Cell

before Alice had been killed. He had dreamed of them in the long field, under the lights, standing on the platforms.

The man with the gray hair stood up, letting his sleeping bag slither down his body. There were rifles with their gear, but he raised his hands to show they were empty. The woman did the same, and when the sleeping bag dropped to her feet, there was no doubt about her pregnancy. The guy in the Dolphins cap was tall and about forty. He also raised his hands.

The three of them stood that way for a few seconds in the beams of the flashlights, and then the gray- haired man took a pair of black-rimmed spectacles from the breast pocket of his wrinkled shirt and put them on. His breath puffed out white in the chilly night air, rising to the Route 11 sign, where arrows pointed both west and north.

'Well, well,' he said. 'The President of Harvard said you'd probably come this way, and here you are. Smart fellow, the President of Harvard, although a trifle young for the job, and in my opinion he could use some plastic surgery before going out to meet with potential big-ticket donors.'

'Who are you?' Clay asked.

'Get that light out of my face, young man, and I'll be happy to tell you.'

Tom and Jordan lowered their flashlights. Clay also lowered his, but kept one hand on the butt of Beth Nickerson's .45.

'I'm Daniel Hartwick, of Haverhill, Mass,' the gray-haired man said. 'The young lady is Denise Link, also of Haverhill. The gentleman on her right is Ray Huizenga, of Groveland, a neighboring town.'

'Meetcha,' Ray Huizenga said. He made a little bow that was funny, charming, and awkward. Clay let his hand fall off the butt of his gun.

'But our names don't actually matter anymore,' Daniel Hartwick said. 'What matters is what we are, at least as far as the phoners are concerned.' He looked at them gravely. 'We are insane. Like you.'

8

Denise and ray rustled a small meal over a propane cooker ('These canned sausages don't taste too bad if you boil em up ha'aad,' Ray said) while they talked—while Dan talked, mostly. He began by telling them it was twenty past two in the morning, and at three he intended to have his 'brave little band' back on the road. He said he wanted to make as many miles as possible before daylight, when the phoners started moving around.

'Because they do not come out at night,' he said. 'We have that much going for us. Later, when their programming is complete, or nears completion, they may be able to, but—'

'You agree that's what's happening?' Jordan asked. For the first time since Alice had died, he looked engaged. He grasped Dan's arm. 'You agree that they're rebooting, like computers whose hard drives have been —'

'—wiped, yes, yes,' Dan said, as if this were the most elementary thing in the world.

'Are you—were you—a scientist of some sort?' Tom asked.

Dan gave him a smile. 'I was the entire sociology department at Haverhill Arts and Technical,' he said. 'If the President of Harvard has a worst nightmare, that would be me.'

Dan Hartwick, Denise Link, and Ray Huizenga had destroyed not just one flock but two. The first, in the back lot of a Haverhill auto junkyard, they had stumbled on by accident, when there had been half a dozen in their group and they were trying to find a way out of the city. That had been two days after the onset of the Pulse, when the phone-people had still been the phone-crazies, confused and as apt to kill each other as any wandering normies they encountered. That first had been a small flock, only about seventy-five, and they had used gasoline.

'The second time, in Nashua, we used dynamite from a construction-site shed,' Denise said. 'We'd lost Charlie, Ralph, and Arthur by then. Ralph and Arthur just took off on their own. Charlie—poor old Charlie had a heart attack. Anyhow, Ray knew how to rig the dynamite, from when he worked on a road crew.'

Ray, hunkered over his cooker and stirring the beans next to the sausages, raised his free hand and gave it a flip.

'After that,' Dan Hartwick said, 'we began to see those Kashwak No-Fo signs. Sounded good to us, didn't it, Denni?'

'Yep,' Denise said. 'Olly-olly-in-for-free. We were headed north, same as you, and when we started seeing those signs, we headed north faster. I was the only one who didn't absolutely love the idea, because I lost my husband during the Pulse. Those fucks are the reason my kid's going to grow up not knowing his daddy.' She saw Clay wince and said, 'Sorry. We know your boy's gone to Kashwak.'

Clay gaped.

'Oh yes,' Dan said, taking a plate as Ray began passing them around. 'The President of Harvard knows all, sees all, has dossiers on all. . . or so he'd like us to believe.' He gave Jordan a wink, and Jordan actually grinned.

'Dan talked me around,' Denise said. 'Some terrorist group—or maybe just a couple of inspired nutcases working in a garage—set this thing off, but no one had any idea it would lead to this. The phoners are just playing out their part in it. They weren't responsible when they were insane, and they aren't really responsible now, because—'

'Because they're in the grip of some group imperative,' Tom said. 'Like migration.'

'It's a group imperative, but it ain't migration,' Ray said, sitting down with his own plate. 'Dan says it's pure survival. I think he's right. Whatever it is, we gotta find a place to get in out of the rain. You know?'

'The dreams started coming after we burned the first flock,' Dan said. 'Powerful dreams. Ecce homo, insanus —very Harvard. Then, after we bombed the Nashua flock, the President of Harvard showed up in person with about five hundred of his closest friends.' He ate in quick, neat bites.

'And left a lot of melted boomboxes on your doorstep,' Clay said.

'Some were melted,' Denise said. 'Mostly what we got were bits and pieces.' She smiled. It was a thin smile. 'That was okay. Their taste in music sucks.'

'You call him the President of Harvard, we call him the Raggedy Man,' Tom said. He had set his plate aside and opened his pack. He rummaged and brought out the drawing Clay had made on the day the Head had been forced to kill himself. Denise's eyes got round. She passed the drawing to Ray Huizenga, who whistled.

Dan took it last and looked up at Tom with new respect. 'You drew this?'

Tom pointed to Clay.

'You're very talented,' Dan said.

'I took a course once,' Clay said. 'Draw Fluffy.' He turned to Tom, who also kept their maps in his pack. 'How far is it between Gaiten and Nashua?'

'Thirty miles, tops.'

Clay nodded and turned back to Dan Hartwick. 'And did he speak to you? The guy in the red hoodie?'

Dan looked at Denise and she looked away. Ray turned back to his little cooker—presumably to shut it down and pack it up—and Clay understood. 'Which one of you did he speak through?'

'Me,' Dan said. 'It was horrible. Have you experienced it?'

'Yeah. You can stop it from happening, but not if you want to know what's on his mind. Does he do it to show how strong he is, do you think?'

'Probably,' Dan said, 'but I don't think that's all. I don't think they can talk. They can vocalize, and I'm sure they think—although not as they did, it would be a terrible mistake to think of them as having human thoughts—but I don't think they can actually speak words.'

'Yet,' Jordan said.

'Yet,' Dan agreed. He glanced at his watch, and that prompted Clay to look at his own. It was already quarter to three.

'He told us to go north,' Ray said. 'He told us Kashwak No-Fo. He said our flock-burnin days were over because they were settin up guards—'

'Yes, we saw some in Rochester,' Tom said.