Cell Page 24

  Alice leaned closer to read the name on the lake. "Kash... Kashwaka-mak, I guess it is."

  "It's in an unincorporated area called TR-90," Jordan said. He tapped this on the map, also. "Once you know that, Kashwak Equals No-Fo is sort of a no-brainer, wouldn't you say?"

  "It's a dead zone, right?" Tom said. "No cell phone towers, no microwave towers."

  Jordan gave him a wan smile. "Well, I imagine there are plenty of people with satellite dishes, but otherwise... bingo."

  "I don't get it," Alice said. "Why would they want to send us to a no-cell zone where everyone should be more or less all right?"

  "Might as well ask why they let us live in the first place," Tom said.

  "Maybe they want to turn us into living guided missiles and use us to bomb the joint," Jordan said. "Get rid of us and them. Two birds with one stone."

  They considered this in silence for a moment.

  "Let's go and find out," Alice said, "but I'm not bombing anybody."

  Jordan eyed her bleakly. "You saw what they did to the Head. If it comes right down to it, do you think you'll have any choice?"

  5

  There were still shoes on most of the stoops across from the fieldstone pillars marking the entrance to Gaiten Academy, but the doors of the nice-looking homes either stood open or had been torn off their hinges. A few of the dead they saw littered on those lawns as they once more began their trek north were phone-crazies, but most had been innocent pilgrims who had happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were the ones with no shoes on their feet, but there was really no need to look as far as their feet; many of the reprisal victims had literally been torn limb from limb.

  Beyond the school, where Academy Avenue once more became Route 102, there was carnage on both sides for half a mile. Alice walked with her eyes resolutely closed, allowing Tom to lead her as if she were blind. Clay offered to do the same for Jordan, but he only shook his head and walked stolidly up the centerline, a skinny kid with a pack on his back and too much hair on his head. After a few cursory glances at the kill-off, he looked down at his sneakers.

  "There are hundreds," Tom said once. It was eight o'clock and full dark, but they could still see far more than they wanted to. Lying curled around a stop-sign at the corner of Academy and Spofford was a girl in red pants and a white sailor blouse. She looked no more than nine, and she was shoeless. Twenty yards away stood the open door of the house from which she had probably been dragged, screaming for mercy. "Hundreds."

  "Maybe not that many," Clay said. "Some of our kind were armed. They shot quite a few of the bastards. Knifed a few more. I even saw one with an arrow sticking out of his--"

  "We caused this," Tom said. "Do you think we have a kind anymore?"

  This question was answered while they were eating their cold lunch at a roadside picnic spot four hours later. By then they were on Route 156, and according to the sign, this was a Scenic Turnout, offering a view of Historic Flint Hill to the west. Clay imagined the view was good, if you were eating lunch here at noon rather than midnight, with gas lanterns at either end of your picnic table to see by.

  They had reached the dessert course--stale Oreos--when a party of half a dozen came toiling along, all of them older folks. Three were pushing shopping carts full of supplies and all were armed. These were the first other travelers they had seen since setting out again.

  "Hey!" Tom called, giving them a wave. "Got another picnic table over here, if you want to sit a spell!"

  They looked over. The older of the two women in the party, a grandmotherly type with lots of white, fluffy hair that shone in the starlight, started to wave. Then she stopped.

  "That's them," one of the men said, and Clay did not mistake either the loathing or the fear in the man's voice. "That's the Gaiten bunch."

  One of the other men said, "Go to hell, buddy." They kept on walking, even moving a little faster, although the grandmotherly type was limping, and the man beside her had to help her past a Subaru that had locked bumpers with somebody's abandoned Saturn.

  Alice jumped up, almost knocking over one of the lanterns. Clay grabbed her arm. "Don't bother, kiddo."

  She ignored him. "At least we did something?" she shouted after them. "What did you do? Just what the fuck did you do?"

  "Tell you what we didn't do," one of the men said. The little group was past the scenic turnout now, and he had to look back over his shoulder to talk to her. He could do this because the road was free of abandoned vehicles for a couple of hundred yards here. "We didn't get a bunch of normies killed. There are more of them than us, in case you didn't notice--"

  "Oh bullshit, you don't know if that's true!" Jordan shouted. Clay realized it was the first time the kid had spoken since they'd passed the Gaiten town limits.

  "Maybe it is and maybe it isn't," the man said, "but they can do some very weird and powerful shit. You gotta buy that for a dollar. They say they'll leave us alone if we leave them alone... and you alone. We say fine."

  "If you believe anything they say--or think at you--then you're an idiot," Alice said.

  The man faced forward, raised his hand in the air, shook it in a combined fuck-off/bye-bye gesture, and said no more.

  The four of them watched the shopping-cart people out of sight, then gazed at each other across the picnic table with its intaglios of old initials.

  "So now we know," Tom said. "We're outcasts."

  "Maybe not if the phone people want us to go where the rest of the--what did he call them?--the rest of the normies are going," Clay said. "Maybe we're something else."

  "What?" Alice asked.

  Clay had an idea, but he didn't like to put it into words. Not at midnight. "Right now I'm more interested in Kent Pond," he said. "I want--I need to see if I can find my wife and son."

  "It's not very likely that they're still there, is it?" Tom asked in his low, kind voice. "I mean, no matter which way things went for them, normal or phoner, they've probably moved on."

  "If they're all right, they will have left word," Clay said. "In any case, it's a place to go."

  And until they got there and that part of it was done, he wouldn't have to consider why the Raggedy Man would send them to a place of safety if the people there hated and feared them.

  Or how, if the phone people knew about it, Kashwak No-Fo could be safe at all.

  6

  They were edging slowly east toward Route 19, a highway that would take them across the state line and into Maine, but they didn't make it that night. All the roads in this part of New Hampshire seemed to pass through the small city of Rochester, and Rochester had burned to the ground. The fire's core was still alive, putting out an almost radioactive glow. Alice took over, leading them around the worst of the fiery ruins in a half-circle to the west. Several times they saw KASHWAK=NO-FO scrawled on the sidewalks; once spray-painted on the side of a U.S. mailbox.

  "That's a bazillion-dollar fine and life in prison at Guantanamo Bay," Tom said with a wan smile.

  Their course eventually took them through the vast parking lot of the Rochester Mall. Long before they reached it, they could hear the over-amplified sound of an uninspired New Age jazz trio playing the sort of stuff Clay thought of as music to shop by. The parking lot was buried in drifts of moldering trash; the remaining cars stood up to their hubcaps in litter. They could smell the blown and fleshy reek of dead bodies on the breeze.

  "Flock here somewhere," Tom commented.

  It was in the cemetery next to the mall. Their course was going to take them south and west of it, but when they left the mall parking lot, they were close enough to see the red eyes of the boomboxes through the trees.

  "Maybe we ought to do em up," Alice proposed suddenly as they stepped back onto North Main Street. "There must be a propane truck that isn't working around here somewhere."

  "Yeah, baby!" Jordan said. He raised his fists to the sides of his head and shook them, looking really alive for the first time since leaving Che
atham Lodge. "For the Head!"

  "I think not," Tom said.

  "Afraid of trying their patience?" Clay asked. He was surprised to find himself actually sort of in favor of Alice's crazy idea. That torching another flock was a crazy idea he had no doubt, but...

  He thought, I might do it just became that's the absolute worst version of "Misty" I've ever heard in my life. Twist my fuckin arm.

  "Not that," Tom said. He seemed to be thinking. "Do you see that street there?" He was pointing to an avenue that ran between the mall and the cemetery. It was choked with stalled cars. Almost all of them were pointed away from the mall. Clay found it all too easy to imagine those cars full of people trying to get home after the Pulse. People who would want to know what was happening, and if their families were all right. They would have reached for their car phones, their cell phones, without a second thought.

  "What about it?" he asked.

  "Let us stroll down there a little way," Tom said. "Very carefully."

  "What did you see, Tom?"

  "I'd rather not say. Maybe nothing. Keep off the sidewalk, stay under the trees. And that was one hell of a traffic jam. There'll be bodies."

  There were dozens rotting their way back into the great scheme of things between Twombley Street and the West Side Cemetery. "Misty" had given way to a cough-syrup rendition of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" by the time they reached the edge of the trees, and they could again see the red eyes of the boombox power lamps. Then Clay saw something else and stopped. "Jesus," he whispered. Tom nodded.

  "What?" Jordan whispered. "What?"

  Alice said nothing, but Clay could tell by the direction she was looking and the defeated slump of her shoulders that she'd seen what he had. There were men with rifles standing a perimeter guard around the cemetery. Clay took Jordan's head, turned it, and saw the boy's shoulders also slump.

  "Let's go," the kid whispered. "The smell's making me sick."

  7

  In Melrose Corner, about four miles north of Rochester (they could still see its red glow waxing and waning on the southern horizon), they came to another picnic area, this one with a little stone firepit as well as picnic tables. Clay, Tom, and Jordan picked up dry wood. Alice, who claimed to have been a Girl Scout, proved her skills by making a neat little fire and then heating three cans of what she called "hobo beans." As they ate, two little parties of pilgrims passed them by. Both looked; no one in either group waved or spoke.

  When the wolf in his belly had quieted a little, Clay said, "You saw those guys, Tom? All the way from the mall parking lot? I'm thinking of changing your name to Hawkeye."

  Tom shook his head. "It was pure luck. That and the light from Rochester. You know, the embers?"

  Clay nodded. They all did.

  "I happened to look over at that cemetery at just the right time and the right angle and saw the shine on a couple of rifle-barrels. I told myself it couldn't be what it looked like, that it was probably iron fence-palings, or something, but..." Tom sighed, looked at the rest of his beans, then put them aside. "There you have it."

  "They were phone-crazies, maybe," Jordan said, but he didn't believe it. Clay could hear it in his voice.

  "Phone-crazies don't do the night shift," Alice said.

  "Maybe they need less sleep now," Jordan said. "Maybe that's part of their new programming."

  Hearing him talk that way, as if the phone people were organic computers in some kind of upload cycle, never failed to give Clay a chill.

  "They don't do rifles, either, Jordan," Tom said. "They don't need them."

  "So now they've got a few collaborators taking care of them while they get their beauty rest," Alice said. There was brittle contempt on top of her voice, tears just beneath. "I hope they rot in hell."

  Clay said nothing, but he found himself thinking of the people they had met earlier that night, the ones with the shopping carts--the fear and loathing in the voice of the man who had called them the Gaiten bunch. He might as well have called us the Dillinger gang, Clay thought. And then he thought, I don't think of them as the phone-crazies anymore; now I think of them as the phone-people. Why is that? The thought that followed was even more uncomfortable: When does a collaborator stop being a collaborator? The answer, it seemed to him, was when the collaborators became the clear majority. Then the ones who weren't collaborators became...

  Well, if you were a romantic, you called those people "the underground." If you weren't a romantic, you called them fugitives.

  Or maybe just criminals.

  They pushed on to the village of Hayes Station and stayed the night at a tumbledown motel called Whispering Pines. It was within sight of a sign reading ROUTE 19, 7 MI SANFORD THE BERWICKS KENT POND. They didn't leave their shoes outside the doors of the units they chose.

  There no longer seemed any need of that.

  8

  He was standing on a platform in the middle of that damned field again, somehow immobilized, the object of every eye. On the horizon was the skeletal shape with the blinking red light on top. The place was bigger than Foxboro. His friends were lined up with him, but now they weren't alone. Similar platforms ran the length of the open area. On Tom's left stood a pregnant woman in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt with cutoff sleeves. On Clay's right was an elderly gent--not in the Head's league, but getting there--with graying hair pulled back in a ponytail and a frightened frown on his horsey, intelligent face. Beyond him was a younger man wearing a battered Miami Dolphins cap.

  Clay saw people that he knew among the thousands and wasn't surprised--wasn't that how things always went in dreams? One minute you were phone-booth-cramming with your first-grade teacher; a minute later you were making out with all three members of Destiny's Child on the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

  Destiny's Child wasn't in this dream, but Clay saw the naked young man who had been jabbing the car aerials (now dressed in chinos and a clean white T-shirt), and the guy with the packsack who had called Alice little ma'am, and the limping grandmotherly type. She pointed to Clay and his friends, who were more or less on the fifty-yard line, then spoke to the woman next to her... who was, Clay observed without surprise, Mr. Scottoni's pregnant daughter-in-law. That's the Gaiten bunch, the limping grandmotherly type said, and Mr. Scottoni's pregnant daughter-in-law lifted her full upper lip in a sneer.

  Help me! called the woman on the platform next to Tom's. It was Mr. Scottoni's daughter-in-law she was calling to. I want to have my baby the same as you! Help me!

  You should have thought of that while there was still time, Mr. Scottoni's daughter-in-law replied, and Clay realized, as he had in the other dream, that no one was actually talking. This was telepathy.

  The Raggedy Man began making his way up the line, putting a hand over the head of each person he came to. He did this as Tom had over the Head's grave: palm extended, fingers curled in. Clay could see some sort of ID bracelet flashing on the Raggedy Man's wrist, maybe one of those medical-alert things, and realized there was power here--the light-towers were blazing. He saw something else, as well. The reason the Raggedy Man could reach above their heads even though they were standing on platforms was because the Raggedy Man wasn't on the ground. He was walking, but on four feet of thin air.

  "Ecce homo--insanus," he said. "Ecce femina--insana." And each time the crowd roared back "DON'T TOUCH!" in a single voice, both the phone-people and the normies. Because now there was no difference. In Clay's dream they were the same.

  He awoke in the late afternoon, huddled in a ball and clutching a flat motel pillow. He went outside and saw Alice and Jordan sitting on the curb between the parking lot and the units. Alice had her arm around Jordan. His head was on her shoulder and his arm was around her waist. His hair was sticking up in back. Clay sat down with them. Beyond them, the highway leading to Route 19 and Maine was deserted except for a Federal Express truck sitting dead on the white line with its back doors standing open, and a crashed motorcycle.

  Clay s
at down with them. "Did you--"

  "Ecce puer, insanus," Jordan said, without lifting his head from Alice's shoulder. "That's me."

  "And I'm the femina," Alice said. "Clay, is there some sort of humongous football stadium in Kashwak? Because if there is, I'm not going near the place."

  A door closed behind them. Footsteps approached. "Me either," Tom said, sitting down with them. "I have many issues--I'd be the first to admit it--but a death-wish has never been one of them."

  "I'm not positive, but I don't think there's much more than an elementary school up there," Clay said. "The high school kids probably get bused to Tashmore."

  "It's a virtual stadium," Jordan said.

  "Huh?" Tom said. "You mean like in a computer game?"

  "I mean like in a computer." Jordan lifted his head, still staring at the empty road leading to Sanford, the Berwicks, and Kent Pond. "Never mind that, I don't care about that. If they won't touch us--the phone-people, the normal people--who will touch us?" Clay had never seen such adult pain in a child's eyes. "Who will touch us?"

  No one answered.

  "Will the Raggedy Man touch us?" Jordan asked, his voice rising a little. "Will the Raggedy Man touch us? Maybe. Because he's watching, I feel him watching."

  "Jordan, you're getting carried away," Clay said, but the idea had a certain weird interior logic. If they were being sent this dream--the dream of the platforms--then maybe he was watching. You didn't mail a letter if you didn't have an address.

  "I don't want to go to Kashwak," Alice said. "I don't care if it's a no-phone zone or not. I'd rather go to... to Idaho."

  "I'm going to Kent Pond before I go to Kashwak or Idaho or anywhere," Clay said. "I can be there in two nights' walk. I wish you guys would come, but if you don't want to--or can't--I'll understand."

  "The man needs closure, let's get him some," Tom said. "After that, we can figure out what comes next. Unless someone's got another idea."

  No one did.

  10

  Route 19 was totally clear on both sides for short stretches, sometimes up to a quarter of a mile, and that encouraged sprinters. This was the term Jordan coined for the semi-suicidal dragsters who would go roaring past at high speeds, usually in the middle of the road, always with their high beams glaring.