by Stephen King
“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 par
ty 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.
SURVIVORS
1
Only three hundred and ninety-seven of the The Mil
l’s two thousand residents survive the fire, most of them in the northeast quadrant of town. By the time night falls, rendering the smudged darkness inside the Dome complete, there will be a hundred and six.
When the sun comes up on Saturday morning, shining weakly through the only part of the Dome not charred completely black, the population of Chester’s Mill is just thirty-two.
2
Ollie slammed the door to the potato cellar before running downstairs. He also flicked the switch that turned on the lights, not knowing if they would still work. They did. As he stumbled down to the barn’s basement (chilly now but not for long; he could already feel the heat starting to push in behind him), Ollie remembered the day four years ago when the guys from Ives Electric in Castle Rock backed up to the barn to unload the new Honda generator.
“Overpriced sonofawhore better work right,” Alden had said, chewing on a piece of grass, “because I’m in hock up to my eyeballs for it.”
It had worked right. It was still working right, but Ollie knew it wouldn’t much longer. The fire would take it as the fire had taken everything else. If he had as much as a minute of light left, he would be surprised.
I may not even be alive in a minute.
The potato grader stood in the middle of the dirty concrete floor, a complexity of belts and chains and gears that looked like some ancient instrument of torture. Beyond it was a huge pile of spuds. It had been a good fall for them, and the Dinsmores had finished the harvest only three days before the Dome came down. In an ordinary year, Alden and his boys would have graded them all through November to sell at the Castle Rock co-op produce market and various roadside stands in Motton, Harlow, and Tarker’s Mills. No spud-money this year. But Ollie thought they might save his life.
