Cell: A Novel (30 page)

Broad scholar’s forehead, marred with a slash.

Filthy, shapeless jeans, torn at the pockets and worn more than a week now.

HARVARD across the narrow chest.

Beth Nickerson’s .45 was in the side-holster on his belt. Clay didn’t even touch it. The Raggedy Man stopped about ten feet from him. He—it—was standing on the Head’s grave, and Clay believed that was no accident. “What do you want?” he asked the Raggedy Man, and immediately answered himself: “To. Tell you.”

He sat staring at the Raggedy Man, mute with surprise. He had expected telepathy or nothing. The Raggedy Man grinned—insofar as he could grin, with that badly split lower lip—and spread his hands as if to say
Shucks, ‘t’warn’t nuthin.

“Say what you have to say, then,” Clay told him, and tried to prepare for having his voice hijacked a second time. He discovered it was a thing you couldn’t prepare for. It was like being turned into a grinning piece of wood sitting on a ventriloquist’s knee.

“Go. Tonight.” Clay concentrated and said, “Shut up, stop it!”

The Raggedy Man waited, the picture of patience.

“I think I can keep you out if I try hard,” Clay said. “I’m not sure, but I think I can.”

The Raggedy Man waited, his face saying
Are you done yet?

“Go ahead,” Clay said, and then said, “I could bring. More. I came. Alone.”

Clay considered the idea of the Raggedy Man’s will joined to that of an entire flock and conceded the point.

“Go. Tonight. North.” Clay waited, and when he was sure the Raggedy Man was done with his voice for the time being, he said, “Where? Why?”

There were no words this time, but an image suddenly rose before him. It was so clear that he didn’t know if it was in his mind or if the Raggedy Man had somehow conjured it on the brilliant screen of the mist. It was what they had seen scrawled in the middle of Academy Avenue in pink chalk:

KASHWAK=NO-FO

“I don’t get it,” he said.

But the Raggedy Man was walking away. Clay saw his red hoodie for a moment, once again seeming to float unoccupied against the brilliant mist; then that was gone, too. Clay was left with only the thin consolation of knowing that they had been going north anyway, and that they had been given another day’s grace. Which meant there was no need to stand a watch. He decided to go to bed and let the others sleep through, as well.

4

Jordan awoke in his right mind, but his nervy brilliance had departed. He nibbled at half a rock-hard bagel and listened dully as Clay recounted his meeting with the Raggedy Man that morning. When Clay finished, Jordan got their road atlas, consulted the index at the back, and then opened it to the western Maine page. “There,” he said, pointing to a town above Fryeburg. “This is Kashwak here, to the east, and Little Kashwak to the west, almost on the Maine-New Hampshire state line. I knew I recognized the name. Because of the lake.” He tapped it. “Almost as big as Sebago.”

Alice leaned closer to read the name on the lake. “Kash… Kashwaka-mak, I guess it is.”

“It’s in an unincorporated area called TR-90,” Jordan said. He tapped this on the map, also. “Once you know that, Kashwak Equals No-Fo is sort of a no-brainer, wouldn’t you say?”

“It’s a dead zone, right?” Tom said. “No cell phone towers, no microwave towers.”

Jordan gave him a wan smile. “Well, I imagine there are plenty of people with satellite dishes, but otherwise… bingo.”

“I don’t get it,” Alice said. “Why would they want to send us to a no-cell zone where everyone should be more or less all right?”

“Might as well ask why they let us live in the first place,” Tom said.

“Maybe they want to turn us into living guided missiles and use us to bomb the joint,” Jordan said. “Get rid of us
and
them. Two birds with one stone.”

They considered this in silence for a moment.

“Let’s go and find out,” Alice said, “but I’m not bombing
anybody.”

Jordan eyed her bleakly. “You saw what they did to the Head. If it comes right down to it, do you think you’ll have any choice?”

5

There were still shoes on most of the stoops across from the fieldstone pillars marking the entrance to Gaiten Academy, but the doors of the nice-looking homes either stood open or had been torn off their hinges. A few of the dead they saw littered on those lawns as they once more began their trek north were phone-crazies, but most had been innocent pilgrims who had happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were the ones with no shoes on their feet, but there was really no need to look as far as their feet; many of the reprisal victims had literally been torn limb from limb.

Beyond the school, where Academy Avenue once more became Route 102, there was carnage on both sides for half a mile. Alice walked with her eyes resolutely closed, allowing Tom to lead her as if she were blind. Clay offered to do the same for Jordan, but he only shook his head and walked stolidly up the centerline, a skinny kid with a pack on his back and too much hair on his head. After a few cursory glances at the kill-off, he looked down at his sneakers.

“There are hundreds,” Tom said once. It was eight o’clock and full dark, but they could still see far more than they wanted to. Lying curled around a stop-sign at the corner of Academy and Spofford was a girl in red pants and a white sailor blouse. She looked no more than nine, and she was shoeless. Twenty yards away stood the open door of the house from which she had probably been dragged, screaming for mercy.
“Hundreds.”

“Maybe not that many,” Clay said. “Some of our kind were armed. They shot quite a few of the bastards. Knifed a few more. I even saw one with an arrow sticking out of his—”

“We
caused
this,” Tom said. “Do you think we
have
a kind anymore?”

This question was answered while they were eating their cold lunch at a roadside picnic spot four hours later. By then they were on Route 156, and according to the sign, this was a Scenic Turnout, offering a view of Historic Flint Hill to the west. Clay imagined the view was good, if you were eating lunch here at noon rather than midnight, with gas lanterns at either end of your picnic table to see by.

They had reached the dessert course—stale Oreos—when a party of half a dozen came toiling along, all of them older folks. Three were pushing shopping carts full of supplies and all were armed. These were the first other travelers they had seen since setting out again.

“Hey!” Tom called, giving them a wave. “Got another picnic table over here, if you want to sit a spell!”

They looked over. The older of the two women in the party, a grandmotherly type with lots of white, fluffy hair that shone in the starlight, started to wave. Then she stopped.

“That’s them,” one of the men said, and Clay did not mistake either the loathing or the fear in the man’s voice. “That’s the Gaiten bunch.”

One of the other men said, “Go to hell, buddy.” They kept on walking, even moving a little faster, although the grandmotherly type was limping, and the man beside her had to help her past a Subaru that had locked bumpers with somebody’s abandoned Saturn.

Alice jumped up, almost knocking over one of the lanterns. Clay grabbed her arm. “Don’t bother, kiddo.”

She ignored him. “At least we did
something?” s
he shouted after them. “What
did you
do? Just what the fuck did
you
do?”

“Tell you what we didn’t do,” one of the men said. The little group was past the scenic turnout now, and he had to look back over his shoulder to talk to her. He could do this because the road was free of abandoned vehicles for a couple of hundred yards here. “We didn’t get a bunch of normies killed. There are more of them than us, in case you didn’t notice—”

“Oh bullshit, you don’t know if that’s true!” Jordan shouted. Clay realized it was the first time the kid had spoken since they’d passed the Gaiten town limits.

“Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t,” the man said, “but they can do some very weird and powerful shit. You gotta buy
that
for a dollar. They say they’ll leave us alone if we leave them alone… and
you
alone. We say fine.”

“If you believe anything they say—or think at you—then you’re an
idiot,”
Alice said.

The man faced forward, raised his hand in the air, shook it in a combined fuck-off/bye-bye gesture, and said no more.

The four of them watched the shopping-cart people out of sight, then gazed at each other across the picnic table with its intaglios of old initials.

“So now we know,” Tom said. “We’re outcasts.”

“Maybe not if the phone people want us to go where the rest of the—what did he call them?—the rest of the normies are going,” Clay said. “Maybe we’re something else.”

“What?” Alice asked.

Clay had an idea, but he didn’t like to put it into words. Not at midnight. “Right now I’m more interested in Kent Pond,” he said. “I want—I
need
to see if I can find my wife and son.”

“It’s not very likely that they’re still there, is it?” Tom asked in his low, kind voice. “I mean, no matter which way things went for them, normal or phoner, they’ve probably moved on.”

“If they’re all right, they will have left word,” Clay said. “In any case, it’s a place to go.”

And until they got there and that part of it was done, he wouldn’t have to consider why the Raggedy Man would send them to a place of safety if the people there hated and feared them.

Or how, if the phone people knew about it, Kashwak No-Fo could be safe at all.

6

They were edging slowly east toward Route 19, a highway that would take them across the state line and into Maine, but they didn’t make it that night. All the roads in this part of New Hampshire seemed to pass through the small city of Rochester, and Rochester had burned to the ground. The fire’s core was still alive, putting out an almost radioactive glow. Alice took over, leading them around the worst of the fiery ruins in a half-circle to the west. Several times they saw
KASHWAK=NO-FO
scrawled on the sidewalks; once spray-painted on the side of a U.S. mailbox.

“That’s a bazillion-dollar fine and life in prison at Guantanamo Bay,” Tom said with a wan smile.

Their course eventually took them through the vast parking lot of the Rochester Mall. Long before they reached it, they could hear the over-amplified sound of an uninspired New Age jazz trio playing the sort of stuff Clay thought of as music to shop by. The parking lot was buried in drifts of moldering trash; the remaining cars stood up to their hubcaps in litter. They could smell the blown and fleshy reek of dead bodies on the breeze.

“Flock here somewhere,” Tom commented.

It was in the cemetery next to the mall. Their course was going to take them south and west of it, but when they left the mall parking lot, they were close enough to see the red eyes of the boomboxes through the trees.

“Maybe we ought to do em up,” Alice proposed suddenly as they stepped back onto North Main Street. “There must be a propane truck that isn’t working around here somewhere.”

“Yeah, baby!” Jordan said. He raised his fists to the sides of his head and shook them, looking really alive for the first time since leaving Cheatham Lodge. “For the Head!”

“I think not,” Tom said.

“Afraid of trying their patience?” Clay asked. He was surprised to find himself actually sort of in favor of Alice’s crazy idea. That torching another flock
was
a crazy idea he had no doubt, but…

He thought,
I might do it just became that’s the absolute worst version of “Misty” I’ve ever heard in my life. Twist my fuckin arm.

“Not that,” Tom said. He seemed to be thinking. “Do you see that street there?” He was pointing to an avenue that ran between the mall and the cemetery. It was choked with stalled cars. Almost all of them were pointed away from the mall. Clay found it all too easy to imagine those cars full of people trying to
get
home after the Pulse. People who would want to know what was happening, and if their families were all right. They would have reached for their car phones, their cell phones, without a second thought.

“What about it?” he asked.

“Let us stroll down there a little way,” Tom said. “Very carefully.”

“What did you see, Tom?”

“I’d rather not say. Maybe nothing. Keep off the sidewalk, stay under the trees. And that was one hell of a traffic jam. There’ll be bodies.”

There were dozens rotting their way back into the great scheme of things between Twombley Street and the West Side Cemetery. “Misty” had given way to a cough-syrup rendition of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” by the time they reached the edge of the trees, and they could again see the red eyes of the boombox power lamps. Then Clay saw something else and stopped. “Jesus,” he whispered. Tom nodded.

“What?” Jordan whispered.
“What?”

Alice said nothing, but Clay could tell by the direction she was looking and the defeated slump of her shoulders that she’d seen what he had. There were men with rifles standing a perimeter guard around the cemetery. Clay took Jordan’s head, turned it, and saw the boy’s shoulders also slump.

“Let’s go,” the kid whispered. “The smell’s making me sick.”

7

In Melrose Corner, about four miles north of Rochester (they could still see its red glow waxing and waning on the southern horizon), they came to another picnic area, this one with a little stone firepit as well as picnic tables. Clay, Tom, and Jordan picked up dry wood. Alice, who claimed to have been a Girl Scout, proved her skills by making a neat little fire and then heating three cans of what she called “hobo beans.” As they ate, two little parties of pilgrims passed them by. Both looked; no one in either group waved or spoke.

When the wolf in his belly had quieted a little, Clay said, “You saw those guys, Tom? All the way from the mall parking lot? I’m thinking of changing your name to Hawkeye.”