Cell

'Yes,' the Head agreed. He spoke almost dreamily. 'As in le moyen вge. Translation, Jordan?'

'The middle age, sir.'

'Good.' He patted Jordan's shoulder.

'Even big flocks would be easy to miss,' Clay said. 'They wouldn't have to be hiding.'

'No, they're not hiding,' Headmaster Ardai agreed, steepling his fingers. 'Not yet, at any rate. They flock . . . they forage . . . and their group mind may break down a bit while they forage . . . but perhaps less. Every day perhaps less.'

'Manchester burned to the ground,' Jordan said suddenly. 'We could see the fire from here, couldn't we, sir?'

'Yes,' the Head agreed. 'It's been very sad and frightening.'

'Is it true that people trying to cross into Massachusetts are being shot at the border?' Jordan asked. 'That's what people are saying. People are saying you have to go to Vermont, only that way is safe.'

'It's a crock,' Clay said. 'We heard the same thing about the New Hampshire border.'

Jordan goggled at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. The sound was clear and beautiful in the still air. Then, in the distance, a gun went off. And closer, someone shouted in either rage or horror.

Jordan stopped laughing.

'Tell us about that weird state they were in last night,' Alice said quietly. 'And the music. Do all the other flocks listen to music at night?'

The Head looked at Jordan.

'Yes,' the boy said. 'It's all soft stuff, no rock, no country—'

'I should guess nothing classical, either,' the Head put in. 'Not of a challenging nature, at any rate.'

'It's their lullabies,' Jordan said. 'That's what the Head and me think, isn't it, sir?'

'The Head and I , Jordan.'

'Head and I, yes, sir.'

'But it is indeed what we think,' the Head agreed. 'Although I suspect there may be more to it than that. Yes, quite a bit more.'

Clay was flummoxed. He hardly knew how to go on. He looked at his friends and saw on their faces what he was feeling—not just puzzlement, but a dreadful reluctance to be enlightened.

Leaning forward, Headmaster Ardai said, 'May I be frank? I must be frank; it is the habit of a lifetime. I want you to help us do a terrible thing here. The time to do it is short, I think, and while one such act alone may come to nothing, one never knows, does one? One never knows what sort of communication may flow between these . . . flocks. In any case, I will not stand idly by while these . . . things . . . steal away not only my school but the very daylight itself. I might have attempted it already, but I'm old and Jordan is very young. Too young. Whatever they are now, they were human not long ago. I won't let him be a part of this.'

'I can do my share, sir!' Jordan said. He spoke as stoutly, Clay thought, as any Muslim teenager who ever strapped on a suicide belt stuffed with explosives.

'I salute your courage, Jordan,' the Head told him, 'but I think not.' He looked at the boy kindly, but when he returned his gaze to the others, his eyes had hardened considerably. 'You have weapons—good ones—and I have nothing but an old single-shot .22 rifle that may not even work anymore, although the barrel's open—I've looked. Even if it does work, the cartridges I have for it may not fire. But we have a gasoline pump at our little motor-pool, and gasoline might serve to end their lives.'

He must have seen the horror in their faces, because he nodded. To Clay he no longer looked like kindly old Mr. Chips; he looked like a Puritan elder in an oil-painting. One who could have sentenced a man to the stocks without batting an eye. Or a woman to be burned at the stake as a witch.

He nodded at Clay in particular. Clay was sure of it. 'I know what I'm saying. I know how it sounds. But it wouldn't be murder, not really; it would be extermination. And I have no power to make you do anything. But in any case . . . whether you help me burn them or not, you must pass on a message.'

'To who?' Alice asked faintly.

'To everyone you meet, Miss Maxwell.' He leaned over the remains of their meal, those hanging-judge eyes sharp and small and burning hot. 'You must tell what's happening to them —to the ones who heard the infernal message on their devil's intercoms. You must pass this on. Everyone who has had the daylight robbed away from them must hear, and before it's too late.' He passed a hand over his lower face, and Clay saw the fingers were shaking a little. It would be easy to dismiss that as a sign of the man's age, but he hadn't seen any tremors before. 'We're afraid it soon will be. Aren't we, Jordan?'

'Yes, sir.' Jordan certainly thought he knew something; he looked terrified.

'What? What's happening to them?' Clay asked. 'It's got something to do with the music and those wired- together boomboxes, doesn't it?'

The Head sagged, suddenly looking tired. 'They're not wired together,' he said. 'Don't you remember me telling you that both of your premises were wrong?'

'Yes, but I don't understand what you m—'

'There's one sound-system with a CD in it, about that you're certainly right. A single compilation disc, Jordan says, which is why the same songs play over and over.'

'Lucky us,' Tom muttered, but Clay barely heard him. He was trying to get the sense of what Ardai had just said—they're not wired together. How could that be? It couldn't.

'The sound-systems—the boomboxes, if you like—are placed all around the field,' the Head went on, 'and they're all on. At night you can see their little red power lamps—'

'Yes,' Alice said. 'I did notice some red lights, I just didn't think anything of it.'

'—but there's nothing in them—no compact discs or cassette tapes– and no wires linking them. They're just slaves that pick up the master-disc audio and rebroadcast it.'

'If their mouths are open, the music comes from them, too,' Jordan said. 'It's just little . . . not hardly a whisper . . . but you can hear it.'

'No,' Clay said. 'That's your imagination, kiddo. Gotta be.'

'I haven't heard that myself,' Ardai said, 'but of course my ears aren't what they were back when I was a Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps fan. 'Back in the day,' Jordan and his friends would say.'

'You're very old-school, sir,' Jordan said. He spoke with gentle solemnity and unmistakable affection.

'Yes, Jordan, I am,' the Head agreed. He clapped the boy on the shoulder, then turned his attention to the others. 'If Jordan says he's heard it … I believe him.'

'It's not possible,' Clay said. 'Not without a transmitter.'

'They are transmitting,' the Head replied. 'It is a skill they seem to have picked up since the Pulse.'

'Wait,' Tom said. He raised one hand like a traffic cop, lowered it, began to speak, raised it again. From his place of dubious shelter at Headmaster Ardai's side, Jordan watched him closely. At last Tom said, 'Are we talking telepathy here?'

'I should guess that's not exactly le mot juste for this particular phenomenon,' the Head answered, 'but why stick at technicalities? I would be willing to wager all the frozen hamburgers remaining in my cooler that the word has been used among you before today.'

'You'd win double burgers,' Clay said.

'Well yeah, but the flocking thing is different,' Tom said.

'Because?' The Head raised his tangled brows.

'Well, because . . .' Tom couldn't finish, and Clay knew why. It wasn't different. The flocking wasn't human behavior and they'd known it from the moment they'd observed George the mechanic following the woman in the filthy pants suit across Tom's front lawn to Salem Street. He'd been walking so closely behind her that he could have bitten her neck . . . but he hadn't. And why? Because for the phone-crazies, biting was done, flocking had begun.

At least, biting their own kind was done. Unless—