Under the Dome

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. AH 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.