Cell: A Novel (2 page)

He didn’t miss, or even hit the girl a glancing blow. The glass paperweight inside the bag struck the back of Pixie Light’s head dead-on, making a muffled
thunk.
Pixie Light dropped her hands, one bloodstained, one still clean, and fell to the sidewalk at her friend’s feet like a sack of mail.

“What the
hell?”
Mister Softee Guy cried. His voice was improbably high. Maybe shock had given him that high tenor.

“I don’t know,” Clay said. His heart was hammering. “Help me quick. This other one’s bleeding to death.”

From behind them, on Newbury Street, came the unmistakable hollow bang-and-jingle of a car crash, followed by screams. The screams were followed by another explosion, this one louder, concussive, hammering the day. Behind the Mister Softee truck, another car swerved across three lanes of Boylston Street and into the courtyard of the Four Seasons, mowing down a couple of pedestrians and then plowing into the back of the previous car, which had finished with its nose crumpled into the revolving doors. This second crash shoved the first car farther into the revolving doors, bending them askew. Clay couldn’t see if anyone was trapped in there—clouds of steam were rising from the first car’s breached radiator—but the agonized shrieks from the shadows suggested bad things. Very bad.

Mister Softee Guy, blind on that side, was leaning out his serving window and staring at Clay. “What’s going on over there?”

“I don’t know. Couple of car wrecks. People hurt. Never mind. Help me, man.” He knelt beside Power Suit Woman in the blood and the shattered remnants of Pixie Light’s pink cell phone. Power Suit Woman’s twitches had now become weak, indeed.

“Smoke from over on Newbury,” observed Mister Softee Guy, still not emerging from the relative safety of his ice cream wagon. “Something blew up over there. I mean bigtime. Maybe it’s terrorists.”

As soon as the word was out of his mouth, Clay was sure he was right. “Help me.”

“WHO AM I?”
Pixie Dark suddenly screamed.

Clay had forgotten all about her. He looked up in time to see the girl smack herself in the forehead with the heel of her hand, then turn around rapidly three times, standing almost on the toes of her tennies to do it. The sight called up a memory of some poem he’d read in a college lit class—
Weave a circle round him thrice.
Coleridge, wasn’t it? She staggered, then ran rapidly down the sidewalk and directly into a lamppost. She made no attempt to avoid it or even put up her hands. She struck it face-first, rebounded, staggered, then went at it again.

“Stop that!”
Clay roared. He shot to his feet, started to run toward her, slipped in Power Suit Woman’s blood, almost fell, got going again, tripped on Pixie Light, and almost fell again.

Pixie Dark looked around at him. Her nose was broken and gushing blood down her lower face. A vertical contusion was puffing up on her brow, rising like a thunderhead on a summer day. One of her eyes had gone crooked in its socket. She opened her mouth, exposing a ruin of what had probably been expensive orthodontic work, and laughed at him. He never forgot it.

Then she ran away down the sidewalk, screaming.

Behind him, a motor started up and amplified bells began tinkling out the
Sesame Street
theme. Clay turned and saw the Mister Softee truck pulling rapidly away from the curb just as, from the top floor of the hotel across the way, a window shattered in a bright spray of glass. A body hurtled out into the October day. It fell to the sidewalk, where it more or less exploded. More screams from the forecourt. Screams of horror; screams of pain.

“No!”
Clay yelled, running alongside the Mister Softee truck. “No,
come back and help me! I need some help here, you sonofabitch!”

No answer from Mister Softee Guy, who maybe couldn’t hear over his amplified music. Clay could remember the words from the days when he’d had no reason not to believe his marriage wouldn’t last forever. In those days Johnny watched
Sesame Street
every day, sitting in his little blue chair with his sippy cup clutched in his hands. Something about a sunny day, keepin’ the clouds away.

A man in a business suit came running out of the park, roaring wordless sounds at the top of his lungs, his coattails flapping behind him. Clay recognized him by his dogfur goatee. The man ran into Boylston Street. Cars swerved around him, barely missing him. He ran on to the other side, still roaring and waving his hands at the sky. He disappeared into the shadows beneath the canopy of the Four Seasons forecourt and was lost to view, but he must have gotten up to more dickens immediately, because a fresh volley of screams broke out over there.

Clay gave up his chase of the Mister Softee truck and stood with one foot on the sidewalk and the other planted in the gutter, watching as it swerved into the center lane of Boylston Street, still tinkling. He was about to turn back to the unconscious girl and dying woman when another Duck Boat appeared, this one not loafing but roaring at top speed and yawing crazily from port to starboard. Some of the passengers were tumbling back and forth and howling—
pleading
—for the driver to stop. Others simply clung to the metal struts running up the open sides of the ungainly thing as it made its way up Boylston Street against the flow of traffic.

A man in a sweatshirt grabbed the driver from behind, and Clay heard another of those inarticulate cries through the Duck Boat’s primitive amplification system as the driver threw the guy off with a mighty backward shrug. Not
“Rast!”
this time but something more guttural, something that sounded like
“Gluh!”
Then the Duck Boat driver saw the Mister Softee truck—Clay was sure of it—and changed course, aiming for it.

“Oh God please no!”
a woman sitting near the front of the tourist craft cried, and as it closed in on the tinkling ice cream truck, which was approximately one-sixth its size, Clay had a clear memory of watching the victory parade on TV the year the Red Sox won the World Series. The team rode in a slow-moving procession of these same Duck Boats, waving to the delirious multitudes as a cold autumn drizzle fell.

“God please no!”
the woman shrieked again, and from beside Clay a man said, almost mildly: “Jesus Christ.”

The Duck Boat hit the ice cream truck broadside and flipped it like a child’s toy. It landed on its side with its own amplification system still tinkling out the
Sesame Street
theme music and went skidding back toward the Common, shooting up friction-generated bursts of sparks. Two women who had been watching dashed to get out of the way, holding hands, and just made it. The Mister Softee truck bounced onto the sidewalk, went briefly airborne, then hit the wrought-iron fence surrounding the park and came to rest. The music hiccuped twice, then stopped.

The lunatic driving the Duck Boat had, meanwhile, lost whatever marginal control he might have had over his vehicle. It looped back across Boylston Street with its freight of terrified, screaming passengers clinging to the open sides, mounted the sidewalk across and about fifty yards down from the point where the Mister Softee truck had tinkled its last, and ran into the low brick retaining wall below the display window of a tony furniture shop called City lights. There was a vast unmusical crash as the window shattered. The Duck Boat’s wide rear end
Harbor Mistress
was written on it in pink script) rose perhaps five feet in the air. Momentum wanted the great waddling thing to go end-over-end; mass would not allow. It settled back to the sidewalk with its snout poked among the scattered sofas and expensive living room chairs, but not before at least a dozen people had gone shooting forward, out of the Duck Boat and out of sight. Inside Citylights, a burglar alarm began to clang.

“Jesus Christ,” said the mild voice from Clay’s right elbow a second time. He turned that way and saw a short man with thinning dark hair, a tiny dark mustache, and gold-rimmed spectacles. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Clay said. Talking was hard. Very. He found himself almost having to push words out. He supposed it was shock. Across the street, people were running away, some from the Four Seasons, some from the crashed Duck Boat. As he watched, a Duck Boat run-awayer collided with a Four Seasons escapee and they both went crashing to the sidewalk. There was time to wonder if he’d gone insane and was hallucinating all this in a madhouse somewhere. Juniper Hill in Augusta, maybe, between Thorazine shots. “The guy in the ice cream truck said maybe terrorists.”

“I don’t see any men with guns,” said the short man with the mustache. “No guys with bombs strapped to their backs, either.”

Neither did Clay, but he
did see
his little
small treasures
shopping bag and his portfolio sitting on the sidewalk, and he saw that the blood from Power Suit Woman’s opened throat—
ye gods,
he thought,
all that blood
—had almost reached the portfolio. All but a dozen or so of his drawings for
Dark Wanderer
were in there, and it was the drawings his mind seized on. He started back that way at a speed-walk, and the short man kept pace. When a second burglar alarm (
some
kind of alarm, anyway) went off in the hotel, joining its hoarse bray to the clang of the Citylights alarm, the little guy jumped.

“It’s the hotel,” Clay said.

“I know, it’s just that…oh my
God.”
He’d seen Power Suit Woman, now lying in a lake of the magic stuff that had been running all her bells and whistles—what? Four minutes ago? Only two?

“She’s dead,” Clay told him. “At least I’m pretty sure she is. That girl…” He pointed at Pixie Light. “She did it. With her teeth.”

“You’re joking.”

“I wish I was.”

From somewhere up Boylston Street there was another explosion. Both men cringed. Clay realized he could now smell smoke. He picked up his
small treasures
bag and his portfolio and moved them both away from the spreading blood. “These are mine,” he said, wondering why he felt the need to explain.

The little guy, who was wearing a tweed suit—quite dapper, Clay thought—was still staring, horrified, at the crumpled body of the woman who had stopped for a sundae and lost first her dog and then her life. Behind them, three young men pelted past on the sidewalk, laughing and hurrahing. Two had Red Sox caps turned around backward. One was carrying a carton clutched against his chest. It had the word
panasonic
printed in blue on the side. This one stepped in Power Suit Woman’s spreading blood with his right sneaker and left a fading one-foot trail behind him as he and his mates ran on toward the east end of the Common and Chinatown beyond.

3

Clay dropped to one knee and used the hand not clutching his portfolio (he was even more afraid of losing it after seeing the sprinting kid with the
panasonic
carton) to pick up Pixie Light’s wrist. He got a pulse at once. It was slow but strong and regular. He felt great relief. No matter what she’d done, she was just a kid. He didn’t want to think he had bludgeoned her to death with his wife’s gift paperweight.

“Look out, look out!”
the little guy with the mustache almost sang. Clay had no time to look out. Luckily, this call wasn’t even close. The vehicle—one of those big OPEC-friendly SUVs—veered off Boylston and into the park at least twenty yards from where he knelt, taking a snarl of the wrought-iron fence in front of it and coming to rest bumper-deep in the duck-pond.

The door opened and a young man floundered out, yelling gibberish at the sky. He fell to his knees in the water, scooped some of it into his mouth with both hands (Clay had a passing thought of all the ducks that had happily shat in that pond over the years), then struggled to his feet and waded to the far side. He disappeared into a grove of trees, still waving his hands and bellowing his nonsense sermon.

“We need to get help for this girl,” Clay said to the man with the mustache. “She’s unconscious but a long way from dead.”

“What we need to
do
is get off the street before we get run over,” said the man with the mustache, and as if to prove this point, a taxi collided with a stretch limo not far from the wrecked Duck Boat. The limo had been going the wrong way but the taxi got the worst of it; as Clay watched from where he still knelt on the sidewalk, the taxi’s driver flew through his suddenly glassless windshield and landed in the street, holding up a bloody arm and screaming.

The man with the mustache was right, of course. Such rationality as Clay could muster—only a little managed to find its way through the blanket of shock that muffled his thinking—suggested that by far the wisest course of action would be to get the hell away from Boylston Street and under cover. If this was an act of terrorism, it was like none he had ever seen or read about. What he—
they
—should do was get down and stay down until the situation clarified. That would probably entail finding a television. But he didn’t want to leave this unconscious girl lying on a street that had suddenly become a madhouse. Every instinct of his mostly kind—and certainly civilized—heart cried out against it.

“You go on,” he told the little man with the mustache. He said it with immense reluctance. He didn’t know the little man from Adam, but at least he wasn’t spouting gibberish and throwing his hands in the air. Or going for Clay’s throat with his teeth bared. “Get inside somewhere. I’ll…” He didn’t know how to finish.

“You’ll what?” the man with the mustache asked, then hunched his shoulders and winced as something else exploded. That one came from directly behind the hotel, it sounded like, and now black smoke began to rise over there, staining the blue sky before it got high enough for the wind to pull away.

“I’ll call a cop,” Clay said, suddenly inspired. “She’s got a cell phone.” He cocked his thumb at Power Suit Woman, now lying dead in a pool of her own blood. “She was using it before… you know, just before the shit…”