Cell

too. He remembered how, in the bingo tents of his childhood, the man with the microphone would invariably exclaim It's the sunshine vitamin! when he pulled B-12 out of the hopper with the dancing Ping-Pong balls inside. Even though the sunshine vitamin was D.

The time now gave itself up in what seemed quarter-inches, and Clay began losing hope. If they were going to hear the sound of the bus's engine, they should have heard it by now.

'It's gone wrong somehow,' Tom said in a low voice.

'Maybe not,' Clay said. He tried to keep his heart's heaviness out of his voice.

'No, Tommy's right,' Denise said. She was on the verge of tears. 'I love him to death, and he was ballsier than Lord Satan on his first night in hell, but if he was coming, he'd be on his way by now.'

Dan's take was surprisingly positive. 'We don't know what he might have run into. Just take a deep breath and try to put your imaginations on hold.'

Clay tried that and failed. Now the seconds dripped by. Schubert's 'Ave Maria' boomed through the big concert speakers. He thought, Iwould sell my soul for some honest rock and roll —Chuck Berry doing 'Oh, Carol,' U2 doing 'When Love Comes to Town' . . .

Outside, nothing but dark, and stars, and that one tiny red battery-driven light.

'Boost me up over there,' Tom said, hopping down from the snack machine. 'I'll squeeze through that window somehow and see if I can't go get him.'

Clay began, 'Tom, if I was wrong about there being explosives in the back of the bus—'

'Fuck the back of the bus and fuck the explosives!' Tom said, distraught. 'I just want to find Jor—'

'Hey!' Dan shouted, and then: 'Hey, all right! BABY-NOW!' He slammed one fist against the wall beside the window.

Clay turned and saw headlights had bloomed in the dark. A mist had begun to rise from the blanket of comatose bodies on the acres of mall, and the bus's headlights seemed to be shining through smoke. They flicked bright, then dim, then bright again, and Clay could see Jordan with brilliant clarity, sitting in the driver's seat of the minibus and trying to figure out which controls did which.

Now the headlights began to creep forward. High beams.

'Yeah, honey,' Denise breathed. 'Do it, my sweetheart.' Standing on her crate, she grabbed Dan's hand on one side and Clay's on the other. 'You're beautiful, just keep on coming.'

The headlights jogged away from them, now illuminating the trees far to the left of the open space with its carpet of phoners.

'What's he doing?' Tom almost moaned.

'That's where the side of the funhouse takes a jog,' Clay said. 'It's all right.' He hesitated. 'I think it's all right.' If his foot doesn't slip. If he doesn'tmix up the brake and the accelerator, run the bus into the side of the damn funhouse, and stick it there.

They waited, and the headlights swung back, spearing the side of Kashwakamak Hall on the dead level. And in the glare of the high beams, Clay saw why it had taken Jordan so long. Not all of the phoners were down. Dozens of them—the ones with bad programming, he assumed—were up and moving. They walked aimlessly toward any and every point of the compass, black silhouettes moving outward in expanding ripples, struggling to make their way over the bodies of the sleepers, stumbling, falling, getting up and walking on again while Schubert's 'Ave' filled the night. One of them, a young man with a long red gash running across the middle of his forehead like a worry line, reached the Hall and felt his way along the side like a blind man.

'That's far enough, Jordan,' Clay murmured as the headlights neared the speaker-standards on the far side of the open area. 'Park it and get your ass back here.'

It seemed that Jordan heard him. The headlights came to a stop. For a moment the only things moving out there were the restless shapes of the wakeful phoners and the mist rising from the warm bodies of the others. Then they heard the bus's engine rev—even over the music they heard it—and the headlights leaped forward. 'No, Jordan, what are you doing?' Tom screamed.

Denise recoiled and would have tumbled off her crate if Clay hadn't caught her around the waist.

The bus jounced into the sleeping flock. Onto the sleeping flock. The headlights began to pogo up and down, now pointing at them, now lifting briefly upward, now coming back to dead level again. The bus slewed left, came back on course, then slewed right. For a moment one of the night-walkers was illuminated in its four glaring high beams as clearly as something cut from black construction paper. Clay saw the phoner's arms go up, as if it wanted to signal a successful field goal, and then it was borne under the bus's charging grille.

Jordan drove the bus into the middle of them and there it stopped, headlights glaring, grille dripping. By raising a hand to block the worst of the shine, Clay was able to see a small dark form—distinguishable from the rest by its agility and purpose—emerge from the side door of the bus and begin making its way toward Kashwakamak Hall. Then Jordan fell and Clay thought he was gone. A moment later Dan rapped, 'There he is, there!' and Clay picked him up again, ten yards closer and considerably to the left of where he'd lost sight of the kid. Jordan must have crawled for some distance over the sleeping bodies before trying his feet again.

When Jordan came back into the hazy cone of radiance thrown by the bus's headlights, tacked to the end of a forty-foot shadow, they could see him clearly for the first time. Not his face, because of the backlighting, but the crazy-graceful way he was running over the bodies of the phoners. The ones who were down were still dead to the world. The ones who were awake but not close to Jordan paid no attention. Several of those who were close, however, made grabs at him. Jordan dodged two of these, but the third, a woman, got him by the tangled mop of his hair.

'Let him alone!' Clay roared. He couldn't see her, but he was insanely positive it was the woman who had once been his wife. 'Let him go!'

She didn't, but Jordan grabbed her wrist, twisted it, went to one knee, and scrambled past. The woman made another grab, just missed the back of his shirt, and then tottered off in her own direction.

Many of the infected phoners, Clay saw, were gathering around the bus. The headlights seemed to be drawing them.

Clay leaped off the snack machine (this time it was Dan Hartwick who saved Denise from a tumble) and grabbed the crowbar. He leaped back up and smashed out the window he'd been looking through.

'Jordan!' he bawled. 'Around back! Get around back!'

Jordan looked up at the sound of Clay's voice and tripped over something—a leg, an arm, maybe a neck. As he was getting back up, a hand came out of the breathing darkness and clutched the kid's throat.

'Please God, no,' Tom whispered.

Jordan lunged forward like a fullback trying for a first down, pistoning with his legs, and broke the hand's grip. He stumbled onward. Clay could see his staring eyes and the way his chest was heaving. As he neared the hall, Clay could hear Jordan's sobbing gasps for air.

Never make it, he thought. Never. And he's so close now, so close.

But Jordan did make it. The two phoners currently staggering along the side of the building showed no interest in him at all as he lunged past them and around to the far side. The four of them were off the snack machine at once and racing across the hall like a relay team, Denise and her belly in the lead.

'Jordan!' she cried, bouncing up and down on her toe-tips. 'Jordan, Jordy, are you there? For chrissake, kid, tell us you're there!'

'I'm'—he tore a great gasp of breath out of the air—'here.' Another whooping gasp. Clay was distantly aware of Tom laughing and pounding him on the back. 'Never knew'—Whooo-oooop! —'running over people was so . . . hard.'

'What did you think you were doing?' Clay shouted. It was killing him not to be able to grab the kid, first to embrace him, then shake him, then kiss him all over his stupid brave face. Killing him to not even be able to see