Cell

what they call them, flocks.) She doesnt look as bad as some but I know if I went out there she wouldnt even no me and would kill me soon as look at me. IF YOU SEE HER DON'T BE FOOLED, I'M SORRY BUT ITS TRUE.

We're going to Kashwak (its up north) tomorow or next day, Mitch's mom is here I could kill him I'm so ennveous. Daddy I know you dont have a cell phone and everyone knows about Kashwak how it's a safe place. If you get this note PLEASE COME GET ME.

I love you with all my Heart, Your Son, John Gavin Riddell

Even after the news about Sharon, Clay was doing all right until he got to I love you with all my Heart. Even then he might have been all right if not for that capital H. He kissed his twelve-year-old son's signature, looked at the bulletin board through eyes that had become untrustworthy– things doubled, tripled, then shivered completely apart—and let out a hoarse cry of pain. Tom and Jordan came running.

'What, Clay?' Tom said. 'What is it?' He saw the sheet of paper—a ruled yellow page from a legal pad— and slipped it out of Clay's hand. He and Jordan scanned it quickly.

'I'm going to Kashwak,' Clay said hoarsely.

'Clay, that's probably not such a hot idea,' Jordan said cautiously. 'Considering, you know, what we did at Gaiten Academy.'

'I don't care. I'm going to Kashwak. I'm going to find my son.'

6

The refugees who had taken shelter in the kent pond town hall had left plenty of supplies behind when they decamped, presumably en masse, for TR-90 and Kashwak. Clay, Tom, and Jordan made a meal of canned chicken salad on stale bread, with canned fruit salad for dessert.

As they were finishing, Tom leaned over to Jordan and murmured something. The boy nodded. The two of them got up. 'Would you excuse us for a few minutes, Clay? Jordan and I need to have a little talk.'

Clay nodded. While they were gone, he cracked another fruit salad cup and read Johnny's letter over for the ninth and tenth times. He was already well on the way to having it memorized. He could remember Alice's death just as clearly, but that now seemed to have happened in another life, and to a different version of Clayton Riddell. An earlier draft, as it were.

He finished his meal and stowed the letter away just as Tom and Jordan returned from the hall, where they had held what he supposed lawyers had called a sidebar, back in the days when there were lawyers. Tom once more had his arm around Jordan's narrow shoulders. Neither of them looked happy, but both looked composed.

'Clay,' Tom began, 'we've talked it over, and—'

'You don't want to go with me. Perfectly understandable.'

Jordan said, 'I know he's your son and all, but—'

'And you know he's all I've got left. His mother . . .' Clay laughed, a single humorless bark. 'His mother. Sharon. It's ironic, really. After all the worry I put in aboutJohnny getting a blast from that goddam little red rattlesnake. If I had to pick one, I would have picked her.' There, it was out. Like a chunk of meat that had been caught in his throat and was threatening to block his windpipe. 'And you know how that makes me feel? Like I offered to make a deal with the devil, and the devil actually came through for me.'

Tom ignored this. When he spoke, he did so carefully, as if he were afraid of setting Clay off like an unexploded land mine. 'They hate us. They started off hating everyone and progressed to just hating us. Whatever's going on up there in Kashwak, if it's their idea, it can't be good.'

'If they're rebooting to some higher level, they may get to a live-and-let-live plane,' Clay said. All of this was pointless, surely they both must see that. He had to go.

'I doubt it,' Jordan said. 'Remember that stuff about the chute leading to the slaughterhouse?'

'Clay, we're normies and that's strike one,' Tom said. 'We torched one of their flocks. That's strike two and strike three combined. Live and let live won't apply to us.'

'Why should it?' Jordan added. 'The Raggedy Man says we're insane.'

'And not to be touched,' Clay said. 'So I should be fine, right?'

After that there didn't seem to be any more to say.

7

Tom and jordan had decided to strike out due west, across new Hampshire and into Vermont, putting KASHWAK=NO-FOat their backs– and over the horizon—as soon as possible. Clay said that Route 11, which made an elbow-bend at Kent Pond, would serve them both as a starting-point. 'It'll take me north to 160,' he said, 'and you guys can follow it all the way to Laconia, in the middle of New Hampshire. It's not exactly a direct route, but what the hell—you don't exactly have a plane to catch, have you?'

Jordan dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbed them, then brushed the hair back from his forehead, a gesture Clay had come to know well—it signaled tiredness and distraction. He would miss it. He would miss Jordan. And Tom even more.

'I wish Alice was still here,' Jordan said. 'She'd talk you out of this.'

'She wouldn't,' Clay said. Still, he wished with all his heart that Alice could have had her chance. He wished with all his heart that Alice could have had her chance at a lot of things. Fifteen was no age at which to die.

'Your current plans remind me of act four in Julius Caesar, ' Tom said. 'In act five, everyone falls on their swords.' They were now making their way around (and sometimes over) the stalled cars jamming Pond Street. The emergency lights of the Town Hall were slowly receding behind them. Ahead was the dead traffic light marking the center of town, swaying in a slight breeze.

'Don't be such a fucking pessimist,' Clay said. He had promised himself not to become annoyed—he wouldn't part with his friends that way if he could possibly help it—but his resolve was being tried.

'Sorry I'm too tired to cheerlead,' Tom said. He stopped beside a road-sign reading JCT RT112 MI. 'and—may i be frank?—too heartsick at losing you.'

'Tom, I'm sorry.'

'If I thought there was one chance in five that you had a happy ending in store . . . hell, one in fifty . . . well, never mind.' Tom shone his flashlight at Jordan. 'What about you? Any final arguments against this madness?'

Jordan considered, then shook his head slowly. 'The Head told me something once,' he said. 'Do you want to hear it?'

Tom made an ironic little salute with his flashlight. The beam skipped off the marquee of the Ioka, which had been showing the new Tom Hanks picture, and the pharmacy next door. 'Have at it.'

'He said the mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.'

'Amen,' Clay said. He said it very softly.

They walked east on Market Street, which was also Route 19A, for two miles. After the first mile, the sidewalks ended and the farms began. At the end of the second there was another dead stoplight and a sign marking the Route 11 junction. There were three people sitting bundled up to the neck in sleeping bags at the crossroads. Clay recognized one of them as soon as he put the beam of his flashlight on him: an elderly gent with a long, intelligent face and graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. The Miami Dolphins cap the other man was wearing looked familiar, too. Then Tom put his beam on the woman next to Mr. Ponytail and said, 'You.'

Clay couldn't tell if she was wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt with cutoff sleeves, the sleeping bag was pulled up too high for that, but he knew there was one in the little pile of packs lying near the Route 11 sign if she wasn't. Just as he knew she was pregnant. He had dreamed of these two in the Whispering Pines Motel, two nights