Cell

3

At eight o'clock that morning, clay sat on a bench at one end of the Head's victory garden, telling himself that if he weren't so tired, he'd get up off his dead ass and make the old fellow some sort of marker. It wouldn't last long, but the guy deserved it for taking care of his last pupil, if for nothing else. The thing was, he didn't even know if he could get up, totter into the house, and wake Tom to stand a watch.

Soon they would have a chilly, beautiful autumn day—one made for apple-picking, cider-making, and touch- football games in the backyard. For now the fog was still thick, but the morning sun shone strongly through it, turning the tiny world in which Clay sat to a dazzling white. Fine suspended droplets hung in the air, and hundreds of tiny rainbow wheels circulated in front of his heavy eyes.

Something red materialized out of this burning whiteness. For a moment the Raggedy Man's hoodie seemed to float by itself, and then, as it came up the garden toward Clay, its occupant's dark brown face and hands materialized above and below it. This morning the hood was up, framing the smiling disfigurement of the face and those dead-alive eyes.

Broad scholar's forehead, marred with a slash.

Filthy, shapeless jeans, torn at the pockets and worn more than a week now.

HARVARD across the narrow chest.

Beth Nickerson's .45 was in the side-holster on his belt. Clay didn't even touch it. The Raggedy Man stopped about ten feet from him. He—it—was standing on the Head's grave, and Clay believed that was no accident. 'What do you want?' he asked the Raggedy Man, and immediately answered himself: 'To. Tell you.'

He sat staring at the Raggedy Man, mute with surprise. He had expected telepathy or nothing. The Raggedy Man grinned—insofar as he could grin, with that badly split lower lip—and spread his hands as if to say Shucks, 't'warn't nuthin.

'Say what you have to say, then,' Clay told him, and tried to prepare for having his voice hijacked a second time. He discovered it was a thing you couldn't prepare for. It was like being turned into a grinning piece of wood sitting on a ventriloquist's knee.

'Go. Tonight.' Clay concentrated and said, 'Shut up, stop it!'

The Raggedy Man waited, the picture of patience.

'I think I can keep you out if I try hard,' Clay said. 'I'm not sure, but I think I can.'

The Raggedy Man waited, his face saying Are you done yet?

'Go ahead,' Clay said, and then said, 'I could bring. More. I came. Alone.'

Clay considered the idea of the Raggedy Man's will joined to that of an entire flock and conceded the point.

'Go. Tonight. North.' Clay waited, and when he was sure the Raggedy Man was done with his voice for the time being, he said, 'Where? Why?'

There were no words this time, but an image suddenly rose before him. It was so clear that he didn't know if it was in his mind or if the Raggedy Man had somehow conjured it on the brilliant screen of the mist. It was what they had seen scrawled in the middle of Academy Avenue in pink chalk:

KASHWAK=NO-FO

'I don't get it,' he said.

But the Raggedy Man was walking away. Clay saw his red hoodie for a moment, once again seeming to float unoccupied against the brilliant mist; then that was gone, too. Clay was left with only the thin consolation of knowing that they had been going north anyway, and that they had been given another day's grace. Which meant there was no need to stand a watch. He decided to go to bed and let the others sleep through, as well.

4

Jordan awoke in his right mind, but his nervy brilliance had departed. He nibbled at half a rock-hard bagel and listened dully as Clay recounted his meeting with the Raggedy Man that morning. When Clay finished, Jordan got their road atlas, consulted the index at the back, and then opened it to the western Maine page. 'There,' he said, pointing to a town above Fryeburg. 'This is Kashwak here, to the east, and Little Kashwak to the west, almost on the Maine-New Hampshire state line. I knew I recognized the name. Because of the lake.' He tapped it. 'Almost as big as Sebago.'

Alice leaned closer to read the name on the lake. 'Kash . . . Kashwaka-mak, I guess it is.'

'It's in an unincorporated area called TR-90,' Jordan said. He tapped this on the map, also. 'Once you know that, Kashwak Equals No-Fo is sort of a no-brainer, wouldn't you say?'

'It's a dead zone, right?' Tom said. 'No cell phone towers, no microwave towers.'

Jordan gave him a wan smile. 'Well, I imagine there are plenty of people with satellite dishes, but otherwise . . . bingo.'

'I don't get it,' Alice said. 'Why would they want to send us to a no-cell zone where everyone should be more or less all right?'

'Might as well ask why they let us live in the first place,' Tom said.

'Maybe they want to turn us into living guided missiles and use us to bomb the joint,' Jordan said. 'Get rid of us and them. Two birds with one stone.'

They considered this in silence for a moment.

'Let's go and find out,' Alice said, 'but I'm not bombing anybody.'

Jordan eyed her bleakly. 'You saw what they did to the Head. If it comes right down to it, do you think you'll have any choice?'

5

There were still shoes on most of the stoops across from the fieldstone pillars marking the entrance to Gaiten Academy, but the doors of the nice-looking homes either stood open or had been torn off their hinges. A few of the dead they saw littered on those lawns as they once more began their trek north were phone- crazies, but most had been innocent pilgrims who had happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were the ones with no shoes on their feet, but there was really no need to look as far as their feet; many of the reprisal victims had literally been torn limb from limb.

Beyond the school, where Academy Avenue once more became Route 102, there was carnage on both sides for half a mile. Alice walked with her eyes resolutely closed, allowing Tom to lead her as if she were blind. Clay offered to do the same for Jordan, but he only shook his head and walked stolidly up the centerline, a skinny kid with a pack on his back and too much hair on his head. After a few cursory glances at the kill-off, he looked down at his sneakers.

'There are hundreds,' Tom said once. It was eight o'clock and full dark, but they could still see far more than they wanted to. Lying curled around a stop-sign at the corner of Academy and Spofford was a girl in red pants and a white sailor blouse. She looked no more than nine, and she was shoeless. Twenty yards away stood the open door of the house from which she had probably been dragged, screaming for mercy. 'Hundreds.'

'Maybe not that many,' Clay said. 'Some of our kind were armed. They shot quite a few of the bastards. Knifed a few more. I even saw one with an arrow sticking out of his—'

'We caused this,' Tom said. 'Do you think we have a kind anymore?'

This question was answered while they were eating their cold lunch at a roadside picnic spot four hours later. By then they were on Route 156, and according to the sign, this was a Scenic Turnout, offering a view of Historic Flint Hill to the west. Clay imagined the view was good, if you were eating lunch here at noon rather than midnight, with gas lanterns at either end of your picnic table to see by.

They had reached the dessert course—stale Oreos—when a party of half a dozen came toiling along, all of them older folks. Three were pushing shopping carts full of supplies and all were armed. These were the first other travelers they had seen since setting out again.

'Hey!' Tom called, giving them a wave. 'Got another picnic table over here, if you want to sit a spell!'

They looked over. The older of the two women in the party, a grandmotherly type with lots of white, fluffy hair that shone in the starlight, started to wave. Then she stopped.