Under the Dome

He stopped. Not too far ahead of him, on the other side of the blacktop highway, was a woodchuck. A damned fat one. Sleek and sassy, too. Instead of scurrying off into the high grass, it was coming on ahead. There was a fallen birch sticking its top half out onto the shoulder of the road, and Barbie was betting the woodchuck would scurry under there and wait for the big bad Two-Legs to go by. If not, they would pass each other like the ramblin guys they were, the one on four legs headed north, the one on two headed south. Barbie hoped that would happen. It would be cool.

These thoughts went through Barbie’s mind in seconds; the shadow of the airplane was still between him and the chuck, a black cross racing along the highway. Then two things happened almost simultaneously.

The first was the woodchuck. It was whole, then it was in two pieces. Both were twitching and bleeding. Barbie stopped, mouth hanging open on the suddenly lax hinge of his lower jaw. It was as if an invisible guillotine blade had dropped. And that was when, directly above the severed woodchuck, the little airplane exploded.

3

Barbie looked up. Falling from the sky was a squashed Bizarro World version of the pretty little airplane that had passed over him seconds before. Twisting orange-red petals of fire hung above it in the air, a flower that was still opening, an American Disaster rose. Smoke billowed from the plummeting plane.

Something clanged to the road and sprayed up clods of asphalt before spinning drunkenly into the high grass to the left. A propeller.

If that had bounced my way—

Barbie had a brief image of being cut in two—like the unfortunate woodchuck—and turned to run. Something thudded down in front of him and he screamed. But it wasn’t the other propeller; it was a man’s leg dressed in denim. He could see no blood, but the side-seam had been blown wide open, revealing white flesh and wiry black hair.

There was no foot attached.

Barbie ran in what felt like slow motion. He saw one of his own feet, clad in an old scuffed workboot, stride out and clop down. Then it disappeared behind him as his other foot strode out. All slow, slow. Like watching the baseball replay of a guy trying to steal second.

There was a tremendous hollow clang from behind him, followed by the boom of a secondary explosion, followed by a blast of heat that struck him from heels to nape. It shoved him on his way like a warm hand. Then all thoughts blew away and there was nothing but the body’s brute need to survive.

Dale Barbara ran for his life.

4

A hundred yards or so down the road, the big warm hand became a ghost hand, although the smell of burning gas—plus a sweeter stench that had to be a mixture of melting plastic and roasting flesh—was strong, carried to him on a light breeze. Barbie ran another sixty yards, then stopped and turned around. He was panting. He didn’t think it was the running; he didn’t smoke, and he was in good shape (well… fair; his ribs on the right side still hurt from the beating in Dipper’s parking lot). He thought it was terror and dismay. He could have been killed by falling pieces of airplane—not just the runaway propeller—or burned to death. It was only blind luck that he hadn’t been.

Then he saw something that made his rapid breathing stop in midgasp. He straightened up, looking back at the site of the accident. The road was littered with debris—it really was a wonder that he hadn’t been struck and at least wounded. A twisted wing lay on the right; the other wing was poking out of the uncut timothy grass on the left, not far from where the runaway propeller had come to rest. In addition to the bluejeans-clad leg, he could see a severed hand and arm. The hand seemed to be pointing at a head, as if to say That’s mine. A woman’s head, judging from the hair. The power lines running beside the highway had been severed. They lay crackling and twisting on the shoulder.

Beyond the head and arm was the twisted tube of the airplane’s fuselage. Barbie could read NJ3. If there was more, it was torn away.

But none of this was what had caught his eye and stopped his breath. The Disaster rose was gone now, but there was still fire in the sky. Burning fuel, certainly. But…

But it was running down the air in a thin sheet. Beyond it and through it, Barbie could see the Maine countryside—still peaceful, not yet reacting, but in motion nevertheless. Shimmering like the air over an incinerator or a burning-barrel. It was as if someone had splashed gasoline over a pane of glass and then set it alight.

Almost hypnotized—that was what it felt like, anyway—Barbie started walking back toward the scene of the crash.

5

His first impulse was to cover the body parts, but there were too many. Now he could see another leg (this one in green slacks), and a female torso caught in a clump of juniper. He could pull off his shirt and drape it over the woman’s head, but after that? Well, there were two extra shirts in his backpack—