Cell Read online

  "All right, sir."

  The old man smiled, exposing a mouthful of large horse-teeth. "Thank you, Jordan."

  The boy walked toward them with absolutely no relish, his dusty shoes scuffing, his shirttail hanging below the hem of his sweater. He held his lantern in one hand, and it fizzed faintly. There were dark up-all-night circles under his eyes, and his hair badly needed washing.

  "Tom?" Clay asked.

  "We'll see what he wants," Tom said, "because I can see it's what you want, but--"

  "Sirs? Pardon me, sirs?"

  "One second," Tom said to the boy, then turned back to Clay. His face was grave. "But it's going to start getting light in an hour. Maybe less. So that old guy better be right about there being a place for us to stay."

  "Oh, yes, sir," Jordan said. He looked like he didn't want to hope and couldn't help it. "Lots of places. Hundreds of dorm rooms, not to mention Cheatham Lodge. Tobias Wolff came last year and stayed there. He gave a lecture on his book, Old School."

  "I read that," Alice said, sounding bemused.

  "The boys who didn't have cell phones have all run off. The ones who did have them..."

  "We know about them," Alice said.

  "I'm a scholarship boy. I lived in Holloway. I didn't have a cell phone. I had to use the dorm mother's phone whenever I wanted to call home and the other boys would make fun of me."

  "Looks to me like you got the last laugh there, Jordan," Tom said.

  "Yes, sir," he said dutifully, but in the light of his fizzing lantern Clay saw no laughter, only woe and weariness. "Won't you please come and meet the Head?"

  And although he had to be very tired himself, Tom responded with complete politeness, as if they had been standing on a sunny veranda--at a Parents' Tea, perhaps--instead of on the trash-littered verge of Academy Avenue at four-fifteen in the morning. "That would be our pleasure, Jordan," he said.

  12

  "The devil's intercoms is what I used to call them," said Charles Ardai, who had been chairman of Gaiten Academy's English Department for twenty-five years and acting Headmaster of the Academy entire at the time of the Pulse. Now he stumped with surprising rapidity up the hill on his cane, keeping to the sidewalk, avoiding the river of swill that carpeted Academy Drive. Jordan walked watchfully beside him, the other three behind him. Jordan was worried about the old man losing his balance. Clay was worried that the man might have a heart attack, trying to talk and climb a hill--even a relatively mild one like this--at the same time.

  "I never really meant it, of course; it was a joke, a jape, a comic exaggeration, but in truth, I never liked the things, especially in an academic environment. I might have moved to keep them out of the school, but naturally I would have been overruled. Might as well try to legislate against the rising of the tide, eh?" He puffed rapidly several times. "My brother gave me one for my sixty-fifth birthday. I ran the thing flat..." Puff, pant. "And simply never recharged it. They emit radiation, are you aware of this? In minuscule amounts, it's true, but still... a source of radiation that close to one's head... one's brain..."

  "Sir, you should wait until we get to Tonney," Jordan said. He steadied Ardai as the Head's cane slid on a rotten piece of fruit and he listed momentarily (but at an alarming angle) to port.

  "Probably a good idea," Clay said.

  "Yes," the Head agreed. "Only... I never trusted them, this is my point. I was never that way with my computer. Took to that like a duck to water."

  At the top of the hill, the campus's main road split in a Y The left fork wound its way to buildings that were almost surely dorms. The right one went toward lecture halls, a cluster of administration buildings, and an archway that glimmered white in the dark. The river of garbage and discarded wrappers flowed beneath it. Headmaster Ardai led them that way, skirting as much of the litter as he could, Jordan holding his elbow. The music--now Bette Midler, singing "Wind Beneath My Wings"--was coming from beyond the arch, and Clay saw dozens of discarded compact discs among the bones and empty potato chip bags. He was starting to get a bad feeling about this.

  "Uh, sir? Headmaster? Maybe we should just--"

  "We'll be fine," the Head replied. "Did you ever play musical chairs as a child? Of course you did. Well, as long as the music doesn't stop, we have nothing to worry about. We'll have a quick peek, and then we'll go over to Cheatham Lodge. That's the Headmaster's residence. Not two hundred yards from Tonney Field. I promise you."

  Clay looked at Tom, who shrugged. Alice nodded.

  Jordan happened to be looking back at them (rather anxiously), and he caught this collegial interplay. "You ought to see it," he told them. "The Head's right about that. Until you see it, you don't know."

  "See what, Jordan?" Alice asked.

  But Jordan only looked at her--big young eyes in the dark. "Wait," he said.

  13

  "Holy fucking shit," Clay said. In his mind the words sounded like a full-throated bellow of surprise and horror--with maybe a soupcon of outrage--but what actually emerged was more of a whipped whimper. Part of it might have been that this close the music was almost as loud as that long-ago AC/DC concert (although Debby Boone making her sweet schoolgirl way through "You Light Up My Life" was quite a stretch from "Hell's Bells," even at full volume), but mostly it was pure shock. He thought that after the Pulse and their subsequent retreat from Boston he'd be prepared for anything, but he was wrong.

  He didn't think prep schools like this indulged in anything so plebeian (and so smashmouth) as football, but soccer had apparently been a big deal. The stands stacking up on either side of Tonney Field looked as if they could seat as many as a thousand, and they were decked with bunting that was only now beginning to look bedraggled by the showery weather of the last few days. There was an elaborate Scoreboard at the far end of the field with big letters marching along the top. Clay couldn't read the message in the dark and probably wouldn't have taken it in even if it had been daylight. There was enough light to see the field itself, and that was all that mattered.

  Every inch of grass was covered with phone-crazies. They were lying on their backs like sardines in a can, leg to leg and hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Their faces stared up into the black predawn sky.

  "Oh my Lord Jesus," Tom said. His voice was muffled because one fist was pressed against his mouth.

  "Catch the girl!" the Head rapped. "She's going to faint!"

  "No--I'm all right," Alice said, but when Clay put his arm around her she slumped against him, breathing fast. Her eyes were open but they had a fixed, druggy look.

  "They're under the bleachers, too," Jordan said. He spoke with a studied, almost showy calm that Clay did not believe for a minute. It was the voice of a boy assuring his pals that he's not grossed out by the maggots boiling in a dead cat's eyes... just before he leans over and blows his groceries. "Me and the Head think that's where they put the hurt ones that aren't going to get better."

  "The Head and I, Jordan."

  "Sorry, sir."

  Debby Boone achieved poetic catharsis and ceased. There was a pause and then Lawrence Welk's Champagne Music Makers once more began to play "Baby Elephant Walk." Dodge had a good time, too, Clay thought.

  "How many of those boomboxes have they got rigged together?" he asked Headmaster Ardai. "And how did they do it? They're brainless, for Christ's sake, zombies!" A terrible idea occurred to him, illogical and persuasive at the same time. "Did you do it? To keep them quiet, or...I don't know..."

  "He didn't do it," Alice said. She spoke quietly from her safe place within the circle of Clay's arm.

  "No, and both of your premises are wrong," the Head told him.

  "Both? I don't--"

  "They must be dedicated music-lovers," Tom mused, "because they don't like to go inside buildings. But that's where the CDs are, right?"

  "Not to mention the boomboxes," Clay said.

  "There's no time to explain now. Already the sky has begun to lighten, and... tell them, Jordan."

/>   Jordan replied dutifully, with the air of one who recites a lesson he does not understand, "All good vampires must be in before cockcrow, sir."

  "That's right--before cockcrow. For now, only look. That's all you need to do. You didn't know there were places like this, did you?"

  "Alice knew," Clay said.

  They looked. And because the night had begun to wane, Clay realized that the eyes in all those faces were open. He was pretty sure they weren't seeing; they were just... open.

  Something bad's going on here, he thought. The flocking was only the beginning of it.

  Looking at the packed bodies and empty faces (mostly white; this was New England, after all) was awful, but the blank eyes turned up to the night sky filled him with unreasoning horror. Somewhere, not too distant, the morning's first bird began to sing. It wasn't a crow, but the Head still jerked, then tottered. This time it was Tom who steadied him.

  "Come on," the Head told them. "It's only a short walk to Cheatham Lodge, but we ought to start. The damp has made me stiffer than ever. Take my elbow, Jordan."

  Alice broke free of Clay and went to the old man's other side. He gave her a rather forbidding smile and a shake of his head. "Jordan can take care of me. We take care of each other now--ay, Jordan?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Jordan?" Tom asked. They were nearing a large (and rather pretentious) Tudor-style dwelling that Clay presumed was Cheatham Lodge.

  "Sir?"

  "The sign over the Scoreboard--I couldn't read it. What did it say?"

  "WELCOME ALUMNI TO HOMECOMING WEEKEND." Jordan almost smiled, then remembered there would be no Homecoming Weekend this year--the bunting on the stands had already begun to tatter--and the brightness left his face. If he hadn't been so tired, he might still have held his composure, but it was very late, almost dawn, and as they made their way up the walk to the Headmaster's residence, the last student at Gaiten Academy, still wearing his colors of maroon and gray, burst into tears.

  14

  "That was incredible, sir," Clay said. He had fallen into Jordan's mode of address very naturally. So had Tom and Alice. "Thank you."

  "Yes," Alice said. "Thanks. I've never eaten two burgers in my life--at least not big ones like that."

  It was three o'clock the following afternoon. They were on the back porch of Cheatham Lodge. Charles Ardai--the Head, as Jordan called him--had grilled the hamburgers on a small gas grill. He said the meat was perfectly safe because the generator powering the cafeteria's freezer had run until noon yesterday (and indeed, the patties he took from the cooler Tom and Jordan had carried in from the pantry had still been white with frost and as hard as hockey pucks). He said that grilling the meat would probably be safe until five o'clock, although prudence dictated an early meal.

  "They'd smell the cooking?" Clay asked.

  "Let's just say that we have no desire to find out," the Head replied. "Have we, Jordan?"

  "No, sir," Jordan said, and took a bite of his second burger. He was slowing down, but Clay thought he'd manage to do his duty. "We want to be inside when they wake up, and inside when they come back from town. That's where they go, to town. They're picking it clean, like birds in a field of grain. That's what the Head says."

  "They were flocking back home earlier when we were in Malden," Alice said. "Not that we knew where home for them was." She was eyeing a tray with pudding cups on it. "Can I have one of those?"

  "Yes, indeed." The Head pushed the tray toward her. "And another hamburger, if you'd like. What we don't eat soon will just spoil."

  Alice groaned and shook her head, but she took a pudding cup. So did Tom.

  "They seem to leave at the same time each morning, but the home-flocking behavior has been starting later," Ardai said thoughtfully. "Why would that be?"

  "Slimmer pickings?" Alice asked.

  "Perhaps..." He took a final bite of his own hamburger, then covered the remains neatly with a paper napkin. "There are many flocks, you know. Maybe as many as a dozen within a fifty-mile radius. We know from people going south that there are flocks in Sandown, Fremont, and Candia. They forage about almost aimlessly in the daytime, perhaps for music as well as food, then go back to where they came from."

  "You know this for sure," Tom said. He finished one pudding cup and reached for another.

  Ardai shook his head. "Nothing is for sure, Mr. McCourt." His hair, a long white tangle (an English professor's hair for sure, Clay thought), rippled a bit in the mild afternoon breeze. The clouds were gone. The back porch gave them a good view of the campus, and so far it was deserted. Jordan went around the house at regular intervals to scout the hill sloping down to Academy Avenue and reported all quiet there, as well. "You've not seen any of the other roosting places?"

  "Nope," Tom said.

  "But we're traveling in the dark," Clay reminded him, "and now the dark is really dark."

  "Yes," the Head agreed. He spoke almost dreamily. "As in le moyen age. Translation, Jordan?"

  "The middle age, sir."

  "Good." He patted Jordan's shoulder.

  "Even big flocks would be easy to miss," Clay said. "They wouldn't have to be hiding."

  "No, they're not hiding," Headmaster Ardai agreed, steepling his fingers. "Not yet, at any rate. They flock... they forage... and their group mind may break down a bit while they forage... but perhaps less. Every day perhaps less."

  "Manchester burned to the ground," Jordan said suddenly. "We could see the fire from here, couldn't we, sir?"

  "Yes," the Head agreed. "It's been very sad and frightening."

  "Is it true that people trying to cross into Massachusetts are being shot at the border?" Jordan asked. "That's what people are saying. People are saying you have to go to Vermont, only that way is safe."

  "It's a crock," Clay said. "We heard the same thing about the New Hampshire border."

  Jordan goggled at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. The sound was clear and beautiful in the still air. Then, in the distance, a gun went off. And closer, someone shouted in either rage or horror.

  Jordan stopped laughing.

  "Tell us about that weird state they were in last night," Alice said quietly. "And the music. Do all the other flocks listen to music at night?"

  The Head looked at Jordan.

  "Yes," the boy said. "It's all soft stuff, no rock, no country--"

  "I should guess nothing classical, either," the Head put in. "Not of a challenging nature, at any rate."

  "It's their lullabies," Jordan said. "That's what the Head and me think, isn't it, sir?"

  "The Head and I, Jordan."

  "Head and I, yes, sir."

  "But it is indeed what we think," the Head agreed. "Although I suspect there may be more to it than that. Yes, quite a bit more."

  Clay was flummoxed. He hardly knew how to go on. He looked at his friends and saw on their faces what he was feeling--not just puzzlement, but a dreadful reluctance to be enlightened.

  Leaning forward, Headmaster Ardai said, "May I be frank? I must be frank; it is the habit of a lifetime. I want you to help us do a terrible thing here. The time to do it is short, I think, and while one such act alone may come to nothing, one never knows, does one? One never knows what sort of communication may flow between these... flocks. In any case, I will not stand idly by while these... things . . . steal away not only my school but the very daylight itself. I might have attempted it already, but I'm old and Jordan is very young. Too young. Whatever they are now, they were human not long ago. I won't let him be a part of this."

  "I can do my share, sir!" Jordan said. He spoke as stoutly, Clay thought, as any Muslim teenager who ever strapped on a suicide belt stuffed with explosives.

  "I salute your courage, Jordan," the Head told him, "but I think not." He looked at the boy kindly, but when he returned his gaze to the others, his eyes had hardened considerably. "You have weapons--good ones--and I have nothing but an old single-shot .22 rifle that may not even work anymore, although th
e barrel's open--I've looked. Even if it does work, the cartridges I have for it may not fire. But we have a gasoline pump at our little motor-pool, and gasoline might serve to end their lives."

  He must have seen the horror in their faces, because he nodded. To Clay he no longer looked like kindly old Mr. Chips; he looked like a Puritan elder in an oil-painting. One who could have sentenced a man to the stocks without batting an eye. Or a woman to be burned at the stake as a witch.

  He nodded at Clay in particular. Clay was sure of it. "I know what I'm saying. I know how it sounds. But it wouldn't be murder, not really; it would be extermination. And I have no power to make you do anything. But in any case... whether you help me burn them or not, you must pass on a message."

  "To who?" Alice asked faintly.

  "To everyone you meet, Miss Maxwell." He leaned over the remains of their meal, those hanging-judge eyes sharp and small and burning hot. "You must tell what's happening to them--to the ones who heard the infernal message on their devil's intercoms. You must pass this on. Everyone who has had the daylight robbed away from them must hear, and before it's too late." He passed a hand over his lower face, and Clay saw the fingers were shaking a little. It would be easy to dismiss that as a sign of the man's age, but he hadn't seen any tremors before. "We're afraid it soon will be. Aren't we, Jordan?"

  "Yes, sir." Jordan certainly thought he knew something; he looked terrified.

  "What? What's happening to them?" Clay asked. "It's got something to do with the music and those wired-together boomboxes, doesn't it?"

  The Head sagged, suddenly looking tired. "They're not wired together," he said. "Don't you remember me telling you that both of your premises were wrong?"

  "Yes, but I don't understand what you m--"

  "There's one sound-system with a CD in it, about that you're certainly right. A single compilation disc, Jordan says, which is why the same songs play over and over."

  "Lucky us," Tom muttered, but Clay barely heard him. He was trying to get the sense of what Ardai had just said--they're not wired together. How could that be? It couldn't.

  "The sound-systems--the boomboxes, if you like--are placed all around the field," the Head went on, "and they're all on. At night you can see their little red power lamps--"