Cell

'That's them,' one of the men said, and Clay did not mistake either the loathing or the fear in the man's voice. 'That's the Gaiten bunch.'

One of the other men said, 'Go to hell, buddy.' They kept on walking, even moving a little faster, although the grandmotherly type was limping, and the man beside her had to help her past a Subaru that had locked bumpers with somebody's abandoned Saturn.

Alice jumped up, almost knocking over one of the lanterns. Clay grabbed her arm. 'Don't bother, kiddo.'

She ignored him. 'At least we did something?' she shouted after them. 'What did you do? Just what the fuck did you do?'

'Tell you what we didn't do,' one of the men said. The little group was past the scenic turnout now, and he had to look back over his shoulder to talk to her. He could do this because the road was free of abandoned vehicles for a couple of hundred yards here. 'We didn't get a bunch of normies killed. There are more of them than us, in case you didn't notice—'

'Oh bullshit, you don't know if that's true!' Jordan shouted. Clay realized it was the first time the kid had spoken since they'd passed the Gaiten town limits.

'Maybe it is and maybe it isn't,' the man said, 'but they can do some very weird and powerful shit. You gotta buy that for a dollar. They say they'll leave us alone if we leave them alone . . . and you alone. We say fine.'

'If you believe anything they say—or think at you—then you're an idiot,' Alice said.

The man faced forward, raised his hand in the air, shook it in a combined fuck-off/bye-bye gesture, and said no more.

The four of them watched the shopping-cart people out of sight, then gazed at each other across the picnic table with its intaglios of old initials.

'So now we know,' Tom said. 'We're outcasts.'

'Maybe not if the phone people want us to go where the rest of the– what did he call them?—the rest of the normies are going,' Clay said. 'Maybe we're something else.'

'What?' Alice asked.

Clay had an idea, but he didn't like to put it into words. Not at midnight. 'Right now I'm more interested in Kent Pond,' he said. 'I want—I need to see if I can find my wife and son.'

'It's not very likely that they're still there, is it?' Tom asked in his low, kind voice. 'I mean, no matter which way things went for them, normal or phoner, they've probably moved on.'

'If they're all right, they will have left word,' Clay said. 'In any case, it's a place to go.'

And until they got there and that part of it was done, he wouldn't have to consider why the Raggedy Man would send them to a place of safety if the people there hated and feared them.

Or how, if the phone people knew about it, Kashwak No-Fo could be safe at all.

6

They were edging slowly east toward route 19, a highway that would take them across the state line and into Maine, but they didn't make it that night. All the roads in this part of New Hampshire seemed to pass through the small city of Rochester, and Rochester had burned to the ground. The fire's core was still alive, putting out an almost radioactive glow. Alice took over, leading them around the worst of the fiery ruins in a half- circle to the west. Several times they saw KASHWAK=NO-FOscrawled on the sidewalks; once spray-painted on the side of a U.S. mailbox.

'That's a bazillion-dollar fine and life in prison at Guantanamo Bay,' Tom said with a wan smile.

Their course eventually took them through the vast parking lot of the Rochester Mall. Long before they reached it, they could hear the over-amplified sound of an uninspired New Age jazz trio playing the sort of stuff Clay thought of as music to shop by. The parking lot was buried in drifts of moldering trash; the remaining cars stood up to their hubcaps in litter. They could smell the blown and fleshy reek of dead bodies on the breeze.

'Flock here somewhere,' Tom commented.

It was in the cemetery next to the mall. Their course was going to take them south and west of it, but when they left the mall parking lot, they were close enough to see the red eyes of the boomboxes through the trees.

'Maybe we ought to do em up,' Alice proposed suddenly as they stepped back onto North Main Street. 'There must be a propane truck that isn't working around here somewhere.'

'Yeah, baby!' Jordan said. He raised his fists to the sides of his head and shook them, looking really alive for the first time since leaving Cheatham Lodge. 'For the Head!'

'I think not,' Tom said.

'Afraid of trying their patience?' Clay asked. He was surprised to find himself actually sort of in favor of Alice's crazy idea. That torching another flock was a crazy idea he had no doubt, but . . .

He thought, Imight do it just became that's the absolute worst version of 'Misty' I've ever heard in my life. Twist my fuckin arm.

'Not that,' Tom said. He seemed to be thinking. 'Do you see that street there?' He was pointing to an avenue that ran between the mall and the cemetery. It was choked with stalled cars. Almost all of them were pointed away from the mall. Clay found it all too easy to imagine those cars full of people trying to get home after the Pulse. People who would want to know what was happening, and if their families were all right. They would have reached for their car phones, their cell phones, without a second thought.

'What about it?' he asked.

'Let us stroll down there a little way,' Tom said. 'Very carefully.'

'What did you see, Tom?'

'I'd rather not say. Maybe nothing. Keep off the sidewalk, stay under the trees. And that was one hell of a traffic jam. There'll be bodies.'

There were dozens rotting their way back into the great scheme of things between Twombley Street and the West Side Cemetery. 'Misty' had given way to a cough-syrup rendition of 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco' by the time they reached the edge of the trees, and they could again see the red eyes of the boombox power lamps. Then Clay saw something else and stopped. 'Jesus,' he whispered. Tom nodded.

'What?' Jordan whispered. 'What?'

Alice said nothing, but Clay could tell by the direction she was looking and the defeated slump of her shoulders that she'd seen what he had. There were men with rifles standing a perimeter guard around the cemetery. Clay took Jordan's head, turned it, and saw the boy's shoulders also slump.

'Let's go,' the kid whispered. 'The smell's making me sick.'

7

In melrose corner, about four miles north of rochester (they could still see its red glow waxing and waning on the southern horizon), they came to another picnic area, this one with a little stone firepit as well as picnic tables. Clay, Tom, and Jordan picked up dry wood. Alice, who claimed to have been a Girl Scout, proved her skills by making a neat little fire and then heating three cans of what she called 'hobo beans.' As they ate, two little parties of pilgrims passed them by. Both looked; no one in either group waved or spoke.

When the wolf in his belly had quieted a little, Clay said, 'You saw those guys, Tom? All the way from the mall parking lot? I'm thinking of changing your name to Hawkeye.'

Tom shook his head. 'It was pure luck. That and the light from Rochester. You know, the embers?'

Clay nodded. They all did.

'I happened to look over at that cemetery at just the right time and the right angle and saw the shine on a couple of rifle-barrels. I told myself it couldn't be what it looked like, that it was probably iron fence-palings, or something, but. . .' Tom sighed, looked at the rest of his beans, then put them aside. 'There you have it.'

'They were phone-crazies, maybe,' Jordan said, but he didn't believe it. Clay could hear it in his voice.

'Phone-crazies don't do the night shift,' Alice said.