Cell: A Novel (13 page)

“It’ll be all right,” Tom said, and Clay knew he meant well, but the words struck terror into his heart just the same, because it was just one of those things you said when there was really nothing else. Like
You’ll get over it
or
He’s in a better place.

11

Alice’s shrieks woke Clay from a confused but not unpleasant dream of being in the Bingo Tent at the Akron State Fair. In the dream he was six again—maybe even younger but surely no older—and crouched beneath the long table where his mother was seated, looking at a forest of lady-legs and smelling sweet sawdust while the caller intoned, “B-12, players, B-12! It’s the
sunshine
vitamin!”

There was one moment when his subconscious mind tried to integrate the girl’s cries into the dream by insisting he was hearing the Saturday noon whistle, but only a moment. Clay had let himself go to sleep on Tom’s porch after an hour of watching because he was convinced that nothing was going to happen out there, at least not tonight. But he must have been equally convinced that Alice wouldn’t sleep through, because there was no real confusion once his mind identified her shrieks for what they were, no groping for where he was or what was going on. At one moment he was a small boy crouching under a bingo table in Ohio; at the next he was rolling off the comfortably long couch on Tom McCourt’s enclosed front porch with the comforter still wrapped around his lower legs. And somewhere in the house, Alice Maxwell, howling in a register almost high enough to burst crystal, articulated all the horror of the day just past, insisting with one scream after another that such things surely could not have happened and must be denied.

Clay tried to rid his lower legs of the comforter and at first it wouldn’t let go. He found himself hopping toward the inside door and pulling at it in a kind of panic while he looked out at Salem Street, sure that lights would start going on up and down the block even though he knew the power was out, sure that someone—maybe the gun-owning, gadget-loving Mr. Nickerson from up the street—would come out on his lawn and yell for someone to for chrissake shut that kid up.
Don’t make me come down there!
Arnie Nickerson would yell.
Don’t make me come down there and shoot her!

Or her screams would draw the phone-crazies like moths to a bug light. Tom might think they were dead, but Clay believed it no more than he believed in Santa’s workshop at the North Pole.

But Salem Street—their block of it, anyway, just west of the town center and below the part of Maiden Tom had called Granada Highlands—remained dark and silent and without movement. Even the glow of the fire from Revere seemed to have diminished.

Clay finally rid himself of the comforter and went inside and stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up into the blackness. Now he could hear Tom’s voice—not the words, but the tone, low and calm and soothing. The girl’s chilling shrieks began to be broken up by gasps for breath, then by sobs and inarticulate cries that became words. Clay caught one of them,
nightmare.
Tom’s voice went on and on, telling lies in a reassuring drone: everything was all right, she would see, things would look better in the morning. Clay could picture them sitting side by side on the guestroom bed, each dressed in a pair of pajamas with
TM
monograms on the breast pockets. He could have drawn them like that. The idea made him smile.

When he was convinced she wasn’t going to resume screaming, he went back to the porch, which was a bit chilly but not uncomfortable once he was wrapped up snugly in the comforter. He sat on the couch, surveying what he could see of the street. To the left, east of Tom’s house, was a business district. He thought he could see the traffic light marking the entrance into the town square. The other way—which was the way they’d come—more houses. All of them still in this deep trench of night.

“Where are you?” he murmured. “Some of you headed north or west, and still in your right minds. But where did the rest of you go?”

No answer from the street. Hell, maybe Tom was right—the cell phones had sent them a message to go crazy at three and drop dead at eight. It seemed too good to be true, but he remembered feeling the same way about recordable CDs.

Silence from the street in front of him; silence from the house behind him. After a while, Clay leaned back on the couch and let his eyes close. He thought he might doze, but doubted he would actually go to sleep again. Eventually, however, he did, and this time there were no dreams. Once, shortly before first light, a mongrel dog came up Tom McCourt’s front walk, looked in at him as he lay snoring in his cocoon of comforter, and then moved on. It was in no hurry; pickings were rich in Malden that morning and would be for some time to come.

12

“Clay. Wake up.”

A hand, shaking him. Clay opened his eyes and saw Tom, dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a gray work-shirt, bending over him. The front porch was lit by strong pale light. Clay glanced at his wristwatch as he swung his feet off the couch and saw it was twenty past six.

“You need to see this,” Tom said. He looked pale, anxious, and grizzled on both sides of his mustache. The tail of his shirt was untucked on one side and his hair was still standing up in back.

Clay looked at Salem Street, saw a dog with something in its mouth trotting past a couple of dead cars half a block west, saw nothing else moving. He could smell a faint smoky funk in the air and supposed it was either Boston or Revere. Maybe both, but at least the wind had died. He turned his gaze to Tom.

“Not out here,” Tom said. He kept his voice low. “In the backyard. I saw when I went in the kitchen to make coffee before I remembered coffee’s out, at least for the time being. Maybe it’s nothing, but… man, I don’t like this.”

“Is Alice still sleeping?” Clay was groping under the comforter for his socks.

“Yes, and that’s good. Never mind your socks and shoes, this ain’t dinner at the Ritz. Come on.”

He followed Tom, who was wearing a pair of comfortable-looking scuffs, down the hall to the kitchen. A half-finished glass of iced tea was standing on the counter.

Tom said, “I can’t get started without some caffeine in the morning, you know? So I poured myself a glass of that stuff—help yourself, by the way, it’s still nice and cold—and I pushed back the curtain over the sink to take a look out at my garden. No reason, just wanted to touch base with the outside world. And I saw… but look for yourself.”

Clay peered out through the window over the sink. There was a neat little brick patio behind the house with a gas grill on it. Beyond the patio was Tom’s yard, half-grass and half-garden. At the back was a high board fence with a gate in it. The gate was open. The bolt holding it closed must have been shot across because it now hung askew, looking to Clay like a broken wrist. It occurred to him that Tom could have made coffee on the gas grill, if not for the man sitting in his garden beside what had to be an ornamental wheelbarrow, eating the soft inside of a split pumpkin and spitting out the seeds. He was wearing a mechanic’s coverall and a greasy cap with a faded letter
B
on it. Written in faded red script on the left breast of his coverall was
George.
Clay could hear the soft smooching sounds his face made every time he dove into the pumpkin.

“Fuck,” Clay said in a low voice. “It’s one of them.”

“Yes. And where there’s one there’ll be more.”

“Did he break the gate to get in?”

“Of course he did,” Tom said. “I didn’t see him do it, but it was locked when I left yesterday, you can depend on that. I don’t have the world’s best relationship with Scottoni, the guy who lives on the other side. He has no use for ‘fellas like me,’ as he’s told me on several occasions.” He paused, then went on in a lower voice. He had been speaking quietly to begin with, and now Clay had to lean toward him to hear him. “You know what’s crazy? I
know
that guy. He works at Sonny’s Texaco, down in the Center. It’s the only gas station in town that still does repairs. Or did. He replaced a radiator hose for me once. Told me about how he and his brother made a trip to Yankee Stadium last year, saw Curt Schilling beat the Big Unit. Seemed like a nice enough guy. Now look at him! Sitting in my garden eating a raw pumpkin!”

“What’s going on, you guys?” Alice asked from behind them.

Tom turned around, looking dismayed. “You don’t want to see this,” he said.

“That won’t work,” Clay said. “She’s got to see it.”

He smiled at Alice, and it wasn’t that hard to smile. There was no monogram on the pocket of the pajamas Tom had loaned her, but they were blue, just as he had imagined, and she looked most dreadfully cute in them, with her feet bare and the pants legs rolled up to her shins and her hair tousled with sleep. In spite of her nightmares, she looked better rested than Tom. Clay was willing to bet she looked better rested than he did, too.

“It’s not a car wreck, or anything,” he said. “Just a guy eating a pumpkin in Tom’s backyard.”

She stood between them, putting her hands on the lip of the sink and rising up on the balls of her feet to look out. Her arm brushed Clay’s, and he could feel the sleep-warmth still radiating from her skin. She looked for a long time, then turned to Tom.

“You said they all killed themselves,” she said, and Clay couldn’t tell if she was accusing or mock scolding.
She probably doesn’t know herself,
he thought.

“I didn’t say for sure,” Tom replied, sounding lame.

“You sounded pretty sure to me.” She looked out again. At least, Clay thought, she wasn’t freaking out. In fact he thought she looked remarkably composed—if a little Chaplinesque—in her slightly outsize pajamas. “Uh… guys?”

“What?” they said together.

“Look at the little wheelbarrow he’s sitting next to. Look at the wheel.”

Clay had already seen what she was talking about—the litter of pumpkin-shell, pumpkin-meat, and pumpkin seeds.

“He smashed the pumpkin on the wheel to break it open and get to what’s inside,” Alice said. “I guess he’s one of them—”

“Oh, he’s one of them, all right,” Clay said. George the mechanic was sitting in the garden with his legs apart, allowing Clay to see that since yesterday afternoon he’d forgotten all his mother had taught him about dropping trou before you did number one.

“—but he used that wheel as a
tool.
That doesn’t seem so crazy to me.”

“One of them was using a knife yesterday,” Tom said. “And there was another guy jabbing a couple of car aerials.”

“Yes, but… this seems different, somehow.”

“More peaceful, you mean?” Tom glanced back at the intruder in his garden. “I wouldn’t want to go out there and find out.”

“No, not that. I don’t mean peaceful. I don’t know exactly how to explain it.”

Clay thought he had an idea of what she was talking about. The aggression they had witnessed yesterday had been a blind, forward-rushing thing. An anything-that-comes-to-hand thing. Yes, there had been the businessman with the knife and the muscular young guy jabbing the car aerials in the air as he ran, but there had also been the man in the park who’d torn off the dog’s ear with his teeth. Pixie Light had also used her teeth. This seemed a lot different, and not just because it was about eating instead of killing. But like Alice, Clay couldn’t put his finger on just
how
it was different.

“Oh God, two more,” Alice said.

Through the open back gate came a woman of about forty in a dirty gray pants suit and an elderly man dressed in jogging shorts and a T-shirt with
GRAY POWER
printed across the front. The woman in the pants suit had been wearing a green blouse that now hung in tatters, revealing the cups of a pale green bra beneath. The elderly man was limping badly, throwing his elbows out in a kind of buck-and-wing with each step to keep his balance. His scrawny left leg was caked with dried blood, and that foot was missing its running shoe. The remains of an athletic sock, grimed with dirt and blood, flapped from his left ankle. The elderly man’s longish white hair hung around his vacant face in a kind of cowl. The woman in the pants suit was making a repetitive noise that sounded like
“Goom! Goom!”
as she surveyed the yard and the garden. She looked at George the Pumpkin Eater as though he were of no account at all, then strode past him toward the remaining cucumbers. Here she knelt, snatched one from its vine, and began to munch. The old man in the
GRAY POWER
shirt marched to the edge of the garden and then only stood there awhile like a robot that has finally run out of juice. He was wearing tiny gold glasses—reading glasses, Clay thought—that gleamed in the early light. He looked to Clay like someone who had once been very smart and was now very stupid.

The three people in the kitchen crowded together, staring out the window, hardly breathing.

The old man’s gaze settled on George, who threw away a piece of pumpkin-shell, examined the rest, and then plowed his face back in and resumed his breakfast. Far from behaving aggressively toward the newcomers, he seemed not to notice them at all.

The old man limped forward, bent, and began to tug at a pumpkin the size of a soccer ball. He was less than three feet from George. Clay, remembering the pitched battle outside the T station, held his breath and waited.

He felt Alice grasp his arm. All the sleep-warmth had departed her hand. “What’s he going to do?” she asked in a low voice.

Clay only shook his head.

The old man tried to bite the pumpkin and only bumped his nose. It should have been funny but wasn’t. His glasses were knocked askew and he pushed them back into place. It was a gesture so normal that for a brief moment Clay felt all but positive that
he
was the one who was crazy.

“Goom!”
cried the woman in the tattered blouse, and threw away her half-eaten cucumber. She had spied a few late tomatoes and crawled toward them with her hair hanging in her face. The seat of her pants was badly soiled.