Cell: A Novel (25 page)

“I was worried for nothing, wasn’t I?” Alice said. “Sometimes I’m a putz. That’s what my father says.”

“No,” the Head told her. “All the putzes had cell phones, dear. That’s why they’re out there and you’re in here, with us.”

Tom said: “I wonder if Rafe’s still making out okay.”

“I wonder if Johnny is,” Clay said. “Johnny and Sharon.”

23

At ten o’clock on that windy autumn night, under a moon now entering its last quarter, Clay and Tom stood in the band alcove at the home end of the Tonney soccer field. Directly in front of them was a waist-high concrete barrier that had been heavily padded on the playing-field side. On their side were a few rusting music stands and a drift of litter that was ankle-deep; the wind blew the torn bags and scraps of paper in here, and here they came to rest. Behind and above them, back at the turnstiles, Alice and Jordan flanked the Head, a tall figure propped on a slender rod of cane. Debby Boone’s voice rolled across the field in amplified waves of comic majesty. Ordinarily she would be followed by Lee Ann Womack singing “I Hope You Dance,” then back to Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers, but perhaps not tonight.

The wind was freshening. It brought them the smell of rotting bodies from the marsh behind the indoor-track building and the aroma of dirt and sweat from the living ones packed together on the field beyond the band alcove.
If you can call that living,
Clay thought, and flashed himself a small and bitter inside smile. Rationalization was a great human sport, maybe
the
great human sport, but he would not fool himself tonight: of course they called it living. Whatever they were or whatever they were becoming, they called it living just as he did.

“What are you waiting for?” Tom murmured.

“Nothing,” Clay murmured back. “Just… nothing.”

From the holster Alice had found in the Nickerson basement, Clay drew Beth Nickerson’s old-fashioned Colt .45 revolver, now once more fully loaded. Alice had offered him the automatic rifle—which so far they had not even test-fired—and he had refused, saying that if the pistol didn’t do the job, probably nothing would.

“I don’t know why the auto wouldn’t be better, if it squirts thirty or forty bullets a second,” she said. “You could turn those trucks into cheese-graters.”

He had agreed that this might be so, but reminded Alice that their object tonight was not destruction per se but ignition. Then he’d explained the highly illegal nature of the ammunition Arnie Nickerson had obtained for his wife’s .45 fraggers. What had once been called dumdum bullets.

“Okay, but if it doesn’t work, you can still try Sir Speedy,” she’d said. “Unless the guys out there just, you know…” She wouldn’t actually use the word
attack,
but had made a little walking motion with the fingers of the hand not holding the sneaker. “In that case, beat feet.”

The wind tore a tattered strip of Homecoming Weekend bunting free of the Scoreboard and sent it dancing above the packed sleepers. Around the field, seeming to float in the dark, were the red eyes of the boomboxes, all but one playing without benefit of CDs. The bunting struck the bumper of one of the propane trucks, flapped there several seconds, then slipped free and flew off into the night. The trucks were parked side by side in the middle of the field, rising from the mass of packed forms like weird metal mesas. The phone-crazies slept beneath them and so closely around them that some were crammed up against the wheels. Clay thought again of passenger pigeons, and the way nineteenth-century hunters had brained them on the ground with clubs. The whole species had been wiped out by the beginning of the twentieth… but of course they’d only been birds, with little bird-brains, incapable of rebooting.

“Clay?” Tom asked, low. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

“No,” Clay said. Now that he was face-to-face with it, there were too many unanswered questions. What they would do if it went wrong was only one of them. What they would do if it went right was another. Because passenger pigeons were incapable of revenge. Those things out there, on the other hand—

“But I’m going to.”

“Then do it,” Tom said. “Because, all else aside, ‘You Light Up My Life’ blows dead rats in hell.”

Clay raised the .45 and held his right wrist firmly with his left hand. He centered the gunsight on the tank of the truck on the left. He would fire twice into that one, then twice into the other one. That would leave one more bullet for each, if necessary. If that didn’t work, he could try the automatic weapon Alice had taken to calling Sir Speedy.

“Duck if it goes up,” he told Tom.

“Don’t worry,” Tom said. His face was drawn into a grimace, anticipating the report of the gun and whatever might follow.

Debby Boone was building to a big finish. It suddenly seemed very important to Clay that he beat her.
If you miss at this range, you’re a monkey,
he thought, and pulled the trigger.

There was no chance for a second shot and no need of one. A bright red flower bloomed in the center of the tank, and by its light he saw a deep dent in the previously smooth metal surface. Hell appeared to be inside, and growing. Then the flower was a river, red turning orange-white.

“Down!”
he shouted, and pushed Tom’s shoulder. He fell on top of the smaller man just as the night became desert noon. There was a huge, whooshing roar followed by a guttering
BANG
that Clay felt in every bone of his body. Shrapnel shot overhead. He thought Tom screamed but he wasn’t sure, because there was another of those whooshing roars and suddenly the air was growing hot, hot, hot.

He seized Tom partly by the scruff of the neck and partly by the collar of his shirt and began to drag him backward up the concrete ramp leading to the turnstiles, his eyes slitted almost completely shut against the enormous glare flowing from the center of the soccer field. Something enormous landed in the auxiliary stands to his right. He thought maybe an engine block. He was pretty sure the shattered bits and twists of metal under his feet had once been Gaiten Academy music stands.

Tom was screaming and his glasses were askew, but he was on his feet and he looked intact. The two of them ran up the ramp like escapees from Gomorrah. Clay could see their shadows, long and spider-thin in front of them, and realized objects were falling all around them: arms, legs, a piece of bumper, a woman’s head with the hair blazing. From behind them came a second tremendous
BANG
—or maybe it was a third—and this time
he
was the one who screamed. His feet tangled and he went sprawling. The whole world was rapidly building heat and the most incredible light: he felt as if he were standing on God’s personal soundstage.

We didn’t know what we were doing,
he thought, looking at a wad of gum, a tromped Junior Mints box, a blue Pepsi Cola cap.
We didn’t have a clue and we’re going to pay with our fucking lives.

“Get up!” That was Tom, and he thought Tom was screaming, but his voice seemed to be coming from a mile away. He felt Tom’s delicate, long-fingered hands yanking at his arm. Then Alice was there, too. Alice was yanking on his other arm, and she was
glaring
in the light. He could see the sneaker dancing and bobbing from its string on her wrist. She was spattered with blood, bits of cloth, and gobbets of smoking flesh.

Clay scrambled up, then went back to one knee, and Alice hauled him up again by main force. From behind them, propane roared like a dragon. And here came Jordan, with the Head tottering along right behind him, his face rosy and every wrinkle running with sweat.

“No, Jordan, no, just get him out of the way!” Tom yelled, and Jordan pulled the Head aside for them, gripping the old man grimly around the waist when he tottered. A burning torso with a ring in its navel landed at Alice’s feet and she booted it off the ramp.
Five years of soccer,
Clay remembered her saying. A blazing piece of shirt landed on the back of her head and Clay swept it aside before it could set her hair on fire.

At the top of the ramp, a blazing truck tire with half a sheared-off axle still attached leaned against the last row of reserved seats. If it had landed blocking their way, they might have cooked—the Head almost certainly would have. As it was, they were able to slide past, holding their breath against billows of oily smoke. A moment later they were lurching through the turnstile, Jordan on one side of the Head and Clay on the other, the two of them almost carrying the old man along. Clay had his ear boxed twice by the Head’s flailing cane, but thirty seconds after passing the tire they were standing beneath Tonney Arch, looking back at the huge column of fire rising above the bleachers and center press box with identical expressions of stupefied disbelief.

A blazing rag of Homecoming bunting floated down to the pavement next to the main ticket booth, trailing a few sparks before coming to rest.

“Did you know that would happen?” Tom asked. His face was white around the eyes, red across the forehead and cheeks. Half his mustache appeared to have been singed off. Clay could hear his voice, but it sounded distant. Everything did. It was as if his ears had been packed with cotton balls, or the shooter’s plugs Beth Nickerson’s husband Arnie had no doubt made her wear when he took her to their favorite target-range. Where they’d probably shot with their cell phones clipped to one hip and their pagers to the other.

“Did you know?”
Tom attempted to shake him, got nothing but a piece of his shirt, and tore it all the way down the front.

“Fuck no, are you insane?” Clay’s voice was beyond hoarse, beyond parched; it sounded
baked.
“You think I would have stood there with a pistol if I’d known? If it hadn’t been for that concrete barrier, we would have been cut in two. Or vaporized.”

Incredibly, Tom began to grin. “I tore your shirt, Batman.”

Clay felt like knocking his head off. Also like hugging and kissing him just because he was still alive.

“I want to go back to the Lodge,” Jordan said. The fear in his voice was unmistakable.

“By all means let us remove to a safe distance,” the Head agreed. He was trembling badly, his eyes fixed on the inferno rising above the Arch and the bleachers. “Thank God the wind’s blowing toward Academy Slope.”

“Can you walk, sir?” Tom asked.

“Thank you, yes. If Jordan will assist me, I’m sure I can walk as far as the Lodge.”

“We got them,” Alice said. She was wiping splatters of gore almost absently from her face, leaving smears of blood. Her eyes were like nothing Clay had ever seen except in a few photographs and some inspired comic art from the 1950s and ‘60s. He remembered going to a comics convention once, only a kid himself then, and listening to Wallace Wood talk about trying to draw something he called Panic Eye. Now Clay was seeing it in the face of a fifteen-year-old suburban schoolgirl.

“Alice, come on,” he said. “We have to go back to the Lodge and get our shit together. We have to get out of here.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he had to say them again and hear if they had the ring of truth. The second time they sounded more than true; they sounded scared.

She might not have heard. She looked exultant. Stuffed with triumph. Sick with it, like a kid who has eaten too much Halloween candy on the way home. The pupils of her eyes were full of fire. “Nothing could live through that.”

Tom gripped Clay’s arm. It hurt the way a sunburn hurt. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I think we made a mistake,” Clay said.

“Is it like in the gas station?” Tom asked him. Behind his crooked spectacles, his eyes were sharp. “When the man and woman were fighting over the damn Tw—”

“No, I just think we made a mistake,” Clay said. Actually, it was stronger than that. He
knew
they had made a mistake. “Come on. We have to go tonight.”

“If you say so, okay,” Tom said. “Come on, Alice.”

She went with them a little way down the path toward the Lodge, where they had left a pair of gas lanterns burning in the big bay window, then turned back for another look. The press box was on fire now, and the bleachers. The stars over the soccer field were gone; even the moon was nothing but a ghost dancing a wild jig in the heat-haze above that fierce gas-jet. “They’re
dead,
they’re
gone, they’re crispy,”
she said. “Burn, baby, b—”

That was when the cry rose, only now it wasn’t coming from Glen’s Falls or Littleton ten miles away. It was coming from right behind them. Nor was there anything spectral or wraithlike about it. It was a cry of agony, the scream of something—a single entity, and
aware,
Clay was certain of it—that had awakened from deep sleep to find it was burning alive.

Alice shrieked and covered her ears, her eyes bulging in the firelight.

“Take it back!” Jordan said, grasping the Head’s wrist. “Sir, we have to take it back!”

“Too late, Jordan,” Ardai said.

24

Their knapsacks were a little plumper as they leaned against the front door of Cheatham Lodge an hour later. There were a couple of shirts in each one, plus bags of trail-mix, juice-boxes, and packets of Slim Jims as well as batteries and spare flashlights. Clay had harried Tom and Alice into sweeping their possessions together as quickly as possible, and now he was the one who kept darting into the living room to steal looks out the big window.

The gas-jet over there was finally starting to burn low, but the bleachers were still blazing and so was the press box. Tonney Arch itself had caught and glared in the night like a horseshoe in a smithy. Nothing that had been on that field could still be alive—Alice had been right about that much, surely—but twice on their return to the Lodge (the Head shambling like an old drunk in spite of their best efforts to support him), they had heard those ghostly cries coming down the wind from other flocks. Clay told himself he didn’t hear anger in those cries, it was just his imagination—his guilty imagination, his murderer’s imagination, his
mass
murderer’s imagination—but he didn’t completely believe it.