Cell

PHONE-BINGO

There was no reason not to resume a more normal life and start traveling days; Clay knew the phone-people wouldn't hurt him. He was off-limits and they actually wanted him up there in Kashwak. The problem was he'd become habituated to a nighttime existence. All I need is a coffin and a cape to wrap around myself when I lie down in it, he thought.

When dawn came up red and cold on the morning after his parting from Tom and Jordan, he was on the outskirts of Springvale. There was a little house, probably a caretaker's cottage, next to the Springvale Logging Museum. It looked cozy. Clay forced the lock on the side door and let himself in. He was delighted to find both a woodstove and a hand-pump in the kitchen. There was also a shipshape little pantry, well stocked and untouched by foragers. He celebrated this find with a large bowl of oatmeal, using powdered milk, adding heaps of sugar, and sprinkling raisins on top.

In the pantry he also found concentrated bacon and eggs in foil packets, stored as neatly on their shelf as paperback books. He cooked one of these and stuffed his pack with the rest. It was a much better meal than he had expected, and once in the back bedroom, Clay fell asleep almost immediately.

There were long tents on both sides of the highway.

This wasn't Route 11 with its farms and towns and open fields, with its pump-equipped convenience store every fifteen miles or so, but a highway somewhere out in the williwags. Deep woods crowded all the way up to the roadside ditches. People stood in long lines on both sides of the white center-stripe.

Left and right, an amplified voice was calling. Left and right, form two lines.

It sounded a little like the amplified voice of the bingo-caller at the Akron State Fair, but as Clay drew closer, walking up the road's center-stripe, he realized all the amplification was going on in his head. It was the voice of the Raggedy Man. Only the Raggedy Man was just a—what had Dan called him?—just a pseudopod. And what Clay was hearing was the voice of the flock.

Left and right, two lines, that's correct. That's doing it.

Where am I? Why doesn't anybody look at me, say "Hey buddy, no cutting in front, wait your turn"?

Up ahead the two lines curved off to either side like turnpike exit ramps, one going into the tent on the left side of the road, one going into the tent on the right. They were the kind of long tents caterers put up to shade outdoor buffets on hot afternoons. Clay could see that just before each line reached the tents, the people were splitting into ten or a dozen shorter lines. Those people looked like fans waiting to have their tickets ripped so they could go into a concert venue.

Standing in the middle of the road at the point where the double line split and curved off to the right and the left, still wearing his threadbare red hoodie, was the Raggedy Man himself.

Left and right, ladies and gentlemen. Mouth not moving. Telepathy that was all jacked up, amped by the power of the flock. Move right along. Everyone gets a chance to call a loved one before you go into the no-fo zone.

That gave Clay a shock, but it was the shock of the known—like the punchline of a good joke you'd heard for the first time ten or twenty years ago. "Where is this?" he asked the Raggedy Man. "What are you doing? What the hell is going on?"

But the Raggedy Man didn't look at him, and of course Clay knew why. This was where Route 160 entered Kashwak, and he was visiting it in a dream. As for what was going on . . .

It's phone-bingo, he thought. It's phone-bingo, and those are the tents where the game is played.

Let's keep it moving, ladies and gents, the Raggedy Man sent. We've got two hours until sunset, and we want to process as many of you as we can before we have to quit for the night.

Process.

Was this a dream?

Clay followed the line curving toward the pavilion-style tent on the left side of the road, knowing what he was going to see even before he saw it. At the head of each shorter line stood one of the phone-people, those connoisseurs of Lawrence Welk, Dean Martin, and Debby Boone. As each person in line reached the front, the waiting usher—dressed in filthy clothes, often much more horribly disfigured by the survival-struggles of the last eleven days than the Raggedy Man—would hold out a cell phone.

As Clay watched, the man closest to him took the offered phone, punched it three times, then held it eagerly to his ear. "Hello?" he said. "Hello, Ma? Ma? Are you th—" Then he fell silent. His eyes emptied and slackness loosened his face. The cell sagged away from his ear slightly. The facilitator—that was the best word Clay could think of—took the phone back, gave the man a push to start him forward, and motioned for the next person in line to step forward.

Left and right, the Raggedy Man was calling. Keep it moving.

The guy who'd been trying to call his mom plodded out from beneath the pavilion. Beyond it, Clay saw, hundreds of other people were milling around. Sometimes someone would get in someone else's way and there would be a little weak slapping. Nothing like before, however. Because—

Because the signal's been modified.

Left and right, ladies and gentlemen, keep it moving, we've got a lot of you to get through before dark.

Clay saw Johnny. He was wearing jeans, his Little League hat, and his favorite Red Sox T-shirt, the one with Tim Wakefield's name and number on the back. He had just reached the head of the line two stations down from where Clay was standing.

Clay ran for him, but at first his path was blocked. "Get out of my way!" he shouted, but of course the man in his way, who was shuffling nervously from foot to foot as if he needed to go to the bathroom, couldn't hear him. This was a dream and besides, Clay was a normie—he had no telepathy.

He darted between the restless man and the woman behind him. He pushed through the next line as well, too fixated on reaching Johnny to know if the people he was pushing had substance or not. He reached Johnny just as a woman—he saw with mounting horror that it was Mr. Scottoni's daughter-in-law, still pregnant but now missing an eye– handed the boy a Motorola cell phone.

Just dial 911, she said without moving her mouth. All calls go through 911.

"No, Johnny, don't!" Clay shouted, and grabbed for the phone as Johnny-Gee began punching in the number, surely one he'd been taught long ago to call if he was ever in trouble. "Don't do that!"

Johnny turned to his left, as if to shield his call from the pregnant facilitator's one dully staring eye, and Clay missed. He probably couldn't have stopped Johnny in any case. This was a dream, after all.

Johnny finished (punching three keys didn't take long), pushed the SEND button, and put the phone to his ear. "Hello? Dad? Dad, are you there? Can you hear me? If you can hear me, please come get m —" Turned away as he was, Clay could only see one of his son's eyes, but one was enough when you were watching the lights go out. Johnny's shoulders slumped. The phone sagged away from his ear. Mr. Scottoni's daughter-in-law snatched the phone from him with a dirty hand, then gave Johnny-Gee an unloving push on the back of the neck to get him moving into Kashwak, along with all the others who had come here to be safe. She motioned for the next person in line to come forward and make his call.

Left and right, form two lines, the Raggedy Man thundered in the middle of Clay's head, and he woke up screaming his son's name in the caretaker's cottage as late-afternoon light streamed in the windows.

At midnight clay reached the little town of north shapleigh. by then a nasty cold rain that was almost sleet—what Sharon had called "Slurpee rain"—had begun to fall. He heard oncoming motors and stepped off the highway (still good old Route 11; no dream highway here) onto the tarmac of a 7-Eleven store. When the headlights showed, turning the drizzle to silver lines, it was a pair of sprinters running side by side, actually racing in the dark. Madness. Clay stood behind a gas pump, not exactly hiding but not going out of his way to be seen, either. He watched them fly past like a vision of the gone world, sending up thin sprays of water. One of the racers looked like a vintage Corvette, although with only a single failing emergency light on the corner of the store to see by, it was impossible to tell for sure. The racers shot beneath North Shapleigh's entire traffic-control system (a dead blinker), were neon cherries in the dark for a moment, then were gone.

Clay thought again: Madness. And as he swung back onto the shoulder of the road: You're a fine one to talk about madness.

True. Because his phone-bingo dream hadn't been a dream, or not entirely a dream. He was sure of it. The phoners were using their strengthening telepathic abilities to keep track of as many of the flock-killers as they could. That only made sense. They might have a problem with groups like Dan Hartwick's, ones that actually tried to fight them, but he doubted if they were having any trouble with him. The thing was, the telepathy was also oddly like a phone—it seemed to work both ways. Which made him . . . what? The ghost in the machine? Something like that. While they were keeping an eye on him, he was able to keep an eye on them. At least in his sleep. In his dreams.

Were there actual tents at the Kashwak border, with normies lining up to get their brains blasted? Clay thought there were, both in Kashwak and places like Kashwak all over the country and the world. Business would be slowing down by now, but the checkpoints—the changing- points– might still be there.

The phoners used group-speak telepathy to coax the normies into coming. To dream them into coming. Did that make the phoners smart, calculating? Not unless you called a spider smart because it could spin a web, or an alligator calculating because it could lie still and look like a log. Walking north along Route 11 toward Route 160, the road that would take him to Kashwak, Clay thought the telepathic signal the phoners sent out like a low siren-call (or a pulse) must contain at least three separate messages.

Come, and you'll be safe —your struggle to survive can cease.

Come, and you'II be with your own kind, in your own place.

Come, and you can speak to your loved ones.

Come. Yes. Bottom line. And once you got close enough, any choice ceased. That telepathy and the dream of safety just took you over. You lined up. You listened as the Raggedy Man told you to keep it moving, everyone gets to call a loved one but we've got a lot of you to process before the sun goes down and we crank up Bette Midler singing "The Wind Beneath My Wings."

And how could they continue doing this, even though the lights had failed and the cities had burned and civilization had slid into a pit of blood? How could they go on replacing the millions of phoners lost in the original convulsion and in the destruction of the flocks that had followed? They could continue because the Pulse wasn't over. Somewhere—in that outlaw lab or nutcase's garage—some gadget was still running on batteries, some modem was still putting out its squealing, insane signal. Sending it up to the satellites that flew around the globe or to the microwave relay towers that cinched it like a steel belt. And where could you call and be sure your call would still go through, even if the voice answering was only on a battery-powered answering machine?

911, apparently.

And that had almost certainly happened to Johnny-Gee.

He knew it had. He was already too late.

So why was he still walking north through the drizzling dark? Up ahead was Newfield, not far, and there he'd leave Route 11 for Route 160, and he had an idea that not too far up Route 160 his days of reading road-signs (or anything else) would be done, so why!

But he knew why, just as he knew that distant crash and the short, faint blare of horn he heard ahead of him in the rainy darkness meant that one of the racing sprinters had come to grief. He was going on because of the note on the storm door, held by less than a quarter-inch of tape when he'd rescued it; all the rest had pulled free. He was going on because of the second one he'd found on the Town Hall bulletin board, half-hidden by Iris Nolan's hopeful note to her sister. His son had written the same thing both times, in capital letters: PLEASE COME GET ME.

If he was too late to get Johnny, he might not be too late to see him and tell him he'd tried. He might be able to hold on to enough of himself long enough to do that even if they made him use one of the cell phones.

As for the platforms, and the thousands of watching people—

"There's no football stadium in Kashwak," he said.

In his mind, Jordan whispered: It's a virtual stadium.

Clay pushed it aside. Pushed it away. He had made his decision. It was madness, of course, but it was a mad world now, and that put him in perfect sync.

At quarter to three that morning, footsore and damp in spite of the hooded parka he had liberated from the caretaker's cottage in Springvale, Clay came to the intersection of Routes 11 and 160. There had been a major pileup at the crossroads, and the Corvette that had gone racing past him in North Shapleigh was now part of it. The driver hung out the severely compressed window on the left side, head down and arms dangling, and when Clay tried to lift the man's face to see if he was still alive, the top half of his body fell into the road, trailing a meaty coil of guts behind. Clay reeled away to a telephone pole, planted his suddenly hot forehead against the wood, and vomited until there was nothing left.

On the other side of the intersection, where 160 took off into the north country, stood the Newfield Trading Post. A sign in the window promised CANDIES NATIVE SIRUP INDIAN CRAFTS "NICK-NACKS." It looked as if it had been trashed as well as looted, but it was shelter from the rain and away from the casual, unexpected horror he had just encountered. Clay went in and sat down with his head lowered until he no longer felt like fainting. There were bodies, he could smell them, but someone had thrown a tarp over all but two, and at least those two weren't in pieces. The joint's beer cooler was smashed and empty, the Coke machine only smashed. He took a ginger ale and drank it in long, slow swallows, pausing to belch. After a while he began to feel a little better.

He missed his friends desperately. The unfortunate out there and whomever he'd been racing were the only sprinters he'd seen all night, and he'd encountered no groups of walking refugees at all. He'd spent the entire night with only his thoughts for company. Maybe the weather was keeping the walkers inside, or maybe now they were traveling days. No reason for them not to, if the phoners had switched from murder to conversion.

He realized he hadn't heard any of what Alice had called flockmusic tonight. Maybe all the flocks were south of here, except for the big one (he assumed it must be a big one) administering the Kashwak Konversions. Clay didn't much care; even alone as he was, he would still take his vacation from "I Hope You Dance" and "The Theme from A Summer Place" as a little gift.

He decided to walk another hour at most, then find a hole to crawl into. The cold rain was killing him. He left the Newfield Trading Post, resolutely not looking at the crashed Corvette or the soaked remains lying beside it.

He ended up walking until nearly daylight, partly because the rain let up but mostly because there wasn't much in the way of shelter on Route 160, just woods. Then, around four thirty, he passed a bullet-pocked sign reading ENTERING GURLEYVILLE, AN UNINCORPORATED TOWNSHIP. Ten minutes or so after that he passed Gurleyville's raison d'кtre, such as it was—the Gurleyville Quarry, a huge rock pit with a few sheds, dump trucks, and a garage at the foot of its gouged granite walls. Clay thought briefly about spending the night in one of the equipment sheds, decided he could do better, and pushed on. He had still seen no pilgrims and heard no flockmusic, even at a distance. He could have been the last person on earth.

He wasn't. Ten minutes or so after leaving the quarry behind, he topped a hill and saw a little village below. The first building he came to was the Gurleyville Volunteer Fire Department (don't forget the haloween blood drive read the notice board out front; it seemed that no one north of Springvale could spell), and two of the phone-people were standing in the parking lot, facing each other in front of a sad-looking old pumper that might have been new around the time the Korean War ended.

They turned slowly toward Clay when he put his flashlight beam on them, but then they turned away to regard each other again. Both were male, one about twenty-five and the other maybe twice that. There was no doubt they were phoners. Their clothes were filthy and almost falling off. Their faces were cut and scraped. The younger man looked as if he had sustained a serious burn all the way up one arm. The older man's left eye glittered from deep inside folds of badly swollen and probably infected flesh. But how they looked wasn't the main thing. The main thing was what Clay felt in himself: that same weird shortness of breath he and Tom had experienced in the office of the Gaiten Citgo, where they'd gone to get the keys to the propane trucks. That sense of some powerful gathering force.

And it was night. With the heavy cloud cover, dawn was still just a rumor. What were these guys doing up at night}

Clay snapped off his flashlight, drew the Nickerson .45, and watched to see if anything would happen. For several seconds he thought nothing would, that the strange out-of-breath feeling, that sense of something being on the verge of happening, was going to be the extent of it. Then he heard a high whining sound, almost like someone vibrating the blade of a saw between his palms. Clay looked up and saw the electrical wires passing in front of the fire station were moving rapidly back and forth, almost too fast to see.

" Go–way !" It was the young man, and he seemed to jerk the words out with a tremendous effort. Clay jumped. If his finger had been on the revolver's trigger, he would almost certainly have pulled it. This wasn't Aw and Eeen, this was actual words. He thought he heard them in his head as well, but faint, faint. Only a dying echo.

"You!. . . Go!" the older man replied. He was wearing baggy Bermuda shorts with a huge brown stain on the seat. It might have been mud or shit. He spoke with equal effort, but this time Clay heard no echo in his head. Paradoxically, it made him more sure he'd heard the first one.

They'd forgotten him entirely. Of that much he was sure.

"Mine!" said the younger man, once more jerking the word out. And he did jerk it. His whole body seemed to flail with the effort. Behind him, several small windows in the fire station's wide garage door shattered outward.

There was a long pause. Clay watched, fascinated, Johnny completely out of his mind for the first time since Kent Pond. The older man seemed to be thinking furiously, struggling furiously, and what Clay thought he was struggling to do was to express himself as he had before the Pulse had robbed him of speech.

On top of the volunteer fire station, which was nothing but a glorified garage, the siren went off with a brief WHOOP, as if a phantom burst of electricity had surged through it. And the lights of the ancient pumper– headlights and red flashers—flicked briefly on, illuminating the two men and briefly scaring up their shadows.

"Hell! You say!" the older man managed. He spit the words out like a piece of meat that had been choking him.

"Mynuck!" the younger man nearly screamed, and in Clay's mind that same voice whispered, My truck. It was simple, really. Instead of Twinkies, they were fighting over the old pumper. Only this was at night —the end of it, granted, but still full dark—and they were almost talking again. Hell, they were talking.

But the talking was done, it seemed. The young man lowered his head, ran at the older man, and butted him in the chest. The older man went sprawling. The younger man tripped over his legs and went to his knees. "Hell!" he cried.

"Fuck!" cried the other. No question about it. You couldn't mistake fuck.

They picked themselves up again and stood about fifteen feet apart. Clay could feel their hate. It was in his head; it was pushing at his eyeballs, trying to get out.

The young man said, "That'n . . . mynuck!" And in Clay's head the young man's distant voice whispered, That one is my truck.

The older man drew in breath. Jerkily raised one scabbed-over arm. And shot the young man the bird. "Sit. On this!" he said with perfect clarity.

The two of them lowered their heads and rushed at each other. Their heads met with a thudding crack that made Clay wince. This time all the windows in the garage blew out. The siren on the roof gave a long war-cry before winding down. The fluorescent lights in the station house flashed on, running for perhaps three seconds on pure crazypower. There was a brief burst of music: Britney Spears singing "Oops! . . . I Did It Again." Two power-lines snapped with liquid twanging sounds and fell almost in front of Clay, who stepped back from them in a hurry. Probably they were dead, they should be dead, but—

The older man dropped to his knees with blood pouring down both sides of his head. "My truck!" he said with perfect clarity, then fell on his face.

The younger one turned to Clay, as if to recruit him as witness to his victory. Blood was pouring out of his matted, filthy hair, between his eyes, in a double course around his nose, and over his mouth. His eyes, Clay saw, weren't blank at all. They were insane. Clay understood—all at once, completely and inarguably—that if this was where the cycle led, his son was beyond saving.

"Mynuck!" the young man shrieked. "Mynuck, mynuck!" The pumper's siren gave a brief, winding growl, as if in agreement. "MYNU —"

Clay shot him, then reholstered the .45. What the hell, he thought, they can only put me up on a pedestal once. Still, he was shaking badly, and when he broke into Gurleyville's only motel on the far side of town, it took him a long time to go to sleep. Instead of the Raggedy Man, it was his son who visited him in his dreams, a dirty, blank-eyed child who responded "Go-hell, mynuck" when Clay called his name.

He woke from this dream long before dark, but sleep was done for him and he decided to start walking again. And once he'd cleared Gurleyville—what little of Gurleyville there was to clear—he'd drive. There was no reason not to; Route 160 now seemed almost entirely clear and probably had been since the nasty pileup where it crossed Route 11. He simply hadn't noticed it in the dark and the rain.

The Raggedy Man and his friends cleared the way, he thought. Of course they did, it's the fucking cattle-chute. For me it probably is the chute that leads to the slaughterhouse. Because I'm old business. They'd like to stamp me PAID and stick me in the filing cabinet as soon as possible. Too bad about Tom and Jordan and theother three. I wonder if they found enough back roads to take them into central New Hampshire y —

He topped a rise and this thought broke off cleanly. Parked in the middle of the road below was a little yellow schoolbus with MAINE SCHOOL DISTRICT 38NEWFIELDprinted on the side. Leaning against it was a man and a boy. The man had his arm around the boy's shoulders in a casual gesture of friendship Clay would have known anywhere. As he stood there, frozen, not quite believing his eyes, another man came around the schoolbus's blunt nose. He had long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail. Following him was a pregnant woman in a T-shirt. It was powder blue instead of Harley-Davidson black, but it was Denise, all right.

Jordan saw him and called his name. He pulled free of Tom's arm and started running. Clay ran to meet him. They met about thirty yards in front of the schoolbus.

"Clay!" Jordan shouted. He was hysterical with joy. "It's really you!"

"It's me," Clay agreed. He swung Jordan in the air, then kissed him. Jordan wasn't Johnny, but Jordan would do, at least for the time being. He hugged him, then set him down and studied the haggard face, not failing to note the brown circles of weariness under Jordan's eyes. "How in God's name did you get here?"

Jordan's face clouded. "We couldn't. . . that is, we only dreamed . . ."

Tom came strolling up. Once again he ignored Clay's outstretched hand and hugged him instead. "How you doin, van Gogh?" he asked.

"Okay. Fucking delighted to see you guys, but I don't understand—"

Tom gave him a smile. It was both tired and sweet, a white flag of a smile. "What computer-boy's trying to tell you is that in the end we just didn't have any choice. Come on down to the little yellow bus. Ray says that if the road stays clear—and I'm sure it will—we can be in Kashwak by sundown, even traveling at thirty miles an hour. Ever read The Haunting of Hill House?"

Clay shook his head, bewildered. "Saw the movie."

"There's a line there that resonates in the current situation—'Journeys end in lovers meeting.' Looks like I might get to meet your kid after all."

They walked down to the schoolbus. Dan Hartwick offered Clay a tin of Altoids with a hand that was not quite steady. Like Jordan and Tom, he looked exhausted. Clay, feeling like a man in a dream, took one. End of the world or not, it was curiously strong.

"Hey, man," Ray said. He was behind the wheel of the schoolbus, Dolphins cap tipped back, a cigarette smoldering in one hand. He looked pale and drawn. He was staring out through the windshield, not at Clay.

"Hey, Ray, what do you say?" Clay asked.

Ray smiled briefly. "Say I've heard that one a few times."

"Sure, probably a few hundred. I'd tell you I'm glad to see you, but under the circumstances, I'm not sure you'd want to hear it."

Still looking out the windshield, Ray replied, "There's someone up there you'll definitely not be glad to see."

Clay looked. They all did. A quarter of a mile or so north, Route 160 crested another hill. Standing there and looking at them, his harvard hoodie dirtier than ever but still bright against the gray afternoon sky, was the Raggedy Man. Maybe fifty other phoners surrounded him. He saw them looking. He raised his hand and waved at them twice, side to side, like a man wiping a windshield. Then he turned and began to walk away, his entourage (his flocklet, Clay thought) falling in to either side of him in a kind of trailing Y Soon they were out of sight.