Cell: A Novel (43 page)

Jordan drove the bus into the middle of them and there it stopped, headlights glaring, grille dripping. By raising a hand to block the worst of the shine, Clay was able to see a small dark form—distinguishable from the rest by its agility and purpose—emerge from the side door of the bus and begin making its way toward Kashwakamak Hall. Then Jordan fell and Clay thought he was gone. A moment later Dan rapped, “There he is,
there!”
and Clay picked him up again, ten yards closer and considerably to the left of where he’d lost sight of the kid. Jordan must have crawled for some distance over the sleeping bodies before trying his feet again.

When Jordan came back into the hazy cone of radiance thrown by the bus’s headlights, tacked to the end of a forty-foot shadow, they could see him clearly for the first time. Not his face, because of the backlighting, but the crazy-graceful way he was running over the bodies of the phoners. The ones who were down were still dead to the world. The ones who were awake but not close to Jordan paid no attention. Several of those who
were
close, however, made grabs at him. Jordan dodged two of these, but the third, a woman, got him by the tangled mop of his hair.

“Let him alone!”
Clay roared. He couldn’t see her, but he was insanely positive it was the woman who had once been his wife.
“Let him go!”

She didn’t, but Jordan grabbed her wrist, twisted it, went to one knee, and scrambled past. The woman made another grab, just missed the back of his shirt, and then tottered off in her own direction.

Many of the infected phoners, Clay saw, were gathering around the bus. The headlights seemed to be drawing them.

Clay leaped off the snack machine (this time it was Dan Hartwick who saved Denise from a tumble) and grabbed the crowbar. He leaped back up and smashed out the window he’d been looking through.

“Jordan!”
he bawled.
‘Around back! Get around back!“

Jordan looked up at the sound of Clay’s voice and tripped over something—a leg, an arm, maybe a neck. As he was getting back up, a hand came out of the breathing darkness and clutched the kid’s throat.

“Please God, no,” Tom whispered.

Jordan lunged forward like a fullback trying for a first down, pistoning with his legs, and broke the hand’s grip. He stumbled onward. Clay could see his staring eyes and the way his chest was heaving. As he neared the hall, Clay could hear Jordan’s sobbing gasps for air.

Never make it,
he thought.
Never. And he’s so close now, so close.

But Jordan did make it. The two phoners currently staggering along the side of the building showed no interest in him at all as he lunged past them and around to the far side. The four of them were off the snack machine at once and racing across the hall like a relay team, Denise and her belly in the lead.

“Jordan!” she cried, bouncing up and down on her toe-tips. “Jordan, Jordy, are you there? For chrissake, kid, tell us you’re there!”

“I’m”—he tore a great gasp of breath out of the air—“here.” Another whooping gasp. Clay was distantly aware of Tom laughing and pounding him on the back. “Never knew”—
Whooo-oooop!
—“running over people was so… hard.”

“What did you think you were doing?” Clay shouted. It was killing him not to be able to grab the kid, first to embrace him, then shake him, then kiss him all over his stupid brave face. Killing him to not even be able to see him. “I said get
close
to them, not drive right the fuck
into
them!”

“I did it”—
Whooo-ooop!
—“for the Head.” There was defiance as well as breathlessness in Jordan’s voice now. “They killed the Head. Them and their Raggedy Man. Them and their stupid President of Harvard. I wanted to make them pay. I want
him
to pay.”

“What took you so long to
get
going?” Denise asked. “We waited and waited!”

“There are dozens of them up and around,” Jordan said. “Maybe hundreds. Whatever’s wrong with them… or right…or just changing… it’s spreading really fast now. They’re walking every which way, like totally lost. I had to keep changing course. I ended up coming to the bus from halfway down the midway. Then—” He laughed breathlessly. “
It wouldn’t start!
Do you believe it? I turned the key and turned the key and got nothing but a click every time. I just about freaked, but I wouldn’t let myself. Because I knew the Head would be disappointed if I did that.”

“Ah, Jordy…” Tom breathed.

“You know what it was? I had to buckle the stupid
seatbelt.
You don’t need em for the passenger seats, but the bus won’t start unless the driver’s wearing his. Anyway, I’m sorry it took me so long, but here I am.”

“And may we assume that the luggage compartment wasn’t empty?” Dan asked.

“You can assume the shit out of that. It’s full of what look like red bricks. Stacks and stacks of them.” Jordan was getting his breath back now. “They’re under a blanket. There’s a cell phone lying on top of them. Ray attached it to a couple of those bricks with an elastic strap, like a bungee cord. The phone’s on, and it’s the kind with a port, like for a fax or so you can download data to a computer. The power-cord runs down into the bricks. I didn’t see it, but I bet the detonator’s in the middle.” He grabbed another deep breath. “And there were bars on the phone. Three bars.”

Clay nodded. He’d been right. Kashwakamak was supposed to be a cell dead zone once you got beyond the feeder-road leading to the Northern Counties Expo. The phoners had plucked that knowledge from the heads of certain normies and had used it. The Kashwak=No-Fo graffiti had spread like smallpox. But had any of the phoners actually tried making a cell-call from the Expo fairgrounds? Of course not. Why would they? When you were telepathic, phones were obsolete. And when you were one member of the flock—one part of the whole—they became doubly obsolete, if such a thing was possible.

But cell phones
did
work within this one small area, and why? Because the carnies were setting up, that was why—carnies working for an outfit called the New England Amusement Corporation. And in the twenty-first century, carnies—like rock-concert roadies, touring stage productions, and movie crews on location—depended on cell phones, especially in isolated places where landlines were in short supply. Were there no cell phone towers to relay signals onward and upward? Fine, they would pirate the necessary software and install one of their own. Illegal? Of course, but judging by the three bars Jordan was reporting, it had been workable, and because it was battery-powered, it was
still
workable. They had installed it on the Expo’s highest point.

They had installed it on the tip of the Parachute Drop.

12

Dan recrossed the hall, got up on the snack machine, and looked out. “They’re three deep around the bus,” he reported. “Four deep in front of the headlights. It’s like they think there’s some big pop star hiding inside. The ones they’re standing on must be getting crushed.” He turned to Clay and nodded at the dirty Motorola cell phone Clay was now holding. “If you’re going to try this, I suggest you try it now, before one of them decides to get in and try driving the damn bus away.”

“I should have turned it off, but I thought the headlights would go out if I did,” Jordan said. “And I wanted them to see by.”

“It’s okay, Jordan,” Clay said. “No harm done. I’m going to—” But there was nothing in the pocket from which he’d taken the cell phone. The scrap of paper with the telephone number on it was gone.

13

Clay and Tom were looking for it on the floor—
frantically
looking for it on the floor—and Dan was dolefully reporting from atop the snack machine that the first phoner had just stumbled on board the bus when Denise bellowed,
“Stop! SHUT UP!”

They all stopped what they were doing and looked at her. Clay’s heart was fluttering high in his throat. He couldn’t believe his own carelessness.
Ray died for that, you stupid shit!
part of him kept shouting at the rest of him.
He died for it and you lost it!

Denise closed her eyes and put her hands together over her bowed head. Then, very rapidly, she chanted, “Tony, Tony, come around, something’s lost that can’t be found.”

“What the fuck is
that?
” Dan asked. He sounded astonished.

“A prayer to St. Anthony,” she said calmly. “I learned it in parochial school. It always works.”

“Give me a break,” Tom almost groaned.

She ignored him, focusing all her attention on Clay. “It’s not on the floor, is it?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Another two just got on the bus,” Dan reported. “And the turn signals are going. So one of them must be sitting at the—”

“Will you please shut up, Dan,” Denise said. She was still looking at Clay. Still calm. “And if you lost it on the bus, or outside somewhere, it’s lost for good, right?”

“Yes,” he said heavily.

“So we know it’s not in either of those places.”

“Why do we know that?”

“Because God wouldn’t let it be.”

“I think… my head’s going to explode,” Tom said in a strangely calm voice.

Again she ignored him. “So which pocket haven’t you checked?”

“I checked
every
—” Clay began, then stopped. Without taking his eyes from Denise’s, he investigated the small watch-pocket sewn into the larger right front pocket of his jeans. And the slip of paper was there. He didn’t remember putting it there, but
it
was there. He pulled it out. Scrawled on it in the dead man’s laborious printing was the number: 207-919-9811.

“Thank St. Anthony for me,” he said.

“If this works,” she said, “I’ll ask St. Anthony to thank God.”

“Deni?” Tom said.

She turned to him.

“Thank Him for me, too,” he said.

14

The four of them sat together against the double doors through which they had entered, counting on the steel cores to protect them. Jordan was crouched down in back of the building, below the broken window through which he had escaped.

“What are we going to do if the explosion doesn’t blow any holes in the side of this place?” Tom asked.

“We’ll think of something,” Clay said.

“And if Ray’s bomb doesn’t go off?” Dan asked.

“Drop back twenty yards and punt,” Denise said. “Go on, Clay. Don’t wait for the theme-music.”

He opened the cell phone, looked at the dark LED readout, and realized he should have checked for bars on this one before sending Jordan out. He hadn’t thought of it. None of them had thought of it. Stupid. Almost as stupid as forgetting he’d put the scrap of paper with the number written on it in his watch pocket. He pushed the power button now. The phone beeped. For a moment there was nothing, and then three bars appeared, bright and clear. He punched in the number, then settled his thumb lightly on the button marked call.

“Jordan, you ready back there?”

“Yes!”

“What about you guys?” Clay asked.

“Just do it before I have a heart attack,” Tom said.

An image rose in Clay’s mind, nightmarish in its clarity: Johnny-Gee lying almost directly beneath the place where the explosives-laden bus had come to rest. Lying on his back with his eyes open and his hands clasped on the chest of his Red Sox T-shirt, listening to the music while his mind rebuilt itself in some strange new way.

He swept it aside.

“Tony, Tony, come around,” he said for no reason whatever, and then pushed the button that called the cell phone in the back of the minibus.

There was time for him to count
Mississippi ONE
and
Mississippi TWO
before the entire world outside Kashwakamak Hall seemed to blow up, the roar swallowing Tomaso Albinoni’s “Adagio” in a hungry blast. All the small windows lining the flock side of the building blew in. Brilliant crimson light shone through the holes, then the entire south end of the building tore away in a hail of boards, glass, and swirling hay. The doors they were leaning against seemed to bend backward. Denise wrapped protective arms around her belly. From outside a terrible hurt screaming began. For a moment this sound ripped through Clay’s head like the blade of a buzzsaw. Then it was gone. The screaming in his ears went on. It was the sound of people roasting in hell.

Something landed on the roof. It was heavy enough to make the whole building shudder. Clay pulled Denise to her feet. She looked at him wildly, as if no longer sure who he was.
“Come on!”
He was shouting but could hardly hear his own voice. It seemed to be seeping through wads of cotton.
“Come on, let’s get out!”

Tom was up. Dan made it halfway, fell back, tried again, and managed it the second time. He grabbed Tom’s hand. Tom grabbed Denise’s. Linked three-across, they shuffled to the gaping hole at the end of the Hall. There they found Jordan standing next to a litter of burning hay and staring out at what a single phone call had done.

15

The giant’s foot that had seemed to stamp the roof of Kashwakamak Hall had been a large chunk of schoolbus. The shingles were burning. Directly in front of them, beyond the little pile of blazing hay, were a pair of upside-down seats, also burning. Their steel frames had been shredded into spaghetti. Clothes floated out of the sky like big snow: shirts, hats, pants, shorts, an athletic supporter, a blazing bra. Clay saw that the hay insulation piled along the bottom of the hall was going to be a moat of fire before very long; they were getting out just in time.

Patches of fire dotted the mall area where concerts, outdoor dances, and various competitions had been held, but the chunks of the exploding bus had swept farther than that. Clay saw flames burning high in trees that had to be at least three hundred yards away. Dead south of their position, the funhouse had started to burn and he could see something—he thought it was probably a human torso—blazing halfway up the strutwork of the Parachute Drop.