Cell

Tom nodded.

'I came out the first night to observe. The flock was much smaller then, of course. I was drawn to them out of simple but overwhelming curiosity. Jordan wasn't with me. Switching to a nighttime existence has been rather hard for him, I'm afraid.'

'You risked your life, you know,' Clay said.

'I had little choice,' the Head replied. 'It was like being hypnotized. I quickly grasped the fact that they were unconscious even though their eyes were open, and a few simple experiments with the tip of my cane confirmed the depth of the state.'

Clay thought of the Head's limp, thought of asking him if he'd considered what would have happened to him if he'd been wrong and they'd come after him, and held his tongue. The Head would no doubt reiterate what he'd already said: no knowledge obtained without risk. Jordan was right—this was one very old-school dude. Clay certainly wouldn't have wanted to be fourteen and standing on his disciplinary carpet.

Ardai, meanwhile, was shaking his head at him. 'Six or seven hundred's a very low estimate, Clay. This is a regulation-size soccer field. That's six thousand square yards.'

'How many?'

'The way they're packed together? I should say a thousand at the very least.'

'And they're not really here at all, are they? You're sure of that.'

'I am. And what comes back—a little more each day, Jordan says the same, and he's an acute observer, you may trust me on that—is not what they were. Which is to say, not human.'

'Can we go back to the Lodge now?' Tom asked. He sounded sick.

'Of course,' the Head agreed.

'Just a second,' Clay said. He knelt beside the young man in the NASCAR T-shirt. He didn't want to do it— he couldn't help thinking that the hand which had clutched for the red cap would now clutch at him – but he made himself. Down here at ground level the stink was worse. He had believed he was getting used to it, but he had been wrong.

Tom began, 'Clay, what are you—'

'Quiet.' Clay leaned toward the young man's mouth, which was partly open. He hesitated, then made himself lean closer, until he could see the dim shine of spit on the man's lower lip. At first he thought it might only be his imagination, but another two inches—he was now almost close enough to kiss the not-sleeping thing with Ricky Craven on its chest– took care of that.

It's just little, Jordan had said. Not hardly a whisper. . . but you can hear it.

Clay heard it, the vocal by some trick just a syllable or two ahead of the one coming from the linked boomboxes: Dean Martin singing 'Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.'

He stood up, nearly screaming at the pistol-shot sound of his own knees cracking. Tom held up his lantern, looking at him, stare-eyed. 'What? What? You're not going to say that kid was—'

Clay nodded. 'Come on. Let's go back.'

Halfway up the ramp he grabbed the Head roughly by the shoulder. Ardai turned to face him, seemingly not disturbed to be handled so.

'You're right, sir. We have to get rid of them. As many as we can, and as fast as we can. This may be the only chance we get. Or do you think I'm wrong?'

'No,' the Head replied. 'Unfortunately, I don't. As I said, this is war—or so I believe—and what one does in war is kill one's enemies. Why don't we go back and talk it over? We could have hot chocolate. I like a tiny splash of bourbon in mine, barbarian that I am.'

At the top of the ramp, Clay spared one final look back. Tonney Field was dark, but under strong northern starlight not too dark to make out the carpet of bodies spread from end to end and side to side. He thought you might not know what you were looking at if you just happened to stumble on it, but once you did . . . once you did . . .

His eyes played him a funny trick and for a moment he almost thought he could see them breathing—all eight hundred or a thousand of them– as one organism. That frightened him badly and he turned to catch up to Tom and Headmaster Ardai, almost running.

16

The head made hot chocolate in the kitchen and they drank it in the formal parlor, by the light of two gas lanterns. Clay thought the old man would suggest they go out to Academy Avenue later on, trolling for more volunteers in Ardai's Army, but he seemed satisfied with what he had.

The gasoline-pump at the motor pool, the Head told them, drew from a four-hundred-gallon overhead tank—all they'd have to do was pull a plug. And there were thirty-gallon sprayers in the greenhouse. At least a dozen. They could load up a pickup truck with them, perhaps, and back it down one of the ramps—

'Wait,' Clay said. 'Before we start talking strategy, if you have a theory about all this, sir, I'd like to hear it.'

'Nothing so formal,' the old man said. 'But Jordan and I have observation, we have intuition, and we have a fair amount of experience between the two of us—'

'I'm a computer geek,' Jordan said over his mug of hot chocolate. Clay found the child's glum assurance oddly charming. 'A total McNerd. Been on em my whole life, just about. Those things're rebooting, all right. They might as well have software installation, please stand by blinking on their foreheads.'

'I don't understand you,' Tom said.

'I do,' Alice said. 'Jordan, you think the Pulse really was a Pulse, don't you? Everyone who heard it. . . they got their hard drives wiped.'

'Well,yeah,' Jordan said. He was too polite to say Well, duh.

Tom looked at Alice, perplexed. Only Clay knew Tom wasn't dumb, and he didn't believe Tom was that slow.

'You had a computer,' Alice said. 'I saw it in your little office.'

'Yes—'

'And you've installed software, right?'

'Sure, but—' Tom stopped, looking at Alice fixedly. She looked back. 'Their brains'? You mean their brains'?'

'What do you think a brain is?' Jordan said. 'A big old hard drive. Organic circuitry. No one knows how many bytes. Say giga to the power of a googolplex. An infinity of bytes.' He put his hands to his ears, which were small and neatly made. 'Right in between here.'

'I don't believe it,' Tom said, but he spoke in a small voice and there was a sick look on his face. Clay thought he did believe it. Thinking back to the madness that had convulsed Boston, Clay had to admit the idea was persuasive. It was also terrible: millions, perhaps even billions, of brains all wiped clean at the same time, the way you could wipe an old-fashioned computer disc with a powerful magnet.

He found himself remembering Pixie Dark, the friend of the girl with the peppermint-colored cell phone. Who are you? What's happening? Pixie Dark had cried. Who are you? Who am I? Then she had smacked herself repeatedly in the forehead with the heel of her hand and had gone running full tilt into a lamppost, not once but twice, smashing her expensive orthodontic work to jagged pieces.

Who are you? Who am I?

It hadn't been her cell phone. She had only been listening in and hadn't gotten a full dose.

Clay, who thought in images rather than words a good deal of the time, now got a vivid mental picture of a computer screen filling up with those words: WHO ARE YOU WHO AM I WHO ARE YOU WHO AM I WHO ARE YOU who AM I who ARE YOU WHO am I, and finally, at the bottom, as bleak and inarguable as Pixie Dark's fate: