Cell

GAITEN ACADEMY

1

When rainy daylight arose the next morning, clay, alice, and tom were camped in the barn adjacent to an abandoned horse-farm in North Reading. They watched from the door as the first groups of crazyfolk began to appear, flocking southwest on Route 62 in the direction of Wilmington. Their clothes looked uniformly soaked and shabby. Some were without shoes. By noon they were gone. Around four, as the sun broke through the clouds in long, spoking rays, they began flocking back in the direction from which they had come. Many were munching as they walked. Some were helping those who were having a hard time walking on their own. If there were acts of murder today, Clay, Tom, and Alice did not see any.

Perhaps half a dozen of the crazies were lugging large objects that looked familiar to Clay; Alice had found one in the closet of Tom's guest bedroom. The three of them had stood around it, afraid to turn it on.

'Clay?' Alice asked. 'Why are some of them carrying boomboxes?'

'I don't know,' he said.

'I don't like it,' Tom said. 'I don't like the flocking behavior, I don't like them helping each other, and I like seeing them with those big portable sound-systems least of all.'

'There's only a few with—' Clay began.

'Check her out, right there,' Tom interrupted, pointing to a middle-aged woman who was staggering up Highway 62 with a radio/CD player the size of a living room hassock cradled in her arms. She held it against her breasts as though it were a sleeping toddler. Its power-cord had come out of the little storage compartment in back and dragged beside her on the road. 'And you don't see any of them carrying lamps or toasters, do you? What if they're programmed to set up battery-powered radios, turn them on, and start broadcasting that tone, pulse, subliminal message, whatever-it-is? What if they want to get the ones they missed the first time?'

They. The ever-popular paranoid they. Alice had produced her little sneaker from somewhere and was squeezing it in her hand, but when she spoke, her voice was calm enough. 'I don't think that's it,' she said.

'Why not?' Tom asked.

She shook her head. 'I can't say. Just that it doesn't feel right.'

'Woman's intuition?' He was smiling, but he wasn't sneering.

'Maybe,' she said, 'but I think one thing's obvious.'

'What's that, Alice?' Clay asked. He had an idea what she was going to say, and he was right.

'They're getting smarter. Not on their own, but because they're thinking together. Probably that sounds crazy, but I think it's more likely than them collecting a big pile of battery-powered FM suitcases to blast us all into loony-land.'

'Telepathic group-think,' Tom said. He mulled it over. Alice watched him do it. Clay, who had already decided she was right, looked out the barn door at the last of the day. He was thinking they needed to stop somewhere and pick up a road-atlas.

Tom was nodding. 'Hey, why not? After all, that's probably what flocking is: telepathic group-think.'

'Do you really think so or are you just saying that to make me—'

'I really think so,' he said. He reached out and touched her hand, which was now squeezing the little sneaker rapidly. 'I really really do. Give that thing a rest, will you?'

She gave him a fleeting, distracted smile. Clay saw it and thought again how beautiful she was, how really beautiful. And how close to breaking. 'That hay looks soft and I'm tired. I think I'll take a nice long nap.'

'Get down with your bad self,' Clay said.

2

Clay dreamed that he and sharon and johnny-gee were having a picnic behind their little house in Kent Pond. Sharon had spread her Navajo blanket on the grass. They were having sandwiches and iced tea. Suddenly the day went dark. Sharon pointed over Clay's shoulder and said, 'Look! Telepaths!' But when he turned that way, he saw nothing but a flock of crows, one so huge it blotted out the sun. Then a tinkling began. It sounded like the Mister Softee truck playing the Sesame Street theme song, but he knew it was a ring-tone, and in his dream he was terrified. He turned back and Johnny-Gee was gone. When he asked Sharon where he was—already dreading, already knowing the answer—she said Johnny had gone under the blanket to answer his cell phone. There was a bump in the blanket. Clay dove under, into the overpowering smell of sweet hay, shouting for Johnny not to pick up, not to answer, reaching for him and finding instead only the cold curve of a glass ball: the paperweight he'd bought in Small Treasures, the one with the haze of dandelion fluff floating deep down inside like a pocket fog.

Then Tom was shaking him, telling him it was past nine by his watch, the moon was up, and if they were going to do some more walking they ought to get at it. Clay had never been so glad to wake up. On the whole, he preferred dreams of the Bingo Tent.

Alice was looking at him oddly.

'What?' Clay said, checking to make sure their automatic weapon was safetied—that was already becoming second nature to him.

'You were talking in your sleep. You were saying, 'Don't answer it, don't answer it.' '

'Nobody should have answered it,' Clay said. 'We all would have been better off.'

'Ah, but who can resist a ringing phone?' Tom asked. 'And there goes your ballgame.'

'Thus spake fuckin Zarathustra,' Clay said. Alice laughed until she cried.

3

With the moon racing in and out of the clouds—like an illustration in a boy's novel of pirates and buried treasure, Clay thought—they left the horse-farm behind and resumed their walk north. That night they began to meet others of their own kind again.

Because this is our time now, Clay thought, shifting the automatic rifle from one hand to the other. Fully loaded, it was damned heavy. The phone-crazies own the days; when the stars come out, that's us. We're like vampires. We've been banished to the night. Up close we know each other because we can still talk; at a little distance we can be pretty sure of each other by the packs we wear and the guns more and more of us carry; but at a distance, the one sure sign is the waving flashlight beam. Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor's guilt about all the other species we'd wiped out on our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we're the Flashlight People.

He looked over at Tom. 'Where do they go?' he asked. 'Where do the crazies go after sundown?'

Tom gave him a look. 'North Pole. All the elves died of mad reindeer disease and these guys are helping out until the new crop shows up.'

'Jesus,' Clay said, 'did someone get up on the wrong side of the haystack tonight?'

But Tom still wouldn't smile. 'I'm thinking about my cat,' he said. 'Wondering if he's all right. No doubt you think that's quite stupid.'

'No,' Clay said, although, having a son and a wife to worry about, he sort of did.

4

They got a road atlas in a card-and-book shop in the two-stoplight burg of Ballardvale. They were now traveling north, and very glad they had decided to stay in the more-or-less bucolic V between