Under the Dome: A Novel (127 page)

“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 O
₂
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.