Under the Dome

1

At quarter to eight, Linda Everett’s almost-new Honda Odyssey Green rolled up to the loading dock behind Burpee’s Department Store. Thurse was riding shotgun. The kids (far too silent for children setting off on an adventure) were in the backseat. Aidan was hugging Audrey’s head. Audi, probably sensing the little boy’s distress, bore this patiently.

Linda’s shoulder was still throbbing in spite of three aspirin, and she couldn’t get Carter Thibodeau’s face out of her mind. Or his smell: a mixture of sweat and cologne. She kept expecting him to pull up behind her in one of the town police cars, blocking their retreat. The next load I shoot is going straight up the old wazoo. Whether the kids are watching or not.

He’d do it, too. He would. And while she couldn’t get all the way out of town, she was wild to put as much distance between herself and Rennie’s new Man Friday as possible.

“Grab a whole roll, and the metal-snips,” she told Thurse. “They’re under that milk box. Rusty told me.”

Thurston had opened the door, but now he paused. “I can’t do that. What if somebody else needs them?”

She wasn’t going to argue; she’d probably wind up screaming at him and scaring the children.

“Whatever. Just hurry up. This is like a box canyon.”

“As fast as I can.”

Yet it seemed to take him forever to snip pieces of the lead roll, and she had to restrain herself from leaning out the window and asking if he had been born a prissy old lady or just grew into one.

Keep it shut. He lost someone he loved last night.

Yes, and if they didn’t hurry, she might lose everything. There were already people on Main Street, heading out toward 119 and the Dinsmore dairy farm, intent on getting the best places. Linda jumped every time a police loudspeaker blared, “CARS ARE NOT ALLOWED ON THE HIGHWAY! UNLESS YOU ARE PHYSICALLY DISABLED, YOU MUST WALK.”

Thibodeau was smart, and he had sniffed something. What if he came back and saw that her van was gone? Would he look for it? Meanwhile, Thurse just kept snipping pieces of lead from the roofing roll. He turned and she thought he was done, but he was only visually measuring the windshield. He started cutting again. Whacking off another piece. Maybe he was actually trying to drive her mad. A silly idea, but once it had entered her mind it wouldn’t leave.

She could still feel Thibodeau rubbing against her bottom. The tickle of his stubble. The fingers squeezing her breast. She told herself not to look at what he’d left on the seat of her jeans when she took them off, but she couldn’t help it. The word that rose in her mind was mansplat, and she’d found herself in a short, grim struggle to keep her breakfast down. Which also would have pleased him, if he had known.

Sweat sprang out on her brow.

“Mom?” Judy, right in her ear. Linda jumped and uttered a cry. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to jump you. Can I have something to eat?”

“Not now.”

“Why does that man keep loudspeakering?”

“Honey, I can’t talk to you right now.”

“Are you bummin?”

“Yes. A little. Now sit back.”

“Are we going to see Daddy?”

“Yes.” Unless we get caught and I get raped in front of you. “Now sit back.”

Thurse was finally coming. Thank God for small favors. He appeared to be carrying enough cut squares and rectangles of lead to armor a tank. “See? That wasn’t so ba—oh, shit.”

The kids giggled, the sound like rough files sawing away at Linda’s brain. “Quarter in the swear-jar, Mr. Marshall,” Janelle said.

Thurse was looking down, bemused. He had stuck the metal-snips in his belt.

“I’ll just put these back under the milk box—”

Linda snatched them before he could finish, restrained a momentary urge to bury them up to the handles in his narrow chest—admirable restraint, she thought—and got out to put them away herself.

As she did, a vehicle slid in behind the van, blocking access to West Street, the only way out of this cul-de-sac.

2

Atop Town Common Hill, just below the Y-intersection where Highland Avenue split off from Main Street, Jim Rennie’s Hummer sat idling. From below came the amplified exhortations for people to leave their cars and walk unless they were disabled. People were flowing down the sidewalks, many with packs on their backs. Big Jim eyed them with that species of longsuffering contempt which is felt only by caretakers who do their jobs not out of love but out of duty.

Going against the tide was Carter Thibodeau. He was striding in the middle of the street, every now and then shoving someone out of his way. He reached the Hummer, got in on the passenger side, and armed sweat from his forehead. “Man, that AC feels good. Not hardly eight in the morning and it’s got to be seventy-five degrees out there already. And the air smells like a frickin ashtray. ’Scuse the language, boss.”

“What kind of luck did you have?”

“The bad kind. I talked to Officer Everett. Ex -Officer Everett. The others are in the breeze.”

“Does she know anything?”

“No. She hasn’t heard from the doc. And Wettington treated her like a mushroom, kept her in the dark and fed her shit.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Her kids there with her?”

“Yup. The hippy, too. The one who straightened out your ticker. Plus the two kids Junior and Frankie found out at the Pond.” Carter thought about this. “With his chick dead and her husband gone, him and Everett’ll probably be boinking each other’s brains out by the end of the week. If you want me to take another run at her, boss, I will.”

Big Jim flicked a single finger up from the steering wheel to show that wouldn’t be necessary. His attention was elsewhere. “Look at them, Carter.”

Carter couldn’t very well help it. The foot traffic out of town was thickening every minute.

“Most of them will be at the Dome by nine, and their cotton-picking relatives won’t arrive until ten. At the earliest. By then they’ll be good and thirsty. By noon the ones who didn’t think to bring water will be drinking cow-piddle out of Alden Dinsmore’s pond, God love them. God must love them, because the majority are too dumb to work and too nervous to steal.”

Carter barked laughter.

“That’s what we’ve got to deal with,” Rennie said. “The mob. The cotton-picking rabble. What do they want, Carter?”

“I don’t know, boss.”

“Sure you do. They want food, Oprah, country music, and a warm bed to thump uglies in when the sun goes down. So they can make more just like them. And goodness me, here comes another member of the tribe.”

It was Chief Randolph, trudging up the hill and mopping his bright red face with a handkerchief.

Big Jim was now in full lecture mode. “Our job, Carter, is to take care of them. We may not like it, we may not always think they’re worth it, but it’s the job God gave us. Only to do it, we have to take care of ourselves first, and that’s why a good deal of fresh fruit and veg from Food City was stored in the Town Clerk’s office two days ago. You didn’t know that, did you? Well, that’s all right. You’re a step ahead of them and I’m a step ahead of you and that’s how it’s supposed to be. The lesson is simple: the Lord helps those that help themselves.”

“Yes, sir.”

Randolph arrived. He was puffing, there were circles under his eyes, and he appeared to have lost weight. Big Jim pushed the button that ran down his window.

“Step in, Chief, grab yourself some AC.” And when Randolph started for the front passenger seat, Big Jim added: “Not there, Carter’s sitting there.” He smiled. “Get in back.”

3

It wasn’t a police car that had pulled up behind the Odyssey van; it was the hospital ambulance. Dougie Twitchell was at the wheel. Ginny Tomlinson was in the passenger seat with a sleeping baby in her lap. The rear doors opened and Gina Buffalino got out. She was still in her candy-striper uniform. The girl who followed her, Harriet Bigelow, wore jeans and tee-shirt that said U.S. OLYMPIC KISSING TEAM.

“What… what…” That seemed to be all Linda was capable of. Her heart was racing, the blood pounding so hard in her head that she seemed to feel her eardrums flapping.

Twitch said, “Rusty called and told us to get out to the orchard at Black Ridge. I didn’t even know there was an orchard up there, but Ginny did, and… Linda? Honey, you’re white as a ghost.”

“I’m okay,” Linda said, and realized she was on the verge of fainting. She pinched her earlobes, a trick Rusty had taught her a long time ago. Like many of his folk-remedies (beating down wens with the spine of a heavy book was another), it worked. When she spoke again, her voice seemed both nearer and somehow realer. “He told you to come here first?”

“Yes. To get some of that.” He pointed to the lead roll sitting on the loading dock. “Just to be on the safe side is what he said. But I’ll need those snips.”

“Uncle Twitch!” Janelle cried, and dashed into his arms.

“What’s up, Tiger Lily?” He hugged her, swung her, set her down. Janelle peered into the passenger window at the baby. “What’s her name?”

“It’s a he,” Ginny said. “His name’s Little Walter.”

“Cool!”

“Jannie, get back in the van, we have to go,” Linda said.

Thurse asked, “Who’s minding the store, you guys?”

Ginny looked embarrassed. “Nobody. But Rusty said not to worry, unless there was somebody in need of constant care. Other than Little Walter, there wasn’t. So I grabbed the baby and we boogied. We might be able to go back later, Twitch says.”

“Somebody better be able to,” Thurse said gloomily. Gloom, Linda had noticed, seemed to be Thurston Marshall’s default position. “Three-quarters of the town is hoofing it out 119 to the Dome. The air quality’s bad and it’s going to be eighty-five by ten o’clock, which will be about the time the visitor buses arrive. If Rennie and his cohorts have done anything about providing shelter, I haven’t heard of it. There’s apt to be a lot of sick people in Chester’s Mill before sundown. With luck, only heatstroke and asthma, but there could be a few heart attacks as well.”

“Guys, maybe we should go back,” Gina said. “I feel like a rat deserting a sinking ship.”

“No!” Linda said so sharply that they all looked at her, even Audi. “Rusty said something bad is going to happen. It might not be today… but he said it might be. Get your lead for the ambulance windows and go. I don’t dare wait around. One of Rennie’s thugs came to see me this morning, and if he swings by the house and sees the van’s gone—”

“Go on, go,” Twitch said. “I’ll back up so you can get out. Don’t bother with Main Street, it’s already a mess.”

“Main Street past the cop-shop?” Linda almost shuddered. “No thanks. Mom’s taxi goes West Street up to Highland.”

Twitch got in behind the wheel of the ambulance and the two young nurse draftees got in back again, Gina giving Linda a final doubtful look over her shoulder.

Linda paused, looking first at the sleeping, sweaty baby, then at Ginny. “Maybe you and Twitch can go back to the hospital tonight to see how things are there. Say you were on a call way the hell and gone out in Northchester, or something. Just, whatever you do, don’t mention anything about Black Ridge.”

“No.”

Easy to say now, Linda thought. You might not find dummying up so easy if Carter Thibodeau bends you over a sink.

She pushed Audrey back, shut the slider, and got behind the wheel of the Odyssey Green.

“Let’s get out of here,” Thurse said, climbing in beside her. “I haven’t been this paranoid since my off-the-pig days.”

“Good,” she said. “Because perfect paranoia is perfect awareness.”

She backed her van around the ambulance and started up West Street.

4

“Jim,” Randolph said from the backseat of the Hummer, “I’ve been thinking about this raid.”

“Have you, now. Why don’t you give us the benefit of your thinking, Peter?”

“I’m the Chief of Police. If it comes down to a choice between crowd control at Dinsmore’s farm and leading a raid on a drug lab where there may be armed addicts guarding illegal substances… well, I know where my duty lies. Let’s just say that.”

Big Jim discovered he didn’t want to argue the point. Arguing with fools was counterproductive. Randolph had no idea what sort of weapons might be stockpiled at the radio station. In truth, neither did Big Jim himself (there was no telling what Bushey might have put on the corporate tab), but at least he could imagine the worst, a mental feat of which this uniformed gasbag seemed incapable. And if something should happen to Randolph… well, hadn’t he already decided that Carter would be a more than adequate replacement?

“All right, Pete,” he said. “Far be it for me to stand between you and your duty. You’re the new OIC, with Fred Denton as your second. That satisfy you?”

“You’re gosh-damn right it does!” Randolph puffed his chest. He looked like a fat rooster about to crow. Big Jim, although not renowned for his sense of humor, had to stifle a laugh.

“Then get down there to the PD and start putting together your crew. Town trucks, remember.”

“Correct! We strike at noon!” He shook a fist in the air.

“Go in through the woods.”

“Now, Jim, I wanted to talk to you about that. It seems a little complicated. Those woods behind the station are pretty snarly… there’ll be poison ivy… and poison oak, which is even w—”

“There’s an access road,” Big Jim said. He was reaching the end of his patience. “I want you to use it. Hit them on their blind side.”

“But—”

“A bullet in the head would be much worse than poison ivy. Nice talking to you, Pete. Glad to see you’re so…” But what was he so? Pompous? Ridiculous? Idiotic?

“So totally gung-ho,” Carter said.

“Thank you, Carter, my thought exactly. Pete, tell Henry Morrison he’s now in charge of crowd control out on 119. And use the access road. ”

“I really think—”

“Carter, get the door for him.”

5

“Oh my God,” Linda said, and swerved the van to the left. It bumped up over the curb not a hundred yards from where Main and Highland intersected. All three girls laughed at the bump, but poor little Aidan only looked scared, and grabbed the longsuffering Audrey’s head once more.

“What?” Thurse snapped. “What?”

She parked on someone’s lawn, behind a tree. It was a good-sized oak, but the van was big, too, and the oak had lost most of its listless leaves. She wanted to believe they were hidden but couldn’t.

“That’s Jim Rennie’s Hummer sitting in the middle of the goddam intersection.”

“You swore big,” Judy said. “Two quarters in the swear-jar.” Thurse craned. “Are you sure?”

“Do you think anybody else in town has a vehicle that humongous?”

“Oh Jesus,” Thurston said.

“Swear-jar!” This time Judy and Jannie said it together.

Linda felt her mouth dry up, and her tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Thibodeau was emerging from the Hummer’s passenger side, and if he looked this way…

If he sees us, I’m going to run him down, she thought. The idea brought a certain perverse calm.

Thibodeau opened the back door of the Hummer. Peter Randolph got out.

“That man is picking his seat,” Alice Appleton informed the company at large. “My mother says that means you’re going to the movies.”

Thurston Marshall burst out laughing, and Linda, who would have said she didn’t have a laugh anywhere in her, joined him. Soon they were all laughing, even Aidan, who certainly didn’t know what they were laughing about. Linda wasn’t sure she did, either.

Randolph headed down the hill on foot, still yanking at the seat of his uniform trousers. There was no reason for it to be as funny, and that made it funnier.

Not wanting to be left out, Audrey began to bark.

6

Somewhere a dog was barking.

Big Jim heard it, but didn’t bother turning around. Watching Peter Randolph stride down the hill suffused him with well-being.

“Look at him picking his pants out of his butt,” Carter remarked. “My father used to say that meant you were going to the movies.”

“The only place he’s going is out to WCIK,” Big Jim said, “and if he’s bullheaded about making a frontal assault, it’s likely to be the last place he ever goes. Let’s go down to the Town Hall and watch this carnival on TV for awhile. When that becomes tiresome, I want you to find the hippy doctor and tell him if he tries to scoot off somewhere, we’ll run him down and throw him in jail.”

“Yes, sir.” This was duty he didn’t mind. Maybe he could take another run at ex-officer Everett, this time get her pants off.

Big Jim put the Hummer in gear and rolled slowly down the hill, honking at people who didn’t get out of his way quickly enough.

As soon as he had turned into the Town Hall driveway, the Odyssey van rolled through the intersection and headed out of town. There was no foot traffic on Upper Highland Street, and Linda accelerated rapidly. Thurse Marshall began singing “The Wheels on the Bus,” and soon all the kids were singing with him.

Linda, who felt a little more terror leave her with each tenth of a mile the odometer turned, soon began to sing along.

7

Visitors Day has come to Chester’s Mill, and a mood of eager anticipation fills the people walking out Route 119 toward the Dinsmore farm, where Joe McClatchey’s demonstration went so wrong just five days ago. They are hopeful (if not exactly happy) in spite of that memory—also in spite of the heat and smelly air. The horizon beyond the Dome now appears blurred, and above the trees, the sky has darkened, due to accumulated particulate matter. It’s better when you look straight up, but still not right; the blue has a yellowish cast, like a film of cataract on an old man’s eye.

“It’s how the sky used to look over the paper mills back in the seventies, when they were running full blast,” says Henrietta Clavard—she of the not-quite-broken ass. She offers her bottle of ginger ale to Petra Searles, who’s walking beside her.

“No, thank you,” Petra says, “I have some water.”

“Is it spiked with vodka?” Henrietta inquires. “Because this is. Half and half, sweetheart; I call it a Canada Dry Rocket.”

Petra takes the bottle and downs a healthy slug. “Yow!” she says.

Henrietta nods in businesslike fashion. “Yes, ma’am. It’s not fancy, but it does brighten up a person’s day.”

Many of the pilgrims are carrying signs they plan on flashing to their visitors from the outside world (and to the cameras, of course) like the audience at a live network morning show. But network morning show signs are uniformly cheerful. Most of these are not. Some, left over from the previous Sunday’s demo, read FIGHT THE POWER and LET US OUT, DAMMIT! There are new ones that say GOVERNMENT EXPERIMENT: WHY???, END THE COVER-UP, and WE’RE HUMAN BEINGS, NOT GUINEA PIGS. Johnny Carver’s reads STOP WHATEVER YOU’RE DOING IN THE NAME OF GOD! BEFORE IT’S 2-LATE!! Frieda Morrison’s asks—ungrammatically but passionately—WHO’S CRIMES ARE WE DYING FOR? Bruce Yardley’s is the only one to strike a completely positive note. Attached to a seven-foot stick and wrapped in blue crepe paper (at the Dome it will tower over all the others), it reads HELLO MOM & DAD IN CLEVELAND! LOVE YOU GUYS!

Nine or ten signs feature scriptural references. Bonnie Morrell, wife of the town’s lumberyard owner, carries one that proclaims DON’T FORGIVE THEM, BECAUSE THEY DO KNOW WHAT THEY DO! Trina Cole’s says THE LORD IS MY SHEPHERD below a drawing of what is probably a sheep, although it’s tough to be sure.

Donnie Baribeau’s simply reads PRAY FOR US.

Marta Edmunds, who sometimes babysits for the Everetts, isn’t among the pilgrims. Her ex-husband lives in South Portland, but she doubts if he’ll show up, and what would she say if he did? You’re behind on the alimony, cocksucker? She goes out Little Bitch Road instead of down Route 119. The advantage is that she doesn’t have to walk. She takes her Acura (and runs the air-conditioning full blast). Her destination is the cozy little house where Clayton Brassey has spent his declining years. He is her great-great uncle once removed (or some damn thing), and while she isn’t quite sure of either their kinship or degree of separation, she knows he has a generator. If it’s still working, she can watch on TV. She also wants to assure herself that Uncle Clayt’s still okay—or as okay as it’s possible to be when you’re a hundred and five and your brains have turned to Quaker Oatmeal.

He’s not okay. Clayton Brassey has given up the mantel of oldest living town resident. He’s sitting in the living room in his favorite chair with his chipped enamel urinal in his lap and the Boston Post Cane leaning against the wall nearby, and he’s cold as a cracker. There’s no sign of Nell Toomey, his great-great granddaughter and chief caregiver; she’s gone out to the Dome with her brother and sister-in-law.

Marta says, “Oh, Unc—I’m sorry, but probably it was time.”

She goes into the bedroom, gets a fresh sheet from the closet, and tosses it over the old man. The result makes him look a bit like a covered piece of furniture in an abandoned house. A highboy, perhaps. Marta can hear the gennie putting away out back and thinks what the hell. She turns on the TV, tunes it to CNN, and sits on the couch. What’s unfolding on-screen almost makes her forget she’s keeping company with a corpse.

It’s an aerial shot, taken with a powerful distance lens from a helicopter hovering above the Motton flea market where the visitor buses will park. The early starters inside the Dome have already arrived. Behind them comes the haj : two-lane blacktop filled from side to side and stretching all the way back to Food City. The similarity of the town’s citizens to trekking ants is unmistakable.

Some newscaster is blabbing away, using words like wonderful and amazing. The second time he says I have never seen anything like this, Marta mutes the sound, thinking Nobody has, you dummocks. She is thinking about getting up and seeing what there might be in the kitchen to snack on (maybe that’s wrong with a corpse in the room, but she’s hungry, dammit), when the picture goes to a split screen. On the left half, another helicopter is now tracking the line of buses heading out of Castle Rock, and the super at the bottom of the screen reads VISITORS TO ARRIVE SHORTLY AFTER 10 AM.

There’s time to fix a little something, after all. Marta finds crackers, peanut butter, and—best of all—three cold bottles of Bud. She takes everything back into the living room on a tray and settles in. “Thanks, Unc,” she says.

Even with the sound off (especially with the sound off), the juxtaposed images are riveting, hypnotic. As the first beer hits her (joyously!), Marta realizes it’s like waiting for an irresistible force to meet an immovable object, and wondering if there will be an explosion when they come together.

Not far from the gathering crowd, on the knoll where he has been digging his father’s grave, Ollie Dinsmore leans on his spade and watches the crowd arrive: two hundred, then four, then eight. Eight hundred at least. He sees a woman with a baby on her back in one of those Papoose carriers, and wonders if she’s insane, bringing a kid that small out in this heat, without even a hat to protect its head. The arriving townsfolk stand in the hazy sun, watching and waiting anxiously for the buses. Ollie thinks what a slow, sad walk they are going to have once the hoopla’s over. All the way back to town in the simmering late-afternoon heat. Then he turns once more to the job at hand.

Behind the growing crowd, on both shoulders of 119, the police—a dozen mostly new officers led by Henry Morrison—park with their flashers throbbing. The last two police cars are late arriving, because Henry ordered them to fill their trunks with containers of water from the spigot at the Fire Department, where, he has discovered, the generator is not only working but looks good to go for another couple of weeks. There’s nowhere near enough water—a foolishly meager amount, in fact, given the size of the crowd—but it’s the best they can do. They’ll save it for the folks who faint in the sun. Henry hopes there won’t be many, but he knows there will be some, and he curses Jim Rennie for the lack of preparation. He knows it’s because Rennie doesn’t give a damn, and to Henry’s mind that makes the negligence worse.

He has ridden out with Pamela Chen, the only one of the new “special deputies” he completely trusts, and when he sees the size of the crowd, he tells her to call the hospital. He wants the ambulance out here, standing by. She comes back five minutes later with news Henry finds both incredible and completely unsurprising. One of the patients answered the phone at reception, Pamela says—a young woman who came in early this morning with a broken wrist. She says all the medical personnel are gone, and the ambulance is gone, too.

“Well that’s just great,” Henry says. “I hope your first aid skills are up to snuff, Pammie, because you may have to use them.”

“I can give CPR,” she says.

“Good.” He points to Joe Boxer, the Eggo-loving dentist. Boxer is wearing a blue armband and self-importantly waving people to either side of the road (most pay no attention). “And if someone gets a toothache, that self-important prick can pull it for them.”

“If they’ve got the cash to pay,” Pamela says. She has had experience of Joe Boxer, when her wisdom teeth came in. He said something about “trading one service for another” while eying her breasts in a way she didn’t care for at all.

“I think there’s a Red Sox hat in the back of my car,” Henry says. “If so, would you take it over there?” He points to the woman Ollie has already noticed, the one with the bareheaded baby. “Put it on the kid and tell that woman she’s an idiot.”

“I’ll take the hat but I won’t tell her any such thing,” Pamela says quietly. “That’s Mary Lou Costas. She’s seventeen, she’s been married for a year to a trucker who’s almost twice her age, and she’s probably hoping he comes to see her.”

Henry sighs. “She’s still an idiot, but I guess at seventeen we all are.”

And still they come. One man appears to have no water, but he is carrying a large boombox that’s blaring WCIK gospel. Two of his friends are unfurling a banner. The words on it are flanked by gigantic, clumsily drawn Q-Tips. PLEASE RES-Q US, the sign reads.

“This is going to be bad,” Henry says, and of course he is right, but he has no idea how bad.

The growing crowd waits in the sun. The ones with weak bladders wander into the underbrush west of the road to pee. Most get scratched up before finding relief. One overweight woman (Mabel Alston; she also suffers from what she calls the dia-betties) sprains her ankle and lies there hollering until a couple of men come over and get her on remaining good foot. Lennie Meechum, the town postmaster (at least until this week, when delivery of the U.S. mail was canceled for the foreseeable future), borrows a cane for her. Then he tells Henry that Mabel needs a ride back to town. Henry says he can’t spare a car. She’ll have to rest in the shade, he says.

Lennie waves his arms at both sides of the road. “In case you didn’t notice, it’s cow-pasture on one side and brambles on the other. No shade to speak of.”

Henry points to the Dinsmore dairy barn. “Plenty of shade there.”

“It’s a quarter of a mile away!” Lennie says indignantly.

It’s an eighth of a mile at most, but Henry doesn’t argue. “Put her in the front seat of my car.”

“Awful hot in the sun,” Lennie says. “She’ll need the fac’try air.”

Yes, Henry knows she’ll need the air-conditioning, which means running the motor, which means burning gasoline. There’s no shortage of that right now—assuming they can pump it out of the tanks at the Gas & Grocery, that is—and he supposes they’ll have to worry about later later.

“Key’s in the ignition,” he says. “Turn it to low cool, do you understand?”

Lennie says he does and heads back to Mabel, but Mabel’s not ready to move, although sweat is pouring down her cheeks and her face is bright red. “I didn’t go yet!” she bawls. “I got to go!”

Leo Lamoine, one of the new officers, strolls up to Henry. This is company Henry could do without; Leo has the brain of a turnip. “How’d she get out here, sport?” he asks. Leo Lamoine is the kind of man who calls everyone “sport.”

“I don’t know, but she did,” Henry says wearily. He’s getting a headache. “Round up some women to take her behind my police car and hold her up while she piddles.”

“Which ones, sport?”

“Big ones,” Henry says, and walks away before the sudden strong urge to punch Leo Lamoine in the nose can overpower him.

“What kind of police force is this?” a woman asks as she and four others escort Mabel to the rear of unit Three, where Mabel will pee while holding onto the bumper, the others standing in front of her for modesty’s sake.

Thanks to Rennie and Randolph, your fearless leaders, the unprepared kind, Henry would like to reply, but he doesn’t. He knows his mouth got him into trouble the night before, when he spoke in favor of Andrea Grinnell’s being heard. What he says is: “The only one you’ve got.”

To be fair, most people are, like Mabel’s female honor guard, more than willing to help one another. Those who have remembered to bring water share it with those who did not, and most drink sparingly. There are idiots in every crowd, though, and those in this one pig the water freely and without thought. Some folks munch cookies and crackers that will leave them thirstier later on. Mary Lou Costas’s baby begins to cry fretfully beneath the Red Sox cap, which is much too big for her. Mary Lou has brought a bottle of water, and she now begins to dab the baby’s overheated cheeks and neck with it. Soon the bottle will be empty.

Henry grabs Pamela Chen and again points to Mary Lou. “Take that bottle and fill it from what we brought,” he says. “Try not to let too many people see you, or it’ll all be gone before noon.”

She does as told, and Henry thinks, There’s one at least who might actually make a good smalltown cop, if she ever wanted the job.

Nobody bothers to watch where Pamela is going. That’s good. When the buses come, these folks will forget all about being hot and thirsty, for a while. Of course, after the visitors go… and with a long walk back to town staring them in the face…

An idea hits him. Henry scopes out his “officers” and sees a lot of dumbbells but few people he trusts; Randolph has taken most of the halfway decent ones on some sort of secret mission. Henry thinks it has to do with the drug operation Andrea accused Rennie of running, but he doesn’t care what it is. All he knows is that they aren’t here and he can’t run this errand himself.

But he knows who could, and hails him over.

“What do you want, Henry?” Bill Allnut asks.

“Have you got your keys to the school?”

Allnut, who’s been the Middle School janitor for thirty years, nods. “Right here.” The key ring hanging from his belt glitters in the hazy sun. “Always carry em, why?”

“Take unit Four,” Henry says. “Go back to town as fast as you can without running over any latecomers. Get one of the schoolbuses and bring it out here. One of the forty-four seaters.”

Allnut doesn’t look pleased. His jaw sets in a Yankee way Henry—a Yankee himself—has seen all his life, knows well, and hates. It’s a penurious look that says I gutta take care of m’self, chummy. “You can’t get all these people in one schoolbus, are you nuts?”

“Not all,” Henry says, “just the ones who won’t be able to make it back on their own.” He’s thinking of Mabel and the Corso girl’s overheated baby, but of course by three this afternoon there will be more who can’t walk all the way back to town. Or maybe at all.

Bill Allnut’s jaw sets even more firmly; now his chin is sticking out like the prow of a ship. “Nossir. My two sons and their wives are coming, they said so. They’re bringing their kids. I don’t want to miss em. And I ain’t leaving m’wife. She’s all upset.”

Henry would like to shake the man for his stupidity (and outright throttle him for his selfishness). Instead he demands Allnut’s keys and asks to be shown which one opens the motor pool. Then he tells Allnut to go back to his wife.

“I’m sorry, Henry,” Allnut says, “but I gut to see m’kids n grand-kids. I deserve to. I didn’t ask the lame, the halt, n the blind to come out here, and I shouldn’t have to pay for their stupidity.”

“Ayup, you’re a fine American, no question about that,” Henry says. “Get out of my sight.”

Allnut opens his mouth to protest, thinks better of it (perhaps it’s something he sees on Officer Morrison’s face), and shuffles away. Henry yells for Pamela, who does not protest when told she’s to go back to town, only asks where, what, and why. Henry tells her.

“Okay, but… are those schoolbuses standard shift? Because I can’t drive a standard.”

Henry shouts the question to Allnut, who is standing at the Dome with his wife Sarah, both of them eagerly scanning the empty highway on the other side of the Motton town line.

“Number Sixteen is a standard!” Allnut shouts back. “All the rest are automatics! And tell her to mind the interlock! Them buses won’t start unless the driver fastens his seatbelt!”

Henry sends Pamela on her way, telling her to hurry as much as prudence will allow. He wants that bus ASAP.

At first the people at the Dome stand, anxiously watching the empty road. Then most of them sit down. Those who have brought blankets spread them. Some shade their heads from the hazy sun with their signs. Conversation lags, and Wendy Goldstone can be heard quite clearly when she asks her friend Ellen where the crickets are—there’s no singing in the high grass. “Or have I gone deaf?” she asks.

She hasn’t. The crickets are either silent or dead.

In the WCIK studio, the airy (and comfortably cool) center space resounds to the voice of Ernie “The Barrel” Kellogg and His Delight Trio rocking out on “I Got a Telephone Call from Heaven and It Was Jesus on the Line.” The two men aren’t listening; they’re watching the TV, as transfixed by the split-screen images as Marta Edmunds (who’s on her second Bud and has forgotten all about the corpse of old Clayton Brassey under the sheet). As transfixed as everyone in America, and—yes—the world beyond.

“Look at them, Sanders,” Chef breathes.

“I am,” Andy says. He’s got CLAUDETTE on his lap. Chef has offered him a couple of hand grenades as well, but this time Andy has declined. He’s afraid he might pull the pin on one and then freeze. He saw that in a movie once. “It’s amazing, but don’t you think we better get ready for our company?”

Chef knows Andy’s right, but it’s hard to look away from the side of the screen where the copter is tracking the buses and the large video truck that leads the parade. He knows every landmark they’re passing; they are recognizable even from above. The visitors are getting close now.

We’re all getting close now, he thinks.

“Sanders!”

“What, Chef?”

Chef hands him a Sucrets tin. “The rock will not hide them; the dead tree gives no shelter, nor the cricket relief. Just which book that’s in slips my mind.”

Andy opens the tin, sees six fat home-rolled cigarettes crammed in there, and thinks: These are soldiers of ecstasy. It is the most poetic thought of his life, and makes him feel like weeping.

“Can you give me an amen, Sanders?”

“Amen.”

The Chef uses the remote control to turn off the TV. He’d like to see the buses arrive—stoned or not, paranoid or not, he’s as fond of a happy reunion story as anyone—but the bitter men might come at any time.

“Sanders!”

“Yes, Chef.”

“I’m going to get the Christian Meals on Wheels truck out of the garage and park it on the far side of the supply building. I can settle in behind it and have a clear view of the woods.” He picks up GOD’S WARRIOR. The grenades attached to it dangle and swing. “The more I think of it, the more sure I am that’s the way they’ll come. There’s an access road. They probably think I don’t know about it, but”—Chef’s red eyes gleam—“the Chef knows more than people think.”

“I know. I love you, Chef.”

“Thank you, Sanders. I love you, too. If they come from the woods, I’ll let them get out in the open and then cut them down like wheat at harvest-time. But we can’t put all our eggs in one basket. So I want you to go out front to where we were the other day. If any of them come that way—”

Andy raises CLAUDETTE.

“That’s right, Sanders. But don’t be hasty. Draw out as many as you can before you start shooting.”

“I will.” Sometimes Andy is struck by the feeling that he must be living in a dream; this is one of those times. “Like wheat at harvest-time.”

“Yea verily. But listen, because this is important, Sanders. Don’t come right away if you hear me start shooting. And I won’t come right away if I hear you start. They might guess we’re not together, but I’m wise to that trick. Can you whistle?”

Andy sticks a couple of fingers in his mouth and lets loose a piercing whistle.

“That’s good, Sanders. Amazing, in fact.”

“I learned it in grammar school.” When life was much simpler, he does not add.

“Don’t do it unless you’re in danger of being overwhelmed. Then I’ll come. And if you hear me whistle, run like hell to reinforce my position.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s have a smoke on it, Sanders, what do you say?”

Andy seconds the motion.

On Black Ridge, at the edge of the McCoy orchard, seventeen exiles from town stand against the smudged skyline like Indians in a John Ford Western. Most are staring in fascinated silence at the silent parade of people moving out Route 119. They are almost six miles distant, but the size of the crowd makes it impossible to miss.

Rusty’s the only one who’s looking at something closer, and it fills him with a relief so great it seems to sing. A silver Odyssey van is speeding along Black Ridge Road. He stops breathing as it approaches the edge of the trees and the glow-belt, which is now invisible again. There is time for him to think how horrible it would be if whoever is driving—Linda, he assumes—blacked out and the van crashed, but then it’s past the danger point. There might have been the smallest swerve, but he knows even that could have been his imagination. They’ll be here soon.

They are standing a hundred yards to the left of the box, but Joe McClatchey thinks he can feel it, just the same: a little pulse that digs at his brain each time the lavender light shines out. That might just be his mind playing tricks on him, but he doesn’t think so.

Barbie is standing next to him, with his arm around Miz Shumway. Joe taps him on the shoulder and says, “This feels bad, Mr. Barbara. All those people together. This feels awful. ”

“Yes,” Barbie says.

“They’re watching. The leatherheads. I can feel them.”

“So can I,” Barbie says.

“Me too,” Julia says, in a voice almost too low to hear.

In the conference room of the Town Hall, Big Jim and Carter Thibodeau watch silently as the split-screen image on the TV gives way to a shot at ground level. At first the image is jerky, like video of an approaching tornado or the immediate aftermath of a car-bombing. They see sky, gravel, and running feet. Someone mutters, “Come on, hurry up.”

Wolf Blitzer says, “The pool-coverage truck has arrived. They’re obviously hurrying, but I’m sure that in a moment… yes. Oh my goodness, look at that.”

The camera steadies on the hundreds of Chester’s Mill residents at the Dome just as they rise to their feet. It’s like watching a large group of open-air worshippers rising from prayer. The ones at the front are being jostled against the Dome by the ones behind; Big Jim sees flattened noses, cheeks, and lips, as if the townspeople are being pressed against a glass wall. He feels a moment of vertigo and realizes why: this is the first time he’s seeing from the outside. For the first time the enormity of it and the reality of it strike home. For the first time he is truly frightened.

Faintly, slightly deadened by the Dome, comes the sound of pistol shots.

“I think I’m hearing gunfire,” Wolf says. “Anderson Cooper, do you hear gunfire? What’s happening?”

Faintly, sounding like a call from a satellite phone originating deep in the Australian outback, Cooper comes back: “Wolf, we’re not there yet, but I’ve got a small monitor and it looks like—”

“I see it now,” Wolf says. “It appears to be—”

“It’s Morrison,” Carter says. “The guy’s got guts, I’ll say that much.”

“He’s out as of tomorrow,” Big Jim replies.

Carter looks at him, eyebrows raised. “What he said at the meeting last night?”

Big Jim points a finger at him. “I knew you were a bright boy.”

At the Dome, Henry Morrison isn’t thinking about last night’s meeting, or bravery, or even doing his duty; he’s thinking that people are going to be crushed against the Dome if he doesn’t do something, and quick. So he fires his gun into the air. Taking the cue, several other cops—Todd Wendlestat, Rance Conroy, and Joe Boxer—do the same.

The shouting voices (and the cries of pain from the people at the front who are being squashed) give way to shocked silence, and Henry uses his bullhorn: “SPREAD OUT! SPREAD OUT, GODDAMMIT! THERE’S ROOM FOR EVERYONE IF YOU JUST SPREAD THE FUCK OUT!”

The profanity has an even more sobering effect on them than the gunshots, and although the most stubborn ones remain on the highway (Bill and Sarah Allnut are prominent among them; so are Johnny and Carrie Carver), the others begin to spread along the Dome. Some head to the right, but the majority shuffle to the left, into Alden Dinsmore’s field, where the going’s easier. Henrietta and Petra are among them, weaving slightly from liberal applications of Canada Dry Rocket.

Henry holsters his weapon and tells the other officers to do the same. Wendlestat and Conroy comply, but Joe Boxer continues to hold his snubnosed.38—a Saturday-night special if Henry has ever seen one.

“Make me,” he sneers, and Henry thinks: It’s all a nightmare. I’ll wake up soon in my own bed and I’ll go to the window and stand there looking out at a beautiful crisp fall day.

Many of those who have chosen to stay away from the Dome (a disquieting number have remained in town because they’re beginning to experience respiratory problems) are able to watch on television. Thirty or forty have gravitated to Dipper’s. Tommy and Willow Anderson are at the Dome, but they’ve left the roadhouse open and the big-screen TV on. The people who gather on the honky-tonk hardwood floor to watch do so quietly, although there is some weeping. The HDTV images are crystal clear. They are heartbreaking.

Nor are they the only ones who are affected by the sight of eight hundred people lining up along the invisible barrier, some with their hands planted on what appears to be thin air. Wolf Blitzer says, “I have never seen such longing on human faces. I…” He chokes up. “I think I better let the images speak for themselves.”

He falls silent, and that’s a good thing. This scene needs no narration.

At his press conference, Cox said, Visitors will debark and walk… visitors will be allowed within two yards of the Dome, we consider that a safe distance. Nothing like that happens, of course. As soon as the doors of the buses open, people spill out in a flood, calling the names of their nearest and dearest. Some fall and are briskly trampled (one will be killed in this stampede and fourteen will be injured, half a dozen seriously). Soldiers who attempt to enforce the dead zone directly in front of the Dome are swept aside. The yellow DO NOT CROSS tapes are knocked down and disappear in the dust raised by running feet. The newcomers swarm forward and spread out on their side of the Dome, most crying and all of them calling for their wives, their husbands, their grandparents, their sons, their daughters, their fiancées. Four people have either lied about their various electronic medical devices or forgotten about them. Three of these die immediately; the fourth, who didn’t see his battery-powered hearing-aid implant on the list of forbidden devices, will linger in a coma for a week before expiring of multiple brain hemorrhages.

Little by little they sort themselves out, and the pool TV cameras see it all. They observe the townspeople and the visitors pressing their hands together, with the invisible barrier between; they watch them try to kiss; they examine men and women weeping as they look into each other’s eyes; they note the ones who faint, both inside the Dome and out, and those who fall to their knees and pray facing each other with their folded hands raised; they record the man on the outside who begins hammering his fists against the thing keeping him from his pregnant wife, hammering until his skin splits and his blood beads on thin air; they peer at the old woman trying to trace her fingers, the tips pressed white and smooth against the unseen surface between them, over her sobbing granddaughter’s forehead.

The press helicopter takes off again and hovers, sending back images of a double human snake spread over a quarter of a mile. On the Motton side, the leaves flame and dance with late October color; on the Chester’s Mill side they hang limp. Behind the towns-folk—on the road, in the fields, caught in the bushes—are dozens of discarded signs. At this moment of reunion (or almost-reunion), politics and protest have been forgotten.

Candy Crowley says: “Wolf, this is without a doubt the saddest, strangest event I’ve witnessed in all my years of reporting.”

Yet human beings are nothing if not adaptable, and little by little the excitement and the strangeness begin to wear off. The reunions merge into the actual visiting. And behind the visitors, those who have been overwhelmed—on both sides of the Dome—are being carried away. On The Mill side, there’s no Red Cross tent to drag them to. The police put them in such scant shade as the police cars allow, to wait for Pamela Chen and the schoolbus.

In the police station, the WCIK raiding party is watching with the same silent fascination as everyone else. Randolph lets them; there is a little time yet. He checks the names off on his clipboard, then motions Freddy Denton to join him on the front steps. He has expected grief from Freddy for taking over the head honcho role (Peter Randolph has been judging others by himself his whole life), but there is none. This is a far bigger deal than rousting scuzzy old drunks out of convenience stores, and Freddy is delighted to hand off the responsibility. He wouldn’t mind taking credit if things went well, but suppose they don’t? Randolph has no such qualms. One unemployed troublemaker and a mild-mannered druggist who wouldn’t say shit if it was in his cereal? What can possibly go wrong?

And Freddy discovers, as they stand on the steps Piper Libby tumbled down not so long ago, that he isn’t going to be able to duck the leadership role completely. Randolph hands him a slip of paper. On it are seven names. One is Freddy’s. The other six are Mel Sear-les, George Frederick, Marty Arsenault, Aubrey Towle, Stubby Norman, and Lauren Conree.

“You will take this party down the access road,” Randolph says. “You know the one?”

“Yep, busts off from Little Bitch this side of town. Sloppy Sam’s father laid that little piece of roa—”

“I don’t care who laid it,” Randolph says, “just drive to the end of it. At noon, you take your men through the belt of woods there. You’ll come out in back of the radio station. Noon, Freddy. That doesn’t mean a minute before or a minute after.”

“I thought we were all supposed to go in that way, Pete.”

“Plans have changed.”

“Does Big Jim know they’ve changed?”

“Big Jim is a selectman, Freddy. I’m the Police Chief. I’m also your superior, so would you kindly shut up and listen?”

“Soh-ree, ” Freddy says, and cups his hands to his ears in a way that is impudent, to say the least.

“I’ll be parked down the road that runs past the front of the station. I’ll have Stewart and Fern with me. Also Roger Killian. If Bushey and Sanders are foolish enough to engage you—if we hear shooting from behind the station, in other words—the three of us will swoop in and take them from behind. Have you got it?”

“Yeah.” It actually sounds like a pretty good plan to Freddy.

“All right, let’s synchronize watches.”

“Uh… sorry?”

Randolph sighs. “We have to make sure they’re the same, so noon comes at the same time for both of us.”

Freddy still looks puzzled, but he complies.

From inside the station, someone—it sounds like Stubby—shouts: “Whoop, another one bites the dust! The fainters’re stacked up behind them cruisers like cordwood!” This is greeted by laughter and applause. They are pumped up, excited to have pulled what Melvin Searles calls “possible shootin duty.”

“We saddle up at eleven fifteen,” Randolph tells Freddy. “That gives us almost forty-five minutes to watch the show on TV.”

“Want popcorn?” Freddy asks. “We got a whole mess of it in the cupboard over the microwave.”

“Might as well, I guess.”

Out at the Dome, Henry Morrison goes to his car and helps himself to a cool drink. His uniform is soaked through with sweat and he can’t recall ever feeling so tired (he thinks a lot of that is down to bad air—he can’t seem to completely catch his breath), but on the whole he is satisfied with himself and his men. They have managed to avoid a mass crushing at the Dome, nobody has died on this side—yet—and folks are settling down. Half a dozen TV cameramen race to and fro on the Motton side, recording as many heartwarming reunion vignettes as possible. Henry knows it’s an invasion of privacy, but he supposes America and the world beyond may have a right to see this. And on the whole, people don’t seem to mind. Some even like it; they are getting their fifteen minutes. Henry has time to search for his own mother and father, although he’s not surprised when he doesn’t see them; they live all the way to hell and gone up in Derry, and they’re getting on in years now. He doubts if they even put their names in the visitor lottery.

A new helicopter is beating in from the west, and although Henry doesn’t know it, Colonel James Cox is inside. Cox is also not entirely displeased with the way Visitors Day has gone so far. He has been told no one on the Chester’s Mill side seems to be preparing for a press conference, but this doesn’t surprise or discommode him. Based on the extensive files he has been accumulating, he would have been more surprised if Rennie had put in an appearance. Cox has saluted a lot of men over the years, and he can smell a bully-pulpit coward a mile away.

Then Cox sees the long line of visitors and the trapped townspeople facing them. The sight drives James Rennie from his mind. “Isn’t that the damndest thing,” he murmurs. “Isn’t that just the damndest thing anyone ever saw.”

On the Dome side, Special Deputy Toby Manning shouts: “Here comes the bus!” Although the civilians barely notice—they are either raptly engaged with their relatives or still searching for them—the cops raise a cheer.

Henry walks to the back of his cruiser, and sure enough, a big yellow schoolbus is just passing Jim Rennie’s Used Cars. Pamela Chen may not weigh more than a hundred and five pounds soaking wet, but she’s come through bigtime, and with a big bus.

Henry checks his watch and sees that it’s twenty minutes past eleven. We’re going to get through this, he thinks. We’re going to get through this just fine.

On Main Street, three big orange trucks are rolling up Town Common Hill. In the third one, Peter Randolph is crammed in with Stew, Fern, and Roger (redolent of chickens). As they head out 119 northbound toward Little Bitch Road and the radio station, Randolph is struck by a thought, and barely restrains himself from smacking his palm against his forehead.

They have plenty of firepower, but they have forgotten the helmets and Kevlar vests.

Go back and get them? If they do that, they won’t be in position until quarter past twelve, maybe even later. And the vests would almost certainly turn out to be a needless precaution, anyway. It’s eleven against two, and the two are probably stoned out of their gourds.

Really, it should be a tit.

8

Andy Sanders was stationed behind the same oak he’d used for cover the first time the bitter men came. Although he hadn’t taken any grenades, he had six ammo clips stuck in the front of his belt, plus four more poking into the small of his back. There were another two dozen in the wooden crate at his feet. Enough to hold off an army… although he supposed if Big Jim actually sent an army, they’d take him out in short order. After all, he was just a pill-roller.

One part of him couldn’t believe he was doing this, but another part—an aspect of his character he might never have suspected without the meth—was grimly delighted. Outraged, too. The Big Jims of the world didn’t get to have everything, nor did they get to take everything away. There would be no negotiation this time, no politics, no backing down. He would stand with his friend. His soul-mate. Andy understood that his state of mind was nihilistic, but that was all right. He had spent his life counting the cost, and stoned don’t-give-a-shit-itis was a delirious change for the better.

He heard trucks approaching and checked his watch. It had stopped. He looked up at the sky, and judged by the position of the yellow-white blear that used to be the sun that it must be close to noon.

He listened to the swelling sound of diesel engines, and when the sound diverged, Andy knew his compadre had smelled out the play—smelled it out as surely as any wise old defensive lineman on a Sunday day afternoon. Some of them were swinging around toward the back of the station to the access road there.

Andy took one more deep drag of his current fry-daddy, held his breath as long as he could, then huffed it out. Regretfully, he dropped the roach and stepped on it. He didn’t want any smoke (no matter how deliciously clarifying) to give away his position.

I love you, Chef, Andy Sanders thought, and pushed off the safety of his Kalashnikov.

9

There was a light chain across the rutted access road. Freddy, behind the wheel of the lead truck, did not hesitate, simply hit it and snapped it with the grill. The lead truck and the one behind it (piloted by Mel Searles) headed into the woods.

Stewart Bowie was behind the wheel of the third truck. He stopped in the middle of Little Bitch Road, pointed at the WCIK radio tower, then looked at Randolph, who was jammed against the door with his HK semiauto between his knees.

“Go another half a mile,” Randolph instructed, “then pull up and kill the engine.” It was just eleven thirty-five. Excellent. Plenty of time.

“What’s the plan?” Fern asked.

“The plan is we wait until noon. When we hear shooting, we roll at once, and take them from behind.”

“These trucks is pretty noisy,” Roger Killian said. “What if those guys hear em comin? We’ll lose that whatdoyoucallit, elephant of surprise.”

“They won’t hear us,” Randolph said. “They’ll be sitting in the station, watching television in air-conditioned comfort. They’re not going to know what hit them.”

“Shouldn’t we have gotten some bulletproof vests or something?” Stewart asked.

“Why carry all that weight on such a hot day? Stop worrying. Ole Cheech and Chong there are going to be in hell before they even know they’re dead.”

10

Shortly before twelve o’clock, Julia looked around and saw that Barbie was gone. When she walked back to the farmhouse, he was loading canned goods into the rear of the Sweetbriar Rose van. He’d put several bags in the stolen phone company van as well.

“What are you doing? We just unloaded those last night.”

Barbie turned a strained, unsmiling face toward her. “I know, and I think we were wrong to do it. I don’t know if it’s being close to the box or not, but all at once I seem to feel that magnifying glass Rusty talked about right over my head, and pretty soon the sun’s going to come out and start shining through it. I hope I’m wrong.”

She studied him. “Is there more stuff? I’ll help you if there is. We can always put it back later.”

“Yes,” Barbie said, and gave her a strained grin. “We can always put it back later.”

11

At the end of the access road there was a small clearing with a long-abandoned house in it. Here the two orange trucks pulled up, and the raiding party disembarked. Teams of two swung down long, heavy duffle bags that had been stenciled with the words HOME-LAND SECURITY. On one of the bags some wit had added REMEMBER THE ALAMO in Magic Marker. Inside were more HK semiautos, two Mossberg pump shotguns with eight-round capacity, and ammo, ammo, ammo.

“Uh, Fred?” It was Stubby Norman. “Shouldn’t we have vests, or somethin?”

“We’re hitting them from behind, Stubby. Don’t worry about it.”

Freddy hoped he sounded better than he felt. He had a gutful of butterflies.

“Do we give em a chance to surrender?” Mel asked. “I mean, Mr. Sanders being a selectman and all?”

Freddy had thought about this. He’d also thought about the Honor Wall, where photographs of the three Chester’s Mill cops who had died in the line of duty since World War II were hung. He had no urge to have his own photo on that wall, and since Chief Randolph hadn’t given him specific orders on this subject, he felt free to issue his own.

“If their hands are up, they live,” he said. “If they’re unarmed, they live. Anything else, they fucking die. Anyone got a problem with that?”

No one did. It was eleven fifty-six. Almost showtime.

He surveyed his men (plus Lauren Conree, so hard-faced and small-busted she almost could have passed for one), pulled in a deep breath, and said: “Follow me. Single-file. We’ll stop at the edge of the woods and scope things out.”

Randolph’s concerns about poison ivy and poison oak proved groundless, and the trees were spaced widely enough to make the going quite easy, even loaded down with ordnance. Freddy thought his little force moved through the clumps of juniper they couldn’t avoid with admirable stealth and silence. He was starting to feel that this was going to be all right. In fact, he was almost looking forward to it. Now that they were actually on the move, the butterflies in his stomach had flown away.

Easy does it, he thought. Easy and quiet. Then, bang! They’ll never know what hit em.

12

Chef, crouched behind the blue panel truck parked in the high grass at the rear of the supply building, heard them almost as soon as they left the clearing where the old Verdreaux homestead was gradually sinking back into the earth. To his drug-jacked ears and Condition Red brain, they sounded like a herd of buffalo looking for the nearest waterhole.

He scurried to the front of the truck and knelt with his gun braced on the bumper. The grenades which had been hung from the barrel of GOD’S WARRIOR now lay on the ground behind him. Sweat gleamed on his skinny, pimple-studded back. The door opener was clipped to the waistband of his RIBBIT pajamas.

Be patient, he counseled himself. You don’t know how many there are. Let them get out into the open before you start shooting, then mow them down in a hurry.

He scattered several extra clips for GOD’S WARRIOR in front of him and waited, hoping to Christ Andy wouldn’t have to whistle. Hoping he wouldn’t either. It was possible they could still get out of this and live to fight another day.

13

Freddy Denton reached the edge of the woods, pushed a fir bough aside with the barrel of his rifle, and peered out. He saw an overgrown hayfield with the radio tower in the middle of it, emitting a low hum he seemed to feel in the fillings of his teeth. A fence posted with signs reading HIGH VOLTAGE surrounded it. To the far left of his position was the one-story brick studio building. In between was a big red barn. He assumed the barn was for storage. Or making drugs. Or both.

Marty Arsenault eased in beside him. Circles of sweat darkened his uniform shirt. His eyes looked terrified. “What’s that truck doing there?” he asked, pointing with the barrel of his gun.

“That’s the Meals On Wheels truck,” Freddy said. “For shut-ins and such. Haven’t you seen that around town?”

“Seen it and helped load it,” Marty said. “I gave up the Catholics for Holy Redeemer last year. How come it’s not inside the barn?” He said barn the Yankee way, making it sound like the cry of a discontented sheep.

“How do I know and why would I care?” Freddy asked. “They’re in the studio.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s where the TV is, and the big show out at the Dome is on all the channels.”

Marty raised his HK. “Let me put a few rounds in that truck just to be sure. It could be booby-trapped. Or they could be inside it.”

Freddy pushed the barrel down. “Jesus-please-us, are you crazy? They don’t know we’re here and you just want to give it away? Did your mother have any kids that lived?”

“Fuck you,” Marty said. He considered. “And fuck your mother, too.”

Freddy looked back over his shoulder. “Come on, you guys. We’ll cut across the field to the studio. Look through the back windows and make sure of their positions.” He grinned. “Smooth sailing.”

Aubrey Towle, a man of few words, said: “We’ll see.”

14

In the truck that had remained on Little Bitch Road, Fern Bowie said, “I don’t hear nothing.”

“You will,” Randolph said. “Just wait.”

It was twelve oh-two.

15

Chef watched as the bitter men broke cover and began moving diagonally across the field toward the rear of the studio. Three were wearing actual police uniforms; the other four had on blue shirts that Chef guessed were supposed to be uniforms. He recognized Lauren Conree (an old customer from his pot-peddling days) and Stubby Norman, the local junkman. He also recognized Mel Searles, another old customer and a friend of Junior’s. Also a friend of the late Frank DeLesseps, which probably meant he was one of the guys who had raped Sammy. Well, he wouldn’t be raping anyone else—not after today.

Seven. On this side, at least. On Sanders’s, who knew?

He waited for more, and when no more came, he got to his feet, planted his elbows on the hood of the panel truck, and shouted: “BEHOLD, THE DAY OF THE LORD COMETH, CRUEL BOTH WITH WRATH AND FIERCE ANGER, TO LAY THE LAND DESOLATE!”

Their heads snapped around, but for a moment they froze, neither trying to raise their weapons nor scatter. They weren’t cops at all, Chef saw; just birds on the ground too dumb to fly.

“AND HE SHALL DESTROY THE SINNERS OUT OF IT! ISAIAH THIRTEEN! SELAH, MOTHERFUCKERS!”

With this homily and call to judgment, Chef opened fire, raking them from left to right. Two of the uniformed cops and Stubby Norman flew backward like broken dolls, painting the high trashgrass with their blood. The paralysis of the survivors broke. Two turned and fled toward the woods. Conree and the last of the uniformed cops booked for the studio. Chef tracked them and opened fire again. The Kalashnikov burped a brief burst, and then the clip was empty.

Conree clapped her hand to the back of her neck as if stung, went facedown into the grass, kicked twice, and was still. The other one—a bald guy—made it to the rear of the studio. Chef didn’t care too much about the pair who’d run for the woods, but he didn’t want to let Baldy get away. If Baldy got around the corner of the building, he was apt to see Sanders, and might shoot him in the back.

Chef grabbed a fresh clip and rammed it home with the heel of his hand.

16

Frederick Howard Denton, aka Baldy, wasn’t thinking about anything when he reached the back of the WCIK studio. He had seen the Conree girl go down with her throat blown out, and that was the end of rational consideration. All he knew now was that he didn’t want his picture on the Honor Wall. He had to get under cover, and that meant inside. There was a door. Behind it, some gospel group was singing “We’ll Join Hands Around the Throne.”

Freddy grabbed the knob. It refused to turn.

Locked.

He dropped his gun, raised the hand which had been holding it, and screamed: “I surrender! Don’t shoot, I sur—”

Three heavy blows boxed him low in the back. He saw a splash of red hit the door and had time to think, We should have remembered the body armor. Then he crumpled, still holding onto the knob with one hand as the world rushed away from him. Everything he was and everything he’d ever known diminished to a single burning-bright point of light. Then it went out. His hand slipped off the knob. He died on his knees, leaning against the door.

17

Melvin Searles didn’t think either. Mel had seen Marty Arsenault, George Frederick, and Stubby Norman cut down in front of him, he had felt at least one bullet whicker right in front of his motherfucking eyes, and those kinds of things were not conducive to thought.

Mel just ran.

He blundered back through the trees, oblivious to the branches that whipped against his face, falling once and getting back up, finally bursting into the clearing where the trucks were. Firing one up and driving it away would have been the most reasonable course of action, but Mel and reason had parted company. He probably would have sprinted straight down the access road to Little Bitch if the other survivor of the backdoor raiding-party hadn’t grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him against the trunk of a large pine.

It was Aubrey Towle, the bookstore owner’s brother. He was a big, shambling, pale-eyed man who sometimes helped his brother Ray stocking the shelves but rarely said much. There were people in town who thought Aubrey was simpleminded, but he didn’t look simple now. Nor did he look panicked.

“I’m going back and get that sonofawhore,” he informed Mel.

“Good luck to you, buddy,” Mel said. He pushed away from the tree and turned toward the access road again.

Aubrey Towle shoved him back harder this time. He brushed his hair out of his eyes, then pointed his Heckler & Koch rifle at Mel’s midsection. “You ain’t going anywhere.”

From behind them came another rattle of gunfire. And screams.

“Do you hear that?” Mel asked. “You want to go back into that?”

Aubrey looked at him patiently. “You don’t have to come with me, but you’re going to cover me. Do you understand that? You do that or I’ll shoot you myself.”

18

Chief Randolph’s face split in a taut grin. “The enemy is engaged at the rear of our objective. All according to plan. Roll, Stewart. Straight up the driveway. We’ll disembark and cut through the studio.”

“What if they’re in the barn?” Stewart asked.

“Then we’ll still be able to hit them from behind. Now roll! Before we miss it!”

Stewart Bowie rolled.

19

Andy heard the gunfire from behind the storage building, but Chef didn’t whistle and so he stayed where he was, snug behind his tree. He hoped everything was going all right back there, because now he had his own problems: a town truck preparing to turn into the station’s driveway.

Andy circled his tree as it came, always keeping the oak between him and the truck. It stopped. The doors opened and four men got out. Andy was pretty sure that three of them were the ones who’d come out here before… and about Mr. Chicken there was no doubt. Andy would have recognized those beshitted green gumrubber boots anywhere. Bitter men. Andy had no intention of letting them blindside The Chef.

He emerged from behind the tree and began walking straight up the middle of the driveway, CLAUDETTE held across his chest in the port arms position. His feet crunched on the gravel, but there was plenty of sound-cover: Stewart had left the truck running and loud gospel music was pouring from the studio.

He raised the Kalashnikov, but made himself wait. Let them bunch together, if they’re going to. As they approached the front door of the studio, they did indeed bunch together.

“Well, it’s Mr. Chicken and all his friends,” Andy said in a passable John Wayne drawl. “How you doing, boys?”

They started to turn. For you, Chef, Andy thought, and opened fire.

He killed both Bowie brothers and Mr. Chicken with his first fusillade. Randolph he only winged. Andy popped the clip as Chef Bushey had taught him, grabbed another from the waistband of his pants, and slammed it home. Chief Randolph was crawling toward the door of the studio with blood pouring down his right arm and leg. He looked back over his shoulder, his peering eyes huge and bright in his sweaty face.

“Please, Andy,” he whispered. “Our orders weren’t to hurt you, only to bring you back so you could work with Jim.”

“Right,” Andy said, and actually laughed. “Don’t bullshit a bull-shitter. You were going to take all this—”

A long, stuttering blast of gunfire erupted behind the studio. Chef might be in trouble, might need him. Andy raised CLAUDETTE.

“Please don’t kill me!” Randolph screamed. He put a hand over his face.

“Just think about the roast beef dinner you’ll be eating with Jesus,” Andy said. “Why, three seconds from now you’ll be spreading your napkin.”

The sustained blast from the Kalashnikov rolled Randolph almost all the way to the studio door. Then Andy ran for the rear of the building, ejecting the partially used clip and putting in a full one as he went.

From the field came a sharp, piercing whistle.

“I’m coming, Chef!” Andy shouted. “Hold on, I’m coming!”

Something exploded.

20

“You cover me,” Aubrey said grimly from the edge of the woods. He had taken off his shirt, torn it in two, and cinched half of it around his forehead, apparently going for the Rambo look. “And if you’re thinking about scragging me, you better get it right the first time, because if you don’t, I’ll come back here and cut your goddam throat.”

“I’ll cover you,” Mel promised. And he would. At least from here at the edge of the woods, he’d be safe.

Probably.

“That crazy tweeker is not getting away with this,” Aubrey said. He was breathing rapidly, psyching himself up. “That loser. That druggie fuck.” And, raising his voice: “I’m coming for you, you nutbag druggie fuck!”

Chef had emerged from behind the Meals On Wheels truck to look at his kill. He redirected his attention to the woods just as Aubrey Towle burst from them, screaming at the top of his lungs.

Then Mel began to fire, and although the burst was nowhere near him, Chef crouched instinctively. When he did, the garage door opener tumbled from the sagging waistband of his pajama pants and into the grass. He bent to get it, and that was when Aubrey opened up with his own automatic rifle. Bulletholes stitched a crazy course up the side of the Meals On Wheels truck, making hollow punching sounds in the metal and smashing the passenger-side window to glistening crumbs. A bullet whined off the strip of metal at the side of the windshield.

Chef abandoned the garage door opener and returned fire. But the element of surprise was gone, and Aubrey Towle was no sitting duck. He was weaving from side to side and heading toward the radio tower. It wouldn’t provide cover, but it would clear Searles’s line of fire.

Aubrey’s clip ran dry, but the last bullet in it grooved the left side of Chef’s head. Blood flew and a clump of hair fell onto one of Chef’s thin shoulders, where it stuck in his sweat. Chef plopped down on his ass, momentarily lost his hold on GOD’S WARRIOR, then regained it. He didn’t think he was seriously wounded, but it was high time for Sanders to come if he could still do so. Chef Bushey stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled.

Aubrey Towle reached the fence surrounding the radio tower just as Mel opened fire again from the edge of the woods. Mel’s target this time was the rear end of the Meals On Wheels truck. The slugs tore it open in metal hooks and flowers. The gas tank exploded and the truck’s rear half rose on a cushion of flame.

Chef felt monstrous heat bake against his back and had time to think of the grenades. Would they blow? He saw the man by the radio tower aiming at him, and suddenly there was a clear choice: shoot back or grab the door opener. He chose the door opener, and as his hand closed on it, the air around him was suddenly full of unseen buzzing bees. One stung his shoulder; another punched into his side and rearranged his intestines. Chef Bushey tumbled and rolled over, once more losing his grip on the door opener. He reached for it and another swarm of bees filled the air around him. He crawled into the high grass, leaving the door opener where it was, now only hoping for Sanders. The man from the radio-tower—One brave bitter man among seven, Chef thought, yea, verily—was walking toward him. GOD’S WARRIOR was very heavy now, his whole body was heavy, but Chef managed to get to his knees and pull the trigger.

Nothing happened.

Either the clip was empty or it had jammed.

“You numb fuck,” Aubrey Towle said. “You nutbag tweeker. Tweek on this, fuckhea—”

“Claudette!” Sanders screamed.

Towle wheeled around, but he was too late. There was a short, hard rattle of gunfire, and four 7.62 Chinese slugs tore most of Aubrey’s head from his shoulders.

“Chef!” Andy screamed, and ran to where his friend knelt in the grass, blood streaming from his shoulder, side, and temple. The entire left side of Chef’s face was red and wet. “Chef! Chef!” He fell to his knees and hugged Chef. Neither of them saw Mel Searles, the last man standing, emerge from the woods and begin to walk cautiously toward them.

“Get the trigger,” Chef whispered.

“What?” Andy looked down at CLAUDETTE’s trigger for a moment, but that obviously wasn’t what Chef meant.

“Door opener,” Chef whispered. His left eye was drowning in blood; the other regarded Andy with bright and lucid intensity. “Door opener, Sanders.”

Andy saw the garage door opener lying in the grass. He picked it up and handed it to the Chef. Chef wrapped his hand around it.

“You… too… Sanders.”

Andy curled his hand over Chef’s hand. “I love you, Chef,” he said, and kissed Chef Bushey’s dry, blood-freckled lips.

“Love… you… too… Sanders.”

“Hey, fags!” Mel cried with a kind of delirious joviality. He was standing just ten yards away. “Get a room! No, wait, I got a better idea! Get a room in hell! ”

“Now… Sanders… now. ”

Mel opened fire.

Andy and Chef were driven sideways by the bullets, but before they were torn asunder, their joined hands pushed the white button marked OPEN.

The explosion was white and all-encompassing.

21

On the edge of the orchard, the Chester’s Mill exiles are having a picnic lunch when gunfire breaks out—not from 119, where the visiting continues, but to the southwest.

“That’s out on Little Bitch Road,” Piper says. “God, I wish we had some binoculars.”

But they need none to see the yellow bloom that opens when the Meals On Wheels truck explodes. Twitch is eating deviled chicken with a plastic spoon. “I dunno what’s going on down there, but that’s the radio station for sure,” he says.

Rusty grabs Barbie’s shoulder. “That’s where the propane is! They stockpiled it to make drugs! That’s where the propane is! ”

Barbie has one moment of clear, premonitory terror; one moment when the worst is still ahead. Then, four miles distant, a brilliant white spark flicks the hazy sky, like a stroke of lightning that goes up instead of down. A moment later, a titanic explosion hammers a hole straight through the center of the day. A red ball of fire blots out first the WCIK tower, then the trees behind it, and then the whole horizon as it spreads north and south.

The people on Black Ridge scream but are unable to hear themselves over the vast, grinding, building roar as eighty pounds of plastic explosive and ten thousand gallons of propane undergo an explosive change. They cover their eyes and stagger backward, stepping on their sandwiches and spilling their drinks. Thurston snatches Alice and Aidan into his arms and for a moment Barbie sees his face against the blackening sky—the long and terrified face of a man observing the literal Gates of Hell swing open, and the ocean of fire waiting just beyond.

“We have to go back to the farmhouse!” Barbie yells. Julia is clinging to him, crying. Beyond her is Joe McClatchey, trying to help his weeping mother to her feet. These people are going nowhere, at least for a while.

To the southwest, where most of Little Bitch Road will within the next three minutes cease to exist, the yellowy-blue sky is turning black and Barbie has time to think, with perfect calm: Now we’re under the magnifying glass.

The blast shatters every window in the mostly deserted downtown, sends shutters soaring, knocks telephone poles askew, rips doors from their hinges, flattens mailboxes. Up and down Main Street, car alarms go off. To Big Jim Rennie and Carter Thibodeau, it feels as if the conference room has been struck by an earthquake.

The TV is still on. Wolf Blitzer is asking, in tones of real alarm, “What’s that? Anderson Cooper? Candy Crowley? Chad Myers? Soledad O’Brien? Does anybody know what the hell that was? What’s going on?”

At the Dome, America’s newest TV stars are looking around, showing the cameras only their backs as they shield their eyes and stare toward town. One camera pans up briefly, for a moment disclosing a monstrous column of black smoke and swirling debris on the horizon.

Carter gets to his feet. Big Jim grabs his wrist. “One quick look,” Big Jim says. “To see how bad it is. Then get your butt back down here. We may have to go to the fallout shelter.”

“Okay.”

Carter races up the stairs. Broken glass from the mostly vaporized front doors crunches beneath his boots as he runs down the hall. What he sees when he comes out on the steps is so beyond anything he has ever imagined that it tumbles him back into childhood again and for a moment he freezes where he is, thinking It’s like the biggest, awfulest thunderstorm anyone ever saw, only worse.

The sky to the west is a red-orange inferno surrounded by billowing clouds of deepest ebony. The air is already stenchy with exploded LP. The sound is like the roar of a dozen steel mills running at full blast.

Directly above him, the sky is dark with fleeing birds.

The sight of them—birds with nowhere to go—is what breaks Carter’s paralysis. That, and the rising wind he feels against his face. There has been no wind in Chester’s Mill for six days, and this one is both hot and vile, stinking of gas and vaporized wood.

A huge smashed oak lands in Main Street, pulling down snarls of dead electrical cable.

Carter flees back down the corridor. Big Jim is standing at the head of the stairs, his heavy face pale and frightened and, for once, irresolute.

“Downstairs,” Carter says. “Fallout shelter. It’s coming. The fire’s coming. And when it gets here, it’s going to eat this town alive.”

Big Jim groans. “What did those idiots do?”

Carter doesn’t care. Whatever they did, it’s done. If they don’t move quickly, they will be done, too. “Is there air-purifying machinery down there, boss?”

“Yes.”

“Hooked to the gennie?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Thank Christ for that. Maybe we’ve got a chance.”

Helping Big Jim down the stairs to make him move more quickly, Carter only hopes they don’t cook alive down there.

The doors of Dipper’s roadhouse have been chocked open, but the force of the explosion breaks the chocks and sweeps the doors shut. The glass coughs inward and several of the people standing at the back of the dance floor are cut. Henry Morrison’s brother Whit suffers a slashed jugular.

The crowd stampedes toward the doors, the big-screen TV completely forgotten. They trample poor Whit Morrison as he lies dying in a spreading pool of his own blood. They hit the doors, and more people are lacerated as they push through the jagged openings.

“Birds!” someone cries. “Ah, God, look at all them birds!”

But most of them look west instead of up—west, where burning doom is rolling down upon them below a sky that is now midnight-black and full of poison air.

Those who can run take a cue from the birds and begin trotting, jogging, or flat-out galloping straight down the middle of Route 117. Several others throw themselves into their cars, and there are multiple fender-benders in the gravel parking lot where, once upon an antique time, Dale Barbara took a beating. Velma Winter gets into her old Datsun pickup and, after avoiding the demolition derby in the parking lot, discovers her right-of-way to the road is blocked by fleeing pedestrians. She looks right—at the firestorm billowing toward them like some great burning dress, eating the woods between Little Bitch and downtown—and drives blindly ahead in spite of the people in her way. She strikes Carla Venziano, who is fleeing with her infant in her arms. Velma feels the truck jounce as it passes over their bodies, and resolutely blocks her ears to Carla’s shrieks as her back is broken and baby Steven is crushed to death beneath her. All Velma knows is that she has to get out of here. Somehow, she has to get out.

At the Dome, the reunions have been ended by an apocalyptic party-crasher. Those on the inside have something more important than relatives to occupy them now: the giant mushroom cloud that’s growing to the northwest of their position, rising on a muscle of fire already almost a mile high. The first feather of wind—the wind that has sent Carter and Big Jim fleeing for the fallout shelter—strikes them, and they cringe against the Dome, mostly ignoring the people behind them. In any case, the people behind them are retreating. They’re lucky; they can.

Henrietta Clavard feels a cold hand wrap around hers. She turns and sees Petra Searles. Petra’s hair has come loose from the clips that were holding it and hangs against her cheeks.

“Got any more of that joy-juice?” Petra asks, and manages a ghastly let’s-party smile.

“Sorry, all out,” Henrietta says.

“Well—maybe it doesn’t matter.”

“Hang onto me, honey,” Henrietta says. “Just hang onto me. We’re going to be okay.”

But when Petra looks into the old woman’s eyes, she sees no belief and no hope. The party’s almost over.

Look, now. Look and see. Eight hundred people are crammed against the Dome, their heads tilted up and their eyes wide, watching as their inevitable end rushes toward them.

Here are Johnny and Carrie Carver, and Bruce Yardley, who worked at Food City. Here is Tabby Morrell, who owns a lumber-yard soon to be reduced to swirling ash, and his wife, Bonnie; Toby Manning, who clerked at the department store; Trina Cole and Donnie Baribeau; Wendy Goldstone with her friend and fellow teacher Ellen Vanedestine; Bill Allnut, who wouldn’t go get the bus, and his wife, Sarah, who is screaming for Jesus to save her as she watches the oncoming fire. Here are Todd Wendlestat and Manuel Ortega with their faces raised dumbly to the west, where the world is disappearing in smoke. Tommy and Willow Anderson, who will never book another band from Boston into their roadhouse. See them all, a whole town with its back to an invisible wall.

Behind them, the visitors go from backing up to retreat, and from retreat into full flight. They ignore the buses and pound straight down the highway toward Motton. A few soldiers hold position, but most throw their guns down, tear after the crowd, and look back no more than Lot looked back at Sodom.

Cox doesn’t flee. Cox approaches the Dome and shouts: “You! Officer in charge!”

Henry Morrison turns, walks to the Colonel’s position, and braces his hands on a hard and mystic surface he can’t see. Breathing has become difficult; bad wind pushed by the firestorm hits the Dome, swirls, then backdrafts toward the hungry thing that’s coming: a black wolf with red eyes. Here, on the Motton town line, is the lambfold where it will feed.

“Help us,” Henry says.

Cox looks at the firestorm and estimates it will reach the crowd’s current position in no more than fifteen minutes, perhaps as few as three. It’s not a fire or an explosion; in this closed and already polluted environment, it is a cataclysm.

“Sir, I cannot,” he says.

Before Henry can reply, Joe Boxer grabs his arm. He is gibbering.

“Quit it, Joe,” Henry says. “There’s nowhere to run and nothing to do but pray.”

But Joe Boxer does not pray. He is still holding his stupid little hockshop pistol, and after a final crazed look at the oncoming inferno, he puts the gun to his temple like a man playing Russian roulette. Henry makes a grab for it, but is too late. Boxer pulls the trigger. Nor does he die at once, although a gout of blood flies from the side of his head. He staggers away, waving the stupid little pistol like a handkerchief, screaming. Then he falls to his knees, throws his hands up once to the darkening sky like a man in the grip of a godhead revelation, and collapses face-first on the broken white line of the highway.

Henry turns his stunned face back to Colonel Cox, who is simultaneously three feet and a million miles away. “I’m so sorry, my friend,” Cox says.

Pamela Chen stumbles up. “The bus!” she screams to Henry over the building roar. “We have to take the bus and drive straight through it! It’s our only chance!”

Henry knows this is no chance at all, but he nods, gives Cox a final look (Cox will never forget the cop’s hellish, despairing eyes), takes Pammie Chen’s hand, and follows her to Bus 19 as the smoky blackness races toward them.

The fire reaches downtown and explodes along Main Street like a blowtorch in a pipe. The Peace Bridge is vaporized. Big Jim and Carter cringe in the fallout shelter as the Town Hall implodes above them. The PD sucks its brick walls in, then spews them high into the sky. The statue of Lucien Calvert is uprooted from its base in War Memorial Plaza. Lucien flies into the burning black with his rifle bravely raised. On the library lawn, the Halloween dummy with the jolly top hat and the garden trowel hands goes up in a sheet of flame. A great whooshing noise—it sounds like God’s own vacuum cleaner—has arisen as the oxygen-hungry fire sucks in good air to fill its single poisonous lung. The buildings along Main Street explode one after another, tossing their boards and goods and shingles and glass into the air like confetti on New Year’s Eve: the abandoned moviehouse, Sanders Hometown Drug, Burpee’s Department Store, the Gas & Grocery, the bookstore, the flower shop, the barber-shop. In the funeral parlor, the most recent additions to the roll of the dead begin roasting in their metal lockers like chickens in a Dutch oven. The fire finishes its triumphant run down Main Street by engulfing Food City, then rolls onward toward Dipper’s, where those still in the parking lot scream and clutch at each other. Their last sight on earth is of a firewall a hundred yards high running eagerly to meet them, like Albion to his beloved. Now the flames are rolling down the main roads, boiling their tar into soup. At the same time it is spreading into Eastchester, snacking on both yuppie homes and the few yuppies cowering inside. Michela Burpee will soon run for her cellar, but too late; her kitchen will explode around her and her last sight on earth will be her Amana refrigerator, melting.

The soldiers standing by the Tarker-Chester border—closest to the origin of this catastrophe—stumble backward as the fire beats impotent fists against the Dome, turning it black. The soldiers feel the heat bake through, raising the temperature twenty degrees in seconds, crisping the leaves on the nearest trees. One of them will later say, “It was like standing outside a glass ball with a nuclear explosion inside of it.”

Now the people cowering against the Dome begin to be bombarded by dead and dying birds as the fleeing sparrows, robins, grackles, crows, gulls, and even geese slam against the Dome they so quickly learned to avoid. And across Dinsmore’s field comes a stampede of the town’s dogs and cats. There are also skunks, woodchucks, porcupines. Deer leap among them, and several clumsily galloping moose, and of course Alden Dinsmore’s cattle, eyes rolling and mooing their distress. When they reach the Dome they crash against it. The lucky animals die. The unlucky ones lie sprawled on pincushions of broken bones, barking and squealing and miaowing and bellowing.

Ollie Dinsmore sees Dolly, the beautiful Brown Swiss who once won him a 4-H blue ribbon (his mother named her, thought Ollie and Dolly was just so cute). Dolly gallops heavily toward the Dome with somebody’s Weimaraner nipping at her legs, which are already bloody. She hits the barrier with a crunch he can’t hear over the oncoming fire… except in his mind he can hear it, and somehow seeing the equally doomed dog pounce on poor Dolly and begin ripping at her defenseless udder is even worse than finding his father dead.

The sight of the dying cow that was once his darling breaks the boy’s paralysis. He doesn’t know if there’s even the slightest chance of surviving this terrible day, but he suddenly sees two things with utter clarity. One is the oxygen tank with his dead father’s Red Sox cap hung on it. The other is Grampy Tom’s oxygen mask dangling from the hook of the bathroom door. As Ollie runs for the farm where he’s lived his whole life—the farm that will soon cease to exist—he has only one completely coherent thought: the potato cellar. Buried under the barn and running beneath the hill behind it, the potato cellar may be safe.

The expatriates are still standing at the edge of the orchard. Barbie hasn’t been able to make them hear him, let alone move them. Yet he must get them back to the farmhouse and the vehicles. Soon.

From here they have a panoramic view of the whole town, and Barbie is able to judge the fire’s course the way a general might judge the most likely route of an invading army by aerial photographs. It’s sweeping southeast, and may stay on the western side of the Prestile. The river, although dry, should still serve as a natural firebreak. The explosive windstorm the fire has generated will also help to keep it from the town’s northernmost quadrant. If the fire burns all the way to where the Dome borders on Castle Rock and Motton—the heel and sole of the boot—then those parts of Chester’s Mill bordering on TR-90 and northern Harlow may be saved. From fire, at least. But it’s not fire that concerns him.

What concerns him is that wind.

He feels it now, rushing over his shoulders and between his spread legs hard enough to ripple his clothes and blow Julia’s hair around her face. It’s rushing away from them to feed the fire, and because The Mill is now an almost completely closed environment, there will be very little good air to replace what is being lost. Barbie has a nightmare image of goldfish floating dead on the surface of an aquarium from which all the oxygen has been exhausted.

Julia turns to him before he can grab her and points at something below: a figure trudging along Black Ridge Road, pulling a wheeled object. From this distance Barbie can’t tell if the refugee is a man or a woman, and it doesn’t matter. Whoever it is will almost certainly die of asphyxiation long before reaching the highland.

He takes Julia’s hand and puts his lips to her ear. “We have to go. Grab Piper, and have her grab whoever’s next to her. Everybody—”

“What about him?” she shouts, still pointing to the trudging figure. It might be a child’s wagon he or she’s pulling. It’s loaded with something that must be heavy, because the figure is bent over and moving very slowly.

Barbie has to make her understand, because time has grown short. “Never mind him. We’re going back to the farmhouse. Now. Everybody joins hands so nobody gets left behind.”

She tries to turn and look at him, but Barbie holds her still. He wants her ear—literally—because he has to make her understand. “If we don’t go now, it may be too late. We’ll run out of air.”

On Route 117, Velma Winter leads a parade of fleeing vehicles in her Datsun truck. All she can think about is the fire and smoke filling the rearview mirror. She’s doing seventy when she hits the Dome, which she has in her panic forgotten completely (just another bird, in other words, this one on the ground). The collision occurs at the same spot where Billy and Wanda Debec, Nora Robichaud, and Elsa Andrews came to grief a week before, shortly after the Dome came down. The engine of Velma’s light truck shoots backward and tears her in half. Her upper body exits through the windshield, trailing intestines like party streamers, and splatters against the Dome like a juicy bug. It is the start of a twelve-vehicle pileup in which many die. The majority are only injured, but they will not suffer long.

Henrietta and Petra feel the heat wash against them. So do all the hundreds pressed against the Dome. The wind lifts their hair and ruffles clothes that will soon be burning.

“Take my hand, honey,” Henrietta says, and Petra does.

They watch the big yellow bus make a wide, drunken turn. It totters along the ditch, barely missing Richie Killian, who first dodges away and then leaps nimbly forward, grabbing onto the back door as the bus goes by. He lifts his feet and squats on the bumper.

“I hope they make it,” Petra says. “So do I, honey.”

“But I don’t think they will.”

Now some of the deer leaping out of the approaching conflagration are on fire.

Henry has taken the wheel of the bus. Pamela stands beside him, holding onto a chrome pole. The passengers are about a dozen townsfolk most loaded in earlier because they were experiencing physical problems. Among them are Mabel Alston, Mary Lou Costas, and Mary Lou’s baby, still wearing Henry’s baseball cap. The redoubtable Leo Lamoine has also gotten onboard, although his problem seems to be emotional rather than physical; he is wailing in terror.

“Step on it and head north!” Pamela shouts. The fire has almost reached them, it’s less than five hundred yards ahead, and the sound of it shakes the world. “Drive like a motherfucker and don’t stop for anything!”

Henry knows it’s hopeless, but because he also knows he would rather go out this way than helplessly cowering with his back to the Dome, he yanks on the headlights and gets rolling. Pamela is thrown backward into the lap of Chaz Bender, the teacher—Chaz was helped into the bus when he began to suffer heart palpitations. He grabs Pammie to steady her. There are shrieks and cries of alarm, but Henry barely hears them. He knows he is going to lose sight of the road in spite of the headlights, but so what? As a cop he has driven this stretch a thousand times.

Use the force, Luke, he thinks, and actually laughs as he drives into the flaming darkness with the accelerator pedal jammed to the mat. Clinging to the back door of the bus, Richie Killian suddenly cannot breathe. He has time to see his arms catch fire. A moment later the temperature outside the bus pops to eight hundred degrees and he is burned off his perch like a fleck of meat off a hot barbecue grill.

The lights running down the center of the bus are on, casting a weak luncheonette-at-midnight glow over the terrified, sweat-drenched faces of the passengers, but the world outside has turned dead black. Whirlpools of ash eddy in the radically foreshortened beams of the headlights. Henry steers by memory, wondering when the tires will explode beneath him. He’s still laughing, although he can’t hear himself over the scalded-cat screech of 19’s engine. He’s keeping to the road; there’s that much. How long until they break through the other side of the firewall? Is it possible they can break through? He’s beginning to think it might be. Good God, how thick can it be?

“You’re doing it!” Pamela shouts. “You’re doing it!”

Maybe, Henry thinks. Maybe I am. But Christ, the heat! He is reaching for the air-conditioning knob, meaning to turn it all the way to MAX COOL, and that’s when the windows implode and the bus fills with fire. Henry thinks, No! No! Not when we’re so close!

But when the charred bus charges clear of the smoke, he sees nothing beyond but a black wasteland. The trees have been burned away to glowing stubs and the road itself is a bubbling ditch. Then an overcoat of fire drops over him from behind and Henry Morrison knows no more. 19 skids from the remains of the road and overturns with flames spewing from every broken window. The quickly blackening message on the back reads: SLOW DOWN, FRIEND! WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN!

Ollie Dinsmore sprints to the barn. Wearing Grampy Tom’s oxygen mask around his neck and carrying two tanks with a strength he never knew he had (the second he spied as he cut through the garage), the boy runs for the stairs that will take him down to the potato cellar. There’s a ripping, snarling sound from overhead as the roof begins to burn. On the west side of the barn the pumpkins also begin to burn, the smell rich and cloying, like Thanksgiving in hell.

The fire moves toward the southern side of the Dome, racing through the last hundred yards; there is an explosion as Dinsmore’s dairy barns are destroyed. Henrietta Clavard regards the oncoming fire and thinks: Well, I’m old. I’ve had my life. That’s more than this poor girl can say.

“Turn around, honey,” she tells Petra, “and put your head on my bosom.”

Petra Searles turns a tearstained and very young face up to Henrietta’s. “Will it hurt?”

“Only for a second, honey. Close your eyes, and when you open them, you’ll be bathing your feet in a cool stream.”

Petra speaks her last words. “That sounds nice.”

She closes her eyes. Henrietta does the same. The fire takes them. At one second they’re there, at the next… gone.

Cox is still close on the other side of the Dome, and the cameras are still rolling from their safe position at the flea-market site. Everyone in America is watching in shocked fascination. The commentators have been stunned to silence, and the only soundtrack is the fire, which has plenty to say.

For a moment Cox can still see the long human snake, although the people who make it up are only silhouettes against the fire. Most of them—like the expatriates on Black Ridge, who are at last making their way back to the farmhouse and their vehicles—are holding hands. Then the fire boils against the Dome and they are gone. As if to make up for their disappearance, the Dome itself becomes visible: a great charred wall rearing into the sky. It holds most of the heat in, but enough flashes out to turn Cox around and send him running. He tears off his smoking shirt as he goes.

The fire has burned on the diagonal Barbie foresaw, sweeping across Chester’s Mill from northwest to southeast. When it dies, it will do so with remarkable quickness. What it has taken is oxygen; what it leaves behind is methane, formaldehyde, hydrochloric acid, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and trace gases equally noxious. Also choking clouds of particulate matter: vaporized houses, trees, and—of course—people.

What it leaves behind is poison.

22

Twenty-eight exiles and two dogs convoyed out to where the Dome bordered on TR-90, known to the oldtimers as Canton. They were crammed into three vans, two cars, and the ambulance. By the time they arrived the day had grown dark and the air had become increasingly hard to breathe.

Barbie jammed on the brakes of Julia’s Prius and ran to the Dome, where a concerned Army lieutenant colonel and half a dozen other soldiers stepped forward to meet him. The run was short, but by the time Barbie reached the red band spray-painted on the Dome, he was gasping. The good air was disappearing like water down a sink.

“The fans!” he panted at the lieutenant colonel. “Turn on the fans!”

Claire McClatchey and Joe spilled out of the department store van, both of them staggering and gasping. The phone company van came next. Ernie Calvert got out, took two steps, and went to his knees. Norrie and her mother tried to help him to his feet. Both were crying.

“Colonel Barbara, what happened?” the lieutenant colonel asked. According to the name-strip on his fatigues, he was STRINGFELLOW. “Report.”

“Fuck your report!” Rommie shouted. He was holding a semi-conscious child—Aidan Appleton—in his arms. Thurse Marshall staggered along behind him with his arm around Alice, whose sparkle-sprinkled top was sticking to her; she’d retched down her front. “Fuck your report, just turn on dose fans, you!”

Stringfellow gave the order and the refugees knelt, their hands pressed against the Dome, greedily gasping in the faint breeze of clean air the huge fans were able to force through the barrier.

Behind them, the fire raged.