A reddish moon finally clears the accumulated filth on the eastern wall of the Dome and shines down its bloody light. This is the end of October and in Chester's Mill, October is the crudest month, mixing memory with desire. There are no lilacs in this dead land. No lilacs, i no trees, no grass. The moon looks down on ruination and little else.
15
Big Jim awoke in the dark, grabbing at his chest. His heart was misfiring again. He pounded at it. Then the alarm on the generator went off as the current tank of propane reached the danger point: AAAAAAAAAAA. Feed me, feed me.
Big Jim jumped and cried out. His poor tortured heart was lurching, missing, skipping, then running to catch up with itself. He felt like an old car with a bad carburetor, the kind of rattletrap you might take in trade but would never sell, the kind that was good for nothing but the junkheap. He gasped and pounded. This was as bad as the one that had sent him to the hospital. Maybe even worse.
AAAAAAAAAAAA: the sound of some huge, gruesome insect - a cicada, maybe - here in the dark with him. Who knew what might have crept in here while he was sleeping?
Big Jim fumbled for the flashlight. With the other hand he alternately pounded and rubbed, telling his heart to settle down, not to be such a cotton-picking baby, he hadn't gone through all of this just to die in the dark.
He found the flashlight, struggled to his feet, and stumbled over the body of his late aide-de-camp. He cried out again and went to his knees. The flashlight didn't break but went rolling away from him, casting a moving spotlight on the lowest lefthand shelf, which was stacked with boxes of spaghetti and cans of tomato paste.
Big Jim crawled after it. As he did, Carter Thibodeau's open eyes moved.
'Carter?' Sweat was running down Big Jim's face; his cheeks felt coated with some light, stinking grease. He could feel his shirt sticking to him. His heart took another of those looping larrups and then, for a wonder, settled into its normal rhythm again.
Well. No. Not exactly. But at least into something more like a normal rhythm.
'Carter? Son? Are you alive?'
Ridiculous, of course; Big Jim had gutted him like a fish on a riverbank, then shot him in the back of the head. He was as dead as Adolf Hitler. Yet he could have sworn... well, almost sworn... that the boy's eyes-He fought back the idea that Carter was going to reach out and seize him by the throat. Telling himself it was normal to feel a little bit (terrified) nervous, because the boy had nearly killed him, after all. And still expecting Carter to sit up and draw him forward and bury hungry teeth in his throat.
Big Jim pressed his fingers under Carter's jaw. The blood-sticky flesh was cold and no pulse moved there. Of course not. The kid was dead. Had been dead for twelve hours or more.
'You're eating dinner with your Savior, son,' Big Jim whispered. 'Roast beef and mashed. Apple cobbler for dessert.'
This made him feel better. He crawled after the flashlight, and when he thought he heard something move behind him - the whisper of a hand, perhaps, slipping across the concrete floor, blindly questing - he didn't look back. He had to feed the generator. Had to silence the AAAAAA.
While he was pulling one of the four remaining tanks out of the storage cubby, his heart went into arrhythmia again. He sat beside the open trapdoor, gasping and trying to cough his heart back into a regular rhythm. And praying, unaware that his prayer was basically a series of demands and rationalizations: make it stop, none of it was my fault, get me out of here, I did the best I could, put everything back the way it was, I was let down by incompetents, heal my heart.
'For Jesus' sake, amen,' he said. But the sound of the words chilled rather than comforted. They were like bones rattling in a tomb.
By the time his heart had settled a little, the hoarse cicada-cry of the alarm had stilled. The current tank had run dry. Save for the glow of the flashlight, it was now as dark in the fallout shelter's second room as in the first; the remaining emergency light in here had flickered its last seven hours ago. Struggling to remove the empty tank and get the fresh one onto the platform beside the generator, Big Jim had a faint memory of stamping NO ACTION on a shelter-maintenance requisition that had come across his desk a year or two ago. That requisition had probably included the price of fresh batteries for the emergency lights. But he couldn't blame himself. There was only so much money in a town budget and people always had their hands out: Feed me, feed me.
Al Timmons should have done it on his own initiative, he told himself. For God's sake, is a little initiative too much to ask? Isn't that part of what we pay the maintenance staff for? He could have gone to that frog Burpee and asked for them as a donation, for heaven's sake. That's what I would have done.
He connected the tank to the generator. Then his heart stuttered again. His hand jerked, and he knocked the flashlight into the storage bin, where it clanged against one of the remaining tanks. The lens shattered and he was left once more in total darkness.
'No!' he screamed. 'No, goddammit, NO!'
But from God there was no answer. The quiet and the dark pressed in on him as his overstrained heart choked and struggled. Traitorous thing!
'Never mind. There'll be another flashlight in the other room. Matches, too. I'll just have to find them. If Carter had stockpiled thenl to begin with, I could go right to them.' It was true. He had overestimated that boy. He had thought the kid was a comer, but in the end he had turned out to be a goer. Big Jim laughed, then made himself stop. The sound in such total darkness was a little spooky.
Never mind. Start the generator.
Yes. Right. The generator was job one. He could double-check the connection once it was running and the air purifier was queeping away again. By then he'd have another flashlight, maybe even a Coleman lantern. Plenty of light for the next tank switchover.