Cell: A Novel Read online

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “Another two just got on the bus,” Dan reported. “And the turn signals are going. So one of them must be sitting at the—”

  “Will you please shut up, Dan,” Denise said. She was still looking at Clay. Still calm. “And if you lost it on the bus, or outside somewhere, it’s lost for good, right?”

  “Yes,” he said heavily.

  “So we know it’s not in either of those places.”

  “Why do we know that?”

  “Because God wouldn’t let it be.”

  “I think… my head’s going to explode,” Tom said in a strangely calm voice.

  Again she ignored him. “So which pocket haven’t you checked?”

  “I checked every—” Clay began, then stopped. Without taking his eyes from Denise’s, he investigated the small watch-pocket sewn into the larger right front pocket of his jeans. And the slip of paper was there. He didn’t remember putting it there, but it was there. He pulled it out. Scrawled on it in the dead man’s laborious printing was the number: 207-919-9811.

  “Thank St. Anthony for me,” he said.

  “If this works,” she said, “I’ll ask St. Anthony to thank God.”

  “Deni?” Tom said.

  She turned to him.

  “Thank Him for me, too,” he said.

  14

  The four of them sat together against the double doors through which they had entered, counting on the steel cores to protect them. Jordan was crouched down in back of the building, below the broken window through which he had escaped.

  “What are we going to do if the explosion doesn’t blow any holes in the side of this place?” Tom asked.

  “We’ll think of something,” Clay said.

  “And if Ray’s bomb doesn’t go off?” Dan asked.

  “Drop back twenty yards and punt,” Denise said. “Go on, Clay. Don’t wait for the theme-music.”

  He opened the cell phone, looked at the dark LED readout, and realized he should have checked for bars on this one before sending Jordan out. He hadn’t thought of it. None of them had thought of it. Stupid. Almost as stupid as forgetting he’d put the scrap of paper with the number written on it in his watch pocket. He pushed the power button now. The phone beeped. For a moment there was nothing, and then three bars appeared, bright and clear. He punched in the number, then settled his thumb lightly on the button marked call.

  “Jordan, you ready back there?”

  “Yes!”

  “What about you guys?” Clay asked.

  “Just do it before I have a heart attack,” Tom said.

  An image rose in Clay’s mind, nightmarish in its clarity: Johnny-Gee lying almost directly beneath the place where the explosives-laden bus had come to rest. Lying on his back with his eyes open and his hands clasped on the chest of his Red Sox T-shirt, listening to the music while his mind rebuilt itself in some strange new way.

  He swept it aside.

  “Tony, Tony, come around,” he said for no reason whatever, and then pushed the button that called the cell phone in the back of the minibus.

  There was time for him to count Mississippi ONE and Mississippi TWO before the entire world outside Kashwakamak Hall seemed to blow up, the roar swallowing Tomaso Albinoni’s “Adagio” in a hungry blast. All the small windows lining the flock side of the building blew in. Brilliant crimson light shone through the holes, then the entire south end of the building tore away in a hail of boards, glass, and swirling hay. The doors they were leaning against seemed to bend backward. Denise wrapped protective arms around her belly. From outside a terrible hurt screaming began. For a moment this sound ripped through Clay’s head like the blade of a buzzsaw. Then it was gone. The screaming in his ears went on. It was the sound of people roasting in hell.

  Something landed on the roof. It was heavy enough to make the whole building shudder. Clay pulled Denise to her feet. She looked at him wildly, as if no longer sure who he was. “Come on!” He was shouting but could hardly hear his own voice. It seemed to be seeping through wads of cotton. “Come on, let’s get out!”

  Tom was up. Dan made it halfway, fell back, tried again, and managed it the second time. He grabbed Tom’s hand. Tom grabbed Denise’s. Linked three-across, they shuffled to the gaping hole at the end of the Hall. There they found Jordan standing next to a litter of burning hay and staring out at what a single phone call had done.

  15

  The giant’s foot that had seemed to stamp the roof of Kashwakamak Hall had been a large chunk of schoolbus. The shingles were burning. Directly in front of them, beyond the little pile of blazing hay, were a pair of upside-down seats, also burning. Their steel frames had been shredded into spaghetti. Clothes floated out of the sky like big snow: shirts, hats, pants, shorts, an athletic supporter, a blazing bra. Clay saw that the hay insulation piled along the bottom of the hall was going to be a moat of fire before very long; they were getting out just in time.

  Patches of fire dotted the mall area where concerts, outdoor dances, and various competitions had been held, but the chunks of the exploding bus had swept farther than that. Clay saw flames burning high in trees that had to be at least three hundred yards away. Dead south of their position, the funhouse had started to burn and he could see something—he thought it was probably a human torso—blazing halfway up the strutwork of the Parachute Drop.

  The flock itself had become a raw meatloaf of dead and dying phoners. Their telepathy had broken down (although little currents of that strange psychic force occasionally tugged at him, making his hair rise and his flesh crawl), but the survivors could still scream, and they filled the night with their cries. Clay would have gone ahead even if he’d been able to imagine how bad it was going to be—even in the first few seconds he made no effort to mislead himself on that score—but this was beyond imagining.

  The firelight was just enough to show them more than they wanted to see. The mutilations and decapitations were bad—the pools of blood, the littered limbs—but the scattered clothes and shoes with nobody inside them were somehow worse, as if the explosion had been fierce enough to actually vaporize part of the flock. A man walked toward them with his hands to his throat in an effort to stem the flow of blood pouring over and between his fingers—it looked orange in the growing glow of the Hall’s burning roof—while his intestines swung back and forth at the level of his crotch. More wet loops came sliding out as he walked past them, his eyes wide and unseeing.

  Jordan was saying something. Clay couldn’t hear it over the screams, the wails, and the growing crackle of fire from behind him, so he leaned closer.

  “We had to do it, it was all we could do,” Jordan said. He looked at a headless woman, a legless man, at something so torn open it had become a flesh canoe filled with blood. Beyond it, two more bus seats lay on a pair of burning women who had died in each other’s arms. “We had to do it, it was all we could do. We had to do it, it was all we could do.”

  “That’s right, honey, put your face against me and walk like that,” Clay said, and Jordan immediately buried his face in Clay’s side. Walking that way was uncomfortable, but it could be done.

  They skirted the edge of the flock’s campground, moving toward the back of what would have been a completed midway and amusement arcade if the Pulse hadn’t intervened. As they went, Kashwakamak Hall burned brighter, casting more light on the mall. Dark shapes—many naked or almost naked, the clothes blown right off them—staggered and shambled. Clay had no idea how many. The few that passed close by their little group showed no interest in them; they either continued on toward the midway area or plunged into the woods west of the Expo grounds, where Clay was quite sure they would die of exposure unless they could reestablish some sort of flock consciousness. He didn’t think they could. Partly because of the virus, but mostly because of Jordan’s decision to drive the bus right into the middle of them and achieve a maximum kill-zone, as they had with the propane trucks.

  If they’
d ever known snuffing one old man could lead to this… Clay thought, and then he thought, But how could they?

  They reached the dirt lot where the carnies had parked their trucks and campers. Here the ground was thick with snaking electrical cables, and the spaces between the campers were filled with the accessories of families who lived on the road: barbecues, gas grills, lawn chairs, a hammock, a little laundry whirligig with clothes that had probably been hanging there for almost two weeks.

  “Let’s find something with the keys in it and get the hell out of here,” Dan said. “They cleared the feeder road, and if we’re careful I bet we can go north on 160 as far as we want.” He pointed. “Up there it’s just about all no-fo.”

  Clay had spotted a panel truck with LEM’S PAINTING AND PLUMBING on the back. He tried the doors and they opened. The inside was filled with milk-crates, most crammed with various plumbing supplies, but in one he found what he wanted: paint in spray-cans. He took four of these after checking to make sure they were full or almost full.

  “What are those for?” Tom asked.

  “Tell you later,” Clay said.

  “Let’s get out of here, please,” Denise said. “I can’t stand this. My pants are soaked with blood.” She began to cry.

  They came onto the midway between the Krazy Kups and a half-constructed kiddie ride called Charlie the Choo-Choo. “Look,” Tom said, pointing.

  “Oh… my… God,” Dan said softly.

  Lying draped across the peak of the train ride’s ticket booth was the remains of a charred and smoking red sweatshirt—the kind sometimes called a hoodie. A large splotch of blood matted the front around a hole probably made by a chunk of flying schoolbus. Before the blood took over, covering the rest, Clay could make out three letters, the Raggedy Man’s last laugh: HAR.

  16

  “There’s nobody in the fucking thing, and judging by the size of the hole, he had open-heart surgery without benefit of anesthetic,” Denise said, “so when you’re tired of looking—”

  “There’s another little parking lot down at the south end of the midway,” Tom said. “Nice-looking cars in that one. Boss-type cars. We might get lucky.”

  They did, but not with a nice-looking car. A small van with TYCO WATER PURIFICATION EXPERTS was parked behind a number of the nice-looking cars, effectively blocking them in. The Tyco man had considerately left his keys in the ignition, probably for that very reason, and Clay drove them away from the fire, the carnage, and the screams, rolling with slow care down the feeder road to the junction marked by the billboard showing the sort of happy family that no longer existed (if it ever had). There Clay stopped and put the gearshift lever in park.

  “One of you guys has to take over now,” he said.

  “Why, Clay?” Jordan asked, but Clay knew from the boy’s voice that Jordan already knew.

  “Because this is where I get out,” he said.

  “No!”

  “Yes. I’m going to look for my boy.”

  Tom said, “He’s almost certainly dead back there. I’m not meaning to be a hardass, only realistic.”

  “I know that, Tom. I also know there’s a chance he’s not, and so do you. Jordan said they were walking every which way, like they were totally lost.”

  Denise said, “Clay… honey… even if he’s alive, he could be wandering around in the woods with half his head blown off. I hate to say that, but you know it’s true.”

  Clay nodded. “I also know he could have gotten out earlier, while we were locked up, and started down the road to Gurleyville. A couple of others made it that far; I saw them. And I saw others on the way. So did you.”

  “No arguing with the artistic mind, is there?” Tom asked sadly.

  “No,” Clay said, “but I wonder if you and Jordan would step outside with me for a minute.”

  Tom sighed. “Why not?” he said.

  17

  Several phoners, looking lost and bewildered, walked past them as they stood by the side of the little water purification van. Clay, Tom, and Jordan paid no attention to them, and the phoners returned the favor. To the northwest the horizon was a brightening red-orange as Kashwakamak Hall shared its fire with the forest behind it.

  “No big goodbyes this time,” Clay said, affecting not to see the tears in Jordan’s eyes. “I’m expecting to see you again. Here, Tom. Take this.” He held out the cell phone he’d used to set off the blast. Tom took it. “Go north from here. Keep checking that thing for bars. If you come to road-reefs, abandon what you’re driving, walk until the road’s clear, then take another car or truck and drive again. You’ll probably get cell transmission bars around the Rangeley area—that was boating in the summer, hunting in the fall, skiing in the winter—but beyond there you should be in the clear, and the days should be safe.”

  “I bet they’re safe now,” Jordan said, wiping his eyes.

  Clay nodded. “You might be right. Anyway, use your judgment. When you get a hundred or so miles north of Rangeley, find a cabin or a lodge or something, fill it with supplies, and lay up for the winter. You know what the winter’s going to do to these things, don’t you?”

  “If the flock mind falls apart and they don’t migrate, almost all of them will die,” Tom said. “Those north of the Mason-Dixon Line, at least.”

  “I think so, yeah. I put those cans of spray-paint in the center console. Every twenty miles or so, spray T-J-D on the road, nice and big. Got it?”

  “T-J-D,” Jordan said. “For Tom, Jordan, Dan, and Denise.”

  “Right. Make sure you spray it extra big, with an arrow, if you change roads. If you take a dirt road, spray it on trees, always on the right-hand side of the road. That’s where I’ll be looking. Have you got that?”

  “Always on the right,” Tom said. “Come with us, Clay. Please.”

  “No. Don’t make this harder for me than it already is. Every time you have to abandon a vehicle, leave it in the middle of the road and spray it T-J-D. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Jordan said. “You better find us.”

  “I will. This is going to be a dangerous world for a while, but not quite as dangerous as it’s been. Jordan, I need to ask you something.”

  “All right.”

  “If I find Johnny and the worst that’s happened to him is a trip through their conversion-point, what should I do?”

  Jordan gaped. “How would I know? Jesus, Clay! I mean…Jesus!”

  “You knew they were rebooting,” Clay said.

  “I made a guess!”

  Clay knew it had been a lot more than that. A lot better than that. He also knew Jordan was exhausted and terrified. He dropped to one knee in front of the boy and took his hand. “Don’t be afraid. It can’t be any worse for him than it already is. God knows it can’t.”

  “Clay, I…” Jordan looked at Tom. “People aren’t like computers, Tom! Tell him!”

  “But computers are like people, aren’t they?” Tom said. “Because we build what we know. You knew about the reboot and you knew about the worm. So tell him what you think. He probably won’t find the kid, anyway. If he does…” Tom shrugged. “Like he said. How much worse can it be?”

  Jordan thought about this, biting his lip. He looked terribly tired, and there was blood on his shirt.

  “Are you guys coming?” Dan called.

  “Give us another minute,” Tom said. And then, in a softer tone: “Jordan?”

  Jordan was quiet a moment longer. Then he looked at Clay and said, “You’d need another cell phone. And you’d need to take him to a place where there’s coverage…”

  SAVE TO SYSTEM

  1

  Clay stood in the middle of Route 160, in what would have been the billboard’s shadow on a sunny day, and watched the taillights until they were out of sight. He couldn’t shake the idea that he would never see Tom and Jordan again (fading roses, his mind whispered), but he refused to let it grow into a premonition. They had come together twice, after all, and didn’t people say the third ti
me was the charm?

  A passing phoner bumped him. It was a man with blood congealing on one side of his face—the first injured refugee from the Northern Counties Expo that he’d seen. He would see more if he didn’t stay ahead of them, so he set off along Route 160, heading south again. He had no real reason to think his kid had gone south, but hoped that some vestige of Johnny’s mind—his old mind—told him home lay in that direction. And it was a direction Clay knew, at least.

  About half a mile south of the feeder road he encountered another phoner, this one a woman, who was pacing rapidly back and forth across the highway like a captain on the foredeck of her ship. She looked around at Clay with such sharp regard that he raised his hands, ready to grapple with her if she attacked him.

  She didn’t. “Who fa-Da?” she asked, and in his mind, quite clearly, he heard: Who fell? Daddy, who fell?

  “I don’t know,” he said, easing past her. “I didn’t see.”

  “Where na?” she asked, pacing more furiously than ever, and in his mind he heard: Where am I now? This he made no attempt to answer, but in his mind he thought of Pixie Dark asking, Who are you? Who am 1?

  Clay walked faster, but not quite fast enough. The pacing woman called after him, chilling him: “Who Pih‘ Da?”

  And in his mind, he heard this question echo with chilling clarity. Who is Pixie Dark?

  2

  There was no gun in the first house he broke into, but there was a long-barreled flashlight, and he shone it on every straggling phoner he encountered, always asking the same question, trying simultaneously to throw it with his mind like a magic-lantern slide on a screen: Have you seen a boy? He got no answers and heard only fading fragments of thought in his head. At the second house there was a nice Dodge Ram in the driveway, but Clay didn’t dare take it. If Johnny was on this road, he’d be walking. If Clay was driving, he might miss his boy even if he was driving slow. In the pantry he found a Daisy canned ham, which he unzipped with the attached key and munched as he hit the road again. He was about to throw the balance into the weeds after he’d eaten his fill when he saw an elderly phoner standing beside a mailbox, watching him with a sad and hungry eye. Clay held out the ham and the old man took it. Then, speaking slowly and clearly, trying to picture Johnny in his mind, Clay said: “Have you seen a boy?”