Cell

GAITEN ACADEMY

When rainy daylight arose the next morning, clay, alice, and tom were camped in the barn adjacent to an abandoned horse-farm in North Reading. They watched from the door as the first groups of crazyfolk began to appear, flocking southwest on Route 62 in the direction of Wilmington. Their clothes looked uniformly soaked and shabby. Some were without shoes. By noon they were gone. Around four, as the sun broke through the clouds in long, spoking rays, they began flocking back in the direction from which they had come. Many were munching as they walked. Some were helping those who were having a hard time walking on their own. If there were acts of murder today, Clay, Tom, and Alice did not see any.

Perhaps half a dozen of the crazies were lugging large objects that looked familiar to Clay; Alice had found one in the closet of Tom's guest bedroom. The three of them had stood around it, afraid to turn it on.

"Clay?" Alice asked. "Why are some of them carrying boomboxes?"

"I don't know," he said.

"I don't like it," Tom said. "I don't like the flocking behavior, I don't like them helping each other, and I like seeing them with those big portable sound-systems least of all."

"There's only a few with—" Clay began.

"Check her out, right there," Tom interrupted, pointing to a middle-aged woman who was staggering up Highway 62 with a radio/CD player the size of a living room hassock cradled in her arms. She held it against her breasts as though it were a sleeping toddler. Its power-cord had come out of the little storage compartment in back and dragged beside her on the road. "And you don't see any of them carrying lamps or toasters, do you? What if they're programmed to set up battery-powered radios, turn them on, and start broadcasting that tone, pulse, subliminal message, whatever-it-is? What if they want to get the ones they missed the first time?"

They. The ever-popular paranoid they. Alice had produced her little sneaker from somewhere and was squeezing it in her hand, but when she spoke, her voice was calm enough. "I don't think that's it," she said.

"Why not?" Tom asked.

She shook her head. "I can't say. Just that it doesn't feel right."

"Woman's intuition?" He was smiling, but he wasn't sneering.

"Maybe," she said, "but I think one thing's obvious."

"What's that, Alice?" Clay asked. He had an idea what she was going to say, and he was right.

"They're getting smarter. Not on their own, but because they're thinking together. Probably that sounds crazy, but I think it's more likely than them collecting a big pile of battery-powered FM suitcases to blast us all into loony-land."

"Telepathic group-think," Tom said. He mulled it over. Alice watched him do it. Clay, who had already decided she was right, looked out the barn door at the last of the day. He was thinking they needed to stop somewhere and pick up a road-atlas.

Tom was nodding. "Hey, why not? After all, that's probably what flocking is: telepathic group-think."

"Do you really think so or are you just saying that to make me—"

"I really think so," he said. He reached out and touched her hand, which was now squeezing the little sneaker rapidly. "I really really do. Give that thing a rest, will you?"

She gave him a fleeting, distracted smile. Clay saw it and thought again how beautiful she was, how really beautiful. And how close to breaking. "That hay looks soft and I'm tired. I think I'll take a nice long nap."

"Get down with your bad self," Clay said.

Clay dreamed that he and sharon and johnny-gee were having a picnic behind their little house in Kent Pond. Sharon had spread her Navajo blanket on the grass. They were having sandwiches and iced tea. Suddenly the day went dark. Sharon pointed over Clay's shoulder and said, "Look! Telepaths!" But when he turned that way, he saw nothing but a flock of crows, one so huge it blotted out the sun. Then a tinkling began. It sounded like the Mister Softee truck playing the Sesame Street theme song, but he knew it was a ring-tone, and in his dream he was terrified. He turned back and Johnny-Gee was gone. When he asked Sharon where he was—already dreading, already knowing the answer—she said Johnny had gone under the blanket to answer his cell phone. There was a bump in the blanket. Clay dove under, into the overpowering smell of sweet hay, shouting for Johnny not to pick up, not to answer, reaching for him and finding instead only the cold curve of a glass ball: the paperweight he'd bought in Small Treasures, the one with the haze of dandelion fluff floating deep down inside like a pocket fog.

Then Tom was shaking him, telling him it was past nine by his watch, the moon was up, and if they were going to do some more walking they ought to get at it. Clay had never been so glad to wake up. On the whole, he preferred dreams of the Bingo Tent.

Alice was looking at him oddly.

"What?" Clay said, checking to make sure their automatic weapon was safetied—that was already becoming second nature to him.

"You were talking in your sleep. You were saying, 'Don't answer it, don't answer it.' "

"Nobody should have answered it," Clay said. "We all would have been better off."

"Ah, but who can resist a ringing phone?" Tom asked. "And there goes your ballgame."

"Thus spake fuckin Zarathustra," Clay said. Alice laughed until she cried.

With the moon racing in and out of the clouds—like an illustration in a boy's novel of pirates and buried treasure, Clay thought—they left the horse-farm behind and resumed their walk north. That night they began to meet others of their own kind again.

Because this is our time now, Clay thought, shifting the automatic rifle from one hand to the other. Fully loaded, it was damned heavy. The phone-crazies own the days; when the stars come out, that's us. We're like vampires. We've been banished to the night. Up close we know each other because we can still talk; at a little distance we can be pretty sure of each other by the packs we wear and the guns more and more of us carry; but at a distance, the one sure sign is the waving flashlight beam. Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor's guilt about all the other species we'd wiped out on our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we're the Flashlight People.

He looked over at Tom. "Where do they go?" he asked. "Where do the crazies go after sundown?"

Tom gave him a look. "North Pole. All the elves died of mad reindeer disease and these guys are helping out until the new crop shows up."

"Jesus," Clay said, "did someone get up on the wrong side of the haystack tonight?"

But Tom still wouldn't smile. "I'm thinking about my cat," he said. "Wondering if he's all right. No doubt you think that's quite stupid."

"No," Clay said, although, having a son and a wife to worry about, he sort of did.

They got a road atlas in a card-and-book shop in the two-stoplight burg of Ballardvale. They were now traveling north, and very glad they had decided to stay in the more-or-less bucolic V between Interstates 93 and 95. The other travelers they met—most moving west, away from 1-95—told of horrendous traffic-jams and terrible wrecks. One of the few pilgrims who was moving east said that a tanker had crashed near the Wakefield exit of 1-93 and the resulting fire had caused a chain of explosions that had incinerated nearly a mile of northbound traffic. The stench, he said, was like "a fish-fry in hell."

They met more Flashlight People as they trudged through the outskirts of Andover and heard a rumor so persistent it was now repeated with the assurance of fact: the New Hampshire border was closed. New Hampshire State Police and special deputies were shooting first and asking questions afterward. It didn't matter to them whether you were crazy or sane.

"It's just a new version of the fucking motto they've had on their fucking license plates since forever," said a bitter-faced elderly man with whom they walked for a while. He was wearing a small pack over his expensive topcoat and carrying a long-barreled flashlight. Poking out of his topcoat pocket was the butt of a handgun. "If you're in New Hampshire, you can live free. If you want to come to New Hampshire, you can fucking die."

"That's just . . . really hard to believe," Alice said.

"Believe what you want, Missy," said their temporary companion. "I met some people who tried to go north like you folks, and they turned back south in a hurry when they saw some people shot out of hand trying to cross into New Hampshire north of Dunstable."

"When?" Clay asked.

"Last night."

Clay thought of several other questions, but held his tongue instead. At Andover, the bitter-faced man and most of the other people with whom they had been sharing their vehicle-clogged (but passable) route turned onto Highway 133, toward Lowell and points west. Clay, Tom, and Alice were left on Andover's main street—deserted except for a few flashlight-waving foragers—with a decision to make.

"Do you believe it?" Clay asked Alice.

"No," she said, and looked at Tom.

Tom shook his head. "Me either. I thought the guy's story had an alligators-in-the-sewers feel to it."

Alice was nodding. "News doesn't travel that fast anymore. Not without phones."

"Yep," Tom said. "Definitely the next-generation urban myth. Still, we are talking about what a friend of mine likes to call New Hamster.

Which is why I think we should cross the border at the most out-of-the-way spot we can find."

"Sounds like a plan," Alice said, and with that they moved on again, using the sidewalk as long as they were in town and there was a sidewalk to use.

On the outskirts of andover, a man with a pair of flashlights rigged in a kind of harness (one light at each temple) stepped out through the broken display window of the IGA. He waved to them in companionable fashion, then picked a course toward them between a jumble of shopping carts, dropping canned goods into what looked like a newsboy's pouch as he walked. He stopped beside a pickup truck lying on its side, introduced himself as Mr. Roscoe Handt of Methuen, and asked where they were going. When Clay told them Maine, Handt shook his head.

"New Hampshire border's closed. I met two people not half an hour ago who got turned back. He said they're trying to tell the difference between the phone-crazies and people like us, but they're not trying too hard."

"Did these two people actually see this with their own eyes?" Tom asked.

Roscoe Handt looked at Tom as though he might be crazy. "You got to trust the word of others, man," he said. "I mean, you can't exactly phone someone up and ask for verification, can you?" He paused. "They're burning the bodies at Salem and Nashua, that's what these folks told me. And it smells like a pig-roast. They told me that, too. I've got a party of five I'm taking west, and we want to make some miles before sunup. The way west is open."

"That the word you're hearing, is it?" Clay asked.

Handt looked at him with mild contempt. "That's the word, all right. And a word to the wise is sufficient, my ma used to say. If you really mean to go north, make sure you get to the border in the middle of the night. The crazies don't go out after dark."

"We know," Tom said.

The man with the flashlights affixed to the sides of his head ignored Tom and went on talking to Clay. He had pegged Clay as the trio's leader. "And they don't carry flashlights. Wave your flashlights back and forth. Talk. Yell. They don't do those things, either. I doubt the people at the border will let you through, but if you're lucky, they won't shoot you, either."

"They're getting smarter," Alice said. "You know that, don't you, Mr. Handt?"

Handt snorted. "They're traveling in packs and they're not killing each other anymore. I don't know if that makes them smarter or not. But they're still killing us, I know that."

Handt must have seen doubt on Clay's face, because he smiled. His flashlights turned it into something unpleasant.

"I saw them catch a woman out this morning," he said. "With my own eyes, okay?"

Clay nodded. "Okay."

"I think I know why she was on the street. This was in Topsfield, about ten miles east of here? Me and my people, we were in a Motel 6. She was walking that way. Only not really walking. Hurrying. Almost running. Looking back over her shoulder. I saw her because I couldn't sleep." He shook his head. "Getting used to sleeping days is a bitch."

Clay thought of telling Handt they'd all get used to it, then didn't. He saw Alice was holding her talisman again. He didn't want Alice hearing this and knew there was no way to keep her from it. Partly because it was survival information (and unlike the stuff about the New Hampshire state line, he was almost positive this was solid information); partly because the world was going to be full of stories like this for a while. If they listened to enough of them, some might eventually begin to line up and make patterns.

"Probably just looking for a better place to stay, you know? No more than that. Saw the Motel 6 and thought, 'Hey, a room with a bed. Right up there by the Exxon station. Only a block away' But before she got even halfway, a bunch of them came around the corner. They were walking . . . you know how they walk now?"

Roscoe Handt walked toward them stiffly, like a tin soldier, with his newsboy's bag swinging. That wasn't how the phone-crazies walked, but they knew what he was trying to convey and nodded.

"And she . . ." He leaned back against the overturned truck and scrubbed briefly at his face with his hands. "This is what I want you to understand, okay? This is why you can't get caught out, can't get fooled that they're getting normal because every now and then one or two of them has lucked into hitting the right controls on a boombox and started a CD playing—"

"You've seen that?" Tom asked. "Heard that?"

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

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

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

Clay, Tom, and Alice shook their heads.

The man nodded. "They will, I've seen em do it, but they don't like to."

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

"I don't exactly know. They smelled her, or something."

"Or maybe touched her thoughts," Tom said.

"Or couldn't touch them," Alice said.

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

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

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

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

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

"Kind of makes it all real, doesn't it?" Tom said.

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

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

"We're okay!" Tom called. "Normal folks! Coming in!"

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

"Come on," Alice said. "My feet hurt. And it'll be getting light soon, won't it?"

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

"And you said they were getting smarter," Tom said.

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

"More likely just dropped it," Tom said.

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

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

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

There were maps for sale in the lobby of the sweet valley inn that would offer more detail than their road atlas. They were in a glass display cabinet that had been smashed. Clay took one for Massachusetts and one for New Hampshire, reaching in carefully so as not to cut his hand, and saw a young man lying on the other side of the reception counter as he did so. His eyes glared sightlessly. For a moment Clay thought someone had put an oddly colored corsage in the corpse's mouth. Then he saw the greenish points poking out through the dead man's cheeks and realized they matched the broken glass littering the shelves of the display cabinet. The corpse was wearing a nametag that said my name is hank ask me about weekly rates. Clay thought briefly of Mr. Ricardi as he looked at Hank.

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

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

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

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

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

Christ.

"Clay? You all right?" Tom asked.

"Sure. Why?"

"I don't know. You looked a little . . . grim."

"Dead guy behind the counter. He's not pretty."

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

"I think that sounds good," Tom said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We'll be all right," he said. "You can go now."

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

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

"Natalie, stop," Gregory said with tired patience.

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

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

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

The little girl began to stir.

"Natalie, you're disturbing Portia," Gregory said.

The woman named Natalie began to laugh. "Well tough shitl It's a disturbing-ass world!" Around them, people continued doing the Refugee Walk. No one paid any attention and Clay thought, So this is how we act.This is how it goes when the bottom drops out. When there are no cameras turning,no buildings burning, no Anderson Cooper saying "Now back to the CNN studios in Atlanta." This is how it goes when Homeland Security's been canceled due to lack of sanity.

"Let me take the boy," Clay said. "I'll carry him until you find something better to put him in. That cart's shot." He looked at Tom. Tom shrugged and nodded.

"Stay away from us," Natalie said, and all at once there was a gun in her hand. It wasn't a big one, probably only a .22, but even a .22 would do the job if the bullet went in the right place.

Clay heard the sound of guns being drawn on either side of him and knew that Tom and Alice were now pointing the pistols they'd taken from the Nickerson home at the woman named Natalie. This was also how it went, it seemed.

"Put it away, Natalie," he said. "We're going to get moving now."

"You're double-fuckin right you are," she said, and brushed an errant lock of hair out of her eye with the heel of her free hand. She didn't seem to be aware that the young man and younger woman with Clay were holding guns on her. Now people passing by did look, but their only response was to move past the spot of confrontation and potential bloodshed a little faster.

"Come on, Clay," Alice said quietly. She put her free hand on his wrist. "Before someone gets shot."

They started walking again. Alice walked with her hand on Clay's wrist, almost as if he were her boyfriend. Just a little midnight stroll, Clay thought, although he had no idea of what time it was and didn't care. His heart was beating hard. Tom walked with them, only until they were around the next curve he walked backward, with his gun still out. Clay supposed Tom wanted to be ready to shoot back if Natalie decided to use her little popgun after all. Because shooting back was also how it went, now that phone service had been interrupted until further notice.

In the hours before dawn, walking on route 102 east of manchester, they began to hear music, very faint.

"Christ," Tom said, coming to a stop. "That's 'Baby Elephant Walk.' "

"It's what?" Alice asked. She sounded amused.

"A big-band instrumental from the age of quarter gas. Les Brown and His Band of Renown, someone like that. My mother had the record."

Two men pulled even with them and stopped for a blow. They were elderly, but both looked fit. Like a couple of recently retired postmen hiking theCotswolds, Clay thought. Wherever they are. One wore a pack—no pussy day-pack, either, but the waist-length kind on a frame—and the other had a rucksack hanging from his right shoulder. Hung over the left was what looked like a .30-.30.

Packsack wiped sweat from his seamed forehead with a forearm and said, "Your mama might have had a version by Les Brown, son, but more likely it was Don Costa or Henry Mancini. Those were the popular ones. That one"—he inclined his head toward the ghostly strains—"that's Lawrence Welk, as I live and breathe."

"Lawrence Welk," Tom breathed, almost in awe.

"Who?" Alice asked

"Listen to that elephant walk," Clay said, and laughed. He was tired and feeling goofy. It occurred to him that Johnny would love that music.

Packsack gave him a glance of passing contempt, then looked back at Tom. "That's Lawrence Welk, all right," he said. "My eyes aren't half-right anymore, but my ears are fine. My wife and I used to watch his show every fucking Saturday night."

"Dodge had a good time, too," Rucksack said. It was his only addition to the conversation, and Clay hadn't the slightest idea what it meant.

"Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Band," Tom said. "Think of it."

"Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers," Packsack said. "Jesus Christ."

"Don't forget the Lennon Sisters and the lovely Alice Lon," Tom said.

In the distance, the ghostly music changed. "That one's 'Calcutta,' " Packsack said. He sighed. "Well, we'll be getting along. Nice passing the time of day with you."

"Night," Clay said.

"Nope," Packsack said. "These're our days now. Haven't you noticed? Have a good one, boys. You too, little ma'am."

"Thank you," the little ma'am standing between Clay and Tom said faintly.

Packsack started along again. Rucksack fell sturdily in beside him. Around them, a steady parade of bobbing flashlight beams led people deeper into New Hampshire. Then Packsack stopped and looked back for a final word.

"You don't want to be on the road more than another hour," he said. "Find a house or motel unit and get inside. You know about the shoes, right?"

"What about the shoes?" Tom asked.

Packsack looked at him patiently, the way he'd probably look at anyone who couldn't help being a fool. Far down the road, "Calcutta"—if that's what it was—had given way to a polka. It sounded insane in the foggy, drizzly night. And now this old man with the big pack on his back was talking about shoes.

"When you go inside a place, you put your shoes out on the stoop," Packsack said. "The crazy ones won't take them, don't worry about that, and it tells other people the place is taken and to move along, find another. Saves"—his eyes dropped to the heavy automatic weapon Clay was carrying—"Saves accidents."

"Have there been accidents?" Tom asked.

"Oh yes," Packsack said, with chilling indifference. "There's always accidents, people being what they are. But there's plenty of places, so there's no need for you to have one. Just put out your shoes."

"How do you know that?" Alice asked.

He gave her a smile that improved his face out of all measure. But it was hard not to smile at Alice; she was young, and even at three in the morning, she was pretty. "People talk; I listen. I talk, sometimes other folks listen. Did you listen?"

"Yes," Alice said. "Listening's one of my best things."

"Then pass it on. Bad enough to have them to contend with." He didn't have to be more specific. "Too bad to have accidents among ourselves on top of that."

Clay thought of Natalie pointing the .22. He said, "You're right. Thank you."

Tom said, "That one's 'The Beer Barrel Polka,' isn't it?"

"That's right, son," Packsack said. "Myron Floren on the squeezebox. God rest his soul. You might want to stop in Gaiten. It's a nice little village two miles or so up the road."

"Is that where you're going to stay?" Alice asked.

"Oh, me and Rolfe might push on a dight farther," he said.

"Why?"

"Because we can, little ma'am, that's all. You have a good day."

This time they didn't contradict him, and although the two men had to be pushing seventy, they were soon out of sight, following the beam of a single flashlight, which Rucksack—Rolfe—held.

"Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers," Tom marveled.

" 'Baby Elephant Walk,' " Clay said, and laughed.

"Why did Dodge have a good time, too?" Alice wanted to know.

"Because it could, I guess," Tom said, and burst out laughing at her perplexed expression.

The music was coming from gaiten, the nice little village packsack had recommended as a place to stop. It was not nearly as loud as the AC/DC concert Clay had gone to in Boston as a teenager—that had left his ears ringing for days—but it was loud enough to make him think of summer band concerts he'd attended in South Berwick with his parents. In fact he had it in his mind that they would discover the source of the music on the Gaiten town common—likely some elderly person, not a phone-crazy but disaster-addled, who had taken it into his head to serenade the ongoing exodus with easy-listening oldies played through a set of battery-powered loudspeakers.

There was a Gaiten town common, but it was deserted save for a few people eating either a late supper or an early breakfast by the glow of flashlights and Coleman lanterns. The source of the music was a little farther to the north. By then Lawrence Welk had given way to someone blowing a horn so mellow it was soporific.

"That's Wynton Marsalis, isn't it?" Clay asked. He was ready to call it quits for the night and thought Alice looked done almost to death.

"Him or Kenny G," Tom said. "You know what Kenny G said when he got off the elevator, don't you?"

"No," Clay said, "but I'm sure you'll tell me."

" 'Man! This place rocks!' "

Clay said, "That's so funny I think my sense of humor just imploded."

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

"It's not worth explaining," Tom said. "Listen, guys, we've got to call it a night. I'm about kilt."

"Me too," Alice said. "I thought I was in shape from soccer, but I'm really tired."

"Yeah," Clay agreed. "Baby makes three."

They had already passed through Gaiten's shopping district, and according to the signs, Main Street—which was also Route 102—had now become Academy Avenue. This was no surprise to Clay, because the sign on the outskirts of town had proclaimed Gaiten home to Historic Gaiten Academy, an institution of which Clay had heard vague rumors. He thought it was one of those New England prep schools for kids who can't quite make it into Exeter or Milton. He supposed the three of them would be back in the land of Burger Kings, muffler-repair shops, and chain motels soon enough, but this part of New Hampshire 102 was lined with very nice-looking homes. The problem was, there were shoes—sometimes as many as four pairs—in front of most of the doors.

The foot-traffic had thinned considerably as other travelers found shelter for the coming day, but as they passed Academy Grove Citgo and approached the fieldstone pillars flanking Gaiten Academy's entrance drive, they began to catch up to a trio just ahead: two men and a woman, all well into middle age. As these three walked slowly up the sidewalk, they inspected each house for one without shoes placed at the front door. The woman was limping badly, and one of the men had his arm around her waist.

Gaiten Academy was on the left, and Clay realized this was where the music (currently a droning, string-laden version of "Fly Me to the Moon") was coming from. He noticed two other things. One was that the road-litter here—torn bags, half-eaten vegetables, gnawed bones—was especially heavy, and that most of it turned in at the gravel Academy drive. The other was that two people were standing there. One was an old man hunched over a cane. The other was a boy with a battery-powered lantern parked between his shoes. He looked no more than twelve and was dozing against one of the pillars. He was wearing what looked like a school uniform: gray pants, gray sweater, a maroon jacket with a crest on it.

As the trio ahead of Clay and his friends drew abreast of the Academy drive, the old man—dressed in a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows—spoke to them in a piercing, I-will-be-heard-all-the-way-to-the-back-of-the-lecture-hall voice. "Hi, there! Hi, I say! Won't you come in here? We can offer you shelter, but more importantly, we have to—"

"We don't have to anything, mister," the woman said. "I got four burst blisters, two on each foot, and I can hardly walk."

"But there's plenty of room—" the old fellow began. The man supporting the woman gave him a look that must have been unpleasant, because the old fellow stopped. The trio went past the drive and the pillars and the sign on old-fashioned iron S-hooks reading GAITEN ACADEMY EST. 1846 "A Young Mind Is A Lamp In The Darkness."

The old fellow slumped over his cane again, then saw Clay, Tom, and Alice approaching and straightened up once more. He seemed about to hail them, then apparently decided his lecture-hall approach wasn't working. He poked his companion in the ribs with the tip of his cane instead. The boy straightened up with a wild look as behind them, where brick buildings loomed in the dark along the slope of a mild hill, "Fly Me to the Moon" gave way to an equally sluggish rendition of something that might once have been "I Get a Kick out of You."

"Jordan!" he said. "Your turn! Ask them in!"

The boy named Jordan started, blinked at the old man, then looked at the new trio of approaching strangers with gloomy mistrust. Clay thought of the March Hare and the Dormouse in Alice in Wonderland. Maybe that was wrong—probably it was—but he was very tired. "Aw, they won't be any different, sir," he said. "They won't come in. Nobody will. We'll try again tomorrow night. I'm sleepy."

And Clay knew that, tired or not, they were going to find out what the old man wanted . . . unless Tom and Alice absolutely refused, that was. Partly because the old man's companion reminded him of Johnny, yes, but mostly because the kid had made up his mind that no one was going to help in this not-very-brave new world—he and the one he called sir were on their own because that was just how it went. Only if that were true, pretty soon there wouldn't be anything worth saving.

"Go on," the old man encouraged him. He prodded Jordan with the tip of his cane again, but not hard. Not painfully. "Tell them we can give them shelter, we have plenty of room, but they ought to see, first. Someone needs to see this. If they also say no, we will indeed give up for the night."

"All right, sir."

The old man smiled, exposing a mouthful of large horse-teeth. "Thank you, Jordan."

The boy walked toward them with absolutely no relish, his dusty shoes scuffing, his shirttail hanging below the hem of his sweater. He held his lantern in one hand, and it fizzed faintly. There were dark up-all-night circles under his eyes, and his hair badly needed washing.

"Tom?" Clay asked.

"We'll see what he wants," Tom said, "because I can see it's what you want, but—"

"Sirs? Pardon me, sirs?"

"One second," Tom said to the boy, then turned back to Clay. His face was grave. "But it's going to start getting light in an hour. Maybe less. So that old guy better be right about there being a place for us to stay."

"Oh, yes, sir," Jordan said. He looked like he didn't want to hope and couldn't help it. "Lots of places. Hundreds of dorm rooms, not to mention Cheatham Lodge. Tobias Wolff came last year and stayed there. He gave a lecture on his book, Old School."

"I read that," Alice said, sounding bemused.

"The boys who didn't have cell phones have all run off. The ones who did have them . . ."

"We know about them," Alice said.

"I'm a scholarship boy. I lived in Holloway. I didn't have a cell phone. I had to use the dorm mother's phone whenever I wanted to call home and the other boys would make fun of me."

"Looks to me like you got the last laugh there, Jordan," Tom said.

"Yes, sir," he said dutifully, but in the light of his fizzing lantern Clay saw no laughter, only woe and weariness. "Won't you please come and meet the Head?"

And although he had to be very tired himself, Tom responded with complete politeness, as if they had been standing on a sunny veranda—at a Parents' Tea, perhaps—instead of on the trash-littered verge of Academy Avenue at four-fifteen in the morning. "That would be our pleasure, Jordan," he said.

"The devil's intercoms is what I used to call them," said Charles Ardai, who had been chairman of Gaiten Academy's English Department for twenty-five years and acting Headmaster of the Academy entire at the time of the Pulse. Now he stumped with surprising rapidity up the hill on his cane, keeping to the sidewalk, avoiding the river of swill that carpeted Academy Drive. Jordan walked watchfully beside him, the other three behind him. Jordan was worried about the old man losing his balance. Clay was worried that the man might have a heart attack, trying to talk and climb a hill—even a relatively mild one like this—at the same time.

"I never really meant it, of course; it was a joke, a jape, a comic exaggeration, but in truth, I never liked the things, especially in an academic environment. I might have moved to keep them out of the school, but naturally I would have been overruled. Might as well try to legislate against the rising of the tide, eh?" He puffed rapidly several times. "My brother gave me one for my sixty-fifth birthday. I ran the thing flat . . ." Puff, pant. "And simply never recharged it. They emit radiation, are you aware of this? In minuscule amounts, it's true, but still. . . a source of radiation that close to one's head . . . one's brain . . ."

"Sir, you should wait until we get to Tonney," Jordan said. He steadied Ardai as the Head's cane slid on a rotten piece of fruit and he listed momentarily (but at an alarming angle) to port.

"Probably a good idea," Clay said.

"Yes," the Head agreed. "Only . . . I never trusted them, this is my point. I was never that way with my computer. Took to that like a duck to water."

At the top of the hill, the campus's main road split in a Y The left fork wound its way to buildings that were almost surely dorms. The right one went toward lecture halls, a cluster of administration buildings, and an archway that glimmered white in the dark. The river of garbage and discarded wrappers flowed beneath it. Headmaster Ardai led them that way, skirting as much of the litter as he could, Jordan holding his elbow. The music—now Bette Midler, singing "Wind Beneath My Wings"—was coming from beyond the arch, and Clay saw dozens of discarded compact discs among the bones and empty potato chip bags. He was starting to get a bad feeling about this.

"Uh, sir? Headmaster? Maybe we should just—"

"We'll be fine," the Head replied. "Did you ever play musical chairs as a child? Of course you did. Well, as long as the music doesn't stop, we have nothing to worry about. We'll have a quick peek, and then we'll go over to Cheatham Lodge. That's the Headmaster's residence. Not two hundred yards from Tonney Field. I promise you."

Clay looked at Tom, who shrugged. Alice nodded.

Jordan happened to be looking back at them (rather anxiously), and he caught this collegial interplay. "You ought to see it," he told them. "The Head's right about that. Until you see it, you don't know."

"See what, Jordan?" Alice asked.

But Jordan only looked at her—big young eyes in the dark. "Wait," he said.

"Holy fucking shit," Clay said. In his mind the words sounded like a full-throated bellow of surprise and horror—with maybe a soupзon of outrage—but what actually emerged was more of a whipped whimper. Part of it might have been that this close the music was almost as loud as that long-ago AC/DC concert (although Debby Boone making her sweet schoolgirl way through "You Light Up My Life" was quite a stretch from "Hell's Bells," even at full volume), but mostly it was pure shock. He thought that after the Pulse and their subsequent retreat from Boston he'd be prepared for anything, but he was wrong.

He didn't think prep schools like this indulged in anything so plebeian (and so smashmouth) as football, but soccer had apparently been a big deal. The stands stacking up on either side of Tonney Field looked as if they could seat as many as a thousand, and they were decked with bunting that was only now beginning to look bedraggled by the showery weather of the last few days. There was an elaborate Scoreboard at the far end of the field with big letters marching along the top. Clay couldn't read the message in the dark and probably wouldn't have taken it in even if it had been daylight. There was enough light to see the field itself, and that was all that mattered.

Every inch of grass was covered with phone-crazies. They were lying on their backs like sardines in a can, leg to leg and hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Their faces stared up into the black predawn sky.

"Oh my Lord Jesus," Tom said. His voice was muffled because one fist was pressed against his mouth.

"Catch the girl!" the Head rapped. "She's going to faint!"

"No—I'm all right," Alice said, but when Clay put his arm around her she slumped against him, breathing fast. Her eyes were open but they had a fixed, druggy look.

"They're under the bleachers, too," Jordan said. He spoke with a studied, almost showy calm that Clay did not believe for a minute. It was the voice of a boy assuring his pals that he's not grossed out by the maggots boiling in a dead cat's eyes . . . just before he leans over and blows his groceries. "Me and the Head think that's where they put the hurt ones that aren't going to get better."

"The Head and I , Jordan."

"Sorry, sir."

Debby Boone achieved poetic catharsis and ceased. There was a pause and then Lawrence Welk's Champagne Music Makers once more began to play "Baby Elephant Walk." Dodge had a good time, too, Clay thought.

"How many of those boomboxes have they got rigged together?" he asked Headmaster Ardai. "And how did they do it? They're brainless, for Christ's sake, zombies!" A terrible idea occurred to him, illogical and persuasive at the same time. "Did you do it? To keep them quiet, or. . .I don't know . . ."

"He didn't do it," Alice said. She spoke quietly from her safe place within the circle of Clay's arm.

"No, and both of your premises are wrong," the Head told him.

"Both? I don't—"

"They must be dedicated music-lovers," Tom mused, "because they don't like to go inside buildings. But that's where the CDs are, right?"

"Not to mention the boomboxes," Clay said.

"There's no time to explain now. Already the sky has begun to lighten, and . . . tell them, Jordan."

Jordan replied dutifully, with the air of one who recites a lesson he does not understand, "All good vampires must be in before cockcrow, sir."

"That's right—before cockcrow. For now, only look. That's all you need to do. You didn't know there were places like this, did you?"

"Alice knew," Clay said.

They looked. And because the night had begun to wane, Clay realized that the eyes in all those faces were open. He was pretty sure they weren't seeing; they were just . . . open.

Something bad's going on here, he thought. The flocking was only the beginning of it.

Looking at the packed bodies and empty faces (mostly white; this was New England, after all) was awful, but the blank eyes turned up to the night sky filled him with unreasoning horror. Somewhere, not too distant, the morning's first bird began to sing. It wasn't a crow, but the Head still jerked, then tottered. This time it was Tom who steadied him.

"Come on," the Head told them. "It's only a short walk to Cheatham Lodge, but we ought to start. The damp has made me stiffer than ever. Take my elbow, Jordan."

Alice broke free of Clay and went to the old man's other side. He gave her a rather forbidding smile and a shake of his head. "Jordan can take care of me. We take care of each other now—ay, Jordan?"

"Yes, sir."

"Jordan?" Tom asked. They were nearing a large (and rather pretentious) Tudor-style dwelling that Clay presumed was Cheatham Lodge.

"Sir?"

"The sign over the Scoreboard—I couldn't read it. What did it say?"

"welcome alumni to homecoming weekend." Jordan almost smiled, then remembered there would be no Homecoming Weekend this year– the bunting on the stands had already begun to tatter—and the brightness left his face. If he hadn't been so tired, he might still have held his composure, but it was very late, almost dawn, and as they made their way up the walk to the Headmaster's residence, the last student at Gaiten Academy, still wearing his colors of maroon and gray, burst into tears.

"That was incredible, sir," Clay said. He had fallen into Jordan's mode of address very naturally. So had Tom and Alice. "Thank you."

"Yes," Alice said. "Thanks. I've never eaten two burgers in my life—at least not big ones like that."

It was three o'clock the following afternoon. They were on the back porch of Cheatham Lodge. Charles Ardai—the Head, as Jordan called him—had grilled the hamburgers on a small gas grill. He said the meat was perfectly safe because the generator powering the cafeteria's freezer had run until noon yesterday (and indeed, the patties he took from the cooler Tom and Jordan had carried in from the pantry had still been white with frost and as hard as hockey pucks). He said that grilling the meat would probably be safe until five o'clock, although prudence dictated an early meal.

"They'd smell the cooking?" Clay asked.

"Let's just say that we have no desire to find out," the Head replied. "Have we, Jordan?"

"No, sir," Jordan said, and took a bite of his second burger. He was slowing down, but Clay thought he'd manage to do his duty. "We want to be inside when they wake up, and inside when they come back from town. That's where they go, to town. They're picking it clean, like birds in a field of grain. That's what the Head says."

"They were flocking back home earlier when we were in Malden," Alice said. "Not that we knew where home for them was." She was eyeing a tray with pudding cups on it. "Can I have one of those?"

"Yes, indeed." The Head pushed the tray toward her. "And another hamburger, if you'd like. What we don't eat soon will just spoil."

Alice groaned and shook her head, but she took a pudding cup. So did Tom.

"They seem to leave at the same time each morning, but the home-flocking behavior has been starting later," Ardai said thoughtfully. "Why would that be?"

"Slimmer pickings?" Alice asked.

"Perhaps . . ." He took a final bite of his own hamburger, then covered the remains neatly with a paper napkin. "There are many flocks, you know. Maybe as many as a dozen within a fifty-mile radius. We know from people going south that there are flocks in Sandown, Fremont, and Candia. They forage about almost aimlessly in the daytime, perhaps for music as well as food, then go back to where they came from."

"You know this for sure," Tom said. He finished one pudding cup and reached for another.

Ardai shook his head. "Nothing is for sure, Mr. McCourt." His hair, a long white tangle (an English professor's hair for sure, Clay thought), rippled a bit in the mild afternoon breeze. The clouds were gone. The back porch gave them a good view of the campus, and so far it was deserted. Jordan went around the house at regular intervals to scout the hill sloping down to Academy Avenue and reported all quiet there, as well. "You've not seen any of the other roosting places?"

"Nope," Tom said.

"But we're traveling in the dark," Clay reminded him, "and now the dark is really dark."

"Yes," the Head agreed. He spoke almost dreamily. "As in le moyen вge. Translation, Jordan?"

"The middle age, sir."

"Good." He patted Jordan's shoulder.

"Even big flocks would be easy to miss," Clay said. "They wouldn't have to be hiding."

"No, they're not hiding," Headmaster Ardai agreed, steepling his fingers. "Not yet, at any rate. They flock . . . they forage . . . and their group mind may break down a bit while they forage . . . but perhaps less. Every day perhaps less."

"Manchester burned to the ground," Jordan said suddenly. "We could see the fire from here, couldn't we, sir?"

"Yes," the Head agreed. "It's been very sad and frightening."

"Is it true that people trying to cross into Massachusetts are being shot at the border?" Jordan asked. "That's what people are saying. People are saying you have to go to Vermont, only that way is safe."

"It's a crock," Clay said. "We heard the same thing about the New Hampshire border."

Jordan goggled at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. The sound was clear and beautiful in the still air. Then, in the distance, a gun went off. And closer, someone shouted in either rage or horror.

Jordan stopped laughing.

"Tell us about that weird state they were in last night," Alice said quietly. "And the music. Do all the other flocks listen to music at night?"

The Head looked at Jordan.

"Yes," the boy said. "It's all soft stuff, no rock, no country—"

"I should guess nothing classical, either," the Head put in. "Not of a challenging nature, at any rate."

"It's their lullabies," Jordan said. "That's what the Head and me think, isn't it, sir?"

"The Head and I , Jordan."

"Head and I, yes, sir."

"But it is indeed what we think," the Head agreed. "Although I suspect there may be more to it than that. Yes, quite a bit more."

Clay was flummoxed. He hardly knew how to go on. He looked at his friends and saw on their faces what he was feeling—not just puzzlement, but a dreadful reluctance to be enlightened.

Leaning forward, Headmaster Ardai said, "May I be frank? I must be frank; it is the habit of a lifetime. I want you to help us do a terrible thing here. The time to do it is short, I think, and while one such act alone may come to nothing, one never knows, does one? One never knows what sort of communication may flow between these . . . flocks. In any case, I will not stand idly by while these . . . things . . . steal away not only my school but the very daylight itself. I might have attempted it already, but I'm old and Jordan is very young. Too young. Whatever they are now, they were human not long ago. I won't let him be a part of this."

"I can do my share, sir!" Jordan said. He spoke as stoutly, Clay thought, as any Muslim teenager who ever strapped on a suicide belt stuffed with explosives.

"I salute your courage, Jordan," the Head told him, "but I think not." He looked at the boy kindly, but when he returned his gaze to the others, his eyes had hardened considerably. "You have weapons—good ones—and I have nothing but an old single-shot .22 rifle that may not even work anymore, although the barrel's open—I've looked. Even if it does work, the cartridges I have for it may not fire. But we have a gasoline pump at our little motor-pool, and gasoline might serve to end their lives."

He must have seen the horror in their faces, because he nodded. To Clay he no longer looked like kindly old Mr. Chips; he looked like a Puritan elder in an oil-painting. One who could have sentenced a man to the stocks without batting an eye. Or a woman to be burned at the stake as a witch.

He nodded at Clay in particular. Clay was sure of it. "I know what I'm saying. I know how it sounds. But it wouldn't be murder, not really; it would be extermination. And I have no power to make you do anything. But in any case . . . whether you help me burn them or not, you must pass on a message."

"To who?" Alice asked faintly.

"To everyone you meet, Miss Maxwell." He leaned over the remains of their meal, those hanging-judge eyes sharp and small and burning hot. "You must tell what's happening to them —to the ones who heard the infernal message on their devil's intercoms. You must pass this on. Everyone who has had the daylight robbed away from them must hear, and before it's too late." He passed a hand over his lower face, and Clay saw the fingers were shaking a little. It would be easy to dismiss that as a sign of the man's age, but he hadn't seen any tremors before. "We're afraid it soon will be. Aren't we, Jordan?"

"Yes, sir." Jordan certainly thought he knew something; he looked terrified.

"What? What's happening to them?" Clay asked. "It's got something to do with the music and those wired-together boomboxes, doesn't it?"

The Head sagged, suddenly looking tired. "They're not wired together," he said. "Don't you remember me telling you that both of your premises were wrong?"

"Yes, but I don't understand what you m—"

"There's one sound-system with a CD in it, about that you're certainly right. A single compilation disc, Jordan says, which is why the same songs play over and over."

"Lucky us," Tom muttered, but Clay barely heard him. He was trying to get the sense of what Ardai had just said—they're not wired together. How could that be? It couldn't.

"The sound-systems—the boomboxes, if you like—are placed all around the field," the Head went on, "and they're all on. At night you can see their little red power lamps—"

"Yes," Alice said. "I did notice some red lights, I just didn't think anything of it."

"—but there's nothing in them—no compact discs or cassette tapes– and no wires linking them. They're just slaves that pick up the master-disc audio and rebroadcast it."

"If their mouths are open, the music comes from them, too," Jordan said. "It's just little . . . not hardly a whisper . . . but you can hear it."

"No," Clay said. "That's your imagination, kiddo. Gotta be."

"I haven't heard that myself," Ardai said, "but of course my ears aren't what they were back when I was a Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps fan. 'Back in the day,' Jordan and his friends would say."

"You're very old-school, sir," Jordan said. He spoke with gentle solemnity and unmistakable affection.

"Yes, Jordan, I am," the Head agreed. He clapped the boy on the shoulder, then turned his attention to the others. "If Jordan says he's heard it … I believe him."

"It's not possible," Clay said. "Not without a transmitter."

"They are transmitting," the Head replied. "It is a skill they seem to have picked up since the Pulse."

"Wait," Tom said. He raised one hand like a traffic cop, lowered it, began to speak, raised it again. From his place of dubious shelter at Headmaster Ardai's side, Jordan watched him closely. At last Tom said, "Are we talking telepathy here?"

"I should guess that's not exactly le mot juste for this particular phenomenon," the Head answered, "but why stick at technicalities? I would be willing to wager all the frozen hamburgers remaining in my cooler that the word has been used among you before today."

"You'd win double burgers," Clay said.

"Well yeah, but the flocking thing is different," Tom said.

"Because?" The Head raised his tangled brows.

"Well, because . . ." Tom couldn't finish, and Clay knew why. It wasn't different. The flocking wasn't human behavior and they'd known it from the moment they'd observed George the mechanic following the woman in the filthy pants suit across Tom's front lawn to Salem Street. He'd been walking so closely behind her that he could have bitten her neck . . . but he hadn't. And why? Because for the phone-crazies, biting was done, flocking had begun.

At least, biting their own kind was done. Unless—

"Professor Ardai, at the beginning they killed everyone . . ."

"Yes," the Head agreed. "We were very lucky to escape, weren't we, Jordan?"

Jordan shuddered and nodded. "The kids ran everywhere. Even some of the teachers. Killing . . . biting . . . babbling nonsense stuff. . . I hid in one of the greenhouses for a while."

"And I in the attic of this very house," the Head added. "I watched out of the small window up there as the campus—the campus I love—literally went to hell."

Jordan said, "Most of the ones who didn't die ran away toward downtown. Now a lot of them are back. Over there." He nodded his head in the general direction of the soccer field.

"All of which leads us to what?" Clay asked.

"I think you know, Mr. Riddell."

"Clay."

"Clay, fine. I think what's happening now is more than temporary anarchy. I think it's the start of a war. It's going to be a short but extremely nasty one."

"Don't you think you're overstating—"

"I don't. While I have only my own observations to go on—mine and Jordan's—we've had a very large flock to observe, and we've seen them going and coming as well as. . .resting, shall we say. They've stopped killing each other, but they continue to kill the people we would classify as normal. I call that warlike behavior."

"You've actually seen them killing normals?" Tom asked. Beside him, Alice opened her pack, removed the Baby Nike, and held it in her hand.

The Head looked at him gravely. "I have. I'm sorry to say that Jordan has, too."

"We couldn't help," Jordan said. His eyes were leaking. "There were too many. It was a man and a woman, see? I don't know what they were doing on campus so close to dark, but they sure couldn't've known about Tonney Field. She was hurt. He was helping her along. They ran into about twenty of them on their way back from town. The man tried to carry her." Jordan's voice began to break. "On his own he might have gotten away, but with her. . . he only made it as far as Horton Hall. That's a dorm. That's where he fell down and they caught them. They —"

Jordan abruptly buried his head against the old man's coat—a charcoal gray number this afternoon. The Head's big hand stroked the back of Jordan's smooth neck.

"They seem to know their enemies," the Head mused. "It may well have been part of the original message, don't you think?"

"Maybe," Clay said. It made a nasty sort of sense.

"As to what they are doing at night as they lie there so still and open-eyed, listening to their music . . ." The Head sighed, took a handkerchief from one of his coat pockets, and wiped the boy's eyes with it in matter-of-fact fashion. Clay saw he was both very frightened and very sure of whatever conclusion he had drawn. "I think they're rebooting," he said.

"You note the red lamps, don't you?" the Head asked in his carrying I-will-be-heard-all-the-way-to-the-back-of-the-lecture-hall voice. "I count at least sixty-thr—"

"Hush up!" Tom hissed. He did everything but clap a hand over the old man's mouth.

The Head looked at him calmly. "Have you forgotten what I said last night about musical chairs, Tom?"

Tom, Clay, and Ardai were standing just beyond the turnstiles, with the Tonney Field archway at their backs. Alice had stayed at Cheatham Lodge with Jordan, by mutual agreement. The music currently drifting up from the prep-school soccer field was a jazz-instrumental version of "The Girl from Ipanema." Clay thought it was probably cutting-edge stuff if you were a phone-crazy.

"No," Tom said. "As long as the music doesn't stop, we have nothing to worry about. I just don't want to be the guy who gets his throat torn out by an insomniac exception to the rule."

"You won't."

"How can you be so positive, sir?" Tom asked.

"Because, to make a small literary pun, we cannot call it sleep. Come."

He started down the concrete ramp the players once took to reach the field, saw that Tom and Clay were hanging back, and looked at them patiently. "Little knowledge is gained without risk," he said, "and at this point, I would say knowledge is critical, wouldn't you? Come."

They followed his rapping cane down the ramp toward the field, Clay a little ahead of Tom. Yes, he could see the red power-lamps of the boomboxes circling the field. Sixty or seventy looked about right. Good-sized sound-systems spotted at ten– or fifteen-foot intervals, each one surrounded with bodies. By starlight those bodies were an eye-boggling sight. They weren't stacked—each had his or her own space—but not so much as an inch had been wasted. Even the arms had been interwoven, so that the impression was one of paper dolls carpeting the field, rank on rank, while that music—Like something you'd hear in a supermarket, Clay thought—rose in the dark. Something else rose, as well: a sallow smell of dirt and rotting vegetables, with a thicker odor of human waste and putrefaction lingering just beneath.

The Head skirted the goal, which had been pushed aside, overturned, its netting shredded. Here, where the lake of bodies started, lay a young man of about thirty with jagged bite-marks running up one arm to the sleeve of his NASCAR T-shirt. The bites looked infected. In one hand he held a red cap that made Clay think of Alice's pet sneaker. He stared dully up at the stars as Bette Midler once more began singing about the wind beneath her wings.

"Hi!" the Head cried in his rusty, piercing voice. He poked the young man briskly in the middle with the tip of his cane, pushing in until the young man broke wind. "Hi, I say!"

"Stop it!" Tom almost groaned.

The Head gave him a look of tight-lipped scorn, then worked the tip of his cane into the cap the young man was holding. He flicked it away. The cap sailed about ten feet and landed on the face of a middle-aged woman. Clay watched, fascinated, as it slid partially aside, revealing one rapt and blinkless eye.

The young man reached up with dreamy slowness and clutched the hand that had been holding the cap into a fist. Then he subsided.

"He thinks he's holding it again," Clay whispered, fascinated.

"Perhaps," the Head replied, without much interest. He poked the tip of his cane against one of the young man's infected bites. It should have hurt like hell, but the young man didn't react, only went on staring up at the sky as Bette Midler gave way to Dean Martin. "I could put my cane right through his throat and he wouldn't try to stop me. Nor would those around him spring to his defense, although in the daytime I have no doubt they'd tear me limb from limb."

Tom was squatting by one of the ghetto blasters. "There are batteries in this," he said. "I can tell by the weight."

"Yes. In all of them. They do seem to need batteries." The Head considered, then added something Clay could have done without. "At least so far."

"We could wade right in, couldn't we?" Clay said. "We could wipe them out the way hunters exterminated passenger pigeons back in the 1880s."

The Head nodded. "Bashed their little brains out as they sat on the ground, didn't they? Not a bad analogy. But I'd make slow work of it with my cane. You'd make slow work of it even with your automatic weapon, I'm afraid."

"I don't have enough bullets, in any case. There must be . . ." Clay ran his eye over the packed bodies again. Looking at them made his head hurt. "There must be six or seven hundred. And that's not even counting the ones under the bleachers."

"Sir? Mr. Ardai?" It was Tom. "When did you . . . how did you first . . .?"

"How did I determine the depth of this trance state? Is that what you're asking me?"

Tom nodded.

"I came out the first night to observe. The flock was much smaller then, of course. I was drawn to them out of simple but overwhelming curiosity. Jordan wasn't with me. Switching to a nighttime existence has been rather hard for him, I'm afraid."

"You risked your life, you know," Clay said.

"I had little choice," the Head replied. "It was like being hypnotized. I quickly grasped the fact that they were unconscious even though their eyes were open, and a few simple experiments with the tip of my cane confirmed the depth of the state."

Clay thought of the Head's limp, thought of asking him if he'd considered what would have happened to him if he'd been wrong and they'd come after him, and held his tongue. The Head would no doubt reiterate what he'd already said: no knowledge obtained without risk. Jordan was right—this was one very old-school dude. Clay certainly wouldn't have wanted to be fourteen and standing on his disciplinary carpet.

Ardai, meanwhile, was shaking his head at him. "Six or seven hundred's a very low estimate, Clay. This is a regulation-size soccer field. That's six thousand square yards."

"How many?"

"The way they're packed together? I should say a thousand at the very least."

"And they're not really here at all, are they? You're sure of that."

"I am. And what comes back—a little more each day, Jordan says the same, and he's an acute observer, you may trust me on that—is not what they were. Which is to say, not human."

"Can we go back to the Lodge now?" Tom asked. He sounded sick.

"Of course," the Head agreed.

"Just a second," Clay said. He knelt beside the young man in the NASCAR T-shirt. He didn't want to do it—he couldn't help thinking that the hand which had clutched for the red cap would now clutch at him – but he made himself. Down here at ground level the stink was worse. He had believed he was getting used to it, but he had been wrong.

Tom began, "Clay, what are you—"

"Quiet." Clay leaned toward the young man's mouth, which was partly open. He hesitated, then made himself lean closer, until he could see the dim shine of spit on the man's lower lip. At first he thought it might only be his imagination, but another two inches—he was now almost close enough to kiss the not-sleeping thing with Ricky Craven on its chest– took care of that.

It's just little, Jordan had said. Not hardly a whisper. . . but you can hear it.

Clay heard it, the vocal by some trick just a syllable or two ahead of the one coming from the linked boomboxes: Dean Martin singing "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime."

He stood up, nearly screaming at the pistol-shot sound of his own knees cracking. Tom held up his lantern, looking at him, stare-eyed. "What? What? You're not going to say that kid was—"

Clay nodded. "Come on. Let's go back."

Halfway up the ramp he grabbed the Head roughly by the shoulder. Ardai turned to face him, seemingly not disturbed to be handled so.

"You're right, sir. We have to get rid of them. As many as we can, and as fast as we can. This may be the only chance we get. Or do you think I'm wrong?"

"No," the Head replied. "Unfortunately, I don't. As I said, this is war—or so I believe—and what one does in war is kill one's enemies. Why don't we go back and talk it over? We could have hot chocolate. I like a tiny splash of bourbon in mine, barbarian that I am."

At the top of the ramp, Clay spared one final look back. Tonney Field was dark, but under strong northern starlight not too dark to make out the carpet of bodies spread from end to end and side to side. He thought you might not know what you were looking at if you just happened to stumble on it, but once you did . . . once you did . . .

His eyes played him a funny trick and for a moment he almost thought he could see them breathing—all eight hundred or a thousand of them– as one organism. That frightened him badly and he turned to catch up to Tom and Headmaster Ardai, almost running.

The head made hot chocolate in the kitchen and they drank it in the formal parlor, by the light of two gas lanterns. Clay thought the old man would suggest they go out to Academy Avenue later on, trolling for more volunteers in Ardai's Army, but he seemed satisfied with what he had.

The gasoline-pump at the motor pool, the Head told them, drew from a four-hundred-gallon overhead tank—all they'd have to do was pull a plug. And there were thirty-gallon sprayers in the greenhouse. At least a dozen. They could load up a pickup truck with them, perhaps, and back it down one of the ramps—

"Wait," Clay said. "Before we start talking strategy, if you have a theory about all this, sir, I'd like to hear it."

"Nothing so formal," the old man said. "But Jordan and I have observation, we have intuition, and we have a fair amount of experience between the two of us—"

"I'm a computer geek," Jordan said over his mug of hot chocolate. Clay found the child's glum assurance oddly charming. "A total McNerd. Been on em my whole life, just about. Those things're rebooting, all right. They might as well have software installation, please stand by blinking on their foreheads."

"I don't understand you," Tom said.

"I do," Alice said. "Jordan, you think the Pulse really was a Pulse, don't you? Everyone who heard it. . . they got their hard drives wiped."

"Well,yeah," Jordan said. He was too polite to say Well, duh.

Tom looked at Alice, perplexed. Only Clay knew Tom wasn't dumb, and he didn't believe Tom was that slow.

"You had a computer," Alice said. "I saw it in your little office."

"Yes—"

"And you've installed software, right?"

"Sure, but—" Tom stopped, looking at Alice fixedly. She looked back. "Their brains'? You mean their brains'?"

"What do you think a brain is?" Jordan said. "A big old hard drive. Organic circuitry. No one knows how many bytes. Say giga to the power of a googolplex. An infinity of bytes." He put his hands to his ears, which were small and neatly made. "Right in between here."

"I don't believe it," Tom said, but he spoke in a small voice and there was a sick look on his face. Clay thought he did believe it. Thinking back to the madness that had convulsed Boston, Clay had to admit the idea was persuasive. It was also terrible: millions, perhaps even billions, of brains all wiped clean at the same time, the way you could wipe an old-fashioned computer disc with a powerful magnet.

He found himself remembering Pixie Dark, the friend of the girl with the peppermint-colored cell phone. Who are you? What's happening? Pixie Dark had cried. Who are you? Who am I? Then she had smacked herself repeatedly in the forehead with the heel of her hand and had gone running full tilt into a lamppost, not once but twice, smashing her expensive orthodontic work to jagged pieces.

Who are you? Who am I?

It hadn't been her cell phone. She had only been listening in and hadn't gotten a full dose.

Clay, who thought in images rather than words a good deal of the time, now got a vivid mental picture of a computer screen filling up with those words: WHO ARE YOU WHO AM I WHO ARE YOU WHO AM I WHO ARE YOU who AM I who ARE YOU WHO am I, and finally, at the bottom, as bleak and inarguable as Pixie Dark's fate:

SYSTEM FAILURE.

Pixie Dark as a partially wiped hard drive? It was horrible, but it felt like the stone truth.

"I majored in English, but as a young man I read a great deal of psychology," the Head told them. "I began with Freud, of course, everyone begins with Freud . . . then Jung . . . Adler . . . worked my way around the whole ballfield from there. Lurking behind all theories of how the mind works is a greater theory: Darwin's. In Freud's vocabulary, the idea of survival as the prime directive is expressed by the concept of the id. In Jung's, by the rather grander idea of blood consciousness. Neither man, I think, would argue with the idea that if all conscious thought, all memory, all ratiocinative ability, were to be stripped from a human mind in a moment, what would remain would be pure and terrible."

He paused, looking around for comment. None of them said anything. The Head nodded as if satisfied and resumed.

"Although neither the Freudians nor the Jungians come right out and say it, they strongly suggest that we may have a core, a single basic carrier wave, or—to use language with which Jordan is comfortable—a single line of written code which cannot be stripped."

"The PD," Jordan said. "The prime directive."

"Yes," the Head agreed. "At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the Pulse exposed five days ago."

"I refuse to believe that we were lunatics and murderers before we were anything else," Tom said. "Christ, man, what about the Parthenon? What about Michelangelo's David? What about that plaque on the moon that says, 'We came in peace for all mankind'?"

"That plaque also has Richard Nixon's name on it," Ardai said drily. "A Quaker, but hardly a man of peace. Mr. McCourt—Tom—I have no interest in handing down an indictment of mankind. If I did, I'd point out that for every Michelangelo there's a Marquis de Sade, for every Gandhi an Eichmann, for every Martin Luther King an Osama bin Laden. Leave it at this: man has come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and anything that gets in his way."

He leaned forward, surveying them with his bright eyes.

"Mankind's intelligence finally trumped mankind's killer instinct, and reason came to rule over mankind's maddest impulses. That, too, was survival. I believe the final showdown between the two may have come in October of 1963, over a handful of missiles in Cuba, but that is a discussion for another day. The fact is, most of us had sublimated the worst in us until the Pulse came along and stripped away everything but that red core."

"Someone let the Tasmanian devil out of its cage," Alice murmured. "Who?"

"That need not concern us, either," the Head replied. "I suspect they had no idea of what they were doing . . . or how much they were doing. Based upon what must have been hurried experiments over a few years– perhaps even months—they may have thought they would unleash a destructive storm of terrorism. Instead they unleashed a tsunami of untold violence, and it's mutating. Horrible as the current days may now seem, we may later view them as a lull between one storm and the next. These days may also be our only chance to make a difference."

"What do you mean, mutating?" Clay asked.

But the Head didn't answer. Instead he turned to twelve-year-old Jordan. "If you please, young man."

"Yes. Well." Jordan paused to think. "Your conscious mind only uses a tiny percentage of your brain's capacity. You guys know that, right?"

"Yes," Tom said, a bit indulgently. "So I've read."

Jordan nodded. "Even when you add in all the autonomic functions they control, plus the subconscious stuff—dreams, blink-think, the sex drive, all that jazz—our brains are barely ticking over."

"Holmes, you astound me," Tom said.

"Don't be a wiseass, Tom!" Alice said, and Jordan gave her a decidedly starry-eyed smile.

"I'm not," Tom said. "The kid is good."

"Indeed he is," the Headmaster said drily. "Jordan may have occasional problems with the King's English, but he did not get his scholarship for excelling at tiddlywinks." He observed the boy's discomfort and gave Jordan's hair an affectionate scruff with his bony fingers. "Continue, please."

"Well. . ." Jordan struggled, Clay could see it, and then seemed to find his rhythm again. "If your brain really was a hard drive, the can would be almost empty." He saw only Alice understood this. "Put it this way: the info strip would say something like 2 percent in use, 98 percent

available. No one has any real idea what that ninety-eight percent is for, but there's plenty of potential there. Stroke victims, for instance . . . they sometimes access previously dormant areas of their brains in order to walk and talk again. It's like their brains wire around the blighted area. The lights go on in a similar area of the brain, but on the other side."

"You study this stuff?" Clay asked.

"It's a natural outgrowth of my interest in computers and cybernetics," Jordan said, shrugging. "Also, I read a lot of cyberpunk science fiction. William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley—"

"Neal Stephenson?" Alice asked.

Jordan grinned radiantly. "Neal Stephenson's a god."

"Back on message," the Head chided . . . but gently.

Jordan shrugged. "If you wipe a computer hard drive, it can't regenerate spontaneously . . . except maybe in a Greg Bear novel." He grinned again, but this time it was quick and, Clay thought, rather nervous. Part of it was Alice, who clearly knocked the kid out. "People are different."

"But there's a huge leap between learning to walk again after a stroke and being able to power a bunch of boomboxes by telepathy," Tom said. "A quantum leap." He looked around self-consciously as the word telepathy came out of his mouth, as if expecting them to laugh. No one did.

"Yeah, but a stroke victim, even someone who has a bad one, is light-years different from what happened to people who were on their cells during the Pulse," Jordan replied. "Me and the Head—the Head and I —think that in addition to stripping people's brains all the way to that one unerasable line of code, the Pulse also kicked something on. Something that's probably been sitting inside all of us for millions of years, buried in that ninety-eight percent of dormant hard drive."

Clay's hand stole to the butt of the revolver he had picked up off the floor in Beth Nickerson's kitchen. "A trigger," he said.

Jordan lit up. "Yeah, exactly! A mutative trigger. It never could have happened without this, like, total erasure on a grand scale. Because what's emerging, what's building up in those people out there . . . only they're no longer people, what's building up is—"

"It's a single organism," the Head interrupted. "This is what we believe."

"Yes, but more than just a flock," Jordan said. "Because what they can do with the CD players may only be the start, like a little kid learning to put his shoes on. Think about what they might be able to do in a week. Or a month. Or a year."

"You could be wrong," Tom said, but his voice was as dry as a breaking stick.

"He could also be right," Alice said.

"Oh, I'm sure he's right," the Head put in. He sipped his spiked hot chocolate. "Of course, I'm an old man and my time is almost over in any case. I'll abide by any decision you make." A slight pause. The eyes flicked from Clay to Alice to Tom. "As long as it's the right one, of course."

Jordan said: "The flocks will try to come together, you know. If they don't hear each other already, they will real soon."

"Crap," Tom said uneasily. "Ghost stories."

"Maybe," Clay said, "but here's something to think about. Right now the nights are ours. What if they decide they need less sleep? Or that they're not afraid of the dark?"

No one said anything for several moments. A wind was rising outside. Clay sipped his hot chocolate, which had never been much more than tepid and was now almost cold. When he looked up again, Alice had put hers aside and was holding her Nike talisman instead.

"I want to wipe them out," she said. "The ones on the soccer field, I want to wipe them out. I don't say kill them because I think Jordan's right, and I don't want to do it for the human race. I want to do it for my mother and my dad, because he's gone, too. I know he is, I feel it. I want to do it for my friends Vickie and Tess. They were good friends, but they had cell phones, they never went anywhere without them, and I know what they're like now and where they're sleeping: someplace just like that fucking soccer field." She glanced at the Head, flushing. "'Scuse me, sir."

The Head waved her apology away.

"Can we do that?" she asked him. "Can we wipe them out?"

Charles Ardai, who had been winding down his career as Gaiten Academy's interim Headmaster when the world ended, bared his eroded teeth in a grin Clay would have given much to have captured with pen or brush; there was not a single ounce of pity in it. "Miss Maxwell, we can try," he said.

At four o'clock the next morning, tom mccourt sat on a picnic table between the two Gaiten Academy greenhouses, which had both sustained serious damage since the Pulse. His feet, now wearing the Reeboks he'd donned back in Malden, were on one of the benches, and his head lay on his arms, which rested on his knees. The wind blew his hair first one way, then the other. Alice sat across from him with her chin propped on her hands and the rays of several flashlights striking angles and shadows across her face. The harsh light made her look pretty in spite of her obvious weariness; at her age, all light was still flattering. The Head, sitting next to her, only looked exhausted. In the closer of the two greenhouses, two Coleman gas-lanterns floated like uneasy spirits.

The Colemans converged at the near end of the greenhouse. Clay and Jordan used the door, although huge holes in the glass paneling had been opened on either side. A moment later, Clay sat down next to Tom and Jordan resumed his usual spot next to the Head. The boy smelled of gasoline and fertilizer, even more strongly of dejection. Clay dropped several sets of keys on the table amid the flashlights. As far as he was concerned, they could stay there until some archaeologist discovered them four millennia from now.

"I'm sorry," Headmaster Ardai said softly. "It seemed so simple."

"Yeah," Clay said. It had seemed simple: fill the greenhouse sprayers with gasoline, load the sprayers into the back of a pickup truck, drive across Tonney Field, wetting down both sides as they went, toss a match. He thought to tell Ardai that George W Bush's Iraq adventure had probably looked equally simple—load the sprayers, toss a match—and didn't. It would have been pointlessly cruel.

"Tom?" Clay asked. "You okay?" He had already realized that Tom didn't have great reserves of stamina.

"Yeah, just tired." He raised his head and gave Clay a smile. "Not used to the night shift. What do we do now?"

"Go to bed, I guess," Clay said. "It'll be dawn in another forty minutes or so." The sky had already begun to lighten in the east.

"It's not fair," Alice said. She brushed angrily at her cheeks. "It's not fair, we tried so hard!"

They had tried hard, but nothing had come easily. Every small (and ultimately meaningless) victory had been the sort of maddening struggle his mother had called a Bolshie shit-pull. Part of Clay did want to blame the Head . . . also himself, for not taking Ardai's sprayer idea with a grain of salt. Part of him now thought that going along with an elderly English teacher's plan to firebomb a soccer field was a little like taking a knife to a gunfight. Still . . . yeah, it had seemed like a good idea.

Until, that was, they discovered the motor pool's gasoline storage tank was inside a locked shed. They'd spent nearly half an hour in the nearby office, scrounging by lantern-light through maddeningly unmarked keys on a board behind the superintendent's desk. It was Jordan who finally found the key that unlocked the shed door.

Then they discovered that One would only have to pull a plug was not exactly the case. There was a cap, not a plug. And like the shed in which the tank resided, the cap was locked. Back to the office; another scrounge by lantern-light; finally a key that did indeed seem to fit the cap. It was Alice who pointed out that since the cap was on the bottom of the tank, assuring gravity-feed in case of a power outage, they would have a flood on their hands without a hose or a siphon. They spent an hour looking for a hose that might fit and couldn't find anything that looked even close. Tom found a small funnel, which sent them all into moderate hysterics.

And because none of the truck keys were marked (at least in ways non-motor-pool employees could understand), locating the right set became another process of trial and error. This one went faster, at least, because there were only eight trucks parked behind the garage.

And last, the greenhouses. There they discovered only eight sprayers, not a dozen, with a capacity of not thirty gallons each but ten. They might be able to fill them from the gasoline storage tank, but they would be drenched in the process, and the result would be a mere eighty gallons of usable, sprayable gas. It was the idea of wiping out a thousand phone-crazies with eighty gallons of regular that had driven Tom, Alice, and the Head out to the picnic bench. Clay and Jordan had hung in a while longer, looking for bigger sprayers, but they had found none.

"We found a few little leaf-sprayers, though," Clay said. "You know, what they used to call flit-guns."

"Also," Jordan said, "the big sprayers in there are all full of weed-killer or plant-food or something. We'd have to start by dumping them all out, and that would mean putting on masks just to make sure we didn't gas ourselves or something."

"Reality bites," Alice said morosely. She looked at her baby sneaker for a moment, then tucked it away in her pocket.

Jordan picked up the keys they had matched to one of the maintenance pickups. "We could drive downtown," he said. "There's a Trustworthy Hardware. They must have sprayers."

Tom shook his head. "It's over a mile and the main drag's full of wrecks and abandoned vehicles. We might be able to get around some, but not all. And driving over the lawns is out of the question. The houses are just too close together. There are reasons everybody's on foot." They had seen a few people on bicycles, but not many; even the ones equipped with lights were dangerous if ridden at any speed.

"Would it be possible for a light truck to negotiate the side streets?" the Head asked.

Clay said, "We could explore the possibility tomorrow night, I suppose. Scout out a path in advance, on foot, then come back for the truck." He considered. "They'd probably have all sorts of hose in a hardware store, too."

"You don't sound exactly jazzed," Alice said.

Clay sighed. "It doesn't take much to block little streets. We'd end up doing a lot of donkey-work even if we got luckier than we did tonight. I just don't know. Maybe it'll look better to me after some rest."

"Of course it will," the Head agreed, but he sounded hollow. "To all of us."

"What about the gas station across from the school?" Jordan asked without much hope.

"What gas station?" Alice asked.

"He's talking about the Citgo," the Head replied. "Same problem, Jordan—plenty of gasoline in the tanks under the pumps, but no power. And I doubt if they have much in the way of containers beyond a few two– or five-gallon gasoline cans. I really think—" But he didn't say what he really thought. He broke off. "What is it, Clay?"

Clay was remembering the trio ahead of them limping past that gas station, one of the men with an arm around the woman's waist. "Academy Grove Citgo," he said. "That's the name, isn't it?"

"Yes—"

"But they didn't just sell gasoline, I think." He didn't just think, he knew. Because of the two trucks parked on the side. He had seen them and hadn't thought anything of them. Not then, he hadn't. No reason to.

"I don't know what you—" the Head began, then stopped. His eyes met Clay's. His eroded teeth once more made their appearance in that singularly pitiless smile. "Oh," he said. "Oh. Oh my. Oh my, yes."

Tom was looking between them with mounting perplexity. So was Alice. Jordan merely waited.

"Would you mind telling the rest of us what you two are communing about?" Tom asked.

Clay was ready to—he already saw clearly how it would work, and it was too good not to share—when the music from Tonney Field died away. It didn't click off, as it usually did when they woke up in the morning; it went in a kind of swoop, as if someone had just kicked the source down an elevator shaft.

"They're up early," Jordan said in a low voice.

Tom gripped Clay's forearm. "It's not the same," he said. "And one of those damned ghetto blasters is still playing . . . I can hear it, very faint."

The wind was strong, and Clay knew it was blowing from the direction of the soccer field because of the ripe smells it carried: decaying food, decaying flesh, hundreds of unwashed bodies. It also carried the ghostly sound of Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers playing "Baby Elephant Walk."

Then, from somewhere to the northwest—maybe ten miles away, maybe thirty, it was hard to tell how far the wind might have carried it—came a spectral, somehow mothlike moaning sound. There was silence . . . silence . . . and then the not-waking, not-sleeping creatures on the Tonney soccer field answered in kind. Their moan was much louder, a hollow, belling ghost-groan that rose toward the black and starry sky.

Alice had covered her mouth. The baby sneaker jutted upward from her hands. Her eyes bulged on either side of it. Jordan had thrown his arms around the Head's waist and buried his face against the old man's side.

"Look, Clay!" Tom said. He got to his feet and tottered toward the grassy aisle between the two shattered greenhouses, pointing at the sky as he went. "Do you see? My God, do you see?"

To the northwest, from where the distant groan had risen, a reddish orange glow had bloomed on the horizon. It strengthened as he watched, the wind bore that terrible sound again . . . and once more it was answered with a similar but much louder groan from Tonney Field.

Alice joined them, then the Head, walking with his arm around Jordan's shoulders.

"What's over there?" Clay asked, pointing toward the glow. It had already begun to wane again.

"It might be Glen's Falls," the Headmaster said. "Or it might be Littleton."

"Wherever it is, there's shrimp on the barbie," Tom said. "They're burning. And our bunch knows. They heard."

"Or felt," Alice said. She shuddered, then straightened and bared her teeth. "I hope they did!"

As if in answer, there was another groan from Tonney Field: many voices raised as one in a cry of sympathy and—perhaps—shared agony. The one boombox—it was the master, Clay assumed, the one with an actual compact disc in it—continued to play. Ten minutes later, the others joined in once more. The music—it now was "Close to You," by The Carpenters—swooped up, just as it had previously swooped down. By then Headmaster Ardai, limping noticeably on his cane, had led them back to Cheatham Lodge. Not long after that, the music stopped again . . . but this time it simply clicked off, as it had the previous morning. From far away, carried across God alone knew how many miles by the wind, came the faint pop of a gunshot. Then the world was eerily and completely silent, waiting for the dark to give place to the day.

As the sun began to spoke its first red rays through the trees on the eastern horizon, they watched the phone-crazies once again begin leaving the soccer field in close-order patterns, headed for downtown Gaiten and the surrounding neighborhoods. They fanned out as they went, headed downhill toward Academy Avenue as if nothing untoward had happened near the end of the night. But Clay didn't trust that. He thought they had better do their business at the Citgo station quickly, today, if they intended to do it at all. Going out in the daylight might mean shooting some of them, but as long as they only moved en masse at the beginning and end of the day, he was willing to take that risk.

They watched what Alice called "the dawn of the dead" from the dining room. Afterward, Tom and the Head went into the kitchen. Clay found them sitting at the table in a bar of sunshine and drinking tepid coffee. Before Clay could begin explaining what he wanted to do later in the day, Jordan touched his wrist.

"Some of the crazies are still there," he said. And, in a lower voice: "I went to school with some of them."

Tom said, "I thought they'd all be shopping Kmart by now, looking for Blue Light Specials."

"You better check it out," Alice said from the doorway. "I'm not sure it's another—what-would-you-call-it, developmental step forward, but it might be. It probably is."

"Sure it is," Jordan said gloomily.

The phone-crazies who had stayed behind—Clay thought it was a squad of about a hundred—were removing the dead from beneath the bleachers. At first they simply carried them off into the parking lot south of the field and behind a long low brick building. They came back empty-handed.

"That building's the indoor track," the Head told them. "It's also where all the sports gear is stored. There's a steep drop-off on the far side. I imagine they're throwing the bodies over the edge."

"You bet," Jordan said. He sounded sick. "It's all marshy down there. They'll rot."

"They were rotting anyway, Jordan," Tom said gently.

"I know," he said, sounding sicker than ever, "but they'll rot even faster in the sun." A pause. "Sir?"

"Yes, Jordan?"

"I saw Noah Chutsky. From your Drama Reading Club."

The Head patted the boy's shoulder. He was very pale. "Never mind."

"It's hard not to," Jordan whispered. "He took my picture once. With his . . . with his you-know."

Then, a new wrinkle. Two dozen of the worker-bees peeled off from the main group with no pause for discussion and headed for the shattered greenhouses, moving in a V-shape that reminded the watchers of migrating geese. The one Jordan had identified as Noah Chutsky was among these. The rest of the body-removal squad watched them go for a moment, then marched back down the ramps, three abreast, and resumed fishing dead bodies out from under the bleachers.

Twenty minutes later the greenhouse party returned, now spread out in a single line. Some were still empty-handed, but most had acquired wheelbarrows or handcarts of the sort used to transport large bags of lime or fertilizer. Soon the phone-crazies were using the carts and barrows to dispose of the bodies, and their work went faster.

"It's a step forward, all right," Tom said.

"More than one," the Head added. "Cleaning house; using tools to do it."

Clay said, "I don't like this."

Jordan looked up at him, his face pale and tired and far older than its years. "Join the club," he said.

They slept until one in the afternoon. then, after confirming that the body detail had finished its work and gone to join the rest of the foragers, they went down to the fieldstone pillars marking the entrance to Gaiten Academy. Alice had scoffed at Clay's idea that he and Tom should do this on their own. "Never mind that Batman and Robin crap," she said.

"Oh my, I always wanted to be the Boy Wonder," Tom said with a trace of a lisp, but when she gave him a humorless look, her sneaker (now beginning to look a bit tattered) clasped in one hand, he wilted. "Sorry."

"You can go across to the gas station on your own," she said. "That much makes sense. But the rest of us will stand lookout on the other side."

The Head had suggested that Jordan should stay behind at the Lodge. Before the boy could respond—and he looked ready to do so hotly—Alice asked, "How are your eyes, Jordan?"

He had given her a smile, once more accompanied by the slightly starry look. "Good. Fine."

"And you've played video games? The ones where you shoot?"

"Sure, a ton."

She handed him her pistol. Clay could see him quiver slightly, like a tapped tuning fork, when their fingers touched. "If I tell you to point and shoot—or if Headmaster Ardai tells you—will you do it?"

"Sure."

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

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

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

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

"Are you ready?" he asked Tom.

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

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

The message scrawled in pink chalk on the macadam was

"Does that mean anything to you?" Tom asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Aw!" said the woman. She held out her hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I learned on a standard. Can you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"One forward should be enough," Clay said.

"Based on the way they're parked, I think you're going to have to start by finding reverse."

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

And that was what they did.

Academy slope was what headmaster ardai and his one remaining pupil called the long, rolling hill that dropped from the campus to the main road. The grass was still bright green and only beginning to be littered with fallen leaves. When afternoon gave way to early evening and

Academy Slope was still empty—no sign of returning phone-crazies– Alice began to pace the main hall of Cheatham Lodge, pausing in each circuit only long enough to look out the bay window of the living room. It offered a fine view of the Slope, the two main lecture halls, and Tonney Field. The sneaker was once more tied to her wrist.

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

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

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

"She's like Ahab on the prod for Moby," the Head remarked.

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

"I beg your pardon, Tom?" the Head asked.

Tom waved it away.

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

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

"She's pretty freaked-out, isn't she, sir?"

"Aren't you, Jordan?"

"Yes," Jordan said in a small voice. "I'm Freak City."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"All I was going to say is that it'll be what it is," he said.

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

"Just calm down, Alice. Watch."

"I'll try, okay? I'll try."

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

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

"I was worried for nothing, wasn't I?" Alice said. "Sometimes I'm a putz. That's what my father says."

"No," the Head told her. "All the putzes had cell phones, dear. That's why they're out there and you're in here, with us."

Tom said: "I wonder if Rafe's still making out okay."

"I wonder if Johnny is," Clay said. "Johnny and Sharon."

At ten o'clock on that windy autumn night, under a moon now entering its last quarter, Clay and Tom stood in the band alcove at the home end of the Tonney soccer field. Directly in front of them was a waist-high concrete barrier that had been heavily padded on the playing-field side. On their side were a few rusting music stands and a drift of litter that was ankle-deep; the wind blew the torn bags and scraps of paper in here, and here they came to rest. Behind and above them, back at the turnstiles, Alice and Jordan flanked the Head, a tall figure propped on a slender rod of cane. Debby Boone's voice rolled across the field in amplified waves of comic majesty. Ordinarily she would be followed by Lee Ann Womack singing "I Hope You Dance," then back to Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers, but perhaps not tonight.

The wind was freshening. It brought them the smell of rotting bodies from the marsh behind the indoor-track building and the aroma of dirt and sweat from the living ones packed together on the field beyond the band alcove. If you can call that living, Clay thought, and flashed himself a small and bitter inside smile. Rationalization was a great human sport, maybe the great human sport, but he would not fool himself tonight: of course they called it living. Whatever they were or whatever they were becoming, they called it living just as he did.

"What are you waiting for?" Tom murmured.

"Nothing," Clay murmured back. "Just. . . nothing."

From the holster Alice had found in the Nickerson basement, Clay drew Beth Nickerson's old-fashioned Colt .45 revolver, now once more fully loaded. Alice had offered him the automatic rifle—which so far they had not even test-fired—and he had refused, saying that if the pistol didn't do the job, probably nothing would.

"I don't know why the auto wouldn't be better, if it squirts thirty or forty bullets a second," she said. "You could turn those trucks into cheese-graters."

He had agreed that this might be so, but reminded Alice that their object tonight was not destruction per se but ignition. Then he'd explained the highly illegal nature of the ammunition Arnie Nickerson had obtained for his wife's .45 fraggers. What had once been called dumdum bullets.

"Okay, but if it doesn't work, you can still try Sir Speedy," she'd said. "Unless the guys out there just, you know . . ." She wouldn't actually use the word attack, but had made a little walking motion with the fingers of the hand not holding the sneaker. "In that case, beat feet."

The wind tore a tattered strip of Homecoming Weekend bunting free of the Scoreboard and sent it dancing above the packed sleepers. Around the field, seeming to float in the dark, were the red eyes of the boomboxes, all but one playing without benefit of CDs. The bunting struck the bumper of one of the propane trucks, flapped there several seconds, then slipped free and flew off into the night. The trucks were parked side by side in the middle of the field, rising from the mass of packed forms like weird metal mesas. The phone-crazies slept beneath them and so closely around them that some were crammed up against the wheels. Clay thought again of passenger pigeons, and the way nineteenth-century hunters had brained them on the ground with clubs. The whole species had been wiped out by the beginning of the twentieth . . . but of course they'd only been birds, with little bird-brains, incapable of rebooting.

"Clay?" Tom asked, low. "Are you sure you want to go through with this?"

"No," Clay said. Now that he was face-to-face with it, there were too many unanswered questions. What they would do if it went wrong was only one of them. What they would do if it went right was another. Because passenger pigeons were incapable of revenge. Those things out there, on the other hand—

"But I'm going to."

"Then do it," Tom said. "Because, all else aside, 'You Light Up My Life' blows dead rats in hell."

Clay raised the .45 and held his right wrist firmly with his left hand. He centered the gunsight on the tank of the truck on the left. He would fire twice into that one, then twice into the other one. That would leave one more bullet for each, if necessary. If that didn't work, he could try the automatic weapon Alice had taken to calling Sir Speedy.

"Duck if it goes up," he told Tom.

"Don't worry," Tom said. His face was drawn into a grimace, anticipating the report of the gun and whatever might follow.

Debby Boone was building to a big finish. It suddenly seemed very important to Clay that he beat her. If you miss at this range, you're a monkey, he thought, and pulled the trigger.

There was no chance for a second shot and no need of one. A bright red flower bloomed in the center of the tank, and by its light he saw a deep dent in the previously smooth metal surface. Hell appeared to be inside, and growing. Then the flower was a river, red turning orange-white.

"Down!" he shouted, and pushed Tom's shoulder. He fell on top of the smaller man just as the night became desert noon. There was a huge, whooshing roar followed by a guttering BANG that Clay felt in every bone of his body. Shrapnel shot overhead. He thought Tom screamed but he wasn't sure, because there was another of those whooshing roars and suddenly the air was growing hot, hot, hot.

He seized Tom partly by the scruff of the neck and partly by the collar of his shirt and began to drag him backward up the concrete ramp leading to the turnstiles, his eyes slitted almost completely shut against the enormous glare flowing from the center of the soccer field. Something enormous landed in the auxiliary stands to his right. He thought maybe an engine block. He was pretty sure the shattered bits and twists of metal under his feet had once been Gaiten Academy music stands.

Tom was screaming and his glasses were askew, but he was on his feet and he looked intact. The two of them ran up the ramp like escapees from Gomorrah. Clay could see their shadows, long and spider-thin in front of them, and realized objects were falling all around them: arms, legs, a piece of bumper, a woman's head with the hair blazing. From behind them came a second tremendous BANG —or maybe it was a third—and this time he was the one who screamed. His feet tangled and he went sprawling. The whole world was rapidly building heat and the most incredible light: he felt as if he were standing on God's personal soundstage.

We didn't know what we were doing, he thought, looking at a wad of gum, a tromped Junior Mints box, a blue Pepsi Cola cap. We didn't have a clueand we're going to pay with our fucking lives.

"Get up!" That was Tom, and he thought Tom was screaming, but his voice seemed to be coming from a mile away. He felt Tom's delicate, long-fingered hands yanking at his arm. Then Alice was there, too. Alice was yanking on his other arm, and she was glaring in the light. He could see the sneaker dancing and bobbing from its string on her wrist. She was spattered with blood, bits of cloth, and gobbets of smoking flesh.

Clay scrambled up, then went back to one knee, and Alice hauled him up again by main force. From behind them, propane roared like a dragon. And here came Jordan, with the Head tottering along right behind him, his face rosy and every wrinkle running with sweat.

"No, Jordan, no, just get him out of the way!" Tom yelled, and Jordan pulled the Head aside for them, gripping the old man grimly around the waist when he tottered. A burning torso with a ring in its navel landed at Alice's feet and she booted it off the ramp. Five years of soccer, Clay remembered her saying. A blazing piece of shirt landed on the back of her head and Clay swept it aside before it could set her hair on fire.

At the top of the ramp, a blazing truck tire with half a sheared-off axle still attached leaned against the last row of reserved seats. If it had landed blocking their way, they might have cooked—the Head almost certainly would have. As it was, they were able to slide past, holding their breath against billows of oily smoke. A moment later they were lurching through the turnstile, Jordan on one side of the Head and Clay on the other, the two of them almost carrying the old man along. Clay had his ear boxed twice by the Head's flailing cane, but thirty seconds after passing the tire they were standing beneath Tonney Arch, looking back at the huge column of fire rising above the bleachers and center press box with identical expressions of stupefied disbelief.

A blazing rag of Homecoming bunting floated down to the pavement next to the main ticket booth, trailing a few sparks before coming to rest.

"Did you know that would happen?" Tom asked. His face was white around the eyes, red across the forehead and cheeks. Half his mustache appeared to have been singed off. Clay could hear his voice, but it sounded distant. Everything did. It was as if his ears had been packed with cotton balls, or the shooter's plugs Beth Nickerson's husband Arnie had no doubt made her wear when he took her to their favorite target-range. Where they'd probably shot with their cell phones clipped to one hip and their pagers to the other.

"Did you know?" Tom attempted to shake him, got nothing but a piece of his shirt, and tore it all the way down the front.

"Fuck no, are you insane?" Clay's voice was beyond hoarse, beyond parched; it sounded baked. "You think I would have stood there with a pistol if I'd known? If it hadn't been for that concrete barrier, we would have been cut in two. Or vaporized."

Incredibly, Tom began to grin. "I tore your shirt, Batman."

Clay felt like knocking his head off. Also like hugging and kissing him just because he was still alive.

"I want to go back to the Lodge," Jordan said. The fear in his voice was unmistakable.

"By all means let us remove to a safe distance," the Head agreed. He was trembling badly, his eyes fixed on the inferno rising above the Arch and the bleachers. "Thank God the wind's blowing toward Academy Slope."

"Can you walk, sir?" Tom asked.

"Thank you, yes. If Jordan will assist me, I'm sure I can walk as far as the Lodge."

"We got them," Alice said. She was wiping splatters of gore almost absently from her face, leaving smears of blood. Her eyes were like nothing Clay had ever seen except in a few photographs and some inspired comic art from the 1950s and '60s. He remembered going to a comics convention once, only a kid himself then, and listening to Wallace Wood talk about trying to draw something he called Panic Eye. Now Clay was seeing it in the face of a fifteen-year-old suburban schoolgirl.

"Alice, come on," he said. "We have to go back to the Lodge and get our shit together. We have to get out of here." As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he had to say them again and hear if they had the ring of truth. The second time they sounded more than true; they sounded scared.

She might not have heard. She looked exultant. Stuffed with triumph. Sick with it, like a kid who has eaten too much Halloween candy on the way home. The pupils of her eyes were full of fire. "Nothing could live through that."

Tom gripped Clay's arm. It hurt the way a sunburn hurt. "What's wrong with you?"

"I think we made a mistake," Clay said.

"Is it like in the gas station?" Tom asked him. Behind his crooked spectacles, his eyes were sharp. "When the man and woman were fighting over the damn Tw—"

"No, I just think we made a mistake," Clay said. Actually, it was stronger than that. He knew they had made a mistake. "Come on. We have to go tonight."

"If you say so, okay," Tom said. "Come on, Alice."

She went with them a little way down the path toward the Lodge, where they had left a pair of gas lanterns burning in the big bay window, then turned back for another look. The press box was on fire now, and the bleachers. The stars over the soccer field were gone; even the moon was nothing but a ghost dancing a wild jig in the heat-haze above that fierce gas-jet. "They're dead, they're gone, they're crispy," she said. "Burn, baby, b—"

That was when the cry rose, only now it wasn't coming from Glen's Falls or Littleton ten miles away. It was coming from right behind them. Nor was there anything spectral or wraithlike about it. It was a cry of agony, the scream of something—a single entity, and aware, Clay was certain of it—that had awakened from deep sleep to find it was burning alive.

Alice shrieked and covered her ears, her eyes bulging in the firelight.

"Take it back!" Jordan said, grasping the Head's wrist. "Sir, we have to take it back!"

"Too late, Jordan," Ardai said.

Their knapsacks were a little plumper as they leaned against the front door of Cheatham Lodge an hour later. There were a couple of shirts in each one, plus bags of trail-mix, juice-boxes, and packets of Slim Jims as well as batteries and spare flashlights. Clay had harried Tom and Alice into sweeping their possessions together as quickly as possible, and now he was the one who kept darting into the living room to steal looks out the big window.

The gas-jet over there was finally starting to burn low, but the bleachers were still blazing and so was the press box. Tonney Arch itself had caught and glared in the night like a horseshoe in a smithy. Nothing that had been on that field could still be alive—Alice had been right about that much, surely—but twice on their return to the Lodge (the Head shambling like an old drunk in spite of their best efforts to support him), they had heard those ghostly cries coming down the wind from other flocks. Clay told himself he didn't hear anger in those cries, it was just his imagination—his guilty imagination, his murderer's imagination, his mass murderer's imagination—but he didn't completely believe it.

It had been a mistake, but what else could they have done? He and Tom had felt their gathering power just that afternoon, had seen it, and that had been only two of them, just two. How could they have let that go on? Just let it grow?

"Damned if you do, damned if you stand pat," he said under his breath, and turned from the window. He didn't even know how long he'd been looking at the burning stadium and resisted the urge to check his watch. It would be easy to give in to the panic-rat, he was close to it now, and if he gave in, it would travel to the others quickly. Starting with Alice. Alice had managed to get herself back under some sort of control, but it was thin. Thin enough to read a newspaper through, his bingo-playing mother might have said. Although a kid herself, Alice had managed to keep herself shiny-side up mostly for the other kid's sake, so he wouldn't give way entirely.

The other kid. Jordan.

Clay hurried back into the front hall, noted there was still no fourth pack by the door, and saw Tom coming down the stairs. Alone.

"Where's the kid?" Clay asked. His ears had started to clear a little, but his voice still sounded too far away, and like a stranger's. He had an idea that was going to continue for a while. "You were supposed to be helping him put some stuff together—Ardai said he brought a pack over with him from that dorm of his—"

"He won't come." Tom rubbed the side of his face. He looked tired, sad, distracted. With half his mustache gone, he looked ludicrous as well.

"What?"

"Lower your voice, Clay. I don't make the news, I just report it."

"Then tell me what you're talking about, for Christ's sake."

"He won't go without the Head. He said, 'You can't make me.' And if you're really serious about going tonight, I believe he's right."

Alice came tearing out of the kitchen. She had washed up, tied her hair back, and put on a new shirt—it hung almost to her knees—but her skin glowed with the same burn Clay felt on his own. He supposed they should count themselves lucky that they weren't popping blisters.

"Alice," he began, "I need you to exercise your womanly powers over Jordan. He's being—"

She steamed past as if he hadn't spoken, fell on her knees, seized her pack, and tore it open. He watched, perplexed, as she began to pull out the stuff inside. He looked at Tom and saw an expression of understanding and sympathy dawning on Tom's face.

"What?" Clay asked. "What, for chrissake?" He had felt an all too similar exasperated annoyance toward Sharon during the last year they'd actually lived together—had felt it often—and hated himself for having that pop up now, of all times. But dammit, another complication was the last thing they needed now. He ran his hands through his hair. "What?"

"Look at her wrist," Tom said.

Clay looked. The dirty piece of shoestring was still there, but the sneaker was gone. He felt an absurd sinking in his stomach. Or maybe it wasn't so absurd. If it mattered to Alice, he supposed it mattered. So what if it was just a sneaker?

The spare T-shirt and sweatshirt she had packed (gaiten boosters' club printed across the front) went flying. Batteries rolled. Her spare flashlight hit the tile floor and the lens-cover cracked. That was enough to convince Clay. This wasn't a Sharon Riddell tantrum because they were out of hazelnut coffee or Chunky Monkey ice cream; this was unvarnished terror.

He went to Alice, knelt beside her, and took hold of her wrists. He could feel the seconds flying by, turning into minutes they should have been using to put this town behind them, but he could also feel the lightning sprint of her pulse under his fingers. And he could see her eyes. It wasn't panic in them now but agony, and he realized she'd put everything in that sneaker: her mother and father, her friends, Beth Nickerson and her daughter, the Tonney Field inferno, everything.

"It's not in here!" she cried. "I thought I must have packed it, but I didn't! I can't find it anywhere!"

"No, honey, I know." Clay was still holding her wrists. Now he lifted the one with the shoelace around it. "Do you see?" He waited until he was sure her eyes had focused, then he flipped the ends beyond the knot, where there had been a second knot.

"It's too long now," she said. "It wasn't that long before."

Clay tried to remember the last time he'd seen the sneaker. He told himself it was impossible to remember a thing like that, given all that had been going on, then realized he could. Very clearly, too. It was when she'd helped Tom pull him up after the second truck had exploded. It had been dancing from its string then. She had been covered with blood, scraps of cloth, and little chunks of flesh, but the sneaker had still been on her wrist. He tried to remember if it was still there when she'd booted the burning torso off the ramp. He didn't think so. Maybe that was hindsight, but he didn't think so.

"It came untied, honey," he said. "It came untied and fell off."

"I lost it?" Her eyes, unbelieving. The first tears. "Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure, yeah."

"It was my luck," she whispered, the tears spilling over.

"No," Tom said, and put an arm around her. "We're your luck."

She looked at him. "How do you know?"

"Because you found us first," Tom said. "And we're still here."

She hugged them both and they stood that way for a while, the three of them, with their arms around each other in the hall with Alice's few possessions scattered around their feet.

The fire spread to a lecture building the head identified as Hackery Hall. Then, around four a.m., the wind dropped away and it spread no farther. When the sun came up, the Gaiten campus stank of propane, charred wood, and a great many burnt bodies. The bright sky of a perfect New England morning in October was obscured by a rising column of gray-black smoke. And Cheatham Lodge was still occupied. In the end it had been like dominoes: the Head couldn't travel except by car, car travel was impossible, and Jordan would not go without the Head. Nor was Ardai able to persuade him. Alice, although resigned to the loss of her talisman, refused to go without Jordan. Tom would not go without Alice. And Clay was loath to go without the two of them, although he was horrified to find these newcomers in his life seemed at least temporarily more important than his own son, and although he continued to feel certain that they would pay a high price for what they'd done on Tonney Field if they stayed in Gaiten, let alone at the scene of the crime.

He thought he might feel better about that last at daybreak, but he did not.

The five of them watched and waited at the living room window, but of course nothing came out of the smoldering wreckage, and there was no sound but the low crackle of fire eating deep into the Athletic Department offices and locker rooms even as it finished off the bleachers above-ground. The thousand or so phone-crazies who had been roosting there were, as Alice had said, crispy. The smell of them was rich and stick-in-your-throat awful. Clay had vomited once and knew the others had, as well– even the Head.

We made a mistake, he thought again.

"You guys should have gone on," Jordan said. "We would have been all right—we were before, weren't we, sir?"

Headmaster Ardai ignored the question. He was studying Clay. "What happened yesterday when you and Tom were in that service station? I think something happened then to make you look as you do now."

"Oh? How do I look, sir?"

"Like an animal that smells a trap. Did those two in the street see you?"

"It wasn't exactly that," Clay said. He didn't love being called an animal, but couldn't deny that was what he was: oxygen and food in, carbon dioxide and shit out, pop goes the weasel.

The Head had begun to rub restlessly at the left side of his midsection with one big hand. Like many of his gestures, Clay thought it had an oddly theatrical quality—not exactly phony, but meant to be seen at the back of the lecture hall. "Then what exactly was it?"

And because protecting the others no longer seemed like an option, Clay told the Head exactly what they'd seen in the office of the Citgo station– a physical struggle over a box of stale treats that had suddenly turned into something else. He told about the fluttering papers, the ashes that had begun circling in the ashtray like water going down a bathtub drain, the keys jingling on the board, the nozzle that fell off the gas-pump.

"I saw that," Jordan said, and Alice nodded.

Tom mentioned feeling short of breath, and Clay agreed. They both tried to explain the sense of something powerful building in the air.

Clay said it was how things felt before a thunderstorm. Tom said the air just felt fraught, somehow. Too heavy.

"Then he let her take a couple of the fucking things and it all went away," Tom said. "The ashes stopped spinning, the keys stopped jingling, that thundery feeling went out of the air." He looked to Clay for confirmation. Clay nodded.

Alice said, "Why didn't you tell us this before?"

"Because it wouldn't have changed anything," Clay said. "We were going to burn the nest if we could, regardless."

"Yes," Tom said.

Jordan said suddenly, "You think the phone-crazies are turning into psionics, don't you?"

Tom said, "I don't know what that word means, Jordan."

"People who can move things around just by thinking about it, for one thing. Or by accident, if their emotions get out of control. Only psionic abilities like telekinesis and levitation—"

"Levitation?" Alice almost barked.

Jordan paid no mind. "—are only branches. The trunk of the psionic tree is telepathy, and that's what you're afraid of, isn't it? The telepathy thing."

Tom's fingers went to the place above his mouth where half of his mustache was gone and touched the reddened skin there. "Well, the thought has crossed my mind." He paused, head cocked. "That might be witty. I'm not sure."

Jordan ignored this, as well. "Say that they are. Getting to be true telepaths, I mean, and not just zombies with a flocking instinct. So what? The Gaiten Academy flock is dead, and they died without a clue of who lit em up, because they died in whatever passes for sleep with them, so if you're worrying that they telepathically faxed our names and descriptions to any of their buddies in the surrounding New England states, you can relax."

"Jordan—" the Head began, then winced. He was still rubbing his midsection.

"Sir? Are you all right?"

"Yes. Fetch my Zantac from the downstairs bathroom, would you? And a bottle of the Poland Spring water. There's a good lad."

Jordan hurried away on the errand.

"Not an ulcer, is it?" Tom asked.

"No," the Head replied. "It's stress. An old . . . one cannot say friend . . . acquaintance?"

"Your heart okay?" Alice asked, speaking in a low voice.

"I suppose," the Head agreed, and bared his teeth in a smile of disconcerting jollity. "If the Zantac doesn't work, we may resuppose . . . but so far, the Zantac always has, and one doesn't care to buy trouble when so much of it is on sale. Ah, Jordan, thank you."

"Quite welcome, sir." The boy handed him the glass and the pill with his usual smile.

"I think you ought to go with them," Ardai told him after swallowing the Zantac.

"Sir, with all respect, I'm telling you there's no way they could know, no way."

The Head looked a question at Tom and Clay. Tom raised his hands. Clay only shrugged. He could say what he felt right out loud, could articulate what they surely must know he felt—we made a mistake, and staying here is compounding it —but saw no point. Jordan's face was set and stubborn on top, scared to death just beneath. They were not going to persuade him. And besides, it was day again. Day was their time.

He rumpled the boy's hair. "If you say so, Jordan. I'm going to catch some winks."

Jordan looked almost sublimely relieved. "That sounds like a good idea. I think I will, too."

"I'm going to have a cup of Cheatham Lodge's world-famous tepid cocoa before I come up," Tom said. "And I believe I'll shave off the rest of this mustache. The wailing and lamentation you hear will be mine."

"Can I watch?" Alice asked. "I always wanted to watch a grown man wail and lament."

Clay and tom were sharing a small bedroom on the third floor; alice had been given the only other. While Clay was taking off his shoes, there was a perfunctory knock on the door, which the Head followed without pause. Two bright spots of color burned high up on his cheekbones. Otherwise his face was deathly pale.

"Are you all right?" Clay asked, standing. "Is it your heart, after all?"

"I'm glad you asked me that," the Head replied. "I wasn't entirely sure I planted the seed, but it seems I did." He glanced back over his shoulder into the hall, then closed the door with the tip of his cane. "Listen carefully, Mr. Riddell—Clay—and don't ask questions unless you feel you absolutely must. I am going to be found dead in my bed late this afternoon or early this evening, and you will say of course it was my heart after all, that what we did last night must have brought it on. Do you understand?"

Clay nodded. He understood, and he bit back the automatic protest. It might have had a place in the old world, but it had none here. He knew why the Head was proposing what he was proposing.

"If Jordan even suspects I may have taken my own life to free him from what he, in his boyishly admirable way, regards as a sacred obligation, he may take his own. At the very least he would be plunged into what the elders of my own childhood called a black fugue. He will grieve for me deeply as it is, but that is permissible. The thought that I committed suicide to get him out of Gaiten is not. Do you understand that?"

"Yes," Clay said. Then: "Sir, wait another day. What you're thinking of. . . it may not be necessary. Could be we're going to get away with this." He didn't believe it, and in any case Ardai meant to do what he said; all the truth Clay needed was in the man's haggard face, tightly pressed lips, and gleaming eyes. Still, he tried again. "Wait another day. No one may come."

"You heard those screams," the Head replied. "That was rage. They'll come."

"Maybe, but—"

The Head raised his cane to forestall him. "And if they do, and if they can read our minds as well as each other's, what will they read in yours, if yours is still here to be read?"

Clay didn't reply, only watched the Head's face.

"Even if they can't read minds," the Head continued, "what do you propose? To stay here, day after day and week after week? Until the snow flies? Until I finally expire of old age? My own father lived to the age of ninety-seven. Meanwhile, you have a wife and a child."

"My wife and boy are either all right or they're not. I've made my peace with that."

This was a lie, and perhaps Ardai saw it in Clay's face, because he smiled his unsettling smile. "And do you believe your son has made peace with not knowing if his father is alive, dead, or insane? After only a week?"

"That's a low blow," Clay said. His voice was not quite steady.

"Really? I didn't know we were fighting. In any case, there's no referee. No one here but us chickens, as they say." The Head glanced at the closed door, then looked back at Clay again. "The equation is very simple. You can't stay and I can't go. It's best that Jordan go with you."

"But to put you down like a horse with a broken leg—"

"No such thing," the Head interrupted. "Horses do not practice euthanasia, but people do." The door opened, Tom stepped in, and with hardly a pause for breath the Head went on, "And have you ever considered commercial illustration, Clay? For books, I mean?"

"My style is too flamboyant for most of the commercial houses," Clay said. "I have done jackets for some of the small fantasy presses like Grant and Eulalia. Some of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars books."

"Barsoom!" the Head cried, and waved his cane vigorously in the air. Then he rubbed his solar plexus and grimaced. "Damned heartburn! Excuse me, Tom—just came up to have a natter before lying down a bit myself."

"Not at all," Tom said, and watched him go out. When the sound of the Head's cane had gotten a good distance down the hall, he turned to Clay and said, "Is he okay? He's very pale."

"I think he's fine." He pointed at Tom's face. "I thought you were going to shave off the other half."

"I decided against it with Alice hanging around," Tom said. "I like her, but about certain things she can be evil."

"That's just paranoia."

"Thanks, Clay, I needed that. It's only been a week and I'm already missing my analyst."

"Combined with a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur."

Clay swung his feet up onto one of the room's two narrow beds, put his hands behind his head, and looked at the ceiling.

"You wish we were out of here, don't you?" Tom asked.

"You bet I do." He spoke in a flat and uninflected monotone.

"It'll be all right, Clay. Really."

"So you say, but you have a persecution complex and delusions of grandeur."

"That's true," Tom said, "but they're balanced out by poor self-image and ego menstruation at roughly six-week intervals. And in any case—"

"—too late now, at least for today," Clay finished.

"That's right."

There was actually a kind of peace in that. Tom said something else, but Clay only caught "Jordan thinks . . ." and then he was asleep.

He woke screaming, or so he thought at first; only a wild look at the other bed, where Tom was still sleeping peacefully with something—a washcloth, maybe—folded over his eyes convinced Clay that the scream had been inside his head. A cry of some sort might have escaped him, but if so it hadn't been enough to wake his roommate.

The room was nowhere near dark—it was midafternoon—but Tom had pulled the shade before corking off himself, and it was at least dim. Clay stayed where he was for a moment, lying on his back, his mouth as dry as wood-shavings, his heartbeat rapid in his chest and in his ears, where it sounded like running footsteps muffled in velvet. Otherwise the house was dead still. They might not have made the switchover from days to nights completely yet, but last night had been extraordinarily exhausting, and at this moment he heard no one stirring in the Lodge. Outside a bird called and somewhere quite distant—not in Gaiten, he thought—a stubborn alarm kept on braying.

Had he ever had a worse dream? Maybe one. A month or so after Johnny was born, Clay had dreamed he'd picked the baby up from the crib to change him, and Johnny's chubby little body had simply fallen apart in his hands like a badly put-together dummy. That one he could understand—fear of fatherhood, fear of fucking up. A fear he still lived with, as Headmaster Ardai had seen. What was he to make of this one?

Whatever it meant, he didn't want to lose it, and he knew from experience that you had to act quickly to keep that from happening.

There was a desk in the room, and a ballpoint pen tucked into one pocket of the jeans Clay had left crumpled at the foot of the bed. He took the pen, crossed to the desk in his bare feet, sat down, and opened the drawer above the kneehole. He found what he was hoping for, a little pile of blank stationery with the heading GAITEN ACADEMY and “AYoung Mind Is A Lamp In The Darkness." on each sheet. He took one of them and placed it on the desk. The light was dim, but would serve. He clicked out the tip of the ballpoint and paused for just a moment, recalling the dream as clearly as he could.

He, Tom, Alice, and Jordan had been lined up in the center of a playing field. Not a soccer field like Tonney—a football field, maybe? There had been some sort of skeletal construction in the background with a blinking red light on it. He had no idea what it was, but he knew the field had been full of people looking at them, people with ruined faces and ripped clothes that he recognized all too well. He and his friends had been . . . had they been in cages? No, on platforms. And they were cages, all the same, although there were no bars. Clay didn't know how that could be, but it was. He was losing the details of the dream already.

Tom was on one end of the line. A man had walked to him, a special man, and put a hand over his head. Clay didn't remember how the man could do that since Tom—like Alice, Jordan, and Clay himself—had been on a platform, but he had. And he'd said, "Ecce homo —insanus." And the crowd—thousands of them—had roared back, "DON'T TOUCH!" in a single voice. The man had gone to Clay and repeated this. With his hand above Alice's head the man had said, "Ecce femina —insana." Above Jordan, "Ecce puer —insanus." Each time the response had been the same: "DON'T TOUCH!"

Neither the man—the host? the ringmaster?—nor the people in the crowd had opened their mouths during this ritual. The call-and-response had been purely telepathic.

Then, letting his right hand do all the thinking (his hand and the special corner of his brain that ran it), Clay began to stroke an image onto the paper. The entire dream had been terrible—the false accusation of it, the caughtness of it—but nothing in it had been so awful as the man who had gone to each of them, placing his open palm-down hand over their heads like an auctioneer preparing to sell livestock at a county fair. Clay felt that if he could catch that man's image on paper, he could catch the terror.

He had been a black man with a noble head and an ascetic's face above a lanky, almost scrawny body. The hair was a tight cap of dark ringlets cut open on one side by an ugly triangular gouge. The shoulders were slight, the hips nearly nonexistent. Below the cap of curls Clay quick-sketched the broad and handsome forehead—a scholar's forehead. Then he marred it with another slash and shaded in the hanging flap of skin that obscured one eyebrow. The man's left cheek had been torn open, possibly by a bite, and the lower lip was also torn on that side, making it droop in a tired sneer. The eyes were a problem. Clay couldn't get them right. In the dream they had been both full of awareness yet somehow dead. After two tries he left them and dropped to the pullover before he lost that: the kind the kids called a hoodie (red, he printed, with an arrow), with white block letters across the front. It had been too big for the skinny body and a flap of material lay over the top half of the letters, but Clay was pretty sure it said harvard. He was starting to print that when the weeping started, soft and muffled, from somewhere below him.

It was jordan: clay knew at once. he took one look back over his shoulder at Tom as he pulled on his jeans, but Tom hadn't moved. Out for the count, Clay thought. He opened the door, slipped through, and closed it behind him.

Alice, wearing a Gaiten Academy T-shirt as a nightgown, was sitting on the second-floor landing with the boy cradled in her arms. Jordan's face was pressed against her shoulder. She looked up at the sound of Clay's bare feet on the stairs and spoke before Clay said something he might have regretted later: Is it the Head?

"He had a bad dream," she said.

Clay said the first thing that came to him. At that moment it seemed vitally important. "Did you?"

Her brow creased. Bare-legged, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her face sunburned as if from a day at the beach, she looked like Jordan's eleven-year-old sister. "What? No. I heard him crying in the hall. I guess I was waking up anyway, and—"

"Just a minute," Clay said. "Stay right there."

He went back to his third-floor room and snatched his sketch off the desk. This time Tom's eyes sprang open. He looked around with a mixture of fright and disorientation, then fixed on Clay and relaxed. "Back to reality," he said. Then, rubbing a hand over his face and getting up on one elbow: "Thank God. Jesus. What time is it?"

"Tom, did you have a dream? A bad dream?"

Tom nodded. "I think so, yeah. I heard crying. Was that Jordan?"

"Yes. What did you dream? Do you remember?"

"Somebody called us insane," Tom said, and Clay felt his stomach drop. "Which we probably are. The rest is gone. Why? Did you—"

Clay didn't wait for any more. He hurried back out and down the stairs again. Jordan looked around at him with a kind of dazed timidity when Clay sat down. There was no sign of the computer whiz now; if Alice looked eleven with her ponytail and sunburn, Jordan had regressed to nine.

"Jordan," Clay said. "Your dream . . . your nightmare. Do you remember it?"

"It's going away now," Jordan said. "They had us up on stands. They were looking at us like we were . . . I don't know, wild animals . . . only they said—"

"That we were insane."

Jordan's eyes widened. "Yeah!"

Clay heard footfalls behind him as Tom came down the stairs. Clay didn't look around. He showed Jordan his sketch. "Was this the man in charge?"

Jordan didn't answer. He didn't have to. He winced away from the picture, grabbing for Alice and turning his face against her chest again.

"What is it?" Alice asked, bewildered. She reached for the sketch, but Tom took it first.

"Christ," he said, and handed it back. "The dream's almost gone, but I remember the torn cheek."

"And his lip," Jordan said, the words muffled against Alice's chest. "The way his lip hangs down. He was the one showing us to them. To them." He shuddered. Alice rubbed his back, then crossed her hands over his shoulder blades so she could hold him more tightly.

Clay put the picture in front of Alice. "Ring any bells? Man of your dreams?"

She shook her head and started to say no. Before she could, there was a loud, protracted rattling and a loose series of thuds from outside Cheatham Lodge's front door. Alice screamed. Jordan clutched her tighter, as if he would burrow into her, and cried out. Tom clutched at Clay's shoulder. "Oh man, what the fuck —"

There was more rattling thunder outside the door, long and loud. Alice screamed again.

"Guns!" Clay shouted. "Guns!"

For a moment they were all paralyzed there on the sunny landing, and then another of those long, loud rattles came, a sound like rolling bones. Tom bolted for the third floor and Clay followed him, skidding once in his stocking feet and grabbing the banister to regain his balance. Alice pushed Jordan away from her and ran for her own room, the hem of the shirt fluttering around her legs, leaving Jordan to huddle against the newel post, staring down the stairs and into the front hall with huge wet eyes.

"Easy," Clay said. "Let's just take this easy, okay?"

The three of them stood at the foot of the stairs not two minutes after the first of those long, loose rattling sounds had come from beyond the front door. Tom had the unproven Russian assault rifle they had taken to calling Sir Speedy, Alice was holding a nine-millimeter automatic in each hand, and Clay had Beth Nickerson's .45, which he had somehow managed to hold on to the previous night (although he had no memory of tucking it back into his belt, where he later found it). Jordan still huddled on the landing. Up there he couldn't see the downstairs windows, and Clay thought that was probably a good thing. The afternoon light in Cheatham Lodge was much dimmer than it should have been, and that was most definitely not a good thing.

It was dimmer because there were phone-crazies at every window they could see, crowded up to the glass and peering in at them: dozens, maybe hundreds of those strange blank faces, most marked by the battles they had been through and the wounds they had suffered during the last anarchic week. Clay saw missing eyes and teeth, torn ears, bruises, burns, scorched skin, and hanging wads of blackened flesh. They were silent. There was a kind of haunted avidity about them, and that feeling was back in the air, that breathless sense of some enormous, spinning power barely held in check. Clay kept expecting to see their guns fly out of their hands and begin to fire on their own.

At us, he thought.

"Now I know how the lobsters feel in the tank at Harbor Seafood on Twofer Tuesday," Tom said in a small, tight voice.

"Just take it easy," Clay repeated. "Let them make the first move."

But there was no first move. There was another of those long, rattling thumps—the sound of something being off-loaded on the front porch was what it sounded like to Clay—and then the creatures at the windows drew back, as if at some signal only they could hear. They did this in orderly rows. This wasn't the time of day during which they ordinarily flocked, but things had changed. That seemed obvious.

Clay walked to the bay window in the living room, holding the revolver at his side. Tom and Alice followed. They watched the phone-crazies (who no longer seemed crazy at all to Clay, at least not in any way he understood) retreat, walking backward with eerie, limber ease, each never losing the little envelope of space around him– or herself. They settled to a stop between Cheatham Lodge and the smoking remains of the Tonney soccer stadium, like some raggedy-ass army battalion on a leaf-strewn parade ground. Every not-quite-vacant eye rested upon the Headmaster's residence.

"Why are their hands and feet all smudgy?" a timid voice asked. They looked around. It was Jordan. Clay himself hadn't even noticed the soot and char on the hands of the silent hundreds out there, but before he could say so, Jordan answered his own question. "They went to see, didn't they? Sure. They went to see what we did to their friends. And they're mad. I can feel it. Can you feel it?"

Clay didn't want to say yes, but of course he could. That heavy, charged feeling in the air, that sense of turning thunder barely contained in a net of electricity: that was rage. He thought about Pixie Light battening on Power Suit Woman's neck and the elderly lady who'd won the Battle of the Boylston Street T Station, the one who'd gone striding off into Boston Common with blood dripping out of her cropped iron-gray hair. The young man, naked except for his sneakers, who had been jabbing a car aerial in each hand as he ran. All that rage—did he think it had just disappeared when they started to flock? Well, think again.

"I feel it," Tom said. "Jordan, if they've got psychic powers, why don't they just make us kill ourselves, or each other?"

"Or make our heads explode," Alice said. Her voice was trembling. "I saw that in an old movie once."

"I don't know," Jordan said. He looked up at Clay. "Where's the Raggedy Man?"

"Is that what you call him?" Clay looked down at his sketch, which he was still carrying—the torn flesh, the torn sleeve of the pullover, the baggy blue jeans. He supposed that Raggedy Man was not a bad name at all for the fellow in the Harvard hoodie.

"I call him trouble, is what I call him," Jordan said in a thin voice. He looked out again at the newcomers—three hundred at least, maybe four hundred, recently arrived from God knew which surrounding towns– and then back at Clay. "Have you seen him?"

"Other than in a bad dream, no."

Tom shook his head.

"To me he's just a picture on a piece of paper," Alice said. "I didn't dream him, and I don't see anyone in a hoodie out there. What were they doing on the soccer field? Do they try to identify their dead, do you think?" She looked doubtful at this. "And isn't it still hot in there? It must be."

"What are they waiting for?" Tom asked. "If they aren't going to charge us or make us stick kitchen knives in each other, what are they waiting for?"

Clay suddenly knew what they were waiting for, and also where Jordan's Raggedy Man was—it was what Mr. Devane, his high school algebra teacher, would have called an aha! moment. He turned and headed for the front hall.

"Where are you going?" Tom asked.

"To see what they left us," Clay said.

They hurried after him. Tom caught up first, while Clay's hand was still on the doorknob. "I don't know if this is a good idea," Tom said.

"Maybe not, but it's what they're waiting for," Clay said. "And you know what? I think if they meant to kill us, we'd be dead already."

"He's prob'ly right," Jordan said in a small, wan voice.

Clay opened the door. Cheatham Lodge's long front porch, with its comfortable wicker furniture and its view of Academy Slope rolling down to Academy Avenue, was made for sunny autumn afternoons like this, but at that moment the ambience was the furthest thing from Clay's mind. Standing at the foot of the steps was an arrowhead of phone-crazies: one in front, two behind him, three behind them, then four, five, and six. Twenty-one in all. The one in front was the Raggedy Man from Clay's dream, his sketch come to life. The lettering on the front of the tattered red hoodie did indeed spell out harvard. The torn left cheek had been pulled up and secured at the side of the nose with two clumsy white stitches that had torn teardrops in the indifferently mended dark flesh before holding. There were rips where a third and fourth stitch had pulled free. Clay thought the stitching might have been done with fish-line. The sagging lip revealed teeth that looked as if they had been seen to by a good orthodontist not long ago, when the world had been a milder place.

In front of the door, burying the welcome mat and spreading in both directions, was a heap of black, misshapen objects. It could almost have been some half-mad sculptor's idea of art. It took Clay only a moment to realize he was looking at the melted remains of the Tonney Field flock's ghetto blasters.

Then Alice shrieked. A few of the heat-warped boomboxes had fallen over when Clay opened the door, and something that had very likely been balanced on top of the pile had fallen over with them, lodging half in and half out of the pile. She stepped forward before Clay could stop her, dropping one of the automatic pistols and grabbing the thing she had seen. It was the sneaker. She cradled it between her breasts.

Clay looked past her, at Tom. Tom gazed back at him. They weren't telepathic, but in that moment they might as well have been. Now what? Tom's eyes asked.

Clay turned his attention back to the Raggedy Man. He wondered if you could feel your mind being read and if his was being read right that second. He put his hands out to the Raggedy Man. The gun was still in one of them, but neither the Raggedy Man nor anyone in his squad seemed to feel threatened by it. Clay held his palms up: What do you want?

The Raggedy Man smiled. There was no humor in the smile. Clay thought he could see anger in the dark brown eyes, but he thought it was a surface thing. Underneath there was no spark at all, at least that he could discern. It was almost like watching a doll smile.

The Raggedy Man cocked his head and held up a finger—Wait. And from below them on Academy Avenue, as if on cue, came many screams. Screams of people in mortal agony. Accompanying them were a few guttural, predatory cries. Not many.

"What are you doing?" Alice shouted. She stepped forward, squeezing the little sneaker convulsively in her hand. The cords in her forearm stood out strongly enough to make shadows like long straight pencil-strokes on her skin. "What are you doing to the people down there?"

As if, Clay thought, there could be any doubt.

She raised the hand that still held a gun. Tom grabbed it and wrestled it away from her before she could pull the trigger. She turned on him, clawing at him with her free hand.

"Give it back, don't you hear that? Don't you hear?"

Clay pulled her away from Tom. During all of this Jordan watched from the entryway with wide, terrified eyes and the Raggedy Man stood at the tip of the arrow, smiling from a face where rage underlay humor and beneath the rage was . . . nothing, as far as Clay could tell. Nothing at all.

"Safety was on, anyway," Tom said after a quick glance. "Thank the Lord for small favors." And to Alice: "Do you want to get us killed?"

"Do you think they're just going to let us go?" She was crying so hard it had become difficult to understand her. Snot hung from her nostrils in two clear strings. From below, on the tree-lined avenue that ran past Gaiten Academy, there were screams and shrieks. A woman cried No, please don't please don't and then her words were lost in a terrible howl of pain.

"I don't know what they're going to do with us," Tom said in a voice that strove for calm, "but if they meant to kill us, they wouldn't be doing that. Look at him, Alice—what's going on down there is for our benefit."

There were a few gunshots as people tried to defend themselves, but not many. Mostly there were just screams of pain and terrible surprise, all coming from the area directly adjacent to Gaiten Academy, where the flock had been burned. It surely didn't last any longer than ten minutes, but sometimes, Clay thought, time really was relative.

It seemed like hours.

When the screams finally stopped, alice stood quietly between clay and Tom with her head lowered. She had put both automatics on a table meant for briefcases and hats inside the front door. Jordan was holding her hand, looking out at the Raggedy Man and his colleagues standing at the head of the walk. So far the boy hadn't noticed the Head's absence. Clay knew he would soon, and then the next scene of this terrible day would commence.

The Raggedy Man took a step forward and made a little bow with his hands held out to either side, as if to say, At your service. Then he looked up and held a hand out toward Academy Slope and the avenue beyond. He looked at the little group clustered in the open door behind the melted boombox sculpture as he did this. To Clay the meaning seemed clear: Theroad is yours. Go on and take it.

"Maybe," he said. "In the meantime, let's be clear on one thing. I'm sure you can wipe us out if you choose to, you've obviously got the numbers, but unless you plan to hang back at Command HQ, someone else is going to be in charge of things tomorrow. Because I'll personally make sure you're the first one to go."

The Raggedy Man put his hands to his cheeks and widened his eyes: Oh dear! The others behind him were as expressionless as robots. Clay looked a moment longer, then gently closed the door.

"I'm sorry," Alice said dully. "I just couldn't stand listening to them scream."

"It's okay," Tom said. "No harm done. And hey, they brought back Mr. Sneaker."

She looked at it. "Is this how they found out it was us? Did they smell it, the way a bloodhound smells a scent?"

"No," Jordan said. He was sitting in a high-backed chair beside the umbrella stand, looking small and haggard and used-up. "That's just their way of saying they know you. At least, that's what I think."

"Yeah," Clay said. "I bet they knew it was us even before they got here. Picked it out of our dreams the way we picked his face out of our dreams."

"I didn't—" Alice began.

"Because you were waking up," Tom said. "You'll be hearing from him in the fullness of time, I imagine." He paused. "If he has anything else to say, that is. I don't understand this, Clay. We did it. We did it and they know we did it, I'm convinced of that."

"Yes," Clay said.

"Then why kill a bunch of innocent pilgrims when it would have been just as easy—well, almost as easy—to break in here and kill us? I mean, I understand the concept of reprisals, but I don't see the point in this—"

That was when Jordan slid off his chair and, looking around with an expression of suddenly blossoming worry, asked: "Where's the Head?"

Clay caught up with jordan, but not until the boy had made it all the way to the second-floor landing. "Hang on, Jordan," he said.

"No," Jordan said. His face was whiter, shockier, than ever. His hair bushed out around his head, and Clay supposed it was only because the boy needed a cut, but it looked as if it were trying to stand on end. "With all the commotion, he should have been with us! He would have been with us, if he was all right." His lips began to tremble. "Remember the way he was rubbing himself? What if that wasn't just his acid reflux stuff?"

"Jordan—"

Jordan paid no attention, and Clay was willing to bet he'd forgotten all about the Raggedy Man and his cohorts, at least for the time being. He yanked free of Clay's hand and went running down the corridor, yelling, "Sir! Sir!" while Heads going back to the nineteenth century frowned down at him from walls.

Clay glanced back down the stairs. Alice was going to be no help—she was sitting at the foot of the staircase with her head bent, staring at that fucking sneaker like it was the skull of Yorick—but Tom started reluctantly up to the second floor. "How bad is this going to be?" he asked Clay.

"Well . . . Jordan thinks the Head would have joined us if he was all right and I tend to think he's—"

Jordan began to shriek. It was a drilling soprano sound that went through Clay's head like a spear. It was actually Tom who got moving first; Clay was rooted at the staircase end of the corridor for at least three and perhaps as many as seven seconds, held there by a single thought: That'snot how someone sounds when they've found what looks like a heart attack. The old man must have botched it somehow. Maybe used the wrong kind of pills. He was halfway down the hall when Tom cried out in shock—"Oh my God Jordan don't look"—almost as if it were one word.

"Wait!" Alice called from behind him, but Clay didn't. The door to the Head's little upstairs suite was open: the study with its books and its now useless hotplate, the bedroom beyond with the door standing open so the light streamed through. Tom was standing in front of the desk, holding Jordan's head against his stomach. The Head was seated behind his desk. His weight had rocked his swivel chair back on its pivot and he seemed to be staring up at the ceiling with his one remaining eye. His tangled white hair hung down over the chairback. To Clay he looked like a concert pianist who had just played the final chord of a difficult piece.

He heard Alice give a choked cry of horror, but hardly noticed. Feeling like a passenger inside his own body, Clay walked to the desk and looked at the sheet of paper that rested on the blotter. Although it was stained with blood, he could make out the words on it; the Head's cursive had been fine and clear. Old-school to the end, Jordan might have said.

aliene geisteskrank

insano

elnebajos vansinnig fou

atamagaokashii gek dolzinnig

hullu

gila

meschuge nebun

dement

Clay spoke nothing but English and a little high school French, but he knew well enough what this was, and what it meant. The Raggedy Man wanted them to go, and he knew somehow that Headmaster Ardai was too old and too arthritic to go with them. So he had been made to sit at his desk and write the word for insane in fourteen different languages. And when he was done, he had been made to plunge the tip of the heavy fountain pen with which he had written into his right eye and from there into the clever old brain behind it.

"They made him kill himself, didn't they?" Alice asked in a breaking voice. "Why him and not us? Why him and not us? What do they want?"

Clay thought of the gesture the Raggedy Man had made toward Academy Avenue—Academy Avenue, which was also New Hampshire Route 102. The phone-crazies who were no longer exactly crazy—or were crazy in some brand-new way—wanted them on the road again. Beyond that he had no idea, and maybe that was good. Maybe that was all for the best. Maybe that was a mercy.