Sea Dogs sprinted for his Toyota, which he'd left parked askew on the highway's broken white line. The guy behind the wheel of the pulper - maybe high on pills, maybe smoked up on meth, maybe just young, in a big hurry, and feeling immortal - saw him and laid on his horn. He wasn't slowing.
'Fuck me sideways!' Sea Dogs cried as he threw himself behind the wheel. He keyed the engine and backed the Toyota out of the road with the driver's door flapping. The little SUV thumped into the ditch with its square nose canted up to the sky. Sea Dogs was out the next moment. He stumbled, landed on one knee, and then took off running into the field.
Barbie, thinking of the plane and the birds - thinking of that weird black smutch that might have been the plane's point of impact - also ran into the grazeland, at first sprinting through low, unenthusiastic flames and sending up puffs of black ash. He saw a man's sneaker - it was too big to be a woman's - with the man's foot still in it.
Pilpt, he thought. And then: J have to stop running around like this.
'YOU IDIOT, SLOW DOWN!' Sea Dogs cried at the pulp-truck in a thin, panicky voice, but it was too late for such instructions. Barbie, looking back over his shoulder (helpless not to), thought the pulp-wrangler might: have tried to brake at the last minute. He probably saw the wreckage of the plane. In any case, it wasn't enough. He struck the Motton side of the Dome at sixty or a little more, carrying a log-load of almost forty thousand pounds. The cab disintegrated as it stopped cold. The overloaded carrier, a prisoner of physics, continued forward. The fuel tanks were driven under the logs, shredding and sparking. When they exploded, the load was already airborne, flipping over where the cab - now a green metal accordion - had been. The logs sprayed forward and upward, struck the invisible barrier, and rebounded in all directions. Fire and black smoke boiled upward in a thick plume. There was a terrific thud that rolled across the day like a boulder. Then the logs were raining back down on the Motton side, landing on the road and the surrounding fields like enormous jackstraws. One struck the roof of Sea Dogs's SUV and smashed it flat, spilling the windshield onto the hood in a spray of diamond crumbles. Another landed right in front of Sea Dogs himself.
Barbie stopped running and only stared.
Sea Dogs got to his feet, fell down, grasped the log that had almost smashed out his life, and got up again. He stood swaying and wild-eyed. Barbie started toward him and after twelve steps ran into something that felt like a brick wall. He staggered backward and felt warmth cascade from his nose and over his lips. He wiped away a palmload of blood, looked at it unbelievingly, and then smeared it on his shirt.
Now cars were coming from both directions - Mocton and Chester's Mill. Three running figures, as yet still small, were cutting across the grazeland from a farmhouse at the other end. Several of the cars were honking their horns, as if that would somehow solve all problems. The first car to arrive on the Motton side pulled over to the shoulder, well back from the burning truck. Two women got out and gawked at the column of smoke and fire, shading their eyes.
7
'Fuck,' Sea Dogs said. He spoke in a small, breathless voice. He approached Barbie through the field, cutting a prudent east-tending diagonal away from the blazing pyre. The trucker might h ive been overloaded and moving too fast, Barbie thought, but at least he was getting a Viking funeral. 'Did you see where that one log landed? I was almost kilt. Squashed like a bug.'
'Do you have a cell phone?' Barbie had to raise his voice to be heard over the furiously burning pulper.
'In my truck,' Sea Dogs said. 'I'll try for it if you wan:.'
'No, wait,' Barbie said. He realized with sudden relief that all this could be a dream, the irrational kind where riding your bicycle underwater or talking of your sex life in some language you never studied seems normal.
The first person to arrive on his side of the barrier was i chubby guy driving an old GMC pickup. Barbie recognized him from Sweetbriar Rose: Ernie Calvert, the previous manager of Food City, now retired. Ernie was staring at the burning clutter on the road with wide eyes, but he had his cell phone in his hand and was ratchet-jawing into it. Barbie could hardly hear him over the roar of the burning pulp-truck, but he made out 'Looks like a bad one' and figured Ernie was talking to the police. Or the fire department. If it was the FD, Barbie hoped it was the one in Castle Rock.There were two engines in the tidy little Chester's Mill firebarn, but Barbie had an idea that if they showed up here, the most they'd be able to do was douse a grassfire that was going to putter out on its own before much longer. The burning pulp-truck was close, but Barbie didn't think they'd be able to get to it.