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.
'Downstairs,' Carter says. 'Fallout shelter. It's coming. The fire's coming. And when it gets here, it's going to eat this town alive.'
Big Jim groans. 'What did those idiots do?
Carter doesn't care. Whatever they did, it's done. If they don't move quickly, they will be done, too.'Is there air-purifying machinery down there, boss?'
'Yes.'
'Hooked to the gennie?'
'Yes, of course.'
'Thank Christ for that. Maybe we've got a chance.'
Helping Big Jim down the stairs to make him move more quickly, Carter only hopes they don't cook alive down there.
The doors of Dipper's roadhouse have been chocked open, but the force of the explosion breaks the chocks and sweeps the doors shut. The glass coughs inward and several of the people standing at the back of the dance floor are cut. Henry Morrison's brother Whit suffers a slashed jugular.
The crowd stampedes toward the doors, the big-screen TV completely forgotten. They trample poor Whit Morrison as he lies dying in a spreading pool of his own blood. They hit the doors, and more people are lacerated as they push through the jagged openings.
'Birds!' someone cries. 'Ah, God, look at all them birds!'
But most of them look west instead of up - west, where burning doom is rolling down upon them below a sky that is now midnight-black and full of poison air.
Those who can run take a cue from the birds and begin trotting, jogging, or flat-out galloping straight down the middle of Route 117. Several others throw themselves into their cars, and there are multiple fender-benders in the gravel parking lot where, once upon an antique time, Dale Barbara took a beating. Velma Winter gets into her old Datsun pickup and, after avoiding the demolition derby in the parking lot, discovers her right-of-way to the road is blocked by fleeing pedestrians.! She looks right - at the firestorm billowing toward them like some great burning dress, eating the woods between Little Bitch and downtown - and drives blindly ahead in spite of the people in her way. She strikes Carla Venziano, who is fleeing with her infant in her arms.Velma feels the truck jounce as it passes over their bodies, and resolutely blocks her ears to Carta's shrieks as her back is broken and baby Steven is crushed to death beneath her. All Velma knows is that she has-to get out of here. Somehow, she has to get out.
At the Dome, the reunions have been ended by an apocalyptic party-crasher. Those on the inside have something more important than relatives to occupy them now: the giant mushroom cloud that's growing to the northwest of their position, rising on a muscle of fire already almost a mile high. The first feather of wind - the wind that has sent Carter and Big Jim fleeing for the fallout shelter - strikes them, and they cringe against the Dome, mostly ignoring the people behind them. In any case, the people behind them are retreating. They're lucky; they can.
Henrietta Clavard feels a cold hand wrap around hers. She turns and sees Petra Searles. Petra's hair has come loose from the clips that were holding it and hangs against her cheeks.
'Got any more of that joy-juice?' Petra asks, and manages a ghastly lets-party smile.
'Sorry, all out,' Henrietta says.
'Well - maybe it doesn't matter.'
'Hang onto me, honey,' Henrietta says. 'Just hang onto me. We're going to be okay'
But when Petra looks into the old woman's eyes., she sees no belief and no hope. The party's almost over.
Look, now. Look and see. Eight hundred people are crammed against the Dome, their heads tilted up and their eyes wide, watching as their inevitable end rushes toward them.
Here are Johnny and Carrie Carver, and Bruce Yardley, who worked at Food City. Here is Tabby Morrell, who owns a lumberyard soon to be reduced to swirling ash, and his wife, Bonnie; Toby Manning, who clerked at the department store;Trina Cole and Donnie Baribeau; Wendy Goldstone with her friend and fellow teacher Ellen Vanedestine; Bill Allnut, who wouldn't go get the bus, and his wife, Sarah, who is screaming for Jesus to save her as she watches the oncoming fire. Here are Todd Wendlestat and Manuel Ortega with their faces raised dumbly to the west, where the world is disappearing in smoke.Tommy and Willow Anderson, who will never book another band from Boston into their roadhouse. See them all, a whole town with its back to an invisible wall.