by Stephen King
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.
3
If the Vegas bookies had given odds on those likely to survive the Visitors Day catastrophe, those on Sam Verdreaux would have been a thousand to one. But longer odds have been beaten—it’s what keeps bringing people back to the tables—and Sam was the figure Julia had spotted laboring along Black Ridge Road shortly before the expatriates ran for the vehicles at the farmhouse.
Sloppy Sam the Canned Heat Man lived for the same reason Ollie did: he had oxygen.
Four years ago, he had gone to see Dr. Haskell (The Wiz—you remember him). When Sam said he couldn’t seem to catch his breath just lately, Dr. Haskell listened to the old rumpot’s wheezing respiration and asked him how much he smoked.
“Well,” Sam had said, “I used to go through as much as four packs a day when I was in the woods, but now that I’m on disability and sociable security, I’ve cut back some.”
Dr. Haskell asked him what that meant in terms of actual consumption. Sam said he guessed he was down to two packs a day. American Iggles. “I used to smoke Chesterfoggies, but now they only come with the filter,” he explained. “Also, they’re expensive. Iggles is cheap, and you can pick the filter off before you light up. Easy as pie.” Then he began to cough.
Dr. Haskell found no lung cancer (something of a surprise), but the X-rays seemed to show a damned fine case of emphysema, and he told Sam that he’d probably be using oxygen for the rest of his life. It was a bad diagnosis, but give the guy a break. As the doctors say, when you hear hoofbeats, you don’t think zebras. Also, folks have a tendency to see what they’re looking for, don’t they? And although Dr. Haskell died what might be called a hero’s death, no one, including Rusty Everett, ever mistook him for Gregory House. What Sam actually had was bronchitis, and it cleared up not too long after The Wiz made his diagnosis.
By then, however, Sam was signed up for oxygen deliveries every week from Castles in the Air (a company based in Castle Rock, of course), and he never canceled the service. Why would he? Like his hypertension medicine, the oxygen was covered by what he referred to as THE MEDICAL. Sam didn’t really understand THE MEDICAL, but he understood that the oxygen cost him nothing out of pocket. He also discovered that huffing pure oxygen had a way of cheering a body up.
Sometimes, however, weeks would pass before it crossed Sam’s mind to visit the scurgy little shed he thought of as “the oxygen bar.” Then, when the guys from Castles in the Air came to retrieve the empties (a thing they were often lax about), Sam would go out to his oxygen bar, open the valves, run the tanks dry, pile them in his son’s old red wagon, and trundle them out to the bright blue truck with the air-bubbles on it.
If he had still lived out on Little Bitch road, site of the old Verdreaux home place, Sam would have burned to a crisp (as Marta Edmunds did) in the minutes after the initial explosion. But the home place and the woodlots which had once surrounded it had been taken for unpaid taxes long since (and purchased back in ’08 by one of several Jim Rennie dummy corporations … at bargain-basement rates). His baby sis owned a little patch of land out on God Creek, however, and that was where Sam was residing on the day the world blew up. The shack wasn’t much, and he had to do his business in an outhouse (the only running water was supplied by an old handpump in the kitchen), but by gorry the taxes were paid, little sis saw to that … and he had THE MEDICAL.
Sam was not proud of his part in instigating the Food City riot. He had drunk many shots and beers with Georgia Roux’s father over the years, and felt bad about hitting the man’s daughter in the face with a rock. He kept thinking about the sound that piece of quartz had made when it connected, and how Georgia’s broken jaw had sagged, making her look like a ventriloquist’s dummy with a busted mouth. He could have killed her, by the living Jesus. Was probably a miracle that he hadn’t … not that she had lasted long. And then an even sadder idea had occurred to him: if he’d left her alone, she wouldn’t have been in the hospital. And if she hadn’t been in the hospital, she’d probably still be alive.
If you looked at it that way, he had killed her.
The explosion at the radio station caused him to sit bolt upright out of a drunken sleep, clutching his chest and staring around wildly. The window above his bed had blown out. In fact, every window in the place had blown out, and his shack’s west-facing front door had been torn clean off its hinges.
He stepped over it and stood frozen in his weedy and tire-strewn front yard, staring west, where the whole world appeared to be on fire.
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 m
e 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 pussy.
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 rhymes-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.”
The picture switched to a concerned-looking Charlie Gibson, safe in New York. (Lucky bastard, Carter thought.) “Any word yet on what may have caused the fire?”
Back to Jake Tapper … and then to the survivors in their small capsule of breathable air. “None, Charlie. It was some sort of explosion, that seems clear, but there’s been no further word from the military and nothing from Chester’s Mill. Some of the people you see on your screen must have phones, but if they are communicating, it’s only with Colonel James Cox, who touched down here about forty-five minutes ago and immediately conferenced with the survivors. While the camera pans this grim scene from our admittedly remote standpoint, let me give concerned viewers in America—and all over the world—the names of the people now at the Dome who have been positively identified. I think you might have still pictures of several, and maybe you can flash them on the screen as I go. I think my list’s alphabetical, but don’t hold me to that.”
“We won’t, Jake. And we do have some pictures, but go slow.”
“Colonel Dale Barbara, formerly Lieutenant Barbara, United States Army.” A picture of Barbie in desert camo came on the screen. He had his arm around a grinning Iraqi boy. “A decorated veteran and most recently a short-order cook in the town restaurant.
“Angelina Buffalino … do we have a picture of her? … no? … okay.
“Romeo Burpee, owner of the local department store.” There was a picture of Rommie. In it he was standing beside a backyard barbecue with his wife and wearing a tee-shirt that read KISS ME, I’M FRENCH.
“Ernest Calvert, his daughter Joan, and Joan’s daughter, Eleanor Calvert.” This picture looked like it had been taken at a family reunion; there were Calverts everywhere. Norrie, looking both grim and pretty, had her skateboard under one arm.
“Alva Drake … her son Benjamin Drake …”
“Turn that off,” Big Jim grunted.
“At least they’re in the open,” Carter said wistfully. “Not stuck in a hole. I feel like Saddam fucking Hussein when he was on the run.”
“Eric Everett, his wife, Linda, and their two daughters …”
“Another family!” Charlie Gibson said in a voice of approval that was almost Mormonesque. That was enough for Big Jim; he got up and snapped the TV off himself, with a hard twist of the wrist. He was still holding the sardine can, and spilled some of the oil on his pants when he did it.
You’ll never get that out, Carter thought but did not say.
I was watching that show, Carter thought but did not say.
“The newspaper woman,” Big Jim brooded, sitting back down. The cushions hissed as they collapsed beneath his weight. “She was always against me. Every trick in the book, Carter. Every trick in the cotton-picking book. Get me another can of sardines, would you?”
Get it yourself, Carter thought but did not say. He got up and grabbed another can of ’dines.
Instead of commenting on the olfactory association he had made between sardines and deceased female sex organs, he asked what seemed to be the logical question.
“What are we going to do, boss?”
Big Jim removed the key from the bottom of the can, inserted it in the tab, and unrolled the top to expose a fresh squadron of dead fish. They gleamed greasily in the glow of the emergency lights. “Wait for the air to clear, then go topside and start picking up the pieces, son.” He sighed, placed a dripping fish on a Saltine, and ate it. Cracker crumbs stuck to his lips in beads of oil. “It’s what people like us always do. The responsible people. The ones who pull the plow.”
“What if the air doesn’t clear? The TV said—”
“Oh dear, the sky is falling, oh dear, the sky is falling!” Big Jim declaimed in a strange (and strangely disturbing) falsetto. “They’ve been saying it for years, haven’t they? The scientists and the bleeding-heart liberals. World War III! Nuclear reactors melting down to the center of the earth! Y2K computer freezes! The end of the ozone layer! Melting ice caps! Killer hurricanes! Global warming! Chickendirt weak-sister atheists who won’t trust in the will of a loving, caring God! Who refuse to believe there is such a thing as a loving, caring God!”
Big Jim pointed a greasy but adamant finger at the younger man.
“Contrary to the beliefs of the secular humanists, the sky is not falling. They can’t help the yellow streak that runs up their backs, son—‘the guilty man flees where none pursueth,’ you know, book of Leviticus—but that doesn’t change God’s truth: those who believe on Him shall not tire, but shall mount up with wings as eagles—book of Isaiah. That’s basically smog out there. It’ll just take awhile to clear out.”
But two hours later, at just past four o’clock on that Friday afternoon, a shrill queep-queep-queep sound came from the alcove that held the fallout shelter’s mechanical support system.
“What’s that?” Carter asked.
Big Jim, now slumped on the couch with his eyes partly closed (and sardine grease on his jowls), sat up and listened. “Air purifier,” he said. “Kind of like a big Ionic Breeze. We’ve got one of those in the car showroom down at the store. Good gadget. Not only does it keep the air nice and sweet, it stops those static electricity shocks you tend to get in cold wea—”
“If the air in town’s clearing, why did the air purifier start up?”
“Why don’t you go upstairs, Carter? Crack the door a little bit and see how things are. Would that ease your mind?”
Carter didn’t know if it would or not, but he knew just sitting here was making him feel squirrelly. He mounted the stairs.
As soon as he was gone, Big Jim got up himself and went to the line of drawers between the stove and the little refrigerator. For such a big man, he moved with surprising speed and quiet. He found what he was looking for in the third drawer. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure he was still alone, then helped himself.
On the door at the top of the stairs, Carter was confronted by a rather ominous sign:
DO YOU NEED TO CHECK THE RADIATION COUNT?
THINK!!!
Carter thought. And the conclusion he came to was that Big Jim was almost certainly full of shit about the air clearing out. Those folks lined up in front of the fans proved that the air exchange between Chester’s Mill and the outside world was almost nil.
Still, it wouldn’t do any harm to check.
At first the door wouldn’t budge. Panic, sparked by dim thoughts of being buried alive, made him push harder. This time the door moved just a little. He heard bricks falling and lumber scraping. Maybe he could open it wider, but there was no reason to. The air coming in through the inch-wide gap he’d opened wasn’t air at all, but something that smelled like the inside of an exhaust pipe when the motor it was attached to was running. He didn’t need any fancy instruments to tell him that two or three minutes outside the shelter would kill him.