Cell

'Even if there are sane people and they let us in, which would hardly be a sane act, what are we going to do?' Tom said. 'Ask to use the phone?'

They discussed stopping somewhere and trying to liberate a vehicle (liberate was Tom's word), but in the end decided against that, too. If the state line was being defended by deputies or vigilantes, driving up to it in a Chevy Tahoe might not be the smoothest move.

So they walked, and of course there was nothing at the state line but a billboard (a small one, as befitted a two-lane blacktop road winding through farm country) reading YOU ARE NOW ENTERING NEW HAMPSHIRE and bienvenue! There was no sound but the drip of moisture in the woods on either side of them, and an occasional sigh of breeze. Maybe the rustle of an animal. They stopped briefly to read the sign and then walked on, leaving Massachusetts behind.

9

Any sense of being alone ended along with the dostie stream road, at a signpost reading NH ROUTE 38 and MANCHESTER 19 MI. There were still only a few travelers on 38, but when they switched to 128—a wide, wreck-littered road that headed almost due north—half an hour later, that trickle became part of a steady stream of refugees. They traveled mostly in little groups of three and four, and with what struck Clay as a rather shabby lack of interest in anyone other than themselves.

They encountered a woman of about forty and a man maybe twenty years older pushing shopping carts, each containing a child. The one in the man's cart was a boy, and too big for the conveyance, but he had found a way to curl up inside and fall asleep. While Clay and his party were passing this jackleg family, a wheel came off the man's shopping cart. It tipped sideways, spilling out the boy, who looked about seven. Tom caught him by the shoulder and broke the worst of the kid's fall, but he scraped one knee. And of course he was frightened. Tom picked him up, but the boy didn't know him and struggled to get away, crying harder than ever.

'That's okay, thanks, I've got him,' the man said. He took the child and sat down at the side of the road with him, where he made much of what he called the boo-boo, a term Clay didn't think he'd heard since he was seven. The man said, 'Gregory kiss it, make it all better.' He kissed the child's scrape, and the boy laid his head against the man's shoulder. He was already going to sleep again. Gregory smiled at Tom and Clay and nodded. He looked weary almost to death, a man who might have been a trim and Nautilus- toned sixty last week and now looked like a seventy-five-year-old Jew trying to get the hell out of Poland while there was still time.

'We'll be all right,' he said. 'You can go now.'

Clay opened his mouth to say, Why shouldn't we all go on together? Why don't we hook up? What do you think, Greg? It was the sort of thing the heroes of the science fiction novels he'd read as a teenager were always saying: Why don't we hook up?

'Yeah, go on, what are you waiting for?' the woman asked before he could say that or anything else. In her shopping cart a girl of about five still slept. The woman stood beside the cart protectively, as if she had grabbed some fabulous sale item and was afraid Clay or one of his friends might try to wrest it from her. 'You think we got something you want?'

'Natalie, stop,' Gregory said with tired patience.

But Natalie didn't, and Clay realized what was so dispiriting about this little scene. Not that he was getting his lunch—his midnight lunch—fed to him by a woman whose exhaustion and terror had led to paranoia; that was understandable and forgivable. What made his spirits sink to his shoetops was the way people just kept on walking, swinging their flashlights, and talking low among themselves in their own little groups, swapping the occasional suitcase from one hand to the other. Some yob on a pocket-rocket motorbike wove his way up the road between the wrecks and over the litter, and people made way for him, muttering resentfully. Clay thought it would have been the same if the little boy had fallen out of the shopping cart and broken his neck instead of just scraping his knee. He thought it would have been the same if that heavyset guy up there panting along the side of the road with an overloaded duffelbag dropped with a thunderclap coronary. No one would try to resuscitate him, and of course the days of 911 were done.

No one even bothered to yell You tell im, lady! or Hey dude, why don't you tell her to shut up? They just went on walking.

'—cause all we got is these kids, a responsibility we didn't ask for when we can hardly take care of ourselfs, he has a pacemaker, what are we supposed to do when the baddery runs out, I'd like to know? And now these kids! You want a kid?' She looked around wildly. 'Hey! Anyone want a kid?'

The little girl began to stir.

'Natalie, you're disturbing Portia,' Gregory said.

The woman named Natalie began to laugh. 'Well tough shitl It's a disturbing-ass world!' Around them, people continued doing the Refugee Walk. No one paid any attention and Clay thought, So this is how we act.This is how it goes when the bottom drops out. When there are no cameras turning,no buildings burning, no Anderson Cooper saying 'Now back to the CNN studios in Atlanta.' This is how it goes when Homeland Security's been canceled due to lack of sanity.

'Let me take the boy,' Clay said. 'I'll carry him until you find something better to put him in. That cart's shot.' He looked at Tom. Tom shrugged and nodded.

'Stay away from us,' Natalie said, and all at once there was a gun in her hand. It wasn't a big one, probably only a .22, but even a .22 would do the job if the bullet went in the right place.

Clay heard the sound of guns being drawn on either side of him and knew that Tom and Alice were now pointing the pistols they'd taken from the Nickerson home at the woman named Natalie. This was also how it went, it seemed.

'Put it away, Natalie,' he said. 'We're going to get moving now.'

'You're double-fuckin right you are,' she said, and brushed an errant lock of hair out of her eye with the heel of her free hand. She didn't seem to be aware that the young man and younger woman with Clay were holding guns on her. Now people passing by did look, but their only response was to move past the spot of confrontation and potential bloodshed a little faster.

'Come on, Clay,' Alice said quietly. She put her free hand on his wrist. 'Before someone gets shot.'

They started walking again. Alice walked with her hand on Clay's wrist, almost as if he were her boyfriend. Just a little midnight stroll, Clay thought, although he had no idea of what time it was and didn't care. His heart was beating hard. Tom walked with them, only until they were around the next curve he walked backward, with his gun still out. Clay supposed Tom wanted to be ready to shoot back if Natalie decided to use her little popgun after all. Because shooting back was also how it went, now that phone service had been interrupted until further notice.

10

In the hours before dawn, walking on route 102 east of manchester, they began to hear music, very faint.

'Christ,' Tom said, coming to a stop. 'That's 'Baby Elephant Walk.' '

'It's what?' Alice asked. She sounded amused.

'A big-band instrumental from the age of quarter gas. Les Brown and His Band of Renown, someone like that. My mother had the record.'

Two men pulled even with them and stopped for a blow. They were elderly, but both looked fit. Like a couple of recently retired postmen hiking theCotswolds, Clay thought. Wherever they are. One wore a pack—no pussy day-pack, either, but the waist-length kind on a frame—and the other had a rucksack hanging from his right shoulder. Hung over the left was what looked like a .30-.30.

Packsack wiped sweat from his seamed forehead with a forearm and said, 'Your mama might have had a version by Les Brown, son, but more likely it was Don Costa or Henry Mancini. Those were the popular ones. That one'—he inclined his head toward the ghostly strains—'that's Lawrence Welk, as I live and breathe.'

'Lawrence Welk,' Tom breathed, almost in awe.