Cell

shoulder and into the weeds if they had spotted wrecks or stalls up ahead. Jordan took to calling these 'sprinter- reefs.' The sprinter would blow past, the people inside frequently whooping (and almost certainly liquored up). If there was only one stall—a small sprinter-reef—the driver would most likely elect to weave around it. If the road was completely blocked, he might still try to go around, but he and his passengers were more apt to simply abandon their vehicle and resume their eastward course on foot until they found something else that looked worth sprinting in—which was to say, something fast and temporarily amusing. Clay imagined their course as a series of jerks . . . but then, most of the sprinters were jerks, just one more pain in the ass in what had become a pain-in- the-ass world. That seemed true of Gunner, as well.

He was the fourth sprinter of their first night on Highway 19, spotting them standing at the side of the road in the flare of his headlights. Spotting Alice. He leaned out, dark hair streaming back from his face, and yelled 'Suck my rod, you teenybop bitch!' as he slammed by in a black Cadillac Escalade. His passengers cheered and waved. Someone shouted 'Tell huh!' To Clay it sounded like absolute ecstasy expressed in a South Boston accent.

'Charming' was Alice's only comment.

'Some people have no—' Tom began, but before he could tell them what some people didn't have, there was a scream of tires from the dark not far ahead, followed by a loud, hollow bang and the tinkle of glass.

']esus-fuck,' Clay said, and began to run. Before he had gotten twenty yards, Alice blew past him. 'Slow down, they might be dangerous!' he shouted.

Alice held up one of the automatic pistols so Clay could see it and ran on, soon outdistancing him completely.

Tom caught up with Clay, already working for breath. Jordan, running beside him, could have been in a rocking chair.

'What . . . are we going . . . to do . . . if they're badly hurt?' Tom asked. 'Call… an ambulance?'

'I don't know,' Clay said, but he was thinking of how Alice had held up one of the automatic pistols. He knew.

11

They caught up with her around the next curve of the highway. she was standing behind the Escalade. It was lying on its side with the airbags deployed. The tale of the accident wasn't hard to read. The Escalade had come steaming around the blind curve at maybe sixty miles an hour and had encountered an abandoned milk tanker dead ahead. The driver, jerk or not, had done well to avoid being totaled. He was walking around the battered SUV in a dazed circle, pushing his hair away from his face. Blood gushed from his nose and a cut in his forehead. Clay walked to the Escalade, sneakers gritting on pebbles of Saf-T-Glas, and looked inside. It was empty. He shone his light around and saw blood on the steering wheel, nowhere else. The passengers had been lively enough to exit the wreck, and all but one had fled the scene, probably out of simple reflex. The one who had stuck with the driver was a shrimpy little postadolescent with bad acne scars, buck teeth, and long, dirty red hair. His steady line of jabber reminded Clay of the little dog who idolized Spike in the Warner Bros, cartoons.

'Ah you all right, Gunnah?' he asked. Clay presumed this was how you pronounced Gunner in Southie. 'Holy shit, you're bleedin like a mutha. Fuckin-A, I thought we was dead.' Then, to Clay: 'Whuttajw lookin at?'

'Shut up,' Clay said—and, under the circumstances, not unkindly. The redhead pointed at Clay, then turned to his bleeding friend. 'This is one of em, Gunnah! This is a bunch of em!'

'Shut up, Harold,' Gunner said. Not kindly at all. Then he looked at Clay, Tom, Alice, and Jordan.

'Let me do something about your forehead,' Alice said. She had reholstered her gun and taken off her pack. Now she was rummaging through it. 'I've got Band-Aids and gauze pads. Also hydrogen peroxide, which will sting, but better a little sting than an infection, am I right?'

'Considering what this young man called you on his way by, you're a better Christian than I was in my prime,' Tom said. He had unslung Sir Speedy and was holding it by the strap as he looked at Gunner and Harold.

Gunner might have been twenty-five. His long black rock-vocalist hair was now matted with blood. He looked at the milk tanker, then at the Escalade, then at Alice, who had a gauze pad in one hand and the bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the other.

'Tommy and Frito and that guy who was always pickin his nose, they took off,' the redheaded shrimp was saying. He expanded what chest he had. 'But I stuck around, Gunnah! Holy fuck, buddy, you're bleedin like a pig.'

Alice put hydrogen peroxide on the gauze pad, then took a step toward Gunner. He immediately took a step back. 'Get away from me. You're poison.'

'It's them!' the redhead cried. 'From the dreams! What'd I tellya?'

'Keep away from me,' Gunner said. 'Fuckin bitch. Alla ya.'

Clay felt a sudden urge to shoot him and wasn't surprised. Gunner looked and acted like a dangerous dog backed into a corner, teeth bared and ready to bite, and wasn't that what you did to dangerous dogs when there was no other recourse? Didn't you shoot them? But of course they did have recourse, and if Alice could play Good Samaritan to the scumbag who had called her a teenybop bitch, he guessed he could refrain from executing him. But there was something he wanted to find out before he let these two charming fellows go their way.

'These dreams,' he said. 'Do you have a . . . I don't know . . . a kind of spirit guide in them? A guy in a red hoodie, let's say?'

Gunner shrugged. Tore a piece off his shirt and used it to mop the blood on his face. He was coming back a little now, seemed a little more aware of what had happened. 'Harvard, yeah. Right, Harold?'

The little redhead nodded. 'Yeah. Harvard. The black guy. But they ain't dreams. If you don't know, it ain't no fuckin good telling ya. They're fuckin broadcasts. Broadcasts in our sleep. If you don't get em, it's because you're poison. Ain't they, Gunnah?'

'You guys fucked up bigtime,' Gunner said in a brooding voice, and mopped his forehead. 'Don't you touch me.'

'We're gonna have our own place,' Harold said. 'Ain't we, Gunnah? Up Maine, fuckin right. Everyone who didn't get Pulsed is goin there, and we're gonna be left alone. Hunt, fish, live off the fuckin land. Harvard says so.'

'And you believe him?' Alice said. She sounded fascinated.

Gunner raised a finger that shook slightly. 'Shut your mouth, bitch.'

'I think you better shut yours,' Jordan said. 'We've got the guns.'

'You better not even think about shootin us!' Harold said shrilly. 'Whatcha think Harvard would do to you if you shot us, you fuckin punkass shorty?'

'Nothing,' Clay said.

'You don't—' Gunner began, but before he could get any further, Clay took a step forward and pistol-whipped him across the jaw with Beth Nickerson's .45. The sight at the end of the barrel opened a fresh cut along Gunner's jaw, but Clay hoped that in the end this might prove better medicine than the hydrogen peroxide the man had refused. In this he proved wrong.

Gunner fell back against the side of the abandoned milk tanker, looking at Clay with shocked eyes. Harold took an impulsive step forward. Tom trained Sir Speedy on him and gave his head a single forbidding shake. Harold shrank back and began to gnaw the ends of his dirty fingers. Above them his eyes were huge and wet.

'We're going now,' Clay said. 'I'd advise you stay here at least an hour, because you really don't want to see us again. We're leaving you your lives as a gift. If we see you again, we'll take them away.' He backed toward Tom and the others, still staring into that glowering, unbelieving bloody face. He felt a little like the old-time lion- tamer Frank Buck, trying to do it all by pure force of will. 'One more thing. I don't know why the phone-people want all the 'normies' in Kashwak, but I know what a roundup usually means for the cattle. You might think about that the next time you're getting one of your nightly podcasts.'

'Fuck you,' Gunner said, but broke his eyelock with Clay and gazed down at his shoes.

'Come on, Clay,' Tom said. 'Let's go.'