At just past one o'clock, Rose Twitchell shakes Barbie awake.
'Thurston Marshall is dead,' she says. 'Rusty and my brother are puttirig the body under the ambulance so the little girl won't be too upset when she wakes up.'Then she adds: 'If she wakes up. Alice is sick too.'
'We're all sick now,' Julia says. 'All except Sam and that dopey little baby.'
Rusty and Twitch hurry back from the huddle of vehicles, collapse in front of one of the fans, and begin breathing in large, whooping gasps.: Twitch starts coughing and Rusty shoves him even closer to the air, so hard that Twitch's forehead strikes the Dome. They all hear the bonk.
Rose has not quite finished her inventory. 'Benny Drake's bad too.' She lowers her voice to a whisper. 'Ginny says he may not last until sunup. If only there was something we could do.'
Barbie doesn't reply. Neither does Julia, who is once more looking in thej direction of a box which, although less than fifty square inches in area and not even an inch thick, cannot be budged. Her eyes are distant, speculative.
A reddish moon finally clears the accumulated filth on the eastern wall of the Dome and shines down its bloody light. This is the end of October and in Chester's Mill, October is the crudest month, mixing memory with desire. There are no lilacs in this dead land. No lilacs, i no trees, no grass. The moon looks down on ruination and little else.
15
Big Jim awoke in the dark, grabbing at his chest. His heart was misfiring again. He pounded at it. Then the alarm on the generator went off as the current tank of propane reached the danger point: AAAAAAAAAAA. Feed me, feed me.
Big Jim jumped and cried out. His poor tortured heart was lurching, missing, skipping, then running to catch up with itself. He felt like an old car with a bad carburetor, the kind of rattletrap you might take in trade but would never sell, the kind that was good for nothing but the junkheap. He gasped and pounded. This was as bad as the one that had sent him to the hospital. Maybe even worse.
AAAAAAAAAAAA: the sound of some huge, gruesome insect - a cicada, maybe - here in the dark with him. Who knew what might have crept in here while he was sleeping?
Big Jim fumbled for the flashlight. With the other hand he alternately pounded and rubbed, telling his heart to settle down, not to be such a cotton-picking baby, he hadn't gone through all of this just to die in the dark.
He found the flashlight, struggled to his feet, and stumbled over the body of his late aide-de-camp. He cried out again and went to his knees. The flashlight didn't break but went rolling away from him, casting a moving spotlight on the lowest lefthand shelf, which was stacked with boxes of spaghetti and cans of tomato paste.
Big Jim crawled after it. As he did, Carter Thibodeau's open eyes moved.
'Carter?' Sweat was running down Big Jim's face; his cheeks felt coated with some light, stinking grease. He could feel his shirt sticking to him. His heart took another of those looping larrups and then, for a wonder, settled into its normal rhythm again.
Well. No. Not exactly. But at least into something more like a normal rhythm.
'Carter? Son? Are you alive?'
Ridiculous, of course; Big Jim had gutted him like a fish on a riverbank, then shot him in the back of the head. He was as dead as Adolf Hitler. Yet he could have sworn... well, almost sworn... that the boy's eyes-He fought back the idea that Carter was going to reach out and seize him by the throat. Telling himself it was normal to feel a little bit (terrified) nervous, because the boy had nearly killed him, after all. And still expecting Carter to sit up and draw him forward and bury hungry teeth in his throat.
Big Jim pressed his fingers under Carter's jaw. The blood-sticky flesh was cold and no pulse moved there. Of course not. The kid was dead. Had been dead for twelve hours or more.
'You're eating dinner with your Savior, son,' Big Jim whispered. 'Roast beef and mashed. Apple cobbler for dessert.'
This made him feel better. He crawled after the flashlight, and when he thought he heard something move behind him - the whisper of a hand, perhaps, slipping across the concrete floor, blindly questing - he didn't look back. He had to feed the generator. Had to silence the AAAAAA.
While he was pulling one of the four remaining tanks out of the storage cubby, his heart went into arrhythmia again. He sat beside the open trapdoor, gasping and trying to cough his heart back into a regular rhythm. And praying, unaware that his prayer was basically a series of demands and rationalizations: make it stop, none of it was my fault, get me out of here, I did the best I could, put everything back the way it was, I was let down by incompetents, heal my heart.