Cell: A Novel (44 page)

The flock itself had become a raw meatloaf of dead and dying phoners. Their telepathy had broken down (although little currents of that strange psychic force occasionally tugged at him, making his hair rise and his flesh crawl), but the survivors could still scream, and they filled the night with their cries. Clay would have gone ahead even if he’d been able to imagine how bad it was going to be—even in the first few seconds he made no effort to mislead himself on that score—but this was beyond imagining.

The firelight was just enough to show them more than they wanted to see. The mutilations and decapitations were bad—the pools of blood, the littered limbs—but the scattered clothes and shoes with nobody inside them were somehow worse, as if the explosion had been fierce enough to actually vaporize part of the flock. A man walked toward them with his hands to his throat in an effort to stem the flow of blood pouring over and between his fingers—it looked orange in the growing glow of the Hall’s burning roof—while his intestines swung back and forth at the level of his crotch. More wet loops came sliding out as he walked past them, his eyes wide and unseeing.

Jordan was saying something. Clay couldn’t hear it over the screams, the wails, and the growing crackle of fire from behind him, so he leaned closer.

“We had to do it, it was all we could do,” Jordan said. He looked at a headless woman, a legless man, at something so torn open it had become a flesh canoe filled with blood. Beyond it, two more bus seats lay on a pair of burning women who had died in each other’s arms. “We had to do it, it was all we could do. We had to do it, it was all we could do.”

“That’s right, honey, put your face against me and walk like that,” Clay said, and Jordan immediately buried his face in Clay’s side. Walking that way was uncomfortable, but it could be done.

They skirted the edge of the flock’s campground, moving toward the back of what would have been a completed midway and amusement arcade if the Pulse hadn’t intervened. As they went, Kashwakamak Hall burned brighter, casting more light on the mall. Dark shapes—many naked or almost naked, the clothes blown right off them—staggered and shambled. Clay had no idea how many. The few that passed close by their little group showed no interest in them; they either continued on toward the midway area or plunged into the woods west of the Expo grounds, where Clay was quite sure they would die of exposure unless they could reestablish some sort of flock consciousness. He didn’t think they could. Partly because of the virus, but mostly because of Jordan’s decision to drive the bus right into the middle of them and achieve a maximum kill-zone, as they had with the propane trucks.

If they’d ever known snuffing one old man could lead to this…
Clay thought, and then he thought,
But how could they?

They reached the dirt lot where the carnies had parked their trucks and campers. Here the ground was thick with snaking electrical cables, and the spaces between the campers were filled with the accessories of families who lived on the road: barbecues, gas grills, lawn chairs, a hammock, a little laundry whirligig with clothes that had probably been hanging there for almost two weeks.

“Let’s find something with the keys in it and get the hell out of here,” Dan said. “They cleared the feeder road, and if we’re careful I bet we can go north on 160 as far as we want.” He pointed. “Up there it’s just about
all
no-fo.”

Clay had spotted a panel truck with
LEM’S PAINTING AND PLUMBING
on the back. He tried the doors and they opened. The inside was filled with milk-crates, most crammed with various plumbing supplies, but in one he found what he wanted: paint in spray-cans. He took four of these after checking to make sure they were full or almost full.

“What are those for?” Tom asked.

“Tell you later,” Clay said.

“Let’s get out of here
, please,
” Denise said. “I can’t stand this. My pants are soaked with blood.” She began to cry.

They came onto the midway between the Krazy Kups and a half-constructed kiddie ride called Charlie the Choo-Choo. “Look,” Tom said, pointing.

“Oh… my…
God
,” Dan said softly.

Lying draped across the peak of the train ride’s ticket booth was the remains of a charred and smoking red sweatshirt—the kind sometimes called a hoodie. A large splotch of blood matted the front around a hole probably made by a chunk of flying schoolbus. Before the blood took over, covering the rest, Clay could make out three letters, the Raggedy Man’s last laugh: HAR.

16

“There’s nobody in the fucking thing, and judging by the size of the hole, he had open-heart surgery without benefit of anesthetic,” Denise said, “so when you’re tired of looking—”

“There’s another little parking lot down at the south end of the midway,” Tom said. “Nice-looking cars in that one. Boss-type cars. We might get lucky.”

They did, but not with a nice-looking car. A small van with
TYCO WATER PURIFICATION EXPERTS
was parked behind a number of the nice-looking cars, effectively blocking them in. The Tyco man had considerately left his keys in the ignition, probably for that very reason, and Clay drove them away from the fire, the carnage, and the screams, rolling with slow care down the feeder road to the junction marked by the billboard showing the sort of happy family that no longer existed (if it ever had). There Clay stopped and put the gearshift lever in park.

“One of you guys has to take over now,” he said.

“Why, Clay?” Jordan asked, but Clay knew from the boy’s voice that Jordan already knew.

“Because this is where I get out,” he said.

“No!”

“Yes. I’m going to look for my boy.”

Tom said, “He’s almost certainly dead back there. I’m not meaning to be a hardass, only realistic.”

“I know that, Tom. I also know there’s a chance he’s not, and so do you. Jordan said they were walking every which way, like they were totally lost.”

Denise said, “Clay… honey… even if he’s alive, he could be wandering around in the woods with half his head blown off. I hate to say that, but you know it’s true.”

Clay nodded. “I also know he could have gotten out earlier, while we were locked up, and started down the road to Gurleyville. A couple of others made it that far; I saw them. And I saw others on the way. So did you.”

“No arguing with the artistic mind, is there?” Tom asked sadly.

“No,” Clay said, “but I wonder if you and Jordan would step outside with me for a minute.”

Tom sighed. “Why not?” he said.

17

Several phoners, looking lost and bewildered, walked past them as they stood by the side of the little water purification van. Clay, Tom, and Jordan paid no attention to them, and the phoners returned the favor. To the northwest the horizon was a brightening red-orange as Kashwakamak Hall shared its fire with the forest behind it.

“No big goodbyes this time,” Clay said, affecting not to see the tears in Jordan’s eyes. “I’m expecting to see you again. Here, Tom. Take this.” He held out the cell phone he’d used to set off the blast. Tom took it. “Go north from here. Keep checking that thing for bars. If you come to road-reefs, abandon what you’re driving, walk until the road’s clear, then take another car or truck and drive again. You’ll probably get cell transmission bars around the Rangeley area—that was boating in the summer, hunting in the fall, skiing in the winter—but beyond there you should be in the clear, and the days should be safe.”

“I bet they’re safe now,” Jordan said, wiping his eyes.

Clay nodded. “You might be right. Anyway, use your judgment. When you get a hundred or so miles north of Rangeley, find a cabin or a lodge or something, fill it with supplies, and lay up for the winter. You know what the winter’s going to do to these things, don’t you?”

“If the flock mind falls apart and they don’t migrate, almost all of them will die,” Tom said. “Those north of the Mason-Dixon Line, at least.”

“I think so, yeah. I put those cans of spray-paint in the center console. Every twenty miles or so, spray T-J-D on the road, nice and big. Got it?”

“T-J-D,” Jordan said. “For Tom, Jordan, Dan, and Denise.”

“Right. Make sure you spray it extra big, with an arrow, if you change roads. If you take a dirt road, spray it on trees, always on the right-hand side of the road. That’s where I’ll be looking. Have you got that?”

“Always on the right,” Tom said. “Come with us, Clay. Please.”

“No. Don’t make this harder for me than it already is. Every time you have to abandon a vehicle, leave it in the middle of the road and spray it T-J-D. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jordan said. “You better find us.”

“I will. This is going to be a dangerous world for a while, but not quite as dangerous as it’s been. Jordan, I need to ask you something.”

“All right.”

“If I find Johnny and the worst that’s happened to him is a trip through their conversion-point, what should I do?”

Jordan gaped. “How would
I
know? Jesus, Clay! I mean…
Jesus!”

“You knew they were rebooting,” Clay said.

“I made a
guess
!”

Clay knew it had been a lot more than that. A lot
better
than that. He also knew Jordan was exhausted and terrified. He dropped to one knee in front of the boy and took his hand. “Don’t be afraid. It can’t be any worse for him than it already is. God knows it can’t.”

“Clay, I…” Jordan looked at Tom. “People aren’t like computers, Tom! Tell him!”

“But computers are like people, aren’t they?” Tom said. “Because we build what we know. You knew about the reboot and you knew about the worm. So tell him what you think. He probably won’t find the kid, anyway. If he does…” Tom shrugged. “Like he said. How much worse can it be?”

Jordan thought about this, biting his lip. He looked terribly tired, and there was blood on his shirt.

“Are you guys coming?” Dan called.

“Give us another minute,” Tom said. And then, in a softer tone: “Jordan?”

Jordan was quiet a moment longer. Then he looked at Clay and said, “You’d need another cell phone. And you’d need to take him to a place where there’s coverage…”

SAVE TO SYSTEM

1

Clay stood in the middle of Route 160, in what would have been the billboard’s shadow on a sunny day, and watched the taillights until they were out of sight. He couldn’t shake the idea that he would never see Tom and Jordan again (
fading roses,
his mind whispered), but he refused to let it grow into a premonition. They had come together twice, after all, and didn’t people say the third time was the charm?

A passing phoner bumped him. It was a man with blood congealing on one side of his face—the first injured refugee from the Northern Counties Expo that he’d seen. He would see more if he didn’t stay ahead of them, so he set off along Route 160, heading south again. He had no real reason to think his kid had gone south, but hoped that some vestige of Johnny’s mind—his old mind—told him home lay in that direction. And it was a direction Clay knew, at least.

About half a mile south of the feeder road he encountered another phoner, this one a woman, who was pacing rapidly back and forth across the highway like a captain on the foredeck of her ship. She looked around at Clay with such sharp regard that he raised his hands, ready to grapple with her if she attacked him.

She didn’t. “Who fa-Da?” she asked, and in his mind, quite clearly, he heard:
Who fell? Daddy, who fell?

“I don’t know,” he said, easing past her. “I didn’t see.”

“Where na?” she asked, pacing more furiously than ever, and in his mind he heard:
Where am I now?
This he made no attempt to answer, but in his mind he thought of Pixie Dark asking,
Who are you? Who am 1?

Clay walked faster, but not quite fast enough. The pacing woman called after him, chilling him: “Who Pih‘ Da?”

And in his mind, he heard this question echo with chilling clarity.
Who is Pixie Dark?

2

There was no gun in the first house he broke into, but there was a long-barreled flashlight, and he shone it on every straggling phoner he encountered, always asking the same question, trying simultaneously to throw it with his mind like a magic-lantern slide on a screen:
Have you seen a boy?
He got no answers and heard only fading fragments of thought in his head. At the second house there was a nice Dodge Ram in the driveway, but Clay didn’t dare take it. If Johnny was on this road, he’d be walking. If Clay was driving, he might miss his boy even if he was driving slow. In the pantry he found a Daisy canned ham, which he unzipped with the attached key and munched as he hit the road again. He was about to throw the balance into the weeds after he’d eaten his fill when he saw an elderly phoner standing beside a mailbox, watching him with a sad and hungry eye. Clay held out the ham and the old man took it. Then, speaking slowly and clearly, trying to picture Johnny in his mind, Clay said: “Have you seen a boy?”

The old man chewed ham. Swallowed. Appeared to consider. Said: “Ganna the wishy.”

“The wishy,” Clay said. “Right. Thanks.” He walked on.

In the third house, a mile or so farther south, he found a .30-30 in the basement, along with three boxes of shells. In the kitchen he found a cell phone sitting in its charging cradle on the counter. The charger was dead—of course—but when he pushed the button on the phone, it beeped and powered up immediately. He only got a single bar, but this didn’t surprise him. The phoners’ conversion-point had been at the edge of the grid.

He started for the door with the loaded rifle in one hand, the flashlight in the other, and the cell phone clipped to his belt when simple exhaustion overwhelmed him. He staggered sideways, as if struck by the head of a padded hammer. He wanted to go on, but such sense as his tired mind was able to muster told him he had to sleep now, and maybe sleep even made sense. If Johnny was out here, the chances were good
he
was sleeping, too.

“Switch over to the day shift, Clayton,” he muttered. “You’re not going to find jackshit in the middle of the night with a flashlight.”

It was a small house—the home of an elderly couple, he thought, judging by the pictures in the living room and the single bedroom and the rails surrounding the toilet in the single bathroom. The bed was neatly made. He lay down on it without opening the covers, only taking off his shoes. And once he was down, the exhaustion seemed to settle on him like a weight. He could not imagine getting up for anything. There was a smell in the room, some old woman’s sachet, he thought. A grandmotherly smell. It seemed almost as tired as he felt. Lying here in this silence, the carnage at the Expo grounds seemed distant and unreal, like an idea for a comic he would never write. Too gruesome.
Stick with
Dark Wanderer, Sharon might have said—his old, sweet Sharon.
Stick with your apocalypse cowboys.

His mind seemed to rise and float above his body. It returned—lazily, without hurry—to the three of them standing beside the Tyco Water Purification van, just before Tom and Jordan had climbed back aboard. Jordan had repeated what he’d said back at Gaiten, about how human brains were really just big old hard drives, and the Pulse had wiped them clean. Jordan said the Pulse had acted on human brains like an EMP.

Nothing left but the core,
Jordan had said.
And the core was murder. But because brains are
organic
hard drives, they started to build themselves back up again. To reboot. Only there was a glitch in the signal-code. I don’t have proof, but I’m positive that the flocking behavior, the telepathy, the levitation… all that came from the glitch. The glitch was there from the start, so it became part of the reboot. Are you following this?

Clay had nodded. Tom had, too. The boy looking at them, his blood-smeared face tired and earnest.

But meanwhile, the Pulse keeps on pulsing, right? Because somewhere there’s a computer running on battery power, and it keeps running that program. The program’s rotten, so the glitch in it continues to mutate. Eventually the signal may quit or the program may get so rotten it’ll shut down. In the meantime, though… you might be able to use it. I say
might,
you got that? It all depends on whether or not brains do what seriously protected computers do when they’re hit with an EMP.

Tom had asked what that was. And Jordan had given him a wan smile.

They save to system. All data. If that happens with people, and if you could wipe the phoner program, the old programming might eventually reboot.

“He meant the human programming,” Clay murmured in the dark bedroom, smelling that sweet, faint aroma of sachet. “The human programming, saved somewhere way down deep. All of it.” He was going now, drifting off. If he was going to dream, he hoped it would not be of the carnage at the Northern Counties Expo.

His last thought before sleep took him was that maybe in the long run, the phoners would have been better. Yes, they had been born in violence and in horror, but birth was usually difficult, often violent, and sometimes horrible. Once they had begun flocking and mind-melding, the violence had subsided. So far as he knew, they
hadn’t
actually made war on the normies, unless one considered forcible conversion an act of war; the reprisals following the destruction of their flocks had been gruesome but perfectly understandable. If left alone, they might eventually have turned out to be better custodians of the earth than the so-called normies. They certainly wouldn’t have been falling all over themselves to buy gas-guzzling SUVs, not with their levitation skills (or with their rather primitive consumer appetites, for that matter). Hell, even their taste in music had been improving at the end.

But what choice did we have?
Clay thought.
Survival is like love. Both are blind.

Sleep took him then, and he didn’t dream of the slaughter at the Expo. He dreamed he was in a bingo tent, and as the caller announced B-12—
It’s the sunshine vitamin!
—he felt a tug on the leg of his pants. He looked under the table. Johnny was there, smiling up at him. And somewhere a phone was ringing.

3

Not all of the rage had gone out of the phoner refugees, nor had the wild talents entirely departed, either. Around noon of the next day, which was cold and raw, with a foretaste of November in the air, Clay stopped to watch two of them fighting furiously on the shoulder of the road. They punched, then clawed, then finally grappled together, butting heads and biting at each other’s cheeks and necks. As they did, they began to rise slowly off the road. Clay watched, mouth hanging open, as they attained a height of approximately ten feet, still fighting, their feet apart and braced, as if standing on an invisible floor. Then one of them sank his teeth into the nose of his opponent, who was wearing a ragged, bloodstained T-shirt with the words
HEAVY FUEL
printed across the front. Nose-Biter pushed
HEAVY FUEL
backward.
HEAVY FUEL
staggered, then dropped like a rock down a well. Blood streamed upward from his ruptured nose as he fell. Nose-Biter looked down, seemed to realize for the first time that he was a second story’s height above the road, and went down himself.
Like Dumbo losing his magic feather,
Clay thought. Nose-Biter wrenched his knee and lay in the dust, lips pulled back from his bloodstained teeth, snarling at Clay as he passed.

Yet these two were an exception. Most of the phoners Clay passed (he saw no normies at all that day or all the following week) seemed lost and bewildered with no flock mind to support them. Clay thought again and again of something Jordan had said before getting back in the van and heading into the north woods where there was no cell phone coverage:
If the worm’s continuing to mutate, their newest conversions aren’t going to be either phoners
or
normies, not really.

Clay thought that meant like Pixie Dark, only a little further gone.
Who are you? Who am I?
He could see these questions in their eyes, and he suspected—no, he
knew
—it was these questions they were trying to ask when they spouted their gibberish.

He continued to ask
Have you seen a boy
and to try to send Johnny’s picture, but he had no hope of an answer that made sense now. Most times he got no answer at all. He stayed the next night in a trailer about five miles north of Gurleyville, and the next morning at a little past nine he spied a small figure sitting on the curb outside the Gurleyville Cafe, in the middle of the town’s one-block business district.

It can’t be,
he thought, but he began to walk faster, and when he got a little closer—close enough to be almost sure that the figure was that of a child and not just a small adult—he began to run. His new pack began to bounce up and down on his back. His feet found the place where Gurleyville’s short length of sidewalk commenced and began clapping on the concrete.

It was a boy.

A very skinny boy with long hair almost down to the shoulders of his Red Sox T-shirt.

“Johnny!”
Clay shouted.
“Johnny, Johnny-Gee!”

The boy turned toward the sound of the shout, startled. His mouth hung open in a vacant gawp. There was nothing in his eyes but vague alarm. He looked as if he was thinking about running, but before he could even begin to put his legs in gear, Clay had swept him up and was covering his grimy, unresponsive face and slack mouth with kisses.

“Johnny,” Clay said. “Johnny, I came for you. I did. I came for you. I came for you.”

And at some point—perhaps only because the man holding him had begun to swing him around in a circle—the child put his hands around Clay’s neck and hung on. He said something, as well. Clay refused to believe it was empty vocalization, as meaningless as wind blowing across the mouth of an empty pop-bottle. It was a
word.
It might have been
tieey,
as if the boy was trying to say
tired.

Or it might have been
Dieey,
which was the way he had, as a sixteen-month-old, first named his father.

Clay chose to hang on to that. To believe the pallid, dirty, malnourished child clinging to his neck had called him Daddy.

4

It was little enough to hang on to, he thought a week later. One sound that might have been a word, one word that might have been
Daddy.
Now the boy was sleeping on a cot in a bedroom closet, because Johnny would settle there and because Clay was tired of fishing him out from under the bed. The almost womblike confines of the closet seemed to comfort him. Perhaps it was part of the conversion he and the others had been through. Some conversion. The phoners at Kashwak had turned his son into a haunted moron without even a flock for comfort.

Outside, under a gray evening sky, snow was spitting down. A cold wind sent it up Springvale’s lightless Main Street in undulating snakes. It seemed too early for snow, but of course it wasn’t, especially this far north. When it came before Thanksgiving you always griped, and when it came before Halloween you griped double, and then somebody reminded you that you were living in Maine, not on the isle of Capri.

He wondered where Tom, Jordan, Dan, and Denise were tonight. He wondered how Denise would do when it came time to have her baby. He thought she’d probably do okay—tough as a boiled owl, that one. He wondered if Tom and Jordan thought about him as often as he thought about them, and if they missed him as much as he missed them—Jordan’s solemn eyes, Tom’s ironic smile. He hadn’t seen half enough of that smile; what they’d been through hadn’t been all that funny.

He wondered if this last week with his broken son had been the loneliest of his life. He thought the answer to that was yes.

Clay looked down at the cell phone in his hand. More than anything else, he wondered about that. Whether to make one more call. There were bars on its little panel when he powered up, three good bars, but the charge wouldn’t last forever, and he knew it. Nor could he count on the Pulse to continue forever. The batteries sending the signal up to the corn-satellites (if that was what was happening, and if it
was
still happening) might give out. Or the Pulse might mutate into no more than a simple carrier wave, an idiot hum or the kind of high-pitched shriek you used to get when you called someone’s fax line by mistake.