Cell

So whatever had happened to George must have happened after Johnny taped that note to the storm door and the three of them left the Riddell house. And since only George had been in those bloody leaves, Clay could assume Johnny and Mitch had gotten off Livery Lane alive.

Of course assume makes an ass out of you and me, he thought. The gospel according to Alice Maxwell, may she rest in peace.

And it was true. George's killer might have chased them and gotten them somewhere else. On Main Street, or Dugway Street, maybe neighboring Laurel Way. Stabbed them with a Swedish butcher knife or a couple of car aerials . . .

They had reached the edge of the Town Hall parking lot. On their left was a pickup truck that had tried to reach it overland and wound up mired in a boggy ditch less than five yards from an acre of civilized (and largely deserted) asphalt. On their right was a woman with her throat torn out and her features pecked away to black holes and bloody ribbons by the birds. She was still wearing her Portland Sea Dogs baseball cap, and her purse was still over her arm.

Killers weren't interested in money anymore.

Tom put a hand on his shoulder, startling him. 'Stop thinking about what might have happened.'

'How did you know—'

'It doesn't take a mind reader. If you find your son—you probably won't, but if you do—I'm sure he'll tell you the whole story. Otherwise . . . does it matter?'

'No. Of course not. But Tom . . . I knew George Gendron. The kids used to call him Connecticut sometimes, because his family moved from there. He ate hot dogs and hamburgers in our backyard. His dad used to come over and watch the Patriots with me.'

'I know,' Tom said. 'I know.' And, to Jordan, sharply: 'Stop looking at her, Jordan, she's not going to get up and walk.'

Jordan ignored him and kept staring at the crow-picked corpse in the Sea Dogs hat. 'The phoners started trying to take care of their own as soon as they got back some base-level programming,' he said. 'Even if it was only fishing them out from under the bleachers and throwing them into the marsh, they tried to do something. But they don't take care of ours. They leave ours to rot where they fell.' He turned to face Clay and Tom. 'No matter what they say or what they promise, we can't trust them,' he said fiercely. 'We can't, okay?'

'I'm totally down with that,' Tom said.

Clay nodded. 'Me too.'

Tom tipped his head toward the Town Hall, where a few emergency lights with long-life batteries still shone, casting a sickly yellow glow on the employees' cars, which now stood in drifts of leaves. 'Let's go in there and see what they left behind.'

'Yes, let's do it,' Clay said. Johnny would be gone, he had no doubt of that, but some small part of him, some small, childish, never-say-die part, still continued to hope that he would hear a cry of 'Daddy!' and his son would spring into his arms, a living thing, real weight in the midst of this nightmare.

4

They knew for sure the town hall was deserted when they saw what had been painted across the double doors. In the fading glow of the battery-powered emergency lights, the large, sloppy strokes of red paint looked like more dried blood:

KASHWAK=N0-F0

'How far away is this Kashwak place?' Tom asked.

Clay thought about it. 'I'd say eighty miles, almost due north. You'd take Route 160 most of the way, but once you get on the TR, I don't know.'

Jordan asked, 'What exactly is a TR?'

'TR-90's an unincorporated township. There are a couple of little villages, some quarries, and a two-bit Micmac rez up north, but mostly it's just woods, bear, and deer.' Clay tried the door and it opened to his hand. 'I'm going to check this place out. You guys really don't have to come if you don't want to—you can be excused.'

'No, we'll come,' Tom said. 'Won't we, Jordan?'

'Sure.' Jordan sighed like a boy confronted with what may be a difficult chore. Then he smiled. 'Hey, electric lights. Who knows when we'll get to see them again.'

5

No Johnny Riddell came hurtling out of a dark room to throw himself into his father's arms, but the Town Hall was still redolent of the cooking that had been done on gas grills and hibachis by the people who'd gathered here following the Pulse. Outside the big main room, on the long bulletin board where notices of town business and upcoming events usually hung, perhaps two hundred notes had been posted. Clay, so tense he was nearly panting, began to study these with the intensity of a scholar who believes he may have found the lost Gospel of Mary Magdalene. He was afraid of what he might find and terrified of what he might not. Tom and Jordan retreated tactfully to the main meeting room, which was still littered with the remains of the refugees who had apparently spent several nights here, waiting for a rescue that had never come.

In the posted notes, Clay saw the survivors had come to believe that they could hope for more than rescue. They believed that salvation awaited them in Kashwak. Why that particular townlet, when probably all of TR-90 (certainly the northern and western quadrants) was dead to cell phone transmission and reception? The notes on the bulletin board weren't clear on that. Most seemed to assume that any readers would understand without needing to be told; it was a case of 'everybody knows, everybody goes.' And even the clearest of the correspondents had obviously been struggling to keep terror and elation balanced and under control; most messages amounted to little more than follow the Yellow Brick Road to Kashwak and salvation as soon as you can.

Three-quarters of the way down the board, half-hidden by a note from Iris Nolan, a lady Clay knew quite well (she volunteered at the tiny town library), he saw a sheet with his son's familiar, looping scrawl and thought, Oh, dear God, thank you. Thank you so much. He pulled it off the board, being careful not to tear it.

This note was dated: Oct 3. Clay tried to remember where he had been on the night of October 3 and couldn't quite do it. Had it been the barn in North Reading, or the Sweet Valley Inn, near Methuen? He thought the barn, but he couldn't be absolutely certain—it all ran together and if he thought too hard about it, it began to seem that the man with the flashlights on the sides of his head had also been the young man jabbing the car aerials, that Mr. Ricardi had killed himself by gobbling broken glass instead of hanging himself, and it had been Alice in Tom's garden, eating cucumbers and tomatoes.

'Stop it,' he whispered, and focused on the note. It was better spelled and a little better composed, but there was no mistaking the agony in it.

Oct 3 Dear Dad,

I hope you are alive & get this. Me & Mitch made it okay but Hughie Darden got George, I think he killed him. Me & Mitch just outran faster.

I felt like it was my fault but Mitch, he said how could you know he was just a Phoner like the others its not your fault.

Daddy there is worse. Mom is one of them, I saw her with one of the 'flocks' today. (That is