Cell: A Novel (37 page)

On the other side of the intersection, where 160 took off into the north country, stood the Newfield Trading Post. A sign in the window promised CANDIES NATIVE SIRUP INDIAN CRAFTS “NICK-NACKS.” It looked as if it had been trashed as well as looted, but it was shelter from the rain and away from the casual, unexpected horror he had just encountered. Clay went in and sat down with his head lowered until he no longer felt like fainting. There were bodies, he could smell them, but someone had thrown a tarp over all but two, and at least those two weren’t in pieces. The joint’s beer cooler was smashed and empty, the Coke machine only smashed. He took a ginger ale and drank it in long, slow swallows, pausing to belch. After a while he began to feel a little better.

He missed his friends desperately. The unfortunate out there and whomever he’d been racing were the only sprinters he’d seen all night, and he’d encountered no groups of walking refugees at all. He’d spent the entire night with only his thoughts for company. Maybe the weather was keeping the walkers inside, or maybe now they were traveling days. No reason for them not to, if the phoners had switched from murder to conversion.

He realized he hadn’t heard any of what Alice had called
flockmusic
tonight. Maybe all the flocks were south of here, except for the big one (he assumed it must be a big one) administering the Kashwak Konversions. Clay didn’t much care; even alone as he was, he would still take his vacation from “I Hope You Dance” and “The Theme from
A Summer Place”
as a little gift.

He decided to walk another hour at most, then find a hole to crawl into. The cold rain was killing him. He left the Newfield Trading Post, resolutely not looking at the crashed Corvette or the soaked remains lying beside it.

5

He ended up walking until nearly daylight, partly because the rain let up but mostly because there wasn’t much in the way of shelter on Route 160, just woods. Then, around four thirty, he passed a bullet-pocked sign reading ENTERING GURLEYVILLE, AN UNINCORPORATED TOWNSHIP. Ten minutes or so after that he passed Gurleyville’s raison d‘être, such as it was—the Gurleyville Quarry, a huge rock pit with a few sheds, dump trucks, and a garage at the foot of its gouged granite walls. Clay thought briefly about spending the night in one of the equipment sheds, decided he could do better, and pushed on. He had still seen no pilgrims and heard no flockmusic, even at a distance. He could have been the last person on earth.

He wasn’t. Ten minutes or so after leaving the quarry behind, he topped a hill and saw a little village below. The first building he came to was the Gurleyville Volunteer Fire Department (
DON’T FORGET THE HALOWEEN BLOOD DRIVE
read the notice board out front; it seemed that no one north of Springvale could spell), and two of the phone-people were standing in the parking lot, facing each other in front of a sad-looking old pumper that might have been new around the time the Korean War ended.

They turned slowly toward Clay when he put his flashlight beam on them, but then they turned away to regard each other again. Both were male, one about twenty-five and the other maybe twice that. There was no doubt they were phoners. Their clothes were filthy and almost falling off. Their faces were cut and scraped. The younger man looked as if he had sustained a serious burn all the way up one arm. The older man’s left eye glittered from deep inside folds of badly swollen and probably infected flesh. But how they looked wasn’t the main thing. The main thing was what Clay felt in
himself:
that same weird shortness of breath he and Tom had experienced in the office of the Gaiten Citgo, where they’d gone to get the keys to the propane trucks. That sense of some powerful gathering force.

And it was
night.
With the heavy cloud cover, dawn was still just a rumor. What were these guys doing up at
night?

Clay snapped off his flashlight, drew the Nickerson .45, and watched to see if anything would happen. For several seconds he thought nothing would, that the strange out-of-breath feeling, that sense of something being on the
verge
of happening, was going to be the extent of it. Then he heard a high whining sound, almost like someone vibrating the blade of a saw between his palms. Clay looked up and saw the electrical wires passing in front of the fire station were moving rapidly back and forth, almost too fast to see.

“
Go
-way !”
It was the young man, and he seemed to jerk the words out with a tremendous effort. Clay jumped. If his finger had been on the revolver’s trigger, he would almost certainly have pulled it. This wasn’t
Aw
and
Eeen,
this was actual words. He thought he heard them in his head as well, but faint, faint. Only a dying echo.

“You!…
Go!” the older man replied. He was wearing baggy Bermuda shorts with a huge brown stain on the seat. It might have been mud or shit. He spoke with equal effort, but this time Clay heard no echo in his head. Paradoxically, it made him more sure he’d heard the first one.

They’d forgotten
him
entirely. Of that much he was sure.

“Mine!”
said the younger man, once more jerking the word out. And he
did
jerk it. His whole body seemed to flail with the effort. Behind him, several small windows in the fire station’s wide garage door shattered outward.

There was a long pause. Clay watched, fascinated, Johnny completely out of his mind for the first time since Kent Pond. The older man seemed to be thinking furiously,
struggling
furiously, and what Clay thought he was struggling to do was to express himself as he had before the Pulse had robbed him of speech.

On top of the volunteer fire station, which was nothing but a glorified garage, the siren went off with a brief
WHOOP,
as if a phantom burst of electricity had surged through it. And the lights of the ancient pumper—headlights and red flashers—flicked briefly on, illuminating the two men and briefly scaring up their shadows.

“Hell!
You say!” the older man managed. He spit the words out like a piece of meat that had been choking him.

“Mynuck!”
the younger man nearly screamed, and in Clay’s mind that same voice whispered,
My truck.
It was simple, really. Instead of Twinkies, they were fighting over the old pumper. Only this was at
night
—the end of it, granted, but still full dark—and they were almost talking again. Hell, they
were
talking.

But the talking was done, it seemed. The young man lowered his head, ran at the older man, and butted him in the chest. The older man went sprawling. The younger man tripped over his legs and went to his knees.
“Hell!”
he cried.

“Fuck!”
cried the other. No question about it. You couldn’t mistake
fuck.

They picked themselves up again and stood about fifteen feet apart. Clay could feel their hate. It was in his head; it was pushing at his eyeballs, trying to get out.

The young man said, “That’n…
mynuck!”
And in Clay’s head the young man’s distant voice whispered,
That one is my truck.

The older man drew in breath. Jerkily raised one scabbed-over arm. And shot the young man the bird. “Sit. On this!” he said with perfect clarity.

The two of them lowered their heads and rushed at each other. Their heads met with a thudding crack that made Clay wince. This time all the windows in the garage blew out. The siren on the roof gave a long war-cry before winding down. The fluorescent lights in the station house flashed on, running for perhaps three seconds on pure crazypower. There was a brief burst of music: Britney Spears singing “Oops!… I Did It Again.” Two power-lines snapped with liquid twanging sounds and fell almost in front of Clay, who stepped back from them in a hurry. Probably they were dead, they
should
be dead, but—

The older man dropped to his knees with blood pouring down both sides of his head.
“My truck!”
he said with perfect clarity, then fell on his face.

The younger one turned to Clay, as if to recruit him as witness to his victory. Blood was pouring out of his matted, filthy hair, between his eyes, in a double course around his nose, and over his mouth. His eyes, Clay saw, weren’t blank at all. They were insane. Clay understood—all at once, completely and inarguably—that if this was where the cycle led, his son was beyond saving.

“Mynuck!”
the young man shrieked.
“Mynuck, mynuck!”
The pumper’s siren gave a brief, winding growl, as if in agreement.
“MYNU
—”

Clay shot him, then reholstered the .45.
What the hell,
he thought,
they can only put me up on a pedestal once.
Still, he was shaking badly, and when he broke into Gurleyville’s only motel on the far side of town, it took him a long time to go to sleep. Instead of the Raggedy Man, it was his son who visited him in his dreams, a dirty, blank-eyed child who responded
“Go-hell, mynuck”
when Clay called his name.

6

He woke from this dream long before dark, but sleep was done for him and he decided to start walking again. And once he’d cleared Gurleyville—what little of Gurleyville there was to clear—he’d drive. There was no reason not to; Route 160 now seemed almost entirely clear and probably had been since the nasty pileup where it crossed Route 11. He simply hadn’t noticed it in the dark and the rain.

The Raggedy Man and his friends cleared the way,
he thought.
Of course they did, it’s the fucking cattle-chute. For me it probably is the chute that leads to the slaughterhouse. Because I’m old business. They’d like to stamp me PAID and stick me in the filing cabinet as soon as possible. Too bad about Tom and Jordan and the other three. I wonder if they found enough back roads to take them into central New Hampshire y
—

He topped a rise and this thought broke off cleanly. Parked in the middle of the road below was a little yellow schoolbus with
MAINE SCHOOL DISTRICT 38
NEWFIELD
printed on the side. Leaning against it was a man and a boy. The man had his arm around the boy’s shoulders in a casual gesture of friendship Clay would have known anywhere. As he stood there, frozen, not quite believing his eyes, another man came around the schoolbus’s blunt nose. He had long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. Following him was a pregnant woman in a T-shirt. It was powder blue instead of Harley-Davidson black, but it was Denise, all right.

Jordan saw him and called his name. He pulled free of Tom’s arm and started running. Clay ran to meet him. They met about thirty yards in front of the schoolbus.

“Clay!” Jordan shouted. He was hysterical with joy. “It’s really you!”

“It’s me,” Clay agreed. He swung Jordan in the air, then kissed him. Jordan wasn’t Johnny, but Jordan would do, at least for the time being. He hugged him, then set him down and studied the haggard face, not failing to note the brown circles of weariness under Jordan’s eyes. “How in God’s name did you get here?”

Jordan’s face clouded. “We couldn’t… that is, we only dreamed…”

Tom came strolling up. Once again he ignored Clay’s outstretched hand and hugged him instead. “How you doin, van Gogh?” he asked.

“Okay. Fucking delighted to see you guys, but I don’t understand—”

Tom gave him a smile. It was both tired and sweet, a white flag of a smile. “What computer-boy’s trying to tell you is that in the end we just didn’t have any choice. Come on down to the little yellow bus. Ray says that if the road stays clear—and I’m sure it will—we can be in Kashwak by sundown, even traveling at thirty miles an hour. Ever read
The Haunting of Hill House?”

Clay shook his head, bewildered. “Saw the movie.”

“There’s a line there that resonates in the current situation—‘Journeys end in lovers meeting.’ Looks like I might get to meet your kid after all.”

They walked down to the schoolbus. Dan Hartwick offered Clay a tin of Altoids with a hand that was not quite steady. Like Jordan and Tom, he looked exhausted. Clay, feeling like a man in a dream, took one. End of the world or not, it was curiously strong.

“Hey, man,” Ray said. He was behind the wheel of the schoolbus, Dolphins cap tipped back, a cigarette smoldering in one hand. He looked pale and drawn. He was staring out through the windshield, not at Clay.

“Hey, Ray, what do you say?” Clay asked.

Ray smiled briefly. “Say I’ve heard that one a few times.”

“Sure, probably a few hundred. I’d tell you I’m glad to see you, but under the circumstances, I’m not sure you’d want to hear it.”

Still looking out the windshield, Ray replied, “There’s someone up there you’ll
definitely
not be glad to see.”

Clay looked. They all did. A quarter of a mile or so north, Route 160 crested another hill. Standing there and looking at them, his harvard hoodie dirtier than ever but still bright against the gray afternoon sky, was the Raggedy Man. Maybe fifty other phoners surrounded him. He saw them looking. He raised his hand and waved at them twice, side to side, like a man wiping a windshield. Then he turned and began to walk away, his entourage
(his flocklet,
Clay thought) falling in to either side of him in a kind of trailing Y. Soon they were out of sight.

1

They stopped at a picnic area a little farther up the road. No one was very hungry, but it was a chance for Clay to ask his questions. Ray didn’t eat at all, just sat on the lip of a stone barbecue pit downwind and smoked, listening. He added nothing to the conversation. To Clay he seemed utterly disheartened.

“We
think
we’re stopping here,” Dan said, gesturing to the little picnic area with its border of firs and autumn-colored deciduous trees, its babbling brook and its hiking trail with the sign at its head reading IF YOU GO
TAKE A MAP!
“We probably
are
stopping here, because—” He looked at Jordan. “Would
you
say we’re stopping here, Jordan? You seem to have the clearest perception.”

“Yes,” Jordan said instantly. “This is real.”

“Yuh,” Ray said, without looking up. “We’re here, all right.” He slapped his hand against the rock of the barbecue pit, and his wedding ring produced a little
tink-tink-tink
sound. “This is the real deal. We’re together again, that’s all they wanted.”

“I don’t understand,” Clay said.

“Neither do we, completely,” Dan said.

“They’re a lot more powerful than I ever would have guessed,” Tom said. “I understand that much.” He took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt. It was a tired, distracted gesture. He looked ten years older than the man Clay had met in Boston. “And they messed with our minds.
Hard.
We never had a chance.”

“You look exhausted, all of you,” Clay replied.

Denise laughed. “Yeah? Well, we come by it honestly. We left you and took off on Route 11 westbound. Walked until we saw light starting to come up in the east. Grabbing wheels didn’t seem to make any sense, because the road was a freaking mess. You’d get maybe a quarter of a mile clear, then—”

“Road-reefs, I know,” Clay said.

“Ray said it would be better once we got west of the Spaulding Turnpike, but we decided to spend the day in this place called the Twilight Motel.”

“I’ve heard of that place,” Clay said. “On the edge of the Vaughan Woods. It’s rather notorious in my part of the world.”

“Yeah? Okay.” She shrugged. “So we get there, and the kid—Jordan—says, ‘I’m gonna make you the biggest breakfast you ever ate.’ And we say dream on, kid—which turned out to be sort of funny, since that’s what it was, in a way—but
the power
in the place is on, and he
does.
He makes this huge freakin breakfast. We all chip in. It’s the Thanksgiving of breakfasts. Am I telling this right?”

Dan, Tom, and Jordan all nodded. Sitting on the barbecue pit, Ray just lit another cigarette.

According to Denise, they had eaten in the dining room, which Clay found fascinating because he was positive the Twilight didn’t
have
a dining room; it had been your basic no-tell motel straddling the Maine-New Hampshire state line. Rumor had it that the only amenities were cold-water showers and hot-running X-ies on the TVs in the crackerbox rooms.

The story got weirder. There had been a jukebox. No Lawrence Welk and Debby Boone, either; it had been stuffed with hot stuff (including “Hot Stuff,” by Donna Summer), and instead of going directly to bed they had danced—arduously—for two or three hours. Then, before turning in, they had eaten another vast meal, this time with Denise donning the chef’s hat. After that, finally, they had crashed.

“And dreamed of walking,” Dan said. He spoke with a beaten bitterness that was unsettling. This wasn’t the same man Clay had met two nights ago, the one who’d said
I’m almost positive we can keep them out of our heads when we’re awake
and
We might really make it, this is still early times for them.
Now he laughed a little, a sound with no humor in it at all. “Man, we
should
have dreamed about it, because we
were.
All that day we were walking.”

“Not quite all of it,” Tom said. “I had a driving-dream…”

“Yeah, you drove,” Jordan said quietly. “Only for an hour or so, but you drove. That was when we also dreamed we were sleeping in that motel. The Twilight place. I dreamed of the driving, too. It was like a dream inside of a dream. Only that one was real.”

“You see?” Tom said, smiling at Clay. He ruffled Jordan’s heavy pelt. “On some level, Jordan knew all along.”

“Virtual reality,” Jordan said. “That’s all it was. Like being in a video game, almost. And it wasn’t all that good.” He looked north, in the direction the Raggedy Man had disappeared. In the direction of Kashwak. “It’ll get better
if they get
better.”

“Sons of bitches can’t do it at all after dark,” Ray said. “They have to go fucking beddy-bye.”

“And at the end of the day, so did we,” Dan said. “That was their purpose. To wear us out so completely that we couldn’t figure out what was going on even when night came and their control slipped. During the day the President of Harvard was always close, along with a good-sized flock, sending out that mental force-field of theirs, creating Jordan’s virtual reality.”

“Must have been,” Denise said. “Yeah.”

All this had been going on, Clay calculated, while he had been sleeping in the caretaker’s cottage.

“Wearing us out wasn’t all they wanted,” Tom said. “Even turning us back north wasn’t all they wanted. They also wanted us all together again.”

The five of them had come to in a tumbledown motel on Route 47—
Maine
Route 47, not too far south of Great Works. The sense of dislocation, Tom said, had been enormous. The sound of flockmusic not too far distant had not helped. They all had a sense of what must have happened, but it was Jordan who had verbalized it, as it had been Jordan who’d pointed out the obvious: their escape attempt had failed. Yes, they could probably slip out of the motel where they found themselves and start west again, but how far would they get this time? They were exhausted. Worse, they were disheartened. It was also Jordan who pointed out that the phoners might even have arranged for a few normie spies to track their nighttime movements.

“We ate,” Denise said, “because we were starving as well as tired. Then we went to bed for real and slept until the next morning.”

“I was the first one up,” Tom said. “The Raggedy Man himself was standing in the courtyard. He made a little bow to me and waved his hand at the road.” Clay remembered the gesture well.
The road is yours. Go on and take it.
“I could have shot him, I suppose—I had Sir Speedy—but what good would that have done?”

Clay shook his head. No good at all.

They had gotten back on the road, first walking up Route 47. Then, Tom said, they’d felt themselves mentally nudged onto an unmarked woods road that actually seemed to meander southeast.

“No visions this morning?” Clay asked. “No dreams?”

“Nope,” Tom said. “They knew we’d gotten the point. They can read minds, after all.”

“They heard us yell uncle,” Dan said in that same beaten, bitter tone. “Ray, do you happen to have an extra cigarette? I quit, but maybe I’ll take the habit up again.”

Ray tossed him the pack without a word.

“It’s like being nudged by a hand, only inside your brain,” Tom said. “Not at all nice. Intrusive in a way I can’t even begin to describe. And all this time there was the sense of the Raggedy Man and his flock, moving with us. Sometimes we saw a few of them through the trees; most times not.”

“So they’re not just flocking early and late now,” Clay said.

“No, all that’s changing,” Dan said. “Jordan’s got a theory—interesting, and with some evidence to back it up. Besides, we constitute a special occasion.” He lit his cigarette. Inhaled. Coughed. “Shit, I knew there was a reason I gave these things up.” And then, with hardly a pause: “They can float, you know. Levitate. Must be a hell of a handy way to get around with the roads so jammed. Like having a magic carpet.”

A mile or so up the seemingly pointless woods road, the five of them had discovered a cabin with a pickup parked in front. Keys in the truck. Ray drove; Tom and Jordan rode in the truck-bed. None of them were surprised when the woods road eventually bent north again. Just before it petered out, the navigation-beacon in their heads sent them onto another, then a third that was little more than a track with weeds growing up the middle. That one eventually drowned in a boggy patch where the truck mired, but an hour’s slog brought them out on Route 11, just south of that highway’s junction with 160.

“Couple of dead phoners there,” Tom said. “Fresh. Downed power-lines, snapped-off poles. The crows were having a banquet.”

Clay thought of telling them what he’d seen at the Gurleyville Volunteer Fire Department, then didn’t. If it had any bearing on the present situation, he didn’t see it. Besides, there were plenty who weren’t fighting with each other, and these had kept forcing Tom and the others onward.

That force hadn’t led them to the little yellow bus; Ray had found it as a result of exploring the Newfield Trading Post while the others were scrounging sodas from the very same cooler Clay had raided. Ray saw it through a back window.

They had stopped only once since then, to build a fire on the granite floor of the Gurleyville Quarry and eat a hot meal. They had also changed into fresh footwear from the Newfield Trading Post—their bog-slog had left all of them muddy from the shins down—and had an hour’s rest. They must have driven past Clay at the Gurleyville Motel right around the time he was waking up, because they were nudged to a stop shortly after that.

“And here we are,” Tom said. “Case almost closed.” He swept an arm at the sky, the land, the trees. “Someday, son, all of this will be yours.”

“That pushing thing has gone out of my head, at least for the time being,” Denise said. “I’m grateful for that. The first day was the worst, you know? I mean, Jordan had the clearest idea that something was wrong, but I think all of us knew it wasn’t… you know, really right.”

“Yeah,” Ray said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “It was like being in a kid’s story where the birds and snakes talk. They say stuff like, ‘You’re okay, you’re fine, never mind that your legs are so tired, you’re deenie-cool.’ Deenie-cool, that’s what we used to say when I was growin up in Lynn.”

“ ‘Lynn, Lynn, city of sin, when you get to heaven, they won’t let you in,’ ” Tom chanted.

“You grew up with the Christers, all right,” Ray said. “Anyway, the kid knew better, I knew better, I think we
all
knew fuckin better. If you had half a brain and still thought you were gettin away—”

“I believed as long as I could because I wanted to believe,” Dan said, “but in truth? We never had a chance. Other normies might, but not us, not flock-killers. They mean to have us, no matter what happens to them.”

“What do you think they’ve got in mind for us?” Clay asked.

“Oh, death,” Tom said, almost without interest. “At least I’ll be able to get some decent sleep.”

Clay’s mind finally caught up with a couple of things and latched on. Earlier in the conversation, Dan had said their normal behavior was changing and Jordan had a theory about it. Just now he’d said
no matter what happens to them.

“I saw a pair of phoners go at each other not far from here,” Clay finally told them.

“Did you,” Dan said, without much interest.

“At
night,”
he added, and now they all looked at him. “They were fighting over a fire truck. Like a couple of kids over a toy. I got some of that telepathy from one of them, but they were both talking.”

“Talking?” Denise asked skeptically. “Like actual words?”

“Actual words. The clarity was in and out, but they were definitely words. How many fresh dead have you guys seen? Just those two?”

Dan said, “We’ve probably seen a dozen since we woke up to where we really are.” He looked at the others. Tom, Denise, and Jordan nodded. Ray shrugged and lit another cigarette. “But it’s hard to tell about the cause of death. They
might
be reverting; that fits Jordan’s theory, although the talking doesn’t seem to. They might’ve just been corpses the flocks haven’t gotten around to getting rid of. Body-disposal isn’t a priority with them right now.”

“We’re
their priority, and they’ll be moving us along pretty soon,” Tom said. “I don’t think we get the… you know, the big stadium treatment until tomorrow, but I’m pretty sure they want us in Kashwak before dark tonight.”

“Jordan, what’s your theory?” Clay asked.

Jordan said, “I think there was a worm in the original program.”

2

“I don’t understand,” Clay said, “but that’s par for the course. When it came to computers, I could use Word, Adobe Illustrator, and MacMail. After that I was pretty much illiterate. Johnny had to walk me through the solitaire program that came with my Mac.” Talking about that hurt. Remembering Johnny’s hand closing over his on the mouse hurt more.

“But you know what a computer worm is, right?”

“Something that gets into your computer and screws up all the programs, right?”

Jordan rolled his eyes but said, “Close enough. It can burrow in, corrupting your files and your hard drive as it goes. If it gets into shareware and the stuff you send, even e-mail attachments—and they do—it can go viral and spread. Sometimes a worm has babies. The worm itself is a mutant and sometimes the babies mutate further. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“The Pulse was a computer program sent out by modem—that’s the only way it could work. And it’s
still
being sent out by modem. Only there was a worm in there, and it’s rotting out the program. It’s becoming more corrupted every day. GIGO. Do you know GIGO?”

Clay said, “I don’t even know the way to San Jose.”

“Stands for ‘garbage in, garbage out.’ We think that there are conversion points where the phoners are changing normies over—”

Clay remembered his dream. “I’m way ahead of you there.”

“But now they’re getting bad programming. Do you see? And it makes sense, because it’s the newest phoners who seem to be going down first. Fighting, freaking out, or actually dropping dead.”