Cell: A Novel (39 page)

Clay swallowed. It wasn’t just the phoners who wanted to know; Dan and the others were watching him, too. Jordan, he saw, was holding on to Tom’s belt, as if he feared Clay’s answer the way a toddler might fear a busy street. One full of speeding trucks.

“He said your way was no way to live,” Clay said. “He took my gun and blew his head off before I could stop him.”

Silence, except for the cawing of crows. Then Jordan spoke, flat and declamatory. “Our way. Is the only way.”

Dan was next. Just as flat.
Unless they feel rage, they feel nothing,
Clay thought. “Get on. The bus.”

They got on the bus. Clay slid behind the wheel and started the engine. He headed north on Route 160. He had been rolling less than a minute when he became aware of movement on his left. It was the phoners. They were moving north along the shoulder—
above
the shoulder—in a straight line, as if on an invisible conveyor belt running maybe eight inches over the dirt. Then, up ahead, where the road crested, they rose much higher, to perhaps fifteen feet, making a human arch against the dull, mostly cloudy sky. Watching the phoners disappear over the top of the hill was like watching people ride the mild swell of an invisible roller coaster.

Then the graceful symmetry broke. One of the rising figures fell like a bird shot from a duck-blind, dropping at least seven feet to the side of the road. It was a man in the tattered remains of a jogging suit. He spun furiously in the dirt, kicking with one leg, dragging the other. As the bus rolled past him at a steady fifteen miles an hour, Clay saw the man’s face was drawn down in a grimace of fury and his mouth was working as he spewed out what was almost surely his dying declaration.

“So now we know,” Tom said hollowly. He was sitting with Jordan on the bench at the back of the bus, in front of the luggage area where their packs were stowed. “Primates give rise to man, man gives rise to phoners, phoners give rise to levitating telepaths with Tourette’s syndrome. Evolution complete.”

Jordan said, “What’s Tourette’s syndrome?”

Tom said, “Fucked if I know, son,” and incredibly, they were all laughing. Soon they were roaring—even Jordan, who didn’t know what he was laughing
at
—while the little yellow bus rolled slowly north with the phoners passing it and then rising, rising, in a seemingly endless procession.

KASHWAK

1

An hour after leaving the picnic area where Ray had shot himself with Clay’s gun, they passed a sign reading

NORTHERN COUNTIES EXPO

OCTOBER 5-15

COME ONE, COME ALL!!!

VISIT KASHWAKAMAK HALL

AND DON’T FORGET THE UNIQUE “NORTH END”

*SLOTS (INCLUDING TEXAS HOLD ‘EM)

*“INDIAN BINGO”

YOU’LL SAY “WOW!!!”

“Oh my God,” Clay said. “The Expo. Kashwakamak Hall. Christ. If there was ever a place for a flock, that’s it.”

“What’s an expo?” Denise asked.

“Your basic county fair,” Clay said, “only bigger than most of them and quite a lot wilder, because it’s on the TR, which is unincorporated. Also, there’s that North End business. Everyone in Maine knows about the North End at the Northern Counties Expo. In its own way, it’s as notorious as the Twilight Motel.”

Tom wanted to know what the North End was, but before Clay could explain, Denise said, “There’s two more. Mary-and-Jesus, I know they’re phoners, but it still makes me sick.”

A man and a woman lay in the dust at the side of the road. They had died either in an embrace or a bitter battle, and embracing did not seem to go with the phoner lifestyle. They had passed half a dozen other bodies on their run north, almost certainly casualties from the flock that had come down to get them, and had seen twice that number wandering aimlessly south, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs. One of the pairs, clearly confused about where they wanted to go, had actually tried to hitchhike the bus as it passed.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if they’d all either fall out or drop dead before what they’ve got planned for us tomorrow?” Tom said.

“Don’t count on it,” Dan said. “For every casualty or deserter we’ve seen, we’ve seen twenty or thirty who are still with the program. And God knows how many are waiting in this Kashwacky place.”

“Don’t count it out, either,” Jordan said from his place beside Tom. He spoke a little sharply. “A bug in the program—a worm—is not a small thing. It can start out as a minor pain in the ass and then boom, everything’s down. I play this game, Star-Mag? Well, you know—I used to play it—and this sore sport out in California got so mad about losing all the time that he put a worm in the system and it took down all the servers in a week. Almost half a million gamers back to computer cribbage because of that jamhead.”

“We don’t have a week, Jordan,” Denise said.

“I know,” he said. “And I know they’re not all apt to go wheels-up overnight… but it’s
possible.
And I won’t stop hoping. I don’t want to end up like Ray. He stopped… you know, hoping.” A single tear rolled down Jordan’s cheek.

Tom gave him a hug. “You won’t end up like Ray,” he said. “You’re going to grow up to be like Bill Gates.”

“I don’t want to grow up to be like Bill Gates,” Jordan said morosely. “I bet Bill Gates had a cell phone. In fact I bet he had a dozen.” He sat up straight. “One thing I’d give a lot to know is how so many cell phone transmission towers can still be working when the fucking
power’s
down.”

“FEMA,” Dan said hollowly.

Tom and Jordan turned to look at him, Tom with a tentative smile on his lips. Even Clay glanced up into the rearview mirror.

“You think I’m joking,” Dan said. “I wish I was. I read an article about it in a newsmagazine while I was in my doctor’s office, waiting for that disgusting exam where he puts on a glove and then goes prospecting—”

“Please,” Denise said. “Things are bad enough. You can skip that part. What did the article say?”

“That after 9/11, FEMA requested and got a sum of money from Congress—I don’t remember how much, but it was in the tens of millions—to equip cell phone transmission towers nationwide with long-life emergency generators to make sure the nation’s ability to communicate wouldn’t go to hell in the event of coordinated terrorist attacks.” Dan paused. “I guess it worked.”

“FEMA,” Tom said. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“I’d tell you to write your congressman, but he’s probably insane,” Denise said.

“He was insane well before the Pulse,” Tom answered, but he spoke absently. He was rubbing the back of his neck and looking out the window. “FEMA,” he said. “You know, it sort of makes sense. Fucking FEMA.”

Dan said,
“I’d
give a lot just to know why they’ve made such a business of collaring us and bringing us in.”

“And making sure the rest of us don’t follow Ray’s example,” Denise said. “Don’t forget that.” She paused. “Not that I would. Suicide’s a sin. They can do whatever they want to me here, but I’m going to heaven with my baby. I believe that.”

“The Latin’s the part that gives me the creeps,” Dan said. “Jordan, is it possible that the phoners could take old stuff—stuff from before the Pulse, I mean—and incorporate it into their new programming? If it fit their… mmmm, I don’t know… their long-term goals?”

“I guess,” Jordan said. “I don’t really know, because we don’t know what sort of commands might have been encoded in the Pulse. This isn’t like ordinary computer programming in any case. It’s self-generating. Organic. Like learning. I guess it
is
learning. ‘It satisfies the definition,’ the Head would say. Only they’re all learning together, because—”

“Because of the telepathy,” Tom said.

“Right,” Jordan agreed. He looked troubled.

“Why does the Latin give you the creeps?” Clay asked, looking at Dan in the rearview mirror.

“Tom said Latin’s the language of justice, and I guess that’s true, but this feels much more like vengeance to me.” He leaned forward. Behind his glasses, his eyes were tired and troubled. “Because, Latin or no Latin,
they can’t really think.
I’m convinced of that. Not yet, anyway. What they depend on instead of rational thought is a kind of hive mind born out of pure rage.”

“I object, Your Honor, Freudian speculation!” Tom said, rather merrily.

“Maybe Freud, maybe Lorenz,” Dan said, “but give me the benefit of the doubt either way. Would it be surprising for such an entity—such a raging entity—to confuse justice and vengeance?”

“Would it matter?” Tom asked.

“It might to us,” Dan said. “As someone who once taught a block course on vigilantism in America, I can tell you that vengeance usually ends up hurting more.”

2

Not long after this conversation, they came to a place Clay recognized. Which was unsettling, because he had never been in this part of the state before. Except once, in his dream of the mass conversions.

Written across the road in broad strokes of bright green paint was
KASHWAK=NO-FO
. The van rolled over the words at a steady thirty miles an hour as the phoners continued to stream past in their stately, witchy procession on the left.

That was no dream,
he thought, looking at the drifts of trash caught in the bushes at the sides of the road, the beer and soda cans in the ditches. Bags that had contained potato chips, Doritos, and Cheez Doodles crackled under the tires of the little bus.
The normies stood here in a double line, eating their snacks and drinking their drinks, feeling that funny itch in their heads, that weird sense of a mental hand pushing on their backs, waiting their turns to call some loved one who got lost in the Pulse. They stood here and listened to the Raggedy Man say “Left and right, two lines, that’s correct, that’s doing it, let’s keep moving, we’ve got a lot of you to process before dark.”

Up ahead the trees drew back on either side of the road. What had been some farmer’s hard-won grazeland for cows or sheep had now been flattened and churned down to bare earth by many passing feet. It was almost as though there had been a rock concert here. One of the tents was gone—blown away—but the other had caught on some trees and flapped in the dull early-evening light like a long brown tongue.

“I dreamed of this place,” Jordan said. His voice was tight.

“Did you?” Clay said. “So did I.”

“The normies followed the Kashwak equals No-Fo signs, and this is what they came to,” Jordan said. “It was like tollbooths, wasn’t it, Clay?”

“Kind of,” Clay said. “Kind of like tollbooths, yeah.”

“They had big cardboard boxes full of cell phones,” Jordan said. This was a detail Clay didn’t remember from his own dream, but he didn’t doubt it. “Heaps and heaps of them. And every normie got to make a call. What a bunch of lucky ducks.”

“When did you dream this, Jordy?” Denise asked.

“Last night.” Jordan’s eyes met Clay’s in the rearview mirror. “They knew they weren’t going to be talking to the people they wanted to talk to. Down deep they knew. But they did it anyway. They took the phones anyway. Took em and listened. Most of em didn’t even put up a fight. Why, Clay?”

“Because they were tired of fighting, I suppose,” Clay said. “Tired of being different. They wanted to hear ‘Baby Elephant Walk’ with new ears.”

They were past the beaten-down fields where the tents had been. Ahead, a paved byroad split off from the highway. It was broader and smoother than the state road. The phoners were streaming up this byway and disappearing into a slot in the woods. Looming high above the trees half a mile or so farther on was a steel gantrylike structure Clay recognized at once from his dreams. He thought it had to be some sort of amusement attraction, maybe a Parachute Drop. There was a billboard at the junction of the highway and the byroad, showing a laughing family—dad, mom, sonny, and little sis—walking into a wonderland of rides, games, and agricultural exhibits.

NORTHERN COUNTIES EXPO

GALA FIREWORKS SHOW OCTOBER 5TH

VISIT KASHWAKAMAK HALL

THE “NORTH END” OPEN “24/7” OCTOBER 5-15

YOU’LL SAY “WOW!!!”

Standing below this billboard was the Raggedy Man. He raised one hand and held it out in a
stop
gesture.

Oh Jesus,
Clay thought, and pulled the minibus up beside him. The Raggedy Man’s eyes, which Clay hadn’t been able to get right in his drawing at Gaiten, looked simultaneously dazed and full of malevolent interest. Clay told himself it was impossible for them to appear both ways at the same time, but they did. Sometimes the dazed dullness was foremost in them; a moment later it seemed to be that weirdly unpleasant avidity.

He can’t want to get on with us.

But the Raggedy Man did, it seemed. He lifted his hands to the door with the palms pressed together, then opened them. The gesture was rather pretty—like a man indicating
this bird has flown
—but the hands themselves were black with filth, and the little finger on the left one had been badly broken in what looked like two places.

These are the new people,
Clay thought.
Telepaths who don’t take baths.

“Don’t let him on,” Denise said. Her voice was trembling.

Clay, who could see that the steady conveyor-movement of phoners to the left of the bus had stopped, shook his head. “No choice.”

They peek in your head and find out you’re thinkin about a fuckin cellphone,
Ray had said—had almost snorted.
What else is anyone thinkin about since October first?

Hope you’re right, Ray,
he thought,
because it’s still an hour and a half until dark. An hour and a half at least.

He threw the lever that opened the door and the Raggedy Man, torn lower lip drooping in its constant sneer, climbed aboard. He was painfully thin; the filthy red sweatshirt hung on him like a sack. None of the normies on the bus were particularly clean—hygiene hadn’t been a priority since the first of October—but the Raggedy Man gave off a ripe and powerful stench that almost made Clay’s eyes water. It was the smell of strong cheese left to sweat it out in a hot room.

The Raggedy Man sat down in the seat by the door, the one that faced the driver’s seat, and looked at Clay. For a moment there was nothing but the dusty weight of his eyes and that strange grinning curiosity.

Then Tom spoke in a thin, outraged voice Clay had heard him use only once before, when he’d said
That’s it, everybody out of the pool
to the plump Bible-toting woman who’d started preaching her End Times sermon to Alice. “What do you want from us? You have the world, such as it is—what do you want from
us?”

The Raggedy Man’s ruined mouth formed the word even as Jordan said it. Only that one word, flat and emotionless. “Justice.”

“When it comes to justice,” Dan said, “I don’t think you have a clue.”

The Raggedy Man replied with a gesture, raising one hand to the feeder-road, palm up and index finger pointing:
Get rolling.

When the bus started to move, most of the phoners started to move again, as well. A few more had fallen to fighting, and in the outside mirror Clay saw others walking back down the expo feeder-road toward the highway.

“You’re losing some of your troops,” Clay said.

The Raggedy Man made no reply on behalf of the flock. His eyes, now dull, now curious, now both, remained fixed on Clay, who fancied he could almost feel that gaze walking lightly over his skin. The Raggedy Man’s twisted fingers, gray with dirt, lay on the lap of his grimy blue jeans. Then he grinned. Maybe that was answer enough. Dan was right, after all. For every phoner who dropped out—who went wheels-up, in Jordan-speak—there were plenty more. But Clay had no idea how
many plenty more
might entail until half an hour later, when the woods opened up on both sides and they passed beneath the wooden arch reading
WELCOME TO THE NORTHERN COUNTIES EXPO.

3

“Dear God,” Dan said.

Denise articulated Clay’s own feelings better; she gave a low scream.

Sitting across the narrow aisle of the little bus in the first passenger seat, the Raggedy Man only sat and stared at Clay with the half-vacant malevolence of a stupid child about to pull the wings off a few flies.
Do you like it?
his grin seemed to say.
It’s quite something, isn’t it? The gang’s all here!
Of course a grin like that could mean that or anything. It could even mean
I know what you have in your pocket.