Cell: A Novel (35 page)

“After that,” Dan Hartwick said, “we began to see those Kashwak No-Fo signs. Sounded good to us, didn’t it, Denni?”

“Yep,” Denise said. “Olly-olly-in-for-free. We were headed north, same as you, and when we started seeing those signs, we headed north faster. I was the only one who didn’t absolutely love the idea, because I lost my husband during the Pulse. Those fucks are the reason my kid’s going to grow up not knowing his daddy.” She saw Clay wince and said, “Sorry. We know your boy’s gone to Kashwak.”

Clay gaped.

“Oh yes,” Dan said, taking a plate as Ray began passing them around. “The President of Harvard knows all, sees all, has dossiers on all… or so he’d like us to believe.” He gave Jordan a wink, and Jordan actually grinned.

“Dan talked me around,” Denise said. “Some terrorist group—or maybe just a couple of inspired nutcases working in a garage—set this thing off, but no one had any idea it would lead to this. The phoners are just playing out their part in it. They weren’t responsible when they were insane, and they aren’t really responsible now, because—”

“Because they’re in the grip of some group imperative,” Tom said. “Like migration.”

“It’s a group imperative, but it ain’t migration,” Ray said, sitting down with his own plate. “Dan says it’s pure survival. I think he’s right. Whatever it is, we gotta find a place to get in out of the rain. You know?”

“The dreams started coming after we burned the first flock,” Dan said. “Powerful dreams.
Ecce homo, insanus
—very Harvard. Then, after we bombed the Nashua flock, the President of Harvard showed up in person with about five hundred of his closest friends.” He ate in quick, neat bites.

“And left a lot of melted boomboxes on your doorstep,” Clay said.

“Some were melted,” Denise said. “Mostly what we got were bits and pieces.” She smiled. It was a thin smile. “That was okay. Their taste in music sucks.”

“You call him the President of Harvard, we call him the Raggedy Man,” Tom said. He had set his plate aside and opened his pack. He rummaged and brought out the drawing Clay had made on the day the Head had been forced to kill himself. Denise’s eyes got round. She passed the drawing to Ray Huizenga, who whistled.

Dan took it last and looked up at Tom with new respect. “You drew this?”

Tom pointed to Clay.

“You’re very talented,” Dan said.

“I took a course once,” Clay said. “Draw Fluffy.” He turned to Tom, who also kept their maps in his pack. “How far is it between Gaiten and Nashua?”

“Thirty miles, tops.”

Clay nodded and turned back to Dan Hartwick. “And did he speak to you? The guy in the red hoodie?”

Dan looked at Denise and she looked away. Ray turned back to his little cooker—presumably to shut it down and pack it up—and Clay understood. “Which one of you did he speak
through?”

“Me,” Dan said. “It was horrible. Have you experienced it?”

“Yeah. You can stop it from happening, but not if you want to know what’s on his mind. Does he do it to show how strong he is, do you think?”

“Probably,” Dan said, “but I don’t think that’s all. I don’t think they can talk. They can
vocalize,
and I’m sure they think—although not as they did, it would be a terrible mistake to think of them as having human thoughts—but I don’t think they can actually speak words.”

“Yet,” Jordan said.

“Yet,” Dan agreed. He glanced at his watch, and that prompted Clay to look at his own. It was already quarter to three.

“He told us to go north,” Ray said. “He told us Kashwak No-Fo. He said our flock-burnin days were over because they were settin up guards—”

“Yes, we saw some in Rochester,” Tom said.

“And you’ve seen plenty of Kashwak No-Fo signs.”

They nodded.

“Purely as a sociologist, I began to question those signs,” Dan said. “Not how they began—I’m sure the first No-Fo signs were posted soon after the Pulse, by survivors who’d decided a place like that, where there was no cell phone coverage, would be the best place on earth to go. What I questioned was how the idea—and the graffiti—could spread so quickly in a cata-strophically fragmented society where all normal forms of communication—other than my mouth to your ear, of course—had broken down. The answer seemed clear, once one admitted that a
new
form of communication, available to only one group, had entered the picture.”

“Telepathy.” Jordan almost whispered the word.
“Them.
The phoners. They
want
us to go north to Kashwak.” He turned his frightened eyes to Clay. “It really
is
a frigging slaughterhouse chute. Clay, you
can’t
go up there! This is all the Raggedy Man’s idea!”

Before Clay could respond, Dan Hartwick was speaking again. He did it with a teacher’s natural assumptions: lecturing was his responsibility, interruption his privilege.

“I’m afraid I really must hurry this along, sorry. We have something to show you—something the President of Harvard has
demanded
we show you, actually—”

“In your dreams, or in person?” Tom asked.

“Our dreams,” Denise said quietly. “We’ve only seen him once in person since we burned the flock in Nashua, and that was at a distance.”

“Checkin up on us,” Ray said. “That’s what I think.”

Dan waited with a look of exasperated patience for this exchange to conclude. When it had, he resumed. “We were willing to comply, since this was on our way—”

“You’re going north, then?” Clay was the one to interrupt this time.

Dan, looking more exasperated now, flicked another quick glance at his watch. “If you look at that route-sign closely, you’ll see that it offers a choice. We intend to go west, not north.”

“Fuckin right,” Ray muttered. “I may be stupid, but I’m not crazy.”

“What I show you will be for our purposes rather than theirs,” Dan said. “And by the way, talking about the President of Harvard—or the Raggedy Man, if you prefer—showing up in person is probably a mistake. Maybe a bad one. He’s really no more than a pseudopod that the group mind, the overflock, puts out front to do business with ordinary normies and special insane normies like us. I theorize that there are overflocks all over the world now, and each may have put forward such a pseudopod. Maybe even more than one. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that when you’re talking to your Raggedy Man you’re talking to an
actual
man. You’re talking to the flock.”

“Why don’t you show us what he wants us to see?” Clay asked. He had to work to sound calm. His mind was roaring. The one clear thought in it was that if he could get to his son before Johnny got to Kashwak—and whatever was going on there—he might still have a chance to save him. Rationality told him that Johnny must be in Kashwak already, but another voice (and it wasn’t entirely irrational) said something might have held up Johnny and whatever group he was traveling with. Or they might have gotten cold feet. It was possible. It was even possible that nothing more sinister than segregation was going on up there in TR-90, that the phone-people were just creating a rez for normies. In the end, he supposed it went back to what Jordan had said, quoting Headmaster Ardai: the mind could calculate, but the spirit yearned.

“Come this way,” Dan said. “It’s not far.” He produced a flashlight and began walking up the shoulder of Route 11—North with the beam aimed at his feet.

“Pardon me if I don’t go,” Denise said. “I’ve seen. Once was enough.”

“I think this was supposed to please you, in a way,” Dan said. “Of course it was also supposed to underline the point—to my little group as well as yours—that the phoners are now the ones with the power, and they are to be obeyed.” He stopped. “Here we are; in this particular sleep-o-gram, the President of Harvard made very sure we all saw the dog, so we couldn’t get the wrong house.” The flashlight beam nailed a roadside mailbox with a collie painted on the side. “I’m sorry Jordan has to see this, but it’s probably best that you know what you’re dealing with.” He raised his flashlight higher. Ray joined his beam to Dan’s. They lit up the front of a modest one-story wooden house, sitting neatly on a postage stamp of lawn.

Gunner had been crucified between the living room window and the front door. He was naked except for a pair of bloodstained Joe Boxers. Nails big enough to be rail spikes jutted from his hands, feet, forearms, and knees. Maybe they
were
rail spikes, Clay thought. Sitting splay-legged at Gunner’s feet was Harold. Like Alice when they met her, Harold was wearing a bib of blood, but his hadn’t come from his nose. The wedge of glass he’d used to cut his throat after crucifying his running buddy still twinkled in one hand.

Hung around Gunner’s neck on a loop of string was a piece of cardboard with three words scrawled on it in dark capital letters:
JUSTITIA EST COMMODATUM.

9

“In case you don’t read Latin—” Dan Hartwick began.

“I remember enough from high school to read that,” Tom said. “ ‘Justice is served.’ This is for killing Alice. For daring to touch one of the untouchables.”

“Right you are,” Dan said, snapping off his light. Ray did the same. “It also serves as a warning to others. And
they
didn’t kill them, although they most certainly could have.”

“We know,” Clay said. “They took reprisals in Gaiten after we burned their flock.”

“They did the same in Nashua,” Ray said somberly. “I’ll remember the screams until my dyin day. Fuckin horrible. This shit is, too.” He gestured toward the dark shape of the house. “They got the little one to crucify the big one, and the big one to hold still for it. And when it was done, they got the little one to cut his own throat.”

“It’s like with the Head,” Jordan said, and took Clay’s hand.

“That’s the power of their minds,” Ray said, “and Dan thinks that’s part of what’s sendin everybody north to Kashwak—maybe part of what kept
us
movin north even when we told ourselves it was only to show you this and persuade you to hook up with us. You know?”

Clay said, “Did the Raggedy Man tell you about my son?”

“No, but if he had I’m sure it would have been that he’s with the other normies, and that you and he will have a happy reunion in Kashwak,” Dan said. “You know, just forget about those dreams of standing on a platform while the President tells the cheering crowd you’re insane, that ending’s not for you, it can’t be for you. I’m sure by now you’ve thought of all the possible happy-ending scenarios, the chief one being how Kashwak and who knows how many other cell phone dead zones are the normie equivalent of wildlife refuges, places where folks who didn’t get a blast on the day of the Pulse will be left alone. I think what your young friend said about the chute leading to the slaughterhouse is far more likely, but even supposing normies
are
to be left alone up there, do you think the phoners will forgive people like us? The flock-killers?”

Clay had no answer for this.

In the dark, Dan looked at his watch again. “It’s gone three,” he said. “Let’s walk back. Denise will have us packed up by now. The time has come when we’ve either got to part company or decide to go on together.”

But when you talk about going on together, you’re asking me to part company from my son,
Clay thought. And that he would never do unless he discovered Johnny-Gee was dead.

Or changed.

10

“How can you hope to get west?” Clay asked as they walked back to the junction sign. “The nights still may be ours for a while, but the days belong to them, and you see what they can do.”

“I’m almost positive we can keep them out of our heads when we’re awake,” Dan said. “It takes a little work, but it can be done. We’ll sleep in shifts, at least for a while. A lot depends on keeping away from the flocks.”

“Which means getting into western New Hampshire and then into Vermont as fast as we can,” Ray said. “Away from built-up areas.” He shone his light on Denise, who was reclining on the sleeping bags. “We set, darlin?”

“All set,” she said. “I just wish you’d let me carry something.”

“You’re carryin your kid,” Ray said fondly. “That’s enough. And we can leave the sleepin bags.”

Dan said, “There are places where driving may actually make sense. Ray thinks some of the back roads could be clear for as much as a dozen miles at a stretch. We’ve got good maps.” He dropped to one knee and shouldered his pack, looking up at Clay with a small and bitter half-smile as he did it. “I know the chances aren’t good; I’m not a fool, in case you wondered. But we wiped out two of their flocks, killed hundreds of them, and I don’t want to wind up on one of those platforms.”

“We’ve got something else going for us,” Tom said. Clay wondered if Tom realized he’d just put himself in the Hartwick camp. Probably. He was far from stupid. “They want us alive.”

“Right,” Dan said. “We might really make it. This is still early times for them, Clay—they’re still weaving their net, and I’m betting there are plenty of holes in it.”

“Hell, they haven’t even changed their clothes yet,” Denise said. Clay admired her. She looked like she was six months along, maybe more, but she was a tough little thing. He wished Alice could have met her.

“We
could
slip through,” Dan said. “Cross into Canada from Vermont or New York, maybe. Five is better than three, but six would be better than five—three to sleep, three to stand watch in the days, fight off the bad telepathy. Our own little flock. So what do you say?”

Clay shook his head slowly. “I’m going after my son.”

“Think it over, Clay,” Tom said.
“Please.”

“Let him alone,” Jordan said. “He’s made up his mind.” He put his arms around Clay and hugged him. “I hope you find him,” he said. “But even if you do, I guess you’ll never find us again.”

“Sure I will,” Clay said. He kissed Jordan on the cheek, then stood back. “I’ll hogtie me a telepath and use him like a compass. Maybe the Raggedy Man himself.” He turned to Tom and held out his hand.