Cell: A Novel (40 page)

Beyond the arch was a midway and a batch of rides, both still being assembled at the time of the Pulse, from the way things looked. Clay didn’t know how many of the carny pitch-tents had been erected, but some had blown away, like the pavilions at the checkpoint six or eight miles back, and only half a dozen or so still stood, their sides seeming to breathe in the evening breeze. The Krazy Kups were half-built, and so was the funhouse across from it (
WE DARE YOU TO
ran across the single piece of façade that had been erected; skeletons danced above the words). Only the Ferris wheel and the Parachute Drop at the far end of what would have been the midway looked complete, and with no electric lights to make them jolly, they looked gruesome to Clay, less like amusement rides than gigantic implements of torture. Yet one light
was
blinking, he saw: a tiny red beacon, surely battery-powered, at the very top of the Parachute Drop.

Well beyond the Drop was a white building with red trim, easily a dozen barn-lengths long. Loose hay had been heaped along the sides. American flags, fluttering in the evening breeze, had been planted in this cheap rural insulation every ten feet or so. The building was draped with swags of patriotic bunting and bore the legend

NORTHERN COUNTIES EXPO

KASHWAKAMAK HALL

in bright blue paint.

But none of this was what had attracted their attention. Between the Parachute Drop and Kashwakamak Hall were several acres of open ground. Clay guessed it was where the big crowds gathered for livestock exhibitions, tractor-pulls, end-of-fair-day concerts, and—of course—the fireworks shows that would both open and close the Expo. It was ringed with light-standards and loudspeaker-poles. Now this broad and grassy mall was crammed with phoners. They stood shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip, their faces turned to watch the arrival of the little yellow bus.

Any hope Clay had harbored of seeing Johnny—or Sharon—was gone in a moment. His first thought was that there had to be five thousand people crowded beneath those dead light-standards. Then he saw they had spilled into the grassy parking lots adjoining the main exhibition area as well and revised his estimate upward. Eight. Eight thousand at least.

The Raggedy Man sat where some Newfield Elementary School third-grader belonged, grinning at Clay with his teeth jutting through the split in his lip.
Do you like it?
that grin seemed to ask, and again Clay had to remind himself that you could read anything into a grin like that.

“So who’s playing tonight? Vince Gill? Or did you guys break the bank and get Alan Jackson?” That was Tom. He was trying to be funny and Clay gave him high marks for that, but Tom only sounded scared.

The Raggedy Man was still looking at Clay, and a little vertical crease had appeared in the middle of his brow, as if something puzzled him.

Clay drove the minibus slowly up the center of the midway, toward the Parachute Drop and the silent multitude beyond. There were more bodies here; they reminded Clay of how you sometimes found heaps of dead bugs on the windowsills after a sudden cold snap. He concentrated on keeping his hands loose. He didn’t want the Raggedy Man to see his knuckles turn white on the wheel.

And go slow. Nice and easy does it. He’s only looking at you. As for cellphones, what else has anyone been thinking about since October first?

The Raggedy Man raised a hand and pointed one twisted, badly used finger at Clay. “No-fo, you,” Clay said in that other voice.
“Insanus.”

“Yeah, no-fo-me-me, no-fo none of us, we’re all bozos on this bus,” Clay said. “But you’ll fix that, right?”

The Raggedy Man grinned, as if to say that
was
right… but the little vertical line was still there. As if something still puzzled him. Maybe something rolling and tumbling around in Clay Riddell’s mind.

Clay looked up into the rearview mirror as they neared the end of the midway. “Tom, you asked me what the North End was,” he said.

“Forgive me, Clay, but my interest seems to have waned,” Tom said. “Maybe it’s the size of the welcoming committee.”

“No, but this is interesting,” Clay said, a little feverishly.

“Okay, what is it?” Jordan asked. God bless Jordan. Curious to the end.

“The Northern Counties Expo was never a big deal in the twentieth century,” Clay said. “Just your standard little shitpot aggie fair with arts, crafts, produce, and animals over there in Kashwakamak Hall… which is where they’re going to put us, from the look of things.”

He glanced at the Raggedy Man, but the Raggedy Man neither confirmed nor denied. The Raggedy Man only grinned. The little vertical line had disappeared from his forehead.

“Clay, look out,” Denise said in a tight, controlled voice.

He looked back through the windshield and stepped on the brake. An elderly woman with infected lacerations on both legs came swaying out of the silent crowd. She skirted the edge of the Parachute Drop, trampled over several prefab pieces of the funhouse that had been laid out but not erected at the time of the Pulse, then broke into a shambling run aimed directly at the schoolbus. When she reached it, she began to hammer slowly on the windshield with filthy, arthritis-twisted hands. What Clay saw in this woman’s face wasn’t the avid blankness he’d come to associate with the phoners but terrified disorientation. And it was familiar.
Who are you?
Pixie Dark had asked. Pixie Dark, who hadn’t gotten a direct blast of the Pulse.
Who am I?

Nine phoners in a neat moving square came after the elderly woman, whose frantic face was less than five feet from Clay’s own. Her mouth moved, and he heard four words, both with his ears and with his mind:
“Take me with you.”

We’re not going anywhere you want to go, lady,
Clay thought.

Then the phoners grabbed her and took her back toward the multitude on the grassy mall. She struggled to get away, but they were relentless. Clay caught one flash of her eyes and thought they were the eyes of a woman who was in purgatory only if she was lucky. More likely it was hell.

Once more the Raggedy Man held out his hand, palm-up and index finger pointing:
Roll.

The elderly woman had left a handprint, ghostly but visible, on the windshield. Clay looked through it and got rolling.

4

“Anyhow,” he said, “until 1999, the Expo was no big deal. If you lived in this part of the world and wanted rides and games—carny stuff—you had to go down to the Fryeburg Fair.” He heard his own voice running as if on a tape loop. Talk for the sake of talk. It made him think of the drivers on the Duck Boat tours in Boston, pointing out the various sights. “Then, just before the turn of the century, the State Bureau of Indian Affairs did a land-survey. Everybody knew the Expo grounds were right next door to the Sockabasin Rez; what that land-survey showed was that the north end of Kashwakamak Hall was actually on reservation land. Technically, it was in Micmac Indian territory. The people running the Expo were no dummies, and neither were the ones on the Micmac tribal council. They agreed to clean out the little shops from the north end of the hall and put in slots. All at once the Northern Counties Expo was Maine’s biggest fall fair.”

They had reached the Parachute Drop. Clay started to jog left and guide the little bus between the ride and the half-constructed funhouse, but the Raggedy Man patted his hands on the air, palms-down. Clay stopped. The Raggedy Man stood up and turned to the door. Clay threw the lever and the Raggedy Man stepped off. Then he turned to Clay and made a kind of sweeping, bowing gesture.

“What’s he doing now?” Denise asked. She couldn’t see from where she was sitting. None of them could.

“He wants us to get off,” Clay said. He stood up. He could feel the cell phone Ray had given him lying hard along his upper thigh. If he looked down, he would see its outline against the blue denim of his jeans. He pulled down the T-shirt he was wearing, trying to cover it.
A cellphone, so what, everybody’s thinking about them.

“Are we going to?” Jordan asked. He sounded scared.

“Not much choice,” Clay said. “Come on, you guys, let’s go to the fair.”

5

The Raggedy Man led them toward the silent multitude. It opened for them, leaving a narrow aisle—not much more than a throat—from the back of the Parachute Drop to the double doors of Kashwakamak Hall. Clay and the others passed a parking area filled with trucks (new england amusement corp. was printed on the sides, along with a roller-coaster logo). Then the crowd swallowed them.

That walk seemed endless to Clay. The smell was nearly insupportable, wild and ferocious even with the freshening breeze to carry the top layer away. He was aware of his legs moving, he was aware of the Raggedy Man’s red hoodie ahead of him, but the hall’s double doors with their swags of red, white, and blue bunting seemed to get no closer. He smelled dirt and blood, urine and shit. He smelled fermenting infections, burned flesh, the spoiled eggwhite aroma of oozing pus. He smelled clothes that were rotting on the bodies they draped. He smelled something else, as well—some new thing. Calling it madness would have been too easy.

I think it’s the smell of telepathy. And if it is, we’re not ready for it. It’s too strong for us. It burns the brain, somehow, the way too much current will burn out the electrical system in a car or a
—

“Help me with her!” Jordan yelled from behind him. “Help me with her, she’s fainting!”

He turned and saw that Denise had gone down on all fours. Jordan was on all fours beside her and had one of her arms over his neck, but she was too heavy for him. Tom and Dan couldn’t get forward enough to help. The corridor cutting through the mass of phoners was too narrow. Denise raised her head, and for a moment her eyes met Clay’s. The look was one of dazed incomprehension, the eyes those of a slugged steer. She vomited a thin gruel onto the grass and her head dropped down again. Her hair fell around her face like a curtain.

“Help me!” Jordan shouted again. He began to cry.

Clay went back and started elbowing phoners in order to get on Denise’s other side. “Get out of the way!” he shouted. “Get out of the way, she’s pregnant, can’t you fools see she’s preg—”

It was the blouse he recognized first. The high-necked, white silk blouse that he had always called Sharon’s doctor shirt. In some ways he thought it was the sexiest garment she owned, partly because of that high, prim neck. He liked her bare, but he liked to touch and squeeze her breasts through that high-necked, white silk blouse even more. He liked to bring her nipples up until he could see them poking the cloth.

Now Sharon’s doctor shirt was streaked black with dirt in some places and maroon with dried blood in others. It was torn under the arm.
She doesn’t look as bad as some,
Johnny had written, but she didn’t look good; she certainly wasn’t the Sharon Riddell who had gone off to school in her doctor shirt and her dark red skirt while her estranged husband was in Boston, about to make a deal that would put an end to their financial worries and make her realize that all her carping about his “expensive hobby” had been so much fear and bad faith (that, anyway, had been his semi-resentful dream). Her dark blond hair hung in lank strings. Her face had been cut in a number of places, and one of her ears looked torn half-off; where it had been, a clotted hole bored into the side of her head. Something she had eaten, something dark, clung in curds to the corners of the mouth he had kissed almost every day for almost fifteen years. She stared at him, through him, with that idiotic half-grin they sometimes wore.

“Clay help me!” Jordan
almost sobbed.

Clay snapped back. Sharon wasn’t here, that was the thing to remember. Sharon hadn’t been here for almost two weeks now. Not since trying to make a call on Johnny’s little red cell phone on the day of the Pulse.

“Give me some room, you bitch,” he said, and pushed aside the woman who’d been his wife. Before she could rebound, he slid into her place.

“This woman’s pregnant, so give me some fucking room.” Then he bent, slipped Denise’s other arm over his neck, and got her up.

“Go on ahead,” Tom said to Jordan. “Let me in, I’ve got her.”

Jordan held up Denise’s arm long enough for Tom to slip it over his own neck. He and Clay carried her that way the final ninety yards to the doors of Kashwakamak Hall, where the Raggedy Man stood waiting. By then Denise was muttering that they could let her go, she could walk, she was all right, but Tom wouldn’t. Neither would Clay. If he let her go, he might look back for Sharon. He didn’t want to do that.

The Raggedy Man grinned at Clay, and this time that grin seemed to have more focus. It really was as though the two of them shared a joke.
Sharon?
he wondered.
Is Sharon the joke?

It seemed not, because the Raggedy Man made a gesture that would have seemed very familiar to Clay in the old world but seemed eerily out of place here: right hand to the right side of his face, right thumb to ear, pinkie finger to mouth. The phone-mime.

“No-fo-you-you,” Denise said, and then, in her own voice: “Don’t do that, I hate
it
when you do that!”

The Raggedy Man paid her no mind. He went on holding his right hand in the phone-gesture, thumb to ear and pinkie to mouth, staring at Clay. For one moment Clay was sure he also glanced down at the pocket where the cell phone was stowed. Then Denise said it again, that horrible parody of his old routine with Johnny-Gee: “No-fo-you-you.” The Raggedy Man mimed laughing, and his ruined mouth made it gruesome. From behind him, Clay felt the eyes of the flock like a physical weight.

Then the double doors of Kashwakamak Hall opened on their own, and the mingled odors that came out, although faint—olfactory ghosts of other years—was still an anodyne to the stink of the flock: spices, jams, hay, and livestock. It wasn’t completely dark, either; the battery-powered emergency lights were dim, but hadn’t yet given out entirely. Clay thought that was pretty amazing, unless they had been saved especially for their arrival, and he doubted that. The Raggedy Man wasn’t telling. He only smiled and gestured with his hands for them to go in.