person who had been alive twenty-four hours previous, not caring. He sucked greedily and hacked out blackish crud until he could go on.

“It was cold under the potatoes at first, but then it got warm and then it got hot. I thought I’d burn alive. The barn was burning down right over my head. Everything was burning. But it was so hot and so quick it didn’t last long, and maybe that was what saved me. I don’t know. I stayed where I was until the first tank was empty. Then I had to go out. I was afraid the other one might have exploded, but it didn’t. I bet it was close, though.”

Ames nodded. Ollie sucked more air through the Dome. It was like trying to breathe through a thick, dirty cloth.

“And the stairs. If they’d been wood instead of concrete block, I couldn’t have gotten out. I didn’t even try at first. I just crawled back under the spuds because it was so hot. The ones on the outside of the pile cooked in their jackets—I could smell em. Then it started to get hard to pull air, and I knew the second tank was running out, too.”

He stopped as a coughing fit shook him. When it was under control, he went on.

“Mostly I just wanted to hear a human voice again before I died. I’m glad it was you, Private Ames.”

“My name’s Clint, Ollie. And you’re not going to die.”

But the eyes that looked through the dirty slot at the bottom of the Dome, like eyes peering through a glass window in a coffin, seemed to know some other, truer truth.

9