He takes Julia's hand and puts his lips to her ear. 'We have to go. Grab Piper, and have her grab whoever's next to her. Everybody—'

'What about him?' she shouts, still pointing to the trudging figure. It might be a child's wagon he or she's pulling. It's loaded with something that must be heavy, because the figure is bent over and moving very slowly.

Barbie has to make her understand, because time has grown short. 'Never mind him. We're going back to the farmhouse. Now. Everybody joins hands so nobody gets left behind.'

She tries to turn and look at him, but Barbie holds her still. He wants her ear—literally—because he has to make her understand. 'If we don't go now, it may be too late. We'll run out of air.'

On Route 117, Velma Winter leads a parade of fleeing vehicles in her Datsun truck. AH she can think about is the fire and smoke filling the rearview mirror. She's doing seventy when she hits the Dome, which she has in her panic forgotten completely (just another bird, in other words, this one on the ground). The collision occurs at the same spot where Billy and Wanda Debec, Nora Robichaud, and Elsa Andrews came to grief a week before, shortly after the Dome came down. The engine of Velma s light truck shoots backward and tears her in half. Her upper body exits through the windshield, trailing intestines like party streamers, and splatters against the Dome like a juicy bug. It is the start of a twelve-vehicle pileup in which many die. The majority are only injured, but they will not suffer long.

Henrietta and Petra feel the heat wash against them. So do all the hundreds pressed against the Dome. The wind lifts their hair and ruffles clothes that will soon be burning.

'Take my hand, honey,' Henrietta says, and Petra does.

They watch the big yellow bus make a wide, drunken turn. It totters along the ditch, barely missing Richie Killian, who first dodges away and then leaps nimbly forward, grabbing onto the back door as the bus goes by. He lifts his feet and squats on the bumper.

'I hope they make it,' Petra says.

'So do I, honey.'

'But I don't think they will.'

Now some of the deer leaping out of the approaching conflagration are on fire.

Henry has taken the wheel of the bus. Pamela stands beside him, holding onto a chrome pole. The passengers are about a dozen townsfolk, most loaded in earlier because they were experiencing physical problems. Among them are Mabel Alston, Mary Lou Costas, and Mary Lou's baby, still wearing Henry's baseball cap. The redoubtable Leo Lamoine has also gotten onboard, although his problem seems to be emotional rather than physical; he is wailing in terror.

'Step on it and head north!' Pamela shouts. The fire has almost reached them, it's less than five hundred yards ahead, and the sound of it shakes the world. 'Drive like a motherfucker and don't stop for anything.,

Henry knows it's hopeless, but because he also knows he would rather go out this way than helplessly cowering with his back to the Dome, he yanks on the headlights and gets rolling. Pamela is thrown backward into the lap of Chaz Bender, the teacher—Chaz was helped into the bus when he began to suffer heart palpitations. He grabs Pammie to steady her. There are shrieks and cries of alarm, but Henry barely hears them. He knows he is going to lose sight of the road in spite of the headlights, but so what? As a cop he has driven this stretch a thousand times.

Use the force, Luke, he thinks, and actually laughs as he drives into the flaming darkness with the accelerator pedal jammed to the mat. Clinging to the back door of the bus, Richie Killian suddenly cannot breathe. He has time to see his arms catch fire. A moment later the temperature outside the bus pops to eight hundred degrees and he is burned off his perch like a fleck of meat off a hot barbecue grill.

The lights running down the center of the bus are on, casting a weak luncheonette-at-midnight glow over the terrified, sweat-drenched faces of the passengers, but the world outside has turned dead black. Whirlpools of ash eddy in the radically foreshortened beams of the headlights. Henry steers by niemory, wondering when the tires will explode beneath him. He's still laughing, although he can't hear himself over the scalded-cat screech of 19's engine. He's keeping to the road; there's that much. How long until they break through the other side of the firewall? Is it possible they can break through? He's beginning to think it might be. Good God, how thick can it be?

'You're doing it!' Pamela shouts. 'You're doing it!'

Maybe, Henry thinks. Maybe I am. But Christ, the heatl He is reaching for the air-conditioning knob, meaning to turn it all the way to MAX COOL, and that's when the windows implode and the bus fills with fire. Henry thinks, No! No! Not when we're so close!

But when the charred bus charges clear of the smoke, he sees nothing beyond but a black wasteland. The trees have been burned away to glowing stubs and the road itself is a bubbling ditch. Then an overcoat of fire drops over him from behind and Henry Morrison knows no more. 19 skids from the remains of the road and overturns with flames spewing from every broken window. The quickly blackening message on the back reads: SLOW DOWN, FRIEND! WE LOVE OUR CHILDREN!

Ollie Dinsmore sprints to the barn. Wearing Cirampy Tom's oxygen mask around his neck and carrying two tanks with a strength he never knew he had (the second he spied as he cut through the garage), the boy runs for the stairs that will take him down to the potato cellar. There's a ripping, snarling sound from overhead as the roof begins to burn. On the west side of the barn the pumpkins also begin to burn, the smell rich and cloying, like Thanksgiving in hell.

The fire moves toward the southern side of the Dome, racing through the last hundred yards; there is an explosion as Dinsmore's dairy barns are destroyed. Henrietta Clavard regards the oncoming fire and thinks: Well, I'm old. I've had my life. That's more than this poor girl can say.

'Turn around, honey,' she tells Petra, 'and put your head on my bosom.'

Petra Searles turns a tearstained and very young face up to Henrietta's. 'Will it hurt?'

'Only for a second, honey. Close your eyes, and when you open them, you'll be bathing your feet in a cool stream.'

Petra speaks her last words. 'That sounds nice.'

She closes her eyes. Henrietta does the same.The fire takes them. At one second they're there, at the next… gone.

Cox is still close on the other side of the Dome, and the cameras are still rolling from their safe position at the flea-market site. Everyone in America is watching in shocked fascination. The commentators have been stunned to silence, and the only soundtrack is the fire, which has plenty to say.

For a moment Cox can still see the long human snake, although the people who make it up are only silhouettes against the fire. Most of them—like the expatriates on Black Ridge, who are at last making their—way back to the farmhouse and their vehicles—are holding hands. Then the fire boils against the Dome and they are gone. As if to make up for their disappearance, the Dome itself becomes visible: a great charred wall rearing into the sky. It holds most of the heat in, but enough flashes out to turn Cox around and send him running. He tears off his smoking shirt as he goes.