Cell: A Novel Read online

  Clay, Tom, and Jordan—a pallid Jordan, a thoughtfully silent Jordan who now usually responded to questions only if asked a second or even a third time—arrived at the intersection of Main and Livery at just past midnight on a windy night during the second week of October. Clay stared wildly at the stop sign on the corner of his old street, where he had come as a visitor for the last four months. NUCLEAR POWER was still stenciled there in spray-paint, as it had been before he’d left for Boston. STOP… NUCLEAR POWER. STOP… NUCLEAR POWER. He couldn’t seem to get the sense of it. It wasn’t a question of meaning, that was clear enough, just someone’s clever little political statement (if he looked he’d probably find the same thing on stop signs all over town, maybe in Springvale and Acton, too), but the sense of how this could be the same when the whole world had changed—that eluded him. Clay felt somehow that if he stared at STOP… NUCLEAR POWER with enough desperate intensity, a wormhole would open, some kind of sci-fi time-tunnel, and he’d dive into the past, and all this would be undone. All this darkness.

  “Clay?” Tom asked. “Are you all right?”

  “This is my street,” Clay said, as if that explained everything, and then, without knowing he was going to do it, he began to run.

  Livery Lane was a cul-de-sac, all the streets on this side of town dead-ending against the flank of Kent’s Hill, which was really an eroded mountain. Oaks overhung it and the street was full of dead leaves that crackled under his feet. There were also a lot of stalled cars, and two that were locked grille to grille in a strenuous mechanical kiss.

  “Where’s he going?” Jordan called behind him. Clay hated the fear he heard in Jordan’s voice, but he couldn’t stop.

  “He’s all right,” Tom said. “Let him go.”

  Clay wove around the stalled cars, the beam of his flashlight jigging and stabbing in front of him. One of the stabs caught Mr. Kretsky’s face. Mr. Kretsky always used to have a Tootsie Pop for Johnny on haircut day when Johnny was Johnny-Gee, just a little guy who used to yell fo-fo-me-me when the phone rang. Mr. Kretsky was lying on the sidewalk in front of his house, half-buried in fallen oak-leaves, and his nose appeared to be gone.

  I mustn’t find them dead. This thought drummed in his mind, over and over. Not after Alice. I mustn’t find them dead. And then, hatefully (but in moments of stress the mind almost always told the truth): And if I have to find one of them dead… let it be her.

  Their house was the last one on the left (as he always used to remind Sharon, with a suitably creepy laugh—long after the joke had worn thin, actually), and the driveway slanted up to the refurbished little shed that was just big enough to park one car. Clay was already out of breath but he didn’t slow. He sprinted up the driveway, kicking leaves in front of him, feeling the stitch starting to sink in high up on his right side, tasting copper in the back of his mouth, where his breathing seemed to rasp. He lifted his flashlight and shined it into the garage.

  Empty. Question was, was that good or bad?

  He turned around, saw Tom’s and Jordan’s lights bobbing toward him down below, and shone his own on his back door. His heart leaped into the back of his throat at what he saw. He ran up the three steps to the stoop, stumbled, and almost put his hand through the storm door pulling the note off the glass. It was held by only a corner of Scotch tape; if they’d come along an hour later, maybe even half an hour, the restless night wind would have blown it over the hills and far away. He could kill her for not taking more pains, such carelessness was just so Sharon, but at least—The note wasn’t from his wife.

  2

  Jordan came up the driveway and stood at the foot of the steps with his light trained on Clay. Tom came toiling along behind, breathing hard and making an enormous crackling sound as he scuffed through the leaves. He stopped beside Jordan and put his own light on the scrap of unfolded paper in Clay’s hand. He raised the beam slowly to Clay’s thunderstruck face. “I forgot about her mother’s fucking diabetes,” Clay said, and handed over the note that had been Scotch-taped to the door. Tom and Jordan read it together.

  Daddy,

  Something bad hapen as you porbly know, I hope your all right & get this. Mitch Steinman and George Gendron are with me, people are going crazy & we think its the cellphones. Dad here is the bad part, we came here because I was afraid. I was going to break mine if I was wrong but I wasnt wrong, it was gone. Mom has been taking it because you know nana is sick and she wanted to keep checking. I gotta go Jesus I’m scrared, someone killed Mr Kretsky. All kinds of people are dead & nuts like in a horra movie but we heard people are getting together (NORMAL people) at the Town Hall and thats where we are going. Maybe mom is there but jesus she had my PHONE. Daddy if you get here okay PLEASE COME GET ME.

  Your Son, John Gavin Riddell

  Tom finished, then spoke in a tone of kindly caution that terrified Clay more thoroughly than the most dire warning could have done. “You know that any people who gathered at the Town Hall have probably gone many different ways, don’t you? It’s been ten days, and the world has undergone a terrible convulsion.”

  “I know,” Clay said. His eyes were stinging and he could feel his voice beginning to waver. “And I know his mother is probably…” He shrugged and flung an unsteady hand at the dark, sloping-away world beyond his leaf-strewn driveway. “But Tom, I have to go to the Town Hall and see. They may have left word. He may have left word.”

  “Yes,” Tom said. “Of course you do. And when we get there, we can decide what comes next.” He spoke in that same tone of awful kindness. Clay almost wished he’d laugh and say something like Come on, you poor sap—you don’t really think you’re going to see him again, do you? Get fucking real.

  Jordan had read the note a second time, maybe a third and fourth. Even in his current state of horror and grief, Clay felt like apologizing to Jordan for Johnny’s poor spelling and composition skills—reminding Jordan that his son must have written under terrible stress, crouched on the stoop, scribbling while his friends stood watching chaos swirl below.

  Now Jordan lowered the note and said, “What does your son look like?”

  Clay almost asked why, then decided he didn’t want to know. At least not yet. “Johnny’s almost a foot shorter than you. Stocky. Dark brown hair.”

  “Not skinny. Not blond.”

  “No, that sounds like his friend George.”

  Jordan and Tom exchanged a look. It was a grave look, but Clay thought there was relief in it, too.

  “What?” he asked. “What? Tell me.”

  “The other side of the street,” Tom said. “You didn’t see because you were running. There’s a dead boy about three houses down. Skinny, blond, red backpack—”

  “That’s George Gendron,” Clay said. He knew George’s red backpack as well as he knew Johnny’s blue one with the strips of reflecting tape on it. “He and Johnny made a Puritan village together for their fourth-grade history project. They got an A-plus. George can’t be dead.” But he almost certainly was. Clay sat down on the stoop, which gave its old familiar creak under his weight, and put his face in his hands.

  3

  The Town Hall was at the intersection of Pond and Mill streets, in front of the town common and the body of water that gave the little village its name. The parking lot was almost empty except for the spaces reserved for employees, because both streets leading to the big white Victorian building were jammed with stalled vehicles. People had gotten as close as they could, then walked the rest of the way. For latecomers like Clay, Tom, and Jordan, it was a slow slog. Within two blocks of the Town Hall, not even the lawns were free of cars. Half a dozen houses had burned down. Some were still smoldering.

  Clay had covered the body of the boy on Livery Lane—it had indeed been Johnny’s friend George—but they could do nothing for the scores of swollen and putrefying dead they encountered as they made their slow way toward the Kent Pond Town Hall. There were hundreds, but in the dark Clay saw none that he recognized. That might have been
true even in daylight. The crows had put in a busy week and a half.

  His mind kept going back to George Gendron, who had been lying facedown in a clot of bloody leaves. In his note, John had said that George and Mitch, his other good friend this year in the seventh grade, had been with him. So whatever had happened to George must have happened after Johnny taped that note to the storm door and the three of them left the Riddell house. And since only George had been in those bloody leaves, Clay could assume Johnny and Mitch had gotten off Livery Lane alive.

  Of course assume makes an ass out of you and me, he thought. The gospel according to Alice Maxwell, may she rest in peace.

  And it was true. George’s killer might have chased them and gotten them somewhere else. On Main Street, or Dugway Street, maybe neighboring Laurel Way. Stabbed them with a Swedish butcher knife or a couple of car aerials…

  They had reached the edge of the Town Hall parking lot. On their left was a pickup truck that had tried to reach it overland and wound up mired in a boggy ditch less than five yards from an acre of civilized (and largely deserted) asphalt. On their right was a woman with her throat torn out and her features pecked away to black holes and bloody ribbons by the birds. She was still wearing her Portland Sea Dogs baseball cap, and her purse was still over her arm.

  Killers weren’t interested in money anymore.

  Tom put a hand on his shoulder, startling him. “Stop thinking about what might have happened.”

  “How did you know—”

  “It doesn’t take a mind reader. If you find your son—you probably won’t, but if you do—I’m sure he’ll tell you the whole story. Otherwise… does it matter?”

  “No. Of course not. But Tom… I knew George Gendron. The kids used to call him Connecticut sometimes, because his family moved from there. He ate hot dogs and hamburgers in our backyard. His dad used to come over and watch the Patriots with me.”

  “I know,” Tom said. “I know.” And, to Jordan, sharply: “Stop looking at her, Jordan, she’s not going to get up and walk.”

  Jordan ignored him and kept staring at the crow-picked corpse in the Sea Dogs hat. “The phoners started trying to take care of their own as soon as they got back some base-level programming,” he said. “Even if it was only fishing them out from under the bleachers and throwing them into the marsh, they tried to do something. But they don’t take care of ours. They leave ours to rot where they fell.” He turned to face Clay and Tom. “No matter what they say or what they promise, we can’t trust them,” he said fiercely. “We can’t, okay?”

  “I’m totally down with that,” Tom said.

  Clay nodded. “Me too.”

  Tom tipped his head toward the Town Hall, where a few emergency lights with long-life batteries still shone, casting a sickly yellow glow on the employees’ cars, which now stood in drifts of leaves. “Let’s go in there and see what they left behind.”

  “Yes, let’s do it,” Clay said. Johnny would be gone, he had no doubt of that, but some small part of him, some small, childish, never-say-die part, still continued to hope that he would hear a cry of “Daddy!” and his son would spring into his arms, a living thing, real weight in the midst of this nightmare.

  4

  They knew for sure the Town Hall was deserted when they saw what had been painted across the double doors. In the fading glow of the battery-powered emergency lights, the large, sloppy strokes of red paint looked like more dried blood:

  KASHWAK=N0-F0

  “How far away is this Kashwak place?” Tom asked.

  Clay thought about it. “I’d say eighty miles, almost due north. You’d take Route 160 most of the way, but once you get on the TR, I don’t know.”

  Jordan asked, “What exactly is a TR?”

  “TR-90’s an unincorporated township. There are a couple of little villages, some quarries, and a two-bit Micmac rez up north, but mostly it’s just woods, bear, and deer.” Clay tried the door and it opened to his hand. “I’m going to check this place out. You guys really don’t have to come if you don’t want to—you can be excused.”

  “No, we’ll come,” Tom said. “Won’t we, Jordan?”

  “Sure.” Jordan sighed like a boy confronted with what may be a difficult chore. Then he smiled. “Hey, electric lights. Who knows when we’ll get to see them again.”

  5

  No Johnny Riddell came hurtling out of a dark room to throw himself into his father’s arms, but the Town Hall was still redolent of the cooking that had been done on gas grills and hibachis by the people who’d gathered here following the Pulse. Outside the big main room, on the long bulletin board where notices of town business and upcoming events usually hung, perhaps two hundred notes had been posted. Clay, so tense he was nearly panting, began to study these with the intensity of a scholar who believes he may have found the lost Gospel of Mary Magdalene. He was afraid of what he might find and terrified of what he might not. Tom and Jordan retreated tactfully to the main meeting room, which was still littered with the remains of the refugees who had apparently spent several nights here, waiting for a rescue that had never come.

  In the posted notes, Clay saw the survivors had come to believe that they could hope for more than rescue. They believed that salvation awaited them in Kashwak. Why that particular townlet, when probably all of TR-90 (certainly the northern and western quadrants) was dead to cell phone transmission and reception? The notes on the bulletin board weren’t clear on that. Most seemed to assume that any readers would understand without needing to be told; it was a case of “everybody knows, everybody goes.” And even the clearest of the correspondents had obviously been struggling to keep terror and elation balanced and under control; most messages amounted to little more than follow the Yellow Brick Road to Kashwak and salvation as soon as you can.

  Three-quarters of the way down the board, half-hidden by a note from Iris Nolan, a lady Clay knew quite well (she volunteered at the tiny town library), he saw a sheet with his son’s familiar, looping scrawl and thought, Oh, dear God, thank you. Thank you so much. He pulled it off the board, being careful not to tear it.

  This note was dated: Oct 3. Clay tried to remember where he had been on the night of October 3 and couldn’t quite do it. Had it been the barn in North Reading, or the Sweet Valley Inn, near Methuen? He thought the barn, but he couldn’t be absolutely certain—it all ran together and if he thought too hard about it, it began to seem that the man with the flashlights on the sides of his head had also been the young man jabbing the car aerials, that Mr. Ricardi had killed himself by gobbling broken glass instead of hanging himself, and it had been Alice in Tom’s garden, eating cucumbers and tomatoes.

  “Stop it,” he whispered, and focused on the note. It was better spelled and a little better composed, but there was no mistaking the agony in it.

  Oct 3

  Dear Dad,

  I hope you are alive & get this. Me & Mitch made it okay but Hughie Darden got George, I think he killed him. Me & Mitch just outran faster.

  I felt like it was my fault but Mitch, he said how could you know he was just a Phoner like the others its not your fault.

  Daddy there is worse. Mom is one of them, I saw her with one of the “flocks” today. (That is what they call them, flocks.) She doesnt look as bad as some but I know if I went out there she wouldnt even no me and would kill me soon as look at me. IF YOU SEE HER DON’T BE FOOLED, I’M SORRY BUT ITS TRUE.

  We’re going to Kashwak (its up north) tomorow or next day, Mitch’s mom is here I could kill him I’m so ennveous. Daddy I know you dont have a cell phone and everyone knows about Kashwak how it’s a safe place. If you get this note PLEASE COME GET ME.

  I love you with all my Heart,

  Your Son,

  John Gavin Riddell

  Even after the news about Sharon, Clay was doing all right until he got to I love you with all my Heart. Even then he might have been all right if not for that capital H. He kissed his twelve-year-old son’s signature, looked at the
bulletin board through eyes that had become untrustworthy—things doubled, tripled, then shivered completely apart—and let out a hoarse cry of pain. Tom and Jordan came running.

  “What, Clay?” Tom said. “What is it?” He saw the sheet of paper—a ruled yellow page from a legal pad—and slipped it out of Clay’s hand. He and Jordan scanned it quickly.

  “I’m going to Kashwak,” Clay said hoarsely.

  “Clay, that’s probably not such a hot idea,” Jordan said cautiously. “Considering, you know, what we did at Gaiten Academy.”

  “I don’t care. I’m going to Kashwak. I’m going to find my son.”

  6

  The refugees who had taken shelter in the Kent Pond Town Hall had left plenty of supplies behind when they decamped, presumably en masse, for TR-90 and Kashwak. Clay, Tom, and Jordan made a meal of canned chicken salad on stale bread, with canned fruit salad for dessert.

  As they were finishing, Tom leaned over to Jordan and murmured something. The boy nodded. The two of them got up. “Would you excuse us for a few minutes, Clay? Jordan and I need to have a little talk.”

  Clay nodded. While they were gone, he cracked another fruit salad cup and read Johnny’s letter over for the ninth and tenth times. He was already well on the way to having it memorized. He could remember Alice’s death just as clearly, but that now seemed to have happened in another life, and to a different version of Clayton Riddell. An earlier draft, as it were.

  He finished his meal and stowed the letter away just as Tom and Jordan returned from the hall, where they had held what he supposed lawyers had called a sidebar, back in the days when there were lawyers. Tom once more had his arm around Jordan’s narrow shoulders. Neither of them looked happy, but both looked composed.