Under the Dome

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.

Sometimes, however, weeks would pass before it crossed Sam’s mind to visit the scurgy little shed he thought of as “the oxygen bar.” Then, when the guys from Castles in the Air came to retrieve the empties (a thing they were often lax about), Sam would go out to his oxygen bar, open the valves, run the tanks dry, pile them in his son’s old red wagon, and trundle them out to the bright blue truck with the air-bubbles on it.

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.

“Shut up,” Big Jim said. Blood was mounting in his heavy cheeks and dashing across his forehead in a wavy line. His eyes bulged in their sockets and his hands were clenched. “That’s Barbara. It’s that son-of-a-buck Dale Barbara!”

Carter saw him among the others. The picture was being transmitted from a camera with an extremely long lens, which made the image shaky—it was like looking at people through a heat-haze—but it was still clear enough. Barbara. The mouthy minister. The hippy doctor. A bunch of kids. The Everett woman.

That bitch was lying all along, he thought. She lied and stupid Carter believed her.

“The roaring sound you hear is not helicopters,” Jake Tapper was saying. “If we can pull back a little…”

The camera pulled back, revealing a line of huge fans on dollies, each connected to its own generator. The sight of all that power just miles away made Carter feel sick with envy.

“You see it now,” Tapper went on. “Not helicopters but industrial fans. Now… if we can move in again on the survivors…”

The camera did so. They were kneeling or sitting at the edge of the Dome, directly in front of the fans. Carter could see their hair moving in the breeze. Not quite rippling, but definitely moving. Like plants in a lazy underwater current.

“There’s Julia Shumway,” Big Jim marveled. “I should have killed that rhymes-with-witch when I had the chance.”

Carter paid no attention. His eyes were riveted on the TV.

“The combined blast from four dozen fans should be enough to knock those folks over, Charlie,” Jake Tapper said, “but from here it looks like they’re getting just enough air to keep them alive in an atmosphere that has become a poison soup of carbon dioxide, methane, and God knows what else. Our experts are telling us that Chester’s Mill’s limited supply of oxygen mostly went to feed the fire. One of those experts—chemistry professor Donald Irving of Princeton—told me via cell phone that the air inside the Dome now might not be all that much different from the atmosphere of Venus.”

The picture switched to a concerned-looking Charlie Gibson, safe in New York. (Lucky bastard, Carter thought.) “Any word yet on what may have caused the fire?”

Back to Jake Tapper… and then to the survivors in their small capsule of breathable air. “None, Charlie. It was some sort of explosion, that seems clear, but there’s been no further word from the military and nothing from Chester’s Mill. Some of the people you see on your screen must have phones, but if they are communicating, it’s only with Colonel James Cox, who touched down here about forty-five minutes ago and immediately conferenced with the survivors. While the camera pans this grim scene from our admittedly remote standpoint, let me give concerned viewers in America—and all over the world—the names of the people now at the Dome who have been positively identified. I think you might have still pictures of several, and maybe you can flash them on the screen as I go. I think my list’s alphabetical, but don’t hold me to that.”

“We won’t, Jake. And we do have some pictures, but go slow.”

“Colonel Dale Barbara, formerly Lieutenant Barbara, United States Army.” A picture of Barbie in desert camo came on the screen. He had his arm around a grinning Iraqi boy. “A decorated veteran and most recently a short-order cook in the town restaurant.

“Angelina Buffalino… do we have a picture of her?… no?… okay.

“Romeo Burpee, owner of the local department store.” There was a picture of Rommie. In it he was standing beside a backyard barbecue with his wife and wearing a tee-shirt that read KISS ME, I’M FRENCH.

“Ernest Calvert, his daughter Joan, and Joan’s daughter, Eleanor Calvert.” This picture looked like it had been taken at a family reunion; there were Calverts everywhere. Norrie, looking both grim and pretty, had her skateboard under one arm.

“Alva Drake… her son Benjamin Drake…”

“Turn that off,” Big Jim grunted.

“At least they’re in the open,” Carter said wistfully. “Not stuck in a hole. I feel like Saddam fucking Hussein when he was on the run.”

“Eric Everett, his wife, Linda, and their two daughters…”

“Another family!” Charlie Gibson said in a voice of approval that was almost Mormonesque. That was enough for Big Jim; he got up and snapped the TV off himself, with a hard twist of the wrist. He was still holding the sardine can, and spilled some of the oil on his pants when he did it.

You’ll never get that out, Carter thought but did not say.

I was watching that show, Carter thought but did not say.

“The newspaper woman,” Big Jim brooded, sitting back down. The cushions hissed as they collapsed beneath his weight. “She was always against me. Every trick in the book, Carter. Every trick in the cotton-picking book. Get me another can of sardines, would you?”

Get it yourself, Carter thought but did not say. He got up and grabbed another can of ’dines.

Instead of commenting on the olfactory association he had made between sardines and deceased female sex organs, he asked what seemed to be the logical question.

“What are we going to do, boss?”

Big Jim removed the key from the bottom of the can, inserted it in the tab, and unrolled the top to expose a fresh squadron of dead fish. They gleamed greasily in the glow of the emergency lights. “Wait for the air to clear, then go topside and start picking up the pieces, son.” He sighed, placed a dripping fish on a Saltine, and ate it. Cracker crumbs stuck to his lips in beads of oil. “It’s what people like us always do. The responsible people. The ones who pull the plow.”

“What if the air doesn’t clear? The TV said—”

“Oh dear, the sky is falling, oh dear, the sky is falling!” Big Jim declaimed in a strange (and strangely disturbing) falsetto. “They’ve been saying it for years, haven’t they? The scientists and the bleeding-heart liberals. World War III! Nuclear reactors melting down to the center of the earth! Y2K computer freezes! The end of the ozone layer! Melting ice caps! Killer hurricanes! Global warming! Chickendirt weak-sister atheists who won’t trust in the will of a loving, caring God! Who refuse to believe there is such a thing as a loving, caring God!”

Big Jim pointed a greasy but adamant finger at the younger man.

“Contrary to the beliefs of the secular humanists, the sky is not falling. They can’t help the yellow streak that runs up their backs, son—‘the guilty man flees where none pursueth,’ you know, book of Leviticus—but that doesn’t change God’s truth: those who believe on Him shall not tire, but shall mount up with wings as eagles—book of Isaiah. That’s basically smog out there. It’ll just take awhile to clear out.”

But two hours later, at just past four o’clock on that Friday afternoon, a shrill queep-queep-queep sound came from the alcove that held the fallout shelter’s mechanical support system.

“What’s that?” Carter asked.

Big Jim, now slumped on the couch with his eyes partly closed (and sardine grease on his jowls), sat up and listened. “Air purifier,” he said. “Kind of like a big Ionic Breeze. We’ve got one of those in the car showroom down at the store. Good gadget. Not only does it keep the air nice and sweet, it stops those static electricity shocks you tend to get in cold wea—”

“If the air in town’s clearing, why did the air purifier start up?”

“Why don’t you go upstairs, Carter? Crack the door a little bit and see how things are. Would that ease your mind?”

Carter didn’t know if it would or not, but he knew just sitting here was making him feel squirrelly. He mounted the stairs.

As soon as he was gone, Big Jim got up himself and went to the line of drawers between the stove and the little refrigerator. For such a big man, he moved with surprising speed and quiet. He found what he was looking for in the third drawer. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure he was still alone, then helped himself.

On the door at the top of the stairs, Carter was confronted by a rather ominous sign:

Carter thought. And the conclusion he came to was that Big Jim was almost certainly full of shit about the air clearing out. Those folks lined up in front of the fans proved that the air exchange between Chester’s Mill and the outside world was almost nil.

Still, it wouldn’t do any harm to check.

At first the door wouldn’t budge. Panic, sparked by dim thoughts of being buried alive, made him push harder. This time the door moved just a little. He heard bricks falling and lumber scraping. Maybe he could open it wider, but there was no reason to. The air coming in through the inch-wide gap he’d opened wasn’t air at all, but something that smelled like the inside of an exhaust pipe when the motor it was attached to was running. He didn’t need any fancy instruments to tell him that two or three minutes outside the shelter would kill him.

The question was, what was he going to tell Rennie?

Nothing, the cold voice of the survivor inside suggested. Hearing something like that will only make him worse. Harder to deal with.

And what exactly did that mean? What did it matter, if they were going to die in the fallout shelter when the generator ran out of fuel? If that was the case, what did anything matter?

He went back down the stairs. Big Jim was sitting on the sofa. “Well?”

“Pretty bad,” Carter said.

“But breathable, right?”

“Well, yeah. But it’d make you damn sick. We better wait, boss.”

“Of course we better wait,” Big Jim said, as if Carter had suggested otherwise. As if Carter were the biggest fool in the universe. “But we’ll be fine, that’s the point. God will take care. He always does. In the meantime, we’ve got good air down here, it’s not too hot, and there’s plenty to eat. Why don’t you see what there is for sweets, son? Candybars and such? I’m still feeling peckish.”

I’m not your son, your son is dead, Carter thought… but didn’t say. He went into the bunkroom to see if there were any candybars on the shelves in there.

5

Around ten o’clock that night, Barbie fell into a troubled sleep with Julia close beside him, their bodies spooned together. Junior Rennie danced through his dreams: Junior standing outside his cell in The Coop. Junior with his gun. And this time there would be no rescue because the air outside had turned to poison and everyone was dead.

These dreams finally slipped away, and he slept more deeply, his head—and Julia’s—cocked toward the Dome and the fresh air seeping through it. It was enough for life, but not enough for ease.

Something woke him around two o’clock in the morning. He looked through the smudged Dome at the muted lights of the Army encampment on the other side. Then the sound came again. It was coughing, low and harsh and desperate.

A flashlight gleamed off to his right. Barbie got up as quietly as he could, not wanting to wake Julia, and walked to the light, stepping over others who lay sleeping in the grass. Most had stripped down to their underwear. The sentries ten feet away were bundled up in duffle coats and gloves, but over here it was hotter than ever.

Rusty and Ginny were kneeling beside Ernie Calvert. Rusty had a stethoscope around his neck and an oxygen mask in his hand. It was attached to a small red bottle marked CRH AMBULANCE DO NOT REMOVE ALWAYS REPLACE. Norrie and her mother looked on anxiously, their arms around each other.

“Sorry he woke you,” Joanie said. “He’s sick.”

“How sick?” Barbie asked.

Rusty shook his head. “I don’t know. It sounds like bronchitis or a bad cold, but of course it’s not. It’s bad air. I gave him some from the ambo, and it helped for awhile, but now…” He shrugged. “And I don’t like the sound of his heart. He’s been under a lot of stress, and he’s not a young man anymore.”

“You have no more oxygen?” Barbie asked. He pointed to the red bottle, which looked quite a lot like the kind of fire extinguisher people keep in their kitchen utility closets and always forget to recharge. “That’s it?”

Thurse Marshall joined them. In the beam of the flashlight he looked grim and tired. “There’s one more, but we agreed—Rusty, Ginny, and me—to save it for the little kids. Aidan’s started to cough too. I moved him as close to the Dome—and the fans—as I could, but he’s still coughing. We’ll start giving Aidan, Alice, Judy, and Janelle the remaining air in rationed whiffs when they wake up. Maybe if the officers brought more fans—”

“No matter how much fresh air they blow at us,” Ginny said, “only so much comes through. And no matter how close to the Dome we get, we’re still breathing in that crap. And the people who are hurting are exactly the ones you’d expect.”

“The oldest and the youngest,” Barbie said.

“Go back and lie down, Barbie,” Rusty said. “Save your strength. There’s nothing you can do here.”

“Can you?”

“Maybe. There’s also nasal decongestant in the ambo. And epinephrine, if it comes to that.”

Barbie crawled back along the Dome with his head turned to the fans—they were all doing this now, without thinking—and was appalled by how tired he felt when he reached Julia. His heart was pounding and he was out of breath.

Julia was awake. “How bad is he?”

“I don’t know,” Barbie admitted, “but it can’t be good. They were giving him oxygen from the ambulance, and he didn’t wake up.”

“Oxygen! Is there more? How much?”

He explained, and was sorry to see the light in her eyes dim a little.

She took his hand. Her fingers were sweaty but cold. “This is like being trapped in a mine cave-in.”

They were sitting now, facing each other, shoulders leaning against the Dome. The faintest of breezes sighed between them. The steady roar of the Air Max fans had become background noise; they raised their voices to speak over it, but otherwise didn’t notice it at all.

We’d notice it if it stopped, Barbie thought. For a few minutes, anyway. Then we wouldn’t notice anything, ever again.

She smiled wanly. “Quit worrying about me, if that’s what you’re doing. I’m okay for a middle-aged Republican lady who can’t quite catch her breath. At least I managed to get myself rogered one more time. Right, good, and proper, too.”

Barbie smiled back. “It was my pleasure, believe me.”

“What about the pencil nuke they’re going to try on Sunday? What do you think?”

“I don’t think. I only hope.”

“And how high are your hopes?”

He didn’t want to tell her the truth, but the truth was what she deserved. “Based on everything that’s happened and the little we know about the creatures running the box, not very.”

“Tell me you haven’t given up.”

“That I can do. I’m not even as scared as I probably should be. I think because… it’s insidious. I’ve even gotten used to the stench.”

“Really?”

He laughed. “No. How about you? Scared?”

“Yes, but sad, mostly. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a gasp.” She coughed again, curling a fist to her mouth. Barbie could hear other people doing the same thing. One would be the little boy who was now Thurston Marshall’s little boy. He’ll get some better stuff in the morning, Barbie thought, and then remembered how Thurston had put it: Air in rationed whiffs. That was no way for a kid to have to breathe.

No way for anyone to have to breathe.

Julia spat into the grass, then faced him again. “I can’t believe we did this to ourselves. The things running the box—the leather-heads—set up the situation, but I think they’re only a bunch of kids watching the fun. Playing the equivalent of a video game, maybe. They’re outside. We’re inside, and we did it to ourselves.”

“You’ve got enough problems without beating yourself up on that score,” Barbie said. “If anyone’s responsible, it’s Rennie. He’s the one who set up the drug lab, and he’s the one who started raiding propane from every source in town. He’s also the one who sent men out there and caused some sort of confrontation, I’m sure of it.”

“But who elected him?” Julia asked. “Who gave him the power to do those things?”

“Not you. Your newspaper campaigned against him. Or am I wrong?”

“You’re right,” she said, “but only about the last eight years or so. At first the Democrat—me, in other words—thought he was the greatest thing since sliced bread. By the time I found out what he really was, he was entrenched. And he had poor smiling stupid Andy Sanders out front to run interference for him.”

“You still can’t blame—”

“I can and do. If I’d known that pugnacious, incompetent sonofabitch might end up in charge during an actual crisis, I’d have… have… I’d have drowned him like a kitten in a sack.”

He laughed, then started coughing. “You sound less like a Republican all the ti—” he began, then broke off.

“What?” she asked, and then she heard it, too. Something was rattling and squeaking in the dark. It got closer and they saw a shambling figure tugging a child’s wagon.

“Who’s there?” called Dougie Twitchell.

When the shambling newcomer answered, his voice was slightly muffled. By an oxygen mask of his own, it turned out.

“Well, thank God,” Sloppy Sam said. “I had me a little nap side of the road, and I thought I’d run out of air before I got up here. But here I am. Just in time, too, because I’m almost tapped out.”

6

The Army encampment at Route 119 in Motton was a sad place that early Saturday morning. Only three dozen military personnel and one Chinook remained. A dozen men were loading in the big tents and a few leftover Air Max fans that Cox had ordered to the south side of the Dome as soon as the explosion had been reported. The fans had never been used. By the time they arrived, there was no one to appreciate the scant air they could push through the barrier. The fire was out by six PM, strangled by lack of fuel and oxygen, but everyone on the Chester’s Mill side was dead.

The medical tent was being taken down and rolled up by a dozen men. Those not occupied with that task had been set to that most ancient of Army jobs: policing up the area. It was make-work, but no one on the shit patrol minded. Nothing could make them forget the nightmare they had seen the previous afternoon, but grubbing up the wrappers, cans, bottles, and cigarette butts helped a little. Soon enough it would be dawn and the big Chinook would fire up. They’d climb aboard and go somewhere else. The members of this ragtag crew absolutely could not wait.

One of them was Pfc Clint Ames, from Hickory Grove, South Carolina. He had a green plastic Hefty bag in one hand and was moving slowly through the beaten-down grass, picking up the occasional discarded sign or flattened Coke can so if that hardass Sergeant Groh glanced over he’d look like he was working. He was nearly asleep on his feet, and at first he thought the knocking he heard (it sounded like knuckles on a thick Pyrex dish) was part of a dream. It almost had to be, because it seemed to be coming from the other side of the Dome.

He yawned and stretched with one hand pressing into the small of his back. As he was doing this, the knocking resumed. It really was coming from behind the blackened wall of the Dome.

Then, a voice. Weak and disembodied, like the voice of a ghost. It gave him the chills.

“Is anybody there? Can anybody hear me? Please… I’m dying.”

Christ, did he know that voice? It sounded like—

Ames dropped his litter bag and ran to the Dome. He put his hands on its blackened, still-warm surface. “Cow-kid? Is that you?”

I’m crazy, he thought. It can’t be. No one could have lived through that firestorm.

“AMES!” Sergeant Groh bawled. “What the hell are you doing over there?”

He was about to turn away when the voice behind the charred surface came again. “It’s me. Don’t…” There was a ragged series of barking coughs. “Don’t go. If you’re there, Private Ames, don’t go.”

Now a hand appeared. It was as ghostly as the voice, the fingers smeared with soot. It was rubbing a clean place on the inside of the Dome. A moment later a face appeared. At first Ames didn’t recognize the cow-kid. Then he realized the boy was wearing an oxygen mask.

“I’m almost out of air,” the cow-kid wheezed. “Dial’s in the red. Has been… for the last half hour.”

Ames stared into the cow-kid’s haunted eyes, and the cow-kid stared back. Then a single imperative rose in Ames’s mind: he couldn’t let the cow-kid die. Not after all he had survived… although how he had survived was impossible for Ames to imagine.

“Kid, listen to me. Y’all drop down on your knees and—”

“Ames, you useless fuckdub!” Sergeant Groh hollered, striding over. “Stop goldbricking and get busy! I have zero patience for your weakass shit tonight!”

Pfc Ames ignored him. He was entirely fixed on the face that appeared to be staring at him from behind a grimy glass wall. “Drop down and scrape the gluck off the bottom! Do it now, kid, right now!”

The face dropped from view, leaving Ames to hope the cow-kid was doing as he’d been told, and hadn’t just passed out.

Sergeant Groh’s hand fell on his shoulder. “Are you deaf? I told you—”

“Get the fans, Sergeant! We have to get the fans!”

“What are you talking ab—”

Ames screamed into the dreaded Sergeant Groh’s face. “There’s somebody alive in there!”

7

Only a single oxygen tank remained in the red wagon by the time Sloppy Sam arrived at the refugee camp by the Dome, and the needle on the dial was resting just above zero. He made no objection when Rusty took the mask and clapped it over Ernie Calvert’s face, only crawled to the Dome next to where Barbie and Julia were sitting. There the new arrival got down on all fours and breathed deeply. Horace the Corgi, sitting at Julia’s side, looked at him with interest.

Sam rolled over on his back. “It ain’t much, but better’n what I had. The last little bit in them tanks never tastes good like it does fresh off the top.”

Then, incredibly, he lit a cigarette.

“Put that out, are you insane?” Julia said.

“Been dyin for one,” Sam said, inhaling with satisfaction. “Can’t smoke around oxygen, you know. Blow y’self up, likely as not. Although there’s people who does it.”

“Might as well let him go,” Rommie said. “It can’t be any worse than the crap we’re breathing. For all we know, the tar and nicotine in his lungs is protectin him.”

Rusty came over and sat down. “That tank’s a dead soldier,” he said, “but Ernie got a few extra breaths from it. He seems to be resting easier now. Thanks, Sam.”

Sam waved it away. “My air’s your air, doc. Or at least it was. Say, can’t you make more with somethin in your ambulance there? The guys who bring my tanks—who did, anyway, before this sack of shit hit the fan—they could make more right in their truck. They had a whatdoyoucallit, pump of some kind.”

“Oxygen extractor,” Rusty said, “and you’re right, we have one on board. Unfortunately, it’s broken.” He showed his teeth in what passed for a grin. “It’s been broken for the last three months.”

“Four,” Twitch said, coming over. He was looking at Sam’s cigarette. “Don’t suppose you got any more of those, do you?”

“Don’t even think about it,” Ginny said.

“Afraid of polluting this tropical paradise with secondary smoke, darlin?” Twitch asked, but when Sloppy Sam held out his battered pack of American Eagles, Twitch shook his head.

Rusty said, “I put in the request for a replacement O₂ extractor myself. To the hospital board. They say the budget’s maxed out, but maybe I can get some help from the town. So I send the request to the Board of Selectmen.”

“Rennie,” Piper Libby said.

“Rennie,” Rusty agreed. “I get a form letter back saying my request will be taken up at the budget meeting in November. So I guess we’ll see then.” He flapped his hands at the sky and laughed.

Others were gathering around now, looking at Sam with curiosity. And at his cigarette with horror.

“How’d you get here, Sam?” Barbie asked.

Sam was more than happy to tell his tale. He began with how, as a result of the emphysema diagnosis, he’d wound up getting regular oxygen deliveries thanks to THE MEDICAL, and how sometimes the full tanks backed up on him. He told about hearing the explosion, and what he’d seen when he went outside.

“I knew what was gonna happen as soon as I saw how big it was,” he said. His audience now included the military on the other side. Cox, dressed in boxer shorts and a khaki undershirt, was among them. “I seen bad fires before, back when I was workin in the woods. Couple of times we had to drop everything and just outrun em, and if one of those old International Harvester trucks we had in those days hadda bogged down, we never woulda. Crown fires is the worst, because they make their own wind. I seen right away the same was gonna happen with this one. Somethin almighty big exploded. What was it?”

“Propane,” Rose said.

Sam stroked his white-stubbled chin. “Ayuh, but propane wasn’t all. There was chemicals, too, because some of those flames was green.

“If it had come my way, I woulda been done. You folks too. But it sucked south instead. Shape of the land had somethin to do with that, I shouldn’t wonder. And the riverbed, too. Anyways, I knew what was gonna happen, and I got the tanks out of the oxygen bar—”

“The what?” Barbie asked.

Sam took a final drag on his cigarette, then butted it in the dirt. “Oh, that’s just the name I give to the shed where I kep’ them tanks. Anyway, I had five full ones—”

“Five!” Thurston Marshall almost moaned.

“Ayuh,” Sam said cheerfully, “but I never could have drug five. I’m gettin on in years, you know.”

“Couldn’t you have found a car or a truck?” Lissa Jamieson asked.

“Ma’am, I lost my drivin license seven years ago. Or maybe it was eight. Too many DUIs. If I got caught behind the wheel of anything bigger’n a go-kart again, they’d put me in County and throw away the key.”

Barbie considered pointing out the fundamental flaw in this, but why bother wasting breath when breath was now so hard to come by?

“Anyway, four tanks in that little red wagon of mine I thought I could manage, and I hadn’t gone but a quarter of a mile before I started pullin on the first one. Had to, don’tcha see.”

Jackie Wettington asked, “Did you know we were out here?”

“No, ma’am. It was high ground, that’s all, and I knew my canned air wouldn’t last forever. I didn’t guess about you, and I didn’t guess about those fans, either. It was just a case of nowhere else to go.”

“What took you so long?” Pete Freeman asked. “It can’t be much more than three miles between God Creek and here.”

“Well, that’s a funny thing,” Sam said. “I was comin up the road—you know, Black Ridge Road—and I got over the bridge okay… still suckin on the first tank, although it was gettin almighty hot, and… say! Did you folks see that dead bear? The one that looked like it bashed its own brains out on a phone-pole?”

“We saw it,” Rusty said. “Let me guess. A little way past the bear, you got woozy and passed out.”

“How’d you know that?”

“We came that way,” Rusty said, “and there’s some kind of force working out there. It seems to hit kids and old people hardest.”

“I ain’t that old,” Sam said, sounding offended. “I just went whitehair early, like my mom.”

“How long were you knocked out?” Barbie asked.

“Well, I don’t wear no watch, but it was dark when I finally got goin again, so it was quite awhile. I woke up once on account of I couldn’t hardly breathe, switched to one of the fresh tanks, and went back to sleep again. Crazy, huh? And the dreams I had! Like a three-ring circus! Last time I woke up I was really awake. It was dark, and I went on to another tank. Makin the switch wasn’t a bit hard, because it wasn’t really dark. Shoulda been, shoulda been darker’n a tomcat’s asshole with all the soot that fire flang on the Dome, but there’s a bright patch down there where I laid up. You can’t see it in daylight, but at night it’s like about a billion fireflies.”

“The glow-belt, we call it,” Joe said. He and Norrie and Benny were bunched together. Benny was coughing into his hand.

“Good name for it,” Sam said approvingly. “Anyway, I knew somebody was up here, because by then I could hear those fans and see the lights.” He nodded toward the encampment on the other side of the Dome. “Didn’t know if I was going to make it before my air ran out—that hill’s a bugger and I sucked up the oh-two like nobody’s business—but I did.”

He was looking curiously at Cox.

“Hey there, Colonel Klink, I can see your breath. You best either put on a coat or come over here where it’s warm.” He cackled, showing a few surviving teeth.

“It’s Cox, not Klink, and I’m fine.”

Julia asked, “What did you dream, Sam?”

“Funny you should ask,” he said, “because there’s only one I can remember out of the whole bunch, and that was about you. You was layin on the bandstand in the Common, and you was cryin.”

Julia squeezed Barbie’s hand, and hard, but her eyes never left Sam’s face. “How did you know it was me?”

“Because you was covered with newspapers,” Sam said. “Issues of the Democrat. You was huggin em against you like you was naked underneath, beggin your pardon, but you asked. Ain’t that just about the funniest dream you ever heard?”

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

The second time the buzzer went off, Carter knew what it was, even though it awakened him from a dreamless sleep. Because part of him wasn’t going to really sleep again until this was over or he was dead. That was what the survival instinct was, he guessed: an unsleeping watchman deep in the brain.

The second time was around seven thirty on Saturday morning.

He knew that because his watch was the kind that lit up if you pressed a button. The emergency lights had died during the night and the fallout shelter was completely black.

He sat up and felt something poke against the back of his neck. The barrel of the flashlight he’d used last night, he supposed. He fumbled for it and turned it on. He was on the floor. Big Jim was on the couch. It was Big Jim who had poked him with the flashlight.

Of course he gets the couch, Carter thought resentfully. He’s the boss, isn’t he?

“Go on, son,” Big Jim said. “Quick as you can.”

Why does it have to be me? Carter thought… but did not say. It had to be him because the boss was old, the boss was fat, the boss had a bad heart. And because he was the boss, of course. James Rennie, the Emperor of Chester’s Mill.

Emperor of used cars, that’s all you are, Carter thought. And you stink of sweat and sardine oil.

“Go on.” Sounding irritable. And scared. “What are you waiting for?”

Carter stood up, the flashlight-beam bouncing off the fallout shelter’s packed shelves (so many cans of sardines!), and made his way into the bunkroom. One emergency light was still on in here, but it was guttering, almost out. The buzzer was louder now, a steady AAAAAAAAAAAA sound. The sound of oncoming doom.

We’re never getting out of here, Carter thought.

He shone the flashlight beam on the trapdoor in front of the generator, which continued to utter the toneless irritating buzz that for some reason made him think of the boss when the boss was speechifying. Maybe because both noises came down to the same stupid imperative: Feed me, feed me, feed me. Give me propane, give me sardines, give me premium unleaded for my Hummer. Feed me. I’ll still die, and then you’ll die, but who cares? Who gives a ripe red fuck? Feed me, feed me, feed me.

Inside the storage bin there were now only six tanks of propane. When he replaced the one that was almost empty, there would be five. Five piss-little containers, not much bigger than Blue Rhino tanks, between them and choking to death when the air purifier quit.

Carter pulled one out of the storage space, but he only set it beside the gennie. He had no intention of replacing the current tank until it was totally empty, in spite of that irritating AAAAAAA. Nope. Nope. Like they used to say about Maxwell House coffee, it was good to the last drop.

But that buzzer could certainly get on a person’s nerves. Carter reckoned he could find the alarm and silence it, but then how would they know when the gennie was running dry?

Like a couple of rats trapped in an overturned bucket, that’s what we are.

He ran the numbers in his head. Six tanks left, each good for about eleven hours. But they could turn off the air-conditioner, and that might stretch it to twelve or even thirteen hours per tank. Stay on the safe side and say twelve. Twelve times six was… let’s see…

The AAAAAAAA made the math harder than it should have been, but he finally got there. Seventy-two hours between them and a miserable choking death down here in the dark. And why was it dark? Because no one had bothered to replace the batteries in the emergency lights, that was why. They probably hadn’t been changed for twenty years or more. The boss had been saving money. And why only seven little shitlicking tanks in the storage cubby when there had been about a zillion gallons out at WCIK, just waiting to blow up? Because the boss liked to have everything right where he wanted it.

Sitting there, listening to the AAAAAAA, Carter remembered one of his dad’s sayings: Hoard a penny and lose a dollar. That was Rennie right down to the floor. Rennie the Emperor of Used Cars. Rennie the bigshot politician. Rennie the drug kingpin. How much had he made with his drug operation? A million dollars? Two? And did it matter?

He probably never would have spent it, Carter thought, and he’s sure as shit not gonna spend it now. Nothing to spend it on down here. He’s got all the sardines he can eat, and they’re free.

“Carter?” Big Jim’s voice came floating through the darkness. “Are you going to change that out, or are we just going to listen to it buzz?”

Carter opened his mouth to holler they were going to wait, that every minute counted, but just then the AAAAAAA finally quit. So did the queep-queep-queep of the air purifier.

“Carter?”

“I’m on it, boss.” With the flashlight clamped in his armpit, Carter pulled the empty, put the full one on a metal platform that was big enough to hold a tank ten times this one’s size, and hooked up the connector.

Every minute counted… or did it? Why did it, if it was going to come down to the same choking conclusion?

But the survival-watchman inside thought that was a bullshit question. The survival-watchman thought seventy-two hours was seventy-two hours, and every minute of those seventy-two hours counted. Because who knew what might happen? The military guys might finally figure out how to crack the Dome open. It might even disappear on its own, going as suddenly and inexplicably as it had come.

“Carter? What are you doing back there? My cotton-picking grandmother could move faster, and she’s dead!”

“Almost done.”

He made sure the connection was tight and put his thumb on the starter-button (thinking that if the little generator’s starter-battery was as old as the batteries that had been powering the emergency lights, they were in trouble). Then he paused.

It was seventy-two hours if it was the two of them. But if it was just him, he could stretch it to ninety or maybe even a hundred by shutting down the purifier until the air got really thick. He had broached this idea to Big Jim, who had vetoed it out of hand.

“Got a dickey heart,” he had reminded Carter. “The thicker the air is, the more likely it is to play up on me.”

“Carter?” Loud and demanding. A voice that got up in his ears the way the smell of the boss’s sardines got up his nose. “What’s going on back there?”

“All set, boss!” he called, and pushed the button. The starter-motor whirred, and the gennie fired up at once.

I have to think about this, Carter told himself, but the survival-watchman thought differently. The survival-watchman thought that every minute lost was a minute wasted.

He was good to me, Carter told himself. He gave me responsibilities.

Dirty jobs he didn’t want to do himself is what he gave you. And a hole in the ground to die in. That too.

Carter made up his mind. He pulled his Beretta from its holster as he walked back into the main room. He considered putting it behind his back so the boss wouldn’t know, and decided against it. The man had called him son, after all, and might even have meant it. He deserved better than an unexpected shot in the back of the head and going out all unprepared.

10

It wasn’t dark at the far northeastern end of town; here the Dome was badly smudged but far from opaque. The sun glared through and turned everything a feverish pink.

Norrie ran to Barbie and Julia. The girl was coughing and out of breath, but she ran anyway.

“My grampy is having a heart attack!” she wailed, and then fell on her knees, hacking and gasping.

Julia put her arms around the girl and turned her face to the roaring fans. Barbie crawled to where the exiles were surrounding Ernie Calvert, Rusty Everett, Ginny Tomlinson, and Dougie Twitchell.

“Give them room, people!” Barbie snapped. “Give the guy some air!”

“That’s the problem,” Tony Guay said. “They gave him what was left… the stuff that was supposed to be for the kids… but—”

“Epi,” Rusty said, and Twitch handed him a syringe. Rusty injected it. “Ginny, start compressions. When you get tired, let Twitch take over. Then me.”

“I want to, too,” Joanie said. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she seemed composed enough. “I took a class.”

“I was in it too,” Claire said. “I’ll help.”

“And me,” Linda said quietly. “I took the refresher just last summer.”

It’s a small town and we all support the team, Barbie thought. Ginny—her face still swollen from her own injuries—began chest compressions. She gave way to Twitch just as Julia and Norrie joined Barbie.

“Will they be able to save him?” Norrie asked.

“I don’t know,” Barbie said. But he did know; that was the hell of it.

Twitch took over from Ginny. Barbie watched as drops of sweat from Twitch’s forehead darkened Ernie’s shirt. After about five minutes he stopped, coughing breathlessly. When Rusty started to move in, Twitch shook his head. “He’s gone.” Twitch turned to Joanie and said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Calvert.”

Joanie’s face trembled, then crumpled. She let out a cry of grief that turned into a coughing fit. Norrie hugged her, coughing again herself.

“Barbie,” a voice said. “A word?”

It was Cox, now dressed in brown camo and wearing a fleece jacket against the chill on the other side. Barbie didn’t like the somber expression on Cox’s face. Julia went with him. They leaned close to the Dome, trying to breathe slowly and evenly.

“There’s been an accident at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico.” Cox kept his voice pitched low. “They were running final tests on the pencil nuke we meant to try, and… shit.”

“It exploded?” Julia asked, horrified.

“No, ma’am, melted down. Two people were killed, and another half dozen are apt to die of radiation burns and/or radiation poisoning. The point is, we lost the nuke. We lost the fucking nuke.”

“Was it a malfunction?” Barbie asked. Almost hoping that it had been, because that meant it wouldn’t have worked, anyway.

“No, Colonel, it did not. That’s why I used the word accident. They happen when people hurry, and we’ve been hurrying our collective ass off.”

“I’m so sorry for those men,” Julia said. “Do their relatives know yet?”

“Given your own situation, it’s very kind of you to think of that. They’ll be informed soon. The accident occurred at one o’clock this morning. Work has already begun on Little Boy Two. It should be ready in three days. Four at most.”

Barbie nodded. “Thank you, sir, but I’m not sure we have that long.”

A long thin wail of grief—a child’s wail—went up from behind them. As Barbie and Julia turned around, the wail turned into a series of harsh coughs and gasps for air. They saw Linda kneel beside her elder daughter and fold the girl into her arms.

“She can’t be dead!” Janelle screamed. “Audrey can’t be dead!”

But she was. The Everetts’ golden retriever had died in the night, quietly and without fuss, as the Little Js slept on either side of her.

11

When Carter came back into the main room, The Mill’s Second Selectman was eating cereal from a box with a cartoon parrot on the front. Carter recognized this mythical bird from many childhood breakfasts: Toucan Sam, the patron saint of Froot Loops.

Must be stale as hell, Carter thought, and had a fleeting moment of pity for the boss. Then he thought of the difference between seventy-some hours of air and eighty or a hundred and hardened his heart.

Big Jim scrummed more cereal from the box, then saw the Beretta in Carter’s hand.

“Well,” he said.

“I’m sorry, boss.”

Big Jim opened his hand and let the Froot Loops cascade back into the box, but his hand was sticky and some of the brightly colored cereal-rings clung to his fingers and palms. Sweat gleamed on his forehead and trickled from his receding hairline.

“Son, don’t do this.”

“I have to, Mr. Rennie. It’s not personal.”

Nor was it, Carter decided. Not even a little bit. They were trapped in here, that was all. And because it had happened as a result of Big Jim’s decisions, Big Jim would have to pay the price.

Big Jim set the box of Froot Loops on the floor. He did it with care, as if he were afraid the box might shatter if treated roughly. “Then what is it?”

“It just comes down to… air.”

“Air. I see.”

“I could have come in here with the gun behind my back and just put a bullet in your head, but I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to give you time to get ready. Because you’ve been good to me.”

“Then don’t make me suffer, son. If it’s not personal, you won’t make me suffer.”

“If you keep still, you won’t. It’ll be quick. Like shooting a wounded deer in the woods.”

“Can we talk about it?”

“No, sir. My mind is made up.”

Big Jim nodded. “All right, then. Can I have a word of prayer, first? Would you allow me that?”

“Yes, sir, you can pray if you want. But make it fast. This is hard on me too, you know.”

“I believe it is. You’re a good boy, son.”

Carter, who hadn’t cried since he was fourteen, felt a prickle in the corners of his eyes. “Calling me son won’t help you.”

“It does help me. And seeing you’re moved… that helps me, too.”

Big Jim shuffled his bulk off the couch and got on his knees. In the act of doing this, he knocked over the Froot Loops and uttered a sad little chuckle. “Wasn’t much of a last meal, I can tell you that.”

“No, probably not. I’m sorry.”

Big Jim, his back now to Carter, sighed. “But I’ll be eating roast beef at the Lord’s table in a minute or two, so that’s all right.” He raised a pudgy finger and pressed it high on the back of his neck. “Right here. The brain stem. All right?”

Carter swallowed what felt like a large dry ball of lint. “Yes, sir.”

“Do you want to get kneebound with me, son?”

Carter, who had gone prayerless even longer than he’d gone tearless, almost said yes. Then he remembered how sly the boss could be. He probably wasn’t being sly now, was probably beyond that, but Carter had seen the man at work and was taking no chances. He shook his head. “Say your prayer. And if you want to get all the way to amen, you really have to make it a short one.”

On his knees, back to Carter, Big Jim clasped his hands on the cushion of the sofa, which was still dimpled from the weight of his not inconsiderable fanny. “Dear God, this is Your servant, James Rennie. I guess I’m coming to you, like it or not. The cup has been raised to my lips, and I can’t—”

A large dry sob escaped him.

“Turn out the light, Carter. I don’t want to be crying in front of you. That’s not how a man should die.”

Carter extended the gun until it was almost touching the nape of Big Jim’s neck. “Okay, but that was your last request.” Then he turned out the light.

He knew it was a mistake the instant he did it, but by then it was too late. He heard the boss move, and he was Christing quick for a big man with a bad heart. Carter fired, and in the muzzle-flash he saw a bullet-hole appear in the dented sofa cushion. Big Jim was no longer kneeling in front of it, but he couldn’t have gone far, no matter how quick he was. As Carter thumbed the button of the flash-light, Big Jim drove forward with the butcher knife he had filched from the drawer next to the fallout shelter’s stove, and six inches of steel slid into Carter Thibodeau’s stomach.

He screamed in agony and fired again. Big Jim felt the bullet buzz close by his ear, but he didn’t pull back. He also had a survival-watchman, one that had served him extremely well over the years, and it was saying now that if he drew back he would die. He staggered to his feet, pulling the knife upward as he rose, eviscerating the stupid boy who had thought he could get the best of Big Jim Rennie.

Carter screamed again as he was split open. Beads of blood sprayed Big Jim’s face, driven by what he devoutly hoped was the boy’s last breath. He pushed Carter back. In the beam of the dropped flashlight, Carter staggered away, crunching through spilled Froot Loops and holding his belly. Blood poured over his fingers. He pawed at the shelves and fell to his knees in a rain of Vigo Sardines, Snow’s Clam Fry-Ettes, and Campbell’s Soups. For a moment he stayed that way, as if he had reconsidered and decided to say a prayer after all. His hair hung in his face. Then he lost his grip and went down.

Big Jim considered the knife, but that was too labor-intensive for a man suffering from heart problems (he promised himself again that he would get that taken care of as soon as this crisis was over). He picked up Carter’s gun instead, and walked to the foolish boy.

“Carter? Are you still with us?”

Carter moaned, tried to turn over, gave up.

“I’m going to put one high up in the back of your neck, just as you suggested. But I want to give you one final piece of advice first. Are you listening?”

Carter groaned again. Big Jim took this for assent.

“The advice is this: Never give a good politician time to pray.”

Big Jim pulled the trigger.

12

“I think he’s dying!” Private Ames shouted. “I think the kid’s dying!”

Sergeant Groh knelt beside Ames and peered through the dirty slot at the bottom of the Dome. Ollie Dinsmore was lying on his side with his lips almost pressed against a surface they could now see, thanks to the filth still clinging to it. In his best drill sergeant’s voice, Groh yelled: “Yo! Ollie Dinsmore! Front and center!”

Slowly, the boy opened his eyes and looked at the two men crouched less than a foot away but in a colder, cleaner world. “What?” he whispered.

“Nothing, son,” Groh said. “Go back to sleep.”

Groh turned to Ames. “Unbunch your panties, Private. He’s fine.”

“He’s not. Just look at him!”

Groh took Ames by the arm and helped him—not unkindly—to his feet. “No,” he agreed in a low voice. “He’s not even slightly okay, but he’s alive and sleeping and right now that’s the best we can ask for. He’ll use up less oxygen that way. You go get yourself something to eat. Did you get any breakfast?”

Ames shook his head. The thought of breakfast hadn’t even crossed his mind. “I want to stay in case he comes back around.” He paused, then plunged. “I want to be here if he dies.”

“He’s not going to for awhile,” Groh said. He had no idea if this was true or not. “Get something out of the truck, even if it’s only a slice of bologna wrapped in a slice of bread. You look like shit, soldier.”

Ames jerked his head toward the boy sleeping on charred ground with his mouth and nose cocked to the Dome. His face was streaked with filth, and they could barely see the rise and fall of his chest. “How long do you think he’s got, Sarge?”

Groh shook his head. “Probably not long. Someone in the group on the other side already died this morning, and several of the others aren’t doing well. And it’s better over there. Cleaner. You have to prepare yourself.”

Ames felt close to tears. “Kid lost his whole family.”

“Go get yourself something to eat. I’ll watch until you come back.”

“But after that I can stay?”

“The kid wants you, Private, the kid gets you. You can stay until the end.”

Groh watched Ames double-time to the table near the helicopter, where some food was laid out. Out here, it was ten o’clock on a pretty late-fall morning. The sun was shining and melting off the last of a heavy frost. But only a few feet away there was a bubble-world of perpetual twilight, a world where the air was unbreathable and time had ceased to have any meaning. Groh remembered a pond in the local park where he’d grown up. Wilton, Connecticut, that had been. There had been golden carp in the pond, big old things. The kids used to feed them. Until one day when one of the groundskeepers had an accident with some fertilizer, that was. Goodbye fishies. All ten or a dozen of them, floating dead on the surface.

Looking at the dirty sleeping boy on the other side of the Dome, it was impossible not to think of those carp… only a boy was not a fish.

Ames came back, eating something he obviously didn’t want. Not much of a soldier, in Groh’s opinion, but a good kid with a good heart.

Private Ames sat down. Sergeant Groh sat with him. Around noon, they got a report from the north side of the Dome that another of the survivors over there had died. A little boy named Aidan Appleton. Another kid. Groh believed he might have met his mother the day before. He hoped he was wrong about that, but didn’t think he was.

“Who did it?” Ames asked him. “Who wound this shit up, Sarge? And why?”

Groh shook his head. “No idea.”

“It makes no sense!” Ames cried. Beyond them, Ollie stirred, lost his air, and moved his sleeping face once more to the scant breeze seeping through the barrier.

“Don’t wake him up,” Groh said, thinking: If he goes in his sleep, it’ll be better for all of us.

13

By two o’clock all of the exiles were coughing except—incredible but true—Sam Verdreaux, who seemed to be thriving in the bad air, and Little Walter Bushey, who did nothing but sleep and suck the occasional ration of milk or juice. Barbie sat against the Dome with his arm around Julia. Not far away, Thurston Marshall sat beside the covered corpse of little Aidan Appleton, who had died with terrifying suddenness. Thurse, now coughing steadily, was holding Alice on his lap. She had cried herself to sleep. Twenty feet further on, Rusty was huddled with his wife and girls, who had also cried themselves to sleep. Rusty had taken Audrey’s body to the ambulance so the girls wouldn’t have to look at it. He held his breath throughout; even fifteen yards inland from the Dome, the air became choking, deadly. Once he got his wind back, he supposed he should do the same with the little boy. Audrey would be good company for him; she’d always liked kids.

Joe McClatchey plopped down beside Barbie. Now he really did look like a scarecrow. His pale face was dotted with acne and there were circles of bruised-looking purple flesh under his eyes.

“My mom’s sleeping,” Joe said.

“Julia too,” Barbie said, “so keep your voice down.”

Julia opened one eye. “Nah sleepin,” she said, and promptly closed the eye again. She coughed, stilled, then coughed some more.

“Benny’s really sick,” Joe said. “He’s running a fever, like the little boy did before he died.” He hesitated. “My mom’s pretty warm, too. Maybe it’s only because it’s so hot in here, but… I don’t think that’s it. What if she dies? What if we all do?”

“We won’t,” Barbie said. “They’ll figure something out.”

Joe shook his head. “They won’t. And you know it. Because they’re outside. Nobody outside can help us.” He looked over the blackened wasteland where there had been a town the day before and laughed—a hoarse, croaking sound that was worse because there was actually some amusement in it. “Chester’s Mill has been a town since 1803—we learned that in school. Over two hundred years. And a week to wipe it off the face of the earth. One fuckin week is all it took. How about that, Colonel Barbara?”

Barbie couldn’t think of a thing to say.

Joe covered his mouth, coughed. Behind them, the fans roared and roared. “I’m a smart kid. You know that? I mean, I’m not bragging, but… I’m smart.”

Barbie thought of the video feed the kid had set up near the site of the missile strike. “No argument, Joe.”

“In a Spielberg movie, it’s the smart kid who’d come up with the last-minute solution, isn’t that right?”

Barbie felt Julia stir again. Both eyes were open now, and she was regarding Joe gravely.

Tears were trickling down the boy’s cheeks. “Some Spielberg kid I turned out to be. If we were in Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs would eat us for sure.”

“If only they’d get tired,” Julia said dreamily.

“Huh?” Joe blinked at her.

“The leatherheads. The leatherhead children. Kids are supposed to get tired of their games and go on to something else. Or”—she coughed hard—“or their parents call them home for dinner.”

“Maybe they don’t eat,” Joe said gloomily. “Maybe they don’t have parents, either.”

“Or maybe time is different for them,” Barbie said. “In their world, maybe they only just sat down around their version of the box. For them the game might only be starting. We don’t even know for sure they’re children.”

Piper Libby joined them. She was flushed, and her hair was sticking to her cheeks. “They’re kids,” she said.

“How do you know?” Barbie asked.

“I just do.” She smiled. “They’re the God I stopped believing in about three years ago. God turned out to be a bunch of bad little kids playing Interstellar X-Box. Isn’t that funny?” Her smile widened, and then she burst into tears.

Julia was looking toward the box with its flashing purple light. Her face was thoughtful and a little dreamy.

14

It’s Saturday night in Chester’s Mill. That’s the night the Eastern Star ladies used to meet (and after the meeting they’d often go to Henrietta Clavard’s house and drink wine and break out their best dirty jokes). It’s the night when Peter Randolph and his buddies used to play poker (and also break out their best dirty jokes). The night when Stewart and Fern Bowie often went to Lewiston to rent a couple of whores at a pussy-parlor on Lower Lisbon Street. The night when the Reverend Lester Coggins used to hold teen prayer meetings in the parsonage hall at Holy Redeemer and Piper Libby used to host teen dances in the basement of the Congo Church. The night when Dipper’s used to roar until one (and around twelve-thirty the crowd would begin chanting drunkenly for their anthem, “Dirty Water,” a song all bands from Boston know well). The night when Howie and Brenda Perkins used to walk, hand-in-hand, on the Town Common, saying hello to the other couples they knew. The night when Alden Dinsmore, his wife, Shelley, and their two sons had been known to play catch by the light of a full moon. In Chester’s Mill (as in most small towns where they all support the team), Saturday nights were usually the best nights, made for dancing and fucking and dreaming.

Not this one. This one is black and seemingly endless. The wind has died. The poisoned air hangs hot and still. Out where Route 119 used to be until the furnace heat boiled it away, Ollie Dismore lies with his face pressed to his slot in the slag, still holding stubbornly onto life, and only a foot and a half away, Private Clint Ames continues his patient watch. Some bright boy wanted to shine a spotlight on the kid; Ames (supported by Sergeant Groh, not such an ogre after all) managed to keep it from happening, arguing that shining spotlights on sleeping people was what you did to terrorists, not teenage kids who would probably be dead before the sun rose. But Ames has a flashlight, and every now and then he shines it on the kid, making sure that he’s still breathing. He is, but each time Ames uses the flashlight again, he expects it to show him that those shallow respirations have stopped. Part of him has actually started to hope for that. Part of him has started to accept the truth: no matter how resourceful Ollie Dinsmore has been or how heroically he’s struggled, he has no future. Watching him fight on is terrible. Not long before midnight, Private Ames falls asleep himself, sitting up, with the flash-light clutched loosely in one hand.

Sleepest thou? Jesus is said to have enquired of Peter. Couldst thou not watch one hour?

To which Chef Bushey might have added, book of Matthew, Sanders.

At just past one o’clock, Rose Twitchell shakes Barbie awake.

“Thurston Marshall is dead,” she says. “Rusty and my brother are putting the body under the ambulance so the little girl won’t be too upset when she wakes up.” Then she adds: “If she wakes up. Alice is sick too.”

“We’re all sick now,” Julia says. “All except Sam and that dopey little baby.”

Rusty and Twitch hurry back from the huddle of vehicles, collapse in front of one of the fans, and begin breathing in large, whooping gasps. Twitch starts coughing and Rusty shoves him even closer to the air, so hard that Twitch’s forehead strikes the Dome. They all hear the bonk.

Rose has not quite finished her inventory. “Benny Drake’s bad too.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “Ginny says he may not last until sunup. If only there was something we could do. ”

Barbie doesn’t reply. Neither does Julia, who is once more looking in the direction of a box which, although less than fifty square inches in area and not even an inch thick, cannot be budged. Her eyes are distant, speculative.

A reddish moon finally clears the accumulated filth on the eastern wall of the Dome and shines down its bloody light. This is the end of October and in Chester’s Mill, October is the cruelest month, mixing memory with desire. There are no lilacs in this dead land. No lilacs, no trees, no grass. The moon looks down on ruination and little else.

15

Big Jim awoke in the dark, grabbing at his chest. His heart was misfiring again. He pounded at it. Then the alarm on the generator went off as the current tank of propane reached the danger point: AAAAAAAAAAA. Feed me, feed me.

Big Jim jumped and cried out. His poor tortured heart was lurching, missing, skipping, then running to catch up with itself. He felt like an old car with a bad carburetor, the kind of rattletrap you might take in trade but would never sell, the kind that was good for nothing but the junkheap. He gasped and pounded. This was as bad as the one that had sent him to the hospital. Maybe even worse.

AAAAAAAAAAAA : the sound of some huge, gruesome insect—a cicada, maybe—here in the dark with him. Who knew what might have crept in here while he was sleeping?

Big Jim fumbled for the flashlight. With the other hand he alternately pounded and rubbed, telling his heart to settle down, not to be such a cotton-picking baby, he hadn’t gone through all of this just to die in the dark.

He found the flashlight, struggled to his feet, and stumbled over the body of his late aide-de-camp. He cried out again and went to his knees. The flashlight didn’t break but went rolling away from him, casting a moving spotlight on the lowest lefthand shelf, which was stacked with boxes of spaghetti and cans of tomato paste.

Big Jim crawled after it. As he did, Carter Thibodeau’s open eyes moved.

“Carter?” Sweat was running down Big Jim’s face; his cheeks felt coated with some light, stinking grease. He could feel his shirt sticking to him. His heart took another of those looping larrups and then, for a wonder, settled into its normal rhythm again.

Well. No. Not exactly. But at least into something more like a normal rhythm.

“Carter? Son? Are you alive?”

Ridiculous, of course; Big Jim had gutted him like a fish on a riverbank, then shot him in the back of the head. He was as dead as Adolf Hitler. Yet he could have sworn… well, almost sworn… that the boy’s eyes—

He fought back the idea that Carter was going to reach out and seize him by the throat. Telling himself it was normal to feel a little bit (terrified) nervous, because the boy had nearly killed him, after all. And still expecting Carter to sit up and draw him forward and bury hungry teeth in his throat.

Big Jim pressed his fingers under Carter’s jaw. The blood-sticky flesh was cold and no pulse moved there. Of course not. The kid was dead. Had been dead for twelve hours or more.

“You’re eating dinner with your Savior, son,” Big Jim whispered. “Roast beef and mashed. Apple cobbler for dessert.”

This made him feel better. He crawled after the flashlight, and when he thought he heard something move behind him—the whisper of a hand, perhaps, slipping across the concrete floor, blindly questing—he didn’t look back. He had to feed the generator. Had to silence the AAAAAA.

While he was pulling one of the four remaining tanks out of the storage cubby, his heart went into arrhythmia again. He sat beside the open trapdoor, gasping and trying to cough his heart back into a regular rhythm. And praying, unaware that his prayer was basically a series of demands and rationalizations: make it stop, none of it was my fault, get me out of here, I did the best I could, put everything back the way it was, I was let down by incompetents, heal my heart.

“For Jesus’ sake, amen,” he said. But the sound of the words chilled rather than comforted. They were like bones rattling in a tomb.

By the time his heart had settled a little, the hoarse cicada-cry of the alarm had stilled. The current tank had run dry. Save for the glow of the flashlight, it was now as dark in the fallout shelter’s second room as in the first; the remaining emergency light in here had flickered its last seven hours ago. Struggling to remove the empty tank and get the fresh one onto the platform beside the generator, Big Jim had a faint memory of stamping NO ACTION on a shelter-maintenance requisition that had come across his desk a year or two ago. That requisition had probably included the price of fresh batteries for the emergency lights. But he couldn’t blame himself. There was only so much money in a town budget and people always had their hands out: Feed me, feed me.

Al Timmons should have done it on his own initiative, he told himself. For God’s sake, is a little initiative too much to ask? Isn’t that part of what we pay the maintenance staff for? He could have gone to that frog Burpee and asked for them as a donation, for heaven’s sake. That’s what I would have done.

He connected the tank to the generator. Then his heart stuttered again. His hand jerked, and he knocked the flashlight into the storage bin, where it clanged against one of the remaining tanks. The lens shattered and he was left once more in total darkness.

“No!” he screamed. “No, goddammit, NO!”

But from God there was no answer. The quiet and the dark pressed in on him as his overstrained heart choked and struggled. Traitorous thing!

“Never mind. There’ll be another flashlight in the other room. Matches, too. I’ll just have to find them. If Carter had stockpiled them to begin with, I could go right to them.” It was true. He had overestimated that boy. He had thought the kid was a comer, but in the end he had turned out to be a goer. Big Jim laughed, then made himself stop. The sound in such total darkness was a little spooky.

Never mind. Start the generator.

Yes. Right. The generator was job one. He could double-check the connection once it was running and the air purifier was queeping away again. By then he’d have another flashlight, maybe even a Coleman lantern. Plenty of light for the next tank switchover.

“That’s the ticket,” he said. “If you want something done right in this world, you have to do it yourself. Just ask Coggins. Just ask the Perkins rhymes-with-witch. They know.” He laughed some more. He couldn’t help it, because it really was rich. “They found out. You don’t tease a big dog if you only have a little stick. Nosir. Nosirree.”

He felt around for the starter-button, found it, pushed it. Nothing happened. Suddenly the air in the room seemed thicker than ever.

I pushed the wrong button, that’s all.

Knowing better but believing it because some things have to be believed. He blew on his fingers like a crap-shooter hoping to heat up a cold pair of dice. Then he felt around until his fingers found the button.

“God,” he said, “this is Your servant, James Rennie. Please let this darned old thing start. I ask it in the name of Your Son, Jesus Christ.”

He pushed the starter-button.

Nothing.

He sat in the dark with his feet dangling in the storage compartment, trying to push back the panic that wanted to descend and eat him raw. He had to think. It was the only way to survive. But it was hard. When you were in the dark, when your heart was threatening full revolt at any second, thinking was hard.

And the worst of it? Everything he’d done and everything he’d worked for during the last thirty years of his life seemed unreal. Like the way people looked on the other side of the Dome. They walked, they talked, they drove cars, they even flew in airplanes and helicopters. But none of it mattered, not under the Dome.

Get hold of yourself. If God won’t help you, help yourself.

Okay. The first thing was light. Even a book of matches would do. There had to be something on one of the shelves in the other room. He would just feel along—very slowly, very methodically—until he found it. And then he would find batteries for the cotton-picking starter-motor. There were batteries, of that he was sure, because he needed the generator. Without the generator he would die.

Suppose you do get it started again? What happens when the propane runs out?

Ah, but something would intervene. He wasn’t meant to die down here. Roast beef with Jesus? He’d pass on that meal, actually. If he couldn’t sit at the head of the table, he’d just as soon skip the whole thing.

That made him laugh again. He made his way very slowly and carefully back to the door leading into the main room. He held his hands out in front of him like a blind man. After seven steps they touched the wall. He moved to the right, trailing his fingertips over the wood, and… ah! Emptiness. The doorway. Good.

He shuffled through it, moving more confidently now in spite of the blackness. He remembered the layout of this room perfectly: shelves to either side, couch dead ahea—

He tripped over the goddam cotton-picking kid again and went sprawling. He hit his forehead on the floor and screamed—more in surprise and outrage than in pain, because there was a carpet to pad the blow. But oh God, there was a dead hand between his legs. It seemed to be clutching at his balls.

Big Jim got to his knees, crawled forward, and hit his head again, this time on the couch. He let out another yell, then crawled up onto it, pulling his legs after him quickly, the way a man might pull his legs from water he’s just realized is infested with sharks.

He lay there trembling, telling himself to calm down, he had to calm down or he really would have a heart attack.

When you feel these arrhythmias, you need to center yourself and take long deep breaths, the hippy doctor had told him. At the time, Big Jim had considered this New Age bullshit, but now there was nothing else—he didn’t have his verapamil—so he’d have to try it.

And it seemed to work. After twenty deep breaths and long, slow exhales, he could feel his heart settling. The coppery taste was leaving his mouth. Unfortunately, a weight seemed to be settling on his chest. Pain was creeping down his left arm. He knew these were heart attack symptoms, but he thought indigestion from all the sardines he’d eaten was just as likely. More likely. The long, slow breaths were taking care of his heart just fine (but he would still get it looked at when he was out of this mess, maybe even give in and get that bypass surgery). The heat was the problem. The heat and the thick air. He had to find that flashlight and get the gennie going again. Just one more minute, or maybe two—

Someone was breathing in here.

Yes, of course. I’m breathing in here.

And yet he was quite sure he heard someone else. More than just one someone. It seemed to him that there were several people in here with him. And he thought he knew who they were.

That’s ridiculous.

Yes, but one of the breathers was behind the couch. One was lurking in the corner. And one was standing not three feet in front of him.

No. Stop it!

Brenda Perkins behind the couch. Lester Coggins in the corner, his jaw unhinged and hanging.

And standing dead ahead—

“No,” Big Jim said. “That’s crap. That’s bullshit. ”

He closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on taking those long slow breaths.

“It sure smells good in here, Dad,” Junior droned from in front of him. “It smells like the pantry. And my girlfriends.”

Big Jim shrieked.

“Help me up, bro,” Carter said from where he lay on the floor. “He cut me up pretty bad. Shot me, too.”

“Stop it,” Big Jim whispered. “I don’t hear any of that, so just stop it. I’m counting breaths. I’m settling my heart.”

“I still have the papers,” Brenda Perkins said. “And lots of copies. Soon they’ll be tacked to every telephone pole in town, the way Julia tacked up the last issue of her newspaper. ‘Be sure your sin will find you out’—Numbers, chapter thirty-two.”

“You’re not there!”

But then something—it felt like a finger—kissed its way down his cheek.

Big Jim shrieked again. The fallout shelter was full of dead people who were nevertheless breathing the increasingly foul air, and they were moving in. Even in the dark he could see their pale faces. He could see his dead son’s eyes.

Big Jim bolted up from the couch, flailing at the black air with his fists. “Get away! All of you get away from me!”

He charged for the stairs and tripped over the bottom one. This time there was no carpet to cushion the blow. Blood began to drip into his eyes. A dead hand caressed the back of his neck.

“You killed me,” Lester Coggins said, but with his broken jaw it came out Ooo ill eee.

Big Jim ran up the stairs and hit the door at the top with all his considerable weight. It squalled open, pushing charred lumber and fallen bricks in front of it. It went just far enough for him to squeeze through.

“No!” he barked. “No, don’t touch me! None of you touch me!”

It was almost as dark in the ruins of the Town Hall conference room as in the shelter, but with one big difference: the air was worthless.

Big Jim realized this when he pulled in his third breath. His heart, tortured beyond endurance by this final outrage, once more rose into his throat. This time it stuck there.

Big Jim suddenly felt as if he were being crushed from throat to navel by a terrible weight: a long burlap sack filled with stones. He struggled back to the door like a man moving through mud. He tried to squeeze through the gap, but this time he stuck fast. A terrible sound began to emerge from his gaping mouth and closing throat, and the sound was AAAAAAA: feed me feed me feed me.

He flailed once, again, then once more: a hand reaching out, grasping for some final rescue.

It was caressed from the other side. “Daaady,” a voice crooned.

16

Someone shook Barbie awake just before dawn on Sunday morning. He came to reluctantly, coughing, turning instinctively to the Dome and the fans beyond. When the coughing finally eased, he looked to see who had awakened him. It was Julia. Her hair hung lankly and her cheeks were blooming with fever, but her eyes were clear. She said, “Benny Drake died an hour ago.”

“Oh, Julia. Jesus. I’m sorry.” His voice was cracked and hoarse, not his own voice at all.

“I have to get to the box that’s making the Dome,” she said. “How do I get to the box?”

Barbie shook his head. “It’s impossible. Even if you could do something to it, it’s on the ridge, almost half a mile from here. We can’t even go to the vans without holding our breaths, and they’re only fifty feet away.”

“There’s a way,” someone said.

They looked around and saw Sloppy Sam Verdreaux. He was smoking the last of his cigarettes and looking at them with sober eyes. He was sober; entirely sober for the first time in eight years.

He repeated, “There’s a way. I could show you.”