Cell Read online

  "Yes," Alice said. "I did notice some red lights, I just didn't think anything of it."

  "--but there's nothing in them--no compact discs or cassette tapes--and no wires linking them. They're just slaves that pick up the master-disc audio and rebroadcast it."

  "If their mouths are open, the music comes from them, too," Jordan said. "It's just little... not hardly a whisper... but you can hear it."

  "No," Clay said. "That's your imagination, kiddo. Gotta be."

  "I haven't heard that myself," Ardai said, "but of course my ears aren't what they were back when I was a Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps fan. 'Back in the day,' Jordan and his friends would say."

  "You're very old-school, sir," Jordan said. He spoke with gentle solemnity and unmistakable affection.

  "Yes, Jordan, I am," the Head agreed. He clapped the boy on the shoulder, then turned his attention to the others. "If Jordan says he's heard it... I believe him."

  "It's not possible," Clay said. "Not without a transmitter."

  "They are transmitting," the Head replied. "It is a skill they seem to have picked up since the Pulse."

  "Wait," Tom said. He raised one hand like a traffic cop, lowered it, began to speak, raised it again. From his place of dubious shelter at Headmaster Ardai's side, Jordan watched him closely. At last Tom said, "Are we talking telepathy here?"

  "I should guess that's not exactly le mot juste for this particular phenomenon," the Head answered, "but why stick at technicalities? I would be willing to wager all the frozen hamburgers remaining in my cooler that the word has been used among you before today."

  "You'd win double burgers," Clay said.

  "Well yeah, but the flocking thing is different," Tom said.

  "Because?" The Head raised his tangled brows.

  "Well, because..." Tom couldn't finish, and Clay knew why. It wasn't different. The flocking wasn't human behavior and they'd known it from the moment they'd observed George the mechanic following the woman in the filthy pants suit across Tom's front lawn to Salem Street. He'd been walking so closely behind her that he could have bitten her neck... but he hadn't. And why? Because for the phone-crazies, biting was done, flocking had begun.

  At least, biting their own kind was done. Unless--

  "Professor Ardai, at the beginning they killed everyone..."

  "Yes," the Head agreed. "We were very lucky to escape, weren't we, Jordan?"

  Jordan shuddered and nodded. "The kids ran everywhere. Even some of the teachers. Killing... biting... babbling nonsense stuff... I hid in one of the greenhouses for a while."

  "And I in the attic of this very house," the Head added. "I watched out of the small window up there as the campus--the campus I love--literally went to hell."

  Jordan said, "Most of the ones who didn't die ran away toward downtown. Now a lot of them are back. Over there." He nodded his head in the general direction of the soccer field.

  "All of which leads us to what?" Clay asked.

  "I think you know, Mr. Riddell."

  "Clay."

  "Clay, fine. I think what's happening now is more than temporary anarchy. I think it's the start of a war. It's going to be a short but extremely nasty one."

  "Don't you think you're overstating--"

  "I don't. While I have only my own observations to go on--mine and Jordan's--we've had a very large flock to observe, and we've seen them going and coming as well as...resting, shall we say. They've stopped killing each other, but they continue to kill the people we would classify as normal. I call that warlike behavior."

  "You've actually seen them killing normals?" Tom asked. Beside him, Alice opened her pack, removed the Baby Nike, and held it in her hand.

  The Head looked at him gravely. "I have. I'm sorry to say that Jordan has, too."

  "We couldn't help," Jordan said. His eyes were leaking. "There were too many. It was a man and a woman, see? I don't know what they were doing on campus so close to dark, but they sure couldn't've known about Tonney Field. She was hurt. He was helping her along. They ran into about twenty of them on their way back from town. The man tried to carry her." Jordan's voice began to break. "On his own he might have gotten away, but with her... he only made it as far as Horton Hall. That's a dorm. That's where he fell down and they caught them. They--"

  Jordan abruptly buried his head against the old man's coat--a charcoal gray number this afternoon. The Head's big hand stroked the back of Jordan's smooth neck.

  "They seem to know their enemies," the Head mused. "It may well have been part of the original message, don't you think?"

  "Maybe," Clay said. It made a nasty sort of sense.

  "As to what they are doing at night as they lie there so still and open-eyed, listening to their music..." The Head sighed, took a handkerchief from one of his coat pockets, and wiped the boy's eyes with it in matter-of-fact fashion. Clay saw he was both very frightened and very sure of whatever conclusion he had drawn. "I think they're rebooting," he said.

  15

  "You note the red lamps, don't you?" the Head asked in his carrying I-will-be-heard-all-the-way-to-the-back-of-the-lecture-hall voice. "I count at least sixty-thr--"

  "Hush up!" Tom hissed. He did everything but clap a hand over the old man's mouth.

  The Head looked at him calmly. "Have you forgotten what I said last night about musical chairs, Tom?"

  Tom, Clay, and Ardai were standing just beyond the turnstiles, with the Tonney Field archway at their backs. Alice had stayed at Cheatham Lodge with Jordan, by mutual agreement. The music currently drifting up from the prep-school soccer field was a jazz-instrumental version of "The Girl from Ipanema." Clay thought it was probably cutting-edge stuff if you were a phone-crazy.

  "No," Tom said. "As long as the music doesn't stop, we have nothing to worry about. I just don't want to be the guy who gets his throat torn out by an insomniac exception to the rule."

  "You won't."

  "How can you be so positive, sir?" Tom asked.

  "Because, to make a small literary pun, we cannot call it sleep. Come."

  He started down the concrete ramp the players once took to reach the field, saw that Tom and Clay were hanging back, and looked at them patiently. "Little knowledge is gained without risk," he said, "and at this point, I would say knowledge is critical, wouldn't you? Come."

  They followed his rapping cane down the ramp toward the field, Clay a little ahead of Tom. Yes, he could see the red power-lamps of the boomboxes circling the field. Sixty or seventy looked about right. Good-sized sound-systems spotted at ten-or fifteen-foot intervals, each one surrounded with bodies. By starlight those bodies were an eye-boggling sight. They weren't stacked--each had his or her own space--but not so much as an inch had been wasted. Even the arms had been interwoven, so that the impression was one of paper dolls carpeting the field, rank on rank, while that music--Like something you'd hear in a supermarket, Clay thought--rose in the dark. Something else rose, as well: a sallow smell of dirt and rotting vegetables, with a thicker odor of human waste and putrefaction lingering just beneath.

  The Head skirted the goal, which had been pushed aside, overturned, its netting shredded. Here, where the lake of bodies started, lay a young man of about thirty with jagged bite-marks running up one arm to the sleeve of his NASCAR T-shirt. The bites looked infected. In one hand he held a red cap that made Clay think of Alice's pet sneaker. He stared dully up at the stars as Bette Midler once more began singing about the wind beneath her wings.

  "Hi!" the Head cried in his rusty, piercing voice. He poked the young man briskly in the middle with the tip of his cane, pushing in until the young man broke wind. "Hi, I say!"

  "Stop it!" Tom almost groaned.

  The Head gave him a look of tight-lipped scorn, then worked the tip of his cane into the cap the young man was holding. He flicked it away. The cap sailed about ten feet and landed on the face of a middle-aged woman. Clay watched, fascinated, as it slid partially aside, revealing one rapt and blinkless eye.
>
  The young man reached up with dreamy slowness and clutched the hand that had been holding the cap into a fist. Then he subsided.

  "He thinks he's holding it again," Clay whispered, fascinated.

  "Perhaps," the Head replied, without much interest. He poked the tip of his cane against one of the young man's infected bites. It should have hurt like hell, but the young man didn't react, only went on staring up at the sky as Bette Midler gave way to Dean Martin. "I could put my cane right through his throat and he wouldn't try to stop me. Nor would those around him spring to his defense, although in the daytime I have no doubt they'd tear me limb from limb."

  Tom was squatting by one of the ghetto blasters. "There are batteries in this," he said. "I can tell by the weight."

  "Yes. In all of them. They do seem to need batteries." The Head considered, then added something Clay could have done without. "At least so far."

  "We could wade right in, couldn't we?" Clay said. "We could wipe them out the way hunters exterminated passenger pigeons back in the 1880s."

  The Head nodded. "Bashed their little brains out as they sat on the ground, didn't they? Not a bad analogy. But I'd make slow work of it with my cane. You'd make slow work of it even with your automatic weapon, I'm afraid."

  "I don't have enough bullets, in any case. There must be..." Clay ran his eye over the packed bodies again. Looking at them made his head hurt. "There must be six or seven hundred. And that's not even counting the ones under the bleachers."

  "Sir? Mr. Ardai?" It was Tom. "When did you... how did you first...?"

  "How did I determine the depth of this trance state? Is that what you're asking me?"

  Tom nodded.

  "I came out the first night to observe. The flock was much smaller then, of course. I was drawn to them out of simple but overwhelming curiosity. Jordan wasn't with me. Switching to a nighttime existence has been rather hard for him, I'm afraid."

  "You risked your life, you know," Clay said.

  "I had little choice," the Head replied. "It was like being hypnotized. I quickly grasped the fact that they were unconscious even though their eyes were open, and a few simple experiments with the tip of my cane confirmed the depth of the state."

  Clay thought of the Head's limp, thought of asking him if he'd considered what would have happened to him if he'd been wrong and they'd come after him, and held his tongue. The Head would no doubt reiterate what he'd already said: no knowledge obtained without risk. Jordan was right--this was one very old-school dude. Clay certainly wouldn't have wanted to be fourteen and standing on his disciplinary carpet.

  Ardai, meanwhile, was shaking his head at him. "Six or seven hundred's a very low estimate, Clay. This is a regulation-size soccer field. That's six thousand square yards."

  "How many?"

  "The way they're packed together? I should say a thousand at the very least."

  "And they're not really here at all, are they? You're sure of that."

  "I am. And what comes back--a little more each day, Jordan says the same, and he's an acute observer, you may trust me on that--is not what they were. Which is to say, not human."

  "Can we go back to the Lodge now?" Tom asked. He sounded sick.

  "Of course," the Head agreed.

  "Just a second," Clay said. He knelt beside the young man in the NASCAR T-shirt. He didn't want to do it--he couldn't help thinking that the hand which had clutched for the red cap would now clutch at him--but he made himself. Down here at ground level the stink was worse. He had believed he was getting used to it, but he had been wrong.

  Tom began, "Clay, what are you--"

  "Quiet." Clay leaned toward the young man's mouth, which was partly open. He hesitated, then made himself lean closer, until he could see the dim shine of spit on the man's lower lip. At first he thought it might only be his imagination, but another two inches--he was now almost close enough to kiss the not-sleeping thing with Ricky Craven on its chest--took care of that.

  It's just little, Jordan had said. Not hardly a whisper... but you can hear it.

  Clay heard it, the vocal by some trick just a syllable or two ahead of the one coming from the linked boomboxes: Dean Martin singing "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime."

  He stood up, nearly screaming at the pistol-shot sound of his own knees cracking. Tom held up his lantern, looking at him, stare-eyed. "What? What? You're not going to say that kid was--"

  Clay nodded. "Come on. Let's go back."

  Halfway up the ramp he grabbed the Head roughly by the shoulder. Ardai turned to face him, seemingly not disturbed to be handled so.

  "You're right, sir. We have to get rid of them. As many as we can, and as fast as we can. This may be the only chance we get. Or do you think I'm wrong?"

  "No," the Head replied. "Unfortunately, I don't. As I said, this is war--or so I believe--and what one does in war is kill one's enemies. Why don't we go back and talk it over? We could have hot chocolate. I like a tiny splash of bourbon in mine, barbarian that I am."

  At the top of the ramp, Clay spared one final look back. Tonney Field was dark, but under strong northern starlight not too dark to make out the carpet of bodies spread from end to end and side to side. He thought you might not know what you were looking at if you just happened to stumble on it, but once you did... once you did...

  His eyes played him a funny trick and for a moment he almost thought he could see them breathing--all eight hundred or a thousand of them--as one organism. That frightened him badly and he turned to catch up to Tom and Headmaster Ardai, almost running.

  16

  The Head made hot chocolate in the kitchen and they drank it in the formal parlor, by the light of two gas lanterns. Clay thought the old man would suggest they go out to Academy Avenue later on, trolling for more volunteers in Ardai's Army, but he seemed satisfied with what he had.

  The gasoline-pump at the motor pool, the Head told them, drew from a four-hundred-gallon overhead tank--all they'd have to do was pull a plug. And there were thirty-gallon sprayers in the greenhouse. At least a dozen. They could load up a pickup truck with them, perhaps, and back it down one of the ramps--

  "Wait," Clay said. "Before we start talking strategy, if you have a theory about all this, sir, I'd like to hear it."

  "Nothing so formal," the old man said. "But Jordan and I have observation, we have intuition, and we have a fair amount of experience between the two of us--"

  "I'm a computer geek," Jordan said over his mug of hot chocolate. Clay found the child's glum assurance oddly charming. "A total McNerd. Been on em my whole life, just about. Those things're rebooting, all right. They might as well have SOFTWARE INSTALLATION, PLEASE STAND BY blinking on their foreheads."

  "I don't understand you," Tom said.

  "I do," Alice said. "Jordan, you think the Pulse really was a Pulse, don't you? Everyone who heard it... they got their hard drives wiped."

  "Well, yeah," Jordan said. He was too polite to say Well, duh.

  Tom looked at Alice, perplexed. Only Clay knew Tom wasn't dumb, and he didn't believe Tom was that slow.

  "You had a computer," Alice said. "I saw it in your little office."

  "Yes--"

  "And you've installed software, right?"

  "Sure, but--" Tom stopped, looking at Alice fixedly. She looked back. "Their brains'? You mean their brains'?"

  "What do you think a brain is?" Jordan said. "A big old hard drive. Organic circuitry. No one knows how many bytes. Say giga to the power of a googolplex. An infinity of bytes." He put his hands to his ears, which were small and neatly made. "Right in between here."

  "I don't believe it," Tom said, but he spoke in a small voice and there was a sick look on his face. Clay thought he did believe it. Thinking back to the madness that had convulsed Boston, Clay had to admit the idea was persuasive. It was also terrible: millions, perhaps even billions, of brains all wiped clean at the same time, the way you could wipe an old-fashioned computer disc with a powerful magnet.

/>   He found himself remembering Pixie Dark, the friend of the girl with the peppermint-colored cell phone. Who are you? What's happening? Pixie Dark had cried. Who are you? Who am I? Then she had smacked herself repeatedly in the forehead with the heel of her hand and had gone running full tilt into a lamppost, not once but twice, smashing her expensive orthodontic work to jagged pieces.

  Who are you? Who am I?

  It hadn't been her cell phone. She had only been listening in and hadn't gotten a full dose.

  Clay, who thought in images rather than words a good deal of the time, now got a vivid mental picture of a computer screen filling up with those words: WHO ARE YOU WHO AM I WHO ARE YOU WHO AM I WHO ARE YOU who AM I who ARE YOU WHO am I, and finally, at the bottom, as bleak and inarguable as Pixie Dark's fate:

  SYSTEM FAILURE.

  Pixie Dark as a partially wiped hard drive? It was horrible, but it felt like the stone truth.

  "I majored in English, but as a young man I read a great deal of psychology," the Head told them. "I began with Freud, of course, everyone begins with Freud... then Jung... Adler... worked my way around the whole ballfield from there. Lurking behind all theories of how the mind works is a greater theory: Darwin's. In Freud's vocabulary, the idea of survival as the prime directive is expressed by the concept of the id. In Jung's, by the rather grander idea of blood consciousness. Neither man, I think, would argue with the idea that if all conscious thought, all memory, all ratiocinative ability, were to be stripped from a human mind in a moment, what would remain would be pure and terrible."

  He paused, looking around for comment. None of them said anything. The Head nodded as if satisfied and resumed.

  "Although neither the Freudians nor the Jungians come right out and say it, they strongly suggest that we may have a core, a single basic carrier wave, or--to use language with which Jordan is comfortable--a single line of written code which cannot be stripped."

  "The PD," Jordan said. "The prime directive."

  "Yes," the Head agreed. "At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago."