Under the Dome

1

Barbie started feeling better as soon as he passed Food City and left downtown behind. When he saw the sign reading YOU ARE LEAVING THE VILLAGE OF CHESTER’S MILL COME BACK REAL SOON!, he felt better still. He was glad to be on his way, and not just because he had taken a pretty good beating in The Mill. It was plain old moving on that had lightened him up. He had been walking around under his own little gray cloud for at least two weeks before getting his shit handed to him in the parking lot of Dipper’s.

“Basically, I’m just a ramblin guy,” he said, and laughed. “A ramblin guy on his way to the Big Sky.” And hell, why not? Montana! Or Wyoming. Fucking Rapid City, South Dakota. Anyplace but here.

He heard an approaching engine, turned around—walking backward now—and stuck out his thumb. What he saw was a lovely combination: a dirty old Ford pickemup with a fresh young blonde behind the wheel. Ash blonde, his favorite blonde of all. Barbie offered his most engaging smile. The girl driving the pickemup responded with one of her own, and oh my Lord if she was a ticktock over nineteen, he’d eat his last paycheck from Sweetbriar Rose. Too young for a gentleman of thirty summers, no doubt, but perfectly street-legal, as they’d said back in the days of his cornfed Iowa youth.

The truck slowed, he started toward it… and then it sped up again. She gave him one more brief look as she went past. The smile was still on her face, but it had turned regretful. I had a brain-cramp there for a minute, the smile said, but now sanity has reasserted itself.

And Barbie thought he recognized her a little, although it was impossible to say with certainty; Sunday mornings in Sweetbriar were always a madhouse. But he thought he’d seen her with an older man, probably her dad, both of them with their faces mostly buried in sections of the Sunday Times. If he could have spoken to her as she rolled past, Barbie would have said: If you trusted me to cook your sausage and eggs, surely you can trust me for a few miles in the shotgun seat.

But of course he didn’t get the chance, so he simply raised his hand in a little no-offense-taken salute. The truck’s taillights flickered, as if she were reconsidering. Then they went out and the truck sped up.

During the following days, as things in The Mill started going from bad to worse, he would replay this little moment in the warm October sun again and again. It was that second reconsidering flicker of the taillights he thought of… as if she had recognized him, after all. That’s the cook from Sweetbriar Rose, I’m almost sure. Maybe I ought to—

But maybe was a gulf better men than him had fallen into. If she had reconsidered, everything in his life thereafter would have changed. Because she must have made it out; he never saw the fresh-faced blonde or the dirty old Ford F-150 again. She must have crossed over the Chester’s Mill town line minutes (or even seconds) before the border slammed shut. If he’d been with her, he would have been out and safe.

Unless, of course, he’d think later, when sleep wouldn’t come, the stop to pick me up was just long enough to be too long. In that case, I probably still wouldn’t be here. And neither would she. Because the speed limit out that way on 119 is fifty miles an hour. And at fifty miles an hour…

At this point he would always think of the plane.

2

The plane flew over him just after he passed Jim Rennie’s Used Cars, a place for which Barbie had no love. Not that he’d bought a lemon there (he hadn’t owned a car in over a year, had sold the last one in Punta Gorda, Florida). It was just that Jim Rennie Jr. had been one of the fellows that night in Dipper’s parking lot. A frat boy with something to prove, and what he could not prove alone he would prove as part of a group. That was the way the Jim Juniors of the world did business, in Barbie’s experience.

But it was behind him now. Jim Rennie’s, Jim Junior, Sweetbriar Rose (Fried Clams Our Specialty! Always “Whole ” Never “Strips ”), Angie McCain, Andy Sanders. The whole deal, including Dipper’s. (Beatings Administered in the Parking Lot Our Specialty!) All behind him. And ahead of him? Why, the gates of America. Goodbye smalltown Maine, hello Big Sky.

Or maybe, hell, he’d head down south again. No matter how beautiful this particular day, winter was lurking a page or two over on the calendar. The south might be good. He’d never been to Muscle Shoals, and he liked the sound of the name. That was goddam poetry, Muscle Shoals was, and the idea so cheered him that when he heard the little plane approaching, he looked up and gave a big old exuberant wave. He hoped for a wing-waggle in return, but didn’t get one, although the plane was slowpoking at low altitude. Barbie’s guess was sightseers—this was a day for them, with the trees in full flame—or maybe some young kid on his learner’s permit, too worried about screwing up to bother with groundlings like Dale Barbara. But he wished them well. Sightseers or a kid still six weeks from his first solo cruise, Barbie wished them very well. It was a good day, and every step away from Chester’s Mill made it better. Too many assholes in The Mill, and besides: travel was good for the soul.

Maybe moving on in October should be a law, he thought. New national motto: EVERYBODY LEAVES IN OCTOBER. You get your Packing Permit in August, give your required week’s notice in mid-September, then—

He stopped. Not too far ahead of him, on the other side of the blacktop highway, was a woodchuck. A damned fat one. Sleek and sassy, too. Instead of scurrying off into the high grass, it was coming on ahead. There was a fallen birch sticking its top half out onto the shoulder of the road, and Barbie was betting the woodchuck would scurry under there and wait for the big bad Two-Legs to go by. If not, they would pass each other like the ramblin guys they were, the one on four legs headed north, the one on two headed south. Barbie hoped that would happen. It would be cool.

These thoughts went through Barbie’s mind in seconds; the shadow of the airplane was still between him and the chuck, a black cross racing along the highway. Then two things happened almost simultaneously.

The first was the woodchuck. It was whole, then it was in two pieces. Both were twitching and bleeding. Barbie stopped, mouth hanging open on the suddenly lax hinge of his lower jaw. It was as if an invisible guillotine blade had dropped. And that was when, directly above the severed woodchuck, the little airplane exploded.

3

Barbie looked up. Falling from the sky was a squashed Bizarro World version of the pretty little airplane that had passed over him seconds before. Twisting orange-red petals of fire hung above it in the air, a flower that was still opening, an American Disaster rose. Smoke billowed from the plummeting plane.

Something clanged to the road and sprayed up clods of asphalt before spinning drunkenly into the high grass to the left. A propeller.

If that had bounced my way—

Barbie had a brief image of being cut in two—like the unfortunate woodchuck—and turned to run. Something thudded down in front of him and he screamed. But it wasn’t the other propeller; it was a man’s leg dressed in denim. He could see no blood, but the side-seam had been blown wide open, revealing white flesh and wiry black hair.

There was no foot attached.

Barbie ran in what felt like slow motion. He saw one of his own feet, clad in an old scuffed workboot, stride out and clop down. Then it disappeared behind him as his other foot strode out. All slow, slow. Like watching the baseball replay of a guy trying to steal second.

There was a tremendous hollow clang from behind him, followed by the boom of a secondary explosion, followed by a blast of heat that struck him from heels to nape. It shoved him on his way like a warm hand. Then all thoughts blew away and there was nothing but the body’s brute need to survive.

Dale Barbara ran for his life.

4

A hundred yards or so down the road, the big warm hand became a ghost hand, although the smell of burning gas—plus a sweeter stench that had to be a mixture of melting plastic and roasting flesh—was strong, carried to him on a light breeze. Barbie ran another sixty yards, then stopped and turned around. He was panting. He didn’t think it was the running; he didn’t smoke, and he was in good shape (well… fair; his ribs on the right side still hurt from the beating in Dipper’s parking lot). He thought it was terror and dismay. He could have been killed by falling pieces of airplane—not just the runaway propeller—or burned to death. It was only blind luck that he hadn’t been.

Then he saw something that made his rapid breathing stop in midgasp. He straightened up, looking back at the site of the accident. The road was littered with debris—it really was a wonder that he hadn’t been struck and at least wounded. A twisted wing lay on the right; the other wing was poking out of the uncut timothy grass on the left, not far from where the runaway propeller had come to rest. In addition to the bluejeans-clad leg, he could see a severed hand and arm. The hand seemed to be pointing at a head, as if to say That’s mine. A woman’s head, judging from the hair. The power lines running beside the highway had been severed. They lay crackling and twisting on the shoulder.

Beyond the head and arm was the twisted tube of the airplane’s fuselage. Barbie could read NJ3. If there was more, it was torn away.

But none of this was what had caught his eye and stopped his breath. The Disaster rose was gone now, but there was still fire in the sky. Burning fuel, certainly. But…

But it was running down the air in a thin sheet. Beyond it and through it, Barbie could see the Maine countryside—still peaceful, not yet reacting, but in motion nevertheless. Shimmering like the air over an incinerator or a burning-barrel. It was as if someone had splashed gasoline over a pane of glass and then set it alight.

Almost hypnotized—that was what it felt like, anyway—Barbie started walking back toward the scene of the crash.

5

His first impulse was to cover the body parts, but there were too many. Now he could see another leg (this one in green slacks), and a female torso caught in a clump of juniper. He could pull off his shirt and drape it over the woman’s head, but after that? Well, there were two extra shirts in his backpack—

Here came a car from the direction of Motton, the next town to the south. One of the smaller SUVs, and moving fast. Someone had either heard the crash or seen the flash. Help. Thank God for help. Straddling the white line and standing well clear of the fire that was still running down from the sky in that weird water-on-a-windowpane way, Barbie waved his arms over his head, crossing them in big Xs.

The driver honked once in acknowledgment, then slammed on his brakes, laying forty feet of rubber. He was out almost before his little green Toyota had stopped, a big, rangy fellow with long gray hair cascading out from under a Sea Dogs baseball cap. He ran toward the side of the road, meaning to skirt the main firefall.

“What happened?” he cried. “What in the blue fu—”

Then he struck something. Hard. There was nothing there, but Barbie saw the guy’s nose snap to the side as it broke. The man rebounded from the nothing, bleeding from the mouth, nose, and forehead. He fell on his back, then struggled to a sitting position. He stared at Barbie with dazed, wondering eyes as blood from his nose and mouth cascaded down the front of his workshirt, and Barbie stared back.