Cell: A Novel (38 page)

“You don’t have enough data to say that,” Clay replied at once. He was thinking of Johnny.

Jordan’s eyes had been bright. Now they dulled a little. “That’s true.” Then his chin lifted. “But it’s logical. If the premise is right—if it’s a worm, something actively burrowing deeper and deeper into the original programming—then it’s every bit as logical as the Latin they use. The new phoners are rebooting, but now it’s a crazy, uneven reboot. They
get
the telepathy, but they can still talk. They—”

“Jordan, you
can’t
draw that conclusion on just the two
I
saw—”

Jordan was paying no attention. He was really talking to himself now. “They don’t flock like the others, not as
completely,
because the flocking imperative is imperfectly installed. Instead they… they stay up late and
get
up early. They revert to aggression against their own kind. And if it’s getting worse… don’t you see? The
newest
phoners would be the first ones to get messed up!”

“It’s like in
War of the Worlds,”
Tom said dreamily.

“Huh?” Denise said. “I didn’t see that movie. It looked too scary.”

“The invaders were killed by microbes
our
bodies tolerate easily,” Tom said. “Wouldn’t it be poetic justice if the phone-crazies all died of a computer-virus?”

“I’d settle for aggression,” Dan said. “Let them kill each other in one big battle royal.”

Clay was still thinking about Johnny. Sharon too, but mostly Johnny. Johnny who’d written
PLEASE COME GET ME
in those big capital letters and then signed all three names, as if that would somehow add weight to his plea.

Ray Huizenga said, “Isn’t going to do us any good unless it happens tonight.” He stood up and stretched. “They’ll be pushin us on pretty quick. I’m gonna pause to do me a little necessary while I’ve got the time. Don’t go without me.”

“Not in the bus, we won’t,” Tom said as Ray started up the hiking trail. “You’ve got the keys in your pocket.”

“Hope everything comes out all right, Ray,” Denise said sweetly.

“Nobody loves a smartass, darlin,” Ray said, and disappeared from view.

“What
are
they going to do to us?” Clay asked. “Any ideas about that?”

Jordan shrugged. “It may be like a closed-circuit TV hookup, only with a lot of different areas of the country participating. Maybe even the whole world. The size of the stadium makes me think that—”

“And the Latin, of course,” Dan said. “It’s a kind of
lingua franca.”

“Why do they need one?” Clay asked. “They’re telepaths.”

“But they still think mostly in words,” Tom said. “At least so far. In any case, they
do
mean to execute us, Clay—Jordan thinks so, Dan does, and so do I.”

“So do I,” Denise said in a small, morose voice, and caressed the curve of her belly.

Tom said, “Latin is more than a
lingua franca.
It’s the language of justice, and we’ve seen it used by them before.”

Gunner and Harold. Yes. Clay nodded.

“Jordan has another idea,” Tom said. “I think you need to hear it, Clay. Just in case. Jordan?”

Jordan shook his head. “I can’t.”

Tom and Dan Hartwick looked at each other.

“Well,
one
of you tell me,” Clay said. “I mean, Jesus!”

So it was Jordan after all. “Because they’re telepaths, they know who our loved ones are,” he said.

Clay searched for some sinister meaning in this and didn’t find it. “So?”

“I have a brother in Providence,” Tom said. “If he’s one
of them,
he’ll be my executioner. If Jordan’s right, that is.”

“My sister,” Dan Hartwick said.

“My floor-proctor,” Jordan said. He was very pale. “The one with the megapixel Nokia phone that shows video downloads.”

“My husband,” Denise said, and burst into tears. “Unless he’s dead. I pray God he’s dead.”

For a moment Clay still didn’t get it. And then he
thought: John? My Johnny?
He saw the Raggedy Man holding a hand over his head, heard the Raggedy Man pronouncing sentence:
“Ecce homo
—
insanus.”
And saw his son walking toward him, wearing his Little League cap turned around backwards and his favorite Red Sox shirt, the one with Tim Wakefield’s name and number on it. Johnny, small beneath the eyes of the millions watching via the miracle of closed-circuit, flock-boosted telepathy.

Little Johnny-Gee, smiling. Empty-handed.

Armed with nothing but the teeth in his head.

3

It was Ray who broke the silence, although Ray wasn’t even there.

“Ah, Jesus.”
Coming from a little distance up the hiking trail.
“Fuck.”
Then: “Yo, Clay!”

“What’s up?” Clay called back.

“You’ve lived up here all your life, right?” Ray didn’t sound like a happy camper. Clay looked at the others, who returned only blank stares. Jordan shrugged and flipped his palms outward, for one heartbreaking moment becoming a near-teenager instead of just another refugee from the Phone War.

“Well… downstate, but yeah.” Clay stood up. “What’s the problem?”

“So you know what poison ivy and poison oak looks like, right?”

Denise started to break up and clapped both hands over her mouth.

“Yeah,” Clay said. He couldn’t help smiling himself, but he knew what it looked like for sure, had warned Johnny and his backyard buddies off enough of it in his time.

“Well get up here and take a look,” Ray said, “and come on your own.” Then, with hardly a pause: “Denise, I don’t need telepathy to know you’re laughin. Put a sock in it, girl.”

Clay left the picnic area, walking past the sign reading IF YOU GO
TAKE A MAP!
and then beside the pretty little brook. Everything in the woods was pretty now, a spectrum of furnace colors mixed with the sturdy, never-changing green of the firs, and he supposed (not for the first time, either) that if men and women owed God a death, there were worse seasons of the year in which to pay up.

He had expected to come upon Ray with his pants loosened or actually around his ankles, but Ray was standing on a carpet of pine needles and his pants were buckled. There were no bushes at all where he was, not poison ivy or anything else. He was as pale as Alice had been when she plunged into the Nickersons’ living room to vomit, his skin so white it looked dead. Only his eyes still had life. They burned in his face.

“C’mere,” he said in a prison-yard whisper. Clay could hardly hear him over the noisy chuckle of the brook. “Quick. We don’t have much time.”

“Ray, what the hell—”

“Just listen. Dan and your pal Tom, they’re too smart. Jordy too. Sometimes thinking gets in the way. Denise is better, but she’s pregnant. Can’t trust a pregnant woman. So you’re it, Mr. Artist. I don’t like it because you’re still holding on to your kid, but your kid’s over. In your heart you know it. Your kid is toast.”

“Everything all right back there, you guys?” Denise called, and numb as he was, Clay could hear the smile in her voice.

“Ray, I don’t know what—”

“No, and that’s how it’s gonna stay. Just
listen.
What that fuck in the red hoodie wants isn’t gonna happen, if you don’t let it. That’s all you need to know.”

Ray reached into the pocket of his chinos and brought out a cell phone and a scrap of paper. The phone was gray with grime, as if it had spent most of its life in a working environment.

“Put it in your pocket. When the time comes, call the number on that slip. You’ll know the time. I gotta hope you’ll know.”

Clay took the phone. It was either take it or drop it. The little slip of paper escaped his fingers.

“Get that!”
Ray whispered fiercely.

Clay bent and picked up the scrap of paper. Ten digits were scrawled on it. The first three were the Maine area code. “Ray,
they read minds!
If I have this—”

Ray’s mouth stretched in a terrible parody of a grin. “Yeah!” he whispered. “They peek in your head and find out you’re thinkin about a fuckin cell phone! What else is anyone thinkin about since October first? Those of us who can still fuckin think, that is?”

Clay looked at the dirty, battered cell phone. There were two DYMO-tape strips on the casing. The top one read
MR. FOGARTY.
The bottom one read
PROP. GURLEYVILLE QUARRY DO NOT REMOVE.

“Put it in your fuckin
pocket!”

It wasn’t the urgency of the command that made him obey. It was the urgency of those desperate eyes. Clay began to put the phone and the scrap of paper in his pocket. He was wearing jeans, which made the pocket a tighter fit than Ray’s chinos. He was looking down to open the pocket wider when Ray reached forward and pulled Clay’s .45 from its holster. When Clay looked up, Ray already had the barrel under his chin.

“You’ll be doin your kid a favor, Clay. Believe it. That’s no fuckin way to live.”

“Ray, no!”

Ray pulled the trigger. The soft-nosed American Defender round took off the entire top half of his head. Crows rose from the trees in a multitude. Clay hadn’t even known they were there, but now they scolded the autumn air with their cries.

For a little while he drowned them out with his own.

4

They had barely started scraping him a grave in the soft dark earth under the firs when the phoners reached into their heads. Clay was feeling that combined power for the first time. It was as Tom had said, like being nudged in the back by a powerful hand. If, that was, both the hand and the back were inside your head. No words. Just that push.

“Let us finish!” he shouted, and immediately responded to himself in a slightly higher register that he recognized at once. “No. Go. Now.”

“Five minutes!” he said.

This time the flock voice used Denise. “Go. Now.”

Tom tumbled Ray’s body—the remains of the head wrapped in one of the headrest-covers from the bus—into the hole and kicked in some dirt. Then he grabbed the sides of his head, grimacing. “Okay, okay,” he said, and immediately answered himself, “Go. Now.”

They walked back down the hiking path to the picnic area, Jordan leading the way. He was very pale, but Clay didn’t think he was as pale as Ray had been in the last minute of his life. Not even close.
That’s no fuckin way to live:
his final words.

Standing at parade rest across the road, in a line that stretched to both horizon-lines, maybe half a mile in all, were phoners. There had to be four hundred of them, but Clay didn’t see the Raggedy Man. He supposed the Raggedy Man had gone on to prepare the way, for in his house there were many mansions.

With a phone extension in every one,
Clay thought.

As they trooped toward the minibus, he saw three of the phoners fall out of line. Two of them began biting and fighting and tearing at each other’s clothes, snarling what could have been words—Clay thought he heard the phrase
bitch-cake,
but he supposed it might just have been a coincidental occurrence of syllables. The third simply turned and began walking away, hiking down the white line toward Newfield.

“That’s right, fall out, sojer!” Denise yelled hysterically.
“All
of you fall out!”

But they didn’t, and before the deserter—if that was what he was—had gotten to the curve where Route 160 swept out of sight to the south, an elderly but powerfully built phoner simply shot out his arms, grasped the hiker’s head, and twisted it to one side. The hiker collapsed to the pavement.

“Ray had the keys,” Dan said in a tired voice. Most of his ponytail had come undone, and his hair spilled over his shoulders. “Somebody will have to go back and—”

“I got them,” Clay said. “And I’ll drive.” He opened the side door of the little bus, feeling that steady beat-beat-beat, push-push-push in his head. There was blood and dirt on his hands. He could feel the weight of the cell phone in his pocket and had a funny thought: maybe Adam and Eve had picked a few apples before being driven out of Eden. A little something to munch while on the long and dusty road to seven hundred television channels and backpack bombs in the London subway system. “Get in, everybody.”

Tom gave him a look. “You don’t have to sound so goddam cheerful, van Gogh.”

“Why not?” Clay said, smiling. He wondered if his smile looked like Ray’s—that awful end-of-life rictus. “At least I won’t have to listen
to your
bullshit much longer. Hop aboard. Next stop, Kashwak-No-Fo.”

But before anyone got on the bus, they were made to throw away their guns.

This didn’t come as a mental command, nor was their motor-control overridden by some superior force—Clay didn’t have to watch as something made his hand reach down and pluck the .45 from its holster. He didn’t think the phoners could do that, at least not yet; they couldn’t even do the ventriloquism thing unless they were allowed to. Instead he felt something like an itch, a terrible one, just short of intolerable, inside his head.

“Oh,
Mary!”
Denise cried in a low voice, and threw the little .22 she carried in her belt as far as she could. It landed in the road. Dan threw his own pistol after it, then added his hunting knife for good measure. The knife flew blade-first almost to the far side of Route 160, but none of the phoners standing there flinched.

Jordan dropped the pistol he was carrying to the ground beside the bus. Then, whining and twitching, he tore into his pack and tossed away the one Alice had been carrying. Tom added Sir Speedy.

Clay contributed the .45 to the other weapons beside the bus. It had been unlucky for two people since the Pulse, and he wasn’t terribly sorry to see it go.

“There,” he said. He spoke to the watching eyes and dirty faces—many of them mutilated—that were watching from across the road, but it was the Raggedy Man he was visualizing. “That’s all of them. Are you satisfied?” And answered himself at once. “Why. Did. He do it?”