Cell

MALDEN

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.

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.

"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."

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.

The plump lady looked and said nothing. One large tear spilled down her rouged cheek.

"That's enough, Tom, I'm okay," Alice said.

Tom dropped the plump lady's shopping bag of possessions into her lap. Clay hadn't even realized Tom had salvaged it. Then Tom took the Bible from Alice, picked up one of the plump lady's be-ringed hands, and smacked the Bible into it, spine first. He started away, then turned back.

"Tom, that's enough, let's go," Clay said.

Tom ignored him. He bent toward the woman sitting with her back against the sign's leg. His hands were on his knees, and to Clay the two of them—the plump, spectacled woman looking up, the small, spectacled man bending over with his hands on his knees—looked like figures in some lunatic's parody of the early illustrations from the Charles Dickens novels.

"Some advice, sister," Tom said. "The police will no longer protect you as they did when you and your self-righteous, holy-rolling friends marched on the family planning centers or the Emily Cathcart Clinic in Waltham—"

"That abortion mill!" she spat, and then raised her Bible, as if to block a blow.

Tom didn't hit her, but he was smiling grimly. "I don't know about the Vial of Insanity, but there's certainly beaucoup crazy making the rounds tonight. May I be clear? The lions are out of their cages, and you may well find that they'll eat the mouthy Christians first. Somebody canceled your right of free speech around three o'clock this afternoon. Just a word to the wise." He looked from Alice to Clay, and Clay saw that the upper lip beneath the mustache was trembling slightly. "Shall we go?"

"Yes," Clay said.

"Wow," Alice said, once they were walking toward the Salem Street ramp again, Mister Big's Giant Discount Liquor falling behind them. "You grew up with someone like that?"

"My mother and both of her sisters," Tom said. "First N.E. Church of Christ the Redeemer. They took Jesus as their personal savior, and the church took them as its personal pigeons."

"Where is your mother now?" Clay asked.

Tom glanced at him briefly. "Heaven. Unless they rooked her on that one, too. I'm pretty sure the bastards did."

Near the stop sign at the foot of the ramp, two men were fighting over a keg of beer. If forced to guess, Clay would have said it had probably been liberated from Mister Big's Giant Discount Liquor. Now it lay forgotten against the guardrails, dented and leaking foam, while the two men—both brawny and both bleeding—battered each other with their fists. Alice shrank against him, and Clay put his arm around her, but there was something almost reassuring about these brawlers. They were angry– enraged—but not crazy. Not like the people back in the city.

One of them was bald and wearing a Celtics jacket. He hit the other a looping overhand blow that mashed his opponent's lips and knocked him flat. When the man in the Celtics jacket advanced on the downed man, the downed man scrambled away, then got up, still backing off. He spat blood. "Take it, ya fuck!" he yelled in a thick, weepy Boston accent. "Hope it chokes ya!"

The bald man in the Celtics jacket made as if to charge him, and the other went running up the ramp toward Route One. Celtics Jacket started to bend down for his prize, registered Clay, Alice, and Tom, and straightened up again. It was three to one, he had a black eye, and blood was trickling down the side of his face from a badly torn earlobe, but Clay saw no fear in that face, although he had only the diminishing light of the Revere fire to go by. He thought his grandfather would have said the guy's Irish was up, and certainly that went with the big green shamrock on the back of his jacket.

"The fuck you lookin at?" he asked.

"Nothing—just going by you, if that's all right," Tom said mildly. "I live on Salem Street."

"You can go to Salem Street or hell, far as I'm concerned," the bald man in the Celtics jacket said. "Still a free country, isn't it?"

"Tonight?" Clay said. "Too free."

The bald man thought it over and then laughed, a humorless double ha-ha. "The fuck happened? Any-a youse know?"

Alice said, "It was the cell phones. They made people crazy."

The bald man picked up the keg. He handled it easily, tipping it so the leak stopped. "Fucking things," he said. "Never cared to own one. Rollover minutes. The fuck're those?"

Clay didn't know. Tom might've—he'd owned a cell phone, so it seemed possible—but Tom said nothing. Probably didn't want to get into a long discussion with the bald man, and probably a good idea. Clay thought the bald man had some of the characteristics of an unexploded grenade.

"City burning?" the bald man asked. "Is, isn't it?"

"Yes," Clay said. "I don't think the Celtics will be playing at the Fleet this year."

"They ain't shit, anyway," the man said. "Doc Rivers couldn't coach a PAL team." He stood watching them, the keg on his shoulder, blood running down the side of his face. Yet now he seemed peaceable enough, almost serene. "Go on," he said. "But I wouldn't stay this close to the city for long. It's gonna get worse before it gets better. There's gonna be a lot more fires, for one thing. You think everybody who hightailed it north remembered to turn off the gas stove? I fuckin doubt it."

The three of them started walking, then Alice stopped. She pointed to the keg. "Was that yours?"

The bald man looked at her reasonably. "Ain't no was at times like this, sweetie pie. Ain't no was left. There's just now and maybe-tomorrow. It's mine now, and if there's any left it'll be mine maybe-tomorrow. Go on now. The fuck out."

"Seeya," Clay said, and raised one hand.

"Wouldn't want to be ya," the bald man replied, unsmiling, but he raised his own hand in return. They had passed the stop sign and were crossing to the far side of what Clay assumed was Salem Street when the bald man called after them again: "Hey, handsome!"

Both Clay and Tom turned to look, then glanced at each other, amused. The bald guy with the keg was now only a dark shape on the rising ramp; he could have been a caveman carrying a club.

"Where are the loonies now?" the bald guy asked. "You're not gonna tell me they're all dead, are ya? Cause I don't fuckin believe it."

"That's a very good question," Clay said.

"You're fuckin-A right it is. Watch out for the little sweetie pie there." And without waiting for them to reply, the man who'd won the battle of the beer keg turned and merged with the shadows.

"This is it," Tom said no more than ten minutes later, and the moon emerged from the wrack of cloud and smoke that had obscured it for the last hour or so as if the little man with the spectacles and the mustache had just given the Celestial Lighting Director a cue. Its rays—silver now instead of that awful infected orange—illuminated a house that was either dark blue, green, or perhaps even gray; without the streetlights to help, it was hard to tell for sure. What Clay could tell for sure was that the house was trim and handsome, although maybe not as big as your eye first insisted. The moonlight aided in that deception, but it was mostly caused by the way the steps rose from Tom McCourt's well-kept lawn to the only pillared porch on the street. There was a fieldstone chimney on the left. From above the porch, a dormer looked down on the street.

"Oh, Tom, it's beautiful!” Alice said in a too-rapturous voice. To Clay she sounded exhausted and bordering on hysteria. He himself didn't think it beautiful, but it certainly looked like the home of a man who owned a cell phone and all the other twenty-first-century bells and whistles. So did the rest of the houses on this part of Salem Street, and Clay doubted if many of the residents had had Tom's fantastic good luck. He looked around nervously. All the houses were dark—the power was out now—and they might have been deserted, except he seemed to feel eyes, surveying them.

The eyes of crazies? Phone-crazies? He thought of Power Suit Woman and Pixie Light; of the lunatic in the gray pants and the shredded tie; the man in the business suit who had bitten the ear right off the side of the dog's head. He thought of the naked man jabbing the car aerials back and forth as he ran. No, surveying was not in the phone-crazies' repertoire. They just came at you. But if there were normal people holed up in these houses—some of them, anyway—where were the phone-crazies?

Clay didn't know.

"I don't know if I'd exactly call it beautiful," Tom said, "but it's still standing, and that's good enough for me. I'd pretty well made up my mind that we'd get here and find nothing but a smoking hole in the ground." He reached in his pocket and brought out a slim ring of keys. "Come on in. Be it ever so humble, and all that."

They started up the walk and had gone no more than half a dozen steps when Alice cried, "Wait!"

Clay wheeled around, feeling both alarm and exhaustion. He thought he was beginning to understand combat fatigue a little. Even his adrenaline felt tired. But no one was there—no phone-crazies, no bald man with blood flowing down the side of his face from a shredded ear, not even a little old lady with the talkin apocalypse blues. Just Alice, down on one knee at the place where Tom's walk left the sidewalk.

"What is it, honey?" Tom asked.

She stood up, and Clay saw she was holding a very small sneaker. "It's a Baby Nike," she said. "Do you—"

Tom shook his head. "I live alone. Except for Rafe, that is. He thinks he's the king, but he's only the cat."

"Then who left it?" She looked from Tom to Clay with wondering, tired eyes.

Clay shook his head. "No telling, Alice. Might as well toss it."

But Clay knew she would not; it was dйjа vu at its disorienting worst. She still held it in her hand, curled against her waist, as she went to stand behind Tom, who was on the steps, picking slowly through his keys in the scant light.

Now we hear the cat, Clay thought. Rafe. And sure enough, there was the cat that had been Tom McCourt's salvation, waowing a greeting from inside.

Tom bent down and rafe or rafer—both short for rafael—leaped into his arms, purring loudly and stretching his head up to sniff Tom's carefully trimmed mustache.

"Yeah, missed you, too," Tom said. "All is forgiven, believe me." He carried Rafer across the enclosed porch, stroking the top of his head. Alice followed. Clay came last, closing the door and turning the knob on the lock before catching up to the others.

"Follow along down to the kitchen," Tom said when they were in the house proper. There was a pleasant smell of furniture polish and, Clay thought, leather, a smell he associated with men living calm lives that did not necessarily include women. "Second door on the right. Stay close. The hallway's wide, and there's nothing on the floor, but there are tables on both sides and it's as black as your hat. As I think you can see."

"So to speak," Clay said.

"Ha-ha."

"Have you got flashlights?" Clay asked.

"Flashlights and a Coleman lantern that should be even better, but let's get in the kitchen first."

They followed him down the hallway, Alice walking between the two men. Clay could hear her breathing rapidly, trying not to let the unfamiliar surroundings freak her out, but of course it was hard. Hell, it was hard for him. Disorienting. It would have been better if there had been even a little light, but—

His knee bumped one of the tables Tom had mentioned, and something that sounded all too ready to break rattled like teeth. Clay steeled himself for the smash, and for Alice's scream. That she would scream was almost a given. Then whatever it was, a vase or some knickknack, decided to live a little longer and settled back into place. Still, it seemed like a very long walk before Tom said, "Here, okay? Hard right."

The kitchen was nearly as black as the hall, and Clay had just a moment to think of all the things he was missing and Tom must be missing more: a digital readout on the microwave oven, the hum of the fridge, maybe light from a neighboring house coming in through the window over the kitchen sink and making highlights on the faucet.

"Here's the table," Tom said. "Alice, I'm going to take your hand. Here's a chair, okay? I'm sorry if I sound like we're playing blindman's bluff."

"It's all r—," she began, then gave a little scream that made Clay jump. His hand was on the haft of his knife (now he thought of it as his) before he even realized he'd reached for it.

"What?" Tom asked sharply. "What?"

"Nothing," she said. "Just. . . nothing. The cat. His tail. . . on my leg."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"It's all right. Stupid," she added with self-contempt that made Clay wince in the dark.

"No," he said. "Let up on yourself, Alice. It's been a tough day at the office."

"Tough day at the office!" Alice repeated, and laughed in a way Clay didn't care for. It reminded him of her voice when she'd called Tom's house beautiful. He thought, That's going to get away from her, and then what do I do? In the movies the hysterical girl gets a slap across the chops and it always brings her around, but in the movies you can see where she is.

He didn't have to slap her, shake her, or hold her, which was what he probably would have tried first. She heard what was in her own voice, maybe, got hold of it, and bulldogged it down: first to a choked gargle, then to a gasp, then to quiet.

"Sit," Tom said. "You have to be tired. You too, Clay. I'll get us some light."

Clay felt for a chair and sat down to a table he could hardly see, although his eyes had to be fully adjusted to the dark by now. There was a whisper of something against his pants leg, there and gone. A low miaow. Rafe.

"Hey, guess what?" he said to the dim shape of the girl as Tom's footsteps receded. "Ole Rafer just put a jump in me, too." Although he hadn't, not really.

"We have to forgive him," she said. "Without that cat, Tom would be just as crazy as the rest of them. And that would be a shame."

"It would."

"I'm so scared," she said. "Do you think it will get better tomorrow, in the daylight? The being scared part?"

"I don't know."

"You must be worried sick about your wife and little boy."

Clay sighed and rubbed his face. "The hard part is trying to come to grips with the helplessness. We're separated, you see, and—" He stopped and shook his head. He wouldn't have gone on if she hadn't reached out and taken his hand. Her fingers were firm and cool. "We separated in the spring. We still live in the same little town, what my own mother would have called a grass marriage. My wife teaches at the elementary school."

He leaned forward, trying to see her face in the dark.

"You want to know the hell of it? If this had happened a year ago, Johnny would have been with her. But this September he made the jump to middle school, which is almost five miles away. I keep trying to figure if he would have been home when things went nuts. He and his friends ride the bus. I think he would have been home. And I think he would have gone right to her."

Or pulled his cellphone out of his backpack and called her! the panic-rat suggested merrily . . . then bit. Clay felt himself tightening his fingers down on Alice's and made himself stop. But he couldn't stop the sweat from springing out on his face and arms.

"But you don't know," she said.

"No."

"My daddy runs a framing and print shop in Newton," she said. "I'm sure he's all right, he's very self-reliant, but he'll be worried about me. Me and my. My you-know."

Clay knew.

"I keep wondering what he did about supper," she said. "I know that's crazy, but he can't cook a lick."

Clay thought about asking if her father had a cell phone and something told him not to. Instead he asked, "Are you doing all right for now?"

"Yes," she said, and shrugged. "What's happened to him has happened. I can't change it."

He thought: Iwish you hadn't said that.

"My kid has a cell phone, did I tell you that?" To his own ears, his voice sounded as harsh as a crow's caw.

"You did, actually. Before we crossed the bridge."

"Sure, that's right." He was gnawing at his lower lip and made himself stop. "But he didn't always keep it charged. Probably I told you that, too."

"Yes."

"I just have no way of knowing." The panic-rat was out of its cage, now. Running and biting.

Now both of her hands closed over both of his. He didn't want to give in to her comfort—it felt hard to let go of his grip on himself and give in to her comfort—but he did it, thinking she might need to give more than he needed to take. They were holding on that way, hands linked next to the pewter salt and pepper shakers on Tom McCourt's little kitchen table, when Tom came back from the cellar with four flashlights and a Coleman lantern that was still in its box.

The coleman gave off enough light to make the flashlights unnecessary. It was harsh and white, but Clay liked its brilliance, the way it drove away every single shadow save for their own and the cat's—which went leaping fantastically up the wall like a Halloween decoration cut from black crepe paper—into hiding.

"I think you should pull the curtains," Alice said.

Tom was opening one of the plastic sacks from the Metropolitan Cafe, the ones with DOGGY BAG on one side and PEOPLE BAG on the other. He stopped and looked at her curiously. "Why?"

She shrugged and smiled. Clay thought it the strangest smile he had ever seen on the face of a teenage girl. She'd cleaned the blood off her nose and chin, but there were dark weary-circles under her eyes, the Coleman lamp had bleached the rest of her face to a corpselike pallor, and the smile, showing the tiniest twinkle of teeth between trembling lips from which all the lipstick had now departed, was disorienting in its adult artificiality. He thought Alice looked like a movie actress from the late 1940s playing a socialite on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She had the tiny sneaker in front of her on the table. She was spinning it with one finger. Each time she spun it, the laces flipped and clicked. Clay began to hope she would break soon. The longer she held up, the worse it would be when she finally let go. She had let some out, but not nearly enough. So far he'd been the one to do most of the letting-out.

"I don't think people should see we're in here, that's all," she said. She flicked the sneaker. What she had called a Baby Nike. It spun. The laces flipped and clicked on Tom's highly polished table. "I think it might be . . .bad."

Tom looked at Clay.

"She could be right," Clay said. "I don't like us being the only lit-up house on the block, even if the light's at the back."

Tom got up and closed the curtains over the sink without another word.

There were two other windows in the kitchen, and he pulled those curtains, too. He started back to the table, then changed course and closed the door between the kitchen and the hall. Alice spun the Baby Nike in front of her on the table. In the harsh, unsparing glow of the Coleman lantern, Clay could see it was pink and purple, colors only a child could love. Around it went. The laces flew and clicked. Tom looked at it, frowning, as he sat down, and Clay thought: Tell her to take it off the table. Tell her she doesn't know where it's been and you don't want it on your table. That should be enough to set her off and then we can start getting this part out of the way. Tell her. I think she wants you to. I think that's why she's doing it.

But Tom only took sandwiches out of the bag—roast beef and cheese, ham and cheese—and doled them out. He got a pitcher of iced tea from the fridge ("Still cold as can be," he said), and then set down the remains of a package of raw hamburger for the cat.

"He deserves it," he said, almost defensively. "Besides, it would only go over with the electricity out."

There was a telephone hanging on the wall. Clay tried it, but it was really just a formality and this time he didn't even get a dial tone. The thing was as dead as . . . well, as Power Suit Woman, back there by Boston Common. He sat back down and worked on his sandwich. He was hungry but didn't feel like eating.

Alice put hers down after only three bites. "I can't," she said. "Not now. I guess I'm too tired. I want to go to sleep. And I want to get out of this dress. I guess I can't wash up—not very well, anyway—but I'd give anything to throw this fucking dress away. It stinks of sweat and blood." She spun the sneaker. It twirled beside the crumpled paper with her barely touched sandwich lying on top of it. "I can smell my mother on it, too. Her perfume."

For a moment no one said anything. Clay was at a complete loss. He had a momentary picture of Alice subtracted from her dress, in a white bra and panties, with her staring, hollowed-out eyes making her look like a paper-doll. His artist's imagination, always facile and always obliging, added tabs at the shoulders and lower legs of the image. It was shocking not because it was sexy but because it wasn't. In the distance—very faint—something exploded with a dim foomp.

Tom broke the silence, and Clay blessed him for it.

"I'll bet a pair of my jeans would just about fit you, if you rolled up the bottoms to make cuffs." He stood up. "You know what, I think you'd even look cute in em, like Huck Finn in a girls' school production of Big River. Come upstairs. I'm going to put out some clothes for you to wear in the morning and you can spend the night in the guest room. I've got plenty of pajamas, a plague of pajamas. Do you want the Coleman?"

"Just . . . I guess just a flashlight will be okay. Are you sure?"

"Yes," he said. He took one flashlight and gave her another. He looked ready to say something about the small sneaker when she picked it up, then seemed to think better of it. What he said was, "You can wash, too. There may not be a lot of water, but the taps will probably draw some even with the power out, and I'm sure we can spare a basinful." He looked over the top of her head at Clay. "I always keep a case of bottled drinking water in the cellar, so we're not short there."

Clay nodded. "Sleep well, Alice," he said.

"You too," she said vaguely, and then, more vaguely still: "Nice meeting you."

Tom opened the door for her. Their flashlights bobbed, and then the door shut again. Clay heard their footsteps on the stairs, then overhead. He heard running water. He waited for the chug of air in the pipes, but the flow of water stopped before the air started. A basinful, Tom had said, and that was what she'd gotten. Clay also had blood and dirt on him he wanted to wash off—he imagined Tom did, too—but he guessed there must be a bathroom on this floor, too, and if Tom was as neat about his personal habits as he was about his person, the water in the toilet bowl would be clean. And there was the water in the tank as well, of course.

Rafer jumped up on Tom's chair and began washing his paws in the white light of the Coleman lantern. Even with the lantern's steady low hiss, Clay could hear him purring. As far as Rafe was concerned, life was still cool.

He thought of Alice twirling the small sneaker and wondered, almost idly, if it was possible for a fifteen-year-old girl to have a nervous breakdown.

"Don't be stupid," he told the cat. "Of course it is. Happens all the time. They make movies of the week about it."

Rafer looked at him with wise green eyes and went on licking his paw. Tell me more, those eyes seemed to say. Vere you beaten as a child? Did you have ze sexual thoughts about your mother?

I can smell my mother on it. Her perfume.

Alice as a paper-doll, with tabs sticking out of her shoulders and legs.

Don't be zilly, Rafer's green eyes seemed to say. Ze tabs go on ze clothes, not on ze doll. Vut kind of artist are you?

"The out-of-work kind," he said. "Just shut up, why don't you?" He closed his eyes, but that was worse. Now Rafer's green eyes floated disembodied in the dark, like the eyes of Lewis Carroll's Cheshire cat: We're all mad here, dear Alice. And under the steady hiss of the Coleman lamp, he could still hear it purring.

Tom was gone fifteen minutes. when he came back, he brushed rafe out of his chair without ceremony and took a large, convincing bite from his sandwich. "She's asleep," he said. "Got into a pair of my pajamas while I waited in the hall, and then we dumped the dress in the trash together. I think she was out forty seconds after her head hit the pillow. Throwing the dress away was what sealed the deal, I'm convinced of it." A slight pause. "It did indeed smell bad."

"While you were gone," Clay said, "I nominated Rafe president of the United States. He was elected by acclamation."

"Good," Tom said. "Wise choice. Who voted?"

"Millions. Everyone still sane. They sent in thought-ballots." Clay made his eyes very wide and tapped his temple. "I can read miiiyyynds."

Tom's chewing stopped, then began again . . . but slowly. "You know," he said, "under the circumstances, that's not really all that funny."

Clay sighed, sipped some iced tea, and made himself eat a little more of his sandwich. He told himself to think of it as body gasoline, if that was what it took to get it down. "No. Probably not. Sorry."

Tom tipped his own glass to him before drinking. "It's all right. I appreciate the effort. Say, where's your portfolio?"

"Left it on the porch. I wanted both hands free while we negotiated Tom McCourt's Hallway of Death."

"That's all right, then. Listen, Clay, I'm sorry as hell about your family-"

"Don't be sorry yet," Clay said, a little harshly. "There's nothing to be sorry about yet."

"—but I'm really glad I ran into you. That's all I wanted to say."

"Same goes back," Clay said. "I appreciate the quiet place to spend the night, and I'm sure Alice does, too."

"As long as Malden doesn't get loud and burn down around our ears."

Clay nodded, smiling a little. "As long as. Did you get that creepy little shoe away from her?"

"No. She took it to bed with her like . . . I don't know, a teddy bear. She'll be a lot better tomorrow if she sleeps through tonight."

"Do you think she will?"

"No," Tom said. "But if she wakes up scared, I'll spend the night with her. Crawl in with her, if that's what it takes. You know I'm safe with her, right?"

"Yes." Clay knew that he would have been safe with her, too, but he understood what Tom was talking about. "I'm going to head north tomorrow morning as soon as it's light. It would probably be a good idea if you and Alice came with me."

Tom thought about this briefly, then asked, "What about her father?"

"She says he's, quote, 'very self-reliant.' Her biggest stated worry on his behalf was what he rolled himself for dinner. What I heard under that is that she isn't ready to know. Of course we'll have to see how she feels about it, but I'd rather keep her with us, and I don't want to head west into those industrial towns."

"You don't want to head west at all."

"No," Clay admitted.

He thought Tom might argue the point, but he didn't. "What about tonight? Do you think we should stand a watch?"

Clay hadn't even considered this until now. He said, "I don't know how much good it would do. If a crazed mob comes down Salem Street waving guns and torches, what can we do about it?"

"Go down cellar?"

Clay thought it over. Going down cellar seemed awfully final to him– the Bunker Defense—but it was always possible the hypothetical crazed mob under discussion would think the house deserted and go sweeping by. Better than being slaughtered in the kitchen, he supposed. Maybe after watching Alice get gang-raped.

It won't come to that, he thought uneasily. You're getting lost among the hypothetical, that's all. Freaking in the dark. It won't come to that.

Except Boston was burning to the ground behind them. Liquor stores were being looted and men were beating each other bloody over aluminum kegs of beer. It had already come to that.

Tom, meanwhile, was watching him, letting him work it through . . . which meant that maybe Tom already had. Rafe jumped into his lap. Tom put his sandwich down and stroked the cat's back.

"Tell you what," Clay said. "If you've got a couple of comforters I can bundle up in, why don't I spend the night out there on your porch? It's enclosed, and it's darker than the street. Which means that I'd likely see anyone coming long before they saw me watching. Especially if the ones coming were phone-crazies. They didn't impress me as being into stealth."

"Nope, not the creep-up-on-you type. What if people came from around in back? That's Lynn Avenue just a block over."

Clay shrugged, trying to indicate that they couldn't defense against everything—or even very much—without saying so right out loud.

"All right," Tom said, after eating a little more of his sandwich and feeding a scrap of ham to Rafe. "But you could come get me around three. If Alice hasn't woken up by then, she might sleep right through."

"Why don't we just see how it goes," Clay said. "Listen, I think I know the answer to this, but you don't have a gun, do you?"

"No," Tom said. "Not even a lonely can of Mace." He looked at his sandwich and then put it down. When he raised his eyes to Clay's, they were remarkably bleak. He spoke in a low voice, as people do when discussing secret things. "Do you remember what the cop said just before he shot that crazy man?"

Clay nodded. Hey, buddy, how ya doin? I mean, what the haps? He would never forget it.

"I knew it wasn't like in the movies," Tom said, "but I never suspected the enormous power of it, or the suddenness . . . and the sound when the stuff. . . the stuff from his head . . ."

He leaned forward suddenly, one small hand curled to his mouth. The movement startled Rafer, and the cat leaped down. Tom made three low, muscular urking sounds, and Clay steeled himself for the vomiting that was almost sure to follow. He could only hope he wouldn't start vomiting himself, but he thought he might. He knew he was close, only a feather-tickle away. Because he knew what Tom was talking about. The gunshot, then the wet, ropy splatter on the cement.

There was no vomiting. Tom got control of himself and looked up, eyes watering. "I'm sorry," he said. "Shouldn't have gone there."

"You don't need to be sorry."

"I think if we're going to get through whatever's ahead, we'd better find a way to put our finer sensibilities on hold. I think that people who can't do that . . ." He stopped, then started again. "I think that people who can't do that. . ." He stopped a second time. The third time he was able to finish. "I think that people who can't do that may die."

They stared at each other in the white glare of the Coleman lamp.

"Once we left the city, I didn't see anyone with a gun," Clay said. "At first I wasn't really looking, and then I was."

"You know why, don't you? Except maybe for California, Massachusetts has got the toughest gun law in the country."

Clay remembered seeing billboards proclaiming that at the state line a few years ago. Then they'd been replaced by ones saying that if you got picked up for driving under the influence, you'd have to spend a night in jail.

Tom said, "If the cops find a concealed handgun in your car—meaning like in the glove compartment with your registration and insurance card—they can put you away for I think seven years. Get stopped with a loaded rifle in your pickup, even in hunting season, and you could get slapped with a ten-thousand-dollar fine and two years of community service." He picked up the remains of his sandwich, inspected it, put it back down again. "You can own a handgun and keep it in your home if you're not a felon, but a license to carry? Maybe if you've got Father O'Malley of the Boys' Club to cosign, but maybe not even then."

"No guns might have saved some lives, coming out of the city."

"I agree with you completely," Tom said. "Those two guys fighting over the keg of beer? Thank God neither of them had a .38."

Clay nodded.

Tom rocked back in his chair, crossed his arms on his narrow chest, and looked around. His glasses glinted. The circle of light thrown by the Coleman lantern was brilliant but small. "Right now, however, I wouldn't mind having a pistol. Even after seeing the mess they make. And I consider myself a pacifist."

"How long have you lived here, Tom?"

"Almost twelve years. Long enough to see Malden go a long way down the road to Shitsville. It's not there yet, but boy, it's going."

"Okay, so think about it. Which of your neighbors is apt to have a gun or guns in their house?"

Tom answered promptly. "Arnie Nickerson, across the street and three houses up. NRA bumper sticker on his Camry—along with a couple of yellow ribbon decals and an old Bush-Cheney sticker—"

"Goes without saying—"

"And two NRA stickers on his pickup, which he equips with a camper cap in November and takes hunting up in your part of the world."

"And we're happy to have the revenue his out-of-state hunting license provides," Clay said. "Let's break into his house tomorrow and take his guns."

Tom McCourt looked at him as though he were mad. "The man isn't as paranoid as some of those militia types out in Utah—I mean, he does live in Taxachusetts—but he's got one of those burglar alarm signs on his lawn that basically says DO YOU FEEL LUCKY, PUNK, and I'm sure you must be familiar with the NRA's stated policy as to just when their guns will be taken away from them."

"I think it has something to do with prying their cold dead fingers—"

"That's the one."

Clay leaned forward and stated what to him had been obvious from the moment they'd come down the ramp from Route One: Malden was now just one more fucked-up town in the Unicel States of America, and that country was now out of service, off the hook, so sorry, please try your call again later. Salem Street was deserted. He had felt that as they approached . . . hadn't he?

No. Bullshit. You felt watched.

Really? And even if he had, was that the sort of intuition that could be relied upon, acted upon, after a day like this one? The idea was ridiculous.

"Tom, listen. One of us'll walk up to this guy Nackleson's house tomorrow, after it's full daylight—"

"It's Nickerson, and I don't think that's a very smart idea, especially since Swami McCourt sees him kneeling inside his living room window with a fully automatic rifle he's been saving for the end of the world. Which seems to have rolled around."

"I'll do it," Clay said. "And I won't do it if we hear any gunshots from the Nickerson place tonight or tomorrow morning. I certainly won't do it if I see any bodies on the guy's lawn, with or without gunshot wounds. I watched all those old Twilight Zone episodes, too—the ones where civilization turns out to be nothing more than a thin layer of shellac."

"If that," Tom said gloomily. "Idi Amin, Pol Pot, the prosecution rests."

"I'll go with my hands raised. Ring the doorbell. If someone answers, I'll say I just want to talk. What's the worst that can happen? He tells me to get lost."

"No, the worst that can happen is he can shoot you dead on his fucking welcome mat and leave me with a motherless teenage girl," Tom said sharply. "Smart off about old Twilight Zone episodes all you want, just don't forget those people you saw today, fighting outside the T station in Boston."

"That was . . . I don't know what it was, but those people were clinically insane. You can't doubt that, Tom."

"What about Bible-Thumping Bertha? And the two men fighting over the keg? Were they insane?"

No, of course they hadn't been, but if there was a gun in that house across the street, he still wanted it. And if there was more than one, he wanted Tom and Alice each to have one, too.

"I'm thinking about going north over a hundred miles," Clay said. "We might be able to boost a car and drive some of it, but we might have to walk the whole way. Do you want to go with just knives for protection? I'm asking you as one serious man to another, because some of the people we run into are going to have guns. I mean, you know that."

"Yes," Tom said. He ran his hands through his neatly trimmed hair, giving it a comic ruffle. "And I know that Arnie and Beth are probably not home. They were gadget-nuts as well as gun-nuts. He was always gabbing on his cell phone when he went by in that big Dodge Ram Detroit phallus of his."

"See? There you go."

Tom sighed. "All right. Depending on how things look in the morning. Okay?"

"Okay." Clay picked up his sandwich again. He felt a little more like eating now.

"Where did they go?" Tom asked. "The ones you call the phone-crazies. Where did they go?"

"I don't know."

"I'll tell you what I think," Tom said. "I think they crawled into the houses and the buildings around sundown and died."

Clay looked at him doubtfully.

"Look at it reasonably and you'll see I'm right," Tom said. "This was almost certainly some sort of terrorist act, would you agree?"

"That seems the most likely explanation, although I'll be damned if I know how any signal, no matter how subversive, could have been programmed to do what this one did."

"Are you a scientist?"

"You know I'm not. I'm an artist."

"So when the government tells you they can guide computerized smart-bombs through bunker doors in the floor of the desert from aircraft carriers that are maybe two thousand miles away, all you can do is look at the photos and accept that the technology exists."

"Would Tom Clancy lie to me?" Clay asked, unsmiling.

"And if that technology exists, why not accept this one, at least on a provisional basis?"

"Okay, spell it out. Small words, please."

"At about three o'clock this afternoon, a terrorist organization, maybe even a tinpot government, generated some sort of signal or pulse. For now we have to assume that this signal was carried by every cell phone operating in the entire world. We'll hope that wasn't the case, but for now I think we have to assume the worst."

"Is it over?"

"I don't know," Tom said. "Do you want to pick up a cell phone and find out?"

"Touchy," Clay said. "That's how my little boy says touchй." And please,God, how he's still saying it.

"But if this group could transmit a signal that would send everyone hearing it insane," Tom said, "isn't it possible that the signal could also contain a directive for those receiving it to kill themselves five hours later? Or perhaps to simply go to sleep and stop breathing?"

"I would say that's impossible."

"I would have said a madman coming at me with a knife across from the Four Seasons Hotel was impossible," Tom said. "Or Boston burning flat while the city's entire population—that part of it lucky enough not to have cell phones, that is—left by the Mystic and the Zakim."

He leaned forward, looking at Clay intently. He wants to believe this, Clay thought. Don't waste a lot of time trying to talk him out of it, because he really, really wants to.

"In a way, this is no different from the bioterrorism the government was so afraid of after nine-eleven," he said. "By using cell phones, which have become the dominant form of communication in our daily lives, you simultaneously turn the populace into your own conscript army—an army that's literally afraid of nothing, because it's insane—and you break down the infrastructure. Where's the National Guard tonight?"

"Iraq?" Clay ventured. "Louisiana?"

It wasn't much of a joke and Tom didn't smile. "It's nowhere. How do you use a homeland force that now depends almost entirely on the cellular network to even mobilize? As for airplanes, the last one I've seen flying was the little one that crashed on the corner of Charles and Beacon." He paused, then went on, looking straight across the table into Clay's eyes. "All this they did . . . whoever they is. They looked at us from wherever it is they live and worship their gods, and what did they see?"

Clay shook his head, fascinated by Tom's eyes, shining behind his spectacles. They were almost the eyes of a visionary.

"They saw we had built the Tower of Babel all over again . . . and on nothing but electronic cobwebs. And in a space of seconds, they brushed those cobwebs aside and our Tower fell. All this they did, and we three are like bugs that happened, by dumb dim luck alone, to have avoided the fall of a giant's foot. All this they did, and you think they could not have encoded a signal telling the affected ones to simply fall asleep and stop breathing five hours later? What's that trick, compared to the first one? Not much, I'd say."

Clay said, "I'd say it's time we got some sleep."

For a moment Tom remained as he was, hunched across the table a little, looking at Clay as if unable to understand what Clay had said. Then he laughed. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, you've got a point. I get wound up. Sorry."

"Not at all," Clay said. "I hope you're right about the crazies being dead." He paused, then said: "I mean . . . unless my boy . . . Johnny-Gee . . ." He couldn't finish. Partly or maybe mostly because if Johnny had tried to use his phone this afternoon and had gotten the same call as Pixie Light and Power Suit Woman, Clay wasn't sure he wanted his son to still be alive.

Tom reached across the table to him and Clay took the other man's delicate, long-fingered hand in both of his. He saw this happening as if he were outside his body, and when he spoke, he didn't seem to be the one speaking, although he could feel his mouth moving and the tears that had begun to fall from his eyes.

"I'm so scared for him," his mouth was saying. "I'm scared for both of them, but mostly for my kid."

"It'll be all right," Tom said, and Clay knew he meant well, but the words struck terror into his heart just the same, because it was just one of those things you said when there was really nothing else. Like You'll get over it or He's in a better place.

Alice's shrieks woke clay from a confused but not unpleasant dream of being in the Bingo Tent at the Akron State Fair. In the dream he was six again—maybe even younger but surely no older—and crouched beneath the long table where his mother was seated, looking at a forest of lady-legs and smelling sweet sawdust while the caller intoned, "B-12, players, B-12! It's the sunshine vitamin!"

There was one moment when his subconscious mind tried to integrate the girl's cries into the dream by insisting he was hearing the Saturday noon whistle, but only a moment. Clay had let himself go to sleep on Tom's porch after an hour of watching because he was convinced that nothing was going to happen out there, at least not tonight. But he must have been equally convinced that Alice wouldn't sleep through, because there was no real confusion once his mind identified her shrieks for what they were, no groping for where he was or what was going on. At one moment he was a small boy crouching under a bingo table in Ohio; at the next he was rolling off the comfortably long couch on Tom McCourt's enclosed front porch with the comforter still wrapped around his lower legs. And somewhere in the house, Alice Maxwell, howling in a register almost high enough to burst crystal, articulated all the horror of the day just past, insisting with one scream after another that such things surely could not have happened and must be denied.

Clay tried to rid his lower legs of the comforter and at first it wouldn't let go. He found himself hopping toward the inside door and pulling at it in a kind of panic while he looked out at Salem Street, sure that lights would start going on up and down the block even though he knew the power was out, sure that someone—maybe the gun-owning, gadget-loving Mr. Nickerson from up the street—would come out on his lawn and yell for someone to for chrissake shut that kid up. Don't make me come down there! Arnie Nickerson would yell. Don't make me come down there and shoot her!

Or her screams would draw the phone-crazies like moths to a bug light. Tom might think they were dead, but Clay believed it no more than he believed in Santa's workshop at the North Pole.

But Salem Street—their block of it, anyway, just west of the town center and below the part of Maiden Tom had called Granada Highlands– remained dark and silent and without movement. Even the glow of the fire from Revere seemed to have diminished.

Clay finally rid himself of the comforter and went inside and stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up into the blackness. Now he could hear Tom's voice—not the words, but the tone, low and calm and soothing. The girl's chilling shrieks began to be broken up by gasps for breath, then by sobs and inarticulate cries that became words. Clay caught one of them, nightmare. Tom's voice went on and on, telling lies in a reassuring drone: everything was all right, she would see, things would look better in the morning. Clay could picture them sitting side by side on the guestroom bed, each dressed in a pair of pajamas with TM monograms on the breast pockets. He could have drawn them like that. The idea made him smile.

When he was convinced she wasn't going to resume screaming, he went back to the porch, which was a bit chilly but not uncomfortable once he was wrapped up snugly in the comforter. He sat on the couch, surveying what he could see of the street. To the left, east of Tom's house, was a business district. He thought he could see the traffic light marking the entrance into the town square. The other way—which was the way they'd come—more houses. All of them still in this deep trench of night.

"Where are you?" he murmured. "Some of you headed north or west, and still in your right minds. But where did the rest of you go?"

No answer from the street. Hell, maybe Tom was right—the cell phones had sent them a message to go crazy at three and drop dead at eight. It seemed too good to be true, but he remembered feeling the same way about recordable CDs.

Silence from the street in front of him; silence from the house behind him. After a while, Clay leaned back on the couch and let his eyes close. He thought he might doze, but doubted he would actually go to sleep again. Eventually, however, he did, and this time there were no dreams. Once, shortly before first light, a mongrel dog came up Tom McCourt's front walk, looked in at him as he lay snoring in his cocoon of comforter, and then moved on. It was in no hurry; pickings were rich in Malden that morning and would be for some time to come.

"Clay. Wake up."

A hand, shaking him. Clay opened his eyes and saw Tom, dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a gray work-shirt, bending over him. The front porch was lit by strong pale light. Clay glanced at his wristwatch as he swung his feet off the couch and saw it was twenty past six.

"You need to see this," Tom said. He looked pale, anxious, and grizzled on both sides of his mustache. The tail of his shirt was untucked on one side and his hair was still standing up in back.

Clay looked at Salem Street, saw a dog with something in its mouth trotting past a couple of dead cars half a block west, saw nothing else moving. He could smell a faint smoky funk in the air and supposed it was either Boston or Revere. Maybe both, but at least the wind had died. He turned his gaze to Tom.

"Not out here," Tom said. He kept his voice low. "In the backyard. I saw when I went in the kitchen to make coffee before I remembered coffee's out, at least for the time being. Maybe it's nothing, but . . . man, I don't like this."

"Is Alice still sleeping?" Clay was groping under the comforter for his socks.

"Yes, and that's good. Never mind your socks and shoes, this ain't dinner at the Ritz. Come on."

He followed Tom, who was wearing a pair of comfortable-looking scuffs, down the hall to the kitchen. A half-finished glass of iced tea was standing on the counter.

Tom said, "I can't get started without some caffeine in the morning, you know? So I poured myself a glass of that stuff—help yourself, by the way, it's still nice and cold—and I pushed back the curtain over the sink to take a look out at my garden. No reason, just wanted to touch base with the outside world. And I saw . . . but look for yourself."

Clay peered out through the window over the sink. There was a neat little brick patio behind the house with a gas grill on it. Beyond the patio was Tom's yard, half-grass and half-garden. At the back was a high board fence with a gate in it. The gate was open. The bolt holding it closed must have been shot across because it now hung askew, looking to Clay like a broken wrist. It occurred to him that Tom could have made coffee on the gas grill, if not for the man sitting in his garden beside what had to be an ornamental wheelbarrow, eating the soft inside of a split pumpkin and spitting out the seeds. He was wearing a mechanic's coverall and a greasy cap with a faded letter B on it. written in faded red script on the left breast of his coverall was George.clay could hear the soft smooching sounds his face made every time he dove into the pumpkin.

"Fuck," Clay said in a low voice. "It's one of them."

"Yes. And where there's one there'll be more."

"Did he break the gate to get in?"

"Of course he did," Tom said. "I didn't see him do it, but it was locked when I left yesterday, you can depend on that. I don't have the world's best relationship with Scottoni, the guy who lives on the other side. He has no use for 'fellas like me,' as he's told me on several occasions." He paused, then went on in a lower voice. He had been speaking quietly to begin with, and now Clay had to lean toward him to hear him. "You know what's crazy? I know that guy. He works at Sonny's Texaco, down in the Center. It's the only gas station in town that still does repairs. Or did. He replaced a radiator hose for me once. Told me about how he and his brother made a trip to Yankee Stadium last year, saw Curt Schilling beat the Big Unit. Seemed like a nice enough guy. Now look at him! Sitting in my garden eating a raw pumpkin!"

"What's going on, you guys?" Alice asked from behind them.

Tom turned around, looking dismayed. "You don't want to see this," he said.

"That won't work," Clay said. "She's got to see it."

He smiled at Alice, and it wasn't that hard to smile. There was no monogram on the pocket of the pajamas Tom had loaned her, but they were blue, just as he had imagined, and she looked most dreadfully cute in them, with her feet bare and the pants legs rolled up to her shins and her hair tousled with sleep. In spite of her nightmares, she looked better rested than Tom. Clay was willing to bet she looked better rested than he did, too.

"It's not a car wreck, or anything," he said. "Just a guy eating a pumpkin in Tom's backyard."

She stood between them, putting her hands on the lip of the sink and rising up on the balls of her feet to look out. Her arm brushed Clay's, and he could feel the sleep-warmth still radiating from her skin. She looked for a long time, then turned to Tom.

"You said they all killed themselves," she said, and Clay couldn't tell if she was accusing or mock scolding. She probably doesn't know herself, he thought.

"I didn't say for sure," Tom replied, sounding lame.

"You sounded pretty sure to me." She looked out again. At least, Clay thought, she wasn't freaking out. In fact he thought she looked remarkably composed—if a little Chaplinesque—in her slightly outsize pajamas. "Uh . . . guys?"

"What?" they said together.

"Look at the little wheelbarrow he's sitting next to. Look at the wheel."

Clay had already seen what she was talking about—the litter of pumpkin-shell, pumpkin-meat, and pumpkin seeds.

"He smashed the pumpkin on the wheel to break it open and get to what's inside," Alice said. "I guess he's one of them—"

"Oh, he's one of them, all right," Clay said. George the mechanic was sitting in the garden with his legs apart, allowing Clay to see that since yesterday afternoon he'd forgotten all his mother had taught him about dropping trou before you did number one.

"—but he used that wheel as a tool. That doesn't seem so crazy to me."

"One of them was using a knife yesterday," Tom said. "And there was another guy jabbing a couple of car aerials."

"Yes, but . . . this seems different, somehow."

"More peaceful, you mean?" Tom glanced back at the intruder in his garden. "I wouldn't want to go out there and find out."

"No, not that. I don't mean peaceful. I don't know exactly how to explain it."

Clay thought he had an idea of what she was talking about. The aggression they had witnessed yesterday had been a blind, forward-rushing thing. An anything-that-comes-to-hand thing. Yes, there had been the businessman with the knife and the muscular young guy jabbing the car aerials in the air as he ran, but there had also been the man in the park who'd torn off the dog's ear with his teeth. Pixie Light had also used her teeth. This seemed a lot different, and not just because it was about eating instead of killing. But like Alice, Clay couldn't put his finger on just how it was different.

"Oh God, two more," Alice said.

Through the open back gate came a woman of about forty in a dirty gray pants suit and an elderly man dressed in jogging shorts and a T-shirt with gray power printed across the front. The woman in the pants suit had been wearing a green blouse that now hung in tatters, revealing the cups of a pale green bra beneath. The elderly man was limping badly, throwing his elbows out in a kind of buck-and-wing with each step to keep his balance. His scrawny left leg was caked with dried blood, and that foot was missing its running shoe. The remains of an athletic sock, grimed with dirt and blood, flapped from his left ankle. The elderly man's longish white hair hung around his vacant face in a kind of cowl. The woman in the pants suit was making a repetitive noise that sounded like "Goom! Goom!" as she surveyed the yard and the garden. She looked at George the Pumpkin Eater as though he were of no account at all, then strode past him toward the remaining cucumbers. Here she knelt, snatched one from its vine, and began to munch. The old man in the gray power shirt marched to the edge of the garden and then only stood there awhile like a robot that has finally run out of juice. He was wearing tiny gold glasses—reading glasses, Clay thought—that gleamed in the early light. He looked to Clay like someone who had once been very smart and was now very stupid.

The three people in the kitchen crowded together, staring out the window, hardly breathing.

The old man's gaze settled on George, who threw away a piece of pumpkin-shell, examined the rest, and then plowed his face back in and resumed his breakfast. Far from behaving aggressively toward the newcomers, he seemed not to notice them at all.

The old man limped forward, bent, and began to tug at a pumpkin the size of a soccer ball. He was less than three feet from George. Clay, remembering the pitched battle outside the T station, held his breath and waited.

He felt Alice grasp his arm. All the sleep-warmth had departed her hand. "What's he going to do?" she asked in a low voice.

Clay only shook his head.

The old man tried to bite the pumpkin and only bumped his nose. It should have been funny but wasn't. His glasses were knocked askew and he pushed them back into place. It was a gesture so normal that for a brief moment Clay felt all but positive that he was the one who was crazy.

"Goom!" cried the woman in the tattered blouse, and threw away her half-eaten cucumber. She had spied a few late tomatoes and crawled toward them with her hair hanging in her face. The seat of her pants was badly soiled.

The old man had spied the ornamental wheelbarrow. He took his pumpkin to it, then seemed to register George, sitting there beside it. He looked at him, head cocked. George gestured with one orange-coated hand at the wheelbarrow, a gesture Clay had seen a thousand times.

"Be my guest," Tom murmured. "I'll be damned."

The old man fell on his knees in the garden, a movement that obviously caused him considerable pain. He grimaced, raised his lined face to the brightening sky, and uttered a chuffing grunt. Then he lifted the pumpkin over the wheel. He studied the line of descent for several moments, elderly biceps trembling, and brought the pumpkin down, smashing it open. It fell in two meaty halves. What happened next happened fast. George dropped his own mostly eaten pumpkin in his lap, rocked forward, grabbed the old man's head in his big, orange-stained hands, and twisted it. They heard the crack of the old man's breaking neck even through the glass. His long white hair flew. His small spectacles disappeared into what Clay thought were beets. His body spasmed once, then went limp. George dropped it. Alice began to scream and Tom covered her mouth with his hand. Her eyes, bulging with terror, peered over the top of it. Outside in the garden, George picked up a fresh chunk of pumpkin and began calmly to eat.

The woman in the shredded blouse looked around for a moment, casually, then plucked another tomato and bit into it. Red juice ran from her chin and trickled down the dirty line of her throat. She and George sat there in Tom McCourt's backyard garden, eating vegetables, and for some reason the name of one of his favorite paintings popped into Clay's mind: The Peaceable Kingdom.

He didn't realize he'd spoken aloud until Tom looked at him bleakly and said: "Not anymore."

The three of them were still standing there at the kitchen window five minutes later when an alarm began to bray at some distance. It sounded tired and hoarse, as though it would run down soon.

"Any idea what that might be?" Clay asked. In the garden, George had abandoned the pumpkins and dug up a large potato. This had brought him closer to the woman, but he showed no interest in her. At least not yet.

"My best guess would be that the generator at the Safeway in the Center just gave up," Tom said. "There's probably a battery-powered alarm in case that happens, because of all the perishables. But that's only a guess. For all I know, it's the First Malden Bank and T—"

"Look!" Alice said.

The woman stopped in the act of plucking another tomato, got up, and walked toward the east side of Tom's house. George got to his feet as she passed, and Clay was sure he meant to kill her as he had the old man. He winced in anticipation and saw Tom reaching for Alice, to turn her away. But George only followed the woman, disappearing around the corner of the house behind her.

Alice turned and hurried toward the kitchen door.

"Don't let them see you!" Tom called in a low, urgent voice, and went after her.

"Don't worry," she said.

Clay followed, worrying for all of them.

They reached the dining room door in time to watch the woman in her filthy pants suit and George in his even filthier coverall pass beyond the dining room window, their bodies broken into segments by Venetian blinds which had been dropped but not closed. Neither of them glanced toward the house, and now George was so close behind the woman that he could have bitten the nape of her neck. Alice, followed by Tom and Clay, moved up the hall to Tom's little office. Here the blinds were closed, but Clay saw the projected shadows of the two outside pass swiftly across them. Alice went on up the hall, toward where the door to the enclosed porch stood open. The comforter lay half on and half off the couch, as Clay had left it. The porch was flooded with brilliant morning sunshine. It seemed to burn on the boards.

"Alice, be careful!" Clay said. "Be—"

But she had stopped. She was just looking. Then Tom was standing beside her, almost exactly the same height. Seen that way, they could have been brother and sister. Neither of them took any pains at all to avoid being seen.

"Holy fucking shit," Tom said. He sounded as if the wind had been knocked out of him. Beside him, Alice began to cry. It was the sort of out-of-breath weeping a tired child might make. One who is becoming used to punishment.

Clay caught up. The woman in the pants suit was cutting across Tom's lawn. George was still behind her, matching her stride for stride. They were almost in lockstep. That broke a little bit at the curb when George swung out to her left, becoming her wingman instead of her back door.

Salem Street was full of crazy people.

Clay's first assessment was that there might be a thousand or more. Then the observer part of him took over—the coldhearted artist's eye– and he realized that was a wild overestimate, prompted by surprise at seeing anyone at all on what he had expected would be an empty street, and shock at realizing they were all them. There was no mistaking the vacant faces, the eyes that seemed to look beyond everything, the dirty, bloody, disheveled clothing (in several cases no clothing at all), the occasional cawing cry or jerky gesture. There was the man dressed only in tighty-whity undershorts and a polo shirt who seemed to be saluting repeatedly; the heavyset woman whose lower lip was split and hung in two beefy flaps, revealing all of her lower teeth; the tall teenage boy in blue jeans shorts who walked up the center of Salem Street carrying what looked like a blood-caked tire-iron in one hand; an Indian or Pakistani gentleman who passed Tom's house wriggling his jaw from side to side and simultaneously chattering his teeth; a boy—dear God, a boy Johnny's age—who walked with absolutely no sign of pain although one arm was flapping below the knob of his dislocated shoulder; a pretty young woman in a short skirt and a shell top who appeared to be eating from the red stomach of a crow. Some moaned, some made vocal noises that might once have been words, and all were moving east. Clay had no idea if they were being drawn by the braying alarm or the smell of food, but they were all walking in the direction of Malden Center.

"Christ, it's zombie heaven," Tom said.

Clay didn't bother answering. The people out there weren't exactly zombies, but Tom was pretty close, just the same. If any of them looks overhere, sees us and decides to come after us, we're done. We won't have a hope in hell. Not even if we barricade ourselves in the cellar. And getting those guns across the street? You can forget that.

The idea that his wife and son might be—very likely were —having to deal with creatures such as these filled him with dread. But this was no comic book and he was no hero: he was helpless. The three of them might be safe in the house, but as far as the immediate future was concerned, it didn't look like he and Tom and Alice were going anywhere.

"They're like birds," Alice said. She wiped the tears from her cheeks with the heels of her hands. "A flock of birds."

Clay saw what she meant at once and gave her an impulsive hug. She had put her finger on something that had first struck him as he'd watched George the mechanic follow the woman instead of killing her, as he had the old man. The two of them clearly vacant in the upper story, yet seeming to go out front by some unspoken agreement.

"I don't get it," Tom said.

"You must have missed March of the Penguins," Alice said.

"Actually, I did," Tom said. "When I want to see someone waddle in a tuxedo, I go to a French restaurant."

"But haven't you ever noticed the way birds are, especially in the spring and fall?" Clay asked. "You must have. They'll all light in the same tree or along the same telephone wire—"

"Sometimes so many they make it sag," Alice said. "Then they all fly at once. My dad says they must have a group leader, but Mr. Sullivan in Earth Science—back in middle school, this was—told us it was a flock-mind thing, like ants all going out from a hill or bees from a hive."

"The flock swoops right or left, all at the same time, and the individual birds never hit each other," Clay said. "Sometimes the sky's black with them and the noise is enough to drive you nuts." He paused. "At least out in the country, where I live." He paused again. "Tom, do you . . . do you recognize any of those people?"

"A few. That's Mr. Potowami, from the bakery," he said, pointing to the Indian man who was wriggling his jaw and chattering his teeth. "That pretty young woman . . . I believe she works in the bank. And do you remember me mentioning Scottoni, the man who lives on the other side of the block from me?"

Clay nodded.

Tom, now very pale, pointed to a visibly pregnant woman dressed only in a food-stained smock that came down to her upper thighs. Blond hair hung against her pimply cheeks, and a stud gleamed in her nose. "That's his daughter-in-law," he said. "Judy. She has gone out of her way to be kind to me." He added in a dry, matter-of-fact tone: "This breaks my heart."

From the direction of the town center there came a loud gunshot. Alice cried out, but this time Tom didn't have to cover her mouth; she did it herself. None of the people in the street glanced over, in any case. Nor did the report—Clay thought it had been a shotgun—seem to disturb them. They just kept walking, no faster and no slower. Clay waited for another shot. Instead there was a scream, very brief, there and gone, as if cut off.

The three standing in the shadows just beyond the porch went on watching, not talking. All of the people who passed were going east, and although they did not precisely walk in formation, there was an unmistakable order about them. For Clay it was best expressed not in his view of the phone-crazies themselves, who often limped and sometimes shambled, who gibbered and made odd gestures, but in the silent, ordered passage of their shadows on the pavement. They made him think of World War II newsreel footage he'd seen, where wave after wave of bombers flew across the sky. He counted two hundred and fifty before giving up. Men, women, teenagers. Quite a few children Johnny's age, too. Far more children than old people, although he saw only a few kids younger than ten. He didn't like to think of what must have happened to the little guys and gals who'd had no one to take care of them when the Pulse occurred.

Or the little guys and gals who'd been in the care of people with cell phones.

As for the vacant-eyed children he could see, Clay wondered how many now passing before him had pestered their parents for cell phones with special ring-tones last year, as Johnny had.

"One mind," Tom said presently. "Do you really believe that?"

"I sort of do," Alice said. "Because . . . like . . . what mind do they have on their own?"

"She's right," Clay said.

The migration (once you'd seen it that way it was hard to think of it as anything else) thinned but didn't stop, even after half an hour; three men would pass walking abreast—one in a bowling shirt, one in the remains of a suit, one with his lower face mostly obliterated in a cake of dried gore—and then two men and a woman walking in a half-assed conga line, then a middle-aged woman who looked like a librarian (if you ignored one bare breast wagging in the wind, that was) walking in tandem with a half-grown, gawky girl who might have been a library aide. There would be a pause and then a dozen more would come, seeming almost to form a kind of hollow square, like a fighting unit from the Napoleonic Wars. And in the distance Clay began to hear warlike sounds—a sporadic rattle of rifle-or pistol-fire and once (and close, maybe from neighboring Medford or right here in Maiden) the long, ripping roar of a large-caliber automatic weapon. Also, more screams. Most were distant, but Clay was pretty sure that was what they were.

There were still other sane people around these parts, plenty of them, and some had managed to get their hands on guns. Those people were very likely having themselves a phoner-shoot. Others, however, had not been lucky enough to have been indoors when the sun came up and the crazies came out. He thought of George the mechanic gripping the old man's head in his orange hands, the twist, the snap, the little reading glasses flying into the beets where they would stay. And stay. And stay.

"I think I want to go into the living room and sit down," Alice said. "I don't want to look at them anymore. Listen, either. It makes me sick."

"Sure," Clay said. "Tom, why don't you—?"

"No," Tom said. "You go. I'll stay here and watch for a while. I think one of us ought to watch, don't you?"

Clay nodded. He did.

"Then, in an hour or so, you can spell me. Turn and turn about."

"Okay. Done."

As they started back down the hall, Clay with his arm around Alice's shoulders, Tom said: "One thing."

They looked back at him.

"I think we all ought to try and get as much rest as possible today. If we're still planning on going north, that is."

Clay looked at him closely to make sure Tom was still in his right mind. He appeared to be, but—

"Have you been seeing what's going on out there?" he asked. "Hearing the shooting? The . . ." He didn't want to say the screams with Alice there, although God knew it was a little late to be trying to protect her remaining sensibilities. ". . . the yelling?"

"Of course," Tom said. "But the nutters went inside last night, didn't they?"

For a moment neither Clay nor Alice moved. Then Alice began to pat her hands together in soft, almost silent applause. And Clay began to smile. The smile felt stiff and unfamiliar on his face, and the hope that went with it was almost painful.

"Tom, you might just be a genius," he said.

Tom did not return the smile. "Don't count on it," he said. "I never broke a thousand on the SATs."

Clearly feeling better—and that had to be a good thing, clay reckoned—Alice went upstairs to poke around in Tom's clothes for daywear. Clay sat on the couch, thinking about Sharon and Johnny, trying to decide what they would have done and where they would have gone, always supposing they'd been fortunate enough to get together. He fell into a doze and saw them clearly at Kent Pond Elementary, Sharon's school. They were barricaded in the gym with two or three dozen others, eating sandwiches from the cafeteria and drinking those little cartons of milk. They—

Alice roused him, calling from upstairs. He looked at his wristwatch and saw he'd been sleeping on the couch for almost twenty minutes. He'd drooled on his chin.

"Alice?" He went to the foot of the stairs. "Everything okay?" Tom, he saw, was also looking.

"Yes, but can you come for a second?"

"Sure." He looked at Tom, shrugged, then went upstairs.

Alice was in a guest bedroom that looked like it hadn't seen many guests, although the two pillows suggested that Tom had spent most of the night here with her, and the rumpled look of the bedclothes further suggested very bad rest. She had found a pair of khakis that almost fit and a sweatshirt with canobie lake park written across the front below the outline of a roller coaster. On the floor was the sort of large portable sound system that Clay and his friends had once lusted after the way Johnny-Gee had lusted after that red cell phone. Clay and his friends had called such systems ghetto blasters or boomboxes.

"It was in the closet and the batteries look fresh," she said. "I thought of turning it on and looking for a radio station, but then I was afraid."

He looked at the ghetto blaster sitting there on the guest room's nice hardwood floor, and he was afraid, too. It could have been a loaded gun. But he felt an urge to reach out and turn the selector-knob, now pointed at CD, to FM. He imagined Alice had felt the same urge, and that was why she'd called him. The urge to touch a loaded gun would have been no different.

"My sister gave me that two birthdays ago," Tom said from the doorway, and they both jumped. "I loaded it up with batteries last July and took it to the beach. When I was a kid we all used to go to the beach and listen to our radios, although I never had one that big."

"Me either," Clay said. "But I wanted one."

"I took it up to Hampton Beach in New Hampshire with a bunch of Van Halen and Madonna CDs, but it wasn't the same. Not even close. I haven't used it since. I imagine all the stations are off the air, don't you?"

"I bet some of them are still on," Alice said. She was biting at her lower lip. Clay thought if she didn't stop soon, it would begin to bleed. "The ones my friends call the robo-eighties stations. They have friendly names like BOB and FRANK, but they all come from some giant radio-computer in Colorado and then get beamed down by satellite. At least that's what my friends say. And . . ." She licked at the place she had been biting. It was shiny with blood just under the surface. "And that's the same way cell phone signals get routed, isn't it? By satellite."

"I don't know," Tom said. "I guess the long-distance ones might . . . and the transatlantic ones for sure . . . and I suppose the right genius could hack the wrong satellite signal into all those microwave towers you see . . . the ones that boost the signals along . . ."

Clay knew the towers he was talking about, steel skeletons with dishes stuck all over them like gray suckers. They had popped up everywhere over the last ten years.

Tom said, "If we could pick up a local station, we might be able to get news. Some idea about what to do, where to go—"

"Yes, but what if it's on the radio, too?" Alice said. "That's what I'm saying. What if you tune into whatever my"—She licked her lips again, then resumed nibbling.—"my mother heard? And my dad? Him, too, oh yes, he had a brand-new cell phone, all the bells and whistles—video, autodial, Internet connection—he loved that puppy!" She gave a laugh that was both hysterical and rueful, a dizzy combination. "What if you tune into whatever they heard? My folks and them out there? Do you want to risk that?"

At first Tom said nothing. Then he said—cautiously, as if testing the idea—"One of us could risk it. The other two could leave and wait until—"

"No," Clay said.

"Please no," Alice said. She was almost crying again. "I want you both. I need you both."

They stood around the radio, looking at it. Clay found himself thinking of science fiction novels he'd read as a teenager (sometimes at the beach, listening to Nirvana instead of Van Halen on the radio). In more than a few of them, the world ended. And then the heroes built it back up again. Not without struggles and setbacks, but yes, they used the tools and the technology and they built it back up again. He couldn't remember anywhere the heroes just stood around in a bedroom looking at a radio. Sooner or later someone is going to pick up a tool or turn on a radio, he thought, because someone will have to.

Yes. But not this morning.

Feeling like a traitor to something larger than he could understand, he picked up Tom's ghetto blaster, put it back in the closet, and closed the door.

An hour or so later, the orderly migration to the east began to collapse. Clay was on watch. Alice was in the kitchen, eating one of the sandwiches they'd brought out of Boston—she said they had to finish the sandwiches before they ate any of the canned stuff in Tom's closet-sized pantry, because none of them knew when they'd get fresh meat again—and Tom was sleeping in the living room, on the couch. Clay could hear him snoring contentedly away.

He noticed a few people wandering against the general easterly flow, then sensed a kind of slackening in the order out there in Salem Street, something so subtle that his brain registered what his eye saw only as an intuition. At first he dismissed it as a falsity caused by the few wanderers—even more deranged than the rest—who were heading west instead of east, and then he looked down at the shadows. The neat herringbone patterns he had observed earlier had begun to distort. And soon they weren't patterns at all.

More people were now heading west, and some of them were gnawing on food that had been liberated from a grocery store, probably the Safeway Tom had mentioned. Mr. Scottoni's daughter-in-law, Judy, was carrying a gigantic tub of melting chocolate ice cream, which had covered the front of her smock and coated her from knees to nose-stud; her chocolate-lathered face made her look like Mrs. Bones in a minstrel show. And any vegetarian beliefs Mr. Potowami might once have held were gone now; he strolled along noshing from a great double handful of raw hamburger meat. A fat man in a dirty suit had what looked like a partially defrosted leg of lamb, and when Judy Scottoni tried to take it from him, the fat man hit her a vicious clip in the center of the forehead with it. She fell as silently as a poleaxed steer, pregnant belly first, on top of her mostly crushed tub of Breyers chocolate.

There was a great deal of milling now, and a good deal of violence to go with it, but no return to the all-out viciousness of the afternoon before. Not here, in any case. In Malden Center, the alarm, tired-sounding to begin with, had long since run down. In the distance, gunfire continued to pop sporadically, but there had been nothing close since that single shotgun blast from the center of town. Clay watched to see if any of the crazies would try breaking into any of the houses, but although they occasionally walked on the lawns, they showed no signs of graduating from trespass to burglary. What they did mostly was wander around, occasionally trying to grab one another's food, sometimes fighting or biting one another. Three or four—the Scottoni woman, for one—lay in the street, either dead or unconscious. Most of those who had passed Tom's house earlier were still in the town square, Clay guessed, having a street dance or maybe the First Annual Malden Raw Meat Festival, and thank God for that. It was strange, though, how that sense of purpose—that sense of flocking —had seemed to loosen and fall apart.

After noon, when he began to feel seriously sleepy, he went into the kitchen and found Alice dozing at the kitchen table with her head in her arms. The little sneaker, the one she had called a Baby Nike, was loosely clasped in one hand. When he woke her, she looked at him groggily and clasped it to the breast of her sweatshirt, as if afraid he would try to take it away.

He asked if she could watch from the end of the hallway for a while without falling asleep again or being seen. She said she could. Clay took her at her word and carried a chair for her. She paused for a moment at the door to the living room. "Check it out," she said.

He looked in over her shoulder and saw the cat, Rafe, was sleeping on Tom's belly. He grunted in amusement.

She sat where he put the chair, far enough inside the door so someone who glanced at the house wouldn't see her. After a single look she said, "They're not a flock anymore. What happened?"

"I don't know."

"What time is it?"

He glanced at his watch. "Twenty past twelve."

"What time did we notice they were flocking?"

"I don't know, Alice." He was trying to be patient with her but he could hardly keep his eyes open. "Six-thirty? Seven? I don't know. Does it matter?"

"If we could chart them, it might matter a lot, don't you think?"

He told her that he'd think about that when he'd had some sleep. "Couple of hours, then wake me or Tom," he said. "Sooner, if something goes wrong."

"It couldn't go much wronger," she said softly. "Go on upstairs. You look really wasted."

He went upstairs to the guest bedroom, slipped off his shoes, and lay down. He thought for a moment about what she'd said: If we could chart them. She might have something there. Odds against, but maybe—

It was a pleasant room, very pleasant, full of sun. You lay in a room like this and it was easy to forget there was a radio in the closet you didn't dare turn on. Not so easy to forget your wife, estranged but still loved, might be dead and your son—not just loved but adored—might be crazy. Still, the body had its imperatives, didn't it? And if there had ever been a room for an afternoon nap, this was the one. The panic-rat twitched but didn't bite, and Clay was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.

This time alice was the one who shook him awake. the little purple sneaker swung back and forth as she did it. She had tied it around her left wrist, turning it into a rather creepy talisman. The light in the room had changed. It was going the other way, and diminished. He had turned on his side and he had to urinate, a reliable sign that he had slept for some time. He sat up in a hurry and was surprised—almost appalled—to see it was quarter of six. He had slept for over five hours. But of course last night hadn't been his first night of broken rest; he'd slept poorly the night before, as well. Nerves, on account of his presentation to the Dark Horse comics people.

"Is everything all right?" he asked, taking her by the wrist. "Why'd you let me sleep so long?"

"Because you needed it," she said. "Tom slept until two and I slept until four. We've been watching together since then. Come down and look. It's pretty amazing."

"Are they flocking again?"

She nodded. "But going the other way this time. And that's not all. Come and see."

He emptied his bladder and hurried downstairs. Tom and Alice were standing in the doorway to the porch with their arms around each other's waist. There was no question of being seen, now; the sky had clouded over and Tom's porch was already thick with shadows. Only a few people were left on Salem Street, anyway. All of them were moving west, not quite running but going at a steady clip. A group of four went past in the street itself, marching over a sprawl of bodies and a litter of discarded food, which included the leg of lamb, now gnawed down to the bone, a great many torn-open cellophane bags and cardboard boxes, and a scattering of discarded fruits and vegetables. Behind them came a group of six, the ones on the end using the sidewalks. They didn't look at each other but were still so perfectly together that when they passed Tom's house they seemed for an instant to be only a single man, and Clay realized even their arms were swinging in unison. After them came a youth of maybe fourteen, limping along, bawling inarticulate cow-sounds, and trying to keep up.

"They left the dead and the totally unconscious ones," Tom said, "but they actually helped a couple who were stirring."

Clay looked for the pregnant woman and didn't see her. "Mrs. Scottoni?"

"She was one of the ones they helped," Tom said.

"So they're acting like people again."

"Don't get that idea," Alice said. "One of the men they tried to help couldn't walk, and after he fell down a couple of times, one of the guys who'd been lifting him got tired of being a Boy Scout and just—"

"Killed him," Tom said. "Not with his hands, either, like the guy in the garden. With his teeth. Tore out his throat."

"I saw what was going to happen and looked away," Alice said, "but I heard it. He . . . squealed."

"Easy," Clay said. He squeezed her arm gently. "Take it easy."

Now the street was almost entirely empty. Two more stragglers came along, and although they moved more or less side by side, both were limping so badly there was no sense of unison about them.

"Where are they going?" Clay asked.

"Alice thinks maybe inside," Tom said, and he sounded excited. "Before it gets dark. She could be right."

"Where? Where are they going in? Have you seen any of them going into houses along this block?"

"No." They said it together.

"They didn't all come back," Alice said. "No way did as many come back up Salem Street as went down this morning. So a lot are still in Malden Center, or beyond. They may have gravitated toward public buildings, like school gymnasiums . . ."

School gymnasiums. Clay didn't like the sound of that.

"Did you see that movie, Dawn of the Dead?" she asked.

"Yes," Clay said. "You're not going to tell me someone let you in to see it, are you?"

She looked at him as if he were nuts. Or old. "One of my friends had the DVD. We watched it at a sleepover back in eighth grade." Back whenthe Pony Express still rode and the plains were dark with buffalo, her tone said. "In that movie, all the dead people—well, not all, but a lot—went back to the mall when they woke up."

Tom McCourt goggled at her for a second, then burst out laughing. It wasn't a little laugh, either, but a long series of guffaws, laughter so hard he had to lean against the wall for support, and Clay thought it wise to shut the door between the hall and the porch. There was no telling how well the things straggling up the street might hear; all he could think of at the moment was that the hearing of the lunatic narrator in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" had been extremely keen.

"Well they did," Alice said, putting her hands on her hips. The baby sneaker flopped. "Straight to the mall." Tom laughed even harder. His knees buckled and he oozed slowly down to the hall floor, howling and flapping his hands against his shirt.

"They died . . . ," he gasped, ". . . and came back . . . to go to the mall. Jesus Christ, does Jerry F-Falwell. . ." He went off into another gale. Tears were now running down his cheeks in clear streams. He brought himself under control enough to finish, "Does Jerry Falwell know heaven's the Newcastle Mall?"

Clay also began to laugh. So did Alice, although Clay thought she was a little bit pissed off that her reference had been greeted not with interest or even mild good humor but outright howls. Still, when people started laughing, it was hard not to join in. Even when you were pissed.

They had almost stopped when Clay said, apropos of nothing, "If heaven ain't a lot like Dixie, I don't want to go."

That set them off again, all three. Alice was still laughing when she said, "If they're flocking, then roosting for the night in gyms and churches and malls, people could machine-gun them by the hundreds."

Clay stopped laughing first. Then Tom stopped. He looked at her, wiping moisture out of his neat little mustache.

Alice nodded. The laughter had brought high color to her cheeks, and she was still smiling. She had, at least for the moment, careened past pretty and into genuine beauty. "By the thousands, maybe, if they're all going to the same place."

"Jesus," Tom said. He took off his glasses and began to wipe them, too. "You don't fool around."

"It's survival," Alice said matter-of-factly. She looked down at the sneaker tied to her wrist, then up at the men. She nodded again. "We ought to chart them. Find out if they 're flocking and when they're flocking, If they're roosting and where they're roosting. Because if they can be charted—"

Clay had led them out of boston, but when the three of them left the house on Salem Street some twenty-four hours later, fifteen-year-old Alice Maxwell was unquestionably in charge. The more Clay thought about it, the less it surprised him.

Tom McCourt didn't lack for what his British cousins called bottle, but he was not and never would be a natural leader. Clay had some leadership qualities, but that evening Alice had an advantage beyond her intelligence and desire to survive: she had suffered her losses and begun to move on. In leaving the house on Salem Street, both men were dealing with new ones. Clay had begun to suffer a rather frightening depression that at first he thought was just the result of his decision—unavoidable, really—to leave his portfolio behind. As the night went on, however, he realized it was a profound dread of what he might find if and when he got to Kent Pond.

For Tom, it was simpler. He hated to leave Rafe.

"Prop the door open for him," Alice said—the new and harder Alice, who seemed more decisive by the minute. "He'll almost certainly be okay, Tom. He'll find plenty of forage. It'll be a long time before the cats starve or the phone-crazies work their way down the food-chain to cat-meat."

"He'll go feral," Tom said. He was sitting on the living room couch, looking stylish and miserable in a belted raincoat and trilby hat. Rafer was on his lap, purring and looking bored.

"Yeah, that's what they do," Clay said. "Think of all the dogs—the little ones and the oversized ones—that are just going to flat die."

"I've had him for a long time. Since he was a kitten, really." He looked up and Clay saw the man was on the verge of tears. "Also, I guess I see him as my luck. My mojo. He saved my life, remember."

"Now we're your mojo," Clay said. He didn't want to point out that he himself had almost certainly saved Tom's life once already, but it was true. "Right, Alice?"

"Yep," she said. Tom had found a poncho for her, and she wore a knapsack on her back, although there currently was nothing in it but batteries for the flashlights . . . and, Clay was quite sure, that creepy little sneaker, which was at least no longer tied to her wrist. Clay was also carrying batteries in his pack, along with the Coleman lantern. They had nothing else, at Alice's suggestion. She said there was no reason for them to carry what they could pick up along the way. "We're the Three Musketeers, Tom—all for one and one for all. Now let's go over to the Nickle-bys' house and see if we can get some muskets."

"Nickerson." He was still stroking the cat.

She was smart enough—and compassionate enough, maybe that, too—not to say something like Whatever, but Clay could see she was getting low in the patience department. He said, "Tom. Time to go."

"Yeah, I suppose." He started to put the cat aside, then picked it up and kissed it firmly between the ears. Rafe bore it with no more than a slight narrowing of the eyes. Tom put it down on the sofa and stood. "Double rations in the kitchen by the stove, kiddo," he said. "Plus a big bowl of milk, with the rest of the half 'n' half poured in for good measure. Back door's open. Try to remember where home is, and maybe . . . hey, maybe I'll see you."

The cat jumped down and walked out of the room toward the kitchen with its tail up. And, true to its kind, it never looked back.

Clay's portfolio, bent and with a horizontal wrinkle running both ways from the knife-slash in the middle, leaned against the living room wall. He glanced at it on the way by and resisted an urge to touch it. He thought briefly of the people inside he'd lived with so long, both in his little studio and in the much wider (or so he liked to flatter himself) reaches of his imagination: Wizard Flak, Sleepy Gene, Jumping Jack Flash, Poison Sally. And the Dark Wanderer, of course. Two days ago he'd thought that maybe they were going to be stars. Now they had a hole running through them and Tom McCourt's cat for company.

He thought of Sleepy Gene leaving town on Robbie the Robo-Cayuse, saying S-So l-long b-boys! Meh-Meh-Mebbe I'll b-be back this w-w-way again!

"So long, boys," he said out loud—a little self-conscious but not very. It was the end of the world, after all. As farewells went, it wasn't much, but it would have to do. . . and as Sleepy Gene might also have said, It sh-sh-sure beats a p-poke in the eye with a ruh-ruh-rusty b-brandin'-arn.

Clay followed Alice and Tom out onto the porch, into the sound of soft autumn rain.

Tom had his trilby, there was a hood on alice's poncho, and tom had found Clay a Red Sox cap that would keep his head dry for a while, at least, if the light rain didn't get heavier. And if it did . . . well, forage shouldn't be a problem, as Alice had pointed out. That would surely include foul-weather gear. From the slight elevation of the porch they could see roughly two blocks of Salem Street. It was impossible to be sure in the failing light, but it appeared completely deserted except for a few bodies and the food-litter the crazies had left behind.

Each of them was wearing a knife seated in scabbards Clay had made. If Tom was right about the Nickersons, they would soon be able to do better. Clay hoped so. He might be able to use the butcher knife from Soul Kitchen again, but he still wasn't sure he would be able to use it in cold blood.

Alice held a flashlight in her left hand. She looked to make sure Tom had one, too, and nodded. "Okay," she said. "You take us to the Nickerson house, right?"

"Right," Tom said.

"And if we see someone on our way there, we stop right away and put our lights on them." She looked at Tom, then Clay, with some anxiety. They had been over this before. Clay guessed she probably obsessed the same way before big tests . . . and of course this was a very big one.

"Right," Tom said. "We say, 'Our names are Tom, Clay, and Alice. We're normal. What are your names?' "

Clay said, "If they have flashlights like us, we can almost assume—"

"We can't assume anything," she said restlessly, querulously. "My father says assume makes an ass out of you and me. Get it, u and—"

"I get it," Clay said.

Alice brushed at her eyes, although whether to wipe away rain or tears

Clay wasn't sure. He wondered, briefly and painfully, if Johnny was somewhere crying for him, right now. Clay hoped he was. He hoped his son was still capable of tears. Of memory.

"If they can answer, if they can say their names, they're fine, and they're probably safe," Alice said. "Right?"

"Right," Clay said.

"Yeah," Tom agreed, a little absently. He was looking at the street where there were no people and no bobbing flashlight beams, near or far.

Someplace in the distance, gunshots popped. They sounded like fireworks. The air stank of burning and char and had all day. Clay thought they were smelling it more strongly now because it was wet. He wondered how long before the smell of decaying flesh turned the fug hanging over greater Boston into a reek. He supposed it depended on how warm the days ahead turned out to be.

"If we meet normal people and they ask us what we're doing or where we're going, remember the story," she said.

"We're looking for survivors," Tom said.

"That's right. Because they're our friends and neighbors. Any people we meet will just be passing through. They'll want to keep moving. Later on we'll probably want to hook up with other normal people, because there's safety in numbers, but right now—"

"Right now we'd like to get to those guns," Clay said. "If there are any guns to get. Come on, Alice, let's do this."

She looked worriedly at him. "What's wrong? What am I missing? You can tell me, I know I'm just a kid."

Patiently—as patiently as he could with nerves that felt like overtuned guitar-strings—Clay said, "There's nothing wrong with it, honey. I just want to get rolling. I don't think we're going to see anyone, anyway. I think it's too soon."

"I hope you're right," she said. "My hair's a mess and I've chipped a nail."

They looked at her silently for a moment, then laughed. After that it was better among them, and stayed better until the end.

"No," Alice said. She made a gagging sound. "No. No, I can't." A louder gagging sound. Then: "I'm going to throw up. I'm sorry."

She plunged out of the Coleman's glare and into the gloom of the Nickersons' living room, which adjoined the kitchen via a wide arch. Clay heard a soft thump as she went to her knees on the carpet, then more gagging. A pause, a gasp, and then she was vomiting. He was almost relieved.

"Oh Christ," Tom said. He pulled in a long, gasping breath and this time spoke in a wavering exhalation that was nearly a howl. "Oh Chriiiiiist."

"Tom," Clay said. He saw how the little man was swaying on his feet and understood he was on the verge of fainting. Why not? These bloody leavings had been his neighbors.

"Tom!" He stepped between Tom and the two bodies on the kitchen floor, between Tom and most of the splattered blood, which looked as black as India ink in the Coleman's unforgiving white glare. He tapped the side of Tom's face with his free hand. "Don't pass out!" And when he saw Tom steady on his feet, he dropped his voice a little. "Go on in the other room and take care of Alice. I'll take care of the kitchen."

"Why would you want to go in there?" Tom asked. "That's Beth Nickerson with her brains . . . her b-brains all over . . ." He swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat. "Most of her face is gone, but I recognize the blue jumper with the white snowflakes on it. And that's Heidi on the floor by the center island. Their daughter. I recognize her, even with . . ." He shook his head, as if to clear it, then repeated: "Why would you want to?"

"I'm pretty sure I see what we came for," Clay said. He was astounded by how calm he sounded.

"In the kitchen?”

Tom tried to look past him and Clay moved to block his view. "Trust me. You see to Alice. If she can, you two start looking around for more guns. Shout if you hit paydirt. And be careful, Mr. Nickerson may be here, too. I mean, we could assume he was at work when all this went down, but as Alice's dad says—"

"Assume makes an ass out of you and me," Tom said. He managed a sickly smile. "Gotcha." He started to turn away, then turned back. "I don't care where we go, Clay, but I don't want to stay here any longer than we have to. I didn't exactly love Arnie and Beth Nickerson, but they were my neighbors. And they treated me a hell of a lot better than that idiot Scottoni from around the block." "Understood."

Tom snapped on his flashlight and went into the Nickerson living room. Clay heard him murmuring to Alice, comforting her.

Steeling himself, Clay walked into the kitchen with the Coleman lantern held up, stepping around the puddles of blood on the hardwood floor. It had dried now, but he still didn't want to put his shoes in any more of it than he had to.

The girl lying on her back by the center island had been tall, but both her pigtails and the angular lines of her body suggested a child two or three years younger than Alice. Her head was cocked at a strenuous angle, almost a parody of interrogation, and her dead eyes bulged. Her hair had been broom straw-blond, but all of it on the left side of her head—the side that had taken the blow which had killed her—was now the same dark maroon as the stains on the floor.

Her mother reclined below the counter to the right of the stove, where the handsome cherrywood cabinets came together to form a corner. Her hands were ghost-white with flour and her bloody, bitten legs were indecorously splayed. Once, before starting work on a limited-run comic called Battle Hell, Clay had accessed a selection of fatal-gunshot photos on the Web, thinking there might be something he could use. There was not. Gunshot wounds spoke a terrible blank language of their own, and here it was again. Beth Nickerson was mostly spray and gristle from her left eye on up. Her right eye had drifted into the upper orbit of its socket, as if she had died trying to look into her own head. Her back hair and a good deal of her brain-matter was caked on the cherrywood cabinet against which she had leaned in her brief moments of dying. A few flies were buzzing around her.

Clay began to gag. He turned his head and covered his mouth. He told himself he had to control himself. In the other room Alice had stopped vomiting—in fact he could hear her and Tom talking together as they moved deeper into the house—and he didn't want to get her going again.

Think of them as dummies, props in a movie, he told himself, but he knew he could never do that.

When he looked back, he looked at the other things on the floor instead. That helped. The gun he had already seen. The kitchen was spacious and the gun was all the way on the other side, lying between the fridge and one of the cabinets with the barrel sticking out. His first impulse on seeing the dead woman and the dead girl had been to avert his eyes; they'd happened on the gun-barrel purely by accident.

But maybe I would have known there had to be a gun.

He even saw where it had been: a wall-mounted clip between the built-in TV and the industrial-size can-opener. They were gadget-nuts as well as gun-nuts, Tom had said, and a wall-mounted pistol in your kitchen just waiting to leap into your hand . . . why, if that wasn't the best of both worlds, what was?

"Clay?" That was Alice. Coming from some distance.

"What?"

There followed the sound of feet quickly ascending a set of stairs, then Alice called from the living room. "Tom said you wanted to know if we hit paydirt. We just did. There must be a dozen guns downstairs in the den. Rifles and pistols both. They're in a cabinet with an alarm-company sticker on it, so we'll probably get arrested . . . that's a joke. Are you coming?"

"In a minute, hon. Don't come out here."

"Don't worry. Don't you stay there and get grossed out."

He was beyond grossed out, far beyond. There were two other objects lying on the bloody hardwood floor of the Nickerson kitchen. One was a rolling pin, which made sense. There was a pie tin, a mixing bowl, and a cheery yellow canister marked FLOUR sitting on the center island. The other object on the floor, this one lying not too distant from one of Heidi Nickerson's hands, was a cell phone only a teenager could love, blue with big orange daisy decals plastered all over it.

Clay could see what had happened, little as he wanted to. Beth Nickerson is making a pie. Does she know something awful has started to happen in greater Boston, in America, maybe in the world? Is it on TV? If so, the TV didn't send her a crazygram, Clay was sure of that.

Her daughter got one, though. Oh yes. And Heidi attacked her mother. Did Beth Nickerson try to reason with her daughter before driving her to the floor with a blow from the rolling pin, or did she just strike? Not in hate, but in pain and fear? In any case, it wasn't enough. And Beth wasn't wearing pants. She was wearing a jumper, and her legs were bare.

Clay pulled down the dead woman's skirt. He did it gently, covering the plain working-at-home underwear that she had soiled at the end.

Heidi, surely no older than fourteen and perhaps only twelve, must have been growling in that savage nonsense-language they seemed to learn all at once after they got a full dose of Sane-B-Gone from their phones, saying things like rast and eelah and kazzalah-CAN! The first blow from the rolling pin had knocked her down but not out, and the mad girl had begun to work on her mother's legs. Not little nips, either, but deep, searing bites, some that had driven all the way to the bone. Clay could see not only toothmarks but ghostly tattoos that must have been left by young Heidi's braces. And so—probably screaming, undoubtedly in agony, almost certainly not aware of what she was doing—Beth Nickerson had struck again, this time much harder. Clay could almost hear the muffled crack as the girl's neck broke. Beloved daughter, dead on the floor of the state-of-the-art kitchen, with braces on her teeth and her state-of-the-art cell phone by one outstretched hand.

And had her mother stopped to consider before popping the gun from its clip between the TV and the can-opener, where it had been waiting who knew how long for a burglar or rapist to appear in this clean, well-lighted kitchen? Clay thought not. Clay thought there would have been no pause, that she would have wanted to catch up with her daughter's fleeing soul while the explanation for what she had done was still fresh on her lips.

Clay went to the gun and picked it up. From a gadget-boy like Arnie Nickerson he would have expected an automatic—maybe even one with a laser sight—but this was a plain old Colt .45 revolver. He supposed it made sense. His wife might feel more comfortable with this kind of gun; no nonsense about making sure it was loaded if the gun was needed (or wasting time fishing a clip out from behind the spatulas or spices if it wasn't), then racking the slide to make sure there was a hot one in the chamber. No, with this old whore you just had to swing the barrel out, which Clay did with ease. He'd drawn a thousand variations of this very gun for Dark Wanderer. As he'd expected, only one of the six chambers was empty. He shook out one of the other loads, knowing just what he would find. Beth Nickerson's .45 was loaded with highly illegal cop-killer bullets. Fraggers. No wonder the top of her head was gone. The wonder was that she had any left at all. He looked down at the remains of the woman leaning in the corner and began to cry.

"Clay?" That was Tom, coming up the stairs from the basement. "Man, Arnie had everything! There's an automatic weapon that would have gotten him a stretch in Walpole, I bet. . . . Clay? Are you all right?"

"I'm coming," Clay said, wiping his eyes. He safetied the revolver and stuck it in his belt. Then he took off the knife and laid it on Beth Nickerson's counter, still in its homemade scabbard. It seemed they were trading up. "Give me two more minutes."

"Yo."

Clay heard Tom clumping back to Arnie Nickerson's downstairs armory and smiled in spite of the tears still running down his face. Here was something he would have to remember: give a nice little gay guy from Malden a roomful of guns to play with, he starts to say yo just like Sylvester Stallone.

Clay started going through drawers. In the third one he tried, he found a heavy red box markedAMERICAN DEFENDER.45 caliberAMERICAN DEFENDER50 rounds. itwas under the dishtowels. he put the box in his pocket and went to join Tom and Alice. He wanted to get out of here now, and as quickly as possible. The trick would be getting them to go without trying to take Arnie Nickerson's entire gun collection along.

Halfway through the arch he paused and glanced back, holding the Coleman lantern high, looking at the bodies. Pulling down the skirt of the woman's jumper hadn't helped much. They were still just corpses, their wounds as naked as Noah when his son had come upon him in liquor. He could find something to cover them with, but once he started covering bodies, where would it end? Where? With Sharon? With his son?

"God forbid," he whispered, but he doubted that God would simply because he asked. He lowered the lantern and followed the dancing glow of flashlights downstairs to Tom and Alice.

They both wore belts with large-caliber handguns in the holsters, and these were automatics. Tom had also slung an ammunition bandolier over his shoulder. Clay didn't know whether to laugh or start crying again. Part of him felt like doing both at the same time. Of course if he did that, they would think he was having hysterics. And of course they would be right.

The plasma TV mounted on the wall down here was the big—very big—brother of the one in the kitchen. Another TV, only slightly smaller, had a multibrand videogame hookup Clay would, once upon a time, have loved to examine. To fawn over, maybe. As if to balance it off, a vintage Seeberg jukebox stood in the corner next to the Nickersons' Ping-Pong table, all its fabulous colors dark and dead. And of course there were the gun cabinets, two of them, still locked but with their glass fronts broken.

"There were locking-bars, but he had a toolbox in his garage," Tom said. "Alice used a wrench to break them off."

"They were cookies," Alice said modestly. "This was in the garage behind the toolbox, wrapped in a piece of blanket. Is it what I think it is?" She picked it up off the Ping-Pong table, holding it carefully by the wire stock, and carried it over to Clay.

"Holy shit," he said. "This is . . ." He squinted at the embossing above the trigger-guard. "I think it's Russian."

"I'm sure it is," Tom said. "Do you think it's a Kalashnikov?"

"You got me. Are there bullets that match it? In boxes that match the printing on the gun, I mean?"

"Halfa dozen. Heavy boxes. It's a machine gun, isn't it?"

"You might as well call it that, I guess." Clay flicked a lever. "I'm pretty sure one of these positions is single shot and the other is autofire."

"How many rounds does it fire a minute?" Alice asked.

"I don't know," Clay said, "but I think it's rounds per second."

"Whoa." Her eyes got round. "Can you figure out how to shoot it?"

"Alice—I'm pretty sure they teach sixteen-year-old farmboys how to shoot these. Yes, I can figure it out. It might take a box of ammo, but I can figure it out." Please God don't let it blow up in my hands, he thought.

"Is something like that legal in Massachusetts?" she asked.

"It is now, Alice," Tom said, not smiling. "Is it time to go?"

"Yes," she said, and then—perhaps still not entirely comfortable being the one to make the decisions—she looked at Clay.

"Yes," he said. "North."

"Fine with me," Alice said.

"Yeah," Tom said. "North. Let's do it."