Cell: A Novel (12 page)

Except Boston was burning to the ground behind them. Liquor stores were being looted and men were beating each other bloody over aluminum kegs of beer. It had already come to that.

Tom, meanwhile, was watching him, letting him work it through… which meant that maybe Tom already had. Rafe jumped into his lap. Tom put his sandwich down and stroked the cat’s back.

“Tell you what,” Clay said. “If you’ve got a couple of comforters I can bundle up in, why don’t I spend the night out there on your porch? It’s enclosed, and it’s darker than the street. Which means that I’d likely see anyone coming long before they saw me watching. Especially if the ones coming were phone-crazies. They didn’t impress me as being into stealth.”

“Nope, not the creep-up-on-you type. What if people came from around in back? That’s Lynn Avenue just a block over.”

Clay shrugged, trying to indicate that they couldn’t defense against everything—or even very much—without saying so right out loud.

“All right,” Tom said, after eating a little more of his sandwich and feeding a scrap of ham to Rafe. “But you could come get me around three. If Alice hasn’t woken up by then, she might sleep right through.”

“Why don’t we just see how it goes,” Clay said. “Listen, I think I know the answer to this, but you don’t have a gun, do you?”

“No,” Tom said. “Not even a lonely can of Mace.” He looked at his sandwich and then put it down. When he raised his eyes to Clay’s, they were remarkably bleak. He spoke in a low voice, as people do when discussing secret things. “Do you remember what the cop said just before he shot that crazy man?”

Clay nodded.
Hey, buddy, how ya doin? I mean, what the haps?
He would never forget it.

“I knew it wasn’t like in the movies,” Tom said, “but I never suspected the enormous
power
of it, or the suddenness… and the sound when the stuff… the stuff from his head…”

He leaned forward suddenly, one small hand curled to his mouth. The movement startled Rafer, and the cat leaped down. Tom made three low, muscular urking sounds, and Clay steeled himself for the vomiting that was almost sure to follow. He could only hope he wouldn’t start vomiting himself, but he thought he might. He knew he was close, only a feather-tickle away. Because he knew what Tom was talking about. The gunshot, then the wet, ropy splatter on the cement.

There was no vomiting. Tom got control of himself and looked up, eyes watering. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Shouldn’t have gone there.”

“You don’t need to be sorry.”

“I think if we’re going to get through whatever’s ahead, we’d better find a way to put our finer sensibilities on hold. I think that people who can’t do that…” He stopped, then started again. “I think that people who can’t do that…” He stopped a second time. The third time he was able to finish. “I think that people who can’t do that may die.”

They stared at each other in the white glare of the Coleman lamp.

10

“Once we left the city, I didn’t see
anyone
with a gun,” Clay said. “At first I wasn’t really looking, and then I was.”

“You know why, don’t you? Except maybe for California, Massachusetts has got the toughest gun law in the country.”

Clay remembered seeing billboards proclaiming that at the state line a few years ago. Then they’d been replaced by ones saying that if you got picked up for driving under the influence, you’d have to spend a night in jail.

Tom said, “If the cops find a concealed handgun in your car—meaning like in the glove compartment with your registration and insurance card—they can put you away for I think seven years. Get stopped with a loaded rifle in your pickup, even in hunting season, and you could get slapped with a ten-thousand-dollar fine and two years of community service.” He picked up the remains of his sandwich, inspected it, put it back down again. “You can own a handgun and keep it in your home if you’re not a felon, but a license to carry? Maybe if you’ve got Father O’Malley of the Boys’ Club to cosign, but maybe not even then.”

“No guns might have saved some lives, coming out of the city.”

“I agree with you completely,” Tom said. “Those two guys fighting over the keg of beer? Thank
God
neither of them had a .38.”

Clay nodded.

Tom rocked back in his chair, crossed his arms on his narrow chest, and looked around. His glasses glinted. The circle of light thrown by the Coleman lantern was brilliant but small. “Right now, however, I wouldn’t mind having a pistol. Even after seeing the mess they make. And I consider myself a pacifist.”

“How long have you lived here, Tom?”

“Almost twelve years. Long enough to see Malden go a long way down the road to Shitsville. It’s not there yet, but boy, it’s going.”

“Okay, so think about it. Which of your neighbors is apt to have a gun or guns in their house?”

Tom answered promptly. “Arnie Nickerson, across the street and three houses up. NRA bumper sticker on his Camry—along with a couple of yellow ribbon decals and an old Bush-Cheney sticker—”

“Goes without saying—”

“And
two
NRA stickers on his pickup, which he equips with a camper cap in November and takes hunting up in your part of the world.”

“And we’re happy to have the revenue his out-of-state hunting license provides,” Clay said. “Let’s break into his house tomorrow and take his guns.”

Tom McCourt looked at him as though he were mad. “The man isn’t as paranoid as some of those militia types out in Utah—I mean, he
does
live in Taxachusetts—but he’s got one of those burglar alarm signs on his lawn that basically says DO YOU FEEL LUCKY, PUNK, and I’m sure you must be familiar with the NRA’s stated policy as to just when their guns will be taken away from them.”

“I think it has something to do with prying their cold dead fingers—”

“That’s the one.”

Clay leaned forward and stated what to him had been obvious from the moment they’d come down the ramp from Route One: Malden was now just one more fucked-up town in the Unicel States of America, and that country was now out of service, off the hook, so sorry, please try your call again later. Salem Street was deserted. He had felt that as they approached… hadn’t he?

No. Bullshit. You felt watched.

Really? And even if he had, was that the sort of intuition that could be relied upon,
acted upon,
after a day like this one? The idea was ridiculous.

“Tom, listen. One of us’ll walk up to this guy Nackleson’s house tomorrow, after it’s full daylight—”

“It’s Nickerson, and I don’t think that’s a very smart idea, especially since Swami McCourt sees him kneeling inside his living room window with a fully automatic rifle he’s been saving for the end of the world. Which seems to have rolled around.”

“I’ll do it,” Clay said. “And I
won’t
do it if we hear any gunshots from the Nickerson place tonight or tomorrow morning. I
certainly
won’t do it if I see any bodies on the guy’s lawn, with or without gunshot wounds. I watched all those old
Twilight Zone
episodes, too—the ones where civilization turns out to be nothing more than a thin layer of shellac.”

“If that,” Tom said gloomily. “Idi Amin, Pol Pot, the prosecution rests.”

“I’ll go with my hands raised. Ring the doorbell. If someone answers, I’ll say I just want to talk. What’s the worst that can happen? He tells me to get lost.”

“No, the worst that can happen is he can shoot you dead on his fucking welcome mat and leave me with a motherless teenage girl,” Tom said sharply. “Smart off about old
Twilight Zone
episodes all you want, just don’t forget those people you saw today, fighting outside the T station in Boston.”

“That was… I don’t know
what
it was, but those people were clinically insane. You can’t doubt that, Tom.”

“What about Bible-Thumping Bertha? And the two men fighting over the keg? Were they insane?”

No, of course they hadn’t been, but if there was a gun in that house across the street, he still wanted it. And if there was more than one, he wanted Tom and Alice each to have one, too.

“I’m thinking about going north over a hundred miles,” Clay said. “We might be able to boost a car and drive some of it, but we might have to walk the whole way. Do you want to go with just knives for protection? I’m asking you as one serious man to another, because some of the people we run into
are
going to have guns. I mean, you
know
that.”

“Yes,” Tom said. He ran his hands through his neatly trimmed hair, giving it a comic ruffle. “And I know that Arnie and Beth are probably not home. They were gadget-nuts as well as gun-nuts. He was always gabbing on his cell phone when he went by in that big Dodge Ram Detroit phallus of his.”

“See? There you go.”

Tom sighed. “All right. Depending on how things look in the morning. Okay?”

“Okay.” Clay picked up his sandwich again. He felt a little more like eating now.

“Where did they go?” Tom asked. “The ones you call the phone-crazies. Where did they go?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Tom said. “I think they crawled into the houses and the buildings around sundown and died.”

Clay looked at him doubtfully.

“Look at it reasonably and you’ll see I’m right,” Tom said. “This was almost certainly some sort of terrorist act, would you agree?”

“That seems the most likely explanation, although I’ll be damned if I know how any signal, no matter how subversive, could have been programmed to do what this one did.”

“Are you a scientist?”

“You know I’m not. I’m an artist.”

“So when the government tells you they can guide computerized smart-bombs through bunker doors in the floor of the desert from aircraft carriers that are maybe two thousand miles away, all you can do is look at the photos and accept that the technology exists.”

“Would Tom Clancy lie to me?” Clay asked, unsmiling.

“And if
that
technology exists, why not accept this one, at least on a provisional basis?”

“Okay, spell it out. Small words, please.”

“At about three o’clock this afternoon, a terrorist organization, maybe even a tinpot government, generated some sort of signal or pulse. For now we have to assume that this signal was carried by every cell phone operating in the entire world. We’ll hope that wasn’t the case, but for now I think we
have
to assume the worst.”

“Is it over?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “Do you want to pick up a cell phone and find out?”

“Touchy,” Clay said. “That’s how my little boy says
touché.” And please, God, how he’s still saying it.

“But if this group could transmit a signal that would send everyone hearing it insane,” Tom said, “isn’t it possible that the signal could also contain a directive for those receiving it to kill themselves five hours later? Or perhaps to simply go to sleep and stop breathing?”

“I would say that’s impossible.”

“I would have said a madman coming at me with a knife across from the Four Seasons Hotel was impossible,” Tom said. “Or Boston burning flat while the city’s entire population—that part of it lucky enough not to have cell phones, that is—left by the Mystic and the Zakim.”

He leaned forward, looking at Clay intently.
He wants to believe this,
Clay thought.
Don’t waste a lot of time trying to talk him out of it, because he really, really wants to.

“In a way, this is no different from the bioterrorism the government was so afraid of after nine-eleven,” he said. “By using cell phones, which have become the dominant form of communication in our daily lives, you simultaneously turn the populace into your own conscript army—an army that’s literally afraid of nothing, because it’s insane—and you break down the infrastructure. Where’s the National Guard tonight?”

“Iraq?” Clay ventured. “Louisiana?”

It wasn’t much of a joke and Tom didn’t smile. “It’s nowhere. How do you use a homeland force that now depends almost entirely on the cellular network to even
mobilize?
As for airplanes, the last one I’ve seen flying was the little one that crashed on the corner of Charles and Beacon.” He paused, then went on, looking straight across the table into Clay’s eyes. “All this they did… whoever
they
is. They looked at us from wherever it is they live and worship their gods, and what did they see?”

Clay shook his head, fascinated by Tom’s eyes, shining behind his spectacles. They were almost the eyes of a visionary.

“They saw we had built the Tower of Babel all over again… and on nothing but electronic cobwebs. And in a space of seconds, they brushed those cobwebs aside and our Tower fell. All this they did, and we three are like bugs that happened, by dumb dim luck alone, to have avoided the fall of a giant’s foot. All this they did, and you think they could not have encoded a signal telling the affected ones to simply fall asleep and stop breathing five hours later? What’s that trick, compared to the first one? Not much, I’d say.”

Clay said, “I’d say it’s time we got some sleep.”

For a moment Tom remained as he was, hunched across the table a little, looking at Clay as if unable to understand what Clay had said. Then he laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you’ve got a point. I get wound up. Sorry.”

“Not at all,” Clay said. “I hope you’re right about the crazies being dead.” He paused, then said: “I mean… unless my boy… Johnny-Gee…” He couldn’t finish. Partly or maybe mostly because if Johnny had tried to use his phone this afternoon and had gotten the same call as Pixie Light and Power Suit Woman, Clay wasn’t sure he wanted his son to still be alive.

Tom reached across the table to him and Clay took the other man’s delicate, long-fingered hand in both of his. He saw this happening as if he were outside his body, and when he spoke, he didn’t seem to be the one speaking, although he could feel his mouth moving and the tears that had begun to fall from his eyes.

“I’m so scared for him,” his mouth was saying. “I’m scared for both of them, but mostly for my kid.”