Cell

No one said anything for several moments. A wind was rising outside. Clay sipped his hot chocolate, which had never been much more than tepid and was now almost cold. When he looked up again, Alice had put hers aside and was holding her Nike talisman instead.

'I want to wipe them out,' she said. 'The ones on the soccer field, I want to wipe them out. I don't say kill them because I think Jordan's right, and I don't want to do it for the human race. I want to do it for my mother and my dad, because he's gone, too. I know he is, I feel it. I want to do it for my friends Vickie and Tess. They were good friends, but they had cell phones, they never went anywhere without them, and I know what they're like now and where they're sleeping: someplace just like that fucking soccer field.' She glanced at the Head, flushing. ''Scuse me, sir.'

The Head waved her apology away.

'Can we do that?' she asked him. 'Can we wipe them out?'

Charles Ardai, who had been winding down his career as Gaiten Academy's interim Headmaster when the world ended, bared his eroded teeth in a grin Clay would have given much to have captured with pen or brush; there was not a single ounce of pity in it. 'Miss Maxwell, we can try,' he said.

18

At four o'clock the next morning, tom mccourt sat on a picnic table between the two Gaiten Academy greenhouses, which had both sustained serious damage since the Pulse. His feet, now wearing the Reeboks he'd donned back in Malden, were on one of the benches, and his head lay on his arms, which rested on his knees. The wind blew his hair first one way, then the other. Alice sat across from him with her chin propped on her hands and the rays of several flashlights striking angles and shadows across her face. The harsh light made her look pretty in spite of her obvious weariness; at her age, all light was still flattering. The Head, sitting next to her, only looked exhausted. In the closer of the two greenhouses, two Coleman gas-lanterns floated like uneasy spirits.

The Colemans converged at the near end of the greenhouse. Clay and Jordan used the door, although huge holes in the glass paneling had been opened on either side. A moment later, Clay sat down next to Tom and Jordan resumed his usual spot next to the Head. The boy smelled of gasoline and fertilizer, even more strongly of dejection. Clay dropped several sets of keys on the table amid the flashlights. As far as he was concerned, they could stay there until some archaeologist discovered them four millennia from now.

'I'm sorry,' Headmaster Ardai said softly. 'It seemed so simple.'

'Yeah,' Clay said. It had seemed simple: fill the greenhouse sprayers with gasoline, load the sprayers into the back of a pickup truck, drive across Tonney Field, wetting down both sides as they went, toss a match. He thought to tell Ardai that George W Bush's Iraq adventure had probably looked equally simple—load the sprayers, toss a match—and didn't. It would have been pointlessly cruel.

'Tom?' Clay asked. 'You okay?' He had already realized that Tom didn't have great reserves of stamina.

'Yeah, just tired.' He raised his head and gave Clay a smile. 'Not used to the night shift. What do we do now?'

'Go to bed, I guess,' Clay said. 'It'll be dawn in another forty minutes or so.' The sky had already begun to lighten in the east.

'It's not fair,' Alice said. She brushed angrily at her cheeks. 'It's not fair, we tried so hard!'

They had tried hard, but nothing had come easily. Every small (and ultimately meaningless) victory had been the sort of maddening struggle his mother had called a Bolshie shit-pull. Part of Clay did want to blame the Head . . . also himself, for not taking Ardai's sprayer idea with a grain of salt. Part of him now thought that going along with an elderly English teacher's plan to firebomb a soccer field was a little like taking a knife to a gunfight. Still . . . yeah, it had seemed like a good idea.

Until, that was, they discovered the motor pool's gasoline storage tank was inside a locked shed. They'd spent nearly half an hour in the nearby office, scrounging by lantern-light through maddeningly unmarked keys on a board behind the superintendent's desk. It was Jordan who finally found the key that unlocked the shed door.

Then they discovered that One would only have to pull a plug was not exactly the case. There was a cap, not a plug. And like the shed in which the tank resided, the cap was locked. Back to the office; another scrounge by lantern-light; finally a key that did indeed seem to fit the cap. It was Alice who pointed out that since the cap was on the bottom of the tank, assuring gravity-feed in case of a power outage, they would have a flood on their hands without a hose or a siphon. They spent an hour looking for a hose that might fit and couldn't find anything that looked even close. Tom found a small funnel, which sent them all into moderate hysterics.

And because none of the truck keys were marked (at least in ways non-motor-pool employees could understand), locating the right set became another process of trial and error. This one went faster, at least, because there were only eight trucks parked behind the garage.

And last, the greenhouses. There they discovered only eight sprayers, not a dozen, with a capacity of not thirty gallons each but ten. They might be able to fill them from the gasoline storage tank, but they would be drenched in the process, and the result would be a mere eighty gallons of usable, sprayable gas. It was the idea of wiping out a thousand phone-crazies with eighty gallons of regular that had driven Tom, Alice, and the Head out to the picnic bench. Clay and Jordan had hung in a while longer, looking for bigger sprayers, but they had found none.

'We found a few little leaf-sprayers, though,' Clay said. 'You know, what they used to call flit-guns.'

'Also,' Jordan said, 'the big sprayers in there are all full of weed-killer or plant-food or something. We'd have to start by dumping them all out, and that would mean putting on masks just to make sure we didn't gas ourselves or something.'

'Reality bites,' Alice said morosely. She looked at her baby sneaker for a moment, then tucked it away in her pocket.

Jordan picked up the keys they had matched to one of the maintenance pickups. 'We could drive downtown,' he said. 'There's a Trustworthy Hardware. They must have sprayers.'

Tom shook his head. 'It's over a mile and the main drag's full of wrecks and abandoned vehicles. We might be able to get around some, but not all. And driving over the lawns is out of the question. The houses are just too close together. There are reasons everybody's on foot.' They had seen a few people on bicycles, but not many; even the ones equipped with lights were dangerous if ridden at any speed.

'Would it be possible for a light truck to negotiate the side streets?' the Head asked.

Clay said, 'We could explore the possibility tomorrow night, I suppose. Scout out a path in advance, on foot, then come back for the truck.' He considered. 'They'd probably have all sorts of hose in a hardware store, too.'

'You don't sound exactly jazzed,' Alice said.

Clay sighed. 'It doesn't take much to block little streets. We'd end up doing a lot of donkey-work even if we got luckier than we did tonight. I just don't know. Maybe it'll look better to me after some rest.'

'Of course it will,' the Head agreed, but he sounded hollow. 'To all of us.'

'What about the gas station across from the school?' Jordan asked without much hope.

'What gas station?' Alice asked.

'He's talking about the Citgo,' the Head replied. 'Same problem, Jordan—plenty of gasoline in the tanks under the pumps, but no power. And I doubt if they have much in the way of containers beyond a few two– or five- gallon gasoline cans. I really think—' But he didn't say what he really thought. He broke off. 'What is it, Clay?'

Clay was remembering the trio ahead of them limping past that gas station, one of the men with an arm around the woman's waist. 'Academy Grove Citgo,' he said. 'That's the name, isn't it?'

'Yes—'

'But they didn't just sell gasoline, I think.' He didn't just think, he knew. Because of the two trucks parked on the side. He had seen them and hadn't thought anything of them. Not then, he hadn't. No reason to.

'I don't know what you—' the Head began, then stopped. His eyes met Clay's. His eroded teeth once more made their appearance in that singularly pitiless smile. 'Oh,' he said. 'Oh. Oh my. Oh