Cell

neared the far end of the bridge (he could see Old Ironsides —at least he thought it was Old Ironsides —riding at anchor in the Harbor, still safe from the flames), he noticed an odd thing. Many of them were also looking at Alice. At first he had the paranoid idea that people must think he and Tom had abducted the girl and were spiriting her away for God knew what immoral purposes. Then he had to remind himself that these wraiths on the Mystic Bridge were in shock, even more uprooted from their normal lives than the Hurricane Katrina refugees had been—those unfortunates had at least had some warning—and were unlikely to be capable of considering such fine ideas. Most were too deep in their own heads for moralizing. Then the moon rose a little higher and came out a little more strongly, and he got it: she was the only adolescent in sight. Even Clay himself was young compared to most of their fellow refugees. The majority of people gawking at the torch that had been Boston or plodding slowly toward Maiden and Danvers were over forty, and many looked eligible for the Golden Ager discount at Denny's. He saw a few people with little kids, and a couple of babies in strollers, but that was pretty much it for the younger set.

A little farther on, he noticed something else. There were cell phones lying discarded in the roadway. Every few feet they passed another one, and none were whole. They had either been run over or stomped down to nothing but wire and splinters of plastic, like dangerous snakes that had been destroyed before they could bite again.

3

' What's your name, dear?' asked a plump woman who came angling across to their side of the highway. This was about five minutes after they had left the bridge. Tom said another fifteen would bring them to the Salem Street exit, and from there it was only four blocks to his house. He said his cat would be awfully glad to see him, and that had brought a wan smile to Alice's face. Clay thought wan was better than nothing.

Now Alice looked with reflexive mistrust at the plump woman who had detached herself from the mostly silent groups and little lines of men and women—hardly more than shadows, really, some with suitcases, some carrying shopping bags or wearing backpacks—that had crossed the Mystic and were walking north on Route One, away from the great fire to the south and all too aware of the new one taking hold in Revere, off to the northeast.

The plump woman looked back at her with sweet interest. Her graying hair was done in neat beauty-shop curls. She wore cat's-eye glasses and what Clay's mother would have called a 'car coat.' She carried a shopping bag in one hand and a book in the other. There seemed to be no harm in her. She certainly wasn't one of the phone-crazies—they hadn't seen a single one of those since leaving the Atlantic Avenue Inn with their sacks of grub—but Clay felt himself go on point, just the same. To be approached as if they were at a get-acquainted tea instead of fleeing a burning city didn't seem normal. But under these circumstances, just what was? He was probably losing it, but if so, Tom was, too. He was also watching the plump, motherly woman with go-away eyes.

'Alice?' Alice said at last, just when Clay had decided the girl wasn't going to reply at all. She sounded like a kid trying to answer what she fears may be a trick question in a class that's really too tough for her. 'My name is Alice Maxwell?'

'Alice,' the plump woman said, and her lips curved in a maternal smile as sweet as her look of interest. There was no reason that smile should have set Clay on edge more than he already was, but it did. 'That's a lovely name. It means 'blessed of God.' '

'Actually, ma'am, it means 'of the royalty' or 'regally born,' ' Tom said. 'Now could you excuse us? The girl has just lost her mother today, and—'

'We've all lost someone today, haven't we, Alice?' the plump woman said without looking at Tom. She kept pace with Alice, her beauty-shop curls bouncing with every step. Alice was eyeing her with a mixture of unease and fascination. Around them others paced and sometimes hurried and often plodded with their heads down, little more than wraiths in this unaccustomed darkness, and Clay still saw nobody young except for a few babies, a few toddlers, and Alice. No adolescents because most adolescents had cell phones, like Pixie Light back at the Mister Softee truck. Or like his own son, who had a red Nextel with a ring-tone from The Monster Club and a teacher workamommy who might be with him or might be just about anyw—

Stop it. Don't you let that rat out. That rat can do nothing but run, bite, and chase its own tail.

The plump woman, meanwhile, kept nodding. Her curls bounced along. 'Yes, we've all lost someone, because this is the time of the great Tribulation. It's all in here, in Revelation.' She held up the book she was carrying, and of course it was a Bible, and now Clay thought he was getting a better look at the sparkle in the eyes behind the plump woman cat's-eye glasses. That wasn't kindly interest; that was lunacy.

'Oh, that's it, everybody out of the pool,' Tom said. In his voice Clay heard a mixture of disgust (at himself, for letting the plump woman bore in and get close to begin with, quite likely) and dismay.

The plump woman took no notice, of course; she had fixed Alice with her stare, and who was there to pull her away? The police were otherwise occupied, if there were any left. Here there were only the shocked and shuffling refugees, and they could care less about one elderly crazy lady with a Bible and a beauty-shop perm.

'The Vial of Insanity has been poured into the brains of the wicked, and the City of Sin has been set afire by the cleansing torch of Yee-ho -vah!' the plump lady cried. She was wearing red lipstick. Her teeth were too even to be anything but old-fashioned dentures. 'Now you see the unrepentant flee, yea, verily, even as maggots flee the burst belly of—'

Alice put her hands over her ears. 'Make her stop!' she cried, and still the ghost-shapes of the city's recent residents filed past, only a few sparing a dull, incurious glance before looking once more into the darkness where somewhere ahead New Hampshire lay.

The plump woman was starting to work up a sweat, Bible raised, eyes blazing, beauty-shop curls nodding and swaying. 'Take your hands down, girl, and hear the Word of God before you let these men lead you away and fornicate with you in the open doorway of Hell itself! 'For I saw a star blaze in the sky, and it was called Wormwood, and those that followed it followed upon Lucifer, and those that followed upon Lucifer walked downward into the furnace of—' '

Clay hit her. He pulled the punch at the last second, but it was still a solid clip to the jaw, and he felt the impact travel all the way up to his shoulder. The plump woman's glasses rose off her pug nose and then settled back. Behind them, her eyes lost their glare and rolled up in their sockets. Her knees came unhinged and she buckled, her Bible tumbling from her clenched fist. Alice, still looking stunned and horrified, nevertheless dropped her hands from her ears fast enough to catch the Bible. And Tom McCourt caught the woman under her arms. The punch and the two subsequent catches were so neatly done they could have been choreographed.

Clay was suddenly closer to undone than at any time since things had started going wrong. Why this should have been worse than the throat-biting teenage girl or the knife-wielding businessman, worse than finding Mr. Ricardi hanging from a light fixture with a bag over his head, he didn't know, but it was. He had kicked the knife- wielding businessman, Tom had, too, but the knife-wielding businessman had been a different kind of crazy. The old lady with the beauty-shop curls had just been a. . .

'Jesus,' he said. 'She was just a nut, and I coldcocked her.' He was starting to shake.

'She was terrorizing a young girl who lost her mother today,' Tom said, and Clay realized it wasn't calmness he heard in the small man's voice but an extraordinary coldness. 'You did exactly the right thing. Besides, you can't keep an old iron horse like this down for long. She's coming around already. Help me get her over to the side of the road.'

4

They had reached the part of route one—sometimes called the miracle Mile, sometimes Sleaze Alley—where limited-access highway yielded to a jostle of liquor marts, cut-rate clothing stores, sporting- goods outlets, and eateries with names like Fuddruckers. Here the six lanes were littered, if not quite choked, with vehicles that had either been piled up or just abandoned when their operators panicked, tried their cell phones, and