Cell

see. Did he get you? Are you cut?'

'No,' Clay said. 'I'm all r—'

There was another gigantic explosion from the north, almost surely from Logan Airport on the other side of Boston Harbor. Both of them hunched their shoulders and winced.

The lunatic took the opportunity to sit up and was scrambling to his feet when the little man in the tweed suit administered a clumsy but effective sideways kick, planting a shoe squarely in the middle of the lunatic's shredded tie and knocking him back down. The lunatic roared and snatched at the little man's foot. He would have pulled the little guy over, then perhaps into a crushing embrace, had Clay not seized his new acquaintance by the shoulder and pulled him away.

'He's got my shoe!' the little man yelped. Behind them, two more cars crashed. There were more screams, more alarms. Car alarms, fire alarms, hearty clanging burglar alarms. Sirens whooped in the distance. 'Bastardgot my sh —'

Suddenly a policeman was there. One of the responders from across the street, Clay assumed, and as the policeman dropped to one blue knee beside the babbling lunatic, Clay felt something very much like love for the cop. That he'd take the time to come over here! That he'd even noticed!

'You want to be careful of him,' the little man said nervously. 'He's—'

'I know what he is,' the cop replied, and Clay saw the cop had his service automatic in his hand. He had no idea if the cop had drawn it after kneeling or if he'd had it out the whole time. Clay had been too busy being grateful to notice.

The cop looked at the lunatic. Leaned close to the lunatic. Almost seemed to offer himself to the lunatic. 'Hey, buddy, how ya doin?' he murmured. 'I mean, what the haps?'

The lunatic lunged at the cop and put his hands on the cop's throat. The instant he did this, the cop slipped the muzzle of his gun into the hollow of the lunatic's temple and pulled the trigger. A great spray of blood leaped through the graying hair on the opposite side of the lunatic's head and he fell back to the sidewalk, throwing both arms out melodramatically: Look,Ma, I'm dead.

Clay looked at the little man with the mustache and the little man with the mustache looked at him. Then they looked back at the cop, who had holstered his weapon and was taking a leather case from the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. Clay was glad to see that the hand he used to do this was shaking a little. He was now frightened of the cop, but would have been more frightened still if the cop's hands had been steady. And what had just happened was no isolated case. The gunshot seemed to have done something to Clay's hearing, cleared a circuit in it or something. Now he could hear other gunshots, isolated cracks punctuating the escalating cacophony of the day.

The cop took a card—Clay thought it was a business card—from the slim leather case, then put the case back in his breast pocket. He held the card between the first two fingers of his left hand while his right hand once more dropped to the butt of his service weapon. Near his highly polished shoes, blood from the lunatic's shattered head was pooling on the sidewalk. Close by, Power Suit Woman lay in another pool of blood, which was now starting to congeal and turn a darker shade of red.

'What's your name, sir?' the cop asked Clay.

'Clayton Riddell.'

'Can you tell me who the president is?'

Clay told him.

'Sir, can you tell me today's date?'

'It's the first of October. Do you know what's—'

The cop looked at the little man with the mustache. 'Your name?'

'I'm Thomas McCourt, 140 Salem Street, Maiden. I—'

'Can you name the man who ran against the president in the last election?'

Tom McCourt did so.

'Who is Brad Pitt married to?'

McCourt threw up his hands. 'How should I know? Some movie star, I think.'

'Okay.' The cop handed Clay the card he'd been holding between his fingers. 'I'm Officer Ulrich Ashland. This is my card. You may be called on to testify about what just happened here, gentlemen. What happened was you needed assistance, I rendered it, I was attacked, I responded.'

'You wanted to kill him,' Clay said.

'Yes, sir, we're putting as many of them out of their misery as fast as we can,' Officer Ashland agreed. 'And if you tell any court or board of inquiry that I said that, I'll deny it. But it has to be done. These people are popping up everywhere. Some only commit suicide. Many others attack.' He hesitated, then added: 'So far as we can tell, all the others attack.' As if to underline this, there was another gunshot from across the street, a pause, then three more, in rapid succession, from the shadowed forecourt of the Four Seasons Hotel, which was now a tangle of broken glass, broken bodies, crashed vehicles, and spilled blood. 'It's like the fucking Night of the Living Dead.' Officer Ulrich Ashland started back toward Boylston Street with his hand still on the butt of his gun. 'Except these people aren't dead. Unless we help them, that is.'

'Rick!' It was a cop on the other side of the street, calling urgently. 'Rick, we gotta go to Logan! All units! Get over here!'

Officer Ashland checked for traffic, but there was none. Except for the wrecks, Boylston Street was momentarily deserted. From the surrounding area, however, came the sound of more explosions and automotive crashes. The smell of smoke was getting stronger. He started across the street, got halfway, then turned back. 'Get inside somewhere,' he said. 'Get under cover. You've been lucky once. You may not be lucky again.'

'Officer Ashland,' Clay said. 'Your guys don't use cell phones, do you?'

Ashland regarded him from the center of Boylston Street—not, in Clay's opinion, a safe place to be. He was thinking of the rogue Duck Boat. 'No, sir,' he said. 'We have radios in our cars. And these.' He patted the radio in his belt, hung opposite his holster. Clay, a comic-book fiend since he could read, thought briefly of Batman's marvelous utility belt.

'Don't use them,' Clay said. 'Tell the others. Don't use the cell phones.'

'Why do you say that?'

'Because they were.' He pointed to the dead woman and the unconscious girl. 'Just before they went crazy. And I'll bet you anything that the guy with the knife—'

'Rick!' the cop on the other side shouted again. 'Hurry the fuck up!'

'Get under cover,' Officer Ashland repeated, and trotted to the Four Seasons side of the street. Clay wished he could have repeated the thing about the cell phones, but on the whole he was just glad to see the cop out of harm's way. Not that he believed anyone in Boston really was, not this afternoon.

4

' What are you doing?' Clay asked Tom McCourt. 'Don't touch him, he might be, I don't know, contagious.'

'I'm not going to touch him,' Tom said, 'but I need my shoe.'

The shoe, lying near the splayed fingers of the lunatic's left hand, was at least away from the exit-spray of blood. Tom hooked his fingers delicately into the back and pulled it to him. Then he sat down on the curb of Boylston Street—right where the Mister Softee truck had been parked in what now seemed to Clay like another lifetime—and slipped his foot into it. 'The laces are broken,' he said. 'That damn nutball broke the laces.' And he started crying again.

'Do the best you can,' Clay said. He began working the butcher knife out of the portfolio. It had been slammed through with tremendous force, and he found he had to wiggle it up and down to free it. It came out