Cell: A Novel (14 page)

The old man had spied the ornamental wheelbarrow. He took his pumpkin to it, then seemed to register George, sitting there beside it. He looked at him, head cocked. George gestured with one orange-coated hand at the wheelbarrow, a gesture Clay had seen a thousand times.

“Be my guest,” Tom murmured. “I’ll be damned.”

The old man fell on his knees in the garden, a movement that obviously caused him considerable pain. He grimaced, raised his lined face to the brightening sky, and uttered a chuffing grunt. Then he lifted the pumpkin over the wheel. He studied the line of descent for several moments, elderly biceps trembling, and brought the pumpkin down, smashing it open. It fell in two meaty halves. What happened next happened fast. George dropped his own mostly eaten pumpkin in his lap, rocked forward, grabbed the old man’s head in his big, orange-stained hands, and twisted it. They heard the crack of the old man’s breaking neck even through the glass. His long white hair flew. His small spectacles disappeared into what Clay thought were beets. His body spasmed once, then went limp. George dropped it. Alice began to scream and Tom covered her mouth with his hand. Her eyes, bulging with terror, peered over the top of it. Outside in the garden, George picked up a fresh chunk of pumpkin and began calmly to eat.

The woman in the shredded blouse looked around for a moment, casually, then plucked another tomato and bit into it. Red juice ran from her chin and trickled down the dirty line of her throat. She and George sat there in Tom McCourt’s backyard garden, eating vegetables, and for some reason the name of one of his favorite paintings popped into Clay’s mind:
The Peaceable Kingdom.

He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until Tom looked at him bleakly and said: “Not anymore.”

13

The three of them were still standing there at the kitchen window five minutes later when an alarm began to bray at some distance. It sounded tired and hoarse, as though it would run down soon.

“Any idea what that might be?” Clay asked. In the garden, George had abandoned the pumpkins and dug up a large potato. This had brought him closer to the woman, but he showed no interest in her. At least not yet.

“My best guess would be that the generator at the Safeway in the Center just gave up,” Tom said. “There’s probably a battery-powered alarm in case that happens, because of all the perishables. But that’s only a guess. For all I know, it’s the First Malden Bank and T—”

“Look!” Alice said.

The woman stopped in the act of plucking another tomato, got up, and walked toward the east side of Tom’s house. George got to his feet as she passed, and Clay was sure he meant to kill her as he had the old man. He winced in anticipation and saw Tom reaching for Alice, to turn her away. But George only followed the woman, disappearing around the corner of the house behind her.

Alice turned and hurried toward the kitchen door.

“Don’t let them see you!” Tom called in a low, urgent voice, and went after her.

“Don’t worry,” she said.

Clay followed, worrying for all of them.

They reached the dining room door in time to watch the woman in her filthy pants suit and George in his even filthier coverall pass beyond the dining room window, their bodies broken into segments by Venetian blinds which had been dropped but not closed. Neither of them glanced toward the house, and now George was so close behind the woman that he could have bitten the nape of her neck. Alice, followed by Tom and Clay, moved up the hall to Tom’s little office. Here the blinds
were
closed, but Clay saw the projected shadows of the two outside pass swiftly across them. Alice went on up the hall, toward where the door to the enclosed porch stood open. The comforter lay half on and half off the couch, as Clay had left it. The porch was flooded with brilliant morning sunshine. It seemed to burn on the boards.

“Alice, be careful!” Clay said. “Be—”

But she had stopped. She was just looking. Then Tom was standing beside her, almost exactly the same height. Seen that way, they could have been brother and sister. Neither of them took any pains at all to avoid being seen.

“Holy fucking shit,” Tom said. He sounded as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Beside him, Alice began to cry. It was the sort of out-of-breath weeping a tired child might make. One who is becoming used to punishment.

Clay caught up. The woman in the pants suit was cutting across Tom’s lawn. George was still behind her, matching her stride for stride. They were almost in lockstep. That broke a little bit at the curb when George swung out to her left, becoming her wingman instead of her back door.

Salem Street was full of crazy people.

Clay’s first assessment was that there might be a thousand or more. Then the observer part of him took over—the coldhearted artist’s eye—and he realized that was a wild overestimate, prompted by surprise at seeing anyone at all on what he had expected would be an empty street, and shock at realizing they were all
them.
There was no mistaking the vacant faces, the eyes that seemed to look beyond everything, the dirty, bloody, disheveled clothing (in several cases no clothing at all), the occasional cawing cry or jerky gesture. There was the man dressed only in tighty-whity undershorts and a polo shirt who seemed to be saluting repeatedly; the heavyset woman whose lower lip was split and hung in two beefy flaps, revealing all of her lower teeth; the tall teenage boy in blue jeans shorts who walked up the center of Salem Street carrying what looked like a blood-caked tire-iron in one hand; an Indian or Pakistani gentleman who passed Tom’s house wriggling his jaw from side to side and simultaneously chattering his teeth; a boy—dear God, a boy Johnny’s age—who walked with absolutely no sign of pain although one arm was flapping below the knob of his dislocated shoulder; a pretty young woman in a short skirt and a shell top who appeared to be eating from the red stomach of a crow. Some moaned, some made vocal noises that might once have been words, and all were moving east. Clay had no idea if they were being drawn by the braying alarm or the smell of food, but they were all walking in the direction of Malden Center.

“Christ, it’s zombie heaven,” Tom said.

Clay didn’t bother answering. The people out there weren’t exactly zombies, but Tom was pretty close, just the same.
If any of them looks over here, sees us and decides to come after us, we’re done. We won’t have a hope in hell. Not even if we barricade ourselves in the cellar. And getting those guns across the street? You can forget that.

The idea that his wife and son might be—very likely
were
—having to deal with creatures such as these filled him with dread. But this was no comic book and he was no hero: he was helpless. The three of them might be safe in the house, but as far as the immediate future was concerned, it didn’t look like he and Tom and Alice were going anywhere.

14

“They’re like birds,” Alice said. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands. “A flock of birds.”

Clay saw what she meant at once and gave her an impulsive hug. She had put her finger on something that had first struck him as he’d watched George the mechanic follow the woman instead of killing her, as he had the old man. The two of them clearly vacant in the upper story, yet seeming to go out front by some unspoken agreement.

“I don’t get it,” Tom said.

“You must have missed
March of the Penguins,”
Alice said.

“Actually, I did,” Tom said. “When I want to see someone waddle in a tuxedo, I go to a French restaurant.”

“But haven’t you ever noticed the way birds are, especially in the spring and fall?” Clay asked. “You must have. They’ll all light in the same tree or along the same telephone wire—”

“Sometimes so many they make it sag,” Alice said. “Then they all fly at once. My dad says they must have a group leader, but Mr. Sullivan in Earth Science—back in middle school, this was—told us it was a flock-mind thing, like ants all going out from a hill or bees from a hive.”

“The flock swoops right or left, all at the same time, and the individual birds never hit each other,” Clay said. “Sometimes the sky’s black with them and the noise is enough to drive you nuts.” He paused. “At least out in the country, where I live.” He paused again. “Tom, do you… do you recognize any of those people?”

“A few. That’s Mr. Potowami, from the bakery,” he said, pointing to the Indian man who was wriggling his jaw and chattering his teeth. “That pretty young woman… I believe she works in the bank. And do you remember me mentioning Scottoni, the man who lives on the other side of the block from me?”

Clay nodded.

Tom, now very pale, pointed to a visibly pregnant woman dressed only in a food-stained smock that came down to her upper thighs. Blond hair hung against her pimply cheeks, and a stud gleamed in her nose. “That’s his daughter-in-law,” he said. “Judy. She has gone out of her way to be kind to me.” He added in a dry, matter-of-fact tone: “This breaks my heart.”

From the direction of the town center there came a loud gunshot. Alice cried out, but this time Tom didn’t have to cover her mouth; she did it herself. None of the people in the street glanced over, in any case. Nor did the report—Clay thought it had been a shotgun—seem to disturb them. They just kept walking, no faster and no slower. Clay waited for another shot. Instead there was a scream, very brief, there and gone, as if cut off.

The three standing in the shadows just beyond the porch went on watching, not talking. All of the people who passed were going east, and although they did not precisely walk in formation, there was an unmistakable order about them. For Clay it was best expressed not in his view of the phone-crazies themselves, who often limped and sometimes shambled, who gibbered and made odd gestures, but in the silent, ordered passage of their shadows on the pavement. They made him think of World War II newsreel footage he’d seen, where wave after wave of bombers flew across the sky. He counted two hundred and fifty before giving up. Men, women, teenagers. Quite a few children Johnny’s age, too. Far more children than old people, although he saw only a few kids younger than ten. He didn’t like to think of what must have happened to the little guys and gals who’d had no one to take care of them when the Pulse occurred.

Or the little guys and gals who’d been in the care of people with cell phones.

As for the vacant-eyed children he could see, Clay wondered how many now passing before him had pestered their parents for cell phones with special ring-tones last year, as Johnny had.

“One mind,” Tom said presently. “Do you really believe that?”

“
I
sort of do,” Alice said. “Because… like… what mind do they have on their own?”

“She’s right,” Clay said.

The migration (once you’d seen it that way it was hard to think of it as anything else) thinned but didn’t stop, even after half an hour; three men would pass walking abreast—one in a bowling shirt, one in the remains of a suit, one with his lower face mostly obliterated in a cake of dried gore—and then two men and a woman walking in a half-assed conga line, then a middle-aged woman who looked like a librarian (if you ignored one bare breast wagging in the wind, that was) walking in tandem with a half-grown, gawky girl who might have been a library aide. There would be a pause and then a dozen more would come, seeming almost to form a kind of hollow square, like a fighting unit from the Napoleonic Wars. And in the distance Clay began to hear warlike sounds—a sporadic rattle of rifle-or pistol-fire and once (and close, maybe from neighboring Medford or right here in Maiden) the long, ripping roar of a large-caliber automatic weapon. Also, more screams. Most were distant, but Clay was pretty sure that was what they were.

There were still other sane people around these parts, plenty of them, and some
had
managed to get their hands on guns. Those people were very likely having themselves a phoner-shoot. Others, however, had not been lucky enough to have been indoors when the sun came up and the crazies came out. He thought of George the mechanic gripping the old man’s head in his orange hands, the twist, the snap, the little reading glasses flying into the beets where they would stay. And stay. And stay.

“I think I want to go into the living room and sit down,” Alice said. “I don’t want to look at them anymore. Listen, either. It makes me sick.”

“Sure,” Clay said. “Tom, why don’t you—?”

“No,” Tom said. “You go. I’ll stay here and watch for a while. I think one of us
ought
to watch, don’t you?”

Clay nodded. He did.

“Then, in an hour or so, you can spell me. Turn and turn about.”

“Okay. Done.”

As they started back down the hall, Clay with his arm around Alice’s shoulders, Tom said: “One thing.”

They looked back at him.

“I think we all ought to try and get as much rest as possible today. If we’re still planning on going north, that is.”

Clay looked at him closely to make sure Tom was still in his right mind. He appeared to be, but—

“Have you been seeing what’s going on out there?” he asked. “Hearing the shooting? The…” He didn’t want to say
the screams
with Alice there, although God knew it was a little late to be trying to protect her remaining sensibilities. “… the yelling?”

“Of course,” Tom said. “But the nutters went inside
last
night, didn’t they?”

For a moment neither Clay nor Alice moved. Then Alice began to pat her hands together in soft, almost silent applause. And Clay began to smile. The smile felt stiff and unfamiliar on his face, and the hope that went with it was almost painful.

“Tom, you might just be a genius,” he said.

Tom did not return the smile. “Don’t count on it,” he said. “I never broke a thousand on the SATs.”

15

Clearly feeling better—and that had to be a good thing, Clay reckoned—Alice went upstairs to poke around in Tom’s clothes for daywear. Clay sat on the couch, thinking about Sharon and Johnny, trying to decide what they would have done and where they would have gone, always supposing they’d been fortunate enough to get together. He fell into a doze and saw them clearly at Kent Pond Elementary, Sharon’s school. They were barricaded in the gym with two or three dozen others, eating sandwiches from the cafeteria and drinking those little cartons of milk. They—