Cell: A Novel (18 page)

“You’ve seen that?” Tom asked.
“Heard
that?”

“Yeah, twice. Second guy I saw was walking along, swinging the thing from side to side so hard in his arms that it was skipping like hell, but yeah, it was playing. So they like music, and sure, they might be retrieving some of their marbles, but that’s exactly why you have to be careful, see?”

“What happened to the woman?” Alice asked. “The one who got caught out?”

“She tried to act like one of them,” Handt said. “And I thought, standing there at the window of the room where I was, I thought, ‘Yeah, you go, girl, you might have a chance if you can hang on to that act a little while and then make a break, get inside somewhere.’ Because they don’t like to go inside places, have you noticed that?”

Clay, Tom, and Alice shook their heads.

The man nodded. “They
will,
I’ve seen em do it, but they don’t like to.”

“How did they get on to her?” Alice asked again.

“I don’t exactly know. They smelled her, or something.”

“Or maybe touched her thoughts,” Tom said.

“Or
couldn’t
touch them,” Alice said.

“I don’t know about any of that,” Handt said, “but I know they tore her apart in the street. I mean literally tore her to pieces.”

“And this happened when?” Clay asked. He saw Alice was swaying and put an arm around her.

“Nine this morning. In Topsfield. So if you see a bunch of them walking up the Yella Brick Road with a boombox that’s playing ‘Why Can’t We Be Friends’…” He surveyed them grimly by the glow of the flashlights strapped to the sides of his head. “I wouldn’t go running out yelling
kemo sake,
that’s all.” He paused. “And I wouldn’t go north, either. Even if they don’t shoot you at the border, it’s a waste of time.”

But after a little consultation at the edge of the IGA parking lot, they went north anyway.

6

They paused near North Andover, standing on a pedestrian overpass above Route 495. The clouds were thickening again, but the moon broke through long enough to show them six lanes of silent traffic. Near the bridge where they stood, in the southbound lanes, an overturned sixteen-wheeler lay like a dead elephant. Orange pylons had been set up around it, showing that someone had made at least a token response, and there were two abandoned police cruisers beyond them, one on its side. The rear half of the truck had been burned black. There was no sign of bodies, not in the momentary moonlight. A few people labored westward in the breakdown lane, but it was slow going even there.

“Kind of makes it all real, doesn’t it?” Tom said.

“No,” Alice said. She sounded indifferent. “To me it looks like a special effect in some big summer movie. Buy a bucket of popcorn and a Coke and watch the end of the world in…what do they call it? Computer graphic imaging? CGI? Blue screens? Some fucking thing.” She held up the little sneaker by one lace. “This is all I need to make it real. Something small enough to hold in my hand. Come on, let’s go.”

7

There were plenty of abandoned vehicles on Highway 28, but it was wide-open compared to 495, and by four o’clock they were nearing Methuen, hometown of Mr. Roscoe Handt, he of the stereo flashlights. And they believed enough of Handt’s story to want to be under cover well before daylight. They chose a motel at the intersection of 28 and 110. A dozen or so cars were parked in front of the various units, but to Clay they had an abandoned feel. And why wouldn’t they? The two roads were passable, but only if you were on foot. Clay and Tom stood at the edge of the parking lot, waving their flashlights over their heads.

“We’re okay!” Tom called. “Normal folks! Coming in!”

They waited. There was no response from what the sign identified as the Sweet Valley Inn, Heated Pool, HBO, Group Rates.

“Come on,” Alice said. “My feet hurt. And it’ll be getting light soon, won’t it?”

“Look at this,” Clay said. He picked up a CD from the motel’s turn-in and shone the beam of his flashlight on it. It was
Love Songs,
by Michael Bolton.

“And you said they were getting smarter,” Tom said.

“Don’t be so quick to judge,” Clay said as they started toward the units. “Whoever had it threw it away, right?”

“More likely just dropped it,” Tom said.

Alice shone her own light on the CD. “Who
is
this guy?”

“Honeybunch,” Tom said, “you don’t want to know.” He took the CD and tossed it back over his shoulder.

They forced the doors on three adjoining units—as gently as possible, so they could at least shoot the bolts once they were inside—and with beds to sleep in, they slept most of the day away. They were not disturbed, although that evening Alice said she thought she had heard music coming from far away. But, she admitted, it might have been part of a dream she was having.

8

There were maps for sale in the lobby of the Sweet Valley Inn that would offer more detail than their road atlas. They were in a glass display cabinet that had been smashed. Clay took one for Massachusetts and one for New Hampshire, reaching in carefully so as not to cut his hand, and saw a young man lying on the other side of the reception counter as he did so. His eyes glared sightlessly. For a moment Clay thought someone had put an oddly colored corsage in the corpse’s mouth. Then he saw the greenish points poking out through the dead man’s cheeks and realized they matched the broken glass littering the shelves of the display cabinet. The corpse was wearing a nametag that said
MY NAME IS HANK ASK ME ABOUT WEEKLY RATES
. Clay thought briefly of Mr. Ricardi as he looked at Hank.

Tom and Alice were waiting for him just inside the lobby door. It was quarter of nine, and outside it was full dark. “How did you do?” Alice asked.

“These may help,” he said. He gave her the maps, then lifted the Coleman lantern so she and Tom could study them, compare them against the road atlas, and plot the night’s travel. He was trying to cultivate a sense of fatalism about Johnny and Sharon, trying to keep the bald truth of his current family situation front and center in his mind: what had happened in Kent Pond had happened. His son and his wife were either all right or they weren’t. He would either find them or he wouldn’t. His success at this sort of semi-magical thinking came and went.

When it started slipping, he told himself he was lucky to be alive, and this was certainly true. What balanced his good luck out was that he’d been in Boston, a hundred miles south of Kent Pond by even the quickest route (which they were definitely
not
taking), when the Pulse happened. And yet he’d fallen in with good people. There was that. People he could think of as friends. He’d seen plenty of others—Beer-Keg Guy and Plump Bible-Toting Lady as well as Mr. Roscoe Handt of Methuen—who weren’t as lucky.

If he got to you, Share, if Johnny got to you, you better be taking care of him. You just better be.

But suppose he’d had his phone? Suppose he’d taken the red cell phone to school? Might he not have been taking it a little more often lately? Because so many of the other kids took theirs?

Christ.

“Clay? You all right?” Tom asked.

“Sure. Why?”

“I don’t know. You looked a little… grim.”

“Dead guy behind the counter. He’s not pretty.”

“Look here,” Alice said, tracing a thread on the map. It squiggled across the state line and then appeared to join New Hampshire Route 38 a little east of Pelham. “That looks pretty good to me,” she said. “If we go west on the highway out there for eight or nine miles”—she pointed at 110, where both the cars and the tar were gleaming faintly in a misty drizzle—“we should hit it. What do you think?”

“I think that sounds good,” Tom said.

She looked from him to Clay. The little sneaker was put away—probably in her backpack—but Clay could see her wanting to squeeze it. He supposed it was good she wasn’t a smoker, she’d be up to four packs a day. “If they’ve got the way across guarded—” she began.

“We’ll worry about that if we have to,” Clay said, but he wasn’t worrying. One way or another, he was getting to Maine. If it meant crawling through some puckerbrush, like an illegal crossing the Canadian border to pick apples in October, he would do it. If Tom and Alice decided to stay behind, that would be too bad. He’d be sorry to leave them… but he would go. Because he had to know.

The red squiggle Alice had found on the Sweet Valley maps had a name—Dostie Stream Road—and it was almost wide-open. It was a four-mile hike to the state line, and they came upon no more than five or six abandoned vehicles and only a single wreck. They also passed two houses where they could see lights and hear the roar of generators. They considered stopping at these, but not for long.

“We’d probably get into a firefight with some guy defending his hearth and home,” Clay said. “Always assuming there’s anyone there. Those generators were probably set to come on when the county juice failed, and they’ll run until they’re out of gas.”

“Even if there are sane people and they let us in, which would hardly be a sane act, what are we going to do?” Tom said. “Ask to use the phone?”

They discussed stopping somewhere and trying to liberate a vehicle
(liberate
was Tom’s word), but in the end decided against that, too. If the state line was being defended by deputies or vigilantes, driving up to it in a Chevy Tahoe might not be the smoothest move.

So they walked, and of course there was nothing at the state line but a billboard (a small one, as befitted a two-lane blacktop road winding through farm country) reading YOU ARE NOW ENTERING NEW HAMPSHIRE and
BIENVENUE
! There was no sound but the drip of moisture in the woods on either side of them, and an occasional sigh of breeze. Maybe the rustle of an animal. They stopped briefly to read the sign and then walked on, leaving Massachusetts behind.

9

Any sense of being alone ended along with the Dostie Stream Road, at a signpost reading NH ROUTE 38 and MANCHESTER 19 MI. There were still only a few travelers on 38, but when they switched to 128—a wide, wreck-littered road that headed almost due north—half an hour later, that trickle became part of a steady stream of refugees. They traveled mostly in little groups of three and four, and with what struck Clay as a rather shabby lack of interest in anyone other than themselves.

They encountered a woman of about forty and a man maybe twenty years older pushing shopping carts, each containing a child. The one in the man’s cart was a boy, and too big for the conveyance, but he had found a way to curl up inside and fall asleep. While Clay and his party were passing this jackleg family, a wheel came off the man’s shopping cart. It tipped sideways, spilling out the boy, who looked about seven. Tom caught him by the shoulder and broke the worst of the kid’s fall, but he scraped one knee. And of course he was frightened. Tom picked him up, but the boy didn’t know him and struggled to get away, crying harder than ever.

“That’s okay, thanks, I’ve got him,” the man said. He took the child and sat down at the side of the road with him, where he made much of what he called the boo-boo, a term Clay didn’t think he’d heard since
he
was seven. The man said, “Gregory kiss it, make it all better.” He kissed the child’s scrape, and the boy laid his head against the man’s shoulder. He was already going to sleep again. Gregory smiled at Tom and Clay and nodded. He looked weary almost to death, a man who might have been a trim and Nautilus-toned sixty last week and now looked like a seventy-five-year-old Jew trying to get the hell out of Poland while there was still time.

“We’ll be all right,” he said. “You can go now.”

Clay opened his mouth to say,
Why shouldn’t we all go on together? Why don’t we hook up? What do you think, Greg?
It was the sort of thing the heroes of the science fiction novels he’d read as a teenager were always saying:
Why don’t we hook up?

“Yeah, go on, what are you waiting for?” the woman asked before he could say that or anything else. In her shopping cart a girl of about five still slept. The woman stood beside the cart protectively, as if she had grabbed some fabulous sale item and was afraid Clay or one of his friends might try to wrest it from her. “You think we got something you want?”

“Natalie, stop,” Gregory said with tired patience.

But Natalie didn’t, and Clay realized what was so dispiriting about this little scene. Not that he was getting his lunch—his
midnight
lunch—fed to him by a woman whose exhaustion and terror had led to paranoia; that was understandable and forgivable. What made his spirits sink to his shoetops was the way people just kept on walking, swinging their flashlights, and talking low among themselves in their own little groups, swapping the occasional suitcase from one hand to the other. Some yob on a pocket-rocket motorbike wove his way up the road between the wrecks and over the litter, and people made way for him, muttering resentfully. Clay thought it would have been the same if the little boy had fallen out of the shopping cart and broken his neck instead of just scraping his knee. He thought it would have been the same if that heavyset guy up there panting along the side of the road with an overloaded duffelbag dropped with a thunderclap coronary. No one would try to resuscitate him, and of course the days of 911 were done.

No one even bothered to yell
You tell im, lady!
or
Hey dude, why don’t you tell her to shut up?
They just went on walking.

“—cause all we got is these
kids,
a responsibility we didn’t ask for when we can hardly take care
of ourselfs,
he has a pacemaker, what are we supposed to do when the
baddery
runs out, I’d like to know? And now these kids! You want a kid?” She looked around wildly.
“Hey! Anyone want a kid?”

The little girl began to stir.

“Natalie, you’re disturbing Portia,” Gregory said.