It had worked right. It was still working right, but Ollie knew it wouldn't much longer. The fire would take it as the lire had taken everything else. If he had as much as a minute of light left, he would be surprised.
I may not even be alive in a minute.
The potato grader stood in the middle of the dirty concrete floor, a complexity of belts and chains and gears that looked like some ancient instrument of torture. Beyond it was a huge pile of spuds. It had been a good fall for them, and the Dinsmores had finished the harvest only three days before the Dome came down. In an ordinary year, Alden and his boys would have graded them all through November to sell at the Castle Rock co-op produce market and various roadside stands in Motton, Harlow, and Tarker's Mills. No spud-money this year. But Ollie thought they might save his life.
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 hand-pump in the kitchen), but by gorry the taxes were paid, little sis saw to that... and he had THE MEDICAL.