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  Come, and you'll be safe--your struggle to survive can cease.

  Come, and you'll be with your own kind, in your own place.

  Come, and you can speak to your loved ones.

  Come. Yes. Bottom line. And once you got close enough, any choice ceased. That telepathy and the dream of safety just took you over. You lined up. You listened as the Raggedy Man told you to keep it moving, everyone gets to call a loved one but we've got a lot of you to process before the sun goes down and we crank up Bette Midler singing "The Wind Beneath My Wings."

  And how could they continue doing this, even though the lights had failed and the cities had burned and civilization had slid into a pit of blood? How could they go on replacing the millions of phoners lost in the original convulsion and in the destruction of the flocks that had followed? They could continue because the Pulse wasn't over. Somewhere--in that outlaw lab or nutcase's garage--some gadget was still running on batteries, some modem was still putting out its squealing, insane signal. Sending it up to the satellites that flew around the globe or to the microwave relay towers that cinched it like a steel belt. And where could you call and be sure your call would still go through, even if the voice answering was only on a battery-powered answering machine?

  911, apparently.

  And that had almost certainly happened to Johnny-Gee.

  He knew it had. He was already too late.

  So why was he still walking north through the drizzling dark? Up ahead was Newfield, not far, and there he'd leave Route 11 for Route 160, and he had an idea that not too far up Route 160 his days of reading road-signs (or anything else) would be done, so why!

  But he knew why, just as he knew that distant crash and the short, faint blare of horn he heard ahead of him in the rainy darkness meant that one of the racing sprinters had come to grief. He was going on because of the note on the storm door, held by less than a quarter-inch of tape when he'd rescued it; all the rest had pulled free. He was going on because of the second one he'd found on the Town Hall bulletin board, half-hidden by Iris Nolan's hopeful note to her sister. His son had written the same thing both times, in capital letters: PLEASE COME GET ME.

  If he was too late to get Johnny, he might not be too late to see him and tell him he'd tried. He might be able to hold on to enough of himself long enough to do that even if they made him use one of the cell phones.

  As for the platforms, and the thousands of watching people--

  "There's no football stadium in Kashwak," he said.

  In his mind, Jordan whispered: It's a virtual stadium.

  Clay pushed it aside. Pushed it away. He had made his decision. It was madness, of course, but it was a mad world now, and that put him in perfect sync.

  4

  At quarter to three that morning, footsore and damp in spite of the hooded parka he had liberated from the caretaker's cottage in Springvale, Clay came to the intersection of Routes 11 and 160. There had been a major pileup at the crossroads, and the Corvette that had gone racing past him in North Shapleigh was now part of it. The driver hung out the severely compressed window on the left side, head down and arms dangling, and when Clay tried to lift the man's face to see if he was still alive, the top half of his body fell into the road, trailing a meaty coil of guts behind. Clay reeled away to a telephone pole, planted his suddenly hot forehead against the wood, and vomited until there was nothing left.

  On the other side of the intersection, where 160 took off into the north country, stood the Newfield Trading Post. A sign in the window promised CANDIES NATIVE SIRUP INDIAN CRAFTS "NICK-NACKS." It looked as if it had been trashed as well as looted, but it was shelter from the rain and away from the casual, unexpected horror he had just encountered. Clay went in and sat down with his head lowered until he no longer felt like fainting. There were bodies, he could smell them, but someone had thrown a tarp over all but two, and at least those two weren't in pieces. The joint's beer cooler was smashed and empty, the Coke machine only smashed. He took a ginger ale and drank it in long, slow swallows, pausing to belch. After a while he began to feel a little better.

  He missed his friends desperately. The unfortunate out there and whomever he'd been racing were the only sprinters he'd seen all night, and he'd encountered no groups of walking refugees at all. He'd spent the entire night with only his thoughts for company. Maybe the weather was keeping the walkers inside, or maybe now they were traveling days. No reason for them not to, if the phoners had switched from murder to conversion.

  He realized he hadn't heard any of what Alice had called flockmusic tonight. Maybe all the flocks were south of here, except for the big one (he assumed it must be a big one) administering the Kashwak Konversions. Clay didn't much care; even alone as he was, he would still take his vacation from "I Hope You Dance" and "The Theme from A Summer Place" as a little gift.

  He decided to walk another hour at most, then find a hole to crawl into. The cold rain was killing him. He left the Newfield Trading Post, resolutely not looking at the crashed Corvette or the soaked remains lying beside it.

  5

  He ended up walking until nearly daylight, partly because the rain let up but mostly because there wasn't much in the way of shelter on Route 160, just woods. Then, around four thirty, he passed a bullet-pocked sign reading ENTERING GURLEYVILLE, AN UNINCORPORATED TOWNSHIP. Ten minutes or so after that he passed Gurleyville's raison d'etre, such as it was--the Gurleyville Quarry, a huge rock pit with a few sheds, dump trucks, and a garage at the foot of its gouged granite walls. Clay thought briefly about spending the night in one of the equipment sheds, decided he could do better, and pushed on. He had still seen no pilgrims and heard no flockmusic, even at a distance. He could have been the last person on earth.

  He wasn't. Ten minutes or so after leaving the quarry behind, he topped a hill and saw a little village below. The first building he came to was the Gurleyville Volunteer Fire Department (DON'T FORGET THE HALOWEEN BLOOD DRIVE read the notice board out front; it seemed that no one north of Springvale could spell), and two of the phone-people were standing in the parking lot, facing each other in front of a sad-looking old pumper that might have been new around the time the Korean War ended.

  They turned slowly toward Clay when he put his flashlight beam on them, but then they turned away to regard each other again. Both were male, one about twenty-five and the other maybe twice that. There was no doubt they were phoners. Their clothes were filthy and almost falling off. Their faces were cut and scraped. The younger man looked as if he had sustained a serious burn all the way up one arm. The older man's left eye glittered from deep inside folds of badly swollen and probably infected flesh. But how they looked wasn't the main thing. The main thing was what Clay felt in himself: that same weird shortness of breath he and Tom had experienced in the office of the Gaiten Citgo, where they'd gone to get the keys to the propane trucks. That sense of some powerful gathering force.

  And it was night. With the heavy cloud cover, dawn was still just a rumor. What were these guys doing up at night?

  Clay snapped off his flashlight, drew the Nickerson .45, and watched to see if anything would happen. For several seconds he thought nothing would, that the strange out-of-breath feeling, that sense of something being on the verge of happening, was going to be the extent of it. Then he heard a high whining sound, almost like someone vibrating the blade of a saw between his palms. Clay looked up and saw the electrical wires passing in front of the fire station were moving rapidly back and forth, almost too fast to see.

  "Go-way !" It was the young man, and he seemed to jerk the words out with a tremendous effort. Clay jumped. If his finger had been on the revolver's trigger, he would almost certainly have pulled it. This wasn't Aw and Eeen, this was actual words. He thought he heard them in his head as well, but faint, faint. Only a dying echo.

  "You!... Go!" the older man replied. He was wearing baggy Bermuda shorts with a huge brown stain on the seat. It might have been mud or shit. He spoke with equal eff
ort, but this time Clay heard no echo in his head. Paradoxically, it made him more sure he'd heard the first one.

  They'd forgotten him entirely. Of that much he was sure.

  "Mine!" said the younger man, once more jerking the word out. And he did jerk it. His whole body seemed to flail with the effort. Behind him, several small windows in the fire station's wide garage door shattered outward.

  There was a long pause. Clay watched, fascinated, Johnny completely out of his mind for the first time since Kent Pond. The older man seemed to be thinking furiously, struggling furiously, and what Clay thought he was struggling to do was to express himself as he had before the Pulse had robbed him of speech.

  On top of the volunteer fire station, which was nothing but a glorified garage, the siren went off with a brief WHOOP, as if a phantom burst of electricity had surged through it. And the lights of the ancient pumper--headlights and red flashers--flicked briefly on, illuminating the two men and briefly scaring up their shadows.

  "Hell! You say!" the older man managed. He spit the words out like a piece of meat that had been choking him.

  "Mynuck!" the younger man nearly screamed, and in Clay's mind that same voice whispered, My truck. It was simple, really. Instead of Twinkies, they were fighting over the old pumper. Only this was at night--the end of it, granted, but still full dark--and they were almost talking again. Hell, they were talking.

  But the talking was done, it seemed. The young man lowered his head, ran at the older man, and butted him in the chest. The older man went sprawling. The younger man tripped over his legs and went to his knees. "Hell!" he cried.

  "Fuck!" cried the other. No question about it. You couldn't mistake fuck.

  They picked themselves up again and stood about fifteen feet apart. Clay could feel their hate. It was in his head; it was pushing at his eyeballs, trying to get out.

  The young man said, "That'n... mynuck!" And in Clay's head the young man's distant voice whispered, That one is my truck.

  The older man drew in breath. Jerkily raised one scabbed-over arm. And shot the young man the bird. "Sit. On this!" he said with perfect clarity.

  The two of them lowered their heads and rushed at each other. Their heads met with a thudding crack that made Clay wince. This time all the windows in the garage blew out. The siren on the roof gave a long war-cry before winding down. The fluorescent lights in the station house flashed on, running for perhaps three seconds on pure crazypower. There was a brief burst of music: Britney Spears singing "Oops!... I Did It Again." Two power-lines snapped with liquid twanging sounds and fell almost in front of Clay, who stepped back from them in a hurry. Probably they were dead, they should be dead, but--

  The older man dropped to his knees with blood pouring down both sides of his head. "My truck!" he said with perfect clarity, then fell on his face.

  The younger one turned to Clay, as if to recruit him as witness to his victory. Blood was pouring out of his matted, filthy hair, between his eyes, in a double course around his nose, and over his mouth. His eyes, Clay saw, weren't blank at all. They were insane. Clay understood--all at once, completely and inarguably--that if this was where the cycle led, his son was beyond saving.

  "Mynuck!" the young man shrieked. "Mynuck, mynuck!" The pumper's siren gave a brief, winding growl, as if in agreement. "MYNU--"

  Clay shot him, then reholstered the .45. What the hell, he thought, they can only put me up on a pedestal once. Still, he was shaking badly, and when he broke into Gurleyville's only motel on the far side of town, it took him a long time to go to sleep. Instead of the Raggedy Man, it was his son who visited him in his dreams, a dirty, blank-eyed child who responded "Go-hell, mynuck" when Clay called his name.

  6

  He woke from this dream long before dark, but sleep was done for him and he decided to start walking again. And once he'd cleared Gurleyville--what little of Gurleyville there was to clear--he'd drive. There was no reason not to; Route 160 now seemed almost entirely clear and probably had been since the nasty pileup where it crossed Route 11. He simply hadn't noticed it in the dark and the rain.

  The Raggedy Man and his friends cleared the way, he thought. Of course they did, it's the fucking cattle-chute. For me it probably is the chute that leads to the slaughterhouse. Because I'm old business. They'd like to stamp me PAID and stick me in the filing cabinet as soon as possible. Too bad about Tom and Jordan and the other three. I wonder if they found enough back roads to take them into central New Hampshire y--

  He topped a rise and this thought broke off cleanly. Parked in the middle of the road below was a little yellow schoolbus with MAINE SCHOOL DISTRICT 38 NEWFIELD printed on the side. Leaning against it was a man and a boy. The man had his arm around the boy's shoulders in a casual gesture of friendship Clay would have known anywhere. As he stood there, frozen, not quite believing his eyes, another man came around the schoolbus's blunt nose. He had long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. Following him was a pregnant woman in a T-shirt. It was powder blue instead of Harley-Davidson black, but it was Denise, all right.

  Jordan saw him and called his name. He pulled free of Tom's arm and started running. Clay ran to meet him. They met about thirty yards in front of the schoolbus.

  "Clay!" Jordan shouted. He was hysterical with joy. "It's really you!"

  "It's me," Clay agreed. He swung Jordan in the air, then kissed him. Jordan wasn't Johnny, but Jordan would do, at least for the time being. He hugged him, then set him down and studied the haggard face, not failing to note the brown circles of weariness under Jordan's eyes. "How in God's name did you get here?"

  Jordan's face clouded. "We couldn't... that is, we only dreamed..."

  Tom came strolling up. Once again he ignored Clay's outstretched hand and hugged him instead. "How you doin, van Gogh?" he asked.

  "Okay. Fucking delighted to see you guys, but I don't understand--"

  Tom gave him a smile. It was both tired and sweet, a white flag of a smile. "What computer-boy's trying to tell you is that in the end we just didn't have any choice. Come on down to the little yellow bus. Ray says that if the road stays clear--and I'm sure it will--we can be in Kashwak by sundown, even traveling at thirty miles an hour. Ever read The Haunting of Hill House?"

  Clay shook his head, bewildered. "Saw the movie."

  "There's a line there that resonates in the current situation--'Journeys end in lovers meeting.' Looks like I might get to meet your kid after all."

  They walked down to the schoolbus. Dan Hartwick offered Clay a tin of Altoids with a hand that was not quite steady. Like Jordan and Tom, he looked exhausted. Clay, feeling like a man in a dream, took one. End of the world or not, it was curiously strong.

  "Hey, man," Ray said. He was behind the wheel of the schoolbus, Dolphins cap tipped back, a cigarette smoldering in one hand. He looked pale and drawn. He was staring out through the windshield, not at Clay.

  "Hey, Ray, what do you say?" Clay asked.

  Ray smiled briefly. "Say I've heard that one a few times."

  "Sure, probably a few hundred. I'd tell you I'm glad to see you, but under the circumstances, I'm not sure you'd want to hear it."

  Still looking out the windshield, Ray replied, "There's someone up there you'll definitely not be glad to see."

  Clay looked. They all did. A quarter of a mile or so north, Route 160 crested another hill. Standing there and looking at them, his harvard hoodie dirtier than ever but still bright against the gray afternoon sky, was the Raggedy Man. Maybe fifty other phoners surrounded him. He saw them looking. He raised his hand and waved at them twice, side to side, like a man wiping a windshield. Then he turned and began to walk away, his entourage (his flocklet, Clay thought) falling in to either side of him in a kind of trailing Y. Soon they were out of sight.

  1

  They stopped at a picnic area a little farther up the road. No one was very hungry, but it was a chance for Clay to ask his questions. Ray didn't eat at all, just sat on the lip of a stone barbec
ue pit downwind and smoked, listening. He added nothing to the conversation. To Clay he seemed utterly disheartened.

  "We think we're stopping here," Dan said, gesturing to the little picnic area with its border of firs and autumn-colored deciduous trees, its babbling brook and its hiking trail with the sign at its head reading IF YOU GO TAKE A MAP! "We probably are stopping here, because--" He looked at Jordan. "Would you say we're stopping here, Jordan? You seem to have the clearest perception."

  "Yes," Jordan said instantly. "This is real."

  "Yuh," Ray said, without looking up. "We're here, all right." He slapped his hand against the rock of the barbecue pit, and his wedding ring produced a little tink-tink-tink sound. "This is the real deal. We're together again, that's all they wanted."

  "I don't understand," Clay said.

  "Neither do we, completely," Dan said.

  "They're a lot more powerful than I ever would have guessed," Tom said. "I understand that much." He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. It was a tired, distracted gesture. He looked ten years older than the man Clay had met in Boston. "And they messed with our minds. Hard. We never had a chance."

  "You look exhausted, all of you," Clay replied.

  Denise laughed. "Yeah? Well, we come by it honestly. We left you and took off on Route 11 westbound. Walked until we saw light starting to come up in the east. Grabbing wheels didn't seem to make any sense, because the road was a freaking mess. You'd get maybe a quarter of a mile clear, then--"

  "Road-reefs, I know," Clay said.

  "Ray said it would be better once we got west of the Spaulding Turnpike, but we decided to spend the day in this place called the Twilight Motel."

  "I've heard of that place," Clay said. "On the edge of the Vaughan Woods. It's rather notorious in my part of the world."

  "Yeah? Okay." She shrugged. "So we get there, and the kid--Jordan--says, 'I'm gonna make you the biggest breakfast you ever ate.' And we say dream on, kid--which turned out to be sort of funny, since that's what it was, in a way--but the power in the place is on, and he does. He makes this huge freakin breakfast. We all chip in. It's the Thanksgiving of breakfasts. Am I telling this right?"