Sea Dogs sprinted for his Toyota, which he’d left parked askew on the highway’s broken white line. The guy behind the wheel of the pulper —maybe high on pills, maybe smoked up on meth, maybe just young, in a big hurry, and feeling immortal—saw him and laid on his horn . He wasn’t slowing.
“Fuck me sideways!” Sea Dogs cried as he threw himself behind the wheel. He keyed the engine and backed the Toyota out of the road with the driver’s door flapping . The little SUV thumped into the ditch with its square nose canted up to the sky. Sea Dogs was out the next moment. He stumbled, landed on one knee, and then took off running into the field.
Barbie, thinking of the plane and the birds—thinking of that weird black smutch that might´ve been the plane’s point of impact—also ran into the grazeland , at first sprinting through low, unenthusiastic flames and sending up puffs of black ash. He saw a man’s sneaker—it was too big to be a woman’s—with the man’s foot still in it.
Pilot, he thought. And then: I have to stop running around like this.
“YOU IDIOT, SLOW DOWN!” Sea Dogs cried at the pulp-truck in a thin, panicky voice, but it was too late for such instructions. Barbie, looking back over his shoulder (helpless not to), thought the pulp-
wrangler might have tried to brake at the last minute.
He probably saw the wreckage of the plane. In any case, it wasn’t enough. He struck the Motton side of the Dome at sixty or a little more, carrying a log-load of almost forty thousand pounds. The cab disintegrated as it stopped cold. The overloaded carrier, a prisoner of physics, continued forward. The fuel tanks were driven under the logs, shredding and sparking. When they exploded, the load was already airborne, flipping over where the cab—now a green metal accordion—had been. The logs sprayed forward and upward, struck the invisible barrier, and rebounded in all directions. Fire and black smoke boiled upward in a thick plume. There was a terrific thud that rolled across the day like a boulder. Then the logs were raining back down on the Motton side, landing on the road and the surrounding fields like enormous jackstraws. One struck the roof of Sea Dogs’s SUV and smashed it flat, spilling the windshield onto the hood in a spray of diamond crumbles. Another landed right in front of Sea Dogs himself.
Barbie stopped running and only stared.
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