Cell

'Jordan, you ready back there?'

'Yes!'

'What about you guys?' Clay asked.

'Just do it before I have a heart attack,' Tom said.

An image rose in Clay's mind, nightmarish in its clarity: Johnny-Gee lying almost directly beneath the place where the explosives-laden bus had come to rest. Lying on his back with his eyes open and his hands clasped on the chest of his Red Sox T-shirt, listening to the music while his mind rebuilt itself in some strange new way.

He swept it aside.

'Tony, Tony, come around,' he said for no reason whatever, and then pushed the button that called the cell phone in the back of the minibus.

There was time for him to count Mississippi ONE and Mississippi TWO before the entire world outside Kashwakamak Hall seemed to blow up, the roar swallowing Tomaso Albinoni's 'Adagio' in a hungry blast. All the small windows lining the flock side of the building blew in. Brilliant crimson light shone through the holes, then the entire south end of the building tore away in a hail of boards, glass, and swirling hay. The doors they were leaning against seemed to bend backward. Denise wrapped protective arms around her belly. From outside a terrible hurt screaming began. For a moment this sound ripped through Clay's head like the blade of a buzzsaw. Then it was gone. The screaming in his ears went on. It was the sound of people roasting in hell.

Something landed on the roof. It was heavy enough to make the whole building shudder. Clay pulled Denise to her feet. She looked at him wildly, as if no longer sure who he was. 'Come on!' He was shouting but could hardly hear his own voice. It seemed to be seeping through wads of cotton. 'Come on, let's get out!'

Tom was up. Dan made it halfway, fell back, tried again, and managed it the second time. He grabbed Tom's hand. Tom grabbed Denise's. Linked three-across, they shuffled to the gaping hole at the end of the Hall. There they found Jordan standing next to a litter of burning hay and staring out at what a single phone call had done.

15

The giant's foot that had seemed to stamp the roof of kashwakamak Hall had been a large chunk of schoolbus. The shingles were burning. Directly in front of them, beyond the little pile of blazing hay, were a pair of upside-down seats, also burning. Their steel frames had been shredded into spaghetti. Clothes floated out of the sky like big snow: shirts, hats, pants, shorts, an athletic supporter, a blazing bra. Clay saw that the hay insulation piled along the bottom of the hall was going to be a moat of fire before very long; they were getting out just in time.

Patches of fire dotted the mall area where concerts, outdoor dances, and various competitions had been held, but the chunks of the exploding bus had swept farther than that. Clay saw flames burning high in trees that had to be at least three hundred yards away. Dead south of their position, the funhouse had started to burn and he could see something—he thought it was probably a human torso—blazing halfway up the strutwork of the Parachute Drop.

The flock itself had become a raw meatloaf of dead and dying phoners. Their telepathy had broken down (although little currents of that strange psychic force occasionally tugged at him, making his hair rise and his flesh crawl), but the survivors could still scream, and they filled the night with their cries. Clay would have gone ahead even if he'd been able to imagine how bad it was going to be—even in the first few seconds he made no effort to mislead himself on that score—but this was beyond imagining.

The firelight was just enough to show them more than they wanted to see. The mutilations and decapitations were bad—the pools of blood, the littered limbs—but the scattered clothes and shoes with nobody inside them were somehow worse, as if the explosion had been fierce enough to actually vaporize part of the flock. A man walked toward them with his hands to his throat in an effort to stem the flow of blood pouring over and between his fingers—it looked orange in the growing glow of the Hall's burning roof—while his intestines swung back and forth at the level of his crotch. More wet loops came sliding out as he walked past them, his eyes wide and unseeing.

Jordan was saying something. Clay couldn't hear it over the screams, the wails, and the growing crackle of fire from behind him, so he leaned closer.

'We had to do it, it was all we could do,' Jordan said. He looked at a headless woman, a legless man, at something so torn open it had become a flesh canoe filled with blood. Beyond it, two more bus seats lay on a pair of burning women who had died in each other's arms. 'We had to do it, it was all we could do. We had to do it, it was all we could do.'

'That's right, honey, put your face against me and walk like that,' Clay said, and Jordan immediately buried his face in Clay's side. Walking that way was uncomfortable, but it could be done.

They skirted the edge of the flock's campground, moving toward the back of what would have been a completed midway and amusement arcade if the Pulse hadn't intervened. As they went, Kashwakamak Hall burned brighter, casting more light on the mall. Dark shapes—many naked or almost naked, the clothes blown right off them—staggered and shambled. Clay had no idea how many. The few that passed close by their little group showed no interest in them; they either continued on toward the midway area or plunged into the woods west of the Expo grounds, where Clay was quite sure they would die of exposure unless they could reestablish some sort of flock consciousness. He didn't think they could. Partly because of the virus, but mostly because of Jordan's decision to drive the bus right into the middle of them and achieve a maximum kill-zone, as they had with the propane trucks.

If they'd ever known snuffing one old man could lead to this . . . Clay thought, and then he thought, But how could they?

They reached the dirt lot where the carnies had parked their trucks and campers. Here the ground was thick with snaking electrical cables, and the spaces between the campers were filled with the accessories of families who lived on the road: barbecues, gas grills, lawn chairs, a hammock, a little laundry whirligig with clothes that had probably been hanging there for almost two weeks.

'Let's find something with the keys in it and get the hell out of here,' Dan said. 'They cleared the feeder road, and if we're careful I bet we can go north on 160 as far as we want.' He pointed. 'Up there it's just about all no-fo.'

Clay had spotted a panel truck with lem's painting and plumbing on the back. He tried the doors and they opened. The inside was filled with milk-crates, most crammed with various plumbing supplies, but in one he found what he wanted: paint in spray-cans. He took four of these after checking to make sure they were full or almost full.

'What are those for?' Tom asked.

'Tell you later,' Clay said.

'Let's get out of here, please, ' Denise said. 'I can't stand this. My pants are soaked with blood.' She began to cry.

They came onto the midway between the Krazy Kups and a half-constructed kiddie ride called Charlie the Choo-Choo. 'Look,' Tom said, pointing.

'Oh . . . my . . . God,' Dan said softly.

Lying draped across the peak of the train ride's ticket booth was the remains of a charred and smoking red sweatshirt—the kind sometimes called a hoodie. A large splotch of blood matted the front around a hole probably made by a chunk of flying schoolbus. Before the blood took over, covering the rest, Clay could make out three letters, the Raggedy Man's last laugh: HAR.

16

' There's nobody in the fucking thing, and judging by the size of the hole, he had open-heart surgery without benefit of anesthetic,' Denise said, 'so when you're tired of looking—'

'There's another little parking lot down at the south end of the midway,' Tom said. 'Nice-looking cars in