Read Online Under the Dome: A Novel by Stephen King - Free Book Online

neither of them were thinking in terms of inside and outside. It didn’t occur to them that the barrier might not have an end.
    6

    Then they came to Route 117, where there had been another nasty accident—two cars and at least two fatals that Barbie could be sure of. There was another, he thought, slumped behind the wheel of an old Chevrolet that had been mostly demolished. Only this time there was also a survivor, sitting beside a smashed-up Mercedes-Benz with her head lowered. Paul Gendron rushed to her, while Barbie could only stand and watch. The woman saw Gendron and struggled to rise.
    “No, ma’am, not at all, you don’t want to do that,” he said.
    “I think I’m fine,” she said. “Just … you know, shaken up.” For some reason this made her laugh, although her face was puffy with tears.
    At that moment another car appeared, a slowpoke driven by an old fellow who was leading a parade of three or four other no doubt impatient drivers. He saw the accident and stopped. The cars behind him did, too.
    Elsa Andrews was on her feet now, and with-it enough to ask what would become the question of the day: “What did we hit? It wasn’t the other car, Nora went around the other car.”
    Gendron answered with complete honesty. “Dunno, ma’am.”
    “Ask her if she has a cell-phone,” Barbie said. Then he called to the gathering spectators. “Hey! Who’s got a cell phone?”
    “I do, mister,” a woman said, but before she could say more, they all heard an approaching
whup-whup-whup
sound. It was a helicopter.
    Barbie and Gendron exchanged a stricken glance.
    The copter was blue and white, flying low. It was angling toward the pillar of smoke marking the crashed pulp-truck on 119, but the air was perfectly clear, with that almost magnifying effect that the best days in northern New England seem to have, and Barbie could easily read the big blue 13 on its side. And see the CBS eye logo. It was a news chopper, out of Portland. It must already have been in the area, Barbie thought. And it was a perfect day to get some juicy crash footage for the six o’clock news.
    “Oh, no,” Gendron moaned, shading his eyes. Then he shouted:
“Get back, you fools! Get back!”
    Barbie chimed in.
“No! Stop it! Get away!”
    It was useless, of course. Even more useless, he was waving his arms in big go-away gestures.
    Elsa looked from Gendron to Barbie, bewildered.
    The chopper dipped to treetop level and hovered.
    “I think it’s gonna be okay,” Gendron breathed. “The people back there must be waving em off, too. Pilot musta seen—”
    But then the chopper swung north, meaning to hook in overAlden Dinsmore’s grazeland for a different view, and it struck the barrier. Barbie saw one of the rotors break off. The helicopter dipped, dropped, and swerved, all at the same time. Then it exploded, showering fresh fire down on the road and fields on the other side of the barrier.
    Gendron’s side.
    The outside.
    7

    Junior Rennie crept like a thief into the house where he had grown up. Or a ghost. It was empty, of course; his father would be out at his giant used car lot on Route 119—what Junior’s friend Frank sometimes called the Holy Tabernacle of No Money Down—and for the last four years Francine Rennie had been hanging out nonstop at Pleasant Ridge Cemetery. The town whistle had quit and the police sirens had faded off to the south somewhere. The house was blessedly quiet.
    He took two Imitrex, then dropped his clothes and got into the shower. When he emerged, he saw there was blood on his shirt and pants. He couldn’t deal with it now. He kicked the clothes under his bed, drew the shades, crawled into the rack, and drew the covers up over his head, as he had when he was a child afraid of closet-monsters. He lay there shivering, his head gonging like all the bells of hell.
    He was dozing when the fire siren went off, jolting him awake. He began to shiver again, but the headache was better. He’d sleep a