Under the Dome: A Novel (133 page)

Julia thinks:
I’m seeing how the child looks to the ant, if the ant looks up from its side of the magnifying glass. If it looks up just before it starts to burn.

—PLEASE, KAYLA! PLEASE! WE ARE ALIVE!

Kayla looks down at her without doing anything. Then she crosses her arms in front of her—they are human arms in this vision—and pulls her sweater over her head. There is no love in her voice when she speaks; no regret or remorse.

But there might be pity.

She says

12

Julia was hurled away from the box as if a hand had swatted her. The held breath blew out of her. Before she could take another one, Barbie seized her by the shoulder, pulled the swatch of plastic from the spindle, and pushed her mouth onto it, hoping he wouldn’t cut her tongue, or—God forbid—skewer the hard plastic into the roof of her mouth. But he couldn’t let her breathe the poisoned air. As
oxygen-starved as she was, it might send her into convulsions or kill her outright.

Wherever she’d been, Julia seemed to understand. Instead of trying to struggle away, she wrapped her arms around the Prius tire in a deathgrip and began sucking frantically at the spindle. He could feel huge, shuddering tremors racing through her body.

Sam had finally stopped coughing, but now there was another sound. Julia heard it, too. She sucked in another vast breath from the tire and looked up, eyes wide in their deep, shadowed sockets.

A dog was barking. It had to be Horace, because he was the only dog left. He—

Barbie grabbed her arm in a grip so strong she felt he would break it. On his face was an expression of pure amazement.

The box with the strange symbol on it was hovering four feet above the ground.

13

Horace was first to feel the fresh air, because he was lowest to the ground. He began to bark. Then Joe felt it: a breeze, startlingly cold, against his sweaty back. He was leaning against the Dome, and the Dome was moving. Moving
up.
Norrie had been dozing with her flushed face resting on Joe’s chest, and now he saw a lock of her dirty, matted hair begin to flutter. She opened her eyes.

“What—? Joey, what’s happening?”

Joe knew, but was too stunned to tell her. He could feel a cool sliding sensation against his back, like an endless sheet of glass being raised.

Horace was barking madly now, his back bowed, his snout on the ground. It was his
I-want-to-play
position, but Horace wasn’t playing. He stuck his nose beneath the rising Dome and sniffed cold sweet fresh air.

Heaven!

14

On the south side of the Dome, Pfc Clint Ames was also dozing. He sat cross-legged on the soft shoulder of Route 119 with a blanket wrapped around him Indian-style. The air suddenly darkened, as if the bad dreams flitting through his head had assumed physical form. Then he coughed himself awake.

Soot was swirling up around his booted feet and settling on the legs of his khaki everydays. Where in God’s name was it coming from? All the burning had been inside. Then he saw. The Dome was going up like a giant windowblind. It was impossible—it went miles down as well as up, everybody knew that—but it was happening.

Ames didn’t hesitate. He crawled forward on his hands and knees and seized Ollie Dinsmore by the arms. For a moment he felt the rising Dome scrape the middle of his back, glassy and hard, and there was time to think
If it comes back down now, it’ll cut me in two.
Then he was dragging the boy out.

For a moment he thought he was hauling a corpse.
“No!”
he shouted. He carried the boy up toward one of the roaring fans.
“Don’t you dare die on me, cow-kid!”

Ollie began coughing, then leaned over and vomited weakly. Ames held him while he did it. The others were running toward them now, shouting jubilantly, Sergeant Groh in the forefront.

Ollie puked again. “Don’t call me cow-kid,” he whispered.

“Get an ambulance!” Ames shouted. “We need an ambulance!”

“Nah, we’ll take him to Central Maine General in the helicopter,” Groh said. “You ever been in a helicopter, kid?”

Ollie, his eyes dazed, shook his head. Then he puked on Sergeant Groh’s shoes.

Groh beamed and shook Ollie’s filthy hand. “Welcome back to the United States, son. Welcome back to the world.”

Ollie put an arm around Ames’s neck. He was aware that he was passing out. He tried to hold on long enough to say thank you, but
he didn’t make it. The last thing he was aware of before the darkness took him again was the southern soldier kissing him on the cheek.

15

On the north end, Horace was the first one out. He raced directly to Colonel Cox and began to dance around his feet. Horace had no tail, but it didn’t matter; his entire hind end was wig-wagging.

“I’ll be damned,” Cox said. He picked the Corgi up and Horace began to lick his face frantically.

The survivors stood together on their side (the line of demarcation was clear in the grass, bright on one side and listless gray on the other), beginning to understand but not quite daring to believe. Rusty, Linda, the Little Js, Joe McClatchey and Norrie Calvert, with their mothers standing to either side of them. Ginny, Gina Buffalino, and Harriet Bigelow with their arms around each other. Twitch was holding his sister Rose, who was sobbing and cradling Little Walter. Piper, Jackie, and Lissa were holding hands. Pete Freeman and Tony Guay, all that remained of the
Democrat
’s staff, stood behind them. Alva Drake leaned against Rommie Burpee, who was holding Alice Appleton in his arms.

They watched as the Dome’s dirty surface rose swiftly into the air. The fall foliage on the other side was heartbreaking in its brilliance.

Sweet fresh air lifted their hair and dried the sweat on their skin.

“For we saw as if through a glass darkly,” Piper Libby said. She was weeping. “But now we see as if face to face.”

Horace jumped from Colonel Cox’s arms and began turning figure eights through the grass, yapping, sniffing, and trying to pee on everything at once.

The survivors looked unbelievingly up at the bright sky arching over a late fall Sunday morning in New England. And above them, the dirty barrier that had held them prisoner still rose, moving faster and faster, shrinking to a line like a long dash of pencil on a sheet of blue paper.

A bird swooped through the place where the Dome had been. Alice Appleton, still being carried by Rommie, looked up at it and laughed.

16

Barbie and Julia knelt with the tire between them, taking alternate breaths from the spindle-straw. They watched as the box began to rise again. It went slowly at first, and seemed to hover a second time at a height of about sixty feet, as if doubtful. Then it shot straight up at a speed far too fast for the human eye to follow; it would have been like trying to see a bullet in flight. The Dome was either flying upward or somehow being
reeled in.

The box,
Barbie thought.
It’s drawing the Dome up the way a magnet draws iron filings.

A breeze came beating toward them. Barbie marked its progress in the rippling grass. He shook Julia by the shoulder and pointed dead north. The filthy gray sky was blue again, and almost too bright to look at. The trees had come into bright focus.

Julia raised her head from the spindle and breathed.

“I don’t know if that’s such a good—” Barbie began, but then the breeze arrived. He saw it lift Julia’s hair and felt it drying the sweat on his grime-streaked face, as gentle as a lover’s palm.

Julia was coughing again. He pounded her back, taking his own first breath of the air as he did so. It still stank and clawed at his throat, but it was breathable. The bad air was blowing south as fresh air from the TR-90 side of the Dome—what
had
been the TR-90 side of the Dome—poured in. The second breath was better; the third better still; the fourth a gift from God.

Or from one leatherhead girl.

Barbie and Julia embraced next to the black square of ground where the box had been. Nothing would grow there, not ever again.

17

“Sam!” Julia cried. “We have to get Sam!”

They were still coughing as they ran to the Odyssey, but Sam wasn’t. He was slumped over the wheel, eyes open, breathing shallowly. His lower face was bearded with blood, and when Barbie pulled him back, he saw that the old man’s blue shirt had turned a muddy purple.

“Can you carry him?” Julia asked. “Can you carry him to where the soldiers are?”

The answer was almost certainly no, but Barbie said, “I can try.”

“Don’t,” Sam whispered. His eyes shifted toward them. “Hurts too much.” Fresh blood seeped from his mouth with each word. “Did you do it?”

“Julia did,” Barbie said. “I don’t know exactly how, but she did.”

“Part of it was the man in the gym,” she said. “The one the hackermonster shot.”

Barbie’s mouth dropped open, but she didn’t notice. She put her arms around Sam and kissed him on each cheek. “And you did it, too, Sam. You drove us out here, and you saw the little girl on the bandstand.”

“You ’us no little girl in my dream,” Sam said. “You ’us grown up.”

“The little girl was still there, though.” Julia touched her chest. “Still here, too. She lives.”

“Help me out of the van,” Sam whispered. “I want to smell some fresh air before I die.”

“You’re not going to—”

“Hush, woman. We both know better’n that.”

They both took an arm, gently lifted him from behind the wheel, and laid him on the ground.

“Smell that air,” he said. “Good Lord.” He breathed in deeply, then coughed out a spray of blood. “I’m gettin a whiff of honeysuckle.”

“Me too,” she said, and brushed his hair back from his brow.

He put his hand over hers. “Were they … were they sorry?”

“There was only one,” Julia said. “If there had been more, it never would have worked. I don’t think you can fight a crowd that’s bent on cruelty. And no—she wasn’t sorry. She took pity, but she wasn’t sorry.”

“Not the same things, are they?” the old man whispered.

“No. Not at all.”

“Pity’s for strong people,” he said, and sighed. “I can only be sorry. What I done was because of the booze, but I’m still sorry. I’d take it back if ever I could.”

“Whatever it was, you made up for it in the end,” Barbie said. He took Sam’s left hand. The wedding ring hung on the third finger, grotesquely large for the scant flesh.

Sam’s eyes, faded Yankee blue, shifted to him, and he tried to smile. “Maybe I did … for the
doin.
But I was
happy
in the doin. I don’t think you can ever make up for a thing like—” He began to cough again, and more blood flew from his mostly toothless mouth.

“Stop now,” Julia said.

“Stop trying to talk.” They were kneeling on either side of him. She looked at Barbie. “Forget about carrying him. He tore something inside. We’ll have to go for help.”

“Oh, the
sky
!” Sam Verdreaux said.

That was the last. He sighed his chest flat, and there was no next breath to lift it. Barbie moved to close his eyes but Julia took his hand and stopped him.

“Let him look,” she said. “Even if he’s dead, let him look as long as he can.”

They sat beside him. There was birdsong. And somewhere, Horace was still barking.

“I suppose I ought to go and find my dog,” Julia said.

“Yes,” he said. “The van?”

She shook her head. “Let’s walk. I think we can handle half a mile if we go slow—don’t you?”

He helped her up. “Let’s find out,” he said.

18

As they walked, hands linked above the grassy crown of the old supply road, she told him as much as she could about what she called “being inside the box.”

“So,” he said when she had finished. “You told her about the terrible things we’re capable of—or showed them to her—and she still let us go.”

“They know all about terrible things,” she said.

“That day in Fallujah is the worst memory of my life. What makes it so bad is …” He tried to think how Julia had put it. “I was the doer instead of the one done by.”

“You
didn’t
do it,” she said. “That other man did.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Barbie said. “The guy’s just as dead no matter who did it.”

“Would it have happened if there had only been two or three of you in that gym? Or if it had been just you been alone?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Then blame fate. Or God. Or the universe. But stop blaming yourself.”

He might not ever be able to do that, but he understood what Sam had said at the end. Sorrow for a wrong was better than nothing, Barbie supposed, but no amount of after-the-fact sorrow could ever atone for joy taken in destruction, whether it was burning ants or shooting prisoners.

He had felt no joy in Fallujah. On that score he could find himself innocent. And that was good.

Soldiers were running toward them. They might have another minute alone. Perhaps two.

He stopped and took her by the arms.

“I love you for what you did, Julia.”

“I know you do,” she said calmly.

“What you did was very brave.”

“Do you forgive me for stealing from your memories? I didn’t mean to; it just happened.”

“Totally forgiven.”

The soldiers were closer. Cox was running with the rest, Horace dancing at his heels. Soon Cox would be here, he’d ask how Ken was, and with that question the world would reclaim them.

Barbie looked up at the blue sky, breathed deeply of the clearing air. “I can’t believe it’s gone.”

“Will it ever come back, do you think?”

“Maybe not to this planet, and not because of that bunch. They’ll grow up and leave their playroom, but the box will stay. And other kids will find it. Sooner or later, the blood always hits the wall.”

“That’s awful.”

“Maybe, but can I tell you something my mother used to say?”

“Of course.”

He recited, “‘For every night, twice the bright.’”

Julia laughed. It was a lovely sound.

“What did the leatherhead girl say to you at the end?” he asked. “Tell me quick, because they’re almost here and this belongs just to us.”