Cell

KENT POND

His old house—the house where johnny and sharon had lived at the time of the Pulse—was on Livery Lane, two blocks north of the dead traffic light that marked the center of Kent Pond. It was the sort of place some real estate ads called a "fixer-upper" and some a "starter home." Clay and Sharon's joke—before the separation—was that their "starter home" would probably also be their "retirement home." And when she'd gotten pregnant, they had talked about naming the baby Olivia if it turned out to be of what Sharon called "the feminine persuasion." Then, she said, they'd have the only Livvie of Livery Lane. How they had laughed.

Clay, Tom, and Jordan—a pallid Jordan, a thoughtfully silent Jordan who now usually responded to questions only if asked a second or even a third time—arrived at the intersection of Main and Livery at just past midnight on a windy night during the second week of October. Clay stared wildly at the stop sign on the corner of his old street, where he had come as a visitor for the last four months. NUCLEAR POWER was still stenciled there in spray-paint, as it had been before he'd left for Boston. STOP . . . NUCLEAR POWER. STOP . . . NUCLEAR POWER. He couldn't seem to get the sense of it. It wasn't a question of meaning, that was clear enough, just someone's clever little political statement (if he looked he'd probably find the same thing on stop signs all over town, maybe in Springvale and Acton, too), but the sense of how this could be the same when the whole world had changed—that eluded him. Clay felt somehow that if he stared at STOP . . . NUCLEAR POWER with enough desperate intensity, a wormhole would open, some kind of sci-fi time-tunnel, and he'd dive into the past, and all this would be undone. All this darkness.

"Clay?" Tom asked. "Are you all right?"

"This is my street," Clay said, as if that explained everything, and then, without knowing he was going to do it, he began to run.

Livery Lane was a cul-de-sac, all the streets on this side of town dead-ending against the flank of Kent's Hill, which was really an eroded mountain. Oaks overhung it and the street was full of dead leaves that crackled under his feet. There were also a lot of stalled cars, and two that were locked grille to grille in a strenuous mechanical kiss.

"Where's he going?" Jordan called behind him. Clay hated the fear he heard in Jordan's voice, but he couldn't stop.

"He's all right," Tom said. "Let him go."

Clay wove around the stalled cars, the beam of his flashlight jigging and stabbing in front of him. One of the stabs caught Mr. Kretsky's face. Mr. Kretsky always used to have a Tootsie Pop for Johnny on haircut day when Johnny was Johnny-Gee, just a little guy who used to yellfo-fo-me-me when the phone rang. Mr. Kretsky was lying on the sidewalk in front of his house, half-buried in fallen oak-leaves, and his nose appeared to be gone.

I mustn't find them dead. This thought drummed in his mind, over and over. Not after Alice. I mustn't find them dead. And then, hatefully (but in moments of stress the mind almost always told the truth): And if I have tofind one of them dead. . . let it be her.

Their house was the last one on the left (as he always used to remind Sharon, with a suitably creepy laugh—long after the joke had worn thin, actually), and the driveway slanted up to the refurbished little shed that was just big enough to park one car. Clay was already out of breath but he didn't slow. He sprinted up the driveway, kicking leaves in front of him, feeling the stitch starting to sink in high up on his right side, tasting copper in the back of his mouth, where his breathing seemed to rasp. He lifted his flashlight and shined it into the garage.

Empty. Question was, was that good or bad?

He turned around, saw Tom's and Jordan's lights bobbing toward him down below, and shone his own on his back door. His heart leaped into the back of his throat at what he saw. He ran up the three steps to the stoop, stumbled, and almost put his hand through the storm door pulling the note off the glass. It was held by only a corner of Scotch tape; if they'd come along an hour later, maybe even half an hour, the restless night wind would have blown it over the hills and far away. He could kill her for not taking more pains, such carelessness was just so Sharon, but at least– The note wasn't from his wife.

Jordan came up the driveway and stood at the foot of the steps with his light trained on Clay. Tom came toiling along behind, breathing hard and making an enormous crackling sound as he scuffed through the leaves. He stopped beside Jordan and put his own light on the scrap of unfolded paper in Clay's hand. He raised the beam slowly to Clay's thunderstruck face. "I forgot about her mother's fucking diabetes," Clay said, and handed over the note that had been Scotch-taped to the door. Tom and Jordan read it together.

Daddy,

Something bad hapen as you porbly know, I hope your all right & get this. Mitch Steinman and George Gendron are with me, people are going crazy & we think its the cellphones. Dad here is the bad part, we came here because I was afraid. I was going to break mine if I was wrong but I wasnt wrong, it was gone. Mom has been taking it because you know nana is sick and she wanted to keep checking. I gotta go Jesus I'm scrared, someone killed Mr Kretsky. All kinds of people are dead & nuts like in a horra movie but we heard people are getting together (NORMAL people) at the Town Hall and thats where we are going. Maybe mom is there but jesus she had my PHONE. Daddy if you get here okay PLEASE COME GET ME.

Your Son, John Gavin Riddell

Tom finished, then spoke in a tone of kindly caution that terrified Clay more thoroughly than the most dire warning could have done. "You know that any people who gathered at the Town Hall have probably gone many different ways, don't you? It's been ten days, and the world has undergone a terrible convulsion."

"I know," Clay said. His eyes were stinging and he could feel his voice beginning to waver. "And I know his mother is probably . . ." He shrugged and flung an unsteady hand at the dark, sloping-away world beyond his leaf-strewn driveway. "But Tom, I have to go to the Town Hall and see. They may have left word. He may have left word."

"Yes," Tom said. "Of course you do. And when we get there, we can decide what comes next." He spoke in that same tone of awful kindness. Clay almost wished he'd laugh and say something like Come on, you poorsap —you don't really think you're going to see him again, do you? Get fucking real.

Jordan had read the note a second time, maybe a third and fourth. Even in his current state of horror and grief, Clay felt like apologizing to Jordan for Johnny's poor spelling and composition skills—reminding Jordan that his son must have written under terrible stress, crouched on the stoop, scribbling while his friends stood watching chaos swirl below.

Now Jordan lowered the note and said, "What does your son look like?"

Clay almost asked why, then decided he didn't want to know. At least not yet. "Johnny's almost a foot shorter than you. Stocky. Dark brown hair."

"Not skinny. Not blond."

"No, that sounds like his friend George."

Jordan and Tom exchanged a look. It was a grave look, but Clay thought there was relief in it, too.

"What?" he asked. "What? Tell me."

"The other side of the street," Tom said. "You didn't see because you were running. There's a dead boy about three houses down. Skinny, blond, red backpack—"

"That's George Gendron," Clay said. He knew George's red backpack as well as he knew Johnny's blue one with the strips of reflecting tape on it. "He and Johnny made a Puritan village together for their fourth-grade history project. They got an A-plus. George can't be dead." But he almost certainly was. Clay sat down on the stoop, which gave its old familiar creak under his weight, and put his face in his hands.

The town hall was at the intersection of pond and mill streets, in front of the town common and the body of water that gave the little village its name. The parking lot was almost empty except for the spaces reserved for employees, because both streets leading to the big white Victorian building were jammed with stalled vehicles. People had gotten as close as they could, then walked the rest of the way. For latecomers like Clay, Tom, and Jordan, it was a slow slog. Within two blocks of the Town Hall, not even the lawns were free of cars. Half a dozen houses had burned down. Some were still smoldering.

Clay had covered the body of the boy on Livery Lane—it had indeed been Johnny's friend George—but they could do nothing for the scores of swollen and putrefying dead they encountered as they made their slow way toward the Kent Pond Town Hall. There were hundreds, but in the dark Clay saw none that he recognized. That might have been true even in daylight. The crows had put in a busy week and a half.

His mind kept going back to George Gendron, who had been lying facedown in a clot of bloody leaves. In his note, John had said that George and Mitch, his other good friend this year in the seventh grade, had been with him. So whatever had happened to George must have happened after Johnny taped that note to the storm door and the three of them left the Riddell house. And since only George had been in those bloody leaves, Clay could assume Johnny and Mitch had gotten off Livery Lane alive.

Of course assume makes an ass out of you and me, he thought. The gospel according to Alice Maxwell, may she rest in peace.

And it was true. George's killer might have chased them and gotten them somewhere else. On Main Street, or Dugway Street, maybe neighboring Laurel Way. Stabbed them with a Swedish butcher knife or a couple of car aerials . . .

They had reached the edge of the Town Hall parking lot. On their left was a pickup truck that had tried to reach it overland and wound up mired in a boggy ditch less than five yards from an acre of civilized (and largely deserted) asphalt. On their right was a woman with her throat torn out and her features pecked away to black holes and bloody ribbons by the birds. She was still wearing her Portland Sea Dogs baseball cap, and her purse was still over her arm.

Killers weren't interested in money anymore.

Tom put a hand on his shoulder, startling him. "Stop thinking about what might have happened."

"How did you know—"

"It doesn't take a mind reader. If you find your son—you probably won't, but if you do—I'm sure he'll tell you the whole story. Otherwise . . . does it matter?"

"No. Of course not. But Tom . . . I knew George Gendron. The kids used to call him Connecticut sometimes, because his family moved from there. He ate hot dogs and hamburgers in our backyard. His dad used to come over and watch the Patriots with me."

"I know," Tom said. "I know." And, to Jordan, sharply: "Stop looking at her, Jordan, she's not going to get up and walk."

Jordan ignored him and kept staring at the crow-picked corpse in the Sea Dogs hat. "The phoners started trying to take care of their own as soon as they got back some base-level programming," he said. "Even if it was only fishing them out from under the bleachers and throwing them into the marsh, they tried to do something. But they don't take care of ours. They leave ours to rot where they fell." He turned to face Clay and Tom. "No matter what they say or what they promise, we can't trust them," he said fiercely. "We can't, okay?"

"I'm totally down with that," Tom said.

Clay nodded. "Me too."

Tom tipped his head toward the Town Hall, where a few emergency lights with long-life batteries still shone, casting a sickly yellow glow on the employees' cars, which now stood in drifts of leaves. "Let's go in there and see what they left behind."

"Yes, let's do it," Clay said. Johnny would be gone, he had no doubt of that, but some small part of him, some small, childish, never-say-die part, still continued to hope that he would hear a cry of "Daddy!" and his son would spring into his arms, a living thing, real weight in the midst of this nightmare.

They knew for sure the town hall was deserted when they saw what had been painted across the double doors. In the fading glow of the battery-powered emergency lights, the large, sloppy strokes of red paint looked like more dried blood:

"How far away is this Kashwak place?" Tom asked.

Clay thought about it. "I'd say eighty miles, almost due north. You'd take Route 160 most of the way, but once you get on the TR, I don't know."

Jordan asked, "What exactly is a TR?"

"TR-90's an unincorporated township. There are a couple of little villages, some quarries, and a two-bit Micmac rez up north, but mostly it's just woods, bear, and deer." Clay tried the door and it opened to his hand. "I'm going to check this place out. You guys really don't have to come if you don't want to—you can be excused."

"No, we'll come," Tom said. "Won't we, Jordan?"

"Sure." Jordan sighed like a boy confronted with what may be a difficult chore. Then he smiled. "Hey, electric lights. Who knows when we'll get to see them again."

No Johnny Riddell came hurtling out of a dark room to throw himself into his father's arms, but the Town Hall was still redolent of the cooking that had been done on gas grills and hibachis by the people who'd gathered here following the Pulse. Outside the big main room, on the long bulletin board where notices of town business and upcoming events usually hung, perhaps two hundred notes had been posted. Clay, so tense he was nearly panting, began to study these with the intensity of a scholar who believes he may have found the lost Gospel of Mary Magdalene. He was afraid of what he might find and terrified of what he might not. Tom and Jordan retreated tactfully to the main meeting room, which was still littered with the remains of the refugees who had apparently spent several nights here, waiting for a rescue that had never come.

In the posted notes, Clay saw the survivors had come to believe that they could hope for more than rescue. They believed that salvation awaited them in Kashwak. Why that particular townlet, when probably all of TR-90 (certainly the northern and western quadrants) was dead to cell phone transmission and reception? The notes on the bulletin board weren't clear on that. Most seemed to assume that any readers would understand without needing to be told; it was a case of "everybody knows, everybody goes." And even the clearest of the correspondents had obviously been struggling to keep terror and elation balanced and under control; most messages amounted to little more than follow the Yellow Brick Road to Kashwak and salvation as soon as you can.

Three-quarters of the way down the board, half-hidden by a note from Iris Nolan, a lady Clay knew quite well (she volunteered at the tiny town library), he saw a sheet with his son's familiar, looping scrawl and thought, Oh, dear God, thank you. Thank you so much. He pulled it off the board, being careful not to tear it.

This note was dated: Oct 3. Clay tried to remember where he had been on the night of October 3 and couldn't quite do it. Had it been the barn in North Reading, or the Sweet Valley Inn, near Methuen? He thought the barn, but he couldn't be absolutely certain—it all ran together and if he thought too hard about it, it began to seem that the man with the flashlights on the sides of his head had also been the young man jabbing the car aerials, that Mr. Ricardi had killed himself by gobbling broken glass instead of hanging himself, and it had been Alice in Tom's garden, eating cucumbers and tomatoes.

"Stop it," he whispered, and focused on the note. It was better spelled and a little better composed, but there was no mistaking the agony in it.

Oct 3 Dear Dad,

I hope you are alive & get this. Me & Mitch made it okay but Hughie Darden got George, I think he killed him. Me & Mitch just outran faster.

I felt like it was my fault but Mitch, he said how could you know he was just a Phoner like the others its not your fault.

Daddy there is worse. Mom is one of them, I saw her with one of the "flocks" today. (That is what they call them, flocks.) She doesnt look as bad as some but I know if I went out there she wouldnt even no me and would kill me soon as look at me. IF YOU SEE HER DON'T BE FOOLED, I'M SORRY BUT ITS TRUE.

We're going to Kashwak (its up north) tomorow or next day, Mitch's mom is here I could kill him I'm so ennveous. Daddy I know you dont have a cell phone and everyone knows about Kashwak how it's a safe place. If you get this note PLEASE COME GET ME.

I love you with all my Heart, Your Son, John Gavin Riddell

Even after the news about Sharon, Clay was doing all right until he got to I love you with all my Heart. Even then he might have been all right if not for that capital H. He kissed his twelve-year-old son's signature, looked at the bulletin board through eyes that had become untrustworthy– things doubled, tripled, then shivered completely apart—and let out a hoarse cry of pain. Tom and Jordan came running.

"What, Clay?" Tom said. "What is it?" He saw the sheet of paper—a ruled yellow page from a legal pad—and slipped it out of Clay's hand. He and Jordan scanned it quickly.

"I'm going to Kashwak," Clay said hoarsely.

"Clay, that's probably not such a hot idea," Jordan said cautiously. "Considering, you know, what we did at Gaiten Academy."

"I don't care. I'm going to Kashwak. I'm going to find my son."

The refugees who had taken shelter in the kent pond town hall had left plenty of supplies behind when they decamped, presumably en masse, for TR-90 and Kashwak. Clay, Tom, and Jordan made a meal of canned chicken salad on stale bread, with canned fruit salad for dessert.

As they were finishing, Tom leaned over to Jordan and murmured something. The boy nodded. The two of them got up. "Would you excuse us for a few minutes, Clay? Jordan and I need to have a little talk."

Clay nodded. While they were gone, he cracked another fruit salad cup and read Johnny's letter over for the ninth and tenth times. He was already well on the way to having it memorized. He could remember Alice's death just as clearly, but that now seemed to have happened in another life, and to a different version of Clayton Riddell. An earlier draft, as it were.

He finished his meal and stowed the letter away just as Tom and Jordan returned from the hall, where they had held what he supposed lawyers had called a sidebar, back in the days when there were lawyers. Tom once more had his arm around Jordan's narrow shoulders. Neither of them looked happy, but both looked composed.

"Clay," Tom began, "we've talked it over, and—"

"You don't want to go with me. Perfectly understandable."

Jordan said, "I know he's your son and all, but—"

"And you know he's all I've got left. His mother . . ." Clay laughed, a single humorless bark. "His mother. Sharon. It's ironic, really. After all the worry I put in aboutJohnny getting a blast from that goddam little red rattlesnake. If I had to pick one, I would have picked her." There, it was out. Like a chunk of meat that had been caught in his throat and was threatening to block his windpipe. "And you know how that makes me feel? Like I offered to make a deal with the devil, and the devil actually came through for me."

Tom ignored this. When he spoke, he did so carefully, as if he were afraid of setting Clay off like an unexploded land mine. "They hate us. They started off hating everyone and progressed to just hating us. Whatever's going on up there in Kashwak, if it's their idea, it can't be good."

"If they're rebooting to some higher level, they may get to a live-and-let-live plane," Clay said. All of this was pointless, surely they both must see that. He had to go.

"I doubt it," Jordan said. "Remember that stuff about the chute leading to the slaughterhouse?"

"Clay, we're normies and that's strike one," Tom said. "We torched one of their flocks. That's strike two and strike three combined. Live and let live won't apply to us."

"Why should it?" Jordan added. "The Raggedy Man says we're insane."

"And not to be touched," Clay said. "So I should be fine, right?"

After that there didn't seem to be any more to say.

Tom and jordan had decided to strike out due west, across new Hampshire and into Vermont, putting KASHWAK=NO-FOat their backs– and over the horizon—as soon as possible. Clay said that Route 11, which made an elbow-bend at Kent Pond, would serve them both as a starting-point. "It'll take me north to 160," he said, "and you guys can follow it all the way to Laconia, in the middle of New Hampshire. It's not exactly a direct route, but what the hell—you don't exactly have a plane to catch, have you?"

Jordan dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbed them, then brushed the hair back from his forehead, a gesture Clay had come to know well—it signaled tiredness and distraction. He would miss it. He would miss Jordan. And Tom even more.

"I wish Alice was still here," Jordan said. "She'd talk you out of this."

"She wouldn't," Clay said. Still, he wished with all his heart that Alice could have had her chance. He wished with all his heart that Alice could have had her chance at a lot of things. Fifteen was no age at which to die.

"Your current plans remind me of act four in Julius Caesar, " Tom said. "In act five, everyone falls on their swords." They were now making their way around (and sometimes over) the stalled cars jamming Pond Street. The emergency lights of the Town Hall were slowly receding behind them. Ahead was the dead traffic light marking the center of town, swaying in a slight breeze.

"Don't be such a fucking pessimist," Clay said. He had promised himself not to become annoyed—he wouldn't part with his friends that way if he could possibly help it—but his resolve was being tried.

"Sorry I'm too tired to cheerlead," Tom said. He stopped beside a road-sign reading JCT RT112 MI. "and—may i be frank?—too heartsick at losing you."

"Tom, I'm sorry."

"If I thought there was one chance in five that you had a happy ending in store . . . hell, one in fifty . . . well, never mind." Tom shone his flashlight at Jordan. "What about you? Any final arguments against this madness?"

Jordan considered, then shook his head slowly. "The Head told me something once," he said. "Do you want to hear it?"

Tom made an ironic little salute with his flashlight. The beam skipped off the marquee of the Ioka, which had been showing the new Tom Hanks picture, and the pharmacy next door. "Have at it."

"He said the mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows."

"Amen," Clay said. He said it very softly.

They walked east on Market Street, which was also Route 19A, for two miles. After the first mile, the sidewalks ended and the farms began. At the end of the second there was another dead stoplight and a sign marking the Route 11 junction. There were three people sitting bundled up to the neck in sleeping bags at the crossroads. Clay recognized one of them as soon as he put the beam of his flashlight on him: an elderly gent with a long, intelligent face and graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. The Miami Dolphins cap the other man was wearing looked familiar, too. Then Tom put his beam on the woman next to Mr. Ponytail and said, "You."

Clay couldn't tell if she was wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt with cutoff sleeves, the sleeping bag was pulled up too high for that, but he knew there was one in the little pile of packs lying near the Route 11 sign if she wasn't. Just as he knew she was pregnant. He had dreamed of these two in the Whispering Pines Motel, two nights before Alice had been killed. He had dreamed of them in the long field, under the lights, standing on the platforms.

The man with the gray hair stood up, letting his sleeping bag slither down his body. There were rifles with their gear, but he raised his hands to show they were empty. The woman did the same, and when the sleeping bag dropped to her feet, there was no doubt about her pregnancy. The guy in the Dolphins cap was tall and about forty. He also raised his hands.

The three of them stood that way for a few seconds in the beams of the flashlights, and then the gray-haired man took a pair of black-rimmed spectacles from the breast pocket of his wrinkled shirt and put them on. His breath puffed out white in the chilly night air, rising to the Route 11 sign, where arrows pointed both west and north.

"Well, well," he said. "The President of Harvard said you'd probably come this way, and here you are. Smart fellow, the President of Harvard, although a trifle young for the job, and in my opinion he could use some plastic surgery before going out to meet with potential big-ticket donors."

"Who are you?" Clay asked.

"Get that light out of my face, young man, and I'll be happy to tell you."

Tom and Jordan lowered their flashlights. Clay also lowered his, but kept one hand on the butt of Beth Nickerson's .45.

"I'm Daniel Hartwick, of Haverhill, Mass," the gray-haired man said. "The young lady is Denise Link, also of Haverhill. The gentleman on her right is Ray Huizenga, of Groveland, a neighboring town."

"Meetcha," Ray Huizenga said. He made a little bow that was funny, charming, and awkward. Clay let his hand fall off the butt of his gun.

"But our names don't actually matter anymore," Daniel Hartwick said. "What matters is what we are, at least as far as the phoners are concerned." He looked at them gravely. "We are insane. Like you."

Denise and ray rustled a small meal over a propane cooker ("These canned sausages don't taste too bad if you boil em up ha'aad," Ray said) while they talked—while Dan talked, mostly. He began by telling them it was twenty past two in the morning, and at three he intended to have his "brave little band" back on the road. He said he wanted to make as many miles as possible before daylight, when the phoners started moving around.

"Because they do not come out at night," he said. "We have that much going for us. Later, when their programming is complete, or nears completion, they may be able to, but—"

"You agree that's what's happening?" Jordan asked. For the first time since Alice had died, he looked engaged. He grasped Dan's arm. "You agree that they're rebooting, like computers whose hard drives have been—"

"—wiped, yes, yes," Dan said, as if this were the most elementary thing in the world.

"Are you—were you—a scientist of some sort?" Tom asked.

Dan gave him a smile. "I was the entire sociology department at Haverhill Arts and Technical," he said. "If the President of Harvard has a worst nightmare, that would be me."

Dan Hartwick, Denise Link, and Ray Huizenga had destroyed not just one flock but two. The first, in the back lot of a Haverhill auto junkyard, they had stumbled on by accident, when there had been half a dozen in their group and they were trying to find a way out of the city. That had been two days after the onset of the Pulse, when the phone-people had still been the phone-crazies, confused and as apt to kill each other as any wandering normies they encountered. That first had been a small flock, only about seventy-five, and they had used gasoline.

"The second time, in Nashua, we used dynamite from a construction-site shed," Denise said. "We'd lost Charlie, Ralph, and Arthur by then. Ralph and Arthur just took off on their own. Charlie—poor old Charlie had a heart attack. Anyhow, Ray knew how to rig the dynamite, from when he worked on a road crew."

Ray, hunkered over his cooker and stirring the beans next to the sausages, raised his free hand and gave it a flip.

"After that," Dan Hartwick said, "we began to see those Kashwak No-Fo signs. Sounded good to us, didn't it, Denni?"

"Yep," Denise said. "Olly-olly-in-for-free. We were headed north, same as you, and when we started seeing those signs, we headed north faster. I was the only one who didn't absolutely love the idea, because I lost my husband during the Pulse. Those fucks are the reason my kid's going to grow up not knowing his daddy." She saw Clay wince and said, "Sorry. We know your boy's gone to Kashwak."

Clay gaped.

"Oh yes," Dan said, taking a plate as Ray began passing them around. "The President of Harvard knows all, sees all, has dossiers on all. . . or so he'd like us to believe." He gave Jordan a wink, and Jordan actually grinned.

"Dan talked me around," Denise said. "Some terrorist group—or maybe just a couple of inspired nutcases working in a garage—set this thing off, but no one had any idea it would lead to this. The phoners are just playing out their part in it. They weren't responsible when they were insane, and they aren't really responsible now, because—"

"Because they're in the grip of some group imperative," Tom said. "Like migration."

"It's a group imperative, but it ain't migration," Ray said, sitting down with his own plate. "Dan says it's pure survival. I think he's right. Whatever it is, we gotta find a place to get in out of the rain. You know?"

"The dreams started coming after we burned the first flock," Dan said. "Powerful dreams. Ecce homo, insanus —very Harvard. Then, after we bombed the Nashua flock, the President of Harvard showed up in person with about five hundred of his closest friends." He ate in quick, neat bites.

"And left a lot of melted boomboxes on your doorstep," Clay said.

"Some were melted," Denise said. "Mostly what we got were bits and pieces." She smiled. It was a thin smile. "That was okay. Their taste in music sucks."

"You call him the President of Harvard, we call him the Raggedy Man," Tom said. He had set his plate aside and opened his pack. He rummaged and brought out the drawing Clay had made on the day the Head had been forced to kill himself. Denise's eyes got round. She passed the drawing to Ray Huizenga, who whistled.

Dan took it last and looked up at Tom with new respect. "You drew this?"

Tom pointed to Clay.

"You're very talented," Dan said.

"I took a course once," Clay said. "Draw Fluffy." He turned to Tom, who also kept their maps in his pack. "How far is it between Gaiten and Nashua?"

"Thirty miles, tops."

Clay nodded and turned back to Dan Hartwick. "And did he speak to you? The guy in the red hoodie?"

Dan looked at Denise and she looked away. Ray turned back to his little cooker—presumably to shut it down and pack it up—and Clay understood. "Which one of you did he speak through?"

"Me," Dan said. "It was horrible. Have you experienced it?"

"Yeah. You can stop it from happening, but not if you want to know what's on his mind. Does he do it to show how strong he is, do you think?"

"Probably," Dan said, "but I don't think that's all. I don't think they can talk. They can vocalize, and I'm sure they think—although not as they did, it would be a terrible mistake to think of them as having human thoughts—but I don't think they can actually speak words."

"Yet," Jordan said.

"Yet," Dan agreed. He glanced at his watch, and that prompted Clay to look at his own. It was already quarter to three.

"He told us to go north," Ray said. "He told us Kashwak No-Fo. He said our flock-burnin days were over because they were settin up guards—"

"Yes, we saw some in Rochester," Tom said.

"And you've seen plenty of Kashwak No-Fo signs."

They nodded.

"Purely as a sociologist, I began to question those signs," Dan said. "Not how they began—I'm sure the first No-Fo signs were posted soon after the Pulse, by survivors who'd decided a place like that, where there was no cell phone coverage, would be the best place on earth to go. What I questioned was how the idea—and the graffiti—could spread so quickly in a cata-strophically fragmented society where all normal forms of communication—other than my mouth to your ear, of course—had broken down. The answer seemed clear, once one admitted that a new form of communication, available to only one group, had entered the picture."

"Telepathy." Jordan almost whispered the word. "Them. The phoners. They want us to go north to Kashwak." He turned his frightened eyes to Clay. "It really is a frigging slaughterhouse chute. Clay, you can't go up there! This is all the Raggedy Man's idea!"

Before Clay could respond, Dan Hartwick was speaking again. He did it with a teacher's natural assumptions: lecturing was his responsibility, interruption his privilege.

"I'm afraid I really must hurry this along, sorry. We have something to show you—something the President of Harvard has demanded we show you, actually—"

"In your dreams, or in person?" Tom asked.

"Our dreams," Denise said quietly. "We've only seen him once in person since we burned the flock in Nashua, and that was at a distance."

"Checkin up on us," Ray said. "That's what I think."

Dan waited with a look of exasperated patience for this exchange to conclude. When it had, he resumed. "We were willing to comply, since this was on our way—"

"You're going north, then?" Clay was the one to interrupt this time.

Dan, looking more exasperated now, flicked another quick glance at his watch. "If you look at that route-sign closely, you'll see that it offers a choice. We intend to go west, not north."

"Fuckin right," Ray muttered. "I may be stupid, but I'm not crazy."

"What I show you will be for our purposes rather than theirs," Dan said. "And by the way, talking about the President of Harvard—or the Raggedy Man, if you prefer—showing up in person is probably a mistake. Maybe a bad one. He's really no more than a pseudopod that the group mind, the overflock, puts out front to do business with ordinary normies and special insane normies like us. I theorize that there are overflocks all over the world now, and each may have put forward such a pseudopod. Maybe even more than one. But don't make the mistake of thinking that when you're talking to your Raggedy Man you're talking to an actual man. You're talking to the flock."

"Why don't you show us what he wants us to see?" Clay asked. He had to work to sound calm. His mind was roaring. The one clear thought in it was that if he could get to his son before Johnny got to Kashwak—and whatever was going on there—he might still have a chance to save him. Rationality told him that Johnny must be in Kashwak already, but another voice (and it wasn't entirely irrational) said something might have held up Johnny and whatever group he was traveling with. Or they might have gotten cold feet. It was possible. It was even possible that nothing more sinister than segregation was going on up there in TR-90, that the phone-people were just creating a rez for normies. In the end, he supposed it went back to what Jordan had said, quoting Headmaster Ardai: the mind could calculate, but the spirit yearned.

"Come this way," Dan said. "It's not far." He produced a flashlight and began walking up the shoulder of Route 11—North with the beam aimed at his feet.

"Pardon me if I don't go," Denise said. "I've seen. Once was enough."

"I think this was supposed to please you, in a way," Dan said. "Of course it was also supposed to underline the point—to my little group as well as yours—that the phoners are now the ones with the power, and they are to be obeyed." He stopped. "Here we are; in this particular sleep-o-gram, the President of Harvard made very sure we all saw the dog, so we couldn't get the wrong house." The flashlight beam nailed a roadside mailbox with a collie painted on the side. "I'm sorry Jordan has to see this, but it's probably best that you know what you're dealing with." He raised his flashlight higher. Ray joined his beam to Dan's. They lit up the front of a modest one-story wooden house, sitting neatly on a postage stamp of lawn.

Gunner had been crucified between the living room window and the front door. He was naked except for a pair of bloodstained Joe Boxers. Nails big enough to be rail spikes jutted from his hands, feet, forearms, and knees. Maybe they were rail spikes, Clay thought. Sitting splay-legged at Gunner's feet was Harold. Like Alice when they met her, Harold was wearing a bib of blood, but his hadn't come from his nose. The wedge of glass he'd used to cut his throat after crucifying his running buddy still twinkled in one hand.

Hung around Gunner's neck on a loop of string was a piece of cardboard with three words scrawled on it in dark capital letters: JUSTITIA EST COMMODATUM.

"Incase you don't read latin—" dan hartwick began.

"I remember enough from high school to read that," Tom said. " 'Justice is served.' This is for killing Alice. For daring to touch one of the untouchables."

"Right you are," Dan said, snapping off his light. Ray did the same. "It also serves as a warning to others. And they didn't kill them, although they most certainly could have."

"We know," Clay said. "They took reprisals in Gaiten after we burned their flock."

"They did the same in Nashua," Ray said somberly. "I'll remember the screams until my dyin day. Fuckin horrible. This shit is, too." He gestured toward the dark shape of the house. "They got the little one to crucify the big one, and the big one to hold still for it. And when it was done, they got the little one to cut his own throat."

"It's like with the Head," Jordan said, and took Clay's hand.

"That's the power of their minds," Ray said, "and Dan thinks that's part of what's sendin everybody north to Kashwak—maybe part of what kept us movin north even when we told ourselves it was only to show you this and persuade you to hook up with us. You know?"

Clay said, "Did the Raggedy Man tell you about my son?"

"No, but if he had I'm sure it would have been that he's with the other normies, and that you and he will have a happy reunion in Kashwak," Dan said. "You know, just forget about those dreams of standing on a platform while the President tells the cheering crowd you're insane, that ending's not for you, it can't be for you. I'm sure by now you've thought of all the possible happy-ending scenarios, the chief one being how Kashwak and who knows how many other cell phone dead zones are the normie equivalent of wildlife refuges, places where folks who didn't get a blast on the day of the Pulse will be left alone. I think what your young friend said about the chute leading to the slaughterhouse is far more likely, but even supposing normies are to be left alone up there, do you think the phoners will forgive people like us? The flock-killers?"

Clay had no answer for this.

In the dark, Dan looked at his watch again. "It's gone three," he said. "Let's walk back. Denise will have us packed up by now. The time has come when we've either got to part company or decide to go on together."

But when you talk about going on together, you're asking me to part companyfrom my son, Clay thought. And that he would never do unless he discovered Johnny-Gee was dead.

Or changed.

"How can you hope to get west?" Clay asked as they walked back to the junction sign. "The nights still may be ours for a while, but the days belong to them, and you see what they can do."

"I'm almost positive we can keep them out of our heads when we're awake," Dan said. "It takes a little work, but it can be done. We'll sleep in shifts, at least for a while. A lot depends on keeping away from the flocks."

"Which means getting into western New Hampshire and then into Vermont as fast as we can," Ray said. "Away from built-up areas." He shone his light on Denise, who was reclining on the sleeping bags. "We set, darlin?"

"All set," she said. "I just wish you'd let me carry something."

"You're carryin your kid," Ray said fondly. "That's enough. And we can leave the sleepin bags."

Dan said, "There are places where driving may actually make sense. Ray thinks some of the back roads could be clear for as much as a dozen miles at a stretch. We've got good maps." He dropped to one knee and shouldered his pack, looking up at Clay with a small and bitter half-smile as he did it. "I know the chances aren't good; I'm not a fool, in case you wondered. But we wiped out two of their flocks, killed hundreds of them, and I don't want to wind up on one of those platforms."

"We've got something else going for us," Tom said. Clay wondered if Tom realized he'd just put himself in the Hartwick camp. Probably. He was far from stupid. "They want us alive."

"Right," Dan said. "We might really make it. This is still early times for them, Clay—they're still weaving their net, and I'm betting there are plenty of holes in it."

"Hell, they haven't even changed their clothes yet," Denise said. Clay admired her. She looked like she was six months along, maybe more, but she was a tough little thing. He wished Alice could have met her.

"We could slip through," Dan said. "Cross into Canada from Vermont or New York, maybe. Five is better than three, but six would be better than five—three to sleep, three to stand watch in the days, fight off the bad telepathy. Our own little flock. So what do you say?"

Clay shook his head slowly. "I'm going after my son."

"Think it over, Clay," Tom said. "Please."

"Let him alone," Jordan said. "He's made up his mind." He put his arms around Clay and hugged him. "I hope you find him," he said. "But even if you do, I guess you'll never find us again."

"Sure I will," Clay said. He kissed Jordan on the cheek, then stood back. "I'll hogtie me a telepath and use him like a compass. Maybe the Raggedy Man himself." He turned to Tom and held out his hand.

Tom ignored it and put his arms around Clay. He kissed him first on one cheek, then the other. "You saved my life," he whispered into Clay's ear. His breath was hot and ticklish. His cheek rasped against Clay's. "Let me save yours. Come with us."

"I can't, Tom. I have to do this."

Tom stood back and looked at him. "I know," he said. "I know you do." He wiped his eyes. "Goddam, I suck at goodbyes. I couldn't even say goodbye to my fucking cat. "

Clay stood beside the junction sign and watched their lights dwindle. He kept his eyes fixed on Jordan's, and it was the last to disappear. For a moment or two it was alone at the top of the first hill to the west, a single small spark in the black, as if Jordan had paused there to look back. It seemed to wave. Then it was also gone, and the darkness was complete. Clay sighed—an unsteady, tearful sound—then shouldered his own pack and started walking north along the dirt shoulder of Route 11. Around quarter to four he crossed the North Berwick town line and left Kent Pond behind.