Cell

SAVE TO SYSTEM

Clay stood in the middle of route 160, in what would have been the billboard's shadow on a sunny day, and watched the taillights until they were out of sight. He couldn't shake the idea that he would never see Tom and Jordan again (fading roses, his mind whispered), but he refused to let it grow into a premonition. They had come together twice, after all, and didn't people say the third time was the charm?

A passing phoner bumped him. It was a man with blood congealing on one side of his face—the first injured refugee from the Northern Counties Expo that he'd seen. He would see more if he didn't stay ahead of them, so he set off along Route 160, heading south again. He had no real reason to think his kid had gone south, but hoped that some vestige of Johnny's mind—his old mind—told him home lay in that direction. And it was a direction Clay knew, at least.

About half a mile south of the feeder road he encountered another phoner, this one a woman, who was pacing rapidly back and forth across the highway like a captain on the foredeck of her ship. She looked around at Clay with such sharp regard that he raised his hands, ready to grapple with her if she attacked him.

She didn't. "Who fa-Da?" she asked, and in his mind, quite clearly, he heard: Who fell? Daddy, who fell?

"I don't know," he said, easing past her. "I didn't see."

"Where na?" she asked, pacing more furiously than ever, and in his mind he heard: Where am I now? This he made no attempt to answer, but in his mind he thought of Pixie Dark asking, Who are you? Who am 1?

Clay walked faster, but not quite fast enough. The pacing woman called after him, chilling him: "Who Pih' Da?"

And in his mind, he heard this question echo with chilling clarity. Who is Pixie Dark?

There was no gun in the first house he broke into, but there was a long-barreled flashlight, and he shone it on every straggling phoner he encountered, always asking the same question, trying simultaneously to throw it with his mind like a magic-lantern slide on a screen: Have you seen a boy? He got no answers and heard only fading fragments of thought in his head. At the second house there was a nice Dodge Ram in the driveway, but Clay didn't dare take it. If Johnny was on this road, he'd be walking. If Clay was driving, he might miss his boy even if he was driving slow. In the pantry he found a Daisy canned ham, which he unzipped with the attached key and munched as he hit the road again. He was about to throw the balance into the weeds after he'd eaten his fill when he saw an elderly phoner standing beside a mailbox, watching him with a sad and hungry eye. Clay held out the ham and the old man took it. Then, speaking slowly and clearly, trying to picture Johnny in his mind, Clay said: "Have you seen a boy?"

The old man chewed ham. Swallowed. Appeared to consider. Said: "Ganna the wishy."

"The wishy," Clay said. "Right. Thanks." He walked on.

In the third house, a mile or so farther south, he found a .30-30 in the basement, along with three boxes of shells. In the kitchen he found a cell phone sitting in its charging cradle on the counter. The charger was dead—of course—but when he pushed the button on the phone, it beeped and powered up immediately. He only got a single bar, but this didn't surprise him. The phoners' conversion-point had been at the edge of the grid.

He started for the door with the loaded rifle in one hand, the flashlight in the other, and the cell phone clipped to his belt when simple exhaustion overwhelmed him. He staggered sideways, as if struck by the head of a padded hammer. He wanted to go on, but such sense as his tired mind was able to muster told him he had to sleep now, and maybe sleep even made sense. If Johnny was out here, the chances were good he was sleeping, too.

"Switch over to the day shift, Clayton," he muttered. "You're not going to find jackshit in the middle of the night with a flashlight."

It was a small house—the home of an elderly couple, he thought, judging by the pictures in the living room and the single bedroom and the rails surrounding the toilet in the single bathroom. The bed was neatly made. He lay down on it without opening the covers, only taking off his shoes. And once he was down, the exhaustion seemed to settle on him like a weight. He could not imagine getting up for anything. There was a smell in the room, some old woman's sachet, he thought. A grandmotherly smell. It seemed almost as tired as he felt. Lying here in this silence, the carnage at the Expo grounds seemed distant and unreal, like an idea for a comic he would never write. Too gruesome. Stick with Dark Wanderer, Sharon might have said—his old, sweet Sharon. Stick with your apocalypse cowboys.

His mind seemed to rise and float above his body. It returned—lazily, without hurry—to the three of them standing beside the Tyco Water Purification van, just before Tom and Jordan had climbed back aboard. Jordan had repeated what he'd said back at Gaiten, about how human brains were really just big old hard drives, and the Pulse had wiped them clean. Jordan said the Pulse had acted on human brains like an EMP

Nothing left but the core, Jordan had said. And the core was murder. But because brains are organic hard drives, they started to build themselves back up again. To reboot. Only there was a glitch in the signal-code. I don't have proof, but I'm positive that the flocking behavior, the telepathy, the levitation . . . all that came from the glitch. The glitch was there from the start, so it became part of the reboot. Are you following this?

Clay had nodded. Tom had, too. The boy looking at them, his blood-smeared face tired and earnest.

But meanwhile, the Pulse keeps on pulsing, right? Because somewhere there's acomputer running on battery power, and it keeps running that program. The program's rotten, so the glitch in it continues to mutate. Eventually the signal may quit or the program may get so rotten it'll shut down. In the meantime, though . . . you might be able to use it. I say might, you got that? It all depends on whether or not brains do what seriously protected computers do when they're hit with an EMP.

Tom had asked what that was. And Jordan had given him a wan smile.

They save to system. All data. If that happens with people, and if you could wipe the phoner program, the old programming might eventually reboot.

"He meant the human programming," Clay murmured in the dark bedroom, smelling that sweet, faint aroma of sachet. "The human programming, saved somewhere way down deep. All of it." He was going now, drifting off. If he was going to dream, he hoped it would not be of the carnage at the Northern Counties Expo.

His last thought before sleep took him was that maybe in the long run, the phoners would have been better. Yes, they had been born in violence and in horror, but birth was usually difficult, often violent, and sometimes horrible. Once they had begun flocking and mind-melding, the violence had subsided. So far as he knew, they hadn't actually made war on the normies, unless one considered forcible conversion an act of war; the reprisals following the destruction of their flocks had been gruesome but perfectly understandable. If left alone, they might eventually have turned out to be better custodians of the earth than the so-called normies. They certainly wouldn't have been falling all over themselves to buy gas-guzzling SUVs, not with their levitation skills (or with their rather primitive consumer appetites, for that matter). Hell, even their taste in music had been improving at the end.

But what choice did we have? Clay thought. Survival is like love. Both are blind.

Sleep took him then, and he didn't dream of the slaughter at the Expo. He dreamed he was in a bingo tent, and as the caller announced B-12—It's the sunshine vitamin! —he felt a tug on the leg of his pants. He looked under the table. Johnny was there, smiling up at him. And somewhere a phone was ringing.

Not all of the rage had gone out of the phoner refugees, nor had the wild talents entirely departed, either. Around noon of the next day, which was cold and raw, with a foretaste of November in the air, Clay stopped to watch two of them fighting furiously on the shoulder of the road. They punched, then clawed, then finally grappled together, butting heads and biting at each other's cheeks and necks. As they did, they began to rise slowly off the road. Clay watched, mouth hanging open, as they attained a height of approximately ten feet, still fighting, their feet apart and braced, as if standing on an invisible floor. Then one of them sank his teeth into the nose of his opponent, who was wearing a ragged, bloodstained T-shirt with the words HEAVY FUELprinted across the front. Nose-Biter pushed HEAVY FUELbackward. HEAVY FUELstaggered, then dropped like a rock down a well. Blood streamed upward from his ruptured nose as he fell. Nose-Biter looked down, seemed to realize for the first time that he was a second story's height above the road, and went down himself. Like Dumbo losing his magic feather, Clay thought. Nose-Biter wrenched his knee and lay in the dust, lips pulled back from his bloodstained teeth, snarling at Clay as he passed.

Yet these two were an exception. Most of the phoners Clay passed (he saw no normies at all that day or all the following week) seemed lost and bewildered with no flock mind to support them. Clay thought again and again of something Jordan had said before getting back in the van and heading into the north woods where there was no cell phone coverage: If the worm's continuing to mutate, their newest conversions aren't going to be either phoners or normies, not really.

Clay thought that meant like Pixie Dark, only a little further gone. Who are you? Who am I? He could see these questions in their eyes, and he suspected—no, he knew —it was these questions they were trying to ask when they spouted their gibberish.

He continued to ask Have you seen a boy and to try to send Johnny's picture, but he had no hope of an answer that made sense now. Most times he got no answer at all. He stayed the next night in a trailer about five miles north of Gurleyville, and the next morning at a little past nine he spied a small figure sitting on the curb outside the Gurleyville Cafe, in the middle of the town's one-block business district.

It can't be, he thought, but he began to walk faster, and when he got a little closer—close enough to be almost sure that the figure was that of a child and not just a small adult—he began to run. His new pack began to bounce up and down on his back. His feet found the place where Gurleyville's short length of sidewalk commenced and began clapping on the concrete.

It was a boy.

A very skinny boy with long hair almost down to the shoulders of his Red Sox T-shirt.

"Johnny!" Clay shouted. "Johnny, Johnny-Gee!"

The boy turned toward the sound of the shout, startled. His mouth hung open in a vacant gawp. There was nothing in his eyes but vague alarm. He looked as if he was thinking about running, but before he could even begin to put his legs in gear, Clay had swept him up and was covering his grimy, unresponsive face and slack mouth with kisses.

"Johnny," Clay said. "Johnny, I came for you. I did. I came for you. I came for you."

And at some point—perhaps only because the man holding him had begun to swing him around in a circle—the child put his hands around Clay's neck and hung on. He said something, as well. Clay refused to believe it was empty vocalization, as meaningless as wind blowing across the mouth of an empty pop-bottle. It was a word. It might have been tieey, as if the boy was trying to say tired.

Or it might have been Dieey, which was the way he had, as a sixteen-month-old, first named his father.

Clay chose to hang on to that. To believe the pallid, dirty, malnourished child clinging to his neck had called him Daddy.

It was little enough to hang on to, he thought a week later. one sound that might have been a word, one word that might have been Daddy. Now the boy was sleeping on a cot in a bedroom closet, because Johnny would settle there and because Clay was tired of fishing him out from under the bed. The almost womblike confines of the closet seemed to comfort him. Perhaps it was part of the conversion he and the others had been through. Some conversion. The phoners at Kashwak had turned his son into a haunted moron without even a flock for comfort.

Outside, under a gray evening sky, snow was spitting down. A cold wind sent it up Springvale's lightless Main Street in undulating snakes. It seemed too early for snow, but of course it wasn't, especially this far north. When it came before Thanksgiving you always griped, and when it came before Halloween you griped double, and then somebody reminded you that you were living in Maine, not on the isle of Capri.

He wondered where Tom, Jordan, Dan, and Denise were tonight. He wondered how Denise would do when it came time to have her baby. He thought she'd probably do okay—tough as a boiled owl, that one. He wondered if Tom and Jordan thought about him as often as he thought about them, and if they missed him as much as he missed them—Jordan's solemn eyes, Tom's ironic smile. He hadn't seen half enough of that smile; what they'd been through hadn't been all that funny.

He wondered if this last week with his broken son had been the loneliest of his life. He thought the answer to that was yes.

Clay looked down at the cell phone in his hand. More than anything else, he wondered about that. Whether to make one more call. There were bars on its little panel when he powered up, three good bars, but the charge wouldn't last forever, and he knew it. Nor could he count on the Pulse to continue forever. The batteries sending the signal up to the corn-satellites (if that was what was happening, and if it was still happening) might give out. Or the Pulse might mutate into no more than a simple carrier wave, an idiot hum or the kind of high-pitched shriek you used to get when you called someone's fax line by mistake.

Snow. Snow on the twenty-first of October. Was it the twenty-first? He'd lost track of the days. One thing he knew for sure was that the phoners would be dying out there, more every night. Johnny would have been one of them, if Clay hadn't searched and found him.

The question was, what had he found?

What had he saved?

Dieey.

Daddy?

Maybe.

Certainly the kid hadn't said anything even remotely resembling a word since then. He had been willing to walk with Clay . . . but he'd also been prone to wandering off in his own direction. When he did that, Clay had to grab him again, the way you grabbed a tot who tried to take off in a supermarket parking lot. Each time Clay did this he couldn't help thinking of a windup robot he'd had when he was a kid, and how it would always find its way into a corner and stand there marching its feet uselessly up and down until you turned it back toward the middle of the room again.

Johnny had put up a brief, panicky fight when Clay had found a car with the key in it, but once he got the boy buckled and locked in and got the car rolling, Johnny had quieted again and seemed to become almost hypnotized. He even found the button that unrolled the window and let the wind blow on his face, closing his eyes and lifting his head slightly. Clay watched the wind blowing back his son's long, dirty hair and thought, God help me, it's like riding with a dog.

When they came to a road-reef they couldn't get around and Clay helped Johnny from the car, he discovered his son had wet his pants. He'slost his toilet training along with his language, he had thought dismally. Christon a crutch. And that turned out to be true, but the consequences weren't as complicated or dire as Clay thought they might be. Johnny was no longer toilet-trained, but if you stopped and led him into a field, he would urinate if he had to. Or if he had to squat, he'd do that, looking dreamily up at the sky while he emptied his bowels. Perhaps tracing the courses of the birds that flew there. Perhaps not.

Not toilet-trained, but housebroken. Again, Clay was helpless not to think of dogs he had owned.

Only dogs did not wake up and scream for fifteen minutes in the middle of each night.

That first night they had stayed in a house not far from the Newfield Trading Post, and when the screaming started, Clay had thought Johnny was dying. And although the boy had fallen asleep in his arms, he was gone when Clay snapped awake. Johnny was no longer in the bed but under it. Clay crawled underneath, into a choking cavern of dust-kitties with the bottom of the box spring only an inch above his head, and clutched a slender body that was like an iron rail. The boy's shrieks were bigger than such small lungs could produce, and Clay understood that he was hearing them amplified in his head. All of Clay's hair, even his pubic hair, seemed to be standing up straight and stiff.

Johnny had shrieked for nearly fifteen minutes there under the bed, then ceased as abruptly as he had begun. His body went limp. Clay had to press his head against Johnny's side (one of the boy's arms somehow squeezed over his neck in the impossibly small space) to make sure he was breathing.

He had dragged Johnny out, limp as a mailsack, and had gotten the dusty, dirty body back onto the bed. Had lain awake beside him almost an hour before falling soddenly asleep himself. In the morning, the bed had been his alone again. Johnny had crawled underneath once more. Like a beaten dog, seeking the smallest shelter it could find. Quite the opposite of previous phoner behavior, it seemed . . . but of course, Johnny wasn't like them. Johnny was a new thing, God help him.

Now they were in the cozy caretaker's cottage next to the Springvale Logging Museum. There was plenty to eat, there was a woodstove, there was fresh water from the hand-pump. There was even a chemical toilet (although Johnny wouldn't use it; Johnny used the backyard). All mod cons, circa 1908.

It had been quiet time, except for Johnny's nightly screaming fit. There had been time to think, and now, standing here by the living room window and watching snow skirl up the street while his son slept in his little closet hidey-hole, there was time to realize that the time for thinking was done. Nothing was going to change unless he changed it.

You'd need another cellphone, Jordan had said. And you'd need to take him to a place where there's coverage.

There was coverage here. Still coverage. He had the bars on the cell phone to prove it.

How much worse can it be? Tom had asked. And shrugged. But of course he could shrug, couldn't he? Johnny wasn't Tom's kid, Tom had his own kid now.

It all depends on whether or not brains do what seriously protected computers do when they're hit with an EMP, Jordan had said. They save to system.

Save to system. A phrase of some power.

But you'd have to wipe the phoner program first to make space for such a highly theoretical second reboot, and Jordan's idea—to hit Johnny with the Pulse yet again, like lighting a backfire—seemed so spooky, so off-the-wall dangerous, given the fact that Clay had no way of knowing what sort of program the Pulse had mutated into by now . . . assuming (makes an ass out of you and me, yeah, yeah, yeah) it was still up and running at all. . .

"Save to system," Clay whispered. Outside the light was almost gone; the skirling snow looked more ghostly than ever.

The Pulse was different now, he was sure of that. He remembered the first phoners he'd come upon who were up at night, the ones at the Gurleyville Volunteer Fire Department. They had been fighting over the old pumper, but they had been doing more than that; they had been talking. Not just making phantom vocalizations that might have been words, talking. It hadn't been much, not brilliant cocktail-party chatter, but actual talk, just the same. Go away. You go. Hell you say. And the always popular Mynuck. Those two had been different from the original phoners—the phoners of the Raggedy Man Era—and Johnny was different from those two. Why? Because the worm was still munching, the Pulse program was still mutating? Probably.

The last thing Jordan had said before kissing him goodbye and heading north was If you set a new version of the program against the one Johnny andthe others got at the checkpoint, they might eat each other up. Because that's what worms do. They eat.

And then, if the old programming was there . . . if it was saved to the system . . .

Clay found his troubled mind turning to Alice—Alice who had lost her mother, Alice who had found a way to be brave by transferring her fears to a child's sneaker. Four hours or so out of Gaiten, on Route 156, Tom had asked another group of normies if they'd like to share their picnic site by the side of the road. That's them, one of the men had said. That's the Gaiten bunch. Another had told Tom he could go to hell. And Alice had jumped up. Jumped up and said—

"She said at least we did something," Clay said as he looked out into the darkening street. "Then she asked them, 'Just what the fuck did you do?' "

So there was his answer, courtesy of a dead girl. Johnny-Gee wasn't getting better. Clay's choices came down to two: stick with what he had, or try to make a change while there was still time. If there was.

Clay used a battery-powered lamp to light his way into the bedroom. The closet door was ajar, and he could see Johnny's face. In sleep, lying with his cheek on one hand and his hair tousled across his forehead, he looked almost exactly like the boy Clay had kissed goodbye before setting out for Boston with his Dark Wanderer portfolio a thousand years ago. A little thinner; otherwise pretty much the same. It was only when he was awake that you saw the differences. The slack mouth and the empty eyes. The slumped shoulders and dangling hands.

Clay opened the closet door all the way and knelt in front of the cot. Johnny stirred a little when the light of the lantern struck his face, then settled again. Clay was not a praying man, and events of the last few weeks had not greatly increased his faith in God, but he had found his son, there was that, so he sent a prayer up to whatever might be listening. It was short and to the point: Tony, Tony, come around, something's lost that can't be found.

He flipped open the cell and pushed the power button. It beeped softly. The amber light in the window came on. Three bars. He hesitated for a moment, but when it came to placing the call, there was only one sure shot: the one the Raggedy Man and his friends had taken.

When the three digits were entered, he reached out and shook Johnny's shoulder. The boy didn't want to wake up. He groaned and tried to pull away. Then he tried to turn over. Clay wouldn't let him do either.

"Johnny! Johnny-Gee! Wake up!" He shook harder and kept on shaking until the boy finally opened his empty eyes and looked at him with wariness but no human curiosity. It was the sort of look you got from a badly treated dog, and it broke Clay's heart every time he saw it.

Last chance, he thought. Do you really mean to do this? The odds can't be one in ten.

But what had the odds been on his finding Johnny in the first place? Of Johnny leaving the Kashwakamak flock before the explosion, for that matter? One in a thousand? In ten thousand? Was he going to live with that wary yet incurious look as Johnny turned thirteen, then fifteen, then twenty-one? While his son slept in the closet and shat in the backyard?

At least we did something, Alice Maxwell had said.

He looked in the window above the keypad. There the numbers 911 stood out as bright and black as some declared destiny.

Johnny's eyes were drooping. Clay gave him another brisk shake to keep him from falling asleep again. He did this with his left hand. With the thumb of his right he pushed the phone's call button. There was time to count Mississippi ONE and Mississippi TWO before calling in the phone's little lighted window changed to connected. When that happened, Clayton Riddell didn't allow himself time to think.

"Hey, Johnny-Gee," he said, "Fo-fo-you-you." And pressed the cell against his son's ear.

December 30, 2004-October 17, 2005 Center Lovell, Maine

Chuck Verrill edited the book and did a great job. Thanks, Chuck.

Robin Furth did research on cell phones and provided various theories on what may lie at the core of the human psyche. Good info is hers; errors in understanding are mine. Thanks, Robin.

My wife read the first-draft manuscript and said encouraging things. Thanks, Tabby.

Bostonians and northern New Englanders will know I took certain geographical liberties. What can I say? It goes with the territory (to make a small pun).

To the best of my knowledge, FEMA hasn't appropriated any money to provide backup generators for cell telephone transmission towers, but I should note that many transmission towers do have generator backup in case of power outages.

S.K.

Stephen King lives in Maine with his wife, the novelist Tabitha King. He does not own a cell phone.