Cell: A Novel Read online

“It’ll be a pleasure, you freak,” Tom said. “Denise, are you sure you can walk on your own?”

  “Yes. I’ve just got one tiny bit of business first.” She drew in breath, then spit in the Raggedy Man’s face. “There. Take that back to Hah-vud with you, fuckface.”

  The Raggedy Man said nothing. He only grinned at Clay. Just two fellows sharing a secret joke.

  6

  No one brought them any food, but there were snack machines galore and Dan found a crowbar in the maintenance closet at the huge building’s south end. The others were standing around and watching him pry open the candy machine—Of course we’re insane, Clay thought, we eat Baby Ruths for dinner and tomorrow we’ll have Pay Days for breakfast—when the music started. And it wasn’t “You Light Up My Life” or “Baby Elephant Walk” coming out of the big speakers ringing the grassy mall outside, not this time. It was something slow and stately that Clay had heard before, although not for years. It filled him with sadness and made gooseflesh run up the soft insides of his arms.

  “Oh my God,” Dan said softly. “I think it’s Albinoni.”

  “No,” Tom said. “That’s Pachelbel. It’s the Canon in D Major.”

  “Of course it is,” Dan said, sounding embarrassed.

  “It’s as if…” Denise began, then stopped. She looked down at her shoes.

  “What?” Clay asked. “Go on, say it. You’re among friends.”

  “It’s like the sound of memories,” she said. “As if it’s all they have.”

  “Yes,” Dan said. “I suppose—”

  “You guys!” Jordan called. He was looking out one of the small windows. They were quite high, but by standing on his tiptoes, he could just manage. “Come look at this!”

  They lined up and looked out at the wide mall. It was almost full dark. The speakers and the light-standards loomed, black sentinels against the dead sky. Beyond was the gantry shape of the Parachute Drop with its one lonely blinking light. And ahead, directly ahead, thousands of phoners had gone to their knees like Muslims about to pray while Johann Pachelbel filled the air with what could have been a substitute for memory. And when they lay down they lay as one, producing a great soft swoop of noise and a fluttering displacement of air that sent empty bags and flattened soda cups twirling into the air.

  “Bedtime for the whole brain-damaged army,” Clay said. “If we’re going to do something, it’s got to be tonight.”

  “Do? What are we going to do?” Tom asked. “The two doors I tried are both locked. I’m sure that’s true of the others, as well.”

  Dan held up the crowbar.

  “Don’t think so,” Clay said. “That thing may work just fine on the vending machines, but remember, this place used to be a casino.” He pointed to the north end of the hall, which was lushly carpeted and filled with rows of one-armed bandits, their chrome muted in the glow of the failing emergency lights. “I think you’ll find the doors are crowbar-resistant.”

  “The windows?” Dan asked, then took a closer look and answered his own question. “Jordan, maybe.”

  “Let’s have something to eat,” Clay said. “Then let’s just sit down and be quiet for a little while. There hasn’t been enough of that.”

  “And do what?” Denise asked.

  “Well, you guys can do what you want,” Clay said. “I haven’t done any drawing in almost two weeks, and I’ve been missing it. I think I’ll draw.”

  “You don’t have any paper,” Jordan objected.

  Clay smiled. “When I don’t have any paper, I draw in my head.”

  Jordan looked at him uncertainly, trying to ascertain whether his leg was being pulled. When he decided it wasn’t, he said, “That can’t be as good as drawing on paper, can it?”

  “In some ways it’s better. Instead of erasing, I just rethink.”

  There was a loud clank and the door of the candy machine swung open. “Bingo!” Dan cried, and lifted his crowbar above his head. “Who said college professors were good for nothing in the real world?”

  “Look,” Denise said greedily, ignoring Dan. “A whole rack of Junior Mints!” She dug in.

  “Clay?” Tom asked.

  “Hmmm?”

  “I don’t suppose you saw your little boy, did you? Or your wife? Sandra?”

  “Sharon,” Clay said. “I didn’t see either of them.” He looked around Denise’s ample hip. “Are those Butterfingers?”

  7

  Half an hour later they had eaten their fill of candy and raided the soda machine. They had tried the other doors and found them all locked. Dan tried his crowbar and couldn’t get purchase even at the bottom. Tom was of the opinion that, although the doors looked like wood, they were very likely equipped with steel cores.

  “Probably alarmed, too,” Clay said. “Screw around with them too much and the reservation police will come and take you away.”

  Now the other four sat in a little circle on the soft casino carpeting among the slot machines. Clay sat on the concrete, with his back against the double doors through which the Raggedy Man had ushered them with that mocking gesture of his—After you, see you in the morning.

  Clay’s thoughts wanted to return to that other mocking gesture—the thumb-and-pinkie phone-mime—but he wouldn’t let them, at least not directly. He knew from long experience that the best way to go after such things was by the back door. So he leaned his head against the wood with the steel core hiding inside, and closed his eyes, and visualized a comic splash-page. Not a page from Dark Wanderer—Dark Wanderer was kaput and nobody knew it better than him—but from a new comic. Call it Cell, for want of a better title, a thrilling end-of-the-world saga of the phoner hordes versus the last few normies—

  Except that couldn’t be right. It looked right if you glanced at it fast, the way the doors in this place looked like wood but weren’t. The ranks of the phoners had to be seriously depleted—had to be. How many of them had been lost in the violence immediately following the Pulse? Half? He recalled the fury of that violence and thought, Maybe more. Maybe sixty or even seventy percent. Then attrition due to serious wounds, infection, exposure, further fighting, and just plain stupidity. Plus, of course, the flock-killers; how many had they taken out? How many big flocks like this one were actually left?

  Clay thought they might find out tomorrow, if the ones remaining all hooked up for one big execute-the-insane extravaganza. Much good the knowledge would do them.

  Never mind. Boil it down. If you wanted backstory on the splash, the situation had to be boiled down enough to fit on a single narrative panel. It was an unwritten rule. The phoners’ situation could be summed up in two words: bad losses. They looked like a lot—hell, like a damned multitude—but probably the passenger pigeons had looked like a lot right up until the end. Because they traveled in sky-darkening flocks right up to the end. What nobody noticed was that there were fewer and fewer of those giant flocks. Until, that was, they were all gone. Extinct. Finite Buh-bye.

  Plus, he thought, they’ve got this other problem now, this bad-programming thing. This worm. What about that? All in all, these guys could have a shorter run than the dinosaurs, telepathy, levitation, and all.

  Okay, enough backstory. What’s your illo? What’s your damn picture, the one that’s going to hook them and draw them in? Why, Clay Riddell and Ray Huizenga, that’s what. They’re standing in the woods. Ray’s got the Beth Nickerson .45 with the barrel under his chin and Clay’s holding…

  A cell phone, of course. The one Ray lifted from the Gurleyville Quarry.

  CLAY (terrified): Ray, STOP! This is pointless! Don’t you remember? Kashwak’s a CELL DEAD Z—

  No good! KA-POW! in jagged yellow capitals across the foreground of the splash, and this one really is a splash, because Arnie Nickerson has thoughtfully provided his wife with the kind of softnosed rounds they sell on the Internet at the American Paranoia sites, and the top of Ray’s head is a red geyser. In the background—one of those detailed touches for which Clay Riddell might
have become famous in a world where the Pulse never happened—a single terrified crow is lifting off from a pine branch.

  A damn good splash page, Clay thought. Gory, sure—it would never have passed muster in the old Comics Code days—but instantly involving. And although Clay had never said that thing about cell phones not working beyond the conversion point, he would’ve if he’d thought of it in time. Only time had run out. Ray had killed himself so that the Raggedy Man and his phoner friends wouldn’t see that phone in his mind, which was bitterly ironic. The Raggedy Man had known all about the cell whose existence Ray had died to protect. He knew it was in Clay’s pocket… and he didn’t care.

  Standing at the double doors to Kashwakamak Hall. The Raggedy Man making that gesture—thumb to ear, curled fingers next to his torn and stubbly cheek, pinkie in front of his mouth. Using Denise to say it again, to drive the point home: No-fo-you-you.

  That’s right. Because Kashwak—No-Fo.

  Ray had died for nothing… so why didn’t that upset him now?

  Clay was aware he was dozing as he often did when he drew inside his head. Coming uncoupled. And that was all right. Because he felt the way he always did just before picture and story became welded into one—happy, like people before an anticipated homecoming. Before journeys end in lovers meeting. He had absolutely no reason to feel that way, but he did.

  Ray Huizenga had died for a useless cell phone.

  Or was it more than one? Now Clay saw another panel. This one was a flashback panel, you could tell by the scalloped edges.

  CU on RAY’S hand, holding the grimy cell phone and a slip of paper with a telephone number scrawled on it. RAY’S thumb obscures everything but the Maine area code.

  RAY (O.S.): When the time comes, call the number on that slip. You’ll know the time. I gotta hope you’ll know.

  Can’t call anybody from a cell in Kaskwakamak, Ray, because Kashwak = No-Fo. Just ask the President of Hah-vud.

  And to drive the point home, here’s another flashback panel with those scalloped edges. It’s Route 160. In the foreground is the little yellow bus with MAINE SCHOOL DISTRICT 38 NEWFIELD printed on the side. In the middle distance, painted across the road, is KASHWAK=NO-FO. Once again the detail-work is terrific: empty soda cans lying in the ditch, a discarded T-shirt caught on a bush, and in the distance, a tent flapping from a tree like a long brown tongue. Above the minibus are four voice-over balloons. These weren’t the things they actually said (even his dozing mind knew it), but that wasn’t the point. Storymaking wasn’t the point, not now.

  He thought he might know the point when he came to it.

  DENISE (VO.): Is this where they—?

  TOM (VO.): Where they did the conversions, correct. Get into line a normie, make your call, and when you head on up to the Expo flock, you’re one of THEM. What a deal.

  DAN (VO.): Why here? Why not on the Expo grounds?

  CLAY (VO.): Don’t you remember? Kashwak=No-Fo. They lined em up at the far edge of cell coverage. Beyond here, nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero bars.

  Another panel. Close-up on the Raggedy Man in all his pestiferous glory. Grinning with his mutilated mouth and summing everything up with one gesture. Ray had some bright idea that depended on making a cell phone call. It was so bright he completely forgot there’s no coverage up here. I’d probably have to go to Quebec to get a bar on that phone he gave me. That’s funny, but what’s even funnier? I took it! What a sap!

  So whatever Ray had died for was pointless? Maybe, but here was another picture forming. Outside, Pachelbel had given way to Fauré, and Fauré had given way to Vivaldi. Pouring from speakers instead of boomboxes. Black speakers against a dead sky, with the half-constructed amusement rides in the background; in the foreground Kashwakamak Hall with its bunting and cheap hay insulation. And as the final touch, the little piece of detail-work for which Clay Riddell was already becoming known—

  He opened his eyes and sat up. The others were still in their circle on the carpet at the north end. Clay didn’t know how long he’d been sitting against the door, but it had been long enough for his ass to go numb.

  You guys, he tried to say, but at first no sound would come out. His mouth was dry. His heart was pumping hard. He cleared his throat and tried again. “You guys!” he said, and they looked around. Something in his voice made Jordan scramble to his feet, and Tom wasn’t far behind.

  Clay walked toward them on legs that didn’t feel like his own—they were half-asleep. He took the cell phone out of his pocket as he walked. The one Ray had died for because in the heat of the moment he had forgotten the most salient fact about Kashwakamak: up here at the Northern Counties Expo, these things didn’t work.

  8

  “If it won’t work, what good is it?” Dan asked. He had been excited by Clay’s excitement, but deflated in a hurry when he saw the object in Clay’s hand wasn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card but only another goddam cell phone. A dirty old Motorola with a cracked casing. The others looked at it with a mixture of fear and curiosity.

  “Bear with me,” Clay said. “Would you do that?”

  “We’ve got all night,” Dan said. He took off his glasses and began to polish them. “Got to spin it away somehow.”

  “You stopped at that Newfield Trading Post for something to eat and drink,” Clay said, “and you found the little yellow schoolbus.”

  “That seems like a zillion years ago,” Denise said. She stuck out her lower lip and blew hair off her forehead.

  “Ray found the little bus,” Clay said. “Seats about twelve—”

  “Sixteen, actually,” Dan said. “It’s written on the dashboard. Man, they must have teensy schools up here.”

  “Seats sixteen, with space behind the rear seat for packs, or a little light luggage for field trips. Then you moved on. And when you got to the Gurleyville Quarry, I bet it was Ray’s idea that you should stop there.”

  “You know, it was,” Tom said. “He thought we could use a hot meal and a rest. How’d you know that, Clay?”

  “I knew it because I drew it,” Clay said, and this was close to true—he was seeing it as he spoke. “Dan, you and Denise and Ray wiped out two flocks. The first with gasoline, but on the second you used dynamite. Ray knew how because he’d used it working highway jobs.”

  “Fuck,” Tom breathed. “He got dynamite in that quarry, didn’t he? While we were sleeping. And he could have—we slept like the dead.”

  “Ray was the one who woke us up,” Denise said.

  Clay said, “I don’t know if it was dynamite or some other explosive, but I’m almost positive he turned that little yellow bus into a rolling bomb while you were sleeping.”

  “It’s in back,” Jordan said. “In the luggage compartment.”

  Clay nodded.

  Jordan’s hands were clenched into fists. “How much, do you think?”

  “No way of knowing until it goes up,” Clay said.

  “Let me see if I’m following this,” Tom said. Outside, Vivaldi gave way to Mozart—A Little Night Music. The phoners had definitely evolved past Debby Boone. “He stowed a bomb in the back of the bus… then somehow rigged a cell phone as a detonator?”

  Clay nodded. “That’s what I believe. I think he found two cells in the quarry office. For all I know, there could have been half a dozen, for crew use—God knows they’re cheap enough nowadays. Anyway, he rigged one to a detonator on the explosives. It’s how the insurgents used to set off roadside bombs in Iraq.”

  “He did all that while we were sleeping?” Denise asked. “And didn’t tell us?”

  Clay said, “He kept it from you so it wouldn’t be in your minds.”

  “And killed himself so it wouldn’t be in his,” Dan said. Then he uttered a burst of bitter laughter. “Okay, he’s a goddam hero! The only thing he forgot is that cell phones don’t work beyond the place where they put up their goddam conversion tents! I bet they barely worked there!”

  “Right,” Clay said. He was smiling. “T
hat’s why the Raggedy Man let me keep this phone. He didn’t know what I wanted it for—I’m not sure they exactly think, anyway—”

  “Not like us, they don’t,” Jordan said. “And they never will.”

  “—but he didn’t care, because he knew it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t even Pulse myself with it, because Kashwak equals no-fo. No-fo-me-me.”

  “Then why the smile?” Denise asked.

  “Because I know something he doesn’t,” Clay said. “Something they don’t.” He turned to Jordan. “Can you drive?”

  Jordan looked startled. “Hey, I’m twelve. I mean, hello?”

  “You’ve never driven a go-kart? An ATV? A snowmobile?”

  “Well, sure… there’s a dirt go-kart track at this pitch-n-putt place outside Nashua, and once or twice…”

  “That’ll work. We’re not talking about very far. Assuming, that is, they left the bus at the Parachute Drop. And I bet they did. I don’t think they know how to drive any more than they know how to think.”

  Tom said, “Clay, have you lost your mind?”

  “No,” he said. “They may hold their mass flock-killer executions in that virtual stadium of theirs tomorrow, but we’re not going to be part of it. We’re getting out of here.”

  9

  The little windows were thick, but Dan’s crowbar was a match for the glass. He, Tom, and Clay took turns with it, working until all the shards were knocked out. Then Denise took the sweater she’d been wearing and laid it over the bottom of the frame.

  “You okay with this, Jordan?” Tom asked.

  Jordan nodded. He was frightened—there was no color in his lips at all—but seemed composed. Outside, the phoners’ lullaby music had cycled around to Pachelbel’s Canon again—what Denise had called the sound of memories.

  “I’m okay,” Jordan said. “I will be, anyway. I think. Once I get going.”

  Clay said, “Tom might be able to squeeze through—”

  Behind Jordan’s shoulder, Tom looked at the small window, no more than eighteen inches wide, and shook his head.

  “I’ll be okay,” Jordan said.

  “All right. Tell it to me again.”