Cell: A Novel (24 page)

“Sure.”

Alice had looked at Ardai with a mixture of defiance and apology. “We need every hand.”

The Head had given in, and now here they were and there was the Academy Grove Citgo, on the other side of the street and just a little way back toward town. From here the other, slightly smaller, sign was easy to read: academy lp gas. The single car standing at the pumps with its driver’s door open already had a dusty, long-deserted look. The gas station’s big plate-glass window was broken. Off to the right, parked in the shade of what had to be one of northern New England’s few surviving elm trees, were two trucks shaped like giant propane bottles. Written on the side of each were the words
Academy LP Gas
and
Serving Southern
New Hampshire Since 1982.

There was no sign of foraging phone-crazies on this part of Academy Avenue, and although most of the houses Clay could see had shoes on their front stoops, several did not. The rush of refugees seemed to be drying up.
Too early to tell,
he cautioned himself.

“Sir? Clay? What’s that?” Jordan asked. He was pointing to the middle of the Avenue—which of course was still Route 102, although that was easy to forget on this sunny, quiet afternoon where the closest sounds were birds and the rustle of the wind in the leaves. There was something written in bright pink chalk on the asphalt, but from where they were, Clay couldn’t make it out. He shook his head.

“Are you ready?” he asked Tom.

“Sure,” Tom said. He was trying to sound casual, but a pulse beat rapidly on the side of his unshaven throat. “You Batman, me Boy Wonder.”

They trotted across the street, pistols in hand. Clay had left the Russian automatic weapon with Alice, more or less convinced it would spin her around like a top if she actually had to use it.

The message scrawled in pink chalk on the macadam was

KASHWAK=NO-FO

“Does that mean anything to you?” Tom asked.

Clay shook his head. It didn’t, and right now he didn’t care. All he wanted was to get out of the middle of Academy Avenue, where he felt as exposed as an ant in a bowl of rice. It occurred to him, suddenly and not for the first time, that he would sell his soul just to know that his son was okay, and in a place where people weren’t putting guns into the hands of children who were good at video games. It was strange. He’d think he had his priorities settled, that he was dealing with his personal deck one card at a time, and then these thoughts would come, each as fresh and painful as an unsettled grief.

Get out of here, Johnny. You don’t belong here. Not your place, not your time.

The propane trucks were empty and locked, but that was all right; today their luck was running the right way. The keys were hanging on a board in the office, below a sign reading
NO TOWING BETWEEN MIDNITE AND 6 AM NO EXEMPTIONS.
A tiny propane bottle dangled from each keychain. Halfway back to the door, Tom touched Clay’s shoulder.

Two phone-crazies walked up the middle of the street, side by side but by no means in lockstep. One was eating Twinkies from a box of them; his face was lathered with cream, crumbs, and frosting. The other, a woman, was holding a coffee-table-size book out in front of her. To Clay she looked like a choir-member holding an oversize hymnal. On the front there appeared to be a photograph of a collie jumping through a tire swing. The fact that the woman held the book upside down gave Clay some comfort. The vacant, blasted expressions on their faces—and the fact that they were wandering on their own, meaning midday was still a non-flocking time—gave him more. But he didn’t like that book. No, he didn’t like that book at all.

They wandered past the fieldstone pillars, and Clay could see Alice, Jordan, and the Head peering out, wide-eyed. The two crazies walked over the cryptic message chalked in the street—
KASHWAK=NO-FO
—and the woman reached for her companion’s Twinkies. The man held the box away from her. The woman cast her book aside (it landed rightside up and Clay saw it was
100 Best Loved Dogs of the World)
and reached again. The man slapped her face hard enough to make her filthy hair fly, the sound very loud in the stillness of the day. All this time they were walking. The woman made a sound:
“Aw!”
The man replied (it sounded to Clay like a reply):
“Eeeen!”
The woman reached for the box of Twinkies. Now they were passing the Citgo. The man punched her in the neck this time, a looping overhand blow, and then dove a hand into his box for another treat. The woman stopped. Looked at him. And a moment later the man stopped. He had pulled a bit ahead, so his back was mostly to her.

Clay felt something in the sunwarmed stillness of the gas station office. No, he thought,
not in the office, in me. Shortness of breath, like after you climb a flight of stairs too fast.

Except maybe it was in the office, too, because—Tom stood on his toes and whispered in his ear, “Do you feel that?” Clay nodded and pointed at the desk. There was no wind, no discernible draft, but the papers there were fluttering. And in the ashtray, the ashes had begun to circle lazily, like water going down a bathtub drain. There were two butts in there—no, three—and the moving ashes seemed to be pushing them toward the center.

The man turned toward the woman. He looked back at her. She looked at him. They looked at each other. Clay could read no expression on either face, but he could feel the hairs on his arms stirring, and he heard a faint jingling. It was the keys on the board below the
NO TOWING
sign. They were stirring, too—chittering against each other just the tiniest bit.

“Aw!”
said the woman. She held out her hand.

“Eeen!”
said the man. He was wearing the fading remains of a suit. On his feet were dull black shoes. Six days ago he might have been a middle manager, a salesman, or an apartment-complex manager. Now the only real estate he cared about was his box of Twinkies. He held it to his chest, his sticky mouth working.

“Aw!”
the woman insisted. She held out both hands instead of just one, the immemorial gesture signifying
gimme,
and the keys were jingling louder. Overhead there was a
bzzzzt
as a fluorescent light for which there was no power flickered and then went out again. The nozzle fell off the middle gas pump and hit the concrete island with a dead-metal clank.

“Aw,”
the man said. His shoulders slumped and all the tension went out of him. The tension went out of the air. The keys on the board fell silent. The ashes made one final, slowing circuit of their dented metal reliquary and came to a stop. You would not have known anything had happened, Clay thought, if not for the fallen nozzle out there and the little cluster of cigarette butts in the ashtray on the desk in here.

“Aw,”
the woman said. She was still holding out her hands. Her companion advanced to within reach of them. She took a Twinkie in each and began to eat them, wrappings and all. Once more Clay was comforted, but only a little. They resumed their slow shuffle toward town, the woman pausing long enough to spit a filling-caked piece of cellophane from the side of her mouth. She showed no interest in
100 Best Loved Dogs of the World.

“What was
that?”
Tom asked in a low and shaken voice when the two of them were almost out of sight.

“I don’t know, but I didn’t like it,” Clay said. He had the keys to the propane trucks. He handed one set to Tom. “Can you drive a standard shift?”

“I
learned
on a standard. Can you?”

Clay smiled patiently. “I’m straight, Tom. Straight guys know how to drive standards without instruction. It’s instinct with us.”

“Very funny.” Tom wasn’t really listening. He was looking after the departed odd couple, and that pulse in the side of his throat was going faster than ever. “End of the world, open season on the queers, why not, right?”

“That’s right. It’s gonna be open season on straights, too, if they get
that
shit under control. Come on, let’s do it.”

He started out the door, but Tom held him back a minute. “Listen. The others may have felt that over there, or they may not have. If they didn’t, maybe we should keep it to ourselves for the time being. What do you think?”

Clay thought about how Jordan wouldn’t let the Head out of his sight and how Alice always kept the creepy little sneaker somewhere within reach. He thought about the circles under their eyes, and then about what they were planning to do tonight. Armageddon was probably too strong a word for it, but not by much. Whatever they were now, the phone-crazies had once been human beings, and burning a thousand of them alive was burden enough. Even thinking about it hurt his imagination.

“Fine by me,” he said. “Go up the hill in low gear, all right?”

“Lowest one I can find,” Tom said. They were walking to the big bottle-shaped trucks now. “How many gears do you think a truck like that has?”

“One forward should be enough,” Clay said.

“Based on the way they’re parked, I think you’re going to have to start by finding reverse.”

“Fuck it,” Clay said. “What good is the end of the world if you can’t drive through a goddam board fence?”

And that was what they did.

21

Academy Slope was what Headmaster Ardai and his one remaining pupil called the long, rolling hill that dropped from the campus to the main road. The grass was still bright green and only beginning to be littered with fallen leaves. When afternoon gave way to early evening and Academy Slope was still empty—no sign of returning phone-crazies—Alice began to pace the main hall of Cheatham Lodge, pausing in each circuit only long enough to look out the bay window of the living room. It offered a fine view of the Slope, the two main lecture halls, and Tonney Field. The sneaker was once more tied to her wrist.

The others were in the kitchen, sipping Cokes from cans. “They’re not coming back,” she told them at the end of one of her circuits. “They got wind of what we were planning—read our minds or something—and they’re not coming.”

Two more circuits of the long downstairs hall, each with a pause to look out the big living room window, and then she looked in on them again. “Or maybe it’s a general migration, did you guys ever think of that? Maybe they go south in the winter like the goddam robins.”

She was gone without waiting for a reply. Up the hall and down the hall. Up and down the hall.

“She’s like Ahab on the prod for Moby,” the Head remarked.

“Eminem might have been a jerk, but he was right about that guy,” Tom said morosely.

“I beg your pardon, Tom?” the Head asked.

Tom waved it away.

Jordan glanced at his watch. “They didn’t come back last night until almost half an hour later than it is right now,” he said. “I’ll go tell her that, if you want.”

“I don’t think it would do any good,” Clay said. “She’s got to work through it, that’s all.”

“She’s pretty freaked-out, isn’t she, sir?”

“Aren’t you, Jordan?”

“Yes,” Jordan said in a small voice. “I’m Freak City.”

The next time Alice came back to the kitchen she said, “Maybe it’s best if they
don’t
come back. I don’t know if they’re rebooting their brains some new way, but for sure there’s some bad voodoo going on. I felt it from those two this afternoon. The woman with the book and the man with the Twinkies?” She shook her head. “Bad voodoo.”

She plunged off on hall patrol again before anyone could reply, the sneaker swinging from her wrist.

The Head looked at Jordan. “Did you feel anything, son?”

Jordan hesitated, then said, “I felt
something.
The hair on my neck tried to stand up.”

Now the Head turned his gaze to the men on the other side of the table. “What about you two? You were far closer.”

Alice saved them from having to answer. She ran into the kitchen, her cheeks flushed, her eyes wide, the soles of her sneakers squeaking on the tiles. “They’re coming,” she said.

22

From the bay window the four of them watched the phone-crazies come up Academy Slope in converging lines, their long shadows making a huge pin-wheel shape on the green grass. As they neared what Jordan and the Head called Tonney Arch, the lines drew together and the pinwheel seemed to spin in the late golden sunlight even as it contracted and solidified.

Alice could no longer stand not holding the sneaker. She had torn it from her wrist and was squeezing it compulsively. “They’ll see what we did and they’ll turn around,” she said, speaking low and rapidly. “They’ve gotten at least
that
smart, if they’re picking up books again, they must have.”

“We’ll see,” Clay said. He was almost positive the phone-crazies
would
go onto Tonney Field, even if what they saw there disquieted their strange group mind; it would be dark soon and they had nowhere else to go. A fragment of a lullaby his mother used to sing him floated through his mind:
Little man, you’ve had a busy day.

“I hope they go and I hope they stay,” she said, lower than ever. “I feel like I’m going to explode.” She gave a wild little laugh. “Only it’s
them
that’s supposed to explode, isn’t it?
Them.”
Tom turned to look at her and she said, “I’m all right. I’m fine, so just close your mouth.”

“All I was going to say is that it’ll be what it is,” he said.

“New Age crap. You sound like my father. The Picture Frame King.” A tear rolled down one cheek and she rubbed it impatiently away with the heel of her hand.

“Just calm down, Alice. Watch.”

“I’ll try, okay? I’ll try.”

“And stop with the sneaker,” Jordan said—irritably, for him. “That squelchy sound is making me crazy.”

She looked down at the sneaker, as if surprised, then slipped it around her wrist on its loop again. They watched as the phone-crazies converged at Tonney Arch and passed beneath it with less pushing and confusion than any crowd attending the Homecoming Weekend soccer match could ever have equaled—Clay was sure of that. They watched as the crazies spread out again on the far side, crossing the concourse and filing down the ramps. They waited to see that steady march slow and stop, but it never did. The last stragglers—most of them hurt and helping each other along, but still walking in those close groups—were in long before the reddening sun had passed below the dormitories on the west side of the Gaiten Academy campus. They had returned once more, like homing pigeons to their nests or the swallows to Capistrano. Not five minutes after the evening star became visible in the darkening sky, Dean Martin began singing “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”