Cell

He started out the door, but Tom held him back a minute. 'Listen. The others may have felt that over there, or they may not have. If they didn't, maybe we should keep it to ourselves for the time being. What do you think?'

Clay thought about how Jordan wouldn't let the Head out of his sight and how Alice always kept the creepy little sneaker somewhere within reach. He thought about the circles under their eyes, and then about what they were planning to do tonight. Armageddon was probably too strong a word for it, but not by much. Whatever they were now, the phone-crazies had once been human beings, and burning a thousand of them alive was burden enough. Even thinking about it hurt his imagination.

'Fine by me,' he said. 'Go up the hill in low gear, all right?'

'Lowest one I can find,' Tom said. They were walking to the big bottle-shaped trucks now. 'How many gears do you think a truck like that has?'

'One forward should be enough,' Clay said.

'Based on the way they're parked, I think you're going to have to start by finding reverse.'

'Fuck it,' Clay said. 'What good is the end of the world if you can't drive through a goddam board fence?'

And that was what they did.

21

Academy slope was what headmaster ardai and his one remaining pupil called the long, rolling hill that dropped from the campus to the main road. The grass was still bright green and only beginning to be littered with fallen leaves. When afternoon gave way to early evening and

Academy Slope was still empty—no sign of returning phone-crazies– Alice began to pace the main hall of Cheatham Lodge, pausing in each circuit only long enough to look out the bay window of the living room. It offered a fine view of the Slope, the two main lecture halls, and Tonney Field. The sneaker was once more tied to her wrist.

The others were in the kitchen, sipping Cokes from cans. 'They're not coming back,' she told them at the end of one of her circuits. 'They got wind of what we were planning—read our minds or something—and they're not coming.'

Two more circuits of the long downstairs hall, each with a pause to look out the big living room window, and then she looked in on them again. 'Or maybe it's a general migration, did you guys ever think of that? Maybe they go south in the winter like the goddam robins.'

She was gone without waiting for a reply. Up the hall and down the hall. Up and down the hall.

'She's like Ahab on the prod for Moby,' the Head remarked.

'Eminem might have been a jerk, but he was right about that guy,' Tom said morosely.

'I beg your pardon, Tom?' the Head asked.

Tom waved it away.

Jordan glanced at his watch. 'They didn't come back last night until almost half an hour later than it is right now,' he said. 'I'll go tell her that, if you want.'

'I don't think it would do any good,' Clay said. 'She's got to work through it, that's all.'

'She's pretty freaked-out, isn't she, sir?'

'Aren't you, Jordan?'

'Yes,' Jordan said in a small voice. 'I'm Freak City.'

The next time Alice came back to the kitchen she said, 'Maybe it's best if they don't come back. I don't know if they're rebooting their brains some new way, but for sure there's some bad voodoo going on. I felt it from those two this afternoon. The woman with the book and the man with the Twinkies?' She shook her head. 'Bad voodoo.'

She plunged off on hall patrol again before anyone could reply, the sneaker swinging from her wrist.

The Head looked at Jordan. 'Did you feel anything, son?'

Jordan hesitated, then said, 'I felt something. The hair on my neck tried to stand up.'

Now the Head turned his gaze to the men on the other side of the table. 'What about you two? You were far closer.'

Alice saved them from having to answer. She ran into the kitchen, her cheeks flushed, her eyes wide, the soles of her sneakers squeaking on the tiles. 'They're coming,' she said.

22

From the bay window the four of them watched the phone-crazies come up Academy Slope in converging lines, their long shadows making a huge pin-wheel shape on the green grass. As they neared what Jordan and the Head called Tonney Arch, the lines drew together and the pinwheel seemed to spin in the late golden sunlight even as it contracted and solidified.

Alice could no longer stand not holding the sneaker. She had torn it from her wrist and was squeezing it compulsively. 'They'll see what we did and they'll turn around,' she said, speaking low and rapidly. 'They've gotten at least that smart, if they're picking up books again, they must have.'

'We'll see,' Clay said. He was almost positive the phone-crazies would go onto Tonney Field, even if what they saw there disquieted their strange group mind; it would be dark soon and they had nowhere else to go. A fragment of a lullaby his mother used to sing him floated through his mind: Little man, you've had a busy day.

'I hope they go and I hope they stay,' she said, lower than ever. 'I feel like I'm going to explode.' She gave a wild little laugh. 'Only it's them that's supposed to explode, isn't it? Them.' Tom turned to look at her and she said, 'I'm all right. I'm fine, so just close your mouth.'

'All I was going to say is that it'll be what it is,' he said.

'New Age crap. You sound like my father. The Picture Frame King.' A tear rolled down one cheek and she rubbed it impatiently away with the heel of her hand.

'Just calm down, Alice. Watch.'

'I'll try, okay? I'll try.'

'And stop with the sneaker,' Jordan said—irritably, for him. 'That squelchy sound is making me crazy.'

She looked down at the sneaker, as if surprised, then slipped it around her wrist on its loop again. They watched as the phone-crazies converged at Tonney Arch and passed beneath it with less pushing and confusion than any crowd attending the Homecoming Weekend soccer match could ever have equaled—Clay was sure of that. They watched as the crazies spread out again on the far side, crossing the concourse and filing down the ramps. They waited to see that steady march slow and stop, but it never did. The last stragglers—most of them hurt and helping each other along, but still walking in those close groups—were in long before the reddening sun had passed below the dormitories on the west side of the Gaiten Academy campus. They had returned once more, like homing pigeons to their nests or the swallows to Capistrano. Not five minutes after the evening star became visible in the darkening sky, Dean Martin began singing 'Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.'

'I was worried for nothing, wasn't I?' Alice said. 'Sometimes I'm a putz. That's what my father says.'

'No,' the Head told her. 'All the putzes had cell phones, dear. That's why they're out there and you're in here, with us.'

Tom said: 'I wonder if Rafe's still making out okay.'

'I wonder if Johnny is,' Clay said. 'Johnny and Sharon.'

23

At ten o'clock on that windy autumn night, under a moon now entering its last quarter, Clay and Tom stood in the band alcove at the home end of the Tonney soccer field. Directly in front of them was a waist-high concrete barrier that had been heavily padded on the playing-field side. On their side were a few rusting music stands and a drift of litter that was ankle-deep; the wind blew the torn bags and scraps of paper in here, and here they came to rest. Behind and above them, back at the turnstiles, Alice and Jordan flanked the Head, a tall