Cell Read online

  17

  "I refuse to believe that we were lunatics and murderers before we were anything else," Tom said. "Christ, man, what about the Parthenon? What about Michelangelo's David? What about that plaque on the moon that says, 'We came in peace for all mankind'?"

  "That plaque also has Richard Nixon's name on it," Ardai said drily. "A Quaker, but hardly a man of peace. Mr. McCourt--Tom--I have no interest in handing down an indictment of mankind. If I did, I'd point out that for every Michelangelo there's a Marquis de Sade, for every Gandhi an Eichmann, for every Martin Luther King an Osama bin Laden. Leave it at this: man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way."

  He leaned forward, surveying them with his bright eyes.

  "Mankind's intelligence finally trumped mankind's killer instinct, and reason came to rule over mankind's maddest impulses. That, too, was survival. I believe the final showdown between the two may have come in October of 1963, over a handful of missiles in Cuba, but that is a discussion for another day. The fact is, most of us had sublimated the worst in us until the Pulse came along and stripped away everything but that red core."

  "Someone let the Tasmanian devil out of its cage," Alice murmured. "Who?"

  "That need not concern us, either," the Head replied. "I suspect they had no idea of what they were doing... or how much they were doing. Based upon what must have been hurried experiments over a few years--perhaps even months--they may have thought they would unleash a destructive storm of terrorism. Instead they unleashed a tsunami of untold violence, and it's mutating. Horrible as the current days may now seem, we may later view them as a lull between one storm and the next. These days may also be our only chance to make a difference."

  "What do you mean, mutating?" Clay asked.

  But the Head didn't answer. Instead he turned to twelve-year-old Jordan. "If you please, young man."

  "Yes. Well." Jordan paused to think. "Your conscious mind only uses a tiny percentage of your brain's capacity. You guys know that, right?"

  "Yes," Tom said, a bit indulgently. "So I've read."

  Jordan nodded. "Even when you add in all the autonomic functions they control, plus the subconscious stuff--dreams, blink-think, the sex drive, all that jazz--our brains are barely ticking over."

  "Holmes, you astound me," Tom said.

  "Don't be a wiseass, Tom!" Alice said, and Jordan gave her a decidedly starry-eyed smile.

  "I'm not," Tom said. "The kid is good."

  "Indeed he is," the Headmaster said drily. "Jordan may have occasional problems with the King's English, but he did not get his scholarship for excelling at tiddlywinks." He observed the boy's discomfort and gave Jordan's hair an affectionate scruff with his bony fingers. "Continue, please."

  "Well..." Jordan struggled, Clay could see it, and then seemed to find his rhythm again. "If your brain really was a hard drive, the can would be almost empty." He saw only Alice understood this. "Put it this way: the info strip would say something like 2 percent in use, 98 percent available. No one has any real idea what that ninety-eight percent is for, but there's plenty of potential there. Stroke victims, for instance... they sometimes access previously dormant areas of their brains in order to walk and talk again. It's like their brains wire around the blighted area. The lights go on in a similar area of the brain, but on the other side."

  "You study this stuff?" Clay asked.

  "It's a natural outgrowth of my interest in computers and cybernetics," Jordan said, shrugging. "Also, I read a lot of cyberpunk science fiction. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley--"

  "Neal Stephenson?" Alice asked.

  Jordan grinned radiantly. "Neal Stephenson's a god."

  "Back on message," the Head chided... but gently.

  Jordan shrugged. "If you wipe a computer hard drive, it can't regenerate spontaneously... except maybe in a Greg Bear novel." He grinned again, but this time it was quick and, Clay thought, rather nervous. Part of it was Alice, who clearly knocked the kid out. "People are different."

  "But there's a huge leap between learning to walk again after a stroke and being able to power a bunch of boomboxes by telepathy," Tom said. "A quantum leap." He looked around self-consciously as the word telepathy came out of his mouth, as if expecting them to laugh. No one did.

  "Yeah, but a stroke victim, even someone who has a bad one, is light-years different from what happened to people who were on their cells during the Pulse," Jordan replied. "Me and the Head--the Head and I--think that in addition to stripping people's brains all the way to that one unerasable line of code, the Pulse also kicked something on. Something that's probably been sitting inside all of us for millions of years, buried in that ninety-eight percent of dormant hard drive."

  Clay's hand stole to the butt of the revolver he had picked up off the floor in Beth Nickerson's kitchen. "A trigger," he said.

  Jordan lit up. "Yeah, exactly! A mutative trigger. It never could have happened without this, like, total erasure on a grand scale. Because what's emerging, what's building up in those people out there... only they're no longer people, what's building up is--"

  "It's a single organism," the Head interrupted. "This is what we believe."

  "Yes, but more than just a flock," Jordan said. "Because what they can do with the CD players may only be the start, like a little kid learning to put his shoes on. Think about what they might be able to do in a week. Or a month. Or a year."

  "You could be wrong," Tom said, but his voice was as dry as a breaking stick.

  "He could also be right," Alice said.

  "Oh, I'm sure he's right," the Head put in. He sipped his spiked hot chocolate. "Of course, I'm an old man and my time is almost over in any case. I'll abide by any decision you make." A slight pause. The eyes flicked from Clay to Alice to Tom. "As long as it's the right one, of course."

  Jordan said: "The flocks will try to come together, you know. If they don't hear each other already, they will real soon."

  "Crap," Tom said uneasily. "Ghost stories."

  "Maybe," Clay said, "but here's something to think about. Right now the nights are ours. What if they decide they need less sleep? Or that they're not afraid of the dark?"

  No one said anything for several moments. A wind was rising outside. Clay sipped his hot chocolate, which had never been much more than tepid and was now almost cold. When he looked up again, Alice had put hers aside and was holding her Nike talisman instead.

  "I want to wipe them out," she said. "The ones on the soccer field, I want to wipe them out. I don't say kill them because I think Jordan's right, and I don't want to do it for the human race. I want to do it for my mother and my dad, because he's gone, too. I know he is, I feel it. I want to do it for my friends Vickie and Tess. They were good friends, but they had cell phones, they never went anywhere without them, and I know what they're like now and where they're sleeping: someplace just like that fucking soccer field." She glanced at the Head, flushing. "'Scuse me, sir."

  The Head waved her apology away.

  "Can we do that?" she asked him. "Can we wipe them out?"

  Charles Ardai, who had been winding down his career as Gaiten Academy's interim Headmaster when the world ended, bared his eroded teeth in a grin Clay would have given much to have captured with pen or brush; there was not a single ounce of pity in it. "Miss Maxwell, we can try," he said.

  18

  At four o'clock the next morning, Tom McCourt sat on a picnic table between the two Gaiten Academy greenhouses, which had both sustained serious damage since the Pulse. His feet, now wearing the Reeboks he'd donned back in Malden, were on one of the benches, and his head lay on his arms, which rested on his knees. The wind blew his hair first one way, then the other. Alice sat across from him with her chin propped on her hands and the rays of several flashlights striking angles and shadows across her face. The harsh light made her look pretty in sp
ite of her obvious weariness; at her age, all light was still flattering. The Head, sitting next to her, only looked exhausted. In the closer of the two greenhouses, two Coleman gas-lanterns floated like uneasy spirits.

  The Colemans converged at the near end of the greenhouse. Clay and Jordan used the door, although huge holes in the glass paneling had been opened on either side. A moment later, Clay sat down next to Tom and Jordan resumed his usual spot next to the Head. The boy smelled of gasoline and fertilizer, even more strongly of dejection. Clay dropped several sets of keys on the table amid the flashlights. As far as he was concerned, they could stay there until some archaeologist discovered them four millennia from now.

  "I'm sorry," Headmaster Ardai said softly. "It seemed so simple."

  "Yeah," Clay said. It had seemed simple: fill the greenhouse sprayers with gasoline, load the sprayers into the back of a pickup truck, drive across Tonney Field, wetting down both sides as they went, toss a match. He thought to tell Ardai that George W Bush's Iraq adventure had probably looked equally simple--load the sprayers, toss a match--and didn't. It would have been pointlessly cruel.

  "Tom?" Clay asked. "You okay?" He had already realized that Tom didn't have great reserves of stamina.

  "Yeah, just tired." He raised his head and gave Clay a smile. "Not used to the night shift. What do we do now?"

  "Go to bed, I guess," Clay said. "It'll be dawn in another forty minutes or so." The sky had already begun to lighten in the east.

  "It's not fair," Alice said. She brushed angrily at her cheeks. "It's not fair, we tried so hard!"

  They had tried hard, but nothing had come easily. Every small (and ultimately meaningless) victory had been the sort of maddening struggle his mother had called a Bolshie shit-pull. Part of Clay did want to blame the Head... also himself, for not taking Ardai's sprayer idea with a grain of salt. Part of him now thought that going along with an elderly English teacher's plan to firebomb a soccer field was a little like taking a knife to a gunfight. Still... yeah, it had seemed like a good idea.

  Until, that was, they discovered the motor pool's gasoline storage tank was inside a locked shed. They'd spent nearly half an hour in the nearby office, scrounging by lantern-light through maddeningly unmarked keys on a board behind the superintendent's desk. It was Jordan who finally found the key that unlocked the shed door.

  Then they discovered that One would only have to pull a plug was not exactly the case. There was a cap, not a plug. And like the shed in which the tank resided, the cap was locked. Back to the office; another scrounge by lantern-light; finally a key that did indeed seem to fit the cap. It was Alice who pointed out that since the cap was on the bottom of the tank, assuring gravity-feed in case of a power outage, they would have a flood on their hands without a hose or a siphon. They spent an hour looking for a hose that might fit and couldn't find anything that looked even close. Tom found a small funnel, which sent them all into moderate hysterics.

  And because none of the truck keys were marked (at least in ways non-motor-pool employees could understand), locating the right set became another process of trial and error. This one went faster, at least, because there were only eight trucks parked behind the garage.

  And last, the greenhouses. There they discovered only eight sprayers, not a dozen, with a capacity of not thirty gallons each but ten. They might be able to fill them from the gasoline storage tank, but they would be drenched in the process, and the result would be a mere eighty gallons of usable, sprayable gas. It was the idea of wiping out a thousand phone-crazies with eighty gallons of regular that had driven Tom, Alice, and the Head out to the picnic bench. Clay and Jordan had hung in a while longer, looking for bigger sprayers, but they had found none.

  "We found a few little leaf-sprayers, though," Clay said. "You know, what they used to call flit-guns."

  "Also," Jordan said, "the big sprayers in there are all full of weed-killer or plant-food or something. We'd have to start by dumping them all out, and that would mean putting on masks just to make sure we didn't gas ourselves or something."

  "Reality bites," Alice said morosely. She looked at her baby sneaker for a moment, then tucked it away in her pocket.

  Jordan picked up the keys they had matched to one of the maintenance pickups. "We could drive downtown," he said. "There's a Trustworthy Hardware. They must have sprayers."

  Tom shook his head. "It's over a mile and the main drag's full of wrecks and abandoned vehicles. We might be able to get around some, but not all. And driving over the lawns is out of the question. The houses are just too close together. There are reasons everybody's on foot." They had seen a few people on bicycles, but not many; even the ones equipped with lights were dangerous if ridden at any speed.

  "Would it be possible for a light truck to negotiate the side streets?" the Head asked.

  Clay said, "We could explore the possibility tomorrow night, I suppose. Scout out a path in advance, on foot, then come back for the truck." He considered. "They'd probably have all sorts of hose in a hardware store, too."

  "You don't sound exactly jazzed," Alice said.

  Clay sighed. "It doesn't take much to block little streets. We'd end up doing a lot of donkey-work even if we got luckier than we did tonight. I just don't know. Maybe it'll look better to me after some rest."

  "Of course it will," the Head agreed, but he sounded hollow. "To all of us."

  "What about the gas station across from the school?" Jordan asked without much hope.

  "What gas station?" Alice asked.

  "He's talking about the Citgo," the Head replied. "Same problem, Jordan--plenty of gasoline in the tanks under the pumps, but no power. And I doubt if they have much in the way of containers beyond a few two-or five-gallon gasoline cans. I really think--" But he didn't say what he really thought. He broke off. "What is it, Clay?"

  Clay was remembering the trio ahead of them limping past that gas station, one of the men with an arm around the woman's waist. "Academy Grove Citgo," he said. "That's the name, isn't it?"

  "Yes--"

  "But they didn't just sell gasoline, I think." He didn't just think, he knew. Because of the two trucks parked on the side. He had seen them and hadn't thought anything of them. Not then, he hadn't. No reason to.

  "I don't know what you--" the Head began, then stopped. His eyes met Clay's. His eroded teeth once more made their appearance in that singularly pitiless smile. "Oh," he said. "Oh. Oh my. Oh my, yes."

  Tom was looking between them with mounting perplexity. So was Alice. Jordan merely waited.

  "Would you mind telling the rest of us what you two are communing about?" Tom asked.

  Clay was ready to--he already saw clearly how it would work, and it was too good not to share--when the music from Tonney Field died away. It didn't click off, as it usually did when they woke up in the morning; it went in a kind of swoop, as if someone had just kicked the source down an elevator shaft.

  "They're up early," Jordan said in a low voice.

  Tom gripped Clay's forearm. "It's not the same," he said. "And one of those damned ghetto blasters is still playing... I can hear it, very faint."

  The wind was strong, and Clay knew it was blowing from the direction of the soccer field because of the ripe smells it carried: decaying food, decaying flesh, hundreds of unwashed bodies. It also carried the ghostly sound of Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers playing "Baby Elephant Walk."

  Then, from somewhere to the northwest--maybe ten miles away, maybe thirty, it was hard to tell how far the wind might have carried it--came a spectral, somehow mothlike moaning sound. There was silence... silence... and then the not-waking, not-sleeping creatures on the Tonney soccer field answered in kind. Their moan was much louder, a hollow, belling ghost-groan that rose toward the black and starry sky.

  Alice had covered her mouth. The baby sneaker jutted upward from her hands. Her eyes bulged on either side of it. Jordan had thrown his arms around the Head's waist and buried his face against the ol
d man's side.

  "Look, Clay!" Tom said. He got to his feet and tottered toward the grassy aisle between the two shattered greenhouses, pointing at the sky as he went. "Do you see? My God, do you see?"

  To the northwest, from where the distant groan had risen, a reddish orange glow had bloomed on the horizon. It strengthened as he watched, the wind bore that terrible sound again... and once more it was answered with a similar but much louder groan from Tonney Field.

  Alice joined them, then the Head, walking with his arm around Jordan's shoulders.

  "What's over there?" Clay asked, pointing toward the glow. It had already begun to wane again.

  "It might be Glen's Falls," the Headmaster said. "Or it might be Littleton."

  "Wherever it is, there's shrimp on the barbie," Tom said. "They're burning. And our bunch knows. They heard."

  "Or felt," Alice said. She shuddered, then straightened and bared her teeth. "I hope they did!"

  As if in answer, there was another groan from Tonney Field: many voices raised as one in a cry of sympathy and--perhaps--shared agony. The one boombox--it was the master, Clay assumed, the one with an actual compact disc in it--continued to play. Ten minutes later, the others joined in once more. The music--it now was "Close to You," by The Carpenters--swooped up, just as it had previously swooped down. By then Headmaster Ardai, limping noticeably on his cane, had led them back to Cheatham Lodge. Not long after that, the music stopped again... but this time it simply clicked off, as it had the previous morning. From far away, carried across God alone knew how many miles by the wind, came the faint pop of a gunshot. Then the world was eerily and completely silent, waiting for the dark to give place to the day.

  19

  As the sun began to spoke its first red rays through the trees on the eastern horizon, they watched the phone-crazies once again begin leaving the soccer field in close-order patterns, headed for downtown Gaiten and the surrounding neighborhoods. They fanned out as they went, headed downhill toward Academy Avenue as if nothing untoward had happened near the end of the night. But Clay didn't trust that. He thought they had better do their business at the Citgo station quickly, today, if they intended to do it at all. Going out in the daylight might mean shooting some of them, but as long as they only moved en masse at the beginning and end of the day, he was willing to take that risk.