Cell: A Novel Read online

  “Considering what this young man called you on his way by, you’re a better Christian than I was in my prime,” Tom said. He had unslung Sir Speedy and was holding it by the strap as he looked at Gunner and Harold.

  Gunner might have been twenty-five. His long black rock-vocalist hair was now matted with blood. He looked at the milk tanker, then at the Escalade, then at Alice, who had a gauze pad in one hand and the bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the other.

  “Tommy and Frito and that guy who was always pickin his nose, they took off,” the redheaded shrimp was saying. He expanded what chest he had. “But I stuck around, Gunnah! Holy fuck, buddy, you’re bleedin like a pig.”

  Alice put hydrogen peroxide on the gauze pad, then took a step toward Gunner. He immediately took a step back. “Get away from me. You’re poison.”

  “It’s them!” the redhead cried. “From the dreams! What’d I tellya?”

  “Keep away from me,” Gunner said. “Fuckin bitch. Alla ya.”

  Clay felt a sudden urge to shoot him and wasn’t surprised. Gunner looked and acted like a dangerous dog backed into a corner, teeth bared and ready to bite, and wasn’t that what you did to dangerous dogs when there was no other recourse? Didn’t you shoot them? But of course they did have recourse, and if Alice could play Good Samaritan to the scumbag who had called her a teenybop bitch, he guessed he could refrain from executing him. But there was something he wanted to find out before he let these two charming fellows go their way.

  “These dreams,” he said. “Do you have a… I don’t know… a kind of spirit guide in them? A guy in a red hoodie, let’s say?”

  Gunner shrugged. Tore a piece off his shirt and used it to mop the blood on his face. He was coming back a little now, seemed a little more aware of what had happened. “Harvard, yeah. Right, Harold?”

  The little redhead nodded. “Yeah. Harvard. The black guy. But they ain’t dreams. If you don’t know, it ain’t no fuckin good telling ya. They’re fuckin broadcasts. Broadcasts in our sleep. If you don’t get em, it’s because you’re poison. Ain’t they, Gunnah?”

  “You guys fucked up bigtime,” Gunner said in a brooding voice, and mopped his forehead. “Don’t you touch me.”

  “We’re gonna have our own place,” Harold said. “Ain’t we, Gunnah? Up Maine, fuckin right. Everyone who didn’t get Pulsed is goin there, and we’re gonna be left alone. Hunt, fish, live off the fuckin land. Harvard says so.”

  “And you believe him?” Alice said. She sounded fascinated.

  Gunner raised a finger that shook slightly. “Shut your mouth, bitch.”

  “I think you better shut yours,” Jordan said. “We’ve got the guns.”

  “You better not even think about shootin us!” Harold said shrilly. “Whatcha think Harvard would do to you if you shot us, you fuckin punkass shorty?”

  “Nothing,” Clay said.

  “You don’t—” Gunner began, but before he could get any further, Clay took a step forward and pistol-whipped him across the jaw with Beth Nickerson’s .45. The sight at the end of the barrel opened a fresh cut along Gunner’s jaw, but Clay hoped that in the end this might prove better medicine than the hydrogen peroxide the man had refused. In this he proved wrong.

  Gunner fell back against the side of the abandoned milk tanker, looking at Clay with shocked eyes. Harold took an impulsive step forward. Tom trained Sir Speedy on him and gave his head a single forbidding shake. Harold shrank back and began to gnaw the ends of his dirty fingers. Above them his eyes were huge and wet.

  “We’re going now,” Clay said. “I’d advise you stay here at least an hour, because you really don’t want to see us again. We’re leaving you your lives as a gift. If we see you again, we’ll take them away.” He backed toward Tom and the others, still staring into that glowering, unbelieving bloody face. He felt a little like the old-time lion-tamer Frank Buck, trying to do it all by pure force of will. “One more thing. I don’t know why the phone-people want all the ‘normies’ in Kashwak, but I know what a roundup usually means for the cattle. You might think about that the next time you’re getting one of your nightly podcasts.”

  “Fuck you,” Gunner said, but broke his eyelock with Clay and gazed down at his shoes.

  “Come on, Clay,” Tom said. “Let’s go.”

  “Don’t let us see you again, Gunner,” Clay said, but they did.

  12

  Gunner and Harold must have gotten ahead of them somehow, maybe by taking a chance and traveling five or ten daylight miles while Clay, Tom, Alice, and Jordan were sleeping in the State Line Motel, which was about two hundred yards into Maine. The pair might have laid up in the Salmon Falls rest area, Gunner hiding his new ride among the half a dozen or so cars that had been abandoned there. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was they got ahead of them, waited for them to go by, and then pounced.

  Clay barely registered the approaching sound of the engine or Jordan’s comment—“Here comes a sprinter.” This was his home turf, and as they passed each familiar landmark—the Freneau Lobster Pound two miles east of the State Line Motel, Shaky’s Tastee Freeze across from it, the statue of General Joshua Chamberlain in the tiny Turnbull town square—he felt more and more like a man having a vivid dream. He didn’t realize how little he’d expected to ever reach home again until he saw the big plastic sof-serv cone towering over Shaky’s—it looked both prosaic and as exotic as something from a lunatic’s nightmare, hulking its curled tip against the stars.

  “Road’s pretty littered for a sprinter,” Alice commented.

  They walked to the side of the road as headlights brightened on the hill behind them. An overturned pickup truck was lying on the white line. Clay thought there was a good chance the oncoming vehicle would ram it, but the headlights swerved to the left only an instant after they cleared the hilltop; the sprinter avoided the pickup easily, running on the shoulder for a few seconds before regaining the road. Clay surmised later that Gunner and Harold must have gone over this stretch, mapping the sprinter-reefs carefully.

  They stood watching, Clay closest to the approaching lights, Alice standing next to him on his left. On her left were Tom and Jordan. Tom had his arm slung casually around Jordan’s shoulders.

  “Boy, he’s really comin,” Jordan said. There was no alarm in his voice; it was just a remark. Clay felt no alarm, either. He had no premonition of what was going to happen. He had forgotten all about Gunner and Harold.

  There was a sports car of some sort, maybe an MG, parked half on and half off the road fifty feet or so west of where they were standing. Harold, who was driving the sprinter vehicle, swerved to avoid it. Just a minor swerve, but perhaps it threw Gunner’s aim off. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Clay had never been his target. Perhaps it was Alice he’d meant to hit all along.

  Tonight they were in a nondescript Chevrolet sedan. Gunner was kneeling on the backseat, out the window to his waist, holding a ragged chunk of cinderblock in his hands. He gave an inarticulate cry that could have come directly from a balloon in one of the comic books Clay had drawn as a freelance—“Yahhhhbh!”—and threw the block. It flew a short and lethal course through the dark and struck Alice in the side of the head. Clay never forgot the sound it made. The flashlight she had been holding—which would have made her a perfect target, although they had all been holding them—tumbled from her relaxing hand and sprayed a cone of light across the macadam, picking out pebbles and a piece of taillight glass that glinted like a fake ruby.

  Clay fell on his knees beside her, calling her name, but he couldn’t hear himself in the sudden roar of Sir Speedy, which was finally getting a trial. Muzzle-flashes strobed the dark, and by their glare he could see blood pouring down the left side of her face—oh God, what face—in a torrent.

  Then the gunfire stopped. Tom was screaming “The barrel pulled up, I couldn’t hold it down, I think I shot the whole fucking clip into the sky” and Jordan was screaming “Is she hurt, did he get her” and Clay thought of how she had off
ered to put hydrogen peroxide on Gunner’s forehead and then bandage it. Better a little sting than an infection, am I right? she had said, and he had to stop the bleeding. He had to stop it right now. He stripped off the jacket he was wearing, then the sweater beneath. He would use the sweater, wrap it around her head like a fucking turban.

  Tom’s roving flashlight happened on the cinderblock and stopped. It was matted with gore and hair. Jordan saw it and began to shriek. Clay, panting and sweating madly in spite of the chilly evening air, began to wrap the sweater around Alice’s head. It soaked through immediately. His hands felt like they were wearing warm wet gloves. Now Tom’s light found Alice, her head wrapped in a sweater down to the nose so that she looked like a prisoner of Islamic extremists in an Internet photo, her cheek (the remains of her cheek) and her neck drowned in blood, and he also began to scream.

  Help me, Clay wanted to say. Stop that, both of you, and help me with her. But his voice wouldn’t come out and all he could do was press the sopping sweater against the spongy side of her head, remembering that she had been bleeding when they had first met her, thinking she had been okay that time, she had been okay then.

  Her hands were twitching aimlessly, the fingers kicking up little sprays of roadside dirt. Somebody give her that sneaker of hers, Clay thought, but the sneaker was in her pack and she was lying on her pack. Lying there with the side of her head crushed in by someone who’d had a little score to settle. Her feet were twitching, too, he saw, and he could still feel the blood pouring out of her, through the sweater and over his hands.

  Here we are at the end of the world, he thought. He looked up in the sky and saw the evening star.

  13

  She never really passed out and never fully regained consciousness. Tom got himself under control and helped carry her up the slope on their side of the road. Here were trees—what Clay remembered as an apple orchard. He thought he and Sharon had come here once to pick, back when Johnny had been small. When it had been good between them and there had been no arguments about money and ambitions and the future.

  “You’re not supposed to move people when they’ve got bad head-wounds,” Jordan fretted, trailing along behind them and carrying her pack.

  “That’s nothing we have to worry about,” Clay said. “She can’t live, Jordan. Not like she is. I don’t think even a hospital could do much for her.” He saw Jordan’s face begin to crumple. There was enough light for that. “I’m sorry.”

  They laid her on the grass. Tom tried to give her water from a Poland Spring bottle with a nipple end, and she actually took some. Jordan gave her the sneaker, the Baby Nike, and she took that, too, squeezing it, leaving smears of blood on it. Then they waited for her to die. They waited all that night.

  14

  She said, “Daddy told me I could have the rest, so don’t blame me.” That was around eleven o’clock. She lay with her head on Tom’s pack, which he had stuffed with a motel blanket he’d taken from the Sweet Valley Inn. That had been on the outskirts of Methuen, in what now seemed like another life. A better life, actually. The pack was already soaked with blood. Her one remaining eye stared up at the stars. Her left hand lay open on the grass beside her. It hadn’t moved in over an hour. Her right hand squeezed the little sneaker relentlessly. Squeeze… and relax. Squeeze… and relax.

  “Alice,” Clay said. “Are you thirsty? Do you want some more water?”

  She did not answer.

  15

  Later—quarter of one by Clay’s watch—she asked someone if she could go swimming. Ten minutes later she said, “I don’t want those tampons, those tampons are dirty,” and laughed. The sound of her laughter was natural, shocking, and it roused Jordan, who had been dozing. He saw how she was and started to cry. He went off by himself to do it. When Tom tried to sit beside him and comfort him, Jordan screamed for him to go away.

  At quarter past two, a large party of normies passed by on the road below them, many flashlights bobbing in the dark. Clay went to the edge of the slope and called down to them. “You don’t have a doctor, do you?” he asked, without much hope.

  The flashlights stopped. There was a murmur of consultation from the dark shapes below, and then a woman’s voice called up to him, a rather beautiful voice. “Leave us alone. You’re off-limits.”

  Tom joined Clay at the edge of the bank. “ ‘And the Levite also passed by on the other side,’ ” Tom called down. “That’s King James for fuck you, lady.”

  Behind them, Alice suddenly spoke in a strong voice. “The men in the car will be taken care of. Not as a favor to you but as a warning to others. You understand.”

  Tom grabbed Clay’s wrist with a cold hand. “Jesus Christ, she sounds like she’s awake.”

  Clay took Tom’s hand in both of his own and held it. “That’s not her. That’s the guy in the red hoodie, using her as a… as a loudspeaker.”

  In the dark Tom’s eyes were huge. “How do you know that?”

  “I know,” Clay said.

  Below them, the flashlights were moving away. Soon they were gone and Clay was glad. This was their business, it was private.

  16

  At half past three, in the ditch of the night, Alice said: “Oh, Mummy, too bad! Fading roses, this garden’s over.” Then her tone brightened. “Will there be snow? We’ll make a fort, we’ll make a leaf, we’ll make a bird, we’ll make a bird, we’ll make a hand, we’ll make a blue one, we’ll…” She trailed off, looking up at stars that turned on the night like a clock. The night was cold. They had bundled her up. Every breath she exhaled came out in white vapor. The bleeding had finally stopped. Jordan sat next to her, petting her left hand, the one that was already dead and waiting for the rest of her to catch up.

  “Play the slinky one I like,” she said. “The one by Hall and Oates.”

  17

  At twenty to five, she said, “It’s the loveliest dress ever.” They were all gathered around her. Clay had said he thought she was going.

  “What color, Alice?” Clay asked, not expecting an answer—but she did answer.

  “Green.”

  “Where will you wear it?”

  “The ladies come to the table,” she said. Her hand still squeezed the sneaker, but more slowly now. The blood on the side of her face had dried to an enamel glaze. “The ladies come to the table, the ladies come to the table. Mr. Ricardi stays at his post and the ladies come to the table.”

  “That’s right, dear,” Tom said softly. “Mr. Ricardi stayed at his post, didn’t he?”

  “The ladies come to the table.” Her remaining eye turned to Clay, and for the second time she spoke in that other voice. One he had heard coming from his own mouth. Only four words this time. ‘“Your son’s with us.”

  “You lie,” Clay whispered. His fists were clenched, and he had to restrain himself from striking the dying girl. “You bastard, you lie.”

  “The ladies come to the table and we all have tea,” Alice said.

  18

  The first line of light had begun to show in the east. Tom sat beside Clay, and put a tentative hand on his arm. “If they read minds,” he said, “they could have gotten the fact that you have a son and you’re worried to death about him as easily as you’d look something up on Google. That guy could be using Alice to fuck with you.”

  “I know that,” Clay said. He knew something else: what she’d said in Harvard’s voice was all too plausible. “You know what I keep thinking about?”

  Tom shook his head.

  “When he was little, three or four—back when Sharon and I still got along and we called him Johnny-Gee—he’d come running every time the phone rang. He’d yell ‘Fo-fo-me-me?’ It knocked us out. And if it was his nana or his PeePop, we’d say ‘Fo-fo-you-you’ and hand it to him. I can still remember how big the fucking thing looked in his little hands… and against the side of his face…”

  “Clay, stop.”

  “And now… now…” He couldn’t go on. And didn’t have to.


  “Come here, you guys!” Jordan called. His voice was agonized. “Hurry up!”

  They went back to where Alice lay. She had come up off the ground in a locked convulsion, her spine a hard, quivering arc. Her remaining eye bulged in its socket; her lips pulled down at the corners. Then, suddenly, everything relaxed. She spoke a name that had no meaning for them—Henry—and squeezed the sneaker one final time. Then the fingers relaxed and it slipped free. There was a sigh and a final white cloud, very thin, from between her parted lips.

  Jordan looked from Clay to Tom, then back to Clay again. “Is she—”

  “Yes,” Clay said.

  Jordan burst into tears. Clay allowed Alice another few seconds to look at the paling stars, then used the heel of his hand to close her eye.

  19

  There was a farmhouse not far from the orchard. They found shovels in one of the sheds and buried her under an apple tree, with the little sneaker in her hand. It was, they agreed, what she would have wanted. At Jordan’s request, Tom once more recited Psalm Forty, although this time he had difficulty finishing. They each told one thing they remembered about Alice. During this part of the impromptu service, a flock of phone-people—a small one—passed north of them. They were noticed but not bothered. This did not surprise Clay in the slightest. They were insane, not to be touched… as he was sure Gunner and Harold would learn to their sorrow.

  They slept away most of the daylight hours in the farmhouse, then moved on to Kent Pond. Clay no longer really expected to find his son there, but he hadn’t given up hope of finding word of Johnny, or perhaps Sharon. Just to know she was alive might lift a little of the sorrow he now felt, a feeling so heavy that it seemed to weigh him down like a cloak lined with lead.

  KENT POND

  1

  His old house—the house where Johnny and Sharon had lived at the time of the Pulse—was on Livery Lane, two blocks north of the dead traffic light that marked the center of Kent Pond. It was the sort of place some real estate ads called a “fixer-upper” and some a “starter home.” Clay and Sharon’s joke—before the separation—was that their “starter home” would probably also be their “retirement home.” And when she’d gotten pregnant, they had talked about naming the baby Olivia if it turned out to be of what Sharon called “the feminine persuasion.” Then, she said, they’d have the only Livvie of Livery Lane. How they had laughed.