Cell

'If they can answer, if they can say their names, they're fine, and they're probably safe,' Alice said. 'Right?'

'Right,' Clay said.

'Yeah,' Tom agreed, a little absently. He was looking at the street where there were no people and no bobbing flashlight beams, near or far.

Someplace in the distance, gunshots popped. They sounded like fireworks. The air stank of burning and char and had all day. Clay thought they were smelling it more strongly now because it was wet. He wondered how long before the smell of decaying flesh turned the fug hanging over greater Boston into a reek. He supposed it depended on how warm the days ahead turned out to be.

'If we meet normal people and they ask us what we're doing or where we're going, remember the story,' she said.

'We're looking for survivors,' Tom said.

'That's right. Because they're our friends and neighbors. Any people we meet will just be passing through. They'll want to keep moving. Later on we'll probably want to hook up with other normal people, because there's safety in numbers, but right now—'

'Right now we'd like to get to those guns,' Clay said. 'If there are any guns to get. Come on, Alice, let's do this.'

She looked worriedly at him. 'What's wrong? What am I missing? You can tell me, I know I'm just a kid.'

Patiently—as patiently as he could with nerves that felt like overtuned guitar-strings—Clay said, 'There's nothing wrong with it, honey. I just want to get rolling. I don't think we're going to see anyone, anyway. I think it's too soon.'

'I hope you're right,' she said. 'My hair's a mess and I've chipped a nail.'

They looked at her silently for a moment, then laughed. After that it was better among them, and stayed better until the end.

20

' No,' Alice said. She made a gagging sound. 'No. No, I can't.' A louder gagging sound. Then: 'I'm going to throw up. I'm sorry.'

She plunged out of the Coleman's glare and into the gloom of the Nickersons' living room, which adjoined the kitchen via a wide arch. Clay heard a soft thump as she went to her knees on the carpet, then more gagging. A pause, a gasp, and then she was vomiting. He was almost relieved.

'Oh Christ,' Tom said. He pulled in a long, gasping breath and this time spoke in a wavering exhalation that was nearly a howl. 'Oh Chriiiiiist.'

'Tom,' Clay said. He saw how the little man was swaying on his feet and understood he was on the verge of fainting. Why not? These bloody leavings had been his neighbors.

'Tom!' He stepped between Tom and the two bodies on the kitchen floor, between Tom and most of the splattered blood, which looked as black as India ink in the Coleman's unforgiving white glare. He tapped the side of Tom's face with his free hand. 'Don't pass out!' And when he saw Tom steady on his feet, he dropped his voice a little. 'Go on in the other room and take care of Alice. I'll take care of the kitchen.'

'Why would you want to go in there?' Tom asked. 'That's Beth Nickerson with her brains . . . her b-brains all over . . .' He swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat. 'Most of her face is gone, but I recognize the blue jumper with the white snowflakes on it. And that's Heidi on the floor by the center island. Their daughter. I recognize her, even with . . .' He shook his head, as if to clear it, then repeated: 'Why would you want to?'

'I'm pretty sure I see what we came for,' Clay said. He was astounded by how calm he sounded.

'In the kitchen?”

Tom tried to look past him and Clay moved to block his view. 'Trust me. You see to Alice. If she can, you two start looking around for more guns. Shout if you hit paydirt. And be careful, Mr. Nickerson may be here, too. I mean, we could assume he was at work when all this went down, but as Alice's dad says—'

'Assume makes an ass out of you and me,' Tom said. He managed a sickly smile. 'Gotcha.' He started to turn away, then turned back. 'I don't care where we go, Clay, but I don't want to stay here any longer than we have to. I didn't exactly love Arnie and Beth Nickerson, but they were my neighbors. And they treated me a hell of a lot better than that idiot Scottoni from around the block.' 'Understood.'

Tom snapped on his flashlight and went into the Nickerson living room. Clay heard him murmuring to Alice, comforting her.

Steeling himself, Clay walked into the kitchen with the Coleman lantern held up, stepping around the puddles of blood on the hardwood floor. It had dried now, but he still didn't want to put his shoes in any more of it than he had to.

The girl lying on her back by the center island had been tall, but both her pigtails and the angular lines of her body suggested a child two or three years younger than Alice. Her head was cocked at a strenuous angle, almost a parody of interrogation, and her dead eyes bulged. Her hair had been broom straw-blond, but all of it on the left side of her head—the side that had taken the blow which had killed her—was now the same dark maroon as the stains on the floor.

Her mother reclined below the counter to the right of the stove, where the handsome cherrywood cabinets came together to form a corner. Her hands were ghost-white with flour and her bloody, bitten legs were indecorously splayed. Once, before starting work on a limited-run comic called Battle Hell, Clay had accessed a selection of fatal-gunshot photos on the Web, thinking there might be something he could use. There was not. Gunshot wounds spoke a terrible blank language of their own, and here it was again. Beth Nickerson was mostly spray and gristle from her left eye on up. Her right eye had drifted into the upper orbit of its socket, as if she had died trying to look into her own head. Her back hair and a good deal of her brain-matter was caked on the cherrywood cabinet against which she had leaned in her brief moments of dying. A few flies were buzzing around her.

Clay began to gag. He turned his head and covered his mouth. He told himself he had to control himself. In the other room Alice had stopped vomiting—in fact he could hear her and Tom talking together as they moved deeper into the house—and he didn't want to get her going again.

Think of them as dummies, props in a movie, he told himself, but he knew he could never do that.

When he looked back, he looked at the other things on the floor instead. That helped. The gun he had already seen. The kitchen was spacious and the gun was all the way on the other side, lying between the fridge and one of the cabinets with the barrel sticking out. His first impulse on seeing the dead woman and the dead girl had been to avert his eyes; they'd happened on the gun-barrel purely by accident.

But maybe I would have known there had to be a gun.

He even saw where it had been: a wall-mounted clip between the built-in TV and the industrial-size can- opener. They were gadget-nuts as well as gun-nuts, Tom had said, and a wall-mounted pistol in your kitchen just waiting to leap into your hand . . . why, if that wasn't the best of both worlds, what was?

'Clay?' That was Alice. Coming from some distance.

'What?'

There followed the sound of feet quickly ascending a set of stairs, then Alice called from the living room. 'Tom said you wanted to know if we hit paydirt. We just did. There must be a dozen guns downstairs in the den. Rifles and pistols both. They're in a cabinet with an alarm-company sticker on it, so we'll probably get arrested . . . that's a joke. Are you coming?'