Cell

'Did you know?' Tom attempted to shake him, got nothing but a piece of his shirt, and tore it all the way down the front.

'Fuck no, are you insane?' Clay's voice was beyond hoarse, beyond parched; it sounded baked. 'You think I would have stood there with a pistol if I'd known? If it hadn't been for that concrete barrier, we would have been cut in two. Or vaporized.'

Incredibly, Tom began to grin. 'I tore your shirt, Batman.'

Clay felt like knocking his head off. Also like hugging and kissing him just because he was still alive.

'I want to go back to the Lodge,' Jordan said. The fear in his voice was unmistakable.

'By all means let us remove to a safe distance,' the Head agreed. He was trembling badly, his eyes fixed on the inferno rising above the Arch and the bleachers. 'Thank God the wind's blowing toward Academy Slope.'

'Can you walk, sir?' Tom asked.

'Thank you, yes. If Jordan will assist me, I'm sure I can walk as far as the Lodge.'

'We got them,' Alice said. She was wiping splatters of gore almost absently from her face, leaving smears of blood. Her eyes were like nothing Clay had ever seen except in a few photographs and some inspired comic art from the 1950s and '60s. He remembered going to a comics convention once, only a kid himself then, and listening to Wallace Wood talk about trying to draw something he called Panic Eye. Now Clay was seeing it in the face of a fifteen-year-old suburban schoolgirl.

'Alice, come on,' he said. 'We have to go back to the Lodge and get our shit together. We have to get out of here.' As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he had to say them again and hear if they had the ring of truth. The second time they sounded more than true; they sounded scared.

She might not have heard. She looked exultant. Stuffed with triumph. Sick with it, like a kid who has eaten too much Halloween candy on the way home. The pupils of her eyes were full of fire. 'Nothing could live through that.'

Tom gripped Clay's arm. It hurt the way a sunburn hurt. 'What's wrong with you?'

'I think we made a mistake,' Clay said.

'Is it like in the gas station?' Tom asked him. Behind his crooked spectacles, his eyes were sharp. 'When the man and woman were fighting over the damn Tw—'

'No, I just think we made a mistake,' Clay said. Actually, it was stronger than that. He knew they had made a mistake. 'Come on. We have to go tonight.'

'If you say so, okay,' Tom said. 'Come on, Alice.'

She went with them a little way down the path toward the Lodge, where they had left a pair of gas lanterns burning in the big bay window, then turned back for another look. The press box was on fire now, and the bleachers. The stars over the soccer field were gone; even the moon was nothing but a ghost dancing a wild jig in the heat-haze above that fierce gas-jet. 'They're dead, they're gone, they're crispy,' she said. 'Burn, baby, b—'

That was when the cry rose, only now it wasn't coming from Glen's Falls or Littleton ten miles away. It was coming from right behind them. Nor was there anything spectral or wraithlike about it. It was a cry of agony, the scream of something—a single entity, and aware, Clay was certain of it—that had awakened from deep sleep to find it was burning alive.

Alice shrieked and covered her ears, her eyes bulging in the firelight.

'Take it back!' Jordan said, grasping the Head's wrist. 'Sir, we have to take it back!'

'Too late, Jordan,' Ardai said.

24

Their knapsacks were a little plumper as they leaned against the front door of Cheatham Lodge an hour later. There were a couple of shirts in each one, plus bags of trail-mix, juice-boxes, and packets of Slim Jims as well as batteries and spare flashlights. Clay had harried Tom and Alice into sweeping their possessions together as quickly as possible, and now he was the one who kept darting into the living room to steal looks out the big window.

The gas-jet over there was finally starting to burn low, but the bleachers were still blazing and so was the press box. Tonney Arch itself had caught and glared in the night like a horseshoe in a smithy. Nothing that had been on that field could still be alive—Alice had been right about that much, surely—but twice on their return to the Lodge (the Head shambling like an old drunk in spite of their best efforts to support him), they had heard those ghostly cries coming down the wind from other flocks. Clay told himself he didn't hear anger in those cries, it was just his imagination—his guilty imagination, his murderer's imagination, his mass murderer's imagination—but he didn't completely believe it.

It had been a mistake, but what else could they have done? He and Tom had felt their gathering power just that afternoon, had seen it, and that had been only two of them, just two. How could they have let that go on? Just let it grow?

'Damned if you do, damned if you stand pat,' he said under his breath, and turned from the window. He didn't even know how long he'd been looking at the burning stadium and resisted the urge to check his watch. It would be easy to give in to the panic-rat, he was close to it now, and if he gave in, it would travel to the others quickly. Starting with Alice. Alice had managed to get herself back under some sort of control, but it was thin. Thin enough to read a newspaper through, his bingo-playing mother might have said. Although a kid herself, Alice had managed to keep herself shiny-side up mostly for the other kid's sake, so he wouldn't give way entirely.

The other kid. Jordan.

Clay hurried back into the front hall, noted there was still no fourth pack by the door, and saw Tom coming down the stairs. Alone.

'Where's the kid?' Clay asked. His ears had started to clear a little, but his voice still sounded too far away, and like a stranger's. He had an idea that was going to continue for a while. 'You were supposed to be helping him put some stuff together—Ardai said he brought a pack over with him from that dorm of his—'

'He won't come.' Tom rubbed the side of his face. He looked tired, sad, distracted. With half his mustache gone, he looked ludicrous as well.

'What?'

'Lower your voice, Clay. I don't make the news, I just report it.'

'Then tell me what you're talking about, for Christ's sake.'

'He won't go without the Head. He said, 'You can't make me.' And if you're really serious about going tonight, I believe he's right.'

Alice came tearing out of the kitchen. She had washed up, tied her hair back, and put on a new shirt—it hung almost to her knees—but her skin glowed with the same burn Clay felt on his own. He supposed they should count themselves lucky that they weren't popping blisters.

'Alice,' he began, 'I need you to exercise your womanly powers over Jordan. He's being—'

She steamed past as if he hadn't spoken, fell on her knees, seized her pack, and tore it open. He watched, perplexed, as she began to pull out the stuff inside. He looked at Tom and saw an expression of understanding and sympathy dawning on Tom's face.

'What?' Clay asked. 'What, for chrissake?' He had felt an all too similar exasperated annoyance toward Sharon during the last year they'd actually lived together—had felt it often—and hated himself for having that pop up now, of all times. But dammit, another complication was the last thing they needed now. He ran his hands through his hair. 'What?'

'Look at her wrist,' Tom said.

Clay looked. The dirty piece of shoestring was still there, but the sneaker was gone. He felt an absurd sinking in his stomach. Or maybe it wasn't so absurd. If it mattered to Alice, he supposed it mattered. So what if it was just a sneaker?

The spare T-shirt and sweatshirt she had packed (gaiten boosters' club printed across the front) went flying. Batteries rolled. Her spare flashlight hit the tile floor and the lens-cover cracked. That was enough to