Cell

Come, and you can speak to your loved ones.

Come. Yes. Bottom line. And once you got close enough, any choice ceased. That telepathy and the dream of safety just took you over. You lined up. You listened as the Raggedy Man told you to keep it moving, everyone gets to call a loved one but we've got a lot of you to process before the sun goes down and we crank up Bette Midler singing 'The Wind Beneath My Wings.'

And how could they continue doing this, even though the lights had failed and the cities had burned and civilization had slid into a pit of blood? How could they go on replacing the millions of phoners lost in the original convulsion and in the destruction of the flocks that had followed? They could continue because the Pulse wasn't over. Somewhere—in that outlaw lab or nutcase's garage—some gadget was still running on batteries, some modem was still putting out its squealing, insane signal. Sending it up to the satellites that flew around the globe or to the microwave relay towers that cinched it like a steel belt. And where could you call and be sure your call would still go through, even if the voice answering was only on a battery-powered answering machine?

911, apparently.

And that had almost certainly happened to Johnny-Gee.

He knew it had. He was already too late.

So why was he still walking north through the drizzling dark? Up ahead was Newfield, not far, and there he'd leave Route 11 for Route 160, and he had an idea that not too far up Route 160 his days of reading road-signs (or anything else) would be done, so why!

But he knew why, just as he knew that distant crash and the short, faint blare of horn he heard ahead of him in the rainy darkness meant that one of the racing sprinters had come to grief. He was going on because of the note on the storm door, held by less than a quarter-inch of tape when he'd rescued it; all the rest had pulled free. He was going on because of the second one he'd found on the Town Hall bulletin board, half-hidden by Iris Nolan's hopeful note to her sister. His son had written the same thing both times, in capital letters: PLEASE COME GET ME.

If he was too late to get Johnny, he might not be too late to see him and tell him he'd tried. He might be able to hold on to enough of himself long enough to do that even if they made him use one of the cell phones.

As for the platforms, and the thousands of watching people—

'There's no football stadium in Kashwak,' he said.

In his mind, Jordan whispered: It's a virtual stadium.

Clay pushed it aside. Pushed it away. He had made his decision. It was madness, of course, but it was a mad world now, and that put him in perfect sync.

4

At quarter to three that morning, footsore and damp in spite of the hooded parka he had liberated from the caretaker's cottage in Springvale, Clay came to the intersection of Routes 11 and 160. There had been a major pileup at the crossroads, and the Corvette that had gone racing past him in North Shapleigh was now part of it. The driver hung out the severely compressed window on the left side, head down and arms dangling, and when Clay tried to lift the man's face to see if he was still alive, the top half of his body fell into the road, trailing a meaty coil of guts behind. Clay reeled away to a telephone pole, planted his suddenly hot forehead against the wood, and vomited until there was nothing left.

On the other side of the intersection, where 160 took off into the north country, stood the Newfield Trading Post. A sign in the window promised CANDIES NATIVE SIRUP INDIAN CRAFTS 'NICK-NACKS.' It looked as if it had been trashed as well as looted, but it was shelter from the rain and away from the casual, unexpected horror he had just encountered. Clay went in and sat down with his head lowered until he no longer felt like fainting. There were bodies, he could smell them, but someone had thrown a tarp over all but two, and at least those two weren't in pieces. The joint's beer cooler was smashed and empty, the Coke machine only smashed. He took a ginger ale and drank it in long, slow swallows, pausing to belch. After a while he began to feel a little better.

He missed his friends desperately. The unfortunate out there and whomever he'd been racing were the only sprinters he'd seen all night, and he'd encountered no groups of walking refugees at all. He'd spent the entire night with only his thoughts for company. Maybe the weather was keeping the walkers inside, or maybe now they were traveling days. No reason for them not to, if the phoners had switched from murder to conversion.

He realized he hadn't heard any of what Alice had called flockmusic tonight. Maybe all the flocks were south of here, except for the big one (he assumed it must be a big one) administering the Kashwak Konversions. Clay didn't much care; even alone as he was, he would still take his vacation from 'I Hope You Dance' and 'The Theme from A Summer Place' as a little gift.

He decided to walk another hour at most, then find a hole to crawl into. The cold rain was killing him. He left the Newfield Trading Post, resolutely not looking at the crashed Corvette or the soaked remains lying beside it.

5

He ended up walking until nearly daylight, partly because the rain let up but mostly because there wasn't much in the way of shelter on Route 160, just woods. Then, around four thirty, he passed a bullet-pocked sign reading ENTERING GURLEYVILLE, AN UNINCORPORATED TOWNSHIP. Ten minutes or so after that he passed Gurleyville's raison d'кtre, such as it was—the Gurleyville Quarry, a huge rock pit with a few sheds, dump trucks, and a garage at the foot of its gouged granite walls. Clay thought briefly about spending the night in one of the equipment sheds, decided he could do better, and pushed on. He had still seen no pilgrims and heard no flockmusic, even at a distance. He could have been the last person on earth.

He wasn't. Ten minutes or so after leaving the quarry behind, he topped a hill and saw a little village below. The first building he came to was the Gurleyville Volunteer Fire Department (don't forget the haloween blood drive read the notice board out front; it seemed that no one north of Springvale could spell), and two of the phone-people were standing in the parking lot, facing each other in front of a sad-looking old pumper that might have been new around the time the Korean War ended.

They turned slowly toward Clay when he put his flashlight beam on them, but then they turned away to regard each other again. Both were male, one about twenty-five and the other maybe twice that. There was no doubt they were phoners. Their clothes were filthy and almost falling off. Their faces were cut and scraped. The younger man looked as if he had sustained a serious burn all the way up one arm. The older man's left eye glittered from deep inside folds of badly swollen and probably infected flesh. But how they looked wasn't the main thing. The main thing was what Clay felt in himself: that same weird shortness of breath he and Tom had experienced in the office of the Gaiten Citgo, where they'd gone to get the keys to the propane trucks. That sense of some powerful gathering force.

And it was night. With the heavy cloud cover, dawn was still just a rumor. What were these guys doing up at night}

Clay snapped off his flashlight, drew the Nickerson .45, and watched to see if anything would happen. For several seconds he thought nothing would, that the strange out-of-breath feeling, that sense of something being on the verge of happening, was going to be the extent of it. Then he heard a high whining sound, almost like someone vibrating the blade of a saw between his palms. Clay looked up and saw the electrical wires passing in front of the fire station were moving rapidly back and forth, almost too fast to see.

' Go–way !' It was the young man, and he seemed to jerk the words out with a tremendous effort. Clay jumped. If his finger had been on the revolver's trigger, he would almost certainly have pulled it. This wasn't Aw and Eeen, this was actual words. He thought he heard them in his head as well, but faint, faint. Only a dying echo.

'You!. . . Go!' the older man replied. He was wearing baggy Bermuda shorts with a huge brown stain on the seat. It might have been mud or shit. He spoke with equal effort, but this time Clay heard no echo in his head. Paradoxically, it made him more sure he'd heard the first one.

They'd forgotten him entirely. Of that much he was sure.