Cell: A Novel (36 page)

Tom ignored it and put his arms around Clay. He kissed him first on one cheek, then the other. “You saved my life,” he whispered into Clay’s ear. His breath was hot and ticklish. His cheek rasped against Clay’s. “Let me save yours. Come with us.”

“I can’t, Tom. I have to do this.”

Tom stood back and looked at him. “I know,” he said. “I know you do.” He wiped his eyes. “Goddam, I
suck
at goodbyes. I couldn’t even say goodbye to my fucking
cat.
”

11

Clay stood beside the junction sign and watched their lights dwindle. He kept his eyes fixed on Jordan’s, and it was the last to disappear. For a moment or two it was alone at the top of the first hill to the west, a single small spark in the black, as if Jordan had paused there to look back. It seemed to wave. Then it was also gone, and the darkness was complete. Clay sighed—an unsteady, tearful sound—then shouldered his own pack and started walking north along the dirt shoulder of Route 11. Around quarter to four he crossed the North Berwick town line and left Kent Pond behind.

PHONE-BINGO

1

There was no reason not to resume a more normal life and start traveling days; Clay knew the phone-people wouldn’t hurt him. He was off-limits and they actually
wanted
him up there in Kashwak. The problem was he’d become habituated to a nighttime existence.
All I need is a coffin and a cape to wrap around myself when I lie down in it,
he thought.

When dawn came up red and cold on the morning after his parting from Tom and Jordan, he was on the outskirts of Springvale. There was a little house, probably a caretaker’s cottage, next to the Springvale Logging Museum. It looked cozy. Clay forced the lock on the side door and let himself in. He was delighted to find both a woodstove and a hand-pump in the kitchen. There was also a shipshape little pantry, well stocked and untouched by foragers. He celebrated this find with a large bowl of oatmeal, using powdered milk, adding heaps of sugar, and sprinkling raisins on top.

In the pantry he also found concentrated bacon and eggs in foil packets, stored as neatly on their shelf as paperback books. He cooked one of these and stuffed his pack with the rest. It was a much better meal than he had expected, and once in the back bedroom, Clay fell asleep almost immediately.

2

There were long tents on both sides of the highway.

This wasn’t Route 11 with its farms and towns and open fields, with its pump-equipped convenience store every fifteen miles or so, but a highway somewhere out in the williwags. Deep woods crowded all the way up to the roadside ditches. People stood in long lines on both sides of the white center-stripe.

Left and right,
an amplified voice was calling.
Left and right, form two lines.

It sounded a little like the amplified voice of the bingo-caller at the Akron State Fair, but as Clay drew closer, walking up the road’s center-stripe, he realized all the amplification was going on in his head. It was the voice of the Raggedy Man. Only the Raggedy Man was just a—what had Dan called him?—just a pseudopod. And what Clay was hearing was the voice of the flock.

Left and right, two lines, that’s correct. That’s doing it.

Where am I? Why doesn’t anybody look at me, say “Hey buddy, no cutting in front, wait your turn”?

Up ahead the two lines curved off to either side like turnpike exit ramps, one going into the tent on the left side of the road, one going into the tent on the right. They were the kind of long tents caterers put up to shade outdoor buffets on hot afternoons. Clay could see that just before each line reached the tents, the people were splitting into ten or a dozen shorter lines. Those people looked like fans waiting to have their tickets ripped so they could go into a concert venue.

Standing in the middle of the road at the point where the double line split and curved off to the right and the left, still wearing his threadbare red hoodie, was the Raggedy Man himself.

Left and right, ladies and gentlemen.
Mouth not moving. Telepathy that was all jacked up, amped by the power of the flock.
Move right along. Everyone gets a chance to call a loved one before you go into the no-fo zone.

That gave Clay a shock, but it was the shock of the known—like the punchline of a good joke you’d heard for the first time ten or twenty years ago. “Where is this?” he asked the Raggedy Man. “What are you doing? What the hell is going on?”

But the Raggedy Man didn’t look at him, and of course Clay knew why. This was where Route 160 entered Kashwak, and he was visiting it in a dream. As for what was going on…

It’s phone-bingo,
he thought.
It’s phone-bingo, and those are the tents where the game is played.

Let’s keep it moving, ladies and gents,
the Raggedy Man sent.
We’ve got two hours until sunset, and we want to process as many of you as we can before we have to quit for the night.

Process.

Was
this a dream?

Clay followed the line curving toward the pavilion-style tent on the left side of the road, knowing what he was going to see even before he saw it. At the head of each shorter line stood one of the phone-people, those connoisseurs of Lawrence Welk, Dean Martin, and Debby Boone. As each person in line reached the front, the waiting usher—dressed in filthy clothes, often much more horribly disfigured by the survival-struggles of the last eleven days than the Raggedy Man—would hold out a cell phone.

As Clay watched, the man closest to him took the offered phone, punched it three times, then held it eagerly to his ear. “Hello?” he said. “Hello, Ma?
Ma?
Are you th—” Then he fell silent. His eyes emptied and slackness loosened his face. The cell sagged away from his ear slightly. The facilitator—that was the best word Clay could think of—took the phone back, gave the man a push to start him forward, and motioned for the next person in line to step forward.

Left and right,
the Raggedy Man was calling.
Keep it moving.

The guy who’d been trying to call his mom plodded out from beneath the pavilion. Beyond it, Clay saw, hundreds of other people were milling around. Sometimes someone would get in someone else’s way and there would be a little weak slapping. Nothing like before, however. Because—

Because the signal’s been modified.

Left and right, ladies and gentlemen, keep it moving, we’ve got a lot of you to get through before dark.

Clay saw Johnny. He was wearing jeans, his Little League hat, and his favorite Red Sox T-shirt, the one with Tim Wakefield’s name and number on the back. He had just reached the head of the line two stations down from where Clay was standing.

Clay ran for him, but at first his path was blocked. “Get out of my way!” he shouted, but of course the man in his way, who was shuffling nervously from foot to foot as if he needed to go to the bathroom, couldn’t hear him. This was a dream and besides, Clay was a normie—he had no telepathy.

He darted between the restless man and the woman behind him. He pushed through the next line as well, too fixated on reaching Johnny to know if the people he was pushing had substance or not. He reached Johnny just as a woman—he saw with mounting horror that it was Mr. Scottoni’s daughter-in-law, still pregnant but now missing an eye—handed the boy a Motorola cell phone.

Just dial 911,
she said without moving her mouth.
All calls go through 911.

“No, Johnny, don’t!”
Clay shouted, and grabbed for the phone as Johnny-Gee began punching in the number, surely one he’d been taught long ago to call if he was ever in trouble.
“Don’t do that!”

Johnny turned to his left, as if to shield his call from the pregnant facilitator’s one dully staring eye, and Clay missed. He probably couldn’t have stopped Johnny in any case. This was a dream, after all.

Johnny finished (punching three keys didn’t take long), pushed the SEND button, and put the phone to his ear. “Hello? Dad? Dad, are you there? Can you hear me? If you can hear
me, please come get m
—” Turned away as he was, Clay could only see one of his son’s eyes, but one was enough when you were watching the lights go out. Johnny’s shoulders slumped. The phone sagged away from his ear. Mr. Scottoni’s daughter-in-law snatched the phone from him with a dirty hand, then gave Johnny-Gee an unloving push on the back of the neck to get him moving into Kashwak, along with all the others who had come here to be safe. She motioned for the next person in line to come forward and make his call.

Left and right, form two lines,
the Raggedy Man thundered in the middle of Clay’s head, and he woke up screaming his son’s name in the caretaker’s cottage as late-afternoon light streamed in the windows.

3

At midnight Clay reached the little town of North Shapleigh. By then a nasty cold rain that was almost sleet—what Sharon had called “Slurpee rain”—had begun to fall. He heard oncoming motors and stepped off the highway (still good old Route 11; no dream highway here) onto the tarmac of a 7-Eleven store. When the headlights showed, turning the drizzle to silver lines, it was a pair of sprinters running side by side, actually racing in the dark. Madness. Clay stood behind a gas pump, not exactly hiding but not going out of his way to be seen, either. He watched them fly past like a vision of the gone world, sending up thin sprays of water. One of the racers looked like a vintage Corvette, although with only a single failing emergency light on the corner of the store to see by, it was impossible to tell for sure. The racers shot beneath North Shapleigh’s entire traffic-control system (a dead blinker), were neon cherries in the dark for a moment, then were gone.

Clay thought again:
Madness.
And as he swung back onto the shoulder of the road:
You’re a fine one to talk about madness.

True. Because his phone-bingo dream
hadn’t
been a dream, or not entirely a dream. He was sure of it. The phoners were using their strengthening telepathic abilities to keep track of as many of the flock-killers as they could. That only made sense. They might have a problem with groups like Dan Hartwick’s, ones that actually tried to fight them, but he doubted if they were having any trouble with him. The thing was, the telepathy was also oddly like a phone—it seemed to work both ways. Which made him… what? The ghost in the machine? Something like that. While they were keeping an eye on him, he was able to keep an eye on
them.
At least in his sleep. In his dreams.

Were there actual tents at the Kashwak border, with normies lining up to get their brains blasted? Clay thought there were, both in Kashwak and places
like
Kashwak all over the country and the world. Business would be slowing down by now, but the checkpoints—the
changing-
points—might still be there.

The phoners used group-speak telepathy to coax the normies into coming. To
dream
them into coming. Did that make the phoners smart, calculating? Not unless you called a spider smart because it could spin a web, or an alligator calculating because it could lie still and look like a log. Walking north along Route 11 toward Route 160, the road that would take him to Kashwak, Clay thought the telepathic signal the phoners sent out like a low siren-call (or a pulse) must contain at least three separate messages.

Come, and you’ll be safe
—
your struggle to survive can cease.

Come, and you’ll be with your own kind, in your own place.

Come, and you can speak to your loved ones.

Come. Yes. Bottom line. And once you got close enough, any choice ceased. That telepathy and the dream of safety just took you over. You lined up. You listened as the Raggedy Man told you to keep it moving, everyone gets to call a loved one but we’ve got a lot of you to process before the sun goes down and we crank up Bette Midler singing “The Wind Beneath My Wings.”

And how could they continue doing this, even though the lights had failed and the cities had burned and civilization had slid into a pit of blood? How could they go on replacing the millions of phoners lost in the original convulsion and in the destruction of the flocks that had followed? They could continue because the Pulse wasn’t over. Somewhere—in that outlaw lab or nutcase’s garage—some gadget was still running on batteries, some modem was still putting out its squealing, insane signal. Sending it up to the satellites that flew around the globe or to the microwave relay towers that cinched it like a steel belt. And where could you call and be sure your call would still go through, even if the voice answering was only on a battery-powered answering machine?

911, apparently.

And that had almost certainly happened to Johnny-Gee.

He
knew
it had. He was already too late.

So why was he still walking north through the drizzling dark? Up ahead was Newfield, not far, and there he’d leave Route 11 for Route 160, and he had an idea that not too far up Route 160 his days of reading road-signs (or anything else) would be done, so
why!

But he knew why, just as he knew that distant crash and the short, faint blare of horn he heard ahead of him in the rainy darkness meant that one of the racing sprinters had come to grief. He was going on because of the note on the storm door, held by less than a quarter-inch of tape when he’d rescued it; all the rest had pulled free. He was going on because of the second one he’d found on the Town Hall bulletin board, half-hidden by Iris Nolan’s hopeful note to her sister. His son had written the same thing both times, in capital letters:
PLEASE COME GET ME.

If he was too late to get Johnny, he might not be too late to see him and tell him he’d tried. He might be able to hold on to enough of himself long enough to do that even if they made him use one of the cell phones.

As for the platforms, and the thousands of watching people—

“There’s no football stadium in Kashwak,” he said.

In his mind, Jordan whispered:
It’s a
virtual
stadium.

Clay pushed it aside. Pushed it away. He had made his decision. It was madness, of course, but it was a mad world now, and that put him in perfect sync.

4

At quarter to three that morning, footsore and damp in spite of the hooded parka he had liberated from the caretaker’s cottage in Springvale, Clay came to the intersection of Routes 11 and 160. There had been a major pileup at the crossroads, and the Corvette that had gone racing past him in North Shapleigh was now part of it. The driver hung out the severely compressed window on the left side, head down and arms dangling, and when Clay tried to lift the man’s face to see if he was still alive, the top half of his body fell into the road, trailing a meaty coil of guts behind. Clay reeled away to a telephone pole, planted his suddenly hot forehead against the wood, and vomited until there was nothing left.