Cell

'In a minute, hon. Don't come out here.'

'Don't worry. Don't you stay there and get grossed out.'

He was beyond grossed out, far beyond. There were two other objects lying on the bloody hardwood floor of the Nickerson kitchen. One was a rolling pin, which made sense. There was a pie tin, a mixing bowl, and a cheery yellow canister marked FLOUR sitting on the center island. The other object on the floor, this one lying not too distant from one of Heidi Nickerson's hands, was a cell phone only a teenager could love, blue with big orange daisy decals plastered all over it.

Clay could see what had happened, little as he wanted to. Beth Nickerson is making a pie. Does she know something awful has started to happen in greater Boston, in America, maybe in the world? Is it on TV? If so, the TV didn't send her a crazygram, Clay was sure of that.

Her daughter got one, though. Oh yes. And Heidi attacked her mother. Did Beth Nickerson try to reason with her daughter before driving her to the floor with a blow from the rolling pin, or did she just strike? Not in hate, but in pain and fear? In any case, it wasn't enough. And Beth wasn't wearing pants. She was wearing a jumper, and her legs were bare.

Clay pulled down the dead woman's skirt. He did it gently, covering the plain working-at-home underwear that she had soiled at the end.

Heidi, surely no older than fourteen and perhaps only twelve, must have been growling in that savage nonsense-language they seemed to learn all at once after they got a full dose of Sane-B-Gone from their phones, saying things like rast and eelah and kazzalah- CAN! The first blow from the rolling pin had knocked her down but not out, and the mad girl had begun to work on her mother's legs. Not little nips, either, but deep, searing bites, some that had driven all the way to the bone. Clay could see not only toothmarks but ghostly tattoos that must have been left by young Heidi's braces. And so—probably screaming, undoubtedly in agony, almost certainly not aware of what she was doing—Beth Nickerson had struck again, this time much harder. Clay could almost hear the muffled crack as the girl's neck broke. Beloved daughter, dead on the floor of the state-of-the-art kitchen, with braces on her teeth and her state-of-the-art cell phone by one outstretched hand.

And had her mother stopped to consider before popping the gun from its clip between the TV and the can- opener, where it had been waiting who knew how long for a burglar or rapist to appear in this clean, well-lighted kitchen? Clay thought not. Clay thought there would have been no pause, that she would have wanted to catch up with her daughter's fleeing soul while the explanation for what she had done was still fresh on her lips.

Clay went to the gun and picked it up. From a gadget-boy like Arnie Nickerson he would have expected an automatic—maybe even one with a laser sight—but this was a plain old Colt .45 revolver. He supposed it made sense. His wife might feel more comfortable with this kind of gun; no nonsense about making sure it was loaded if the gun was needed (or wasting time fishing a clip out from behind the spatulas or spices if it wasn't), then racking the slide to make sure there was a hot one in the chamber. No, with this old whore you just had to swing the barrel out, which Clay did with ease. He'd drawn a thousand variations of this very gun for Dark Wanderer. As he'd expected, only one of the six chambers was empty. He shook out one of the other loads, knowing just what he would find. Beth Nickerson's .45 was loaded with highly illegal cop-killer bullets. Fraggers. No wonder the top of her head was gone. The wonder was that she had any left at all. He looked down at the remains of the woman leaning in the corner and began to cry.

'Clay?' That was Tom, coming up the stairs from the basement. 'Man, Arnie had everything! There's an automatic weapon that would have gotten him a stretch in Walpole, I bet. . . . Clay? Are you all right?'

'I'm coming,' Clay said, wiping his eyes. He safetied the revolver and stuck it in his belt. Then he took off the knife and laid it on Beth Nickerson's counter, still in its homemade scabbard. It seemed they were trading up. 'Give me two more minutes.'

'Yo.'

Clay heard Tom clumping back to Arnie Nickerson's downstairs armory and smiled in spite of the tears still running down his face. Here was something he would have to remember: give a nice little gay guy from Malden a roomful of guns to play with, he starts to say yo just like Sylvester Stallone.

Clay started going through drawers. In the third one he tried, he found a heavy red box markedAMERICAN DEFENDER.45 caliberAMERICAN DEFENDER50 rounds. itwas under the dishtowels. he put the box in his pocket and went to join Tom and Alice. He wanted to get out of here now, and as quickly as possible. The trick would be getting them to go without trying to take Arnie Nickerson's entire gun collection along.

Halfway through the arch he paused and glanced back, holding the Coleman lantern high, looking at the bodies. Pulling down the skirt of the woman's jumper hadn't helped much. They were still just corpses, their wounds as naked as Noah when his son had come upon him in liquor. He could find something to cover them with, but once he started covering bodies, where would it end? Where? With Sharon? With his son?

'God forbid,' he whispered, but he doubted that God would simply because he asked. He lowered the lantern and followed the dancing glow of flashlights downstairs to Tom and Alice.

21

They both wore belts with large-caliber handguns in the holsters, and these were automatics. Tom had also slung an ammunition bandolier over his shoulder. Clay didn't know whether to laugh or start crying again. Part of him felt like doing both at the same time. Of course if he did that, they would think he was having hysterics. And of course they would be right.

The plasma TV mounted on the wall down here was the big—very big—brother of the one in the kitchen. Another TV, only slightly smaller, had a multibrand videogame hookup Clay would, once upon a time, have loved to examine. To fawn over, maybe. As if to balance it off, a vintage Seeberg jukebox stood in the corner next to the Nickersons' Ping-Pong table, all its fabulous colors dark and dead. And of course there were the gun cabinets, two of them, still locked but with their glass fronts broken.

'There were locking-bars, but he had a toolbox in his garage,' Tom said. 'Alice used a wrench to break them off.'

'They were cookies,' Alice said modestly. 'This was in the garage behind the toolbox, wrapped in a piece of blanket. Is it what I think it is?' She picked it up off the Ping-Pong table, holding it carefully by the wire stock, and carried it over to Clay.

'Holy shit,' he said. 'This is . . .' He squinted at the embossing above the trigger-guard. 'I think it's Russian.'

'I'm sure it is,' Tom said. 'Do you think it's a Kalashnikov?'

'You got me. Are there bullets that match it? In boxes that match the printing on the gun, I mean?'

'Halfa dozen. Heavy boxes. It's a machine gun, isn't it?'

'You might as well call it that, I guess.' Clay flicked a lever. 'I'm pretty sure one of these positions is single shot and the other is autofire.'

'How many rounds does it fire a minute?' Alice asked.

'I don't know,' Clay said, 'but I think it's rounds per second.'

'Whoa.' Her eyes got round. 'Can you figure out how to shoot it?'

'Alice—I'm pretty sure they teach sixteen-year-old farmboys how to shoot these. Yes, I can figure it out. It might take a box of ammo, but I can figure it out.' Please God don't let it blow up in my hands, he thought.

'Is something like that legal in Massachusetts?' she asked.

'It is now, Alice,' Tom said, not smiling. 'Is it time to go?'

'Yes,' she said, and then—perhaps still not entirely comfortable being the one to make the decisions—she looked at Clay.

'Yes,' he said. 'North.'

'Fine with me,' Alice said.

'Yeah,' Tom said. 'North. Let's do it.'