Cell: A Novel (3 page)

He trailed off, replaying exactly what
had
happened just before the shit hit the fan. He found his eyes wandering from the dead woman to the unconscious girl and then on to the shards of the unconscious girl’s peppermint-colored cell phone.

Warbling sirens of two distinctly different pitches rose in the air. Clay supposed one pitch belonged to police cars, the other to fire trucks. He supposed you could tell the difference if you lived in this city, but he didn’t, he lived in Kent Pond, Maine, and he wished with all his heart that he were there right now.

What happened just before the shit hit the fan was that Power Suit Woman had called her friend Maddy to tell her she’d gotten her hair done, and one of Pixie Light’s friends had called
her.
Pixie Dark had listened in to this latter call. After that all three of them had gone crazy.

You’re not thinking
—

From behind them, to the east, came the biggest explosion yet: a terrific shotgun-blast of sound. Clay leaped to his feet. He and the little man in the tweed suit looked wildly at each other, then toward Chinatown and Boston’s North End. They couldn’t see what had exploded, but now a much larger, darker plume of smoke was rising above the buildings on that horizon.

While they were looking at it, a Boston PD radio-car and a hook-and-ladder fire truck pulled up in front of the Four Seasons across the street. Clay glanced that way in time to see a second jumper set sail from the top story of the hotel, followed by another pair from the roof. To Clay it looked as if the two coming from the roof were actually brawling with each other on the way down.

“Jesus Mary and Joseph NO!”
a woman screamed, her voice breaking.
“Oh NO, no MORE, no MORE!”

The first of the suicidal trio hit the rear of the police car, splattering the trunk with hair and gore, shattering the back window. The other two hit the hook and ladder as firemen dressed in bright yellow coats scattered like improbable birds.

“NO!”
the woman shrieked. “No
MORE! No MORE! Dear GOD, no MORE!”

But here came a woman from the fifth or sixth floor, tumbling like a crazy acrobat, striking a policeman who was peering up and surely killing him even as she killed herself.

From the north there came another of those great roaring explosions—the sound of the devil firing a shotgun in hell—and once again Clay looked at the little man, who was looking anxiously back up at him. More smoke was rising in the sky, and in spite of the brisk breeze, the blue over there was almost blotted out.

“They’re using planes again,” the little man said. “The dirty bastards are using planes again.”

As if to underline the idea, a third monstrous explosion came rolling to them from the city’s northeast.

“But… that’s Logan over there.” Clay was once again finding it hard to talk, and even harder to think. All he really seemed to have in his mind was some sort of half-baked joke:
Did you hear the one about the
[insert your favorite ethnic group here]
terrorists who decided to bring America to its knees by blowing up the airport?

“So?” the little man asked, almost truculently.

“So why not the Hancock Building? Or the Pru?”

The little man’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. I only know I want to get off this street.”

As if to emphasize his point, half a dozen more young people sprinted past them. Boston was a
city
of young people, Clay had noticed—all those colleges. These six, three men and three women, were running lootless, at least, and they most assuredly weren’t laughing. As they ran, one of the young men pulled out his cell phone and stuck it to his ear.

Clay glanced across the street and saw that a second black-and-white unit had pulled up behind the first. No need to use Power Suit Woman’s cell phone after all (which was good, since he’d decided he really didn’t want to do that). He could just walk across the street and talk to them except he wasn’t sure that he dared to cross Boylston Street just now. Even if he did, would they come over
here
to look at one unconscious girl when they had God knew how many casualties over
there?
And as he watched, the firemen began piling back on board their hook-and-ladder unit; it looked like they were heading someplace else. Over to Logan Airport, quite likely, or—

“Oh my God-Jesus, watch out for this one,” said the little man with the mustache, speaking in a low, tight voice. He was looking west along Boylston, back toward downtown, in the direction Clay had been coming from when his major object in life had been reaching Sharon on the phone. He’d even known how he was going to start:
Good news, hon
—
no matter how it comes out between us, there’ll always be shoes for the kid.
In his head it had sounded light and funny—like the old days.

There was nothing funny about this. Coming toward them—not running but walking in long, flat-footed strides—was a man of about fifty, wearing suit pants and the remains of a shirt and tie. The pants were gray. It was impossible to tell what color the shirt and tie had been, because both were now shredded and stained with blood. In his right hand the man held what looked like a butcher knife with an eighteen-inch blade. Clay actually believed he had seen this knife, in the window of a shop called Soul Kitchen, on his walk back from his meeting at the Copley Square Hotel. The row of knives in the window (
SWEDISH STEEL!
the little engraved card in front of them proclaimed) had shone in the cunning glow of hidden downlighters, but this blade had done a good deal of work since its liberation—or a bad deal of it—and was now dull with blood.

The man in the tattered shirt swung the knife as he closed in on them with his flat-footed strides, the blade cutting short up-and-down arcs in the air. He broke the pattern only once, to slash at himself. A fresh rill of blood ran through a new rip in his tattered shirt. The remains of his tie flapped. And as he closed the distance he hectored them like a backwoods preacher speaking in tongues at the moment of some divine godhead revelation.

“Eyelab!”
he cried.
“Eeelah-eyelah-a-babbalah naz! A-babbalah
why?
A-bunnaloo
coy?
Kazzalah! Kazzalah-CAN! Fie! SHY-fie!”
And now he brought the knife back to his right hip and then beyond it, and Clay, whose visual sense was overdeveloped, at once saw the sweeping stroke that would follow. The gutting stroke, made even as he continued his nuthouse march to nowhere through the October afternoon in those flat-footed declamatory strides.

“Look out!”
the little guy with the mustache screamed, but
he
wasn’t looking out, not the little guy with the mustache; the little guy with the mustache, the first
normal
person with whom Clay Riddell had spoken since this craziness began—who had, in fact, spoken to
him,
which had probably taken some courage, under the circumstances—was frozen in place, his eyes bigger than ever behind the lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles. And was the crazy guy going for him because of the two men, the one with the mustache was smaller and looked like easier prey? If so, maybe Mr. Speaking-in-Tongues wasn’t
completely
crazy, and suddenly Clay was mad as well as scared, mad the way he might have been if he’d looked through a schoolyard fence and seen a bully getting ready to tune up on a smaller, younger kid.

“LOOK OUT!”
the little man with the mustache almost wailed, still not moving as his death swept toward him, death liberated from a shop called Soul Kitchen where Diner’s Club and Visa were no doubt accepted, along with Your Personal Check If Accompanied By Bank Card.

Clay didn’t think. He simply picked up his portfolio again by its double handle and stuck it between the oncoming knife and his new acquaintance in the tweed suit. The blade went all the way through with a hollow
thuck,
but the tip stopped four inches short of the little man’s belly. The little man finally came to his senses and cringed aside, toward the Common, shrieking for help at the top of his lungs.

The man in the shredded shirt and tie—he was getting a bit jowly in the cheek and heavy in the neck, as if his personal equation of good meals and good exercise had stopped balancing about two years ago—abruptly ceased his nonsense peroration. His face took on a look of vacuous perplexity that stopped short of surprise, let alone amazement.

What Clay felt was a species of dismal outrage. That blade had gone through all of his
Dark Wanderer
pictures (to him they were always pictures, never drawings or illustrations), and it seemed to him that the
thuck
sound might as well have been the blade penetrating a special chamber of his heart. That was stupid when he had repros of everything, including the four color splash-pages, but it didn’t change how he felt. The madman’s blade had skewered Sorcerer John (named after his own son, of course), the Wizard Flak, Frank and the Posse Boys, Sleepy Gene, Poison Sally, Lily Astolet, Blue Witch, and of course Ray Damon, the Dark Wanderer himself. His own fantastic creatures, living in the cave of his imagination and poised to set him free from the drudgery of teaching art in a dozen rural Maine schools, driving thousands of miles a month and practically living out of his car.

He could swear he had heard them moan when the madman’s Swedish blade pierced them where they slept in their innocency.

Furious, not caring about the blade (at least for the moment), he drove the man in the shredded shirt rapidly backward, using the portfolio as a kind of shield, growing angrier as it bent into a wide V-shape around the knife-blade.

“Blet!”
the lunatic hollered, and tried to pull his blade back. It was caught too firmly for him to do so.
“Blet ky-yam doe-ram kazzalah a-babbalah!”

“I’ll a-babbalah
your
a-kazzalah, you fuck!” Clay shouted, and planted his left foot behind the lunatic’s backpedaling legs. It would occur to him later that the body knows how to fight when it has to. That it’s a secret the body keeps, just as it does the secrets of how to run or jump a creek or throw a fuck or—quite likely—die when there’s no other choice. That under conditions of extreme stress it simply takes over and does what needs doing while the brain stands off to one side, unable to do anything but whistle and tap its foot and look up at the sky. Or contemplate the sound a knife makes going through the portfolio your wife gave you for your twenty-eighth birthday, for that matter.

The lunatic tripped over Clay’s foot just as Clay’s wise body meant him to do and fell to the sidewalk on his back. Clay stood over him, panting, with the portfolio still held in both hands like a shield bent in battle. The butcher knife still stuck out of it, handle from one side, blade from the other.

The lunatic tried to get up. Clay’s new friend scurried forward and kicked him in the neck, quite hard. The little fellow was weeping loudly, the tears gushing down his cheeks and fogging the lenses of his spectacles. The lunatic fell back on the sidewalk with his tongue sticking out of his mouth. Around
it
he made choking sounds that sounded to Clay like his former speaking-in-tongues babble.

“He tried to kill us!” the little man wept. “He tried to
kill
us!”

“Yes, yes,” Clay said. He was aware that he had once said
yes, yes
to Johnny in exactly the same way back when they’d still called him Johnny-Gee and he’d come to them up the front walk with his scraped shins or elbows, wailing
I got BLOOD!

The man on the sidewalk (who had plenty of blood) was on his elbows, trying to get up again. Clay did the honors this time, kicking one of the guy’s elbows out from under him and putting him back down on the pavement. This kicking seemed like a stopgap solution at best, and a messy one. Clay grabbed the handle of the knife, winced at the slimy feel of half-jellied blood on the handle—it was like rubbing a palm through cold bacon-grease—and pulled. The knife came a little bit, then either stopped or his hand slipped. He fancied he heard his characters murmuring unhappily from the darkness of the portfolio, and he made a painful noise himself. He couldn’t help it. And he couldn’t help wondering what he meant to do with the knife if he got it out. Stab the lunatic to death with it? He thought he could have done that in the heat of the moment, but probably not now.

“What’s wrong?” the little man asked in a watery voice. Clay, even in his own distress, couldn’t help being touched by the concern he heard there. “Did he get you? You had him blocked out for a few seconds and I couldn’t see. Did he
get
you? Are you cut?”

“No,” Clay said. “I’m all r—”

There was another gigantic explosion from the north, almost surely from Logan Airport on the other side of Boston Harbor. Both of them hunched their shoulders and winced.

The lunatic took the opportunity to sit up and was scrambling to his feet when the little man in the tweed suit administered a clumsy but effective sideways kick, planting a shoe squarely in the middle of the lunatic’s shredded tie and knocking him back down. The lunatic roared and snatched at the little man’s foot. He would have pulled the little guy over, then perhaps into a crushing embrace, had Clay not seized his new acquaintance by the shoulder and pulled him away.

“He’s got my shoe!”
the little man yelped. Behind them, two more cars crashed. There were more screams, more alarms. Car alarms, fire alarms, hearty clanging burglar alarms. Sirens whooped in the distance.
“Bastard got my sh
—”

Suddenly a policeman was there. One of the responders from across the street, Clay assumed, and as the policeman dropped to one blue knee beside the babbling lunatic, Clay felt something very much like love for the cop. That he’d take the time to come over here! That he’d even noticed!

“You want to be careful of him,” the little man said nervously. “He’s—”