Cell: A Novel Read online

  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 jagg
ed 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.”

  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 spite 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.