Under the Dome

Andy curled his hand over Chef’s hand. “I love you, Chef,” he said, and kissed Chef Bushey’s dry, blood-freckled lips.

“Love… you… too… Sanders.”

“Hey, fags!” Mel cried with a kind of delirious joviality. He was standing just ten yards away. “Get a room! No, wait, I got a better idea! Get a room in hell! ”

“Now… Sanders… now. ”

Mel opened fire.

Andy and Chef were driven sideways by the bullets, but before they were torn asunder, their joined hands pushed the white button marked OPEN.

The explosion was white and all-encompassing.

21

On the edge of the orchard, the Chester’s Mill exiles are having a picnic lunch when gunfire breaks out—not from 119, where the visiting continues, but to the southwest.

“That’s out on Little Bitch Road,” Piper says. “God, I wish we had some binoculars.”

But they need none to see the yellow bloom that opens when the Meals On Wheels truck explodes. Twitch is eating deviled chicken with a plastic spoon. “I dunno what’s going on down there, but that’s the radio station for sure,” he says.

Rusty grabs Barbie’s shoulder. “That’s where the propane is! They stockpiled it to make drugs! That’s where the propane is! ”

Barbie has one moment of clear, premonitory terror; one moment when the worst is still ahead. Then, four miles distant, a brilliant white spark flicks the hazy sky, like a stroke of lightning that goes up instead of down. A moment later, a titanic explosion hammers a hole straight through the center of the day. A red ball of fire blots out first the WCIK tower, then the trees behind it, and then the whole horizon as it spreads north and south.

The people on Black Ridge scream but are unable to hear themselves over the vast, grinding, building roar as eighty pounds of plastic explosive and ten thousand gallons of propane undergo an explosive change. They cover their eyes and stagger backward, stepping on their sandwiches and spilling their drinks. Thurston snatches Alice and Aidan into his arms and for a moment Barbie sees his face against the blackening sky—the long and terrified face of a man observing the literal Gates of Hell swing open, and the ocean of fire waiting just beyond.

“We have to go back to the farmhouse!” Barbie yells. Julia is clinging to him, crying. Beyond her is Joe McClatchey, trying to help his weeping mother to her feet. These people are going nowhere, at least for a while.

To the southwest, where most of Little Bitch Road will within the next three minutes cease to exist, the yellowy-blue sky is turning black and Barbie has time to think, with perfect calm: Now we’re under the magnifying glass.

The blast shatters every window in the mostly deserted downtown, sends shutters soaring, knocks telephone poles askew, rips doors from their hinges, flattens mailboxes. Up and down Main Street, car alarms go off. To Big Jim Rennie and Carter Thibodeau, it feels as if the conference room has been struck by an earthquake.

The TV is still on. Wolf Blitzer is asking, in tones of real alarm, “What’s that? Anderson Cooper? Candy Crowley? Chad Myers? Soledad O’Brien? Does anybody know what the hell that was? What’s going on?”

At the Dome, America’s newest TV stars are looking around, showing the cameras only their backs as they shield their eyes and stare toward town. One camera pans up briefly, for a moment disclosing a monstrous column of black smoke and swirling debris on the horizon.

Carter gets to his feet. Big Jim grabs his wrist. “One quick look,” Big Jim says. “To see how bad it is. Then get your butt back down here. We may have to go to the fallout shelter.”

“Okay.”

Carter races up the stairs. Broken glass from the mostly vaporized front doors crunches beneath his boots as he runs down the hall. What he sees when he comes out on the steps is so beyond anything he has ever imagined that it tumbles him back into childhood again and for a moment he freezes where he is, thinking It’s like the biggest, awfulest thunderstorm anyone ever saw, only worse.

The sky to the west is a red-orange inferno surrounded by billowing clouds of deepest ebony. The air is already stenchy with exploded LP. The sound is like the roar of a dozen steel mills running at full blast.

Directly above him, the sky is dark with fleeing birds.

The sight of them—birds with nowhere to go—is what breaks Carter’s paralysis. That, and the rising wind he feels against his face. There has been no wind in Chester’s Mill for six days, and this one is both hot and vile, stinking of gas and vaporized wood.

A huge smashed oak lands in Main Street, pulling down snarls of dead electrical cable.

Carter flees back down the corridor. Big Jim is standing at the head of the stairs, his heavy face pale and frightened and, for once, irresolute.