Cell: A Novel Read online

  “You see?” Tom said, smiling at Clay. He ruffled Jordan’s heavy pelt. “On some level, Jordan knew all along.”

  “Virtual reality,” Jordan said. “That’s all it was. Like being in a video game, almost. And it wasn’t all that good.” He looked north, in the direction the Raggedy Man had disappeared. In the direction of Kashwak. “It’ll get better if they get better.”

  “Sons of bitches can’t do it at all after dark,” Ray said. “They have to go fucking beddy-bye.”

  “And at the end of the day, so did we,” Dan said. “That was their purpose. To wear us out so completely that we couldn’t figure out what was going on even when night came and their control slipped. During the day the President of Harvard was always close, along with a good-sized flock, sending out that mental force-field of theirs, creating Jordan’s virtual reality.”

  “Must have been,” Denise said. “Yeah.”

  All this had been going on, Clay calculated, while he had been sleeping in the caretaker’s cottage.

  “Wearing us out wasn’t all they wanted,” Tom said. “Even turning us back north wasn’t all they wanted. They also wanted us all together again.”

  The five of them had come to in a tumbledown motel on Route 47—Maine Route 47, not too far south of Great Works. The sense of dislocation, Tom said, had been enormous. The sound of flockmusic not too far distant had not helped. They all had a sense of what must have happened, but it was Jordan who had verbalized it, as it had been Jordan who’d pointed out the obvious: their escape attempt had failed. Yes, they could probably slip out of the motel where they found themselves and start west again, but how far would they get this time? They were exhausted. Worse, they were disheartened. It was also Jordan who pointed out that the phoners might even have arranged for a few normie spies to track their nighttime movements.

  “We ate,” Denise said, “because we were starving as well as tired. Then we went to bed for real and slept until the next morning.”

  “I was the first one up,” Tom said. “The Raggedy Man himself was standing in the courtyard. He made a little bow to me and waved his hand at the road.” Clay remembered the gesture well. The road is yours. Go on and take it. “I could have shot him, I suppose—I had Sir Speedy—but what good would that have done?”

  Clay shook his head. No good at all.

  They had gotten back on the road, first walking up Route 47. Then, Tom said, they’d felt themselves mentally nudged onto an unmarked woods road that actually seemed to meander southeast.

  “No visions this morning?” Clay asked. “No dreams?”

  “Nope,” Tom said. “They knew we’d gotten the point. They can read minds, after all.”

  “They heard us yell uncle,” Dan said in that same beaten, bitter tone. “Ray, do you happen to have an extra cigarette? I quit, but maybe I’ll take the habit up again.”

  Ray tossed him the pack without a word.

  “It’s like being nudged by a hand, only inside your brain,” Tom said. “Not at all nice. Intrusive in a way I can’t even begin to describe. And all this time there was the sense of the Raggedy Man and his flock, moving with us. Sometimes we saw a few of them through the trees; most times not.”

  “So they’re not just flocking early and late now,” Clay said.

  “No, all that’s changing,” Dan said. “Jordan’s got a theory—interesting, and with some evidence to back it up. Besides, we constitute a special occasion.” He lit his cigarette. Inhaled. Coughed. “Shit, I knew there was a reason I gave these things up.” And then, with hardly a pause: “They can float, you know. Levitate. Must be a hell of a handy way to get around with the roads so jammed. Like having a magic carpet.”

  A mile or so up the seemingly pointless woods road, the five of them had discovered a cabin with a pickup parked in front. Keys in the truck. Ray drove; Tom and Jordan rode in the truck-bed. None of them were surprised when the woods road eventually bent north again. Just before it petered out, the navigation-beacon in their heads sent them onto another, then a third that was little more than a track with weeds growing up the middle. That one eventually drowned in a boggy patch where the truck mired, but an hour’s slog brought them out on Route 11, just south of that highway’s junction with 160.

  “Couple of dead phoners there,” Tom said. “Fresh. Downed power-lines, snapped-off poles. The crows were having a banquet.”

  Clay thought of telling them what he’d seen at the Gurleyville Volunteer Fire Department, then didn’t. If it had any bearing on the present situation, he didn’t see it. Besides, there were plenty who weren’t fighting with each other, and these had kept forcing Tom and the others onward.

  That force hadn’t led them to the little yellow bus; Ray had found it as a result of exploring the Newfield Trading Post while the others were scrounging sodas from the very same cooler Clay had raided. Ray saw it through a back window.

  They had stopped only once since then, to build a fire on the granite floor of the Gurleyville Quarry and eat a hot meal. They had also changed into fresh footwear from the Newfield Trading Post—their bog-slog had left all of them muddy from the shins down—and had an hour’s rest. They must have driven past Clay at the Gurleyville Motel right around the time he was waking up, because they were nudged to a stop shortly after that.

  “And here we are,” Tom said. “Case almost closed.” He swept an arm at the sky, the land, the trees. “Someday, son, all of this will be yours.”

  “That pushing thing has gone out of my head, at least for the time being,” Denise said. “I’m grateful for that. The first day was the worst, you know? I mean, Jordan had the clearest idea that something was wrong, but I think all of us knew it wasn’t… you know, really right.”

  “Yeah,” Ray said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “It was like being in a kid’s story where the birds and snakes talk. They say stuff like, ‘You’re okay, you’re fine, never mind that your legs are so tired, you’re deenie-cool.’ Deenie-cool, that’s what we used to say when I was growin up in Lynn.”

  “ ‘Lynn, Lynn, city of sin, when you get to heaven, they won’t let you in,’ ” Tom chanted.

  “You grew up with the Christers, all right,” Ray said. “Anyway, the kid knew better, I knew better, I think we all knew fuckin better. If you had half a brain and still thought you were gettin away—”

  “I believed as long as I could because I wanted to believe,” Dan said, “but in truth? We never had a chance. Other normies might, but not us, not flock-killers. They mean to have us, no matter what happens to them.”

  “What do you think they’ve got in mind for us?” Clay asked.

  “Oh, death,” Tom said, almost without interest. “At least I’ll be able to get some decent sleep.”

  Clay’s mind finally caught up with a couple of things and latched on. Earlier in the conversation, Dan had said their normal behavior was changing and Jordan had a theory about it. Just now he’d said no matter what happens to them.

  “I saw a pair of phoners go at each other not far from here,” Clay finally told them.

  “Did you,” Dan said, without much interest.

  “At night,” he added, and now they all looked at him. “They were fighting over a fire truck. Like a couple of kids over a toy. I got some of that telepathy from one of them, but they were both talking.”

  “Talking?” Denise asked skeptically. “Like actual words?”

  “Actual words. The clarity was in and out, but they were definitely words. How many fresh dead have you guys seen? Just those two?”

  Dan said, “We’ve probably seen a dozen since we woke up to where we really are.” He looked at the others. Tom, Denise, and Jordan nodded. Ray shrugged and lit another cigarette. “But it’s hard to tell about the cause of death. They might be reverting; that fits Jordan’s theory, although the talking doesn’t seem to. They might’ve just been corpses the flocks haven’t gotten around to getting rid of. Body-disposal isn’t a priority with them right now.”

>   “We’re their priority, and they’ll be moving us along pretty soon,” Tom said. “I don’t think we get the… you know, the big stadium treatment until tomorrow, but I’m pretty sure they want us in Kashwak before dark tonight.”

  “Jordan, what’s your theory?” Clay asked.

  Jordan said, “I think there was a worm in the original program.”

  2

  “I don’t understand,” Clay said, “but that’s par for the course. When it came to computers, I could use Word, Adobe Illustrator, and MacMail. After that I was pretty much illiterate. Johnny had to walk me through the solitaire program that came with my Mac.” Talking about that hurt. Remembering Johnny’s hand closing over his on the mouse hurt more.

  “But you know what a computer worm is, right?”

  “Something that gets into your computer and screws up all the programs, right?”

  Jordan rolled his eyes but said, “Close enough. It can burrow in, corrupting your files and your hard drive as it goes. If it gets into shareware and the stuff you send, even e-mail attachments—and they do—it can go viral and spread. Sometimes a worm has babies. The worm itself is a mutant and sometimes the babies mutate further. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “The Pulse was a computer program sent out by modem—that’s the only way it could work. And it’s still being sent out by modem. Only there was a worm in there, and it’s rotting out the program. It’s becoming more corrupted every day. GIGO. Do you know GIGO?”

  Clay said, “I don’t even know the way to San Jose.”

  “Stands for ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ We think that there are conversion points where the phoners are changing normies over—”

  Clay remembered his dream. “I’m way ahead of you there.”

  “But now they’re getting bad programming. Do you see? And it makes sense, because it’s the newest phoners who seem to be going down first. Fighting, freaking out, or actually dropping dead.”

  “You don’t have enough data to say that,” Clay replied at once. He was thinking of Johnny.

  Jordan’s eyes had been bright. Now they dulled a little. “That’s true.” Then his chin lifted. “But it’s logical. If the premise is right—if it’s a worm, something actively burrowing deeper and deeper into the original programming—then it’s every bit as logical as the Latin they use. The new phoners are rebooting, but now it’s a crazy, uneven reboot. They get the telepathy, but they can still talk. They—”

  “Jordan, you can’t draw that conclusion on just the two I saw—”

  Jordan was paying no attention. He was really talking to himself now. “They don’t flock like the others, not as completely, because the flocking imperative is imperfectly installed. Instead they… they stay up late and get up early. They revert to aggression against their own kind. And if it’s getting worse… don’t you see? The newest phoners would be the first ones to get messed up!”

  “It’s like in War of the Worlds,” Tom said dreamily.

  “Huh?” Denise said. “I didn’t see that movie. It looked too scary.”

  “The invaders were killed by microbes our bodies tolerate easily,” Tom said. “Wouldn’t it be poetic justice if the phone-crazies all died of a computer-virus?”

  “I’d settle for aggression,” Dan said. “Let them kill each other in one big battle royal.”

  Clay was still thinking about Johnny. Sharon too, but mostly Johnny. Johnny who’d written PLEASE COME GET ME in those big capital letters and then signed all three names, as if that would somehow add weight to his plea.

  Ray Huizenga said, “Isn’t going to do us any good unless it happens tonight.” He stood up and stretched. “They’ll be pushin us on pretty quick. I’m gonna pause to do me a little necessary while I’ve got the time. Don’t go without me.”

  “Not in the bus, we won’t,” Tom said as Ray started up the hiking trail. “You’ve got the keys in your pocket.”

  “Hope everything comes out all right, Ray,” Denise said sweetly.

  “Nobody loves a smartass, darlin,” Ray said, and disappeared from view.

  “What are they going to do to us?” Clay asked. “Any ideas about that?”

  Jordan shrugged. “It may be like a closed-circuit TV hookup, only with a lot of different areas of the country participating. Maybe even the whole world. The size of the stadium makes me think that—”

  “And the Latin, of course,” Dan said. “It’s a kind of lingua franca.”

  “Why do they need one?” Clay asked. “They’re telepaths.”

  “But they still think mostly in words,” Tom said. “At least so far. In any case, they do mean to execute us, Clay—Jordan thinks so, Dan does, and so do I.”

  “So do I,” Denise said in a small, morose voice, and caressed the curve of her belly.

  Tom said, “Latin is more than a lingua franca. It’s the language of justice, and we’ve seen it used by them before.”

  Gunner and Harold. Yes. Clay nodded.

  “Jordan has another idea,” Tom said. “I think you need to hear it, Clay. Just in case. Jordan?”

  Jordan shook his head. “I can’t.”

  Tom and Dan Hartwick looked at each other.

  “Well, one of you tell me,” Clay said. “I mean, Jesus!”

  So it was Jordan after all. “Because they’re telepaths, they know who our loved ones are,” he said.

  Clay searched for some sinister meaning in this and didn’t find it. “So?”

  “I have a brother in Providence,” Tom said. “If he’s one of them, he’ll be my executioner. If Jordan’s right, that is.”

  “My sister,” Dan Hartwick said.

  “My floor-proctor,” Jordan said. He was very pale. “The one with the megapixel Nokia phone that shows video downloads.”

  “My husband,” Denise said, and burst into tears. “Unless he’s dead. I pray God he’s dead.”

  For a moment Clay still didn’t get it. And then he thought: John? My Johnny? He saw the Raggedy Man holding a hand over his head, heard the Raggedy Man pronouncing sentence: “Ecce homo—insanus.” And saw his son walking toward him, wearing his Little League cap turned around backwards and his favorite Red Sox shirt, the one with Tim Wakefield’s name and number on it. Johnny, small beneath the eyes of the millions watching via the miracle of closed-circuit, flock-boosted telepathy.

  Little Johnny-Gee, smiling. Empty-handed.

  Armed with nothing but the teeth in his head.

  3

  It was Ray who broke the silence, although Ray wasn’t even there.

  “Ah, Jesus.” Coming from a little distance up the hiking trail. “Fuck.” Then: “Yo, Clay!”

  “What’s up?” Clay called back.

  “You’ve lived up here all your life, right?” Ray didn’t sound like a happy camper. Clay looked at the others, who returned only blank stares. Jordan shrugged and flipped his palms outward, for one heartbreaking moment becoming a near-teenager instead of just another refugee from the Phone War.

  “Well… downstate, but yeah.” Clay stood up. “What’s the problem?”

  “So you know what poison ivy and poison oak looks like, right?”

  Denise started to break up and clapped both hands over her mouth.

  “Yeah,” Clay said. He couldn’t help smiling himself, but he knew what it looked like for sure, had warned Johnny and his backyard buddies off enough of it in his time.

  “Well get up here and take a look,” Ray said, “and come on your own.” Then, with hardly a pause: “Denise, I don’t need telepathy to know you’re laughin. Put a sock in it, girl.”

  Clay left the picnic area, walking past the sign reading IF YOU GO TAKE A MAP! and then beside the pretty little brook. Everything in the woods was pretty now, a spectrum of furnace colors mixed with the sturdy, never-changing green of the firs, and he supposed (not for the first time, either) that if men and women owed God a death, there were worse seasons of the year in which to pay up.

  He had expect
ed to come upon Ray with his pants loosened or actually around his ankles, but Ray was standing on a carpet of pine needles and his pants were buckled. There were no bushes at all where he was, not poison ivy or anything else. He was as pale as Alice had been when she plunged into the Nickersons’ living room to vomit, his skin so white it looked dead. Only his eyes still had life. They burned in his face.

  “C’mere,” he said in a prison-yard whisper. Clay could hardly hear him over the noisy chuckle of the brook. “Quick. We don’t have much time.”

  “Ray, what the hell—”

  “Just listen. Dan and your pal Tom, they’re too smart. Jordy too. Sometimes thinking gets in the way. Denise is better, but she’s pregnant. Can’t trust a pregnant woman. So you’re it, Mr. Artist. I don’t like it because you’re still holding on to your kid, but your kid’s over. In your heart you know it. Your kid is toast.”

  “Everything all right back there, you guys?” Denise called, and numb as he was, Clay could hear the smile in her voice.

  “Ray, I don’t know what—”

  “No, and that’s how it’s gonna stay. Just listen. What that fuck in the red hoodie wants isn’t gonna happen, if you don’t let it. That’s all you need to know.”

  Ray reached into the pocket of his chinos and brought out a cell phone and a scrap of paper. The phone was gray with grime, as if it had spent most of its life in a working environment.

  “Put it in your pocket. When the time comes, call the number on that slip. You’ll know the time. I gotta hope you’ll know.”

  Clay took the phone. It was either take it or drop it. The little slip of paper escaped his fingers.

  “Get that!” Ray whispered fiercely.

  Clay bent and picked up the scrap of paper. Ten digits were scrawled on it. The first three were the Maine area code. “Ray, they read minds! If I have this—”

  Ray’s mouth stretched in a terrible parody of a grin. “Yeah!” he whispered. “They peek in your head and find out you’re thinkin about a fuckin cell phone! What else is anyone thinkin about since October first? Those of us who can still fuckin think, that is?”