Cell: A Novel (17 page)

Her mother reclined below the counter to the right of the stove, where the handsome cherrywood cabinets came together to form a corner. Her hands were ghost-white with flour and her bloody, bitten legs were indecorously splayed. Once, before starting work on a limited-run comic called
Battle Hell,
Clay had accessed a selection of fatal-gunshot photos on the Web, thinking there might be something he could use. There was not. Gunshot wounds spoke a terrible blank language of their own, and here it was again. Beth Nickerson was mostly spray and gristle from her left eye on up. Her right eye had drifted into the upper orbit of its socket, as if she had died trying to look into her own head. Her back hair and a good deal of her brain-matter was caked on the cherrywood cabinet against which she had leaned in her brief moments of dying. A few flies were buzzing around her.

Clay began to gag. He turned his head and covered his mouth. He told himself he had to control himself. In the other room Alice had stopped vomiting—in fact he could hear her and Tom talking together as they moved deeper into the house—and he didn’t want to get her going again.

Think of them as dummies, props in a movie,
he told himself, but he knew he could never do that.

When he looked back, he looked at the other things on the floor instead. That helped. The gun he had already seen. The kitchen was spacious and the gun was all the way on the other side, lying between the fridge and one of the cabinets with the barrel sticking out. His first impulse on seeing the dead woman and the dead girl had been to avert his eyes; they’d happened on the gun-barrel purely by accident.

But maybe I would have known there had to be a gun.

He even saw where it had been: a wall-mounted clip between the built-in TV and the industrial-size can-opener.
They were gadget-nuts as well as gun-nuts,
Tom had said, and a wall-mounted pistol in your kitchen just waiting to leap into your hand… why, if that wasn’t the best of both worlds, what was?

“Clay?” That was Alice. Coming from some distance.

“What?”

There followed the sound of feet quickly ascending a set of stairs, then Alice called from the living room. “Tom said you wanted to know if we hit paydirt. We just did. There must be a dozen guns downstairs in the den. Rifles and pistols both. They’re in a cabinet with an alarm-company sticker on it, so we’ll probably get arrested… that’s a joke. Are you coming?”

“In a minute, hon. Don’t come out here.”

“Don’t worry. Don’t
you
stay there and get grossed out.”

He was beyond grossed out, far beyond. There were two other objects lying on the bloody hardwood floor of the Nickerson kitchen. One was a rolling pin, which made sense. There was a pie tin, a mixing bowl, and a cheery yellow canister marked FLOUR sitting on the center island. The other object on the floor, this one lying not too distant from one of Heidi Nickerson’s hands, was a cell phone only a teenager could love, blue with big orange daisy decals plastered all over it.

Clay could
see
what had happened, little as he wanted to. Beth Nickerson is making a pie. Does she know something awful has started to happen in greater Boston, in America, maybe in the world? Is it on TV? If so, the TV didn’t send her a crazygram, Clay was sure of that.

Her daughter got one, though. Oh yes. And Heidi attacked her mother. Did Beth Nickerson try to reason with her daughter before driving her to the floor with a blow from the rolling pin, or did she just strike? Not in hate, but in pain and fear? In any case, it wasn’t enough. And Beth wasn’t wearing pants. She was wearing a jumper, and her legs were bare.

Clay pulled down the dead woman’s skirt. He did it gently, covering the plain working-at-home underwear that she had soiled at the end.

Heidi, surely no older than fourteen and perhaps only twelve, must have been growling in that savage nonsense-language they seemed to learn all at once after they got a full dose of Sane-B-Gone from their phones, saying things like
rast
and
eelah
and
kazzalah-CAN!
The first blow from the rolling pin had knocked her down but not out, and the mad girl had begun to work on her mother’s legs. Not little nips, either, but deep, searing bites, some that had driven all the way to the bone. Clay could see not only toothmarks but ghostly tattoos that must have been left by young Heidi’s braces. And so—probably screaming, undoubtedly in agony, almost certainly not aware of what she was doing—Beth Nickerson had struck again, this time much harder. Clay could almost hear the muffled crack as the girl’s neck broke. Beloved daughter, dead on the floor of the state-of-the-art kitchen, with braces on her teeth and her state-of-the-art cell phone by one outstretched hand.

And had her mother stopped to consider before popping the gun from its clip between the TV and the can-opener, where it had been waiting who knew how long for a burglar or rapist to appear in this clean, well-lighted kitchen? Clay thought not. Clay thought there would have been no pause, that she would have wanted to catch up with her daughter’s fleeing soul while the explanation for what she had done was still fresh on her lips.

Clay went to the gun and picked it up. From a gadget-boy like Arnie Nickerson he would have expected an automatic—maybe even one with a laser sight—but this was a plain old Colt .45 revolver. He supposed it made sense. His wife might feel more comfortable with this kind of gun; no nonsense about making sure it was loaded if the gun was needed (or wasting time fishing a clip out from behind the spatulas or spices if it wasn’t), then racking the slide to make sure there was a hot one in the chamber. No, with this old whore you just had to swing the barrel out, which Clay did with ease. He’d drawn a thousand variations of this very gun for Dark Wanderer. As he’d expected, only one of the six chambers was empty. He shook out one of the other loads, knowing just what he would find. Beth Nickerson’s .45 was loaded with highly illegal cop-killer bullets. Fraggers. No wonder the top of her head was gone. The wonder was that she had any left at all. He looked down at the remains of the woman leaning in the corner and began to cry.

“Clay?” That was Tom, coming up the stairs from the basement. “Man, Arnie had
everything!
There’s an automatic weapon that would have gotten him a stretch in Walpole, I bet… Clay? Are you all right?”

“I’m coming,” Clay said, wiping his eyes. He safetied the revolver and stuck it in his belt. Then he took off the knife and laid it on Beth Nickerson’s counter, still in its homemade scabbard. It seemed they were trading up. “Give me two more minutes.”

“Yo.”

Clay heard Tom clumping back to Arnie Nickerson’s downstairs armory and smiled in spite of the tears still running down his face. Here was something he would have to remember: give a nice little gay guy from Malden a roomful of guns to play with, he starts to say
yo
just like Sylvester Stallone.

Clay started going through drawers. In the third one he tried, he found a heavy red box marked
AMERICAN DEFENDER
.45 CALIBER
AMERICAN DEFENDER
50 ROUNDS. It was under the dishtowels. He put the box in his pocket and went to join Tom and Alice. He wanted to get out of here now, and as quickly as possible. The trick would be getting them to go without trying to take Arnie Nickerson’s entire gun collection along.

Halfway through the arch he paused and glanced back, holding the Coleman lantern high, looking at the bodies. Pulling down the skirt of the woman’s jumper hadn’t helped much. They were still just corpses, their wounds as naked as Noah when his son had come upon him in liquor. He could find something to cover them with, but once he started covering bodies, where would it end? Where? With Sharon? With his son?

“God forbid,” he whispered, but he doubted that God would simply because he asked. He lowered the lantern and followed the dancing glow of flashlights downstairs to Tom and Alice.

21

They both wore belts with large-caliber handguns in the holsters, and these
were
automatics. Tom had also slung an ammunition bandolier over his shoulder. Clay didn’t know whether to laugh or start crying again. Part of him felt like doing both at the same time. Of course if he did that, they would think he was having hysterics. And of course they would be right.

The plasma TV mounted on the wall down here was the big—very big—brother of the one in the kitchen. Another TV, only slightly smaller, had a multibrand videogame hookup Clay would, once upon a time, have loved to examine. To fawn over, maybe. As if to balance it off, a vintage Seeberg jukebox stood in the corner next to the Nickersons’ Ping-Pong table, all its fabulous colors dark and dead. And of course there were the gun cabinets, two of them, still locked but with their glass fronts broken.

“There were locking-bars, but he had a toolbox in his garage,” Tom said. “Alice used a wrench to break them off.”

“They were cookies,” Alice said modestly. “This was in the garage behind the toolbox, wrapped in a piece of blanket. Is it what I think it is?” She picked it up off the Ping-Pong table, holding it carefully by the wire stock, and carried it over to Clay.

“Holy shit,” he said. “This is…” He squinted at the embossing above the trigger-guard. “I think it’s Russian.”

“I’m sure it is,” Tom said. “Do you think it’s a Kalashnikov?”

“You got me. Are there bullets that match it? In boxes that match the printing on the gun, I mean?”

“Halfa dozen.
Heavy
boxes. It’s a machine gun, isn’t it?”

“You might as well call it that, I guess.” Clay flicked a lever. “I’m pretty sure one of these positions is single shot and the other is autofire.”

“How many rounds does it fire a minute?” Alice asked.

“I don’t know,” Clay said, “but I think it’s rounds per
second.”

“Whoa.”
Her eyes got round. “Can you figure out how to shoot it?”

“Alice—I’m pretty sure they teach sixteen-year-old farmboys how to shoot these. Yes, I can figure it out. It might take a box of ammo, but I can figure it out.”
Please God don’t let it blow up in my hands,
he thought.

“Is something like that legal in Massachusetts?” she asked.

“It is now, Alice,” Tom said, not smiling. “Is it time to go?”

“Yes,” she said, and then—perhaps still not entirely comfortable being the one to make the decisions—she looked at Clay.

“Yes,” he said. “North.”

“Fine with me,” Alice said.

“Yeah,” Tom said. “North. Let’s do it.”

GAITEN ACADEMY

1

When rainy daylight arose the next morning, Clay, Alice, and Tom were camped in the barn adjacent to an abandoned horse-farm in North Reading. They watched from the door as the first groups of crazyfolk began to appear, flocking southwest on Route 62 in the direction of Wilmington. Their clothes looked uniformly soaked and shabby. Some were without shoes. By noon they were gone. Around four, as the sun broke through the clouds in long, spoking rays, they began flocking back in the direction from which they had come. Many were munching as they walked. Some were helping those who were having a hard time walking on their own. If there were acts of murder today, Clay, Tom, and Alice did not see any.

Perhaps half a dozen of the crazies were lugging large objects that looked familiar to Clay; Alice had found one in the closet of Tom’s guest bedroom. The three of them had stood around it, afraid to turn it on.

“Clay?” Alice asked. “Why are some of them carrying boomboxes?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“I don’t like it,” Tom said. “I don’t like the flocking behavior, I don’t like them helping each other, and I like seeing them with those big portable sound-systems least of all.”

“There’s only a few with—” Clay began.

“Check her out, right there,” Tom interrupted, pointing to a middle-aged woman who was staggering up Highway 62 with a radio/CD player the size of a living room hassock cradled in her arms. She held it against her breasts as though it were a sleeping toddler. Its power-cord had come out of the little storage compartment in back and dragged beside her on the road. “And you don’t see any of them carrying lamps or toasters, do you? What if they’re programmed to set up battery-powered radios, turn them on, and start broadcasting that tone, pulse, subliminal message, whatever-it-is? What if they want to get the ones they missed the first time?”

They.
The ever-popular paranoid
they.
Alice had produced her little sneaker from somewhere and was squeezing it in her hand, but when she spoke, her voice was calm enough. “I don’t think that’s it,” she said.

“Why not?” Tom asked.

She shook her head. “I can’t say. Just that it doesn’t feel right.”

“Woman’s intuition?” He was smiling, but he wasn’t sneering.

“Maybe,” she said, “but I think one thing’s obvious.”

“What’s that, Alice?” Clay asked. He had an idea what she was going to say, and he was right.

“They’re getting smarter. Not on their own, but because they’re thinking together. Probably that sounds crazy, but I think it’s more likely than them collecting a big pile of battery-powered FM suitcases to blast us all into loony-land.”

“Telepathic group-think,” Tom said. He mulled it over. Alice watched him do it. Clay, who had already decided she was right, looked out the barn door at the last of the day. He was thinking they needed to stop somewhere and pick up a road-atlas.

Tom was nodding. “Hey, why not? After all, that’s probably what flocking
is:
telepathic group-think.”

“Do you really think so or are you just saying that to make me—”

“I really think so,” he said. He reached out and touched her hand, which was now squeezing the little sneaker rapidly. “I really really do. Give that thing a rest, will you?”

She gave him a fleeting, distracted smile. Clay saw it and thought again how beautiful she was, how really beautiful. And how close to breaking. “That hay looks soft and I’m tired. I think I’ll take a nice long nap.”

“Get down with your bad self,” Clay said.

2

Clay dreamed that he and Sharon and Johnny-Gee were having a picnic behind their little house in Kent Pond. Sharon had spread her Navajo blanket on the grass. They were having sandwiches and iced tea. Suddenly the day went dark. Sharon pointed over Clay’s shoulder and said, “Look! Telepaths!” But when he turned that way, he saw nothing but a flock of crows, one so huge it blotted out the sun. Then a tinkling began. It sounded like the Mister Softee truck playing the
Sesame Street
theme song, but he knew it was a ring-tone, and in his dream he was terrified. He turned back and Johnny-Gee was gone. When he asked Sharon where he was—already dreading, already knowing the answer—she said Johnny had gone under the blanket to answer his cell phone. There was a bump in the blanket. Clay dove under, into the overpowering smell of sweet hay, shouting for Johnny not to pick up, not to answer, reaching for him and finding instead only the cold curve of a glass ball: the paperweight he’d bought in Small Treasures, the one with the haze of dandelion fluff floating deep down inside like a pocket fog.

Then Tom was shaking him, telling him it was past nine by his watch, the moon was up, and if they were going to do some more walking they ought to get at it. Clay had never been so glad to wake up. On the whole, he preferred dreams of the Bingo Tent.

Alice was looking at him oddly.

“What?” Clay said, checking to make sure their automatic weapon was safetied—that was already becoming second nature to him.

“You were talking in your sleep. You were saying, ‘Don’t answer it, don’t answer it.’ ”

“Nobody
should have answered it,” Clay said. “We all would have been better off.”

“Ah, but who can resist a ringing phone?” Tom asked. “And there goes your ballgame.”

“Thus spake fuckin Zarathustra,” Clay said. Alice laughed until she cried.

3

With the moon racing in and out of the clouds—like an illustration in a boy’s novel of pirates and buried treasure, Clay thought—they left the horse-farm behind and resumed their walk north. That night they began to meet others of their own kind again.

Because this is our time now,
Clay thought, shifting the automatic rifle from one hand to the other. Fully loaded, it was damned heavy.
The phone-crazies own the days; when the stars come out, that’s us. We’re like vampires. We’ve been banished to the night. Up close we know each other because we can still talk; at a little distance we can be pretty sure of each other by the packs we wear and the guns more and more of us carry; but at a distance, the one sure sign is the waving flashlight beam. Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor’s guilt about all the other species we’d wiped out on our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we’re the Flashlight People.

He looked over at Tom. “Where do they go?” he asked. “Where do the crazies go after sundown?”

Tom gave him a look. “North Pole. All the elves died of mad reindeer disease and these guys are helping out until the new crop shows up.”

“Jesus,” Clay said, “did someone get up on the wrong side of the haystack tonight?”

But Tom still wouldn’t smile. “I’m thinking about my cat,” he said. “Wondering if he’s all right. No doubt you think that’s quite stupid.”

“No,” Clay said, although, having a son and a wife to worry about, he sort of did.

4

They got a road atlas in a card-and-book shop in the two-stoplight burg of Ballardvale. They were now traveling north, and very glad they had decided to stay in the more-or-less bucolic V between Interstates 93 and 95. The other travelers they met—most moving west, away from I-95—told of horrendous traffic-jams and terrible wrecks. One of the few pilgrims who was moving east said that a tanker had crashed near the Wakefield exit of I-93 and the resulting fire had caused a chain of explosions that had incinerated nearly a mile of northbound traffic. The stench, he said, was like “a fish-fry in hell.”

They met more Flashlight People as they trudged through the outskirts of Andover and heard a rumor so persistent it was now repeated with the assurance of fact: the New Hampshire border was closed. New Hampshire State Police and special deputies were shooting first and asking questions afterward. It didn’t matter to them whether you were crazy or sane.

“It’s just a new version of the fucking motto they’ve had on their fucking license plates since forever,” said a bitter-faced elderly man with whom they walked for a while. He was wearing a small pack over his expensive topcoat and carrying a long-barreled flashlight. Poking out of his topcoat pocket was the butt of a handgun. “If you’re
in
New Hampshire, you can live free. If you want to
come
to New Hampshire, you can fucking die.”

“That’s just… really hard to believe,” Alice said.

“Believe what you want, Missy,” said their temporary companion. “I met some people who tried to go north like you folks, and they turned back south in a hurry when they saw some people shot out of hand trying to cross into New Hampshire north of Dunstable.”

“When?” Clay asked.

“Last night.”

Clay thought of several other questions, but held his tongue instead. At Andover, the bitter-faced man and most of the other people with whom they had been sharing their vehicle-clogged (but passable) route turned onto Highway 133, toward Lowell and points west. Clay, Tom, and Alice were left on Andover’s main street—deserted except for a few flashlight-waving foragers—with a decision to make.

“Do you believe it?” Clay asked Alice.

“No,” she said, and looked at Tom.

Tom shook his head. “Me either. I thought the guy’s story had an alligators-in-the-sewers feel to it.”

Alice was nodding. “News doesn’t travel that fast anymore. Not without phones.”

“Yep,” Tom said. “Definitely the next-generation urban myth. Still, we
are
talking about what a friend of mine likes to call New Hamster.

Which is why I think we should cross the border at the most out-of-the-way spot we can find.“

“Sounds like a plan,” Alice said, and with that they moved on again, using the sidewalk as long as they were in town and there was a sidewalk to use.

5

On the outskirts of Andover, a man with a pair of flashlights rigged in a kind of harness (one light at each temple) stepped out through the broken display window of the IGA. He waved to them in companionable fashion, then picked a course toward them between a jumble of shopping carts, dropping canned goods into what looked like a newsboy’s pouch as he walked. He stopped beside a pickup truck lying on its side, introduced himself as Mr. Roscoe Handt of Methuen, and asked where they were going. When Clay told them Maine, Handt shook his head.

“New Hampshire border’s closed. I met two people not half an hour ago who got turned back. He said they’re trying to tell the difference between the phone-crazies and people like us, but they’re not trying too hard.”

“Did these two people actually see this with their own eyes?” Tom asked.

Roscoe Handt looked at Tom as though
he
might be crazy. “You got to trust the word of others, man,” he said. “I mean, you can’t exactly phone someone up and ask for verification, can you?” He paused. “They’re burning the bodies at Salem and Nashua, that’s what these folks told me. And it smells like a pig-roast. They told me that, too. I’ve got a party of five I’m taking west, and we want to make some miles before sunup. The way west is open.”

“That the word you’re hearing, is it?” Clay asked.

Handt looked at him with mild contempt. “That’s the word, all right. And a word to the wise is sufficient, my ma used to say. If you really mean to go north, make sure you get to the border in the middle of the night. The crazies don’t go out after dark.”

“We know,” Tom said.

The man with the flashlights affixed to the sides of his head ignored Tom and went on talking to Clay. He had pegged Clay as the trio’s leader. “And they don’t carry flashlights. Wave your flashlights back and forth. Talk.
Yell.
They don’t do those things, either. I doubt the people at the border will let you through, but if you’re lucky, they won’t shoot you, either.”

“They’re getting smarter,” Alice said. “You know that, don’t you, Mr. Handt?”

Handt snorted. “They’re traveling in packs and they’re not killing each other anymore. I don’t know if that makes them smarter or not. But they’re still killing
us,
I know that.”

Handt must have seen doubt on Clay’s face, because he smiled. His flashlights turned it into something unpleasant.

“I saw them catch a woman out this morning,” he said. “With my own eyes, okay?”

Clay nodded. “Okay.”

“I think I know why she was on the street. This was in Topsfield, about ten miles east of here? Me and my people, we were in a Motel 6. She was walking that way. Only not really walking. Hurrying. Almost running. Looking back over her shoulder. I saw her because I couldn’t sleep.” He shook his head. “Getting used to sleeping days is a bitch.”

Clay thought of telling Handt they’d all get used to it, then didn’t. He saw Alice was holding her talisman again. He didn’t want Alice hearing this and knew there was no way to keep her from it. Partly because it was survival information (and unlike the stuff about the New Hampshire state line, he was almost positive this was solid information); partly because the world was going to be full of stories like this for a while. If they listened to enough of them, some might eventually begin to line up and make patterns.

“Probably just looking for a better place to stay, you know? No more than that. Saw the Motel 6 and thought, ‘Hey, a room with a bed. Right up there by the Exxon station. Only a block away.’ But before she got even halfway, a bunch of them came around the corner. They were walking… you know how they walk now?”

Roscoe Handt walked toward them stiffly, like a tin soldier, with his newsboy’s bag swinging. That wasn’t how the phone-crazies walked, but they knew what he was trying to convey and nodded.

“And she…” He leaned back against the overturned truck and scrubbed briefly at his face with his hands. “This is what I want you to understand, okay? This is why you can’t get caught out, can’t get fooled that they’re getting normal because every now and then one or two of them has lucked into hitting the right controls on a boombox and started a CD playing—”