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 semiconscious 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 Mill'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 lire 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.
He ran to the edge of the pile, then stopped to examine the two tanks. The dial on the one from the house read only half full, but the needle on the one from the garage was all the way in the green. Ollie let the half-full one clang to the concrete and attached the mask to the one from the garage. He had done this many times when Grampy Tom was alive, and it was the work of seconds.
Just as he hung the mask around his neck again, the lights went out.
The air was growing warmer. He dropped to his knees and began burrowing into the cold weight of the potatoes, pushing with his feet, protecting the long tank with his body and yanking it along beneath him with one hand. With the other he made awkward swimming motions.
He heard potatoes avalanche down behind him and fought a panicky urge to back out. It was like being buried alive, and telling himself that if he wasn't buried alive he'd surely die didn't help much. He was gasping, coughing, seeming to breathe in as much potato-dirt as air. He clapped the oxygen mask over his face and... nothing.
He fumbled at the tank valve for what seemed like forever, his heart pounding in his chest like an animal in a cage. Red flowers began to open in the darkness behind his eyes. Cold vegetable weight bore! down on him. He had been crazy to do this, as crazy as Rory had been, shooting off a gun at the Dome, and he was going to pay the price. He was going to die.
Then his fingers finally found the valve. At first it wouldn't turn, and he realized he was trying to spin it the wrong way. He reversed his fingers and a rush of cool, blessed air gusted into the mask.
Ollie lay under the potatoes, gasping. He jumped a little when the fire blew in the door at the top of the stairs; for a moment he could actually see the dirty cradle he lay in. It was getting warmer, and he wondered if the half-full tank he had left behind would blow. He also wondered how much additional time the full one had bought him, and if it was worth it.
But that was his brain. His body had only one imperative, and that was life. Ollie began to crawl deeper into the potato pile, dragging the tank along, adjusting the mask on his face each time it came askew.