Cell

KASHWAK

An hour after leaving the picnic area where ray had shot himself with Clay's gun, they passed a sign reading

"Oh my God," Clay said. "The Expo. Kashwakamak Hall. Christ. If there was ever a place for a flock, that's it."

"What's an expo?" Denise asked.

"Your basic county fair," Clay said, "only bigger than most of them and quite a lot wilder, because it's on the TR, which is unincorporated. Also, there's that North End business. Everyone in Maine knows about the North End at the Northern Counties Expo. In its own way, it's as notorious as the Twilight Motel."

Tom wanted to know what the North End was, but before Clay could explain, Denise said, "There's two more. Mary-and-Jesus, I know they're phoners, but it still makes me sick."

A man and a woman lay in the dust at the side of the road. They had died either in an embrace or a bitter battle, and embracing did not seem to go with the phoner lifestyle. They had passed half a dozen other bodies on their run north, almost certainly casualties from the flock that had come down to get them, and had seen twice that number wandering aimlessly south, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs. One of the pairs, clearly confused about where they wanted to go, had actually tried to hitchhike the bus as it passed.

"Wouldn't it be nice if they'd all either fall out or drop dead before what they've got planned for us tomorrow?" Tom said.

"Don't count on it," Dan said. "For every casualty or deserter we've seen, we've seen twenty or thirty who are still with the program. And God knows how many are waiting in this Kashwacky place."

"Don't count it out, either," Jordan said from his place beside Tom. He spoke a little sharply. "A bug in the program—a worm—is not a small thing. It can start out as a minor pain in the ass and then boom, everything's down. I play this game, Star-Mag? Well, you know—I used to play it—and this sore sport out in California got so mad about losing all the time that he put a worm in the system and it took down all the servers in a week. Almost half a million gamers back to computer cribbage because of that jamhead."

"We don't have a week, Jordan," Denise said.

"I know," he said. "And I know they're not all apt to go wheels-up overnight . . . but it's possible. And I won't stop hoping. I don't want to end up like Ray. He stopped . . . you know, hoping." A single tear rolled down Jordan's cheek.

Tom gave him a hug. "You won't end up like Ray," he said. "You're going to grow up to be like Bill Gates."

"I don't want to grow up to be like Bill Gates," Jordan said morosely. "I bet Bill Gates had a cell phone. In fact I bet he had a dozen." He sat up straight. "One thing I'd give a lot to know is how so many cell phone transmission towers can still be working when the fucking power's down."

"FEMA," Dan said hollowly.

Tom and Jordan turned to look at him, Tom with a tentative smile on his lips. Even Clay glanced up into the rearview mirror.

"You think I'm joking," Dan said. "I wish I was. I read an article about it in a newsmagazine while I was in my doctor's office, waiting for that disgusting exam where he puts on a glove and then goes prospecting—"

"Please," Denise said. "Things are bad enough. You can skip that part. What did the article say?"

"That after 9/11, FEMA requested and got a sum of money from Congress—I don't remember how much, but it was in the tens of millions—to equip cell phone transmission towers nationwide with long-life emergency generators to make sure the nation's ability to communicate wouldn't go to hell in the event of coordinated terrorist attacks." Dan paused. "I guess it worked."

"FEMA," Tom said. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry."

"I'd tell you to write your congressman, but he's probably insane," Denise said.

"He was insane well before the Pulse," Tom answered, but he spoke absently. He was rubbing the back of his neck and looking out the window. "FEMA," he said. "You know, it sort of makes sense. Fucking FEMA."

Dan said, "I'd give a lot just to know why they've made such a business of collaring us and bringing us in."

"And making sure the rest of us don't follow Ray's example," Denise said. "Don't forget that." She paused. "Not that I would. Suicide's a sin. They can do whatever they want to me here, but I'm going to heaven with my baby. I believe that."

"The Latin's the part that gives me the creeps," Dan said. "Jordan, is it possible that the phoners could take old stuff—stuff from before the Pulse, I mean—and incorporate it into their new programming? If it fit their . . . mmmm, I don't know . . . their long-term goals?"

"I guess," Jordan said. "I don't really know, because we don't know what sort of commands might have been encoded in the Pulse. This isn't like ordinary computer programming in any case. It's self-generating. Organic. Like learning. I guess it is learning. 'It satisfies the definition,' the Head would say. Only they're all learning together, because—"

"Because of the telepathy," Tom said.

"Right," Jordan agreed. He looked troubled.

"Why does the Latin give you the creeps?" Clay asked, looking at Dan in the rearview mirror.

"Tom said Latin's the language of justice, and I guess that's true, but this feels much more like vengeance to me." He leaned forward. Behind his glasses, his eyes were tired and troubled. "Because, Latin or no Latin, they can't really think. I'm convinced of that. Not yet, anyway. What they depend on instead of rational thought is a kind of hive mind born out of pure rage."

"I object, Your Honor, Freudian speculation!" Tom said, rather merrily.

"Maybe Freud, maybe Lorenz," Dan said, "but give me the benefit of the doubt either way. Would it be surprising for such an entity—such a raging entity—to confuse justice and vengeance?"

"Would it matter?" Tom asked.

"It might to us," Dan said. "As someone who once taught a block course on vigilantism in America, I can tell you that vengeance usually ends up hurting more."

Not long after this conversation, they came to a place clay recognized. Which was unsettling, because he had never been in this part of the state before. Except once, in his dream of the mass conversions.

Written across the road in broad strokes of bright green paint was KASHWAK=NO-FO. the van rolled over the words at a steady thirty miles an hour as the phoners continued to stream past in their stately, witchy procession on the left.

That was no dream, he thought, looking at the drifts of trash caught in the bushes at the sides of the road, the beer and soda cans in the ditches. Bags that had contained potato chips, Doritos, and Cheez Doodles crackled under the tires of the little bus. The normies stood here in a double line, eating their snacks and drinking their drinks, feeling that funny itch in their heads, that weird sense of a mental hand pushing on their backs, waiting their turns to call some loved one who got lost in the Pulse. They stood here and listened to the Raggedy Man say "Left and right, two lines, that's correct, that's doing it, let's keep moving, we've got a lot of you to process before dark."

Up ahead the trees drew back on either side of the road. What had been some farmer's hard-won grazeland for cows or sheep had now been flattened and churned down to bare earth by many passing feet. It was almost as though there had been a rock concert here. One of the tents was gone—blown away—but the other had caught on some trees and flapped in the dull early-evening light like a long brown tongue.

"I dreamed of this place," Jordan said. His voice was tight.

"Did you?" Clay said. "So did I."

"The normies followed the Kashwak equals No-Fo signs, and this is what they came to," Jordan said. "It was like tollbooths, wasn't it, Clay?"

"Kind of," Clay said. "Kind of like tollbooths, yeah."

"They had big cardboard boxes full of cell phones," Jordan said. This was a detail Clay didn't remember from his own dream, but he didn't doubt it. "Heaps and heaps of them. And every normie got to make a call. What a bunch of lucky ducks."

"When did you dream this, Jordy?" Denise asked.

"Last night." Jordan's eyes met Clay's in the rearview mirror. "They knew they weren't going to be talking to the people they wanted to talk to. Down deep they knew. But they did it anyway. They took the phones anyway. Took em and listened. Most of em didn't even put up a fight. Why, Clay?"

"Because they were tired of fighting, I suppose," Clay said. "Tired of being different. They wanted to hear 'Baby Elephant Walk' with new ears."

They were past the beaten-down fields where the tents had been. Ahead, a paved byroad split off from the highway. It was broader and smoother than the state road. The phoners were streaming up this byway and disappearing into a slot in the woods. Looming high above the trees half a mile or so farther on was a steel gantrylike structure Clay recognized at once from his dreams. He thought it had to be some sort of amusement attraction, maybe a Parachute Drop. There was a billboard at the junction of the highway and the byroad, showing a laughing family– dad, mom, sonny, and little sis—walking into a wonderland of rides, games, and agricultural exhibits.

Standing below this billboard was the Raggedy Man. He raised one hand and held it out in a stop gesture.

Oh Jesus, Clay thought, and pulled the minibus up beside him. The Raggedy Man's eyes, which Clay hadn't been able to get right in his drawing at Gaiten, looked simultaneously dazed and full of malevolent interest. Clay told himself it was impossible for them to appear both ways at the same time, but they did. Sometimes the dazed dullness was foremost in them; a moment later it seemed to be that weirdly unpleasant avidity.

He can't want to get on with us.

But the Raggedy Man did, it seemed. He lifted his hands to the door with the palms pressed together, then opened them. The gesture was rather pretty—like a man indicating this bird has flown —but the hands themselves were black with filth, and the little finger on the left one had been badly broken in what looked like two places.

These are the new people, Clay thought. Telepaths who don't take baths.

"Don't let him on," Denise said. Her voice was trembling.

Clay, who could see that the steady conveyor-movement of phoners to the left of the bus had stopped, shook his head. "No choice."

They peek in your head and find out you're thinkin about a fuckin cellphone, Ray had said—had almost snorted. What else is anyone thinkin about since October first?

Hope you're right, Ray, he thought, because it's still an hour and a half until dark. An hour and a half at least.

He threw the lever that opened the door and the Raggedy Man, torn lower lip drooping in its constant sneer, climbed aboard. He was painfully thin; the filthy red sweatshirt hung on him like a sack. None of the normies on the bus were particularly clean—hygiene hadn't been a priority since the first of October—but the Raggedy Man gave off a ripe and powerful stench that almost made Clay's eyes water. It was the smell of strong cheese left to sweat it out in a hot room.

The Raggedy Man sat down in the seat by the door, the one that faced the driver's seat, and looked at Clay. For a moment there was nothing but the dusty weight of his eyes and that strange grinning curiosity.

Then Tom spoke in a thin, outraged voice Clay had heard him use only once before, when he'd said That's it, everybody out of the pool to the plump Bible-toting woman who'd started preaching her End Times sermon to Alice. "What do you want from us? You have the world, such as it is– what do you want from us?"

The Raggedy Man's ruined mouth formed the word even as Jordan said it. Only that one word, flat and emotionless. "Justice."

"When it comes to justice," Dan said, "I don't think you have a clue."

The Raggedy Man replied with a gesture, raising one hand to the feeder-road, palm up and index finger pointing: Get rolling.

When the bus started to move, most of the phoners started to move again, as well. A few more had fallen to fighting, and in the outside mirror Clay saw others walking back down the expo feeder-road toward the highway.

"You're losing some of your troops," Clay said.

The Raggedy Man made no reply on behalf of the flock. His eyes, now dull, now curious, now both, remained fixed on Clay, who fancied he could almost feel that gaze walking lightly over his skin. The Raggedy Man's twisted fingers, gray with dirt, lay on the lap of his grimy blue jeans. Then he grinned. Maybe that was answer enough. Dan was right, after all. For every phoner who dropped out—who went wheels-up, in Jordan-speak—there were plenty more. But Clay had no idea how many plenty more might entail until half an hour later, when the woods opened up on both sides and they passed beneath the wooden arch reading WELCOME TO THE NORTHERN COUNTIES EXPO.

"Dear God," Dan said.

Denise articulated Clay's own feelings better; she gave a low scream.

Sitting across the narrow aisle of the little bus in the first passenger seat, the Raggedy Man only sat and stared at Clay with the half-vacant malevolence of a stupid child about to pull the wings off a few flies. Do youlike it? his grin seemed to say. It's quite something, isn't it? The gang's all here! Of course a grin like that could mean that or anything. It could even mean I know what you have in your pocket.

Beyond the arch was a midway and a batch of rides, both still being assembled at the time of the Pulse, from the way things looked. Clay didn't know how many of the carny pitch-tents had been erected, but some had blown away, like the pavilions at the checkpoint six or eight miles back, and only half a dozen or so still stood, their sides seeming to breathe in the evening breeze. The Krazy Kups were half-built, and so was the funhouse across from it (WE DARE YOU TOran across the single piece of faзade that had been erected; skeletons danced above the words). Only the Ferris wheel and the Parachute Drop at the far end of what would have been the midway looked complete, and with no electric lights to make them jolly, they looked gruesome to Clay, less like amusement rides than gigantic implements of torture. Yet one light was blinking, he saw: a tiny red beacon, surely battery-powered, at the very top of the Parachute Drop.

Well beyond the Drop was a white building with red trim, easily a dozen barn-lengths long. Loose hay had been heaped along the sides. American flags, fluttering in the evening breeze, had been planted in this cheap rural insulation every ten feet or so. The building was draped with swags of patriotic bunting and bore the legend

in bright blue paint.

But none of this was what had attracted their attention. Between the Parachute Drop and Kashwakamak Hall were several acres of open ground. Clay guessed it was where the big crowds gathered for livestock exhibitions, tractor-pulls, end-of-fair-day concerts, and—of course—the fireworks shows that would both open and close the Expo. It was ringed with light-standards and loudspeaker-poles. Now this broad and grassy mall was crammed with phoners. They stood shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip, their faces turned to watch the arrival of the little yellow bus.

Any hope Clay had harbored of seeing Johnny—or Sharon—was gone in a moment. His first thought was that there had to be five thousand people crowded beneath those dead light-standards. Then he saw they had spilled into the grassy parking lots adjoining the main exhibition area as well and revised his estimate upward. Eight. Eight thousand at least.

The Raggedy Man sat where some Newfield Elementary School third-grader belonged, grinning at Clay with his teeth jutting through the split in his lip. Do you like it? that grin seemed to ask, and again Clay had to remind himself that you could read anything into a grin like that.

"So who's playing tonight? Vince Gill? Or did you guys break the bank and get Alan Jackson?" That was Tom. He was trying to be funny and Clay gave him high marks for that, but Tom only sounded scared.

The Raggedy Man was still looking at Clay, and a little vertical crease had appeared in the middle of his brow, as if something puzzled him.

Clay drove the minibus slowly up the center of the midway, toward the Parachute Drop and the silent multitude beyond. There were more bodies here; they reminded Clay of how you sometimes found heaps of dead bugs on the windowsills after a sudden cold snap. He concentrated on keeping his hands loose. He didn't want the Raggedy Man to see his knuckles turn white on the wheel.

And go slow. Nice and easy does it. He's only looking at you. As for cellphones, what else has anyone been thinking about since October first?

The Raggedy Man raised a hand and pointed one twisted, badly used finger at Clay. "No-fo, you," Clay said in that other voice. "Insanus."

"Yeah, no-fo-me-me, no-fo none of us, we're all bozos on this bus," Clay said. "But you'll fix that, right?"

The Raggedy Man grinned, as if to say that was right . . . but the little vertical line was still there. As if something still puzzled him. Maybe something rolling and tumbling around in Clay Riddell's mind.

Clay looked up into the rearview mirror as they neared the end of the midway. "Tom, you asked me what the North End was," he said.

"Forgive me, Clay, but my interest seems to have waned," Tom said. "Maybe it's the size of the welcoming committee."

"No, but this is interesting," Clay said, a little feverishly.

"Okay, what is it?" Jordan asked. God bless Jordan. Curious to the end.

"The Northern Counties Expo was never a big deal in the twentieth century," Clay said. "Just your standard little shitpot aggie fair with arts, crafts, produce, and animals over there in Kashwakamak Hall. . . which is where they're going to put us, from the look of things."

He glanced at the Raggedy Man, but the Raggedy Man neither confirmed nor denied. The Raggedy Man only grinned. The little vertical line had disappeared from his forehead.

"Clay, look out," Denise said in a tight, controlled voice.

He looked back through the windshield and stepped on the brake. An elderly woman with infected lacerations on both legs came swaying out of the silent crowd. She skirted the edge of the Parachute Drop, trampled over several prefab pieces of the funhouse that had been laid out but not erected at the time of the Pulse, then broke into a shambling run aimed directly at the schoolbus. When she reached it, she began to hammer slowly on the windshield with filthy, arthritis-twisted hands. What Clay saw in this woman's face wasn't the avid blankness he'd come to associate with the phoners but terrified disorientation. And it was familiar. Who are you? Pixie Dark had asked. Pixie Dark, who hadn't gotten a direct blast of the Pulse. Who am I?

Nine phoners in a neat moving square came after the elderly woman, whose frantic face was less than five feet from Clay's own. Her mouth moved, and he heard four words, both with his ears and with his mind: "Take me with you."

We're not going anywhere you want to go, lady, Clay thought.

Then the phoners grabbed her and took her back toward the multitude on the grassy mall. She struggled to get away, but they were relentless. Clay caught one flash of her eyes and thought they were the eyes of a woman who was in purgatory only if she was lucky. More likely it was hell.

Once more the Raggedy Man held out his hand, palm-up and index finger pointing: Roll.

The elderly woman had left a handprint, ghostly but visible, on the windshield. Clay looked through it and got rolling.

"Anyhow," he said, "until 1999, the Expo was no big deal. If you lived in this part of the world and wanted rides and games—carny stuff—you had to go down to the Fryeburg Fair." He heard his own voice running as if on a tape loop. Talk for the sake of talk. It made him think of the drivers on the Duck Boat tours in Boston, pointing out the various sights. "Then, just before the turn of the century, the State Bureau of Indian Affairs did a land-survey. Everybody knew the Expo grounds were right next door to the Sockabasin Rez; what that land-survey showed was that the north end of Kashwakamak Hall was actually on reservation land. Technically, it was in Micmac Indian territory. The people running the Expo were no dummies, and neither were the ones on the Micmac tribal council. They agreed to clean out the little shops from the north end of the hall and put in slots. All at once the Northern Counties Expo was Maine's biggest fall fair."

They had reached the Parachute Drop. Clay started to jog left and guide the little bus between the ride and the half-constructed funhouse, but the Raggedy Man patted his hands on the air, palms-down. Clay stopped. The Raggedy Man stood up and turned to the door. Clay threw the lever and the Raggedy Man stepped off. Then he turned to Clay and made a kind of sweeping, bowing gesture.

"What's he doing now?" Denise asked. She couldn't see from where she was sitting. None of them could.

"He wants us to get off," Clay said. He stood up. He could feel the cell phone Ray had given him lying hard along his upper thigh. If he looked down, he would see its outline against the blue denim of his jeans. He pulled down the T-shirt he was wearing, trying to cover it. A cellphone, sowhat, everybody's thinking about them.

"Are we going to?" Jordan asked. He sounded scared.

"Not much choice," Clay said. "Come on, you guys, let's go to the fair."

The raggedy man led them toward the silent multitude. it opened for them, leaving a narrow aisle—not much more than a throat—from the back of the Parachute Drop to the double doors of Kashwakamak Hall. Clay and the others passed a parking area filled with trucks (new england amusement corp. was printed on the sides, along with a roller-coaster logo). Then the crowd swallowed them.

That walk seemed endless to Clay. The smell was nearly insupportable, wild and ferocious even with the freshening breeze to carry the top layer away. He was aware of his legs moving, he was aware of the Raggedy Man's red hoodie ahead of him, but the hall's double doors with their swags of red, white, and blue bunting seemed to get no closer. He smelled dirt and blood, urine and shit. He smelled fermenting infections, burned flesh, the spoiled eggwhite aroma of oozing pus. He smelled clothes that were rotting on the bodies they draped. He smelled something else, as well—some new thing. Calling it madness would have been too easy.

I think it's the smell of telepathy. And if it is, we're not ready for it. It's too strong for us. It burns the brain, somehow, the way too much current will burn out the electrical system in a car or a —

"Help me with her!" Jordan yelled from behind him. "Help me with her, she's fainting!"

He turned and saw that Denise had gone down on all fours. Jordan was on all fours beside her and had one of her arms over his neck, but she was too heavy for him. Tom and Dan couldn't get forward enough to help. The corridor cutting through the mass of phoners was too narrow. Denise raised her head, and for a moment her eyes met Clay's. The look was one of dazed incomprehension, the eyes those of a slugged steer. She vomited a thin gruel onto the grass and her head dropped down again. Her hair fell around her face like a curtain.

"Help me!" Jordan shouted again. He began to cry.

Clay went back and started elbowing phoners in order to get on Denise's other side. "Get out of the way!" he shouted. "Get out of the way, she's pregnant, can't you fools see she's preg—"

It was the blouse he recognized first. The high-necked, white silk blouse that he had always called Sharon's doctor shirt. In some ways he thought it was the sexiest garment she owned, partly because of that high, prim neck. He liked her bare, but he liked to touch and squeeze her breasts through that high-necked, white silk blouse even more. He liked to bring her nipples up until he could see them poking the cloth.

Now Sharon's doctor shirt was streaked black with dirt in some places and maroon with dried blood in others. It was torn under the arm. She doesn’t look as bad as some, Johnny had written, but she didn't look good; she certainly wasn't the Sharon Riddell who had gone off to school in her doctor shirt and her dark red skirt while her estranged husband was in Boston, about to make a deal that would put an end to their financial worries and make her realize that all her carping about his "expensive hobby" had been so much fear and bad faith (that, anyway, had been his semi-resentful dream). Her dark blond hair hung in lank strings. Her face had been cut in a number of places, and one of her ears looked torn half-off; where it had been, a clotted hole bored into the side of her head. Something she had eaten, something dark, clung in curds to the corners of the mouth he had kissed almost every day for almost fifteen years. She stared at him, through him, with that idiotic half-grin they sometimes wore.

"Clay help me!" Jordan almost sobbed.

Clay snapped back. Sharon wasn't here, that was the thing to remember. Sharon hadn't been here for almost two weeks now. Not since trying to make a call on Johnny's little red cell phone on the day of the Pulse.

"Give me some room, you bitch," he said, and pushed aside the woman who'd been his wife. Before she could rebound, he slid into her place.

"This woman's pregnant, so give me some fucking room." Then he bent, slipped Denise's other arm over his neck, and got her up.

"Go on ahead," Tom said to Jordan. "Let me in, I've got her."

Jordan held up Denise's arm long enough for Tom to slip it over his own neck. He and Clay carried her that way the final ninety yards to the doors of Kashwakamak Hall, where the Raggedy Man stood waiting. By then Denise was muttering that they could let her go, she could walk, she was all right, but Tom wouldn't. Neither would Clay. If he let her go, he might look back for Sharon. He didn't want to do that.

The Raggedy Man grinned at Clay, and this time that grin seemed to have more focus. It really was as though the two of them shared a joke. Sharon? he wondered. Is Sharon the joke?

It seemed not, because the Raggedy Man made a gesture that would have seemed very familiar to Clay in the old world but seemed eerily out of place here: right hand to the right side of his face, right thumb to ear, pinkie finger to mouth. The phone-mime.

"No-fo-you-you," Denise said, and then, in her own voice: "Don't do that, I hate it when you do that!"

The Raggedy Man paid her no mind. He went on holding his right hand in the phone-gesture, thumb to ear and pinkie to mouth, staring at Clay. For one moment Clay was sure he also glanced down at the pocket where the cell phone was stowed. Then Denise said it again, that horrible parody of his old routine with Johnny-Gee: "No-fo-you-you." The Raggedy Man mimed laughing, and his ruined mouth made it gruesome. From behind him, Clay felt the eyes of the flock like a physical weight.

Then the double doors of Kashwakamak Hall opened on their own, and the mingled odors that came out, although faint—olfactory ghosts of other years—was still an anodyne to the stink of the flock: spices, jams, hay, and livestock. It wasn't completely dark, either; the battery-powered emergency lights were dim, but hadn't yet given out entirely. Clay thought that was pretty amazing, unless they had been saved especially for their arrival, and he doubted that. The Raggedy Man wasn't telling. He only smiled and gestured with his hands for them to go in.

"It'll be a pleasure, you freak," Tom said. "Denise, are you sure you can walk on your own?"

"Yes. I've just got one tiny bit of business first." She drew in breath, then spit in the Raggedy Man's face. "There. Take that back to Hah-vud with you, fuckface."

The Raggedy Man said nothing. He only grinned at Clay. Just two fellows sharing a secret joke.

No one brought them any food, but there were snack machines galore and Dan found a crowbar in the maintenance closet at the huge building's south end. The others were standing around and watching him pry open the candy machine—Of course we're insane, Clay thought, we eat Baby Ruths for dinner and tomorrow we'll have Pay Days for breakfast —when the music started. And it wasn't "You Light Up My Life" or "Baby Elephant Walk" coming out of the big speakers ringing the grassy mall outside, not this time. It was something slow and stately that Clay had heard before, although not for years. It filled him with sadness and made gooseflesh run up the soft insides of his arms.

"Oh my God," Dan said softly. "I think it's Albinoni."

"No," Tom said. "That's Pachelbel. It's the Canon in D Major."

"Of course it is," Dan said, sounding embarrassed.

"It's as if . . ." Denise began, then stopped. She looked down at her shoes.

"What?" Clay asked. "Go on, say it. You're among friends."

"It's like the sound of memories," she said. "As if it's all they have."

"Yes," Dan said. "I suppose—"

"You guys!" Jordan called. He was looking out one of the small windows. They were quite high, but by standing on his tiptoes, he could just manage. "Come look at this!"

They lined up and looked out at the wide mall. It was almost full dark. The speakers and the light-standards loomed, black sentinels against the dead sky. Beyond was the gantry shape of the Parachute Drop with its one lonely blinking light. And ahead, directly ahead, thousands of phoners had gone to their knees like Muslims about to pray while Johann Pachelbel filled the air with what could have been a substitute for memory. And when they lay down they lay as one, producing a great soft swoop of noise and a fluttering displacement of air that sent empty bags and flattened soda cups twirling into the air.

"Bedtime for the whole brain-damaged army," Clay said. "If we're going to do something, it's got to be tonight."

"Do? What are we going to do?" Tom asked. "The two doors I tried are both locked. I'm sure that's true of the others, as well."

Dan held up the crowbar.

"Don't think so," Clay said. "That thing may work just fine on the vending machines, but remember, this place used to be a casino." He pointed to the north end of the hall, which was lushly carpeted and filled with rows of one-armed bandits, their chrome muted in the glow of the failing emergency lights. "I think you'll find the doors are crowbar-resistant."

"The windows?" Dan asked, then took a closer look and answered his own question. "Jordan, maybe."

"Let's have something to eat," Clay said. "Then let's just sit down and be quiet for a little while. There hasn't been enough of that."

"And do what?" Denise asked.

"Well, you guys can do what you want," Clay said. "I haven't done any drawing in almost two weeks, and I've been missing it. I think I'll draw."

"You don't have any paper," Jordan objected.

Clay smiled. "When I don't have any paper, I draw in my head."

Jordan looked at him uncertainly, trying to ascertain whether his leg was being pulled. When he decided it wasn't, he said, "That can't be as good as drawing on paper, can it?"

"In some ways it's better. Instead of erasing, I just rethink."

There was a loud clank and the door of the candy machine swung open. "Bingo!" Dan cried, and lifted his crowbar above his head. "Who said college professors were good for nothing in the real world?"

"Look," Denise said greedily, ignoring Dan. "A whole rack of Junior Mints!" She dug in.

"Clay?" Tom asked.

"Hmmm?"

"I don't suppose you saw your little boy, did you? Or your wife? Sandra?"

"Sharon," Clay said. "I didn't see either of them." He looked around Denise's ample hip. "Are those Butterfingers?"

Half an hour later they had eaten their fill of candy and raided the soda machine. They had tried the other doors and found them all locked. Dan tried his crowbar and couldn't get purchase even at the bottom. Tom was of the opinion that, although the doors looked like wood, they were very likely equipped with steel cores.

"Probably alarmed, too," Clay said. "Screw around with them too much and the reservation police will come and take you away."

Now the other four sat in a little circle on the soft casino carpeting among the slot machines. Clay sat on the concrete, with his back against the double doors through which the Raggedy Man had ushered them with that mocking gesture of his—After you, see you in the morning.

Clay's thoughts wanted to return to that other mocking gesture—the thumb-and-pinkie phone-mime—but he wouldn't let them, at least not directly. He knew from long experience that the best way to go after such things was by the back door. So he leaned his head against the wood with the steel core hiding inside, and closed his eyes, and visualized a comic splash-page. Not a page from Dark Wanderer —Dark Wanderer was kaput and nobody knew it better than him—but from a new comic. Call it Cell, for want of a better title, a thrilling end-of-the-world saga of the phoner hordes versus the last few normies—

Except that couldn't be right. It looked right if you glanced at it fast, the way the doors in this place looked like wood but weren't. The ranks of the phoners had to be seriously depleted—had to be. How many of them had been lost in the violence immediately following the Pulse? Half? He recalled the fury of that violence and thought, Maybe more. Maybe sixty or even seventy percent. Then attrition due to serious wounds, infection, exposure, further fighting, and just plain stupidity. Plus, of course, the flock-killers; how many had they taken out? How many big flocks like this one were actually left?

Clay thought they might find out tomorrow, if the ones remaining all hooked up for one big execute-the-insane extravaganza. Much good the knowledge would do them.

Never mind. Boil it down. If you wanted backstory on the splash, the situation had to be boiled down enough to fit on a single narrative panel. It was an unwritten rule. The phoners' situation could be summed up in two words: bad losses. They looked like a lot—hell, like a damned multitude —but probably the passenger pigeons had looked like a lot right up until the end. Because they traveled in sky-darkening flocks right up to the end. What nobody noticed was that there were fewer and fewer of those giant flocks. Until, that was, they were all gone. Extinct. Finite Buh-bye.

Plus, he thought, they've got this other problem now, this bad-programming thing. This worm. What about that? All in all, these guys could have a shorter run than the dinosaurs, telepathy, levitation, and all.

Okay, enough backstory. What's your illo? What's your damn picture, the one that's going to hook them and draw them in? Why, Clay Riddell and Ray Huizenga, that's what. They're standing in the woods. Ray's got the Beth Nickerson .45 with the barrel under his chin and Clay's holding . . .

A cell phone, of course. The one Ray lifted from the Gurleyville Quarry.

CLAY (terrified): Ray, STOP! This is pointless! Don't you remember? Kashwak's a CELL DEAD Z—

No good! KA-POW!in jagged yellow capitals across the foreground of the splash, and this one really is a splash, because Arnie Nickerson has thoughtfully provided his wife with the kind of softnosed rounds they sell on the Internet at the American Paranoia sites, and the top of Ray's head is a red geyser. In the background—one of those detailed touches for which Clay Riddell might have become famous in a world where the Pulse never happened—a single terrified crow is lifting off from a pine branch.

A damn good splash page, Clay thought. Gory, sure—it would never have passed muster in the old Comics Code days—but instantly involving. And although Clay had never said that thing about cell phones not working beyond the conversion point, he would've if he'd thought of it in time. Only time had run out. Ray had killed himself so that the Raggedy Man and his phoner friends wouldn't see that phone in his mind, which was bitterly ironic. The Raggedy Man had known all about the cell whose existence Ray had died to protect. He knew it was in Clay's pocket . . . and he didn't care.

Standing at the double doors to Kashwakamak Hall. The Raggedy Man making that gesture—thumb to ear, curled fingers next to his torn and stubbly cheek, pinkie in front of his mouth. Using Denise to say it again, to drive the point home: No-fo-you-you.

That's right. Because Kashwak—No-Fo.

Ray had died for nothing . . . so why didn't that upset him now?

Clay was aware he was dozing as he often did when he drew inside his head. Coming uncoupled. And that was all right. Because he felt the way he always did just before picture and story became welded into one– happy, like people before an anticipated homecoming. Before journeys end in lovers meeting. He had absolutely no reason to feel that way, but he did.

Ray Huizenga had died for a useless cell phone.

Or was it more than one? Now Clay saw another panel. This one was a flashback panel, you could tell by the scalloped edges.

CU on RAY'S hand, holding the grimy cell phone and a slip of paper with a telephone number scrawled on it. RAY'S thumb obscures everything but the Maine area code.

RAY (O.S.): When the time comes, call the number on that slip. You'll know the time. I gotta hope you'll know.

Can't call anybody from a cell in Kaskwakamak, Ray, because Kashwak = No-Fo. Just ask the President of Hah-vud.

And to drive the point home, here's another flashback panel with those scalloped edges. It's Route 160. In the foreground is the little yellow bus with MAINE SCHOOL DISTRICT 38 NEWFIELD printed on the side. in the middle distance, painted across the road, is KASHWAK= NO-FO.once again the detail-work is terrific: empty soda cans lying in the ditch, a discarded T-shirt caught on a bush, and in the distance, a tent flapping from a tree like a long brown tongue. Above the minibus are four voice-over balloons. These weren't the things they actually said (even his dozing mind knew it), but that wasn't the point. Storymaking wasn't the point, not now.

He thought he might know the point when he came to it.

DENISE (VO.): Is this where they—?

TOM (VO.): Where they did the conversions, correct. Get into line a normie, make your call, and when you head on up to the Expo flock, you're one of THEM. What a deal

DAN (VO.): Why here? Why not on the Expo grounds?

CLAY (VO.): Don't you remember? Kashwak=No-Fo. They lined em up at the far edge of cell coverage. Beyond here, nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero bars.

Another panel. Close-up on the Raggedy Man in all his pestiferous glory. Grinning with his mutilated mouth and summing everything up with one gesture. Ray had some bright idea that depended on making a cell phone call. It was so bright he completely forgot there's no coverage up here. I'd probably have to go to Quebec to get a bar on that phone he gave me. That's funny, but what's even funnier? I took it! What a sap!

So whatever Ray had died for was pointless? Maybe, but here was another picture forming. Outside, Pachelbel had given way to Faurй, and Faurй had given way to Vivaldi. Pouring from speakers instead of boom-boxes. Black speakers against a dead sky, with the half-constructed amusement rides in the background; in the foreground Kashwakamak Hall with its bunting and cheap hay insulation. And as the final touch, the little piece of detail-work for which Clay Riddell was already becoming known—

He opened his eyes and sat up. The others were still in their circle on the carpet at the north end. Clay didn't know how long he'd been sitting against the door, but it had been long enough for his ass to go numb.

You guys, he tried to say, but at first no sound would come out. His mouth was dry. His heart was pumping hard. He cleared his throat and tried again. "You guys!" he said, and they looked around. Something in his voice made Jordan scramble to his feet, and Tom wasn't far behind.

Clay walked toward them on legs that didn't feel like his own—they were half-asleep. He took the cell phone out of his pocket as he walked. The one Ray had died for because in the heat of the moment he had forgotten the most salient fact about Kashwakamak: up here at the Northern Counties Expo, these things didn't work.

"If it won't work, what good is it?" Dan asked. He had been excited by Clay's excitement, but deflated in a hurry when he saw the object in Clay's hand wasn't a Get Out of Jail Free card but only another goddam cell phone. A dirty old Motorola with a cracked casing. The others looked at it with a mixture of fear and curiosity.

"Bear with me," Clay said. "Would you do that?"

"We've got all night," Dan said. He took off his glasses and began to polish them. "Got to spin it away somehow."

"You stopped at that Newfield Trading Post for something to eat and drink," Clay said, "and you found the little yellow schoolbus."

"That seems like a zillion years ago," Denise said. She stuck out her lower lip and blew hair off her forehead.

"Ray found the little bus," Clay said. "Seats about twelve—"

"Sixteen, actually," Dan said. "It's written on the dashboard. Man, they must have teensy schools up here."

"Seats sixteen, with space behind the rear seat for packs, or a little light luggage for field trips. Then you moved on. And when you got to the Gurleyville Quarry, I bet it was Ray's idea that you should stop there."

"You know, it was," Tom said. "He thought we could use a hot meal and a rest. How'd you know that, Clay?"

"I knew it because I drew it," Clay said, and this was close to true—he was seeing it as he spoke. "Dan, you and Denise and Ray wiped out two flocks. The first with gasoline, but on the second you used dynamite. Ray knew how because he'd used it working highway jobs."

"Fuck," Tom breathed. "He got dynamite in that quarry, didn't he? While we were sleeping. And he could have —we slept like the dead."

"Ray was the one who woke us up," Denise said.

Clay said, "I don't know if it was dynamite or some other explosive, but I'm almost positive he turned that little yellow bus into a rolling bomb while you were sleeping."

"It's in back," Jordan said. "In the luggage compartment."

Clay nodded.

Jordan's hands were clenched into fists. "How much, do you think?"

"No way of knowing until it goes up," Clay said.

"Let me see if I'm following this," Tom said. Outside, Vivaldi gave way to Mozart—A Little Night Music. The phoners had definitely evolved past Debby Boone. "He stowed a bomb in the back of the bus . . . then somehow rigged a cell phone as a detonator?"

Clay nodded. "That's what I believe. I think he found two cells in the quarry office. For all I know, there could have been half a dozen, for crew use—God knows they're cheap enough nowadays. Anyway, he rigged one to a detonator on the explosives. It's how the insurgents used to set off roadside bombs in Iraq."

"He did all that while we were sleeping?" Denise asked. "And didn't tell us?"

Clay said, "He kept it from you so it wouldn't be in your minds."

"And killed himself so it wouldn't be in his," Dan said. Then he uttered a burst of bitter laughter. "Okay, he's a goddam hero! The only thing he forgot is that cell phones don't work beyond the place where they put up their goddam conversion tents! I bet they barely worked there!"

"Right," Clay said. He was smiling. "That's why the Raggedy Man let me keep this phone. He didn't know what I wanted it for—I'm not sure they exactly think, anyway—"

"Not like us, they don't," Jordan said. "And they never will."

"—but he didn't care, because he knew it wouldn't work. I couldn't even Pulse myself with it, because Kashwak equals no-fo. No-fo-me-me."

"Then why the smile?" Denise asked.

"Because I know something he doesn't," Clay said. "Something they don't." He turned to Jordan. "Can you drive?"

Jordan looked startled. "Hey, I'm twelve. I mean, hello?"

"You've never driven a go-kart? An ATV? A snowmobile?"

"Well, sure . . . there's a dirt go-kart track at this pitch-n-putt place outside Nashua, and once or twice . . ."

"That'll work. We're not talking about very far. Assuming, that is, they left the bus at the Parachute Drop. And I bet they did. I don't think they know how to drive any more than they know how to think."

Tom said, "Clay, have you lost your mind?"

"No," he said. "They may hold their mass flock-killer executions in that virtual stadium of theirs tomorrow, but we're not going to be part of it. We're getting out of here."

The little windows were thick, but dan's crowbar was a match for the glass. He, Tom, and Clay took turns with it, working until all the shards were knocked out. Then Denise took the sweater she'd been wearing and laid it over the bottom of the frame.

"You okay with this, Jordan?" Tom asked.

Jordan nodded. He was frightened—there was no color in his lips at all—but seemed composed. Outside, the phoners' lullaby music had cycled around to Pachelbel's Canon again—what Denise had called the sound of memories.

"I'm okay," Jordan said. "I will be, anyway. I think. Once I get going."

Clay said, "Tom might be able to squeeze through—"

Behind Jordan's shoulder, Tom looked at the small window, no more than eighteen inches wide, and shook his head.

"I'll be okay," Jordan said.

"All right. Tell it to me again."

"Go around and look in the back of the bus. Make sure there's explosives, but don't touch any of it. Look for the other cell phone."

"Right. Make sure it's on. And if it's not on—"

"I know, turn it on." Jordan gave Clay an I'm-no-dummy look. "Then start the motor—"

"No, don't get ahead of yourself—"

"Pull the driving seat forward so I can reach the pedals, then start the motor."

"Right."

"Drive between the Parachute Drop and the funhouse. Go super slow. I'll run over some pieces of the funhouse and they may break—snap under the tires—but don't let that stop me."

"Right on."

"Get as close to them as I can."

"Yes, that's right. Then come around back again, to this window. So the hall is between you and the explosion."

"What we hope will be an explosion," Dan said.

Clay could have done without this, but let it pass. He stooped and kissed Jordan on the cheek. "I love you, you know," he said.

Jordan hugged him briefly, fiercely. Then Tom. Then Denise.

Dan put out his hand, then said, "Oh, what the hell," and enfolded Jordan in a bearhug. Clay, who had never warmed very much to Dan Hartwick, liked him better for that.

Clay made a step with his hands and boosted jordan up. "Remember," he said, "it's going to be like a dive, only into hay instead of water. Hands up and out."

Jordan put his hands over his head, extending them through the broken window and into the night. His face underneath his thick fall of hair was paler than ever; the first red blemishes of adolescence stood out there like tiny burns. He was scared, and Clay didn't blame him. He was in for a ten-foot drop, and even with the hay, the landing was apt to be hard. Clay hoped Jordan would remember to keep his hands out and his head tucked; he'd do none of them any good lying beside Kashwakamak Hall with a broken neck.

"You want me to count three, Jordan?" he asked.

"Fuck, no! Just do it before I pee myself!"

"Then keep your hands out, go!" Clay cried, and thrust his locked hands upward. Jordan shot through the window and disappeared. Clay didn't hear him land; the music was too loud.

The others crowded up to the window, which was just above their heads. "Jordan?" Tom called. "Jordan, you there?"

For a moment there was nothing, and Clay was sure Jordan really had broken his neck. Then he said shakily, "I'm here. Jeez, that hurts. I croggled my elbow. The left one. That arm's all weird. Wait a minute . . ."

They waited. Denise took Clay's hand and squeezed it hard.

"It moves," Jordan said. "It's okay, I guess, but maybe I ought to see the school nurse."

They all laughed too hard.

Tom had tied the bus's ignition key to a double line of thread from his shirt, and the thread to the buckle of his belt. Now Clay laced his fingers together again and Tom stepped up. "I'm going to lower the key to you, Jordan. Ready?"

"Yeah."

Tom gripped the edge of the window, looked down, and then lowered his belt. "Okay, you got it," he said. "Now listen to me. All we ask is do it if you can. If you can't, no penalty minutes. Got that?"

"Yes."

"Go on, then. Scat." He watched a moment, then said, "He's on his way. God help him, he's a brave kid. Put me down."

Jordan had gone out on the side of the building away from the roosting flock. Clay, Tom, Denise, and Dan crossed the room to the midway side. The three men tipped the already vandalized snack machine over on its side and shoved it against the wall. Clay and Dan could easily see out the high windows by standing on it, Tom by standing on tiptoes. Clay added a crate so Denise could also see, praying she wouldn't topple off it and go into labor.

They saw Jordan cross to the edge of the sleeping multitude, stand there a minute as if debating, and then move off to his left. Clay thought he continued seeing movement long after his rational mind told him that Jordan must be gone, skirting the edge of the massive flock.

"How long will it take him to get back, do you think?" Tom asked.

Clay shook his head. He didn't know. It depended on so many variables—the size of the flock was only one of them.

"What if they looked in the back of the bus?" Denise asked.

"What ifJordy looks in the back of the bus and there's nothing there?" Dan asked, and Clay had to restrain himself from telling the man to keep his negative vibe to himself.

Time passed, giving itself up by inches. The little red light on the tip of the Parachute Drop blinked. Pachelbel once more gave way to Faurй and Faurй to Vivaldi. Clay found himself remembering the sleeping boy who had come spilling out of the shopping cart, how the man with him—probably not his father—had sat down with him at the side of the road and said Gregory kiss it, make it all better. He remembered the man with the rucksack listening to "Baby Elephant Walk" and saying Dodge had a good time, too. He remembered how, in the bingo tents of his childhood, the man with the microphone would invariably exclaim It's the sunshine vitamin! when he pulled B-12 out of the hopper with the dancing Ping-Pong balls inside. Even though the sunshine vitamin was D.

The time now gave itself up in what seemed quarter-inches, and Clay began losing hope. If they were going to hear the sound of the bus's engine, they should have heard it by now.

"It's gone wrong somehow," Tom said in a low voice.

"Maybe not," Clay said. He tried to keep his heart's heaviness out of his voice.

"No, Tommy's right," Denise said. She was on the verge of tears. "I love him to death, and he was ballsier than Lord Satan on his first night in hell, but if he was coming, he'd be on his way by now."

Dan's take was surprisingly positive. "We don't know what he might have run into. Just take a deep breath and try to put your imaginations on hold."

Clay tried that and failed. Now the seconds dripped by. Schubert's "Ave Maria" boomed through the big concert speakers. He thought, Iwould sell my soul for some honest rock and roll —Chuck Berry doing "Oh, Carol," U2 doing "When Love Comes to Town" . . .

Outside, nothing but dark, and stars, and that one tiny red battery-driven light.

"Boost me up over there," Tom said, hopping down from the snack machine. "I'll squeeze through that window somehow and see if I can't go get him."

Clay began, "Tom, if I was wrong about there being explosives in the back of the bus—"

"Fuck the back of the bus and fuck the explosives!" Tom said, distraught. "I just want to find Jor—"

"Hey!" Dan shouted, and then: "Hey, all right! BABY-NOW!" He slammed one fist against the wall beside the window.

Clay turned and saw headlights had bloomed in the dark. A mist had begun to rise from the blanket of comatose bodies on the acres of mall, and the bus's headlights seemed to be shining through smoke. They flicked bright, then dim, then bright again, and Clay could see Jordan with brilliant clarity, sitting in the driver's seat of the minibus and trying to figure out which controls did which.

Now the headlights began to creep forward. High beams.

"Yeah, honey," Denise breathed. "Do it, my sweetheart." Standing on her crate, she grabbed Dan's hand on one side and Clay's on the other. "You're beautiful, just keep on coming."

The headlights jogged away from them, now illuminating the trees far to the left of the open space with its carpet of phoners.

"What's he doing?" Tom almost moaned.

"That's where the side of the funhouse takes a jog," Clay said. "It's all right." He hesitated. "I think it's all right." If his foot doesn't slip. If he doesn'tmix up the brake and the accelerator, run the bus into the side of the damn funhouse, and stick it there.

They waited, and the headlights swung back, spearing the side of Kashwakamak Hall on the dead level. And in the glare of the high beams, Clay saw why it had taken Jordan so long. Not all of the phoners were down. Dozens of them—the ones with bad programming, he assumed—were up and moving. They walked aimlessly toward any and every point of the compass, black silhouettes moving outward in expanding ripples, struggling to make their way over the bodies of the sleepers, stumbling, falling, getting up and walking on again while Schubert's "Ave" filled the night. One of them, a young man with a long red gash running across the middle of his forehead like a worry line, reached the Hall and felt his way along the side like a blind man.

"That's far enough, Jordan," Clay murmured as the headlights neared the speaker-standards on the far side of the open area. "Park it and get your ass back here."

It seemed that Jordan heard him. The headlights came to a stop. For a moment the only things moving out there were the restless shapes of the wakeful phoners and the mist rising from the warm bodies of the others. Then they heard the bus's engine rev—even over the music they heard it—and the headlights leaped forward. "No, Jordan, what are you doing?" Tom screamed.

Denise recoiled and would have tumbled off her crate if Clay hadn't caught her around the waist.

The bus jounced into the sleeping flock. Onto the sleeping flock. The headlights began to pogo up and down, now pointing at them, now lifting briefly upward, now coming back to dead level again. The bus slewed left, came back on course, then slewed right. For a moment one of the night-walkers was illuminated in its four glaring high beams as clearly as something cut from black construction paper. Clay saw the phoner's arms go up, as if it wanted to signal a successful field goal, and then it was borne under the bus's charging grille.

Jordan drove the bus into the middle of them and there it stopped, headlights glaring, grille dripping. By raising a hand to block the worst of the shine, Clay was able to see a small dark form—distinguishable from the rest by its agility and purpose—emerge from the side door of the bus and begin making its way toward Kashwakamak Hall. Then Jordan fell and Clay thought he was gone. A moment later Dan rapped, "There he is, there!" and Clay picked him up again, ten yards closer and considerably to the left of where he'd lost sight of the kid. Jordan must have crawled for some distance over the sleeping bodies before trying his feet again.

When Jordan came back into the hazy cone of radiance thrown by the bus's headlights, tacked to the end of a forty-foot shadow, they could see him clearly for the first time. Not his face, because of the backlighting, but the crazy-graceful way he was running over the bodies of the phoners. The ones who were down were still dead to the world. The ones who were awake but not close to Jordan paid no attention. Several of those who were close, however, made grabs at him. Jordan dodged two of these, but the third, a woman, got him by the tangled mop of his hair.

"Let him alone!" Clay roared. He couldn't see her, but he was insanely positive it was the woman who had once been his wife. "Let him go!"

She didn't, but Jordan grabbed her wrist, twisted it, went to one knee, and scrambled past. The woman made another grab, just missed the back of his shirt, and then tottered off in her own direction.

Many of the infected phoners, Clay saw, were gathering around the bus. The headlights seemed to be drawing them.

Clay leaped off the snack machine (this time it was Dan Hartwick who saved Denise from a tumble) and grabbed the crowbar. He leaped back up and smashed out the window he'd been looking through.

"Jordan!" he bawled. 'Around back! Get around back!"

Jordan looked up at the sound of Clay's voice and tripped over something—a leg, an arm, maybe a neck. As he was getting back up, a hand came out of the breathing darkness and clutched the kid's throat.

"Please God, no," Tom whispered.

Jordan lunged forward like a fullback trying for a first down, pistoning with his legs, and broke the hand's grip. He stumbled onward. Clay could see his staring eyes and the way his chest was heaving. As he neared the hall, Clay could hear Jordan's sobbing gasps for air.

Never make it, he thought. Never. And he's so close now, so close.

But Jordan did make it. The two phoners currently staggering along the side of the building showed no interest in him at all as he lunged past them and around to the far side. The four of them were off the snack machine at once and racing across the hall like a relay team, Denise and her belly in the lead.

"Jordan!" she cried, bouncing up and down on her toe-tips. "Jordan, Jordy, are you there? For chrissake, kid, tell us you're there!"

"I'm"—he tore a great gasp of breath out of the air—"here." Another whooping gasp. Clay was distantly aware of Tom laughing and pounding him on the back. "Never knew"—Whooo-oooop! —"running over people was so . . . hard."

"What did you think you were doing?" Clay shouted. It was killing him not to be able to grab the kid, first to embrace him, then shake him, then kiss him all over his stupid brave face. Killing him to not even be able to see him. "I said get close to them, not drive right the fuck into them!"

"I did it"—Whooo-ooop! —"for the Head." There was defiance as well as zbreathlessness in Jordan's voice now. "They killed the Head. Them and their Raggedy Man. Them and their stupid President of Harvard. I wanted to make them pay. I want him to pay."

"What took you so long to get going?" Denise asked. "We waited and waited!"

"There are dozens of them up and around," Jordan said. "Maybe hundreds. Whatever's wrong with them . . . or right. . .or just changing . . . it's spreading really fast now. They're walking every which way, like totally lost. I had to keep changing course. I ended up coming to the bus from halfway down the midway. Then—" He laughed breathlessly. "Itwouldn't start! Do you believe it? I turned the key and turned the key and got nothing but a click every time. I just about freaked, but I wouldn't let myself. Because I knew the Head would be disappointed if I did that."

"Ah, Jordy . . ." Tom breathed.

"You know what it was? I had to buckle the stupid seatbelt. You don't need em for the passenger seats, but the bus won't start unless the driver's wearing his. Anyway, I'm sorry it took me so long, but here I am."

"And may we assume that the luggage compartment wasn't empty?" Dan asked.

"You can assume the shit out of that. It's full of what look like red bricks. Stacks and stacks of them." Jordan was getting his breath back now. "They're under a blanket. There's a cell phone lying on top of them. Ray attached it to a couple of those bricks with an elastic strap, like a bungee cord. The phone's on, and it's the kind with a port, like for a fax or so you can download data to a computer. The power-cord runs down into the bricks. I didn't see it, but I bet the detonator's in the middle." He grabbed another deep breath. "And there were bars on the phone. Three bars."

Clay nodded. He'd been right. Kashwakamak was supposed to be a cell dead zone once you got beyond the feeder-road leading to the Northern Counties Expo. The phoners had plucked that knowledge from the heads of certain normies and had used it. The Kashwak=No-Fo graffiti had spread like smallpox. But had any of the phoners actually tried making a cell-call from the Expo fairgrounds? Of course not. Why would they? When you were telepathic, phones were obsolete. And when you were one member of the flock—one part of the whole—they became doubly obsolete, if such a thing was possible.

But cell phones did work within this one small area, and why? Because the carnies were setting up, that was why—carnies working for an outfit called the New England Amusement Corporation. And in the twenty-first century, carnies—like rock-concert roadies, touring stage productions, and movie crews on location—depended on cell phones, especially in isolated places where landlines were in short supply. Were there no cell phone towers to relay signals onward and upward? Fine, they would pirate the necessary software and install one of their own. Illegal? Of course, but judging by the three bars Jordan was reporting, it had been workable, and because it was battery-powered, it was still workable. They had installed it on the Expo's highest point.

They had installed it on the tip of the Parachute Drop.

Dan recrossed the hall, got up on the snack machine, and looked out. "They're three deep around the bus," he reported. "Four deep in front of the headlights. It's like they think there's some big pop star hiding inside. The ones they're standing on must be getting crushed." He turned to Clay and nodded at the dirty Motorola cell phone Clay was now holding. "If you're going to try this, I suggest you try it now, before one of them decides to get in and try driving the damn bus away."

"I should have turned it off, but I thought the headlights would go out if I did," Jordan said. "And I wanted them to see by."

"It's okay, Jordan," Clay said. "No harm done. I'm going to—" But there was nothing in the pocket from which he'd taken the cell phone. The scrap of paper with the telephone number on it was gone.

Clay and tom were looking for it on the floor—frantically looking for it on the floor—and Dan was dolefully reporting from atop the snack machine that the first phoner had just stumbled on board the bus when Denise bellowed, "Stop! SHUT UP!"

They all stopped what they were doing and looked at her. Clay's heart was fluttering high in his throat. He couldn't believe his own carelessness. Ray died for that, you stupid shit! part of him kept shouting at the rest of him. He died for it and you lost it!

Denise closed her eyes and put her hands together over her bowed head. Then, very rapidly, she chanted, "Tony, Tony, come around, something's lost that can't be found."

"What the fuck is that?' Dan asked. He sounded astonished.

"A prayer to St. Anthony," she said calmly. "I learned it in parochial school. It always works."

"Give me a break," Tom almost groaned.

She ignored him, focusing all her attention on Clay. "It's not on the floor, is it?"

"I don't think so, no."

"Another two just got on the bus," Dan reported. "And the turn signals are going. So one of them must be sitting at the—"

"Will you please shut up, Dan," Denise said. She was still looking at Clay. Still calm. "And if you lost it on the bus, or outside somewhere, it's lost for good, right?"

"Yes," he said heavily.

"So we know it's not in either of those places."

"Why do we know that?"

"Because God wouldn't let it be."

"I think . . . my head's going to explode," Tom said in a strangely calm voice.

Again she ignored him. "So which pocket haven't you checked?"

"I checked every —" Clay began, then stopped. Without taking his eyes from Denise's, he investigated the small watch-pocket sewn into the larger right front pocket of his jeans. And the slip of paper was there. He didn't remember putting it there, but it was there. He pulled it out. Scrawled on it in the dead man's laborious printing was the number: 207-919-9811.

"Thank St. Anthony for me," he said.

"If this works," she said, "I'll ask St. Anthony to thank God."

"Deni?" Tom said.

She turned to him.

"Thank Him for me, too," he said.

The four of them sat together against the double doors through which they had entered, counting on the steel cores to protect them. Jordan was crouched down in back of the building, below the broken window through which he had escaped.

"What are we going to do if the explosion doesn't blow any holes in the side of this place?" Tom asked.

"We'll think of something," Clay said.

"And if Ray's bomb doesn't go off?" Dan asked.

"Drop back twenty yards and punt," Denise said. "Go on, Clay. Don't wait for the theme-music."

He opened the cell phone, looked at the dark LED readout, and realized he should have checked for bars on this one before sending Jordan out. He hadn't thought of it. None of them had thought of it. Stupid. Almost as stupid as forgetting he'd put the scrap of paper with the number written on it in his watch pocket. He pushed the power button now. The phone beeped. For a moment there was nothing, and then three bars appeared, bright and clear. He punched in the number, then settled his thumb lightly on the button marked call.

"Jordan, you ready back there?"

"Yes!"

"What about you guys?" Clay asked.

"Just do it before I have a heart attack," Tom said.

An image rose in Clay's mind, nightmarish in its clarity: Johnny-Gee lying almost directly beneath the place where the explosives-laden bus had come to rest. Lying on his back with his eyes open and his hands clasped on the chest of his Red Sox T-shirt, listening to the music while his mind rebuilt itself in some strange new way.

He swept it aside.

"Tony, Tony, come around," he said for no reason whatever, and then pushed the button that called the cell phone in the back of the minibus.

There was time for him to count Mississippi ONE and Mississippi TWO before the entire world outside Kashwakamak Hall seemed to blow up, the roar swallowing Tomaso Albinoni's "Adagio" in a hungry blast. All the small windows lining the flock side of the building blew in. Brilliant crimson light shone through the holes, then the entire south end of the building tore away in a hail of boards, glass, and swirling hay. The doors they were leaning against seemed to bend backward. Denise wrapped protective arms around her belly. From outside a terrible hurt screaming began. For a moment this sound ripped through Clay's head like the blade of a buzzsaw. Then it was gone. The screaming in his ears went on. It was the sound of people roasting in hell.

Something landed on the roof. It was heavy enough to make the whole building shudder. Clay pulled Denise to her feet. She looked at him wildly, as if no longer sure who he was. "Come on!" He was shouting but could hardly hear his own voice. It seemed to be seeping through wads of cotton. "Come on, let's get out!"

Tom was up. Dan made it halfway, fell back, tried again, and managed it the second time. He grabbed Tom's hand. Tom grabbed Denise's. Linked three-across, they shuffled to the gaping hole at the end of the Hall. There they found Jordan standing next to a litter of burning hay and staring out at what a single phone call had done.

The giant's foot that had seemed to stamp the roof of kashwakamak Hall had been a large chunk of schoolbus. The shingles were burning. Directly in front of them, beyond the little pile of blazing hay, were a pair of upside-down seats, also burning. Their steel frames had been shredded into spaghetti. Clothes floated out of the sky like big snow: shirts, hats, pants, shorts, an athletic supporter, a blazing bra. Clay saw that the hay insulation piled along the bottom of the hall was going to be a moat of fire before very long; they were getting out just in time.

Patches of fire dotted the mall area where concerts, outdoor dances, and various competitions had been held, but the chunks of the exploding bus had swept farther than that. Clay saw flames burning high in trees that had to be at least three hundred yards away. Dead south of their position, the funhouse had started to burn and he could see something—he thought it was probably a human torso—blazing halfway up the strutwork of the Parachute Drop.

The flock itself had become a raw meatloaf of dead and dying phoners. Their telepathy had broken down (although little currents of that strange psychic force occasionally tugged at him, making his hair rise and his flesh crawl), but the survivors could still scream, and they filled the night with their cries. Clay would have gone ahead even if he'd been able to imagine how bad it was going to be—even in the first few seconds he made no effort to mislead himself on that score—but this was beyond imagining.

The firelight was just enough to show them more than they wanted to see. The mutilations and decapitations were bad—the pools of blood, the littered limbs—but the scattered clothes and shoes with nobody inside them were somehow worse, as if the explosion had been fierce enough to actually vaporize part of the flock. A man walked toward them with his hands to his throat in an effort to stem the flow of blood pouring over and between his fingers—it looked orange in the growing glow of the Hall's burning roof—while his intestines swung back and forth at the level of his crotch. More wet loops came sliding out as he walked past them, his eyes wide and unseeing.

Jordan was saying something. Clay couldn't hear it over the screams, the wails, and the growing crackle of fire from behind him, so he leaned closer.

"We had to do it, it was all we could do," Jordan said. He looked at a headless woman, a legless man, at something so torn open it had become a flesh canoe filled with blood. Beyond it, two more bus seats lay on a pair of burning women who had died in each other's arms. "We had to do it, it was all we could do. We had to do it, it was all we could do."

"That's right, honey, put your face against me and walk like that," Clay said, and Jordan immediately buried his face in Clay's side. Walking that way was uncomfortable, but it could be done.

They skirted the edge of the flock's campground, moving toward the back of what would have been a completed midway and amusement arcade if the Pulse hadn't intervened. As they went, Kashwakamak Hall burned brighter, casting more light on the mall. Dark shapes—many naked or almost naked, the clothes blown right off them—staggered and shambled. Clay had no idea how many. The few that passed close by their little group showed no interest in them; they either continued on toward the midway area or plunged into the woods west of the Expo grounds, where Clay was quite sure they would die of exposure unless they could reestablish some sort of flock consciousness. He didn't think they could. Partly because of the virus, but mostly because of Jordan's decision to drive the bus right into the middle of them and achieve a maximum kill-zone, as they had with the propane trucks.

If they'd ever known snuffing one old man could lead to this . . . Clay thought, and then he thought, But how could they?

They reached the dirt lot where the carnies had parked their trucks and campers. Here the ground was thick with snaking electrical cables, and the spaces between the campers were filled with the accessories of families who lived on the road: barbecues, gas grills, lawn chairs, a hammock, a little laundry whirligig with clothes that had probably been hanging there for almost two weeks.

"Let's find something with the keys in it and get the hell out of here," Dan said. "They cleared the feeder road, and if we're careful I bet we can go north on 160 as far as we want." He pointed. "Up there it's just about all no-fo."

Clay had spotted a panel truck with lem's painting and plumbing on the back. He tried the doors and they opened. The inside was filled with milk-crates, most crammed with various plumbing supplies, but in one he found what he wanted: paint in spray-cans. He took four of these after checking to make sure they were full or almost full.

"What are those for?" Tom asked.

"Tell you later," Clay said.

"Let's get out of here, please, " Denise said. "I can't stand this. My pants are soaked with blood." She began to cry.

They came onto the midway between the Krazy Kups and a half-constructed kiddie ride called Charlie the Choo-Choo. "Look," Tom said, pointing.

"Oh . . . my . . . God," Dan said softly.

Lying draped across the peak of the train ride's ticket booth was the remains of a charred and smoking red sweatshirt—the kind sometimes called a hoodie. A large splotch of blood matted the front around a hole probably made by a chunk of flying schoolbus. Before the blood took over, covering the rest, Clay could make out three letters, the Raggedy Man's last laugh: HAR.

"There's nobody in the fucking thing, and judging by the size of the hole, he had open-heart surgery without benefit of anesthetic," Denise said, "so when you're tired of looking—"

"There's another little parking lot down at the south end of the midway," Tom said. "Nice-looking cars in that one. Boss-type cars. We might get lucky."

They did, but not with a nice-looking car. A small van with tyco water purification experts was parked behind a number of the nice-looking cars, effectively blocking them in. The Tyco man had considerately left his keys in the ignition, probably for that very reason, and Clay drove them away from the fire, the carnage, and the screams, rolling with slow care down the feeder road to the junction marked by the billboard showing the sort of happy family that no longer existed (if it ever had). There Clay stopped and put the gearshift lever in park.

"One of you guys has to take over now," he said.

"Why, Clay?" Jordan asked, but Clay knew from the boy's voice that Jordan already knew.

"Because this is where I get out," he said.

"No!"

"Yes. I'm going to look for my boy."

Tom said, "He's almost certainly dead back there. I'm not meaning to be a hardass, only realistic."

"I know that, Tom. I also know there's a chance he's not, and so do you. Jordan said they were walking every which way, like they were totally lost."

Denise said, "Clay . . . honey . . . even if he's alive, he could be wandering around in the woods with half his head blown off. I hate to say that, but you know it's true."

Clay nodded. "I also know he could have gotten out earlier, while we were locked up, and started down the road to Gurleyville. A couple of others made it that far; I saw them. And I saw others on the way. So did you."

"No arguing with the artistic mind, is there?" Tom asked sadly.

"No," Clay said, "but I wonder if you and Jordan would step outside with me for a minute."

Tom sighed. "Why not?" he said.

Several phoners, looking lost and bewildered, walked past them as they stood by the side of the little water purification van. Clay, Tom, and Jordan paid no attention to them, and the phoners returned the favor. To the northwest the horizon was a brightening red-orange as Kashwakamak Hall shared its fire with the forest behind it.

"No big goodbyes this time," Clay said, affecting not to see the tears in Jordan's eyes. "I'm expecting to see you again. Here, Tom. Take this." He held out the cell phone he'd used to set off the blast. Tom took it. "Go north from here. Keep checking that thing for bars. If you come to road-reefs, abandon what you're driving, walk until the road's clear, then take another car or truck and drive again. You'll probably get cell transmission bars around the Rangeley area—that was boating in the summer, hunting in the fall, skiing in the winter—but beyond there you should be in the clear, and the days should be safe."

"I bet they're safe now," Jordan said, wiping his eyes.

Clay nodded. "You might be right. Anyway, use your judgment. When you get a hundred or so miles north of Rangeley, find a cabin or a lodge or something, fill it with supplies, and lay up for the winter. You know what the winter's going to do to these things, don't you?"

"If the flock mind falls apart and they don't migrate, almost all of them will die," Tom said. "Those north of the Mason-Dixon Line, at least."

"I think so, yeah. I put those cans of spray-paint in the center console. Every twenty miles or so, spray T-J-D on the road, nice and big. Got it?"

"T-J-D," Jordan said. "For Tom, Jordan, Dan, and Denise."

"Right. Make sure you spray it extra big, with an arrow, if you change roads. If you take a dirt road, spray it on trees, always on the right-hand side of the road. That's where I'll be looking. Have you got that?"

"Always on the right," Tom said. "Come with us, Clay. Please."

"No. Don't make this harder for me than it already is. Every time you have to abandon a vehicle, leave it in the middle of the road and spray it T-J-D. Okay?"

"Okay," Jordan said. "You better find us."

"I will. This is going to be a dangerous world for a while, but not quite as dangerous as it's been. Jordan, I need to ask you something."

"All right."

"If I find Johnny and the worst that's happened to him is a trip through their conversion-point, what should I do?"

Jordan gaped. "How would I know? Jesus, Clay! I mean . . .Jesus!"

"You knew they were rebooting," Clay said.

"I made aguess!"

Clay knew it had been a lot more than that. A lot better than that. He also knew Jordan was exhausted and terrified. He dropped to one knee in front of the boy and took his hand. "Don't be afraid. It can't be any worse for him than it already is. God knows it can't."

"Clay, I . . ." Jordan looked at Tom. "People aren't like computers, Tom! Tell him!"

"But computers are like people, aren't they?" Tom said. "Because we build what we know. You knew about the reboot and you knew about the worm. So tell him what you think. He probably won't find the kid, anyway. If he does . . ." Tom shrugged. "Like he said. How much worse can it be?"

Jordan thought about this, biting his lip. He looked terribly tired, and there was blood on his shirt.

"Are you guys coming?" Dan called.

"Give us another minute," Tom said. And then, in a softer tone: "Jordan?"

Jordan was quiet a moment longer. Then he looked at Clay and said, "You'd need another cell phone. And you'd need to take him to a place where there's coverage . . ."