Cell: A Novel (15 page)

Alice roused him, calling from upstairs. He looked at his wristwatch and saw he’d been sleeping on the couch for almost twenty minutes. He’d drooled on his chin.

“Alice?” He went to the foot of the stairs. “Everything okay?” Tom, he saw, was also looking.

“Yes, but can you come for a second?”

“Sure.” He looked at Tom, shrugged, then went upstairs.

Alice was in a guest bedroom that looked like it hadn’t seen many guests, although the two pillows suggested that Tom had spent most of the night here with her, and the rumpled look of the bedclothes further suggested very bad rest. She had found a pair of khakis that almost fit and a sweatshirt with
CANOBIE LAKE PARK
written across the front below the outline of a roller coaster. On the floor was the sort of large portable sound system that Clay and his friends had once lusted after the way Johnny-Gee had lusted after that red cell phone. Clay and his friends had called such systems ghetto blasters or boomboxes.

“It was in the closet and the batteries look fresh,” she said. “I thought of turning it on and looking for a radio station, but then I was afraid.”

He looked at the ghetto blaster sitting there on the guest room’s nice hardwood floor, and he was afraid, too. It could have been a loaded gun. But he felt an urge to reach out and turn the selector-knob, now pointed at CD, to FM. He imagined Alice had felt the same urge, and that was why she’d called him. The urge to touch a loaded gun would have been no different.

“My sister gave me that two birthdays ago,” Tom said from the doorway, and they both jumped. “I loaded it up with batteries last July and took it to the beach. When I was a kid we all used to go to the beach and listen to our radios, although I never had one that big.”

“Me either,” Clay said. “But I wanted one.”

“I took it up to Hampton Beach in New Hampshire with a bunch of Van Halen and Madonna CDs, but it wasn’t the same. Not even close. I haven’t used it since. I imagine all the stations are off the air, don’t you?”

“I bet some of them are still on,” Alice said. She was biting at her lower lip. Clay thought if she didn’t stop soon, it would begin to bleed. “The ones my friends call the robo-eighties stations. They have friendly names like BOB and FRANK, but they all come from some giant radio-computer in Colorado and then get beamed down by satellite. At least that’s what my friends say. And…” She licked at the place she had been biting. It was shiny with blood just under the surface. “And that’s the same way cell phone signals get routed, isn’t it? By satellite.”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “I guess the long-distance ones might… and the transatlantic ones for sure… and I suppose the right genius could hack the wrong satellite signal into all those microwave towers you see… the ones that boost the signals along…”

Clay knew the towers he was talking about, steel skeletons with dishes stuck all over them like gray suckers. They had popped up everywhere over the last ten years.

Tom said, “If we could pick up a local station, we might be able to
get
news. Some idea about what to do, where to go—”

“Yes, but what if it’s on the radio, too?” Alice said. “That’s what
I’m
saying. What if you tune into whatever my”—She licked her lips again, then resumed nibbling.—“my mother heard? And my dad? Him, too, oh yes, he had a brand-new cell phone, all the bells and whistles—video, autodial, Internet connection—he
loved
that puppy!” She gave a laugh that was both hysterical and rueful, a dizzy combination. “What if you tune into whatever
they
heard? My folks and them out there? Do you want to risk that?”

At first Tom said nothing. Then he said—cautiously, as if testing the idea—
“One
of us could risk it. The other two could leave and wait until—”

“No,” Clay said.

“Please
no,” Alice said. She was almost crying again. “I want you
both.
I need you
both.”

They stood around the radio, looking at it. Clay found himself thinking of science fiction novels he’d read as a teenager (sometimes at the beach, listening to Nirvana instead of Van Halen on the radio). In more than a few of them, the world ended. And then the heroes built it back up again. Not without struggles and setbacks, but yes, they used the tools and the technology and they built it back up again. He couldn’t remember anywhere the heroes just stood around in a bedroom looking at a radio.
Sooner or later someone is going to pick up a tool or turn on a radio,
he thought,
because someone will have to.

Yes. But not this morning.

Feeling like a traitor to something larger than he could understand, he picked up Tom’s ghetto blaster, put it back in the closet, and closed the door.

16

An hour or so later, the orderly migration to the east began to collapse. Clay was on watch. Alice was in the kitchen, eating one of the sandwiches they’d brought out of Boston—she said they had to finish the sandwiches before they ate any of the canned stuff in Tom’s closet-sized pantry, because none of them knew when they’d get fresh meat again—and Tom was sleeping in the living room, on the couch. Clay could hear him snoring contentedly away.

He noticed a few people wandering against the general easterly flow, then sensed a kind of slackening in the order out there in Salem Street, something so subtle that his brain registered what his eye saw only as an intuition. At first he dismissed it as a falsity caused by the few wanderers—even more deranged than the rest—who were heading west instead of east, and then he looked down at the shadows. The neat herringbone patterns he had observed earlier had begun to distort. And soon they weren’t patterns at all.

More people were now heading west, and some of them were gnawing on food that had been liberated from a grocery store, probably the Safeway Tom had mentioned. Mr. Scottoni’s daughter-in-law, Judy, was carrying a gigantic tub of melting chocolate ice cream, which had covered the front of her smock and coated her from knees to nose-stud; her chocolate-lathered face made her look like Mrs. Bones in a minstrel show. And any vegetarian beliefs Mr. Potowami might once have held were gone now; he strolled along noshing from a great double handful of raw hamburger meat. A fat man in a dirty suit had what looked like a partially defrosted leg of lamb, and when Judy Scottoni tried to take it from him, the fat man hit her a vicious clip in the center of the forehead with it. She fell as silently as a poleaxed steer, pregnant belly first, on top of her mostly crushed tub of Breyers chocolate.

There was a great deal of milling now, and a good deal of violence to go with it, but no return to the all-out viciousness of the afternoon before. Not here, in any case. In Malden Center, the alarm, tired-sounding to begin with, had long since run down. In the distance, gunfire continued to pop sporadically, but there had been nothing close since that single shotgun blast from the center of town. Clay watched to see if any of the crazies would try breaking into any of the houses, but although they occasionally walked on the lawns, they showed no signs of graduating from trespass to burglary. What they did mostly was wander around, occasionally trying to grab one another’s food, sometimes fighting or biting one another. Three or four—the Scottoni woman, for one—lay in the street, either dead or unconscious. Most of those who had passed Tom’s house earlier were still in the town square, Clay guessed, having a street dance or maybe the First Annual Malden Raw Meat Festival, and thank God for that. It was strange, though, how that sense of purpose—that sense of
flocking
—had seemed to loosen and fall apart.

After noon, when he began to feel seriously sleepy, he went into the kitchen and found Alice dozing at the kitchen table with her head in her arms. The little sneaker, the one she had called a Baby Nike, was loosely clasped in one hand. When he woke her, she looked at him groggily and clasped it to the breast of her sweatshirt, as if afraid he would try to take it away.

He asked if she could watch from the end of the hallway for a while without falling asleep again or being seen. She said she could. Clay took her at her word and carried a chair for her. She paused for a moment at the door to the living room. “Check it out,” she said.

He looked in over her shoulder and saw the cat, Rafe, was sleeping on Tom’s belly. He grunted in amusement.

She sat where he put the chair, far enough inside the door so someone who glanced at the house wouldn’t see her. After a single look she said, “They’re not a flock anymore. What happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“What time is it?”

He glanced at his watch. “Twenty past twelve.”

“What time did we notice they
were
flocking?”

“I don’t know, Alice.” He was trying to be patient with her but he could hardly keep his eyes open. “Six-thirty? Seven? I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“If we could chart them, it might matter a lot, don’t you think?”

He told her that he’d think about that when he’d had some sleep. “Couple of hours, then wake me or Tom,” he said. “Sooner, if something goes wrong.”

“It couldn’t go much wronger,” she said softly. “Go on upstairs. You look really wasted.”

He went upstairs to the guest bedroom, slipped off his shoes, and lay down. He thought for a moment about what she’d said:
If we could chart them.
She might have something there. Odds against, but maybe—

It was a pleasant room, very pleasant, full of sun. You lay in a room like this and it was easy to forget there was a radio in the closet you didn’t dare turn on. Not so easy to forget your wife, estranged but still loved, might be dead and your son—not just loved but adored—might be crazy. Still, the body had its imperatives, didn’t it? And if there had ever been a room for an afternoon nap, this was the one. The panic-rat twitched but didn’t bite, and Clay was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.

17

This time Alice was the one who shook him awake. The little purple sneaker swung back and forth as she did it. She had tied it around her left wrist, turning it into a rather creepy talisman. The light in the room had changed. It was going the other way, and diminished. He had turned on his side and he had to urinate, a reliable sign that he had slept for some time. He sat up in a hurry and was surprised—almost appalled—to see it was quarter of six. He had slept for over five hours. But of course last night hadn’t been his first night of broken rest; he’d slept poorly the night before, as well. Nerves, on account of his presentation to the Dark Horse comics people.

“Is everything all right?” he asked, taking her by the wrist. “Why’d you let me sleep so long?”

“Because you needed it,” she said. “Tom slept until two and I slept until four. We’ve been watching together since then. Come down and look. It’s pretty amazing.”

“Are they flocking again?”

She nodded. “But going the other way this time. And that’s not all. Come and see.”

He emptied his bladder and hurried downstairs. Tom and Alice were standing in the doorway to the porch with their arms around each other’s waist. There was no question of being seen, now; the sky had clouded over and Tom’s porch was already thick with shadows. Only a few people were left on Salem Street, anyway. All of them were moving west, not quite running but going at a steady clip. A group of four went past in the street itself, marching over a sprawl of bodies and a litter of discarded food, which included the leg of lamb, now gnawed down to the bone, a great many torn-open cellophane bags and cardboard boxes, and a scattering of discarded fruits and vegetables. Behind them came a group of six, the ones on the end using the sidewalks. They didn’t look at each other but were still so perfectly together that when they passed Tom’s house they seemed for an instant to be only a single man, and Clay realized even their arms were swinging in unison. After them came a youth of maybe fourteen, limping along, bawling inarticulate cow-sounds, and trying to keep up.

“They left the dead and the totally unconscious ones,” Tom said, “but they actually helped a couple who were stirring.”

Clay looked for the pregnant woman and didn’t see her. “Mrs. Scottoni?”

“She was one of the ones they helped,” Tom said.

“So they’re acting like people again.”

“Don’t get that idea,” Alice said. “One of the men they tried to help couldn’t walk, and after he fell down a couple of times, one of the guys who’d been lifting him got tired of being a Boy Scout and just—”

“Killed him,” Tom said. “Not with his hands, either, like the guy in the garden. With his teeth. Tore out his throat.”

“I saw what was going to happen and looked away,” Alice said, “but I heard it. He…
squealed.”

“Easy,” Clay said. He squeezed her arm gently. “Take it easy.”

Now the street was almost entirely empty. Two more stragglers came along, and although they moved more or less side by side, both were limping so badly there was no sense of unison about them.

“Where are they going?” Clay asked.

“Alice thinks maybe inside,” Tom said, and he sounded excited. “Before it gets dark. She could be right.”

“Where?
Where
are they going in? Have you seen any of them going into houses along this block?”

“No.” They said it together.

“They didn’t all come back,” Alice said. “No way did as many come back
up
Salem Street as went down this morning. So a lot are still in Malden Center, or beyond. They may have gravitated toward public buildings, like school gymnasiums…”

School gymnasiums. Clay didn’t like the sound of that.

“Did you see that movie,
Dawn of the Dead?”
she asked.

“Yes,” Clay said. “You’re not going to tell me someone
let you
in to see it, are you?”

She looked at him as if he were nuts. Or old. “One of my friends had the DVD. We watched it at a sleepover back in eighth grade.”
Back when the Pony Express still rode and the plains were dark with buffalo,
her tone said. “In that movie, all the dead people—well, not all, but a lot—went back to the mall when they woke up.”