Cell: A Novel (21 page)

“Tell us about that weird state they were in last night,” Alice said quietly. “And the music. Do all the other flocks listen to music at night?”

The Head looked at Jordan.

“Yes,” the boy said. “It’s all soft stuff, no rock, no country—”

“I should guess nothing classical, either,” the Head put in. “Not of a challenging nature, at any rate.”

“It’s their lullabies,” Jordan said. “That’s what the Head and me think, isn’t it, sir?”

“The Head and
I
, Jordan.”

“Head and I, yes, sir.”

“But it is indeed what we think,” the Head agreed. “Although I suspect there may be more to it than that. Yes, quite a bit more.”

Clay was flummoxed. He hardly knew how to go on. He looked at his friends and saw on their faces what he was feeling—not just puzzlement, but a dreadful reluctance to be enlightened.

Leaning forward, Headmaster Ardai said, “May I be frank? I
must
be frank; it is the habit of a lifetime. I want you to help us do a terrible thing here. The time to do it is short, I think, and while one such act alone may come to nothing, one never knows, does one? One never knows what sort of communication may flow between these… flocks. In any case, I will not stand idly by while these…
things . .
. steal away not only my school but the very daylight itself. I might have attempted it already, but I’m old and Jordan is very young. Too young. Whatever they are now, they were human not long ago. I won’t let him be a part of this.”

“I can do my share, sir!” Jordan said. He spoke as stoutly, Clay thought, as any Muslim teenager who ever strapped on a suicide belt stuffed with explosives.

“I salute your courage, Jordan,” the Head told him, “but I think not.” He looked at the boy kindly, but when he returned his gaze to the others, his eyes had hardened considerably. “You have weapons—good ones—and I have nothing but an old single-shot .22 rifle that may not even work anymore, although the barrel’s open—I’ve looked. Even if it does work, the cartridges I have for it may not fire. But we have a gasoline pump at our little motor-pool, and gasoline might serve to end their lives.”

He must have seen the horror in their faces, because he nodded. To Clay he no longer looked like kindly old Mr. Chips; he looked like a Puritan elder in an oil-painting. One who could have sentenced a man to the stocks without batting an eye. Or a woman to be burned at the stake as a witch.

He nodded at Clay in particular. Clay was sure of it. “I know what I’m saying. I know how it sounds. But it wouldn’t be murder, not really; it would be extermination. And I have no power to make you do anything. But in any case… whether you help me burn them or not, you must pass on a message.”

“To who?” Alice asked faintly.

“To everyone you meet, Miss Maxwell.” He leaned over the remains of their meal, those hanging-judge eyes sharp and small and burning hot. “You must tell what’s happening to
them
—to the ones who heard the infernal message on their devil’s intercoms. You must pass this on. Everyone who has had the daylight robbed away from them must hear, and before it’s too late.” He passed a hand over his lower face, and Clay saw the fingers were shaking a little. It would be easy to dismiss that as a sign of the man’s age, but he hadn’t seen any tremors before. “We’re afraid it soon will be. Aren’t we, Jordan?”

“Yes, sir.” Jordan certainly thought he knew something; he looked terrified.

“What? What’s happening to them?” Clay asked. “It’s got something to do with the music and those wired-together boomboxes, doesn’t it?”

The Head sagged, suddenly looking tired. “They’re
not
wired together,” he said. “Don’t you remember me telling you that both of your premises were wrong?”

“Yes, but I don’t understand what you m—”

“There’s one sound-system with a CD in it, about that you’re certainly right. A single compilation disc, Jordan says, which is why the same songs play over and over.”

“Lucky us,” Tom muttered, but Clay barely heard him. He was trying to get the sense of what Ardai had just said—
they’re not wired together.
How could that be? It couldn’t.

“The sound-systems—the boomboxes, if you like—are placed all around the field,” the Head went on, “and they’re all on. At night you can see their little red power lamps—”

“Yes,” Alice said. “I did notice some red lights, I just didn’t think anything of it.”

“—but there’s nothing in them—no compact discs or cassette tapes—and no wires linking them. They’re just slaves that pick up the master-disc audio and rebroadcast it.”

“If their mouths are open, the music comes from them, too,” Jordan said. “It’s just little… not hardly a whisper… but you can hear it.”

“No,” Clay said. “That’s your imagination, kiddo. Gotta be.”

“I haven’t heard that myself,” Ardai said, “but of course my ears aren’t what they were back when I was a Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps fan. ‘Back in the day,’ Jordan and his friends would say.”

“You’re
very
old-school, sir,” Jordan said. He spoke with gentle solemnity and unmistakable affection.

“Yes, Jordan, I am,” the Head agreed. He clapped the boy on the shoulder, then turned his attention to the others. “If Jordan says he’s heard it… I believe him.”

“It’s not possible,” Clay said. “Not without a transmitter.”

“They
are transmitting,” the Head replied. “It is a skill they seem to have picked up since the Pulse.”

“Wait,” Tom said. He raised one hand like a traffic cop, lowered it, began to speak, raised it again. From his place of dubious shelter at Headmaster Ardai’s side, Jordan watched him closely. At last Tom said, “Are we talking telepathy here?”

“I should guess that’s not exactly
le mot juste
for this particular phenomenon,” the Head answered, “but why stick at technicalities? I would be willing to wager all the frozen hamburgers remaining in my cooler that the word has been used among you before today.”

“You’d win double burgers,” Clay said.

“Well yeah, but the flocking thing is different,” Tom said.

“Because?” The Head raised his tangled brows.

“Well, because…” Tom couldn’t finish, and Clay knew why. It
wasn’t
different. The flocking wasn’t human behavior and they’d known it from the moment they’d observed George the mechanic following the woman in the filthy pants suit across Tom’s front lawn to Salem Street. He’d been walking so closely behind her that he could have bitten her neck… but he hadn’t. And why? Because for the phone-crazies, biting was done, flocking had begun.

At least, biting their own kind was done. Unless—

“Professor Ardai, at the beginning they killed everyone…”

“Yes,” the Head agreed. “We were very lucky to escape, weren’t we, Jordan?”

Jordan shuddered and nodded. “The kids ran everywhere. Even some of the teachers. Killing… biting… babbling nonsense stuff… I hid in one of the greenhouses for a while.”

“And I in the attic of this very house,” the Head added. “I watched out of the small window up there as the campus—the campus I love—literally went to hell.”

Jordan said, “Most of the ones who didn’t die ran away toward downtown. Now a lot of them are back. Over there.” He nodded his head in the general direction of the soccer field.

“All of which leads us to what?” Clay asked.

“I think you know, Mr. Riddell.”

“Clay.”

“Clay, fine. I think what’s happening now is more than temporary anarchy. I think it’s the start of a war. It’s going to be a short but extremely nasty one.”

“Don’t you think you’re overstating—”

“I don’t. While I have only my own observations to go on—mine and Jordan’s—we’ve had a very large flock to observe, and we’ve seen them going and coming as well as…
resting,
shall we say. They’ve stopped killing each other, but they continue to kill the people we would classify as normal. I call that warlike behavior.”

“You’ve actually seen them killing normals?” Tom asked. Beside him, Alice opened her pack, removed the Baby Nike, and held it in her hand.

The Head looked at him gravely. “I have. I’m sorry to say that Jordan has, too.”

“We couldn’t help,” Jordan said. His eyes were leaking. “There were too many. It was a man and a woman, see? I don’t know what they were doing on campus so close to dark, but they sure couldn’t‘ve known about Tonney Field. She was hurt. He was helping her along. They ran into about twenty
of them
on their way back from town. The man tried to carry her.” Jordan’s voice began to break. “On his own he might have gotten away, but with her… he only made it as far as Horton Hall. That’s a dorm. That’s where he fell down and they caught them.
They
—”

Jordan abruptly buried his head against the old man’s coat—a charcoal gray number this afternoon. The Head’s big hand stroked the back of Jordan’s smooth neck.

“They seem to know their enemies,” the Head mused. “It may well have been part of the original message, don’t you think?”

“Maybe,” Clay said. It made a nasty sort of sense.

“As to what they are doing at night as they lie there so still and open-eyed, listening to their music…” The Head sighed, took a handkerchief from one of his coat pockets, and wiped the boy’s eyes with it in matter-of-fact fashion. Clay saw he was both very frightened and very sure of whatever conclusion he had drawn. “I think they’re rebooting,” he said.

15

“You note the red lamps, don’t you?” the Head asked in his carrying I-will-be-heard-all-the-way-to-the-back-of-the-lecture-hall voice. “I count at least sixty-thr—”

“Hush up!”
Tom hissed. He did everything but clap a hand over the old man’s mouth.

The Head looked at him calmly. “Have you forgotten what I said last night about musical chairs, Tom?”

Tom, Clay, and Ardai were standing just beyond the turnstiles, with the Tonney Field archway at their backs. Alice had stayed at Cheatham Lodge with Jordan, by mutual agreement. The music currently drifting up from the prep-school soccer field was a jazz-instrumental version of “The Girl from Ipanema.” Clay thought it was probably cutting-edge stuff if you were a phone-crazy.

“No,” Tom said. “As long as the music doesn’t stop, we have nothing to worry about. I just don’t want to be the guy who gets his throat torn out by an insomniac exception to the rule.”

“You won’t.”

“How can you be so positive, sir?” Tom asked.

“Because, to make a small literary pun, we cannot call it sleep. Come.”

He started down the concrete ramp the players once took to reach the field, saw that Tom and Clay were hanging back, and looked at them patiently. “Little knowledge is gained without risk,” he said, “and at this point, I would say knowledge is critical, wouldn’t you? Come.”

They followed his rapping cane down the ramp toward the field, Clay a little ahead of Tom. Yes, he could see the red power-lamps of the boomboxes circling the field. Sixty or seventy looked about right. Good-sized sound-systems spotted at ten- or fifteen-foot intervals, each one surrounded with bodies. By starlight those bodies were an eye-boggling sight. They weren’t stacked—each had his or her own space—but not so much as an inch had been wasted. Even the arms had been interwoven, so that the impression was one of paper dolls carpeting the field, rank on rank, while that music—
Like something you’d hear in a supermarket,
Clay thought—rose in the dark. Something else rose, as well: a sallow smell of dirt and rotting vegetables, with a thicker odor of human waste and putrefaction lingering just beneath.

The Head skirted the goal, which had been pushed aside, overturned, its netting shredded. Here, where the lake of bodies started, lay a young man of about thirty with jagged bite-marks running up one arm to the sleeve of his NASCAR T-shirt. The bites looked infected. In one hand he held a red cap that made Clay think of Alice’s pet sneaker. He stared dully up at the stars as Bette Midler once more began singing about the wind beneath her wings.

“Hi!” the Head cried in his rusty, piercing voice. He poked the young man briskly in the middle with the tip of his cane, pushing in until the young man broke wind. “Hi, I say!”

“Stop it!” Tom almost groaned.

The Head gave him a look of tight-lipped scorn, then worked the tip of his cane into the cap the young man was holding. He flicked it away. The cap sailed about ten feet and landed on the face of a middle-aged woman. Clay watched, fascinated, as it slid partially aside, revealing one rapt and blinkless eye.

The young man reached up with dreamy slowness and clutched the hand that had been holding the cap into a fist. Then he subsided.

“He thinks he’s holding it again,” Clay whispered, fascinated.

“Perhaps,” the Head replied, without much interest. He poked the tip of his cane against one of the young man’s infected bites. It should have hurt like hell, but the young man didn’t react, only went on staring up at the sky as Bette Midler gave way to Dean Martin. “I could put my cane right through his throat and he wouldn’t try to stop me. Nor would those around him spring to his defense, although in the daytime I have no doubt they’d tear me limb from limb.”

Tom was squatting by one of the ghetto blasters. “There are batteries in this,” he said. “I can tell by the weight.”

“Yes. In all of them. They do seem to need batteries.” The Head considered, then added something Clay could have done without. “At least so far.”

“We could wade right in, couldn’t we?” Clay said. “We could wipe them out the way hunters exterminated passenger pigeons back in the 1880s.”

The Head nodded. “Bashed their little brains out as they sat on the ground, didn’t they? Not a bad analogy. But I’d make slow work of it with my cane. You’d make slow work of it even with your automatic weapon, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t have enough bullets, in any case. There must be…” Clay ran his eye over the packed bodies again. Looking at them made his head hurt. “There must be six or seven hundred. And that’s not even counting the ones under the bleachers.”