Cell: A Novel (26 page)

It had been a mistake, but what else could they have done? He and Tom had felt their gathering power just that afternoon, had
seen
it, and that had been only two of them, just two. How could they have let that go on? Just let it grow?

“Damned if you do, damned if you stand pat,” he said under his breath, and turned from the window. He didn’t even know how long he’d been looking at the burning stadium and resisted the urge to check his watch. It would be easy to give in to the panic-rat, he was close to it now, and if he gave in, it would travel to the others quickly. Starting with Alice. Alice had managed to get herself back under some sort of control, but it was thin.
Thin enough to read a newspaper through,
his bingo-playing mother might have said. Although a kid herself, Alice had managed to keep herself shiny-side up mostly for the other kid’s sake, so he wouldn’t give way entirely.

The other kid. Jordan.

Clay hurried back into the front hall, noted there was still no fourth pack by the door, and saw Tom coming down the stairs. Alone.

“Where’s the kid?” Clay asked. His ears had started to clear a little, but his voice still sounded too far away, and like a stranger’s. He had an idea that was going to continue for a while. “You were supposed to be helping him put some stuff together—Ardai said he brought a pack over with him from that dorm of his—”

“He won’t come.” Tom rubbed the side of his face. He looked tired, sad, distracted. With half his mustache gone, he looked ludicrous as well.

“What?”

“Lower your voice, Clay. I don’t make the news, I just report it.”

“Then tell me what you’re talking about, for Christ’s sake.”

“He won’t go without the Head. He said, ‘You can’t make me.’ And if you’re really serious about going tonight, I believe he’s right.”

Alice came tearing out of the kitchen. She had washed up, tied her hair back, and put on a new shirt—it hung almost to her knees—but her skin glowed with the same burn Clay felt on his own. He supposed they should count themselves lucky that they weren’t popping blisters.

“Alice,” he began, “I need you to exercise your womanly powers over Jordan. He’s being—”

She steamed past as if he hadn’t spoken, fell on her knees, seized her pack, and tore it open. He watched, perplexed, as she began to pull out the stuff inside. He looked at Tom and saw an expression of understanding and sympathy dawning on Tom’s face.

“What?” Clay asked.
“What,
for chrissake?” He had felt an all too similar exasperated annoyance toward Sharon during the last year they’d actually lived together—had felt it often—and hated himself for having that pop up now, of all times. But
dammit,
another complication was the last thing they needed now. He ran his hands through his hair.
“What?”

“Look at her wrist,” Tom said.

Clay looked. The dirty piece of shoestring was still there, but the sneaker was gone. He felt an absurd sinking in his stomach. Or maybe it wasn’t so absurd. If it mattered to Alice, he supposed it
mattered.
So what if it was just a sneaker?

The spare T-shirt and sweatshirt she had packed (gaiten boosters’ club printed across the front) went flying. Batteries rolled. Her spare flashlight hit the tile floor and the lens-cover cracked. That was enough to convince Clay. This wasn’t a Sharon Riddell tantrum because they were out of hazelnut coffee or Chunky Monkey ice cream; this was unvarnished terror.

He went to Alice, knelt beside her, and took hold of her wrists. He could feel the seconds flying by, turning into minutes they should have been using to put this town behind them, but he could also feel the lightning sprint of her pulse under his fingers. And he could see her eyes. It wasn’t panic in them now but agony, and he realized she’d put everything in that sneaker: her mother and father, her friends, Beth Nickerson and her daughter, the Tonney Field inferno, everything.

“It’s not in here!” she cried. “I thought I must have packed it, but I didn’t!
I can’t find it anywhere!”

“No, honey, I know.” Clay was still holding her wrists. Now he lifted the one with the shoelace around it. “Do you see?” He waited until he was sure her eyes had focused, then he flipped the ends beyond the knot, where there had been a second knot.

“It’s too long now,” she said. “It wasn’t that long before.”

Clay tried to remember the last time he’d seen the sneaker. He told himself it was impossible to remember a thing like that, given all that had been going on, then realized he could. Very clearly, too. It was when she’d helped Tom pull him up after the second truck had exploded. It had been dancing from its string then. She had been covered with blood, scraps of cloth, and little chunks of flesh, but the sneaker had still been on her wrist. He tried to remember if it was still there when she’d booted the burning torso off the ramp. He didn’t think so. Maybe that was hindsight, but he didn’t think so.

“It came untied, honey,” he said. “It came untied and fell off.”

“I
lost
it?” Her eyes, unbelieving. The first tears. “Are you
sure?”

“Pretty sure, yeah.”

“It was my luck,” she whispered, the tears spilling over.

“No,” Tom said, and put an arm around her.
“We’re
your luck.”

She looked at him. “How do you know?”

“Because you found us first,” Tom said. “And we’re still here.”

She hugged them both and they stood that way for a while, the three of them, with their arms around each other in the hall with Alice’s few possessions scattered around their feet.

25

The fire spread to a lecture building the Head identified as Hackery Hall. Then, around four a.m., the wind dropped away and it spread no farther. When the sun came up, the Gaiten campus stank of propane, charred wood, and a great many burnt bodies. The bright sky of a perfect New England morning in October was obscured by a rising column of gray-black smoke. And Cheatham Lodge was still occupied. In the end it had been like dominoes: the Head couldn’t travel except by car, car travel was impossible, and Jordan would not go without the Head. Nor was Ardai able to persuade him. Alice, although resigned to the loss of her talisman, refused to go without Jordan. Tom would not go without Alice. And Clay was loath to go without the two of them, although he was horrified to find these newcomers in his life seemed at least temporarily more important than his own son, and although he continued to feel certain that they would pay a high price for what they’d done on Tonney Field if they stayed in Gaiten, let alone at the scene of the crime.

He thought he might feel better about that last at daybreak, but he did not.

The five of them watched and waited at the living room window, but of course nothing came out of the smoldering wreckage, and there was no sound but the low crackle of fire eating deep into the Athletic Department offices and locker rooms even as it finished off the bleachers above-ground. The thousand or so phone-crazies who had been roosting there were, as Alice had said,
crispy.
The smell of them was rich and stick-in-your-throat awful. Clay had vomited once and knew the others had, as well—even the Head.

We made a mistake,
he thought again.

“You guys should have gone on,” Jordan said. “We would have been all right—we were before, weren’t we, sir?”

Headmaster Ardai ignored the question. He was studying Clay. “What happened yesterday when you and Tom were in that service station? I think something happened then to make you look as you do now.”

“Oh? How do I look, sir?”

“Like an animal that smells a trap. Did those two in the street see you?”

“It wasn’t exactly that,” Clay said. He didn’t love being called an animal, but couldn’t deny that was what he was: oxygen and food in, carbon dioxide and shit out, pop goes the weasel.

The Head had begun to rub restlessly at the left side of his midsection with one big hand. Like many of his gestures, Clay thought it had an oddly theatrical quality—not exactly phony, but meant to be seen at the back of the lecture hall. “Then what exactly
was
it?”

And because protecting the others no longer seemed like an option, Clay told the Head exactly what they’d seen in the office of the Citgo station—a physical struggle over a box of stale treats that had suddenly turned into something else. He told about the fluttering papers, the ashes that had begun circling in the ashtray like water going down a bathtub drain, the keys jingling on the board, the nozzle that fell off the gas-pump.

“I saw that,” Jordan said, and Alice nodded.

Tom mentioned feeling short of breath, and Clay agreed. They both tried to explain the sense of something powerful building in the air.

Clay said it was how things felt before a thunderstorm. Tom said the air just felt
fraught,
somehow. Too heavy.

“Then he let her take a couple of the fucking things and it all went away,” Tom said. “The ashes stopped spinning, the keys stopped jingling, that thundery feeling went out of the air.” He looked to Clay for confirmation. Clay nodded.

Alice said, “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

“Because it wouldn’t have changed anything,” Clay said. “We were going to burn the nest if we could, regardless.”

“Yes,” Tom said.

Jordan said suddenly, “You think the phone-crazies are turning into psionics, don’t you?”

Tom said, “I don’t know what that word means, Jordan.”

“People who can move things around just by thinking about it, for one thing. Or by accident, if their emotions get out of control. Only psionic abilities like telekinesis and levitation—”

“Levitation?”
Alice almost barked.

Jordan paid no mind. “—are only branches. The trunk of the psionic tree is telepathy, and that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? The telepathy thing.”

Tom’s fingers went to the place above his mouth where half of his mustache was gone and touched the reddened skin there. “Well, the thought has crossed my mind.” He paused, head cocked. “That might be witty. I’m not sure.”

Jordan ignored this, as well. “Say that they are. Getting to be true telepaths, I mean, and not just zombies with a flocking instinct. So what? The Gaiten Academy flock is
dead,
and they died without a clue of who lit em up, because they died in whatever passes for sleep with them, so if you’re worrying that they telepathically faxed our names and descriptions to any of their buddies in the surrounding New England states, you can relax.”

“Jordan—” the Head began, then winced. He was still rubbing his midsection.

“Sir? Are you all right?”

“Yes. Fetch my Zantac from the downstairs bathroom, would you? And a bottle of the Poland Spring water. There’s a good lad.”

Jordan hurried away on the errand.

“Not an ulcer, is it?” Tom asked.

“No,” the Head replied. “It’s stress. An old… one cannot say friend… acquaintance?”

“Your heart okay?” Alice asked, speaking in a low voice.

“I suppose,” the Head agreed, and bared his teeth in a smile of disconcerting jollity. “If the Zantac doesn’t work, we may resuppose… but so far, the Zantac always has, and one doesn’t care to buy trouble when so much of it is on sale. Ah, Jordan, thank you.”

“Quite welcome, sir.” The boy handed him the glass and the pill with his usual smile.

“I think you ought to go with them,” Ardai told him after swallowing the Zantac.

“Sir, with all respect, I’m telling you there’s no
way
they could know, no
way.”

The Head looked a question at Tom and Clay. Tom raised his hands. Clay only shrugged. He could say what he felt right out loud, could articulate what they surely must know he felt—
we made a mistake, and staying here is compounding it
—but saw no point. Jordan’s face was set and stubborn on top, scared to death just beneath. They were not going to persuade him. And besides, it was day again. Day was
their
time.

He rumpled the boy’s hair. “If you say so, Jordan. I’m going to catch some winks.”

Jordan looked almost sublimely relieved. “That sounds like a good idea. I think I will, too.”

“I’m going to have a cup of Cheatham Lodge’s world-famous tepid cocoa before I come up,” Tom said. “And I believe I’ll shave off the rest of this mustache. The wailing and lamentation you hear will be mine.”

“Can I watch?” Alice asked. “I always wanted to watch a grown man wail and lament.”

26

Clay and Tom were sharing a small bedroom on the third floor; Alice had been given the only other. While Clay was taking off his shoes, there was a perfunctory knock on the door, which the Head followed without pause. Two bright spots of color burned high up on his cheekbones. Otherwise his face was deathly pale.

“Are you all right?” Clay asked, standing. “Is it your heart, after all?”

“I’m glad you asked me that,” the Head replied. “I wasn’t entirely sure I planted the seed, but it seems I did.” He glanced back over his shoulder into the hall, then closed the door with the tip of his cane. “Listen carefully, Mr. Riddell—Clay—and don’t ask questions unless you feel you absolutely must. I am going to be found dead in my bed late this afternoon or early this evening, and you will say of course it was my heart after all, that what we did last night must have brought it on. Do you understand?”

Clay nodded. He understood, and he bit back the automatic protest. It might have had a place in the old world, but it had none here. He knew why the Head was proposing what he was proposing.

“If Jordan even suspects I may have taken my own life to free him from what he, in his boyishly admirable way, regards as a sacred obligation, he may take his own. At the very least he would be plunged into what the elders of my own childhood called a black fugue. He will grieve for me deeply as it is, but that is permissible. The thought that I committed suicide to get him out of Gaiten is not. Do you understand
that?”