Cell: A Novel (45 page)
Authors: Stephen King
Tags: #Horror, #Fiction, #Horror Fiction, #General, #Psychological, #Psychological Fiction, #Murderers, #Cellular Telephones, #Cell Phones
Snow. Snow on the twenty-first of October.
Was
it the twenty-first? He’d lost track of the days. One thing he knew for sure was that the phoners would be dying out there, more every night. Johnny would have been one of them, if Clay hadn’t searched and found him.
The question was, what had he found?
What had he saved?
Dieey.
Daddy?
Maybe.
Certainly the kid hadn’t said anything even remotely resembling a word since then. He had been willing to walk with Clay… but he’d also been prone to wandering off in his own direction. When he did that, Clay had to grab him again, the way you grabbed a tot who tried to take off in a supermarket parking lot. Each time Clay did this he couldn’t help thinking of a windup robot he’d had when he was a kid, and how it would always find its way into a corner and stand there marching its feet uselessly up and down until you turned it back toward the middle of the room again.
Johnny had put up a brief, panicky fight when Clay had found a car with the key in it, but once he got the boy buckled and locked in and got the car rolling, Johnny had quieted again and seemed to become almost hypnotized. He even found the button that unrolled the window and let the wind blow on his face, closing his eyes and lifting his head slightly. Clay watched the wind blowing back his son’s long, dirty hair and thought,
God help me, it’s like riding with a dog.
When they came to a road-reef they couldn’t get around and Clay helped Johnny from the car, he discovered his son had wet his pants.
He’s lost his toilet training along with his language,
he had thought dismally.
Christ on a crutch.
And that turned out to be true, but the consequences weren’t as complicated or dire as Clay thought they might be. Johnny was no longer toilet-trained, but if you stopped and led him into a field, he would urinate if he had to. Or if he had to squat, he’d do that, looking dreamily up at the sky while he emptied his bowels. Perhaps tracing the courses of the birds that flew there. Perhaps not.
Not toilet-trained, but housebroken. Again, Clay was helpless not to think of dogs he had owned.
Only dogs did not wake up and scream for fifteen minutes in the middle of each night.
5
That first night they had stayed in a house not far from the Newfield Trading Post, and when the screaming started, Clay had thought Johnny was dying. And although the boy had fallen asleep in his arms, he was gone when Clay snapped awake. Johnny was no longer in the bed but under it. Clay crawled underneath, into a choking cavern of dust-kitties with the bottom of the box spring only an inch above his head, and clutched a slender body that was like an iron rail. The boy’s shrieks were bigger than such small lungs could produce, and Clay understood that he was hearing them amplified in his head. All of Clay’s hair, even his pubic hair, seemed to be standing up straight and stiff.
Johnny had shrieked for nearly fifteen minutes there under the bed, then ceased as abruptly as he had begun. His body went limp. Clay had to press his head against Johnny’s side (one of the boy’s arms somehow squeezed over his neck in the impossibly small space) to make sure he was breathing.
He had dragged Johnny out, limp as a mailsack, and had gotten the dusty, dirty body back onto the bed. Had lain awake beside him almost an hour before falling soddenly asleep himself. In the morning, the bed had been his alone again. Johnny had crawled underneath once more. Like a beaten dog, seeking the smallest shelter it could find. Quite the opposite of previous phoner behavior, it seemed… but of course, Johnny wasn’t like them. Johnny was a new thing, God help him.
6
Now they were in the cozy caretaker’s cottage next to the Springvale Logging Museum. There was plenty to eat, there was a woodstove, there was fresh water from the hand-pump. There was even a chemical toilet (although Johnny wouldn’t use it; Johnny used the backyard). All mod cons, circa 1908.
It had been quiet time, except for Johnny’s nightly screaming fit. There had been time to think, and now, standing here by the living room window and watching snow skirl up the street while his son slept in his little closet hidey-hole, there was time to realize that the time for thinking was done. Nothing was going to change unless he changed it.
You’d need another cellphone,
Jordan had said.
And you’d need to take him to a place where there’s coverage.
There was coverage here. Still coverage. He had the bars on the cell phone to prove it.
How much worse can it be?
Tom had asked. And shrugged. But of course he
could
shrug, couldn’t he? Johnny wasn’t Tom’s kid, Tom had his own kid now.
It all depends on whether or not brains do what seriously protected computers do when they’re hit with an EMP,
Jordan had said.
They save to system.
Save to system. A phrase of some power.
But you’d have to wipe the phoner program first to make space for such a highly theoretical second reboot, and Jordan’s idea—to hit Johnny with the Pulse yet
again,
like lighting a backfire—seemed so spooky, so off-the-wall dangerous, given the fact that Clay had no way of knowing what sort of program the Pulse had mutated into by now… assuming (makes an ass out of you
and
me, yeah, yeah, yeah) it was still up and running at all…
“Save to system,” Clay whispered. Outside the light was almost gone; the skirling snow looked more ghostly than ever.
The Pulse
was
different now, he was sure of that. He remembered the first phoners he’d come upon who were up at night, the ones at the Gurleyville Volunteer Fire Department. They had been fighting over the old pumper, but they had been doing more than that; they had been talking. Not just making phantom vocalizations that might have been words,
talking.
It hadn’t been much, not brilliant cocktail-party chatter, but actual talk, just the same.
Go away. You go. Hell you say.
And the always popular
Mynuck.
Those two had been different from the original phoners—the phoners of the Raggedy Man Era—and Johnny was different from those two. Why? Because the worm was still munching, the Pulse program was still mutating? Probably.
The last thing Jordan had said before kissing him goodbye and heading north was
If you set a new version of the program against the one Johnny and the others got at the checkpoint, they might eat each other up. Because that’s what worms do. They eat.
And then, if the old programming was there… if it was saved to the system…
Clay found his troubled mind turning to Alice—Alice who had lost her mother, Alice who had found a way to be brave by transferring her fears to a child’s sneaker. Four hours or so out of Gaiten, on Route 156, Tom had asked another group of normies if they’d like to share their picnic site by the side of the road.
That’s them,
one of the men had said.
That’s the Gaiten bunch.
Another had told Tom he could go to hell. And Alice had jumped up. Jumped up and said—
“She said at least we did something,” Clay said as he looked out into the darkening street. “Then she asked them, ‘Just what the fuck did
you
do?’ ”
So there was his answer, courtesy of a dead girl. Johnny-Gee wasn’t getting better. Clay’s choices came down to two: stick with what he had, or try to make a change while there was still time. If there was.
Clay used a battery-powered lamp to light his way into the bedroom. The closet door was ajar, and he could see Johnny’s face. In sleep, lying with his cheek on one hand and his hair tousled across his forehead, he looked almost exactly like the boy Clay had kissed goodbye before setting out for Boston with his
Dark Wanderer
portfolio a thousand years ago. A little thinner; otherwise pretty much the same. It was only when he was awake that you saw the differences. The slack mouth and the empty eyes. The slumped shoulders and dangling hands.
Clay opened the closet door all the way and knelt in front of the cot. Johnny stirred a little when the light of the lantern struck his face, then settled again. Clay was not a praying man, and events of the last few weeks had not greatly increased his faith in God, but he
had
found his son, there was that, so he sent a prayer up to whatever might be listening. It was short and to the point:
Tony, Tony, come around, something’s lost that can’t be found.
He flipped open the cell and pushed the power button. It beeped softly. The amber light in the window came on. Three bars. He hesitated for a moment, but when it came to placing the call, there was only one sure shot: the one the Raggedy Man and his friends had taken.
When the three digits were entered, he reached out and shook Johnny’s shoulder. The boy didn’t want to wake up. He groaned and tried to pull away. Then he tried to turn over. Clay wouldn’t let him do either.
“Johnny! Johnny-Gee! Wake up!” He shook harder and kept on shaking until the boy finally opened his empty eyes and looked at him with wariness but no human curiosity. It was the sort of look you got from a badly treated dog, and it broke Clay’s heart every time he saw it.
Last chance,
he thought.
Do you really mean to do this? The odds can’t be one in ten.
But what had the odds been on his finding Johnny in the first place? Of Johnny leaving the Kashwakamak flock before the explosion, for that matter? One in a thousand? In ten thousand? Was he going to live with that wary yet incurious look as Johnny turned thirteen, then fifteen, then twenty-one? While his son slept in the closet and shat in the backyard?
At least we did something,
Alice Maxwell had said.
He looked in the window above the keypad. There the numbers 911 stood out as bright and black as some declared destiny.
Johnny’s eyes were drooping. Clay gave him another brisk shake to keep him from falling asleep again. He did this with his left hand. With the thumb of his right he pushed the phone’s call button. There was time to count
Mississippi ONE
and
Mississippi TWO
before calling in the phone’s little lighted window changed to connected. When that happened, Clayton Riddell didn’t allow himself time to think.
“Hey, Johnny-Gee,” he said, “Fo-fo-you-you.” And pressed the cell against his son’s ear.
December 30, 2004-October 17, 2005
Center Lovell, Maine
Chuck Verrill edited the book and did a great job. Thanks, Chuck.
Robin Furth did research on cell phones and provided various theories on what may lie at the core of the human psyche. Good info is hers; errors in understanding are mine. Thanks, Robin.
My wife read the first-draft manuscript and said encouraging things. Thanks, Tabby.
Bostonians and northern New Englanders will know I took certain geographical liberties. What can I say? It goes with the territory (to make a small pun).
To the best of my knowledge, FEMA hasn’t appropriated any money to provide backup generators for cell telephone transmission towers, but I should note that many transmission towers
do
have generator backup in case of power outages.
S.K.
Stephen King lives in Maine with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King. He does not own a cell phone.
