Cell: A Novel (9 page)

He backed away, as if Mr. Ricardi might slip his homemade drape-cord noose and come after him the second he turned his back. He was suddenly more than afraid for Sharon and Johnny; he was homesick for them with a depth of feeling that made him think of his first day at school, his mother leaving him at the playground gate. The other parents had walked their kids inside. But his mother said,
You just go in there, Clayton, it’s the first room, you’ll be fine, boys should do this part alone.
Before he did what she told him he had watched her going away, back up Cedar Street. Her blue coat. Now, standing here in the dark, he was renewing acquaintance with the knowledge that the second part of homesick was
sick
for a reason.

Tom and Alice were fine, but he wanted the people he loved.

Once he was around the reception desk, he faced the street and crossed the lobby. He got close enough to the long broken window to see the frightened faces of his new friends, then remembered he had forgotten his fucking portfolio again and had to go back. Reaching for it, he felt certain that Mr. Ricardi’s hand would steal out of the gathering darkness behind the desk and close over his. That didn’t happen, but from overhead came another of those thumps. Something still up there, something still blundering around in the dark. Something that had been human until three o’clock this afternoon.

This time when he was halfway to the door, the lobby’s single battery-powered emergency light stuttered briefly, then went out.
That’s a Fire Code violation,
Clay thought.
I ought to report that.

He handed out his portfolio. Tom took it.

“Where is he?” Alice asked. “Wasn’t he there?”

“Dead,” Clay said. It had crossed his mind to lie, but he didn’t think he was capable. He was too shocked by what he had seen. How did a man hang himself? He didn’t see how it was even possible. “Suicide.”

Alice began to cry, and it occurred to Clay that she didn’t know that if it had been up to Mr. Ricardi, she’d probably be dead herself now. The thing was, he felt a little like crying himself. Because Mr. Ricardi had come around. Maybe most people did, if they got a chance.

From west of them on the darkening street, back toward the Common, came a scream that seemed too great to have issued from human lungs. It sounded to Clay almost like the trumpeting of an elephant. There was no pain in it, and no joy. There was only madness. Alice cringed against him, and he put an arm around her. The feel of her body was like the feel of an electrical wire with a strong current passing through it.

“If we’re going to get out of here, let’s do it,” Tom said. “If we don’t run into too much trouble, we should be able to get as far north as Maiden, and spend the night at my place.”

“That’s a hell of a good idea,” Clay said.

Tom smiled cautiously. “You really think so?”

“I really do. Who knows, maybe Officer Ashland’s already there.”

“Who’s Officer Ashland?” Alice asked.

“A policeman we met back by the Common,” Tom said. “He… you know, helped us out.” The three of them were now walking east toward Atlantic Avenue, through the falling ash and the sound of alarms. “We won’t see him, though. Clay’s just trying to be funny.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m glad somebody’s trying to be.” Lying on the pavement by a litter barrel was a blue cell phone with a cracked casing. Alice kicked it into the gutter without breaking stride.

“Good one,” Clay said.

Alice shrugged. “Five years of soccer,” she said, and at that moment the streetlights came on, like a promise that all was not yet lost.

MALDEN

1

Thousands of people stood on the Mystic River Bridge and watched as everything between Comm Ave and Boston Harbor took fire and burned. The wind from the west remained brisk and warm even after the sun was down and the flames roared like a furnace, blotting out the stars. The rising moon was full and ultimately hideous. Sometimes the smoke masked it, but all too often that bulging dragon’s eye swam free and peered down, casting a bleary orange light. Clay thought it a horror-comic moon, but didn’t say so.

No one had much to say. The people on the bridge only looked at the city they had so lately left, watching as the flames reached the pricey harborfront condos and began engulfing them. From across the water came an interwoven tapestry of alarms—fire alarms and car alarms, mostly, with several whooping sirens added for spice. For a while an amplified voice had told citizens to GET OFF THE STREETS, and then another had begun advising them to LEAVE THE CITY ON FOOT BY MAJOR ARTERIES WEST AND NORTH. These two contradictory pieces of advice had competed with each other for several minutes, and then GET OFF THE STREETS had ceased. About five minutes later, LEAVE THE CITY ON FOOT had also quit. Now there was only the hungry roar of the wind-driven fire, the alarms, and a steady low crumping sound that Clay thought must be windows imploding in the enormous heat.

He wondered how many people had been trapped over there. Trapped between the fire and the water.

“Remember wondering if a modern city could burn?” Tom McCourt said. In the light of the fire, his small, intelligent face looked tired and sick. There was a smudge of ash on one of his cheeks. “Remember that?”

“Shut up, come on,” Alice said. She was clearly distraught, but like Tom, she spoke in a low voice.
It’s like we’re in a library,
Clay thought. And then he thought, No—
a funeral home.
“Can’t we please go? Because this is kicking my ass.”

“Sure,” Clay said. “You bet. How far to your place, Tom?”

“From here, less than two miles,” he said. “But it’s not all behind us, I’m sorry to say.” They had turned north now, and he pointed ahead and to the right. The glow blooming there could almost have been orange-tinted arc-sodium streetlights on a cloudy night, except the night was clear and the streetlights were now out. In any case, streetlights did not give off rising columns of smoke.

Alice moaned, then covered her mouth as if she expected someone among the silent multitude watching Boston burn might reprimand her for making too much noise.

“Don’t worry,” Tom said with eerie calm. “We’re going to Maiden and that looks like Revere. The way the wind’s blowing, Maiden should still be all right.”

Stop right there,
Clay urged him silently, but Tom did not.

“For now,” he added.

2

There were several dozen abandoned cars on the lower deck of the span, and a fire truck with EAST BOSTON lettered on its avocado-green side that had been sideswiped by a cement truck (both were abandoned), but mostly this level of the bridge belonged to the pedestrians.
Except now you probably have to call them refugees,
Clay thought, and then realized there was no
them
about it. Us.
Call us refugees.

There was still very little talk. Most people just stood and watched the city burn in silence. Those who
were
moving went slowly, looking back frequently over their shoulders. Then, as they neared the far end of the bridge (he could see
Old Ironsides
—at least he thought it was
Old Ironsides
—riding at anchor in the Harbor, still safe from the flames), he noticed an odd thing. Many of them were also looking at Alice. At first he had the paranoid idea that people must think he and Tom had abducted the girl and were spiriting her away for God knew what immoral purposes. Then he had to remind himself that these wraiths on the Mystic Bridge were in shock, even more uprooted from their normal lives than the Hurricane Katrina refugees had been—those unfortunates had at least had some warning—and were unlikely to be capable of considering such fine ideas. Most were too deep in their own heads for moralizing. Then the moon rose a little higher and came out a little more strongly, and he got it: she was the only adolescent in sight. Even Clay himself was young compared to most of their fellow refugees. The majority of people gawking at the torch that had been Boston or plodding slowly toward Maiden and Danvers were over forty, and many looked eligible for the Golden Ager discount at Denny’s. He saw a few people with little kids, and a couple of babies in strollers, but that was pretty much it for the younger set.

A little farther on, he noticed something else. There were cell phones lying discarded in the roadway. Every few feet they passed another one, and none were whole. They had either been run over or stomped down to nothing but wire and splinters of plastic, like dangerous snakes that had been destroyed before they could bite again.

3

“What’s your name, dear?” asked a plump woman who came angling across to their side of the highway. This was about five minutes after they had left the bridge. Tom said another fifteen would bring them to the Salem Street exit, and from there it was only four blocks to his house. He said his cat would be awfully glad to see him, and that had brought a wan smile to Alice’s face. Clay thought wan was better than nothing.

Now Alice looked with reflexive mistrust at the plump woman who had detached herself from the mostly silent groups and little lines of men and women—hardly more than shadows, really, some with suitcases, some carrying shopping bags or wearing backpacks—that had crossed the Mystic and were walking north on Route One, away from the great fire to the south and all too aware of the new one taking hold in Revere, off to the northeast.

The plump woman looked back at her with sweet interest. Her graying hair was done in neat beauty-shop curls. She wore cat’s-eye glasses and what Clay’s mother would have called a “car coat.” She carried a shopping bag in one hand and a book in the other. There seemed to be no harm in her. She certainly wasn’t one of the phone-crazies—they hadn’t seen a single one of those since leaving the Atlantic Avenue Inn with their sacks of grub—but Clay felt himself go on point, just the same. To be approached as if they were at a get-acquainted tea instead of fleeing a burning city didn’t seem normal. But under these circumstances, just what was? He was probably losing it, but if so, Tom was, too. He was also watching the plump, motherly woman with go-away eyes.

“Alice?” Alice said at last, just when Clay had decided the girl wasn’t going to reply at all. She sounded like a kid trying to answer what she fears may be a trick question in a class that’s really too tough for her. “My name is Alice Maxwell?”

“Alice,” the plump woman said, and her lips curved in a maternal smile as sweet as her look of interest. There was no reason that smile should have set Clay on edge more than he already was, but it did. “That’s a lovely name. It means ‘blessed of God.’ ”

“Actually, ma’am, it means ‘of the royalty’ or ‘regally born,’ ” Tom said. “Now could you excuse us? The girl has just lost her mother today, and—”

“We’ve
all
lost someone today, haven’t we, Alice?” the plump woman said without looking at Tom. She kept pace with Alice, her beauty-shop curls bouncing with every step. Alice was eyeing her with a mixture of unease and fascination. Around them others paced and sometimes hurried and often plodded with their heads down, little more than wraiths in this unaccustomed darkness, and Clay still saw nobody young except for a few babies, a few toddlers, and Alice. No adolescents because most adolescents had cell phones, like Pixie Light back at the Mister Softee truck. Or like his own son, who had a red Nextel with a ring-tone from
The Monster Club
and a teacher workamommy who might be with him or might be just about anyw—

Stop it. Don’t you let that rat out. That rat can do nothing but run, bite, and chase its own tail.

The plump woman, meanwhile, kept nodding. Her curls bounced along. “Yes, we’ve all lost someone, because this is the time of the great Tribulation. It’s all in here, in Revelation.” She held up the book she was carrying, and of course it was a Bible, and now Clay thought he was getting a better look at the sparkle in the eyes behind the plump woman cat’s-eye glasses. That wasn’t kindly interest; that was lunacy.

“Oh, that’s it, everybody out of the pool,” Tom said. In his voice Clay heard a mixture of disgust (at himself, for letting the plump woman bore in and get close to begin with, quite likely) and dismay.

The plump woman took no notice, of course; she had fixed Alice with her stare, and who was there to pull her away? The police were otherwise occupied, if there were any left. Here there were only the shocked and shuffling refugees, and they could care less about one elderly crazy lady with a Bible and a beauty-shop perm.

“The Vial of Insanity has been poured into the brains of the wicked, and the City of Sin has been set afire by the cleansing torch of Yee-
ho
-vah!” the plump lady cried. She was wearing red lipstick. Her teeth were too even to be anything but old-fashioned dentures. “Now you see the unrepentant flee, yea, verily, even as maggots flee the burst belly of—”

Alice put her hands over her ears. “Make her stop!” she cried, and still the ghost-shapes of the city’s recent residents filed past, only a few sparing a dull, incurious glance before looking once more into the darkness where somewhere ahead New Hampshire lay.

The plump woman was starting to work up a sweat, Bible raised, eyes blazing, beauty-shop curls nodding and swaying. “Take your hands down, girl, and hear the Word of God before you let these men lead you away and fornicate with you in the open doorway of Hell itself! ‘For I saw a star blaze in the sky, and it was called Wormwood, and those that followed it followed upon Lucifer, and those that followed upon Lucifer walked downward into the furnace of—’ ”

Clay hit her. He pulled the punch at the last second, but it was still a solid clip to the jaw, and he felt the impact travel all the way up to his shoulder. The plump woman’s glasses rose off her pug nose and then settled back. Behind them, her eyes lost their glare and rolled up in their sockets. Her knees came unhinged and she buckled, her Bible tumbling from her clenched fist. Alice, still looking stunned and horrified, nevertheless dropped her hands from her ears fast enough to catch the Bible. And Tom McCourt caught the woman under her arms. The punch and the two subsequent catches were so neatly done they could have been choreographed.

Clay was suddenly closer to undone than at any time since things had started going wrong. Why this should have been worse than the throat-biting teenage girl or the knife-wielding businessman, worse than finding Mr. Ricardi hanging from a light fixture with a bag over his head, he didn’t know, but it was. He had kicked the knife-wielding businessman, Tom had, too, but the knife-wielding businessman had been a different kind of crazy. The old lady with the beauty-shop curls had just been a…

“Jesus,” he said. “She was just a nut, and I coldcocked her.” He was starting to shake.

“She was terrorizing a young girl who lost her mother today,” Tom said, and Clay realized it wasn’t calmness he heard in the small man’s voice but an extraordinary coldness. “You did exactly the right thing. Besides, you can’t keep an old iron horse like this down for long. She’s coming around already. Help me get her over to the side of the road.”

4

They had reached the part of Route One—sometimes called the Miracle Mile, sometimes Sleaze Alley—where limited-access highway yielded to a jostle of liquor marts, cut-rate clothing stores, sporting-goods outlets, and eateries with names like Fuddruckers. Here the six lanes were littered, if not quite choked, with vehicles that had either been piled up or just abandoned when their operators panicked, tried their cell phones, and went insane. The refugees wove their various courses silently among the remains, reminding Clay Riddell more than a little of ants evacuating a hill that has been demolished by the careless passing boot-stride of some heedless human.

There was a green reflectorized sign reading
MALDEN SALEM ST. EXIT 1/4 MI
at the edge of a low pink building that had been broken into; it was fronted by a jagged skirting of broken glass, and a battery-powered burglar alarm was even now in the tired last stages of running down. A glance at the dead sign on the roof was all Clay needed to tell him what had made the place a target in the aftermath of the day’s disaster:
MISTER BIG’S GIANT DISCOUNT LIQUOR
.

He had one of the plump woman’s arms. Tom had the other, and Alice supported the muttering woman’s head as they eased her to a sitting position with her back against one of the exit sign’s legs. Just as they got her down, the plump woman opened her eyes and looked at them dazedly.

Tom snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, twice, briskly. She blinked, then turned her eyes to Clay. “You… hit me,” she said. Her fingers rose to touch the rapidly puffing spot on her jaw.

“Yes, I’m sor—” Clay began.

“He may be, but I’m not,” Tom said. He spoke with that same cold briskness. “You were terrorizing our ward.”

The plump woman laughed softly, but tears were in her eyes.
“Ward!
I’ve heard a lot of words for it, but never that one. As if I don’t know what men like you want with a tender girl like this, especially in times like these. ‘They repented not their fornications, nor their sodomies, nor their—’ ”

“Shut up,” Tom said, “or I’ll hit you myself. And unlike my friend, who was I think lucky enough not to grow up among the holy Hannahs and thus does not recognize you for what you are, I won’t pull my punch. Fair warning—one more word.” He held his fist before her eyes, and although Clay had already concluded that Tom was an educated man, civilized, and probably not much of a puncher under ordinary circumstances, he could not help feeling dismay at the sight of that small, tight fist, as if he were looking at an omen of the coming age.