4
In the fallout shelter below where the Town Hall had once stood, the generator - small, old-fashioned, and now the only thing standing between the occupants and the great hereafter - ran steadily. Battery-powered lights cast a yellowish glow from the corners of the main room. Carter was sitting in the only chair, Big Jim taking up most of the elderly two-person sofa and eating sardines from a can, plucking them out one by one with his thick fingers and laying them on Saltines. The two men had little to say to each other; the portable TV Carter had found gathering dust in the bunkroom took up all of their attention. It got only a single station - WMTW out of Poland Spring - but one was enough. Too much, really; the devastation was hard to comprehend. Downtown had been destroyed. Satellite photos showed that the woods around Chester Pond had been reduced to slag, and the Visitors Day crowd at 119 was now dust in a dying wind. To a height of twenty thousand feet, the Dome had become visible: an endless, sooty prison wall surrounding a town that was now seventy percent burned over.
Not long after the explosion, the temperature in the cellar had begun to climb appreciably. Big Jim told Carter to turn on the air-conditioning.
'Will the gennie handle that?' Carter had asked.
'If it won't, we'll cook,' Big Jim had replied irritably, 'so what's the difference?'
Don't you snap at me, Carter thought. Don't you snap at me when you were the one who made this happen. The one who's responsible.
He'd gotten up to find the air-conditioning unit, and as he did, another thought crossed his mind: those sardines really stank. He wondered what the boss would say if he told him the stuff he was putting in his mouth smelled like old dead pu**y.
But Big Jim had called him son like he meant it, so Carter kept his mouth shut. And when he turned on the air-conditioner, it had started right up. The sound of the generator had deepened a little, though, as it shouldered the extra burden. It would burn through their supply of LP that much quicker.
Doesn't matter, he's right, we gotta have it, Carter told himself as he watched the relentless scenes of devastation on the TV. The majority were coming from satellites or high-flying reconnaissance planes. At lower levels, most of the Dome had become opaque.
But not, he and Big Jim discovered, at the northeastern end of town. Around three o'clock in the afternoon, the coverage abruptly switched there, with video coming from just beyond a bustling Army outpost in the woods.
'This is Jake Tapper in TR-90, an unincorporated township just north of Chester's Mill. This is as close as we've been allowed, but as you can see, there are survivors. I repeat, there are survivors.'
'There are survivors right here, you dummy,' Carter said.
'Shut up,' Big Jim said. Blood was mounting in his heavy cheeks and dashing across his forehead in a wavy line. His eyes bulged in their sockets and his hands were clenched. 'That's Barbara. It's that son-of-a-buck Dale Barbara!'
Carter saw him among the others. The picture was being transmitted from a camera with an extremely long lens, which made the image shaky - it was like looking at people through a heat-haze - but it] was still clear enough. Barbara.The mouthy minister.The hippy doctor. A bunch of kids. The Everett woman.
That bitch was lying all along, he thought. She lied and stupid Carter believed her.
'The roaring sound you hear is not; helicopters,'Jake Tapper was saying. 'If we can pull back a little...'
The camera pulled back, revealing a line of huge fans on dollies, each connected to its own generator. The sight of all that power just miles away made Carter feel sick with envy.
'You see it now,' Tapper went on. 'Not helicopters but industrial fans. Now... if we can move in again on the survivors...'
The camera did so. They were kneeling or sitting at the edge of the Dome, directly in front of the fans. Carter could see their hair moving in the breeze. Not quite rippling, but definitely moving. Like plants in a lazy underwater current.
'There's Julia Shumway' Big Jim marveled. 'I should have killed that rjhymes-with-witch when I had the chance.'
Carter paid no attention. His eyes were riveted on the TV.
'The combined blast from four dozen fans should be enough to knock those folks over, Charlie,' Jake Tapper said, 'but from here it looks like they're getting just enough air to keep them alive in an atmosphere that has become a poison soup of carbon dioxide, methane, and God knows what else. Our experts are telling us that Chester's Mill's limited supply of oxygen mostly went to feed the fire. One of those experts - chemistry professor Donald Irving of Princeton - told me via cell phone that the air inside the Dome now might not be all that much different from the atmosphere of Venus.'