Cell

FADING ROSES, THIS GARDEN'S OVER

There were half a dozen fine linen tablecloths in a cabinet at the end of the back hallway, and one of these served as Headmaster Ardai's shroud. Alice volunteered to sew it shut, then collapsed in tears when either her needlework or her nerve did not prove equal to such finality. Tom took over, pulling the tablecloth taut, doubling the seam, and sewing it closed in quick, almost professional overhand strokes. Clay thought it was like watching a boxer work an invisible light bag with his right hand.

"Don't make jokes," Tom said without looking up. "I appreciate what you did upstairs—I never could have done that—but I can't take a single joke right now, not even of the inoffensive Will and Grace variety. I'm barely holding myself together."

All right," Clay said. Joking was the farthest thing from his mind. As for what he had done upstairs . . . well, the pen had to be removed from the Head's eye. No way were they going to leave that in. So Clay had taken care of it, looking away into the corner of the room as he wrenched it free, trying not to think about what he was doing or why it was stuck so fucking tight, and mostly he had succeeded in not thinking, but the pen had made a grinding sound against the bone of the old man's eyesocket when it finally let go, and there had been a loose, gobbety plopping sound as something fell from the bent tip of the pen's steel nib onto the blotter. He thought he would remember those sounds forever, but he had succeeded in getting the damn thing out, and that was the important thing.

Outside, nearly a thousand phone-crazies stood on the lawn between the smoking ruins of the soccer field and Cheatham Lodge. They stood there most of the afternoon. Then, around five o'clock, they flocked silently off in the direction of downtown Gaiten. Clay and Tom carried the Head's shrouded body down the back stairs and put it on the back porch. The four survivors gathered in the kitchen and ate the meal they had taken to calling breakfast as the shadows began to draw long outside.

Jordan ate surprisingly well. His color was high and his speech was animated. It consisted of reminiscences of his life at Gaiten Academy, and the influence Headmaster Ardai had had on the heart and mind of a friendless, introverted computer geek from Madison, Wisconsin. The brilliant lucidity of the boy's recollections made Clay increasingly uncomfortable, and when he caught first Alice's eyes and then Tom's, he saw they felt the same. Jordan's mind was tottering, but it was hard to know what to do about that; they could hardly send him to a psychiatrist.

At some point, after full dark, Tom suggested that Jordan should rest. Jordan said he would, but not until they had buried the Head. They could put him in the garden behind the Lodge, he said. He told them the Head had called the little vegetable patch his "victory garden," although he had never told Jordan why.

"That's the place," Jordan said, smiling. His cheeks now flamed with color. His eyes, deep in their bruised sockets, sparkled with what could have been inspiration, good cheer, madness, or all three. "Not only is the ground soft, it's the place he always liked the best. . . outside, I mean. So what do you say? They're gone, they still don't come out at night, that hasn't changed, and we can use the gas lanterns to dig by. What do you say?"

After consideration, Tom said, "Are there shovels?"

"You bet, in the gardening shed. We don't even need to go up to the greenhouses." And Jordan actually laughed.

"Let's do it," Alice said. "Let's bury him and have done with it."

"And you'll rest afterwards," Clay said, looking at Jordan.

"Sure, sure!" Jordan cried impatiently. He got up from his chair and began to pace around the room. "Come on, you guys!" As if he were trying to get up a game of tag.

So they dug the grave in the Head's garden behind the Lodge and buried him among the beans and tomatoes. Tom and Clay lowered the shrouded form into the hole, which was about three feet deep. The exercise kept them warm, and only when they stopped did they notice the night had grown cold, almost frosty. The stars were brilliant overhead, but a heavy ground-mist was rolling up the Slope. Academy Avenue was already submerged in that rising tide of white; only the steeply slanted roofs of the biggest old houses down there broke its surface.

"I wish someone knew some good poetry," Jordan said. His cheeks were redder than ever, but his eyes had receded into circular caves and he was shivering in spite of the two sweaters he was wearing. His breath came out in little puffs. "The Head loved poetry, he thought that stuff was the shit. He was . . ." Jordan's voice, which had been strangely gay all night, finally broke. "He was so totally old-school."

Alice folded him against her. Jordan struggled, then gave in.

"Tell you what," Tom said, "let's cover him up nice—cover him against the cold—and then I'll give him some poetry. Would that be okay?"

"Do you really know some?"

"I really do," Tom said.

"You're so smart, Tom. Thank you." And Jordan smiled at him with weary, horrible gratitude.

Filling in the grave was quick, although in the end they had to borrow some earth from the garden's nether parts to bring it up to dead level. By the time they were finished, Clay was sweating again and he could smell himself. It had been a long time between showers.

Alice had tried to keep Jordan from helping, but he broke free of her and pitched in, using his bare hands to toss earth into the hole. By the time Clay finished tamping the ground with the flat of his spade, the boy was glassy-eyed with exhaustion, all but reeling on his feet like a drunk.

Nevertheless, he looked at Tom. "Go ahead. You promised." Clay almost expected him to add, And make it good, seсor, or I weel put a boolet inyou, like a homicidal bandido in a Sam Peckinpah western.

Tom stepped to one end of the grave—Clay thought it was the top, but in his weariness could no longer remember. He could not even remember for sure if the Head's first name had been Charles or Robert. Runners of mist curled around Tom's feet and ankles, twined among the dead beanstalks. He removed his baseball cap, and Alice took off hers. Clay reached for his own and remembered he wasn't wearing one.

"That's right!" Jordan cried. He was smiling, frantic with understanding. "Hats off! Hats off to the Head!" He was bareheaded himself, but mimed taking a hat off just the same—taking it off and flinging it into the air—and Clay once more found himself fearing for the boy's sanity. "Now the poem! Come on, Tom!"

"All right," Tom said, "but you have to be quiet. Show respect."

Jordan laid a finger across his lips to show he understood, and Clay saw by the brokenhearted eyes above that upraised finger that the boy had not lost his mind yet. His friend, but not his mind.

Clay waited, curious to see how Tom would go on. He expected some Frost, maybe a fragment of Shakespeare (surely the Head would have approved of Shakespeare, even if it had only been When shall we three meet again), perhaps even a little extemporaneous Tom McCourt. What he did not expect was what came from Tom's mouth in low, precisely measured lines.

"Do not withhold Your mercy from us, O Lord; may Your love and Your truth always protect us. For troubles without numbers surround us; our sins have overtaken us and we cannot see. Our sins are more than the hairs of our heads, and our hearts fail within us. Be pleased, O Lord, to save us; O Lord, come quickly to help us."

Alice was holding her sneaker and weeping at the foot of the grave. Her head was bowed. Her sobs were quick and low.

Tom pressed on, holding one hand out over the new grave, palm extended, fingers curled in. "May all who seek to take our lives as this life was taken be put to shame and confusion; may all who desire our ruin be turned back in disgrace. May those who say to us, 'Aha, aha!' be appalled at their own shame. Here lies the dead, dust of the earth—"

"I'm so sorry, Head!" Jordan cried in a breaking treble voice. "I'm so sorry, it's not right, sir, I'm so sorry you're dead—" His eyes rolled up and he crumpled to the new grave. The mist stole its greedy white fingers over him.

Clay picked him up and felt the pulse in Jordan's neck, strong and regular. "Just fainted. What is it you're saying, Tom?"

Tom look flustered, embarrassed. "A rather free adaptation of Psalm Forty. Let's take him inside—"

"No," Clay said. "If it's not too long, finish."

"Yes, please," Alice said. "Finish. It's lovely. Like salve on a cut."

Tom turned and faced the grave again. He seemed to gather himself, or perhaps he was only finding his place. "Here lies the dead, dust of the earth, and here are we the living, poor and needy; Lord, think of us. You are our help and our deliverer; O my God, do not delay. Amen."

"Amen," Clay and Alice said together.

"Let's get the kid inside," Tom said. "It's fucking freezing out here."

"Did you learn that from the holy Hannahs at the First N.E. Church of Christ the Redeemer?" Clay asked.

"Oh, yes," Tom said. "Many psalms by heart, good for extra desserts. I also learned how to beg on street corners and leaflet a whole Sears parking lot in just twenty minutes with A Million Years in Hell and Not One Drink of Water. Let's put this kid to bed. I'm betting he'll sleep through until at least four tomorrow afternoon and wake up feeling a hell of a lot better."

"What if that man with the torn cheek comes and finds we're still here after he told us to go?" Alice asked.

Clay thought that was a good question, but not one he needed to spend a lot of time mulling over. Either the Raggedy Man would give them another day's grace or he wouldn't. As he took Jordan upstairs to his bed, Clay found he was too tired to care one way or the other.

At around four in the morning, alice bid clay and tom a foggy goodnight and stumbled off to bed. The two men sat in the kitchen, drinking iced tea, not talking much. There seemed nothing to say. Then, just before dawn, another of those great groans, made ghostly by distance, rode in on the foggy air from the northeast. It wavered like the cry of a theremin in an old horror movie, and just as it began to fade, a much louder answering cry came from Gaiten, where the Raggedy Man had taken his new, larger flock.

Clay and Tom went out front, pushing aside the barrier of melted boom-boxes to get down the porch steps. They could see nothing; the whole world was white. They stood there awhile and went back in.

Neither the death-cry nor the answer from Gaiten woke Alice and Jordan; they had that much to be grateful for. Their road atlas, now bent and crumpled at the corners, was on the kitchen counter. Tom thumbed through it and said, "That might have come from Hooksett or Suncook. They're both good-sized towns northeast of here—good-sized for New Hampshire, I mean. I wonder how many they got? And how they did it."

Clay shook his head.

"I hope it was a lot," Tom said with a thin and charmless smile. "I hope it was at least a thousand, and that they slow-cooked them. I find myself thinking of some restaurant chain or other that used to advertise 'broasted chicken.' Are we going tomorrow night?"

"If the Raggedy Man lets us live through today, I guess we ought to. Don't you think?"

"I don't see any choice," Tom said, "but I'll tell you something, Clay– I feel like a cow being driven down a tin chute into the slaughterhouse. I can almost smell the blood of my little moo-brothers."

Clay had the same feeling, but the same question recurred: If slaughtering was what they had on their group mind, why not do it here? They could have done it yesterday afternoon, instead of leaving melted boom-boxes and Alice's pet sneaker on the porch.

Tom yawned. "Turning in. Are you good for another couple of hours?"

"I could be," Clay said. In fact, he had never felt less like sleeping. His body was exhausted but his mind kept turning and turning. It would begin to settle a bit, and then he'd recall the sound the pen had made coming out of the Head's eyesocket: the low squall of metal against bone. "Why?"

"Because if they decide to kill us today, I'd rather go my way than theirs," Tom said. "I've seen theirs. You agree?"

Clay thought that if the collective mind which the Raggedy Man represented had really made the Head stick a fountain pen in his eye, the four remaining residents of Cheatham Lodge might find that suicide was no longer among their options. That was no thought to send Tom to bed on, however. So he nodded.

"I'll take all the guns upstairs. You've got that big old .45, right?"

"The Beth Nickerson special. Right."

"Good night, then. And if you see them coming—or feel them coming—give a yell." Tom paused. "If you have time, that is. And if they let you."

Clay watched Tom leave the kitchen, thinking Tom had been ahead of him all the time. Thinking how much he liked Tom. Thinking he'd like to get to know him better. Thinking the chances of that weren't good. And Johnny and Sharon? They had never seemed so far away.

At eight o'clock that morning, clay sat on a bench at one end of the Head's victory garden, telling himself that if he weren't so tired, he'd get up off his dead ass and make the old fellow some sort of marker. It wouldn't last long, but the guy deserved it for taking care of his last pupil, if for nothing else. The thing was, he didn't even know if he could get up, totter into the house, and wake Tom to stand a watch.

Soon they would have a chilly, beautiful autumn day—one made for apple-picking, cider-making, and touch-football games in the backyard. For now the fog was still thick, but the morning sun shone strongly through it, turning the tiny world in which Clay sat to a dazzling white. Fine suspended droplets hung in the air, and hundreds of tiny rainbow wheels circulated in front of his heavy eyes.

Something red materialized out of this burning whiteness. For a moment the Raggedy Man's hoodie seemed to float by itself, and then, as it came up the garden toward Clay, its occupant's dark brown face and hands materialized above and below it. This morning the hood was up, framing the smiling disfigurement of the face and those dead-alive eyes.

Broad scholar's forehead, marred with a slash.

Filthy, shapeless jeans, torn at the pockets and worn more than a week now.

HARVARD across the narrow chest.

Beth Nickerson's .45 was in the side-holster on his belt. Clay didn't even touch it. The Raggedy Man stopped about ten feet from him. He—it—was standing on the Head's grave, and Clay believed that was no accident. "What do you want?" he asked the Raggedy Man, and immediately answered himself: "To. Tell you."

He sat staring at the Raggedy Man, mute with surprise. He had expected telepathy or nothing. The Raggedy Man grinned—insofar as he could grin, with that badly split lower lip—and spread his hands as if to say Shucks, 't'warn't nuthin.

"Say what you have to say, then," Clay told him, and tried to prepare for having his voice hijacked a second time. He discovered it was a thing you couldn't prepare for. It was like being turned into a grinning piece of wood sitting on a ventriloquist's knee.

"Go. Tonight." Clay concentrated and said, "Shut up, stop it!"

The Raggedy Man waited, the picture of patience.

"I think I can keep you out if I try hard," Clay said. "I'm not sure, but I think I can."

The Raggedy Man waited, his face saying Are you done yet?

"Go ahead," Clay said, and then said, "I could bring. More. I came. Alone."

Clay considered the idea of the Raggedy Man's will joined to that of an entire flock and conceded the point.

"Go. Tonight. North." Clay waited, and when he was sure the Raggedy Man was done with his voice for the time being, he said, "Where? Why?"

There were no words this time, but an image suddenly rose before him. It was so clear that he didn't know if it was in his mind or if the Raggedy Man had somehow conjured it on the brilliant screen of the mist. It was what they had seen scrawled in the middle of Academy Avenue in pink chalk:

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

But the Raggedy Man was walking away. Clay saw his red hoodie for a moment, once again seeming to float unoccupied against the brilliant mist; then that was gone, too. Clay was left with only the thin consolation of knowing that they had been going north anyway, and that they had been given another day's grace. Which meant there was no need to stand a watch. He decided to go to bed and let the others sleep through, as well.

Jordan awoke in his right mind, but his nervy brilliance had departed. He nibbled at half a rock-hard bagel and listened dully as Clay recounted his meeting with the Raggedy Man that morning. When Clay finished, Jordan got their road atlas, consulted the index at the back, and then opened it to the western Maine page. "There," he said, pointing to a town above Fryeburg. "This is Kashwak here, to the east, and Little Kashwak to the west, almost on the Maine-New Hampshire state line. I knew I recognized the name. Because of the lake." He tapped it. "Almost as big as Sebago."

Alice leaned closer to read the name on the lake. "Kash . . . Kashwaka-mak, I guess it is."

"It's in an unincorporated area called TR-90," Jordan said. He tapped this on the map, also. "Once you know that, Kashwak Equals No-Fo is sort of a no-brainer, wouldn't you say?"

"It's a dead zone, right?" Tom said. "No cell phone towers, no microwave towers."

Jordan gave him a wan smile. "Well, I imagine there are plenty of people with satellite dishes, but otherwise . . . bingo."

"I don't get it," Alice said. "Why would they want to send us to a no-cell zone where everyone should be more or less all right?"

"Might as well ask why they let us live in the first place," Tom said.

"Maybe they want to turn us into living guided missiles and use us to bomb the joint," Jordan said. "Get rid of us and them. Two birds with one stone."

They considered this in silence for a moment.

"Let's go and find out," Alice said, "but I'm not bombing anybody."

Jordan eyed her bleakly. "You saw what they did to the Head. If it comes right down to it, do you think you'll have any choice?"

There were still shoes on most of the stoops across from the fieldstone pillars marking the entrance to Gaiten Academy, but the doors of the nice-looking homes either stood open or had been torn off their hinges. A few of the dead they saw littered on those lawns as they once more began their trek north were phone-crazies, but most had been innocent pilgrims who had happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were the ones with no shoes on their feet, but there was really no need to look as far as their feet; many of the reprisal victims had literally been torn limb from limb.

Beyond the school, where Academy Avenue once more became Route 102, there was carnage on both sides for half a mile. Alice walked with her eyes resolutely closed, allowing Tom to lead her as if she were blind. Clay offered to do the same for Jordan, but he only shook his head and walked stolidly up the centerline, a skinny kid with a pack on his back and too much hair on his head. After a few cursory glances at the kill-off, he looked down at his sneakers.

"There are hundreds," Tom said once. It was eight o'clock and full dark, but they could still see far more than they wanted to. Lying curled around a stop-sign at the corner of Academy and Spofford was a girl in red pants and a white sailor blouse. She looked no more than nine, and she was shoeless. Twenty yards away stood the open door of the house from which she had probably been dragged, screaming for mercy. "Hundreds."

"Maybe not that many," Clay said. "Some of our kind were armed. They shot quite a few of the bastards. Knifed a few more. I even saw one with an arrow sticking out of his—"

"We caused this," Tom said. "Do you think we have a kind anymore?"

This question was answered while they were eating their cold lunch at a roadside picnic spot four hours later. By then they were on Route 156, and according to the sign, this was a Scenic Turnout, offering a view of Historic Flint Hill to the west. Clay imagined the view was good, if you were eating lunch here at noon rather than midnight, with gas lanterns at either end of your picnic table to see by.

They had reached the dessert course—stale Oreos—when a party of half a dozen came toiling along, all of them older folks. Three were pushing shopping carts full of supplies and all were armed. These were the first other travelers they had seen since setting out again.

"Hey!" Tom called, giving them a wave. "Got another picnic table over here, if you want to sit a spell!"

They looked over. The older of the two women in the party, a grandmotherly type with lots of white, fluffy hair that shone in the starlight, started to wave. Then she stopped.

"That's them," one of the men said, and Clay did not mistake either the loathing or the fear in the man's voice. "That's the Gaiten bunch."

One of the other men said, "Go to hell, buddy." They kept on walking, even moving a little faster, although the grandmotherly type was limping, and the man beside her had to help her past a Subaru that had locked bumpers with somebody's abandoned Saturn.

Alice jumped up, almost knocking over one of the lanterns. Clay grabbed her arm. "Don't bother, kiddo."

She ignored him. "At least we did something?' she shouted after them. "What did you do? Just what the fuck did you do?"

"Tell you what we didn't do," one of the men said. The little group was past the scenic turnout now, and he had to look back over his shoulder to talk to her. He could do this because the road was free of abandoned vehicles for a couple of hundred yards here. "We didn't get a bunch of normies killed. There are more of them than us, in case you didn't notice—"

"Oh bullshit, you don't know if that's true!" Jordan shouted. Clay realized it was the first time the kid had spoken since they'd passed the Gaiten town limits.

"Maybe it is and maybe it isn't," the man said, "but they can do some very weird and powerful shit. You gotta buy that for a dollar. They say they'll leave us alone if we leave them alone . . . and you alone. We say fine."

"If you believe anything they say—or think at you—then you're an idiot," Alice said.

The man faced forward, raised his hand in the air, shook it in a combined fuck-off/bye-bye gesture, and said no more.

The four of them watched the shopping-cart people out of sight, then gazed at each other across the picnic table with its intaglios of old initials.

"So now we know," Tom said. "We're outcasts."

"Maybe not if the phone people want us to go where the rest of the– what did he call them?—the rest of the normies are going," Clay said. "Maybe we're something else."

"What?" Alice asked.

Clay had an idea, but he didn't like to put it into words. Not at midnight. "Right now I'm more interested in Kent Pond," he said. "I want—I need to see if I can find my wife and son."

"It's not very likely that they're still there, is it?" Tom asked in his low, kind voice. "I mean, no matter which way things went for them, normal or phoner, they've probably moved on."

"If they're all right, they will have left word," Clay said. "In any case, it's a place to go."

And until they got there and that part of it was done, he wouldn't have to consider why the Raggedy Man would send them to a place of safety if the people there hated and feared them.

Or how, if the phone people knew about it, Kashwak No-Fo could be safe at all.

They were edging slowly east toward route 19, a highway that would take them across the state line and into Maine, but they didn't make it that night. All the roads in this part of New Hampshire seemed to pass through the small city of Rochester, and Rochester had burned to the ground. The fire's core was still alive, putting out an almost radioactive glow. Alice took over, leading them around the worst of the fiery ruins in a half-circle to the west. Several times they saw KASHWAK=NO-FOscrawled on the sidewalks; once spray-painted on the side of a U.S. mailbox.

"That's a bazillion-dollar fine and life in prison at Guantanamo Bay," Tom said with a wan smile.

Their course eventually took them through the vast parking lot of the Rochester Mall. Long before they reached it, they could hear the over-amplified sound of an uninspired New Age jazz trio playing the sort of stuff Clay thought of as music to shop by. The parking lot was buried in drifts of moldering trash; the remaining cars stood up to their hubcaps in litter. They could smell the blown and fleshy reek of dead bodies on the breeze.

"Flock here somewhere," Tom commented.

It was in the cemetery next to the mall. Their course was going to take them south and west of it, but when they left the mall parking lot, they were close enough to see the red eyes of the boomboxes through the trees.

"Maybe we ought to do em up," Alice proposed suddenly as they stepped back onto North Main Street. "There must be a propane truck that isn't working around here somewhere."

"Yeah, baby!" Jordan said. He raised his fists to the sides of his head and shook them, looking really alive for the first time since leaving Cheatham Lodge. "For the Head!"

"I think not," Tom said.

"Afraid of trying their patience?" Clay asked. He was surprised to find himself actually sort of in favor of Alice's crazy idea. That torching another flock was a crazy idea he had no doubt, but . . .

He thought, Imight do it just became that's the absolute worst version of "Misty" I've ever heard in my life. Twist my fuckin arm.

"Not that," Tom said. He seemed to be thinking. "Do you see that street there?" He was pointing to an avenue that ran between the mall and the cemetery. It was choked with stalled cars. Almost all of them were pointed away from the mall. Clay found it all too easy to imagine those cars full of people trying to get home after the Pulse. People who would want to know what was happening, and if their families were all right. They would have reached for their car phones, their cell phones, without a second thought.

"What about it?" he asked.

"Let us stroll down there a little way," Tom said. "Very carefully."

"What did you see, Tom?"

"I'd rather not say. Maybe nothing. Keep off the sidewalk, stay under the trees. And that was one hell of a traffic jam. There'll be bodies."

There were dozens rotting their way back into the great scheme of things between Twombley Street and the West Side Cemetery. "Misty" had given way to a cough-syrup rendition of "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" by the time they reached the edge of the trees, and they could again see the red eyes of the boombox power lamps. Then Clay saw something else and stopped. "Jesus," he whispered. Tom nodded.

"What?" Jordan whispered. "What?"

Alice said nothing, but Clay could tell by the direction she was looking and the defeated slump of her shoulders that she'd seen what he had. There were men with rifles standing a perimeter guard around the cemetery. Clay took Jordan's head, turned it, and saw the boy's shoulders also slump.

"Let's go," the kid whispered. "The smell's making me sick."

In melrose corner, about four miles north of rochester (they could still see its red glow waxing and waning on the southern horizon), they came to another picnic area, this one with a little stone firepit as well as picnic tables. Clay, Tom, and Jordan picked up dry wood. Alice, who claimed to have been a Girl Scout, proved her skills by making a neat little fire and then heating three cans of what she called "hobo beans." As they ate, two little parties of pilgrims passed them by. Both looked; no one in either group waved or spoke.

When the wolf in his belly had quieted a little, Clay said, "You saw those guys, Tom? All the way from the mall parking lot? I'm thinking of changing your name to Hawkeye."

Tom shook his head. "It was pure luck. That and the light from Rochester. You know, the embers?"

Clay nodded. They all did.

"I happened to look over at that cemetery at just the right time and the right angle and saw the shine on a couple of rifle-barrels. I told myself it couldn't be what it looked like, that it was probably iron fence-palings, or something, but. . ." Tom sighed, looked at the rest of his beans, then put them aside. "There you have it."

"They were phone-crazies, maybe," Jordan said, but he didn't believe it. Clay could hear it in his voice.

"Phone-crazies don't do the night shift," Alice said.

"Maybe they need less sleep now," Jordan said. "Maybe that's part of their new programming."

Hearing him talk that way, as if the phone people were organic computers in some kind of upload cycle, never failed to give Clay a chill.

"They don't do rifles, either, Jordan," Tom said. "They don't need them."

"So now they've got a few collaborators taking care of them while they get their beauty rest," Alice said. There was brittle contempt on top of her voice, tears just beneath. "I hope they rot in hell."

Clay said nothing, but he found himself thinking of the people they had met earlier that night, the ones with the shopping carts—the fear and loathing in the voice of the man who had called them the Gaiten bunch. He might as well have called us the Dillinger gang, Clay thought. And then he thought, Idon't think of them as the phone-crazies anymore; now I think of them as the phone-people. Why is that? The thought that followed was even more uncomfortable: When does a collaborator stop being a collaborator? The answer, it seemed to him, was when the collaborators became the clear majority. Then the ones who weren't collaborators became . . .

Well, if you were a romantic, you called those people "the underground." If you weren't a romantic, you called them fugitives.

Or maybe just criminals.

They pushed on to the village of Hayes Station and stayed the night at a tumbledown motel called Whispering Pines. It was within sight of a sign reading ROUTE 19, 7 MI SANFORD THE BERWICKS KENT POND.they didn't leave their shoes outside the doors of the units they chose.

There no longer seemed any need of that.

He was standing on a platform in the middle of that damned field again, somehow immobilized, the object of every eye. On the horizon was the skeletal shape with the blinking red light on top. The place was bigger than Foxboro. His friends were lined up with him, but now they weren't alone. Similar platforms ran the length of the open area. On Tom's left stood a pregnant woman in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt with cutoff sleeves. On Clay's right was an elderly gent—not in the Head's league, but getting there—with graying hair pulled back in a ponytail and a frightened frown on his horsey, intelligent face. Beyond him was a younger man wearing a battered Miami Dolphins cap.

Clay saw people that he knew among the thousands and wasn't surprised—wasn't that how things always went in dreams? One minute you were phone-booth-cramming with your first-grade teacher; a minute later you were making out with all three members of Destiny's Child on the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

Destiny's Child wasn't in this dream, but Clay saw the naked young man who had been jabbing the car aerials (now dressed in chinos and a clean white T-shirt), and the guy with the packsack who had called Alice little ma'am, and the limping grandmotherly type. She pointed to Clay and his friends, who were more or less on the fifty-yard line, then spoke to the woman next to her . . . who was, Clay observed without surprise, Mr. Scottoni's pregnant daughter-in-law. That's the Gaiten bunch, the limping grandmotherly type said, and Mr. Scottoni's pregnant daughter-in-law lifted her full upper lip in a sneer.

Help me! called the woman on the platform next to Tom's. It was Mr. Scottoni's daughter-in-law she was calling to. Iwant to have my baby thesame as you! Help me!

You should have thought of that while there was still time, Mr. Scottoni's daughter-in-law replied, and Clay realized, as he had in the other dream, that no one was actually talking. This was telepathy.

The Raggedy Man began making his way up the line, putting a hand over the head of each person he came to. He did this as Tom had over the Head's grave: palm extended, fingers curled in. Clay could see some sort of ID bracelet flashing on the Raggedy Man's wrist, maybe one of those medical-alert things, and realized there was power here—the light-towers were blazing. He saw something else, as well. The reason the Raggedy Man could reach above their heads even though they were standing on platforms was because the Raggedy Man wasn't on the ground. He was walking, but on four feet of thin air.

"Ecce homo —insanus," he said. "Ecce femina —insana." And each time the crowd roared back "DON'T TOUCH!" in a single voice, both the phone-people and the normies. Because now there was no difference. In Clay's dream they were the same.

He awoke in the late afternoon, huddled in a ball and clutching a flat motel pillow. He went outside and saw Alice and Jordan sitting on the curb between the parking lot and the units. Alice had her arm around Jordan. His head was on her shoulder and his arm was around her waist. His hair was sticking up in back. Clay sat down with them. Beyond them, the highway leading to Route 19 and Maine was deserted except for a Federal Express truck sitting dead on the white line with its back doors standing open, and a crashed motorcycle.

Clay sat down with them. "Did you—"

"Ecce puer, insanus," Jordan said, without lifting his head from Alice's shoulder. "That's me."

"And I'm the femina," Alice said. "Clay, is there some sort of humongous football stadium in Kashwak? Because if there is, I'm not going near the place."

A door closed behind them. Footsteps approached. "Me either," Tom said, sitting down with them. "I have many issues—I'd be the first to admit it—but a death-wish has never been one of them."

"I'm not positive, but I don't think there's much more than an elementary school up there," Clay said. "The high school kids probably get bused to Tashmore."

"It's a virtual stadium," Jordan said.

"Huh?" Tom said. "You mean like in a computer game?"

"I mean like in a computer." Jordan lifted his head, still staring at the empty road leading to Sanford, the Berwicks, and Kent Pond. "Never mind that, I don't care about that. If they won't touch us—the phone-people, the normal people—who will touch us?" Clay had never seen such adult pain in a child's eyes. "Who will touch us?"

No one answered.

"Will the Raggedy Man touch us?" Jordan asked, his voice rising a little. "Will the Raggedy Man touch us? Maybe. Because he's watching, I feel him watching."

"Jordan, you're getting carried away," Clay said, but the idea had a certain weird interior logic. If they were being sent this dream—the dream of the platforms—then maybe he was watching. You didn't mail a letter if you didn't have an address.

"I don't want to go to Kashwak," Alice said. "I don't care if it's a no-phone zone or not. I'd rather go to . . . to Idaho."

"I'm going to Kent Pond before I go to Kashwak or Idaho or anywhere," Clay said. "I can be there in two nights' walk. I wish you guys would come, but if you don't want to—or can't—I'll understand."

"The man needs closure, let's get him some," Tom said. "After that, we can figure out what comes next. Unless someone's got another idea."

No one did.

Route 19 was totally clear on both sides for short stretches, sometimes up to a quarter of a mile, and that encouraged sprinters. This was the term Jordan coined for the semi-suicidal dragsters who would go roaring past at high speeds, usually in the middle of the road, always with their high beams glaring.

Clay and the others would see the approaching lights and get off the pavement in a hurry, right off the shoulder and into the weeds if they had spotted wrecks or stalls up ahead. Jordan took to calling these "sprinter-reefs." The sprinter would blow past, the people inside frequently whooping (and almost certainly liquored up). If there was only one stall—a small sprinter-reef—the driver would most likely elect to weave around it. If the road was completely blocked, he might still try to go around, but he and his passengers were more apt to simply abandon their vehicle and resume their eastward course on foot until they found something else that looked worth sprinting in—which was to say, something fast and temporarily amusing. Clay imagined their course as a series of jerks . . . but then, most of the sprinters were jerks, just one more pain in the ass in what had become a pain-in-the-ass world. That seemed true of Gunner, as well.

He was the fourth sprinter of their first night on Highway 19, spotting them standing at the side of the road in the flare of his headlights. Spotting Alice. He leaned out, dark hair streaming back from his face, and yelled "Suck my rod, you teenybop bitch!" as he slammed by in a black Cadillac Escalade. His passengers cheered and waved. Someone shouted "Tell huh!" To Clay it sounded like absolute ecstasy expressed in a South Boston accent.

"Charming" was Alice's only comment.

"Some people have no—" Tom began, but before he could tell them what some people didn't have, there was a scream of tires from the dark not far ahead, followed by a loud, hollow bang and the tinkle of glass.

"]esus-fuck," Clay said, and began to run. Before he had gotten twenty yards, Alice blew past him. "Slow down, they might be dangerous!" he shouted.

Alice held up one of the automatic pistols so Clay could see it and ran on, soon outdistancing him completely.

Tom caught up with Clay, already working for breath. Jordan, running beside him, could have been in a rocking chair.

"What . . . are we going . . . to do . . . if they're badly hurt?" Tom asked. "Call… an ambulance?"

"I don't know," Clay said, but he was thinking of how Alice had held up one of the automatic pistols. He knew.

They caught up with her around the next curve of the highway. she was standing behind the Escalade. It was lying on its side with the airbags deployed. The tale of the accident wasn't hard to read. The Escalade had come steaming around the blind curve at maybe sixty miles an hour and had encountered an abandoned milk tanker dead ahead. The driver, jerk or not, had done well to avoid being totaled. He was walking around the battered SUV in a dazed circle, pushing his hair away from his face. Blood gushed from his nose and a cut in his forehead. Clay walked to the Escalade, sneakers gritting on pebbles of Saf-T-Glas, and looked inside. It was empty. He shone his light around and saw blood on the steering wheel, nowhere else. The passengers had been lively enough to exit the wreck, and all but one had fled the scene, probably out of simple reflex. The one who had stuck with the driver was a shrimpy little postadolescent with bad acne scars, buck teeth, and long, dirty red hair. His steady line of jabber reminded Clay of the little dog who idolized Spike in the Warner Bros, cartoons.

"Ah you all right, Gunnah?" he asked. Clay presumed this was how you pronounced Gunner in Southie. "Holy shit, you're bleedin like a mutha. Fuckin-A, I thought we was dead." Then, to Clay: "Whuttajw lookin at?"

"Shut up," Clay said—and, under the circumstances, not unkindly. The redhead pointed at Clay, then turned to his bleeding friend. "This is one of em, Gunnah! This is a bunch of em!"

"Shut up, Harold," Gunner said. Not kindly at all. Then he looked at Clay, Tom, Alice, and Jordan.

"Let me do something about your forehead," Alice said. She had reholstered her gun and taken off her pack. Now she was rummaging through it. "I've got Band-Aids and gauze pads. Also hydrogen peroxide, which will sting, but better a little sting than an infection, am I right?"

"Considering what this young man called you on his way by, you're a better Christian than I was in my prime," Tom said. He had unslung Sir Speedy and was holding it by the strap as he looked at Gunner and Harold.

Gunner might have been twenty-five. His long black rock-vocalist hair was now matted with blood. He looked at the milk tanker, then at the Escalade, then at Alice, who had a gauze pad in one hand and the bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the other.

"Tommy and Frito and that guy who was always pickin his nose, they took off," the redheaded shrimp was saying. He expanded what chest he had. "But I stuck around, Gunnah! Holy fuck, buddy, you're bleedin like a pig."

Alice put hydrogen peroxide on the gauze pad, then took a step toward Gunner. He immediately took a step back. "Get away from me. You're poison."

"It's them!" the redhead cried. "From the dreams! What'd I tellya?"

"Keep away from me," Gunner said. "Fuckin bitch. Alla ya."

Clay felt a sudden urge to shoot him and wasn't surprised. Gunner looked and acted like a dangerous dog backed into a corner, teeth bared and ready to bite, and wasn't that what you did to dangerous dogs when there was no other recourse? Didn't you shoot them? But of course they did have recourse, and if Alice could play Good Samaritan to the scumbag who had called her a teenybop bitch, he guessed he could refrain from executing him. But there was something he wanted to find out before he let these two charming fellows go their way.

"These dreams," he said. "Do you have a . . . I don't know . . . a kind of spirit guide in them? A guy in a red hoodie, let's say?"

Gunner shrugged. Tore a piece off his shirt and used it to mop the blood on his face. He was coming back a little now, seemed a little more aware of what had happened. "Harvard, yeah. Right, Harold?"

The little redhead nodded. "Yeah. Harvard. The black guy. But they ain't dreams. If you don't know, it ain't no fuckin good telling ya. They're fuckin broadcasts. Broadcasts in our sleep. If you don't get em, it's because you're poison. Ain't they, Gunnah?"

"You guys fucked up bigtime," Gunner said in a brooding voice, and mopped his forehead. "Don't you touch me."

"We're gonna have our own place," Harold said. "Ain't we, Gunnah? Up Maine, fuckin right. Everyone who didn't get Pulsed is goin there, and we're gonna be left alone. Hunt, fish, live off the fuckin land. Harvard says so."

"And you believe him?" Alice said. She sounded fascinated.

Gunner raised a finger that shook slightly. "Shut your mouth, bitch."

"I think you better shut yours," Jordan said. "We've got the guns."

"You better not even think about shootin us!" Harold said shrilly. "Whatcha think Harvard would do to you if you shot us, you fuckin punkass shorty?"

"Nothing," Clay said.

"You don't—" Gunner began, but before he could get any further, Clay took a step forward and pistol-whipped him across the jaw with Beth Nickerson's .45. The sight at the end of the barrel opened a fresh cut along Gunner's jaw, but Clay hoped that in the end this might prove better medicine than the hydrogen peroxide the man had refused. In this he proved wrong.

Gunner fell back against the side of the abandoned milk tanker, looking at Clay with shocked eyes. Harold took an impulsive step forward. Tom trained Sir Speedy on him and gave his head a single forbidding shake. Harold shrank back and began to gnaw the ends of his dirty fingers. Above them his eyes were huge and wet.

"We're going now," Clay said. "I'd advise you stay here at least an hour, because you really don't want to see us again. We're leaving you your lives as a gift. If we see you again, we'll take them away." He backed toward Tom and the others, still staring into that glowering, unbelieving bloody face. He felt a little like the old-time lion-tamer Frank Buck, trying to do it all by pure force of will. "One more thing. I don't know why the phone-people want all the 'normies' in Kashwak, but I know what a roundup usually means for the cattle. You might think about that the next time you're getting one of your nightly podcasts."

"Fuck you," Gunner said, but broke his eyelock with Clay and gazed down at his shoes.

"Come on, Clay," Tom said. "Let's go."

"Don't let us see you again, Gunner," Clay said, but they did.

Gunner and harold must have gotten ahead of them somehow, maybe by taking a chance and traveling five or ten daylight miles while Clay, Tom, Alice, and Jordan were sleeping in the State Line Motel, which was about two hundred yards into Maine. The pair might have laid up in the Salmon Falls rest area, Gunner hiding his new ride among the half a dozen or so cars that had been abandoned there. It didn't really matter. What mattered was they got ahead of them, waited for them to go by, and then pounced.

Clay barely registered the approaching sound of the engine or Jordan's comment—"Here comes a sprinter." This was his home turf, and as they passed each familiar landmark—the Freneau Lobster Pound two miles east of the State Line Motel, Shaky's Tastee Freeze across from it, the statue of General Joshua Chamberlain in the tiny Turnbull town square—he felt more and more like a man having a vivid dream. He didn't realize how little he'd expected to ever reach home again until he saw the big plastic sof-serv cone towering over Shaky's—it looked both prosaic and as exotic as something from a lunatic's nightmare, hulking its curled tip against the stars.

"Road's pretty littered for a sprinter," Alice commented.

They walked to the side of the road as headlights brightened on the hill behind them. An overturned pickup truck was lying on the white line. Clay thought there was a good chance the oncoming vehicle would ram it, but the headlights swerved to the left only an instant after they cleared the hilltop; the sprinter avoided the pickup easily, running on the shoulder for a few seconds before regaining the road. Clay surmised later that Gunner and Harold must have gone over this stretch, mapping the sprinter-reefs carefully.

They stood watching, Clay closest to the approaching lights, Alice standing next to him on his left. On her left were Tom and Jordan. Tom had his arm slung casually around Jordan's shoulders.

"Boy, he's really comin," Jordan said. There was no alarm in his voice; it was just a remark. Clay felt no alarm, either. He had no premonition of what was going to happen. He had forgotten all about Gunner and Harold.

There was a sports car of some sort, maybe an MG, parked half on and half off the road fifty feet or so west of where they were standing. Harold, who was driving the sprinter vehicle, swerved to avoid it. Just a minor swerve, but perhaps it threw Gunner's aim off. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Clay had never been his target. Perhaps it was Alice he'd meant to hit all along.

Tonight they were in a nondescript Chevrolet sedan. Gunner was kneeling on the backseat, out the window to his waist, holding a ragged chunk of cinderblock in his hands. He gave an inarticulate cry that could have come directly from a balloon in one of the comic books Clay had drawn as a freelance—"Yahhhhbh!" —and threw the block. It flew a short and lethal course through the dark and struck Alice in the side of the head. Clay never forgot the sound it made. The flashlight she had been holding—which would have made her a perfect target, although they had all been holding them—tumbled from her relaxing hand and sprayed a cone of light across the macadam, picking out pebbles and a piece of tail-light glass that glinted like a fake ruby.

Clay fell on his knees beside her, calling her name, but he couldn't hear himself in the sudden roar of Sir Speedy, which was finally getting a trial. Muzzle-flashes strobed the dark, and by their glare he could see blood pouring down the left side of her face—oh God, what face—in a torrent.

Then the gunfire stopped. Tom was screaming "The barrel pulled up, Icouldn't hold it down, I think I shot the whole fucking clip into the sky" and Jordan was screaming "Is she hurt, did he get her" and Clay thought of how she had offered to put hydrogen peroxide on Gunner's forehead and then bandage it. Better a little sting than an infection, am I right? she had said, and he had to stop the bleeding. He had to stop it right now. He stripped off the jacket he was wearing, then the sweater beneath. He would use the sweater, wrap it around her head like a fucking turban.

Tom's roving flashlight happened on the cinderblock and stopped. It was matted with gore and hair. Jordan saw it and began to shriek. Clay, panting and sweating madly in spite of the chilly evening air, began to wrap the sweater around Alice's head. It soaked through immediately. His hands felt like they were wearing warm wet gloves. Now Tom's light found Alice, her head wrapped in a sweater down to the nose so that she looked like a prisoner of Islamic extremists in an Internet photo, her cheek (the remains of her cheek) and her neck drowned in blood, and he also began to scream.

Help me, Clay wanted to say. Stop that, both of you, and help me with her. But his voice wouldn't come out and all he could do was press the sopping sweater against the spongy side of her head, remembering that she had been bleeding when they had first met her, thinking she had been okay that time, she had been okay then.

Her hands were twitching aimlessly, the fingers kicking up little sprays of roadside dirt. Somebody give her that sneaker of hers, Clay thought, but the sneaker was in her pack and she was lying on her pack. Lying there with the side of her head crushed in by someone who'd had a little score to settle. Her feet were twitching, too, he saw, and he could still feel the blood pouring out of her, through the sweater and over his hands.

Here we are at the end of the world, he thought. He looked up in the sky and saw the evening star.

She never really passed out and never fully regained consciousness. Tom got himself under control and helped carry her up the slope on their side of the road. Here were trees—what Clay remembered as an apple orchard. He thought he and Sharon had come here once to pick, back when Johnny had been small. When it had been good between them and there had been no arguments about money and ambitions and the future.

"You're not supposed to move people when they've got bad head-wounds," Jordan fretted, trailing along behind them and carrying her pack.

"That's nothing we have to worry about," Clay said. "She can't live, Jordan. Not like she is. I don't think even a hospital could do much for her." He saw Jordan's face begin to crumple. There was enough light for that. "I'm sorry."

They laid her on the grass. Tom tried to give her water from a Poland Spring bottle with a nipple end, and she actually took some. Jordan gave her the sneaker, the Baby Nike, and she took that, too, squeezing it, leaving smears of blood on it. Then they waited for her to die. They waited all that night.

She said, "daddy told me i could have the rest, so don't blameme." That was around eleven o'clock. She lay with her head on Tom's pack, which he had stuffed with a motel blanket he'd taken from the Sweet Valley Inn. That had been on the outskirts of Methuen, in what now seemed like another life. A better life, actually. The pack was already soaked with blood. Her one remaining eye stared up at the stars. Her left hand lay open on the grass beside her. It hadn't moved in over an hour. Her right hand squeezed the little sneaker relentlessly. Squeeze . . . and relax. Squeeze . . . and relax.

"Alice," Clay said. "Are you thirsty? Do you want some more water?"

She did not answer.

Later—quarter of one by clay's watch—she asked someone if she could go swimming. Ten minutes later she said, "I don't want those tampons, those tampons are dirty," and laughed. The sound of her laughter was natural, shocking, and it roused Jordan, who had been dozing. He saw how she was and started to cry. He went off by himself to do it. When Tom tried to sit beside him and comfort him, Jordan screamed for him to go away.

At quarter past two, a large party of normies passed by on the road below them, many flashlights bobbing in the dark. Clay went to the edge of the slope and called down to them. "You don't have a doctor, do you?" he asked, without much hope.

The flashlights stopped. There was a murmur of consultation from the dark shapes below, and then a woman's voice called up to him, a rather beautiful voice. "Leave us alone. You're off-limits."

Tom joined Clay at the edge of the bank. " 'And the Levite also passed by on the other side,' " Tom called down. "That's King James for fuck you, lady."

Behind them, Alice suddenly spoke in a strong voice. "The men in the car will be taken care of. Not as a favor to you but as a warning to others. You understand."

Tom grabbed Clay's wrist with a cold hand. "Jesus Christ, she sounds like she's awake."

Clay took Tom's hand in both of his own and held it. "That's not her. That's the guy in the red hoodie, using her as a . . . as a loudspeaker."

In the dark Tom's eyes were huge. "How do you know that?"

"I know," Clay said.

Below them, the flashlights were moving away. Soon they were gone and Clay was glad. This was their business, it was private.

At half past three, in the ditch of the night, alice said: "Oh, Mummy, too bad! Fading roses, this garden's over." Then her tone brightened. "Will there be snow? We'll make a fort, we'll make a leaf, we'll make a bird, we'll make a bird, we'll make a hand, we'll make a blue one, we'll . . ." She trailed off, looking up at stars that turned on the night like a clock. The night was cold. They had bundled her up. Every breath she exhaled came out in white vapor. The bleeding had finally stopped. Jordan sat next to her, petting her left hand, the one that was already dead and waiting for the rest of her to catch up.

"Play the slinky one I like," she said. "The one by Hall and Oates."

At twenty to five, she said, "it's the loveliest dress ever." They were all gathered around her. Clay had said he thought she was going.

"What color, Alice?" Clay asked, not expecting an answer—but she did answer.

"Green."

"Where will you wear it?"

"The ladies come to the table," she said. Her hand still squeezed the sneaker, but more slowly now. The blood on the side of her face had dried to an enamel glaze. "The ladies come to the table, the ladies come to the table. Mr. Ricardi stays at his post and the ladies come to the table."

"That's right, dear," Tom said softly. "Mr. Ricardi stayed at his post, didn't he?"

"The ladies come to the table." Her remaining eye turned to Clay, and for the second time she spoke in that other voice. One he had heard coming from his own mouth. Only four words this time. '"Your son's with us."

"You lie," Clay whispered. His fists were clenched, and he had to restrain himself from striking the dying girl. "You bastard, you lie."

"The ladies come to the table and we all have tea," Alice said.

The first line of light had begun to show in the east. tom sat beside Clay, and put a tentative hand on his arm. "If they read minds," he said, "they could have gotten the fact that you have a son and you're worried to death about him as easily as you'd look something up on Google. That guy could be using Alice to fuck with you."

"I know that," Clay said. He knew something else: what she'd said in Harvard's voice was all too plausible. "You know what I keep thinking about?"

Tom shook his head.

"When he was little, three or four—back when Sharon and I still got along and we called him Johnny-Gee—he'd come running every time the phone rang. He'd yell 'Fo-fo-me-me?' It knocked us out. And if it was his nana or his PeePop, we'd say 'Fo-fo-you-you' and hand it to him. I can still remember how big the fucking thing looked in his little hands . . . and against the side of his face . . ."

"Clay, stop."

"And now . . . now . . ." He couldn't go on. And didn't have to.

"Come here, you guys!" Jordan called. His voice was agonized. "Hurry up!"

They went back to where Alice lay. She had come up off the ground in a locked convulsion, her spine a hard, quivering arc. Her remaining eye bulged in its socket; her lips pulled down at the corners. Then, suddenly, everything relaxed. She spoke a name that had no meaning for them– Henry—and squeezed the sneaker one final time. Then the fingers relaxed and it slipped free. There was a sigh and a final white cloud, very thin, from between her parted lips.

Jordan looked from Clay to Tom, then back to Clay again. "Is she—"

"Yes," Clay said.

Jordan burst into tears. Clay allowed Alice another few seconds to look at the paling stars, then used the heel of his hand to close her eye.

There was a farmhouse not far from the orchard. they found shovels in one of the sheds and buried her under an apple tree, with the little sneaker in her hand. It was, they agreed, what she would have wanted. At Jordan's request, Tom once more recited Psalm Forty, although this time he had difficulty finishing. They each told one thing they remembered about Alice. During this part of the impromptu service, a flock of phone-people—a small one—passed north of them. They were noticed but not bothered. This did not surprise Clay in the slightest. They were insane, not to be touched . . . as he was sure Gunner and Harold would learn to their sorrow.

They slept away most of the daylight hours in the farmhouse, then moved on to Kent Pond. Clay no longer really expected to find his son there, but he hadn't given up hope of finding word of Johnny, or perhaps Sharon. Just to know she was alive might lift a little of the sorrow he now felt, a feeling so heavy that it seemed to weigh him down like a cloak lined with lead.