Cell: A Novel Read online

  Clay was suddenly closer to undone than at any time since things had started going wrong. Why this should have been worse than the throat-biting teenage girl or the knife-wielding businessman, worse than finding Mr. Ricardi hanging from a light fixture with a bag over his head, he didn’t know, but it was. He had kicked the knife-wielding businessman, Tom had, too, but the knife-wielding businessman had been a different kind of crazy. The old lady with the beauty-shop curls had just been a…

  “Jesus,” he said. “She was just a nut, and I coldcocked her.” He was starting to shake.

  “She was terrorizing a young girl who lost her mother today,” Tom said, and Clay realized it wasn’t calmness he heard in the small man’s voice but an extraordinary coldness. “You did exactly the right thing. Besides, you can’t keep an old iron horse like this down for long. She’s coming around already. Help me get her over to the side of the road.”

  4

  They had reached the part of Route One—sometimes called the Miracle Mile, sometimes Sleaze Alley—where limited-access highway yielded to a jostle of liquor marts, cut-rate clothing stores, sporting-goods outlets, and eateries with names like Fuddruckers. Here the six lanes were littered, if not quite choked, with vehicles that had either been piled up or just abandoned when their operators panicked, tried their cell phones, and went insane. The refugees wove their various courses silently among the remains, reminding Clay Riddell more than a little of ants evacuating a hill that has been demolished by the careless passing boot-stride of some heedless human.

  There was a green reflectorized sign reading MALDEN SALEM ST. EXIT 1/4 MI at the edge of a low pink building that had been broken into; it was fronted by a jagged skirting of broken glass, and a battery-powered burglar alarm was even now in the tired last stages of running down. A glance at the dead sign on the roof was all Clay needed to tell him what had made the place a target in the aftermath of the day’s disaster: MISTER BIG’S GIANT DISCOUNT LIQUOR.

  He had one of the plump woman’s arms. Tom had the other, and Alice supported the muttering woman’s head as they eased her to a sitting position with her back against one of the exit sign’s legs. Just as they got her down, the plump woman opened her eyes and looked at them dazedly.

  Tom snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, twice, briskly. She blinked, then turned her eyes to Clay. “You… hit me,” she said. Her fingers rose to touch the rapidly puffing spot on her jaw.

  “Yes, I’m sor—” Clay began.

  “He may be, but I’m not,” Tom said. He spoke with that same cold briskness. “You were terrorizing our ward.”

  The plump woman laughed softly, but tears were in her eyes. “Ward! I’ve heard a lot of words for it, but never that one. As if I don’t know what men like you want with a tender girl like this, especially in times like these. ‘They repented not their fornications, nor their sodomies, nor their—’ ”

  “Shut up,” Tom said, “or I’ll hit you myself. And unlike my friend, who was I think lucky enough not to grow up among the holy Hannahs and thus does not recognize you for what you are, I won’t pull my punch. Fair warning—one more word.” He held his fist before her eyes, and although Clay had already concluded that Tom was an educated man, civilized, and probably not much of a puncher under ordinary circumstances, he could not help feeling dismay at the sight of that small, tight fist, as if he were looking at an omen of the coming age.

  The plump lady looked and said nothing. One large tear spilled down her rouged cheek.

  “That’s enough, Tom, I’m okay,” Alice said.

  Tom dropped the plump lady’s shopping bag of possessions into her lap. Clay hadn’t even realized Tom had salvaged it. Then Tom took the Bible from Alice, picked up one of the plump lady’s beringed hands, and smacked the Bible into it, spine first. He started away, then turned back.

  “Tom, that’s enough, let’s go,” Clay said.

  Tom ignored him. He bent toward the woman sitting with her back against the sign’s leg. His hands were on his knees, and to Clay the two of them—the plump, spectacled woman looking up, the small, spectacled man bending over with his hands on his knees—looked like figures in some lunatic’s parody of the early illustrations from the Charles Dickens novels.

  “Some advice, sister,” Tom said. “The police will no longer protect you as they did when you and your self-righteous, holy-rolling friends marched on the family planning centers or the Emily Cathcart Clinic in Waltham—”

  “That abortion mill!” she spat, and then raised her Bible, as if to block a blow.

  Tom didn’t hit her, but he was smiling grimly. “I don’t know about the Vial of Insanity, but there’s certainly beaucoup crazy making the rounds tonight. May I be clear? The lions are out of their cages, and you may well find that they’ll eat the mouthy Christians first. Somebody canceled your right of free speech around three o’clock this afternoon. Just a word to the wise.” He looked from Alice to Clay, and Clay saw that the upper lip beneath the mustache was trembling slightly. “Shall we go?”

  “Yes,” Clay said.

  “Wow,” Alice said, once they were walking toward the Salem Street ramp again, Mister Big’s Giant Discount Liquor falling behind them. “You grew up with someone like that?”

  “My mother and both of her sisters,” Tom said. “First N.E. Church of Christ the Redeemer. They took Jesus as their personal savior, and the church took them as its personal pigeons.”

  “Where is your mother now?” Clay asked.

  Tom glanced at him briefly. “Heaven. Unless they rooked her on that one, too. I’m pretty sure the bastards did.”

  5

  Near the stop sign at the foot of the ramp, two men were fighting over a keg of beer. If forced to guess, Clay would have said it had probably been liberated from Mister Big’s Giant Discount Liquor. Now it lay forgotten against the guardrails, dented and leaking foam, while the two men—both brawny and both bleeding—battered each other with their fists. Alice shrank against him, and Clay put his arm around her, but there was something almost reassuring about these brawlers. They were angry—enraged—but not crazy. Not like the people back in the city.

  One of them was bald and wearing a Celtics jacket. He hit the other a looping overhand blow that mashed his opponent’s lips and knocked him flat. When the man in the Celtics jacket advanced on the downed man, the downed man scrambled away, then got up, still backing off. He spat blood. “Take it, ya fuck!” he yelled in a thick, weepy Boston accent. “Hope it chokes ya!”

  The bald man in the Celtics jacket made as if to charge him, and the other went running up the ramp toward Route One. Celtics Jacket started to bend down for his prize, registered Clay, Alice, and Tom, and straightened up again. It was three to one, he had a black eye, and blood was trickling down the side of his face from a badly torn earlobe, but Clay saw no fear in that face, although he had only the diminishing light of the Revere fire to go by. He thought his grandfather would have said the guy’s Irish was up, and certainly that went with the big green shamrock on the back of his jacket.

  “The fuck you lookin at?” he asked.

  “Nothing—just going by you, if that’s all right,” Tom said mildly. “I live on Salem Street.”

  “You can go to Salem Street or hell, far as I’m concerned,” the bald man in the Celtics jacket said. “Still a free country, isn’t it?”

  “Tonight?” Clay said. “Too free.”

  The bald man thought it over and then laughed, a humorless double ha-ha. “The fuck happened? Any-a youse know?”

  Alice said, “It was the cell phones. They made people crazy.”

  The bald man picked up the keg. He handled it easily, tipping it so the leak stopped. “Fucking things,” he said. “Never cared to own one. Rollover minutes. The fuck’re those?”

  Clay didn’t know. Tom might’ve—he’d owned a cell phone, so it seemed possible—but Tom said nothing. Probably didn’t want to get into a long discussion with the bald man, and probably a good
idea. Clay thought the bald man had some of the characteristics of an unexploded grenade.

  “City burning?” the bald man asked. “Is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Clay said. “I don’t think the Celtics will be playing at the Fleet this year.”

  “They ain’t shit, anyway,” the man said. “Doc Rivers couldn’t coach a PAL team.” He stood watching them, the keg on his shoulder, blood running down the side of his face. Yet now he seemed peaceable enough, almost serene. “Go on,” he said. “But I wouldn’t stay this close to the city for long. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better. There’s gonna be a lot more fires, for one thing. You think everybody who hightailed it north remembered to turn off the gas stove? I fuckin doubt it.”

  The three of them started walking, then Alice stopped. She pointed to the keg. “Was that yours?”

  The bald man looked at her reasonably. “Ain’t no was at times like this, sweetie pie. Ain’t no was left. There’s just now and maybe-tomorrow. It’s mine now, and if there’s any left it’ll be mine maybe-tomorrow. Go on now. The fuck out.”

  “Seeya,” Clay said, and raised one hand.

  “Wouldn’t want to be ya,” the bald man replied, unsmiling, but he raised his own hand in return. They had passed the stop sign and were crossing to the far side of what Clay assumed was Salem Street when the bald man called after them again: “Hey, handsome!”

  Both Clay and Tom turned to look, then glanced at each other, amused. The bald guy with the keg was now only a dark shape on the rising ramp; he could have been a caveman carrying a club.

  “Where are the loonies now?” the bald guy asked. “You’re not gonna tell me they’re all dead, are ya? Cause I don’t fuckin believe it.”

  “That’s a very good question,” Clay said.

  “You’re fuckin-A right it is. Watch out for the little sweetie pie there.” And without waiting for them to reply, the man who’d won the battle of the beer keg turned and merged with the shadows.

  6

  “This is it,” Tom said no more than ten minutes later, and the moon emerged from the wrack of cloud and smoke that had obscured it for the last hour or so as if the little man with the spectacles and the mustache had just given the Celestial Lighting Director a cue. Its rays—silver now instead of that awful infected orange—illuminated a house that was either dark blue, green, or perhaps even gray; without the streetlights to help, it was hard to tell for sure. What Clay could tell for sure was that the house was trim and handsome, although maybe not as big as your eye first insisted. The moonlight aided in that deception, but it was mostly caused by the way the steps rose from Tom McCourt’s well-kept lawn to the only pillared porch on the street. There was a fieldstone chimney on the left. From above the porch, a dormer looked down on the street.

  “Oh, Tom, it’s beautiful!” Alice said in a too-rapturous voice. To Clay she sounded exhausted and bordering on hysteria. He himself didn’t think it beautiful, but it certainly looked like the home of a man who owned a cell phone and all the other twenty-first-century bells and whistles. So did the rest of the houses on this part of Salem Street, and Clay doubted if many of the residents had had Tom’s fantastic good luck. He looked around nervously. All the houses were dark—the power was out now—and they might have been deserted, except he seemed to feel eyes, surveying them.

  The eyes of crazies? Phone-crazies? He thought of Power Suit Woman and Pixie Light; of the lunatic in the gray pants and the shredded tie; the man in the business suit who had bitten the ear right off the side of the dog’s head. He thought of the naked man jabbing the car aerials back and forth as he ran. No, surveying was not in the phone-crazies’ repertoire. They just came at you. But if there were normal people holed up in these houses—some of them, anyway—where were the phone-crazies?

  Clay didn’t know.

  “I don’t know if I’d exactly call it beautiful,” Tom said, “but it’s still standing, and that’s good enough for me. I’d pretty well made up my mind that we’d get here and find nothing but a smoking hole in the ground.” He reached in his pocket and brought out a slim ring of keys. “Come on in. Be it ever so humble, and all that.”

  They started up the walk and had gone no more than half a dozen steps when Alice cried, “Wait!”

  Clay wheeled around, feeling both alarm and exhaustion. He thought he was beginning to understand combat fatigue a little. Even his adrenaline felt tired. But no one was there—no phone-crazies, no bald man with blood flowing down the side of his face from a shredded ear, not even a little old lady with the talkin apocalypse blues. Just Alice, down on one knee at the place where Tom’s walk left the sidewalk.

  “What is it, honey?” Tom asked.

  She stood up, and Clay saw she was holding a very small sneaker. “It’s a Baby Nike,” she said. “Do you—”

  Tom shook his head. “I live alone. Except for Rafe, that is. He thinks he’s the king, but he’s only the cat.”

  “Then who left it?” She looked from Tom to Clay with wondering, tired eyes.

  Clay shook his head. “No telling, Alice. Might as well toss it.”

  But Clay knew she would not; it was déjà vu at its disorienting worst. She still held it in her hand, curled against her waist, as she went to stand behind Tom, who was on the steps, picking slowly through his keys in the scant light.

  Now we hear the cat, Clay thought. Rafe. And sure enough, there was the cat that had been Tom McCourt’s salvation, waowing a greeting from inside.

  7

  Tom bent down and Rafe or Rafer—both short for Rafael—leaped into his arms, purring loudly and stretching his head up to sniff Tom’s carefully trimmed mustache.

  “Yeah, missed you, too,” Tom said. “All is forgiven, believe me.” He carried Rafer across the enclosed porch, stroking the top of his head. Alice followed. Clay came last, closing the door and turning the knob on the lock before catching up to the others.

  “Follow along down to the kitchen,” Tom said when they were in the house proper. There was a pleasant smell of furniture polish and, Clay thought, leather, a smell he associated with men living calm lives that did not necessarily include women. “Second door on the right. Stay close. The hallway’s wide, and there’s nothing on the floor, but there are tables on both sides and it’s as black as your hat. As I think you can see.”

  “So to speak,” Clay said.

  “Ha-ha.”

  “Have you got flashlights?” Clay asked.

  “Flashlights and a Coleman lantern that should be even better, but let’s get in the kitchen first.”

  They followed him down the hallway, Alice walking between the two men. Clay could hear her breathing rapidly, trying not to let the unfamiliar surroundings freak her out, but of course it was hard. Hell, it was hard for him. Disorienting. It would have been better if there had been even a little light, but—

  His knee bumped one of the tables Tom had mentioned, and something that sounded all too ready to break rattled like teeth. Clay steeled himself for the smash, and for Alice’s scream. That she would scream was almost a given. Then whatever it was, a vase or some knickknack, decided to live a little longer and settled back into place. Still, it seemed like a very long walk before Tom said, “Here, okay? Hard right.”

  The kitchen was nearly as black as the hall, and Clay had just a moment to think of all the things he was missing and Tom must be missing more: a digital readout on the microwave oven, the hum of the fridge, maybe light from a neighboring house coming in through the window over the kitchen sink and making highlights on the faucet.

  “Here’s the table,” Tom said. “Alice, I’m going to take your hand. Here’s a chair, okay? I’m sorry if I sound like we’re playing blindman’s bluff.”

  “It’s all r—,” she began, then gave a little scream that made Clay jump. His hand was on the haft of his knife (now he thought of it as his) before he even realized he’d reached for it.

  “What?” Tom asked sharply. “What?”


  “Nothing,” she said. “Just… nothing. The cat. His tail… on my leg.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. Stupid,” she added with self-contempt that made Clay wince in the dark.

  “No,” he said. “Let up on yourself, Alice. It’s been a tough day at the office.”

  “Tough day at the office!” Alice repeated, and laughed in a way Clay didn’t care for. It reminded him of her voice when she’d called Tom’s house beautiful. He thought, That’s going to get away from her, and then what do I do? In the movies the hysterical girl gets a slap across the chops and it always brings her around, but in the movies you can see where she is.

  He didn’t have to slap her, shake her, or hold her, which was what he probably would have tried first. She heard what was in her own voice, maybe, got hold of it, and bulldogged it down: first to a choked gargle, then to a gasp, then to quiet.

  “Sit,” Tom said. “You have to be tired. You too, Clay. I’ll get us some light.”

  Clay felt for a chair and sat down to a table he could hardly see, although his eyes had to be fully adjusted to the dark by now. There was a whisper of something against his pants leg, there and gone. A low miaow. Rafe.

  “Hey, guess what?” he said to the dim shape of the girl as Tom’s footsteps receded. “Ole Rafer just put a jump in me, too.” Although he hadn’t, not really.

  “We have to forgive him,” she said. “Without that cat, Tom would be just as crazy as the rest of them. And that would be a shame.”

  “It would.”

  “I’m so scared,” she said. “Do you think it will get better tomorrow, in the daylight? The being scared part?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You must be worried sick about your wife and little boy.”