Cell: A Novel Read online

  They wandered past the fieldstone pillars, and Clay could see Alice, Jordan, and the Head peering out, wide-eyed. The two crazies walked over the cryptic message chalked in the street—KASHWAK=NO-FO—and the woman reached for her companion’s Twinkies. The man held the box away from her. The woman cast her book aside (it landed rightside up and Clay saw it was 100 Best Loved Dogs of the World) and reached again. The man slapped her face hard enough to make her filthy hair fly, the sound very loud in the stillness of the day. All this time they were walking. The woman made a sound: “Aw!” The man replied (it sounded to Clay like a reply): “Eeeen!” The woman reached for the box of Twinkies. Now they were passing the Citgo. The man punched her in the neck this time, a looping overhand blow, and then dove a hand into his box for another treat. The woman stopped. Looked at him. And a moment later the man stopped. He had pulled a bit ahead, so his back was mostly to her.

  Clay felt something in the sunwarmed stillness of the gas station office. No, he thought, not in the office, in me. Shortness of breath, like after you climb a flight of stairs too fast.

  Except maybe it was in the office, too, because—Tom stood on his toes and whispered in his ear, “Do you feel that?” Clay nodded and pointed at the desk. There was no wind, no discernible draft, but the papers there were fluttering. And in the ashtray, the ashes had begun to circle lazily, like water going down a bathtub drain. There were two butts in there—no, three—and the moving ashes seemed to be pushing them toward the center.

  The man turned toward the woman. He looked back at her. She looked at him. They looked at each other. Clay could read no expression on either face, but he could feel the hairs on his arms stirring, and he heard a faint jingling. It was the keys on the board below the NO TOWING sign. They were stirring, too—chittering against each other just the tiniest bit.

  “Aw!” said the woman. She held out her hand.

  “Eeen!” said the man. He was wearing the fading remains of a suit. On his feet were dull black shoes. Six days ago he might have been a middle manager, a salesman, or an apartment-complex manager. Now the only real estate he cared about was his box of Twinkies. He held it to his chest, his sticky mouth working.

  “Aw!” the woman insisted. She held out both hands instead of just one, the immemorial gesture signifying gimme, and the keys were jingling louder. Overhead there was a bzzzzt as a fluorescent light for which there was no power flickered and then went out again. The nozzle fell off the middle gas pump and hit the concrete island with a dead-metal clank.

  “Aw,” the man said. His shoulders slumped and all the tension went out of him. The tension went out of the air. The keys on the board fell silent. The ashes made one final, slowing circuit of their dented metal reliquary and came to a stop. You would not have known anything had happened, Clay thought, if not for the fallen nozzle out there and the little cluster of cigarette butts in the ashtray on the desk in here.

  “Aw,” the woman said. She was still holding out her hands. Her companion advanced to within reach of them. She took a Twinkie in each and began to eat them, wrappings and all. Once more Clay was comforted, but only a little. They resumed their slow shuffle toward town, the woman pausing long enough to spit a filling-caked piece of cellophane from the side of her mouth. She showed no interest in 100 Best Loved Dogs of the World.

  “What was that?” Tom asked in a low and shaken voice when the two of them were almost out of sight.

  “I don’t know, but I didn’t like it,” Clay said. He had the keys to the propane trucks. He handed one set to Tom. “Can you drive a standard shift?”

  “I learned on a standard. Can you?”

  Clay smiled patiently. “I’m straight, Tom. Straight guys know how to drive standards without instruction. It’s instinct with us.”

  “Very funny.” Tom wasn’t really listening. He was looking after the departed odd couple, and that pulse in the side of his throat was going faster than ever. “End of the world, open season on the queers, why not, right?”

  “That’s right. It’s gonna be open season on straights, too, if they get that shit under control. Come on, let’s do it.”

  He started out the door, but Tom held him back a minute. “Listen. The others may have felt that over there, or they may not have. If they didn’t, maybe we should keep it to ourselves for the time being. What do you think?”

  Clay thought about how Jordan wouldn’t let the Head out of his sight and how Alice always kept the creepy little sneaker somewhere within reach. He thought about the circles under their eyes, and then about what they were planning to do tonight. Armageddon was probably too strong a word for it, but not by much. Whatever they were now, the phone-crazies had once been human beings, and burning a thousand of them alive was burden enough. Even thinking about it hurt his imagination.

  “Fine by me,” he said. “Go up the hill in low gear, all right?”

  “Lowest one I can find,” Tom said. They were walking to the big bottle-shaped trucks now. “How many gears do you think a truck like that has?”

  “One forward should be enough,” Clay said.

  “Based on the way they’re parked, I think you’re going to have to start by finding reverse.”

  “Fuck it,” Clay said. “What good is the end of the world if you can’t drive through a goddam board fence?”

  And that was what they did.

  21

  Academy Slope was what Headmaster Ardai and his one remaining pupil called the long, rolling hill that dropped from the campus to the main road. The grass was still bright green and only beginning to be littered with fallen leaves. When afternoon gave way to early evening and Academy Slope was still empty—no sign of returning phone-crazies—Alice began to pace the main hall of Cheatham Lodge, pausing in each circuit only long enough to look out the bay window of the living room. It offered a fine view of the Slope, the two main lecture halls, and Tonney Field. The sneaker was once more tied to her wrist.

  The others were in the kitchen, sipping Cokes from cans. “They’re not coming back,” she told them at the end of one of her circuits. “They got wind of what we were planning—read our minds or something—and they’re not coming.”

  Two more circuits of the long downstairs hall, each with a pause to look out the big living room window, and then she looked in on them again. “Or maybe it’s a general migration, did you guys ever think of that? Maybe they go south in the winter like the goddam robins.”

  She was gone without waiting for a reply. Up the hall and down the hall. Up and down the hall.

  “She’s like Ahab on the prod for Moby,” the Head remarked.

  “Eminem might have been a jerk, but he was right about that guy,” Tom said morosely.

  “I beg your pardon, Tom?” the Head asked.

  Tom waved it away.

  Jordan glanced at his watch. “They didn’t come back last night until almost half an hour later than it is right now,” he said. “I’ll go tell her that, if you want.”

  “I don’t think it would do any good,” Clay said. “She’s got to work through it, that’s all.”

  “She’s pretty freaked-out, isn’t she, sir?”

  “Aren’t you, Jordan?”

  “Yes,” Jordan said in a small voice. “I’m Freak City.”

  The next time Alice came back to the kitchen she said, “Maybe it’s best if they don’t come back. I don’t know if they’re rebooting their brains some new way, but for sure there’s some bad voodoo going on. I felt it from those two this afternoon. The woman with the book and the man with the Twinkies?” She shook her head. “Bad voodoo.”

  She plunged off on hall patrol again before anyone could reply, the sneaker swinging from her wrist.

  The Head looked at Jordan. “Did you feel anything, son?”

  Jordan hesitated, then said, “I felt something. The hair on my neck tried to stand up.”

  Now the Head turned his gaze to the men on the other side of the table. “What about you two? You were far cl
oser.”

  Alice saved them from having to answer. She ran into the kitchen, her cheeks flushed, her eyes wide, the soles of her sneakers squeaking on the tiles. “They’re coming,” she said.

  22

  From the bay window the four of them watched the phone-crazies come up Academy Slope in converging lines, their long shadows making a huge pinwheel shape on the green grass. As they neared what Jordan and the Head called Tonney Arch, the lines drew together and the pinwheel seemed to spin in the late golden sunlight even as it contracted and solidified.

  Alice could no longer stand not holding the sneaker. She had torn it from her wrist and was squeezing it compulsively. “They’ll see what we did and they’ll turn around,” she said, speaking low and rapidly. “They’ve gotten at least that smart, if they’re picking up books again, they must have.”

  “We’ll see,” Clay said. He was almost positive the phone-crazies would go onto Tonney Field, even if what they saw there disquieted their strange group mind; it would be dark soon and they had nowhere else to go. A fragment of a lullaby his mother used to sing him floated through his mind: Little man, you’ve had a busy day.

  “I hope they go and I hope they stay,” she said, lower than ever. “I feel like I’m going to explode.” She gave a wild little laugh. “Only it’s them that’s supposed to explode, isn’t it? Them.” Tom turned to look at her and she said, “I’m all right. I’m fine, so just close your mouth.”

  “All I was going to say is that it’ll be what it is,” he said.

  “New Age crap. You sound like my father. The Picture Frame King.” A tear rolled down one cheek and she rubbed it impatiently away with the heel of her hand.

  “Just calm down, Alice. Watch.”

  “I’ll try, okay? I’ll try.”

  “And stop with the sneaker,” Jordan said—irritably, for him. “That squelchy sound is making me crazy.”

  She looked down at the sneaker, as if surprised, then slipped it around her wrist on its loop again. They watched as the phone-crazies converged at Tonney Arch and passed beneath it with less pushing and confusion than any crowd attending the Homecoming Weekend soccer match could ever have equaled—Clay was sure of that. They watched as the crazies spread out again on the far side, crossing the concourse and filing down the ramps. They waited to see that steady march slow and stop, but it never did. The last stragglers—most of them hurt and helping each other along, but still walking in those close groups—were in long before the reddening sun had passed below the dormitories on the west side of the Gaiten Academy campus. They had returned once more, like homing pigeons to their nests or the swallows to Capistrano. Not five minutes after the evening star became visible in the darkening sky, Dean Martin began singing “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”

  “I was worried for nothing, wasn’t I?” Alice said. “Sometimes I’m a putz. That’s what my father says.”

  “No,” the Head told her. “All the putzes had cell phones, dear. That’s why they’re out there and you’re in here, with us.”

  Tom said: “I wonder if Rafe’s still making out okay.”

  “I wonder if Johnny is,” Clay said. “Johnny and Sharon.”

  23

  At ten o’clock on that windy autumn night, under a moon now entering its last quarter, Clay and Tom stood in the band alcove at the home end of the Tonney soccer field. Directly in front of them was a waist-high concrete barrier that had been heavily padded on the playing-field side. On their side were a few rusting music stands and a drift of litter that was ankle-deep; the wind blew the torn bags and scraps of paper in here, and here they came to rest. Behind and above them, back at the turnstiles, Alice and Jordan flanked the Head, a tall figure propped on a slender rod of cane. Debby Boone’s voice rolled across the field in amplified waves of comic majesty. Ordinarily she would be followed by Lee Ann Womack singing “I Hope You Dance,” then back to Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers, but perhaps not tonight.

  The wind was freshening. It brought them the smell of rotting bodies from the marsh behind the indoor-track building and the aroma of dirt and sweat from the living ones packed together on the field beyond the band alcove. If you can call that living, Clay thought, and flashed himself a small and bitter inside smile. Rationalization was a great human sport, maybe the great human sport, but he would not fool himself tonight: of course they called it living. Whatever they were or whatever they were becoming, they called it living just as he did.

  “What are you waiting for?” Tom murmured.

  “Nothing,” Clay murmured back. “Just… nothing.”

  From the holster Alice had found in the Nickerson basement, Clay drew Beth Nickerson’s old-fashioned Colt .45 revolver, now once more fully loaded. Alice had offered him the automatic rifle—which so far they had not even test-fired—and he had refused, saying that if the pistol didn’t do the job, probably nothing would.

  “I don’t know why the auto wouldn’t be better, if it squirts thirty or forty bullets a second,” she said. “You could turn those trucks into cheese-graters.”

  He had agreed that this might be so, but reminded Alice that their object tonight was not destruction per se but ignition. Then he’d explained the highly illegal nature of the ammunition Arnie Nickerson had obtained for his wife’s .45 fraggers. What had once been called dumdum bullets.

  “Okay, but if it doesn’t work, you can still try Sir Speedy,” she’d said. “Unless the guys out there just, you know…” She wouldn’t actually use the word attack, but had made a little walking motion with the fingers of the hand not holding the sneaker. “In that case, beat feet.”

  The wind tore a tattered strip of Homecoming Weekend bunting free of the Scoreboard and sent it dancing above the packed sleepers. Around the field, seeming to float in the dark, were the red eyes of the boomboxes, all but one playing without benefit of CDs. The bunting struck the bumper of one of the propane trucks, flapped there several seconds, then slipped free and flew off into the night. The trucks were parked side by side in the middle of the field, rising from the mass of packed forms like weird metal mesas. The phone-crazies slept beneath them and so closely around them that some were crammed up against the wheels. Clay thought again of passenger pigeons, and the way nineteenth-century hunters had brained them on the ground with clubs. The whole species had been wiped out by the beginning of the twentieth… but of course they’d only been birds, with little bird-brains, incapable of rebooting.

  “Clay?” Tom asked, low. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

  “No,” Clay said. Now that he was face-to-face with it, there were too many unanswered questions. What they would do if it went wrong was only one of them. What they would do if it went right was another. Because passenger pigeons were incapable of revenge. Those things out there, on the other hand—

  “But I’m going to.”

  “Then do it,” Tom said. “Because, all else aside, ‘You Light Up My Life’ blows dead rats in hell.”

  Clay raised the .45 and held his right wrist firmly with his left hand. He centered the gunsight on the tank of the truck on the left. He would fire twice into that one, then twice into the other one. That would leave one more bullet for each, if necessary. If that didn’t work, he could try the automatic weapon Alice had taken to calling Sir Speedy.

  “Duck if it goes up,” he told Tom.

  “Don’t worry,” Tom said. His face was drawn into a grimace, anticipating the report of the gun and whatever might follow.

  Debby Boone was building to a big finish. It suddenly seemed very important to Clay that he beat her. If you miss at this range, you’re a monkey, he thought, and pulled the trigger.

  There was no chance for a second shot and no need of one. A bright red flower bloomed in the center of the tank, and by its light he saw a deep dent in the previously smooth metal surface. Hell appeared to be inside, and growing. Then the flower was a river, red turning orange-white.

  “Down!” he sh
outed, and pushed Tom’s shoulder. He fell on top of the smaller man just as the night became desert noon. There was a huge, whooshing roar followed by a guttering BANG that Clay felt in every bone of his body. Shrapnel shot overhead. He thought Tom screamed but he wasn’t sure, because there was another of those whooshing roars and suddenly the air was growing hot, hot, hot.

  He seized Tom partly by the scruff of the neck and partly by the collar of his shirt and began to drag him backward up the concrete ramp leading to the turnstiles, his eyes slitted almost completely shut against the enormous glare flowing from the center of the soccer field. Something enormous landed in the auxiliary stands to his right. He thought maybe an engine block. He was pretty sure the shattered bits and twists of metal under his feet had once been Gaiten Academy music stands.

  Tom was screaming and his glasses were askew, but he was on his feet and he looked intact. The two of them ran up the ramp like escapees from Gomorrah. Clay could see their shadows, long and spider-thin in front of them, and realized objects were falling all around them: arms, legs, a piece of bumper, a woman’s head with the hair blazing. From behind them came a second tremendous BANG—or maybe it was a third—and this time he was the one who screamed. His feet tangled and he went sprawling. The whole world was rapidly building heat and the most incredible light: he felt as if he were standing on God’s personal soundstage.

  We didn’t know what we were doing, he thought, looking at a wad of gum, a tromped Junior Mints box, a blue Pepsi Cola cap. We didn’t have a clue and we’re going to pay with our fucking lives.