Cell

2

There was no gun in the first house he broke into, but there was a long-barreled flashlight, and he shone it on every straggling phoner he encountered, always asking the same question, trying simultaneously to throw it with his mind like a magic-lantern slide on a screen: Have you seen a boy? He got no answers and heard only fading fragments of thought in his head. At the second house there was a nice Dodge Ram in the driveway, but Clay didn't dare take it. If Johnny was on this road, he'd be walking. If Clay was driving, he might miss his boy even if he was driving slow. In the pantry he found a Daisy canned ham, which he unzipped with the attached key and munched as he hit the road again. He was about to throw the balance into the weeds after he'd eaten his fill when he saw an elderly phoner standing beside a mailbox, watching him with a sad and hungry eye. Clay held out the ham and the old man took it. Then, speaking slowly and clearly, trying to picture Johnny in his mind, Clay said: 'Have you seen a boy?'

The old man chewed ham. Swallowed. Appeared to consider. Said: 'Ganna the wishy.'

'The wishy,' Clay said. 'Right. Thanks.' He walked on.

In the third house, a mile or so farther south, he found a .30-30 in the basement, along with three boxes of shells. In the kitchen he found a cell phone sitting in its charging cradle on the counter. The charger was dead—of course—but when he pushed the button on the phone, it beeped and powered up immediately. He only got a single bar, but this didn't surprise him. The phoners' conversion-point had been at the edge of the grid.

He started for the door with the loaded rifle in one hand, the flashlight in the other, and the cell phone clipped to his belt when simple exhaustion overwhelmed him. He staggered sideways, as if struck by the head of a padded hammer. He wanted to go on, but such sense as his tired mind was able to muster told him he had to sleep now, and maybe sleep even made sense. If Johnny was out here, the chances were good he was sleeping, too.

'Switch over to the day shift, Clayton,' he muttered. 'You're not going to find jackshit in the middle of the night with a flashlight.'

It was a small house—the home of an elderly couple, he thought, judging by the pictures in the living room and the single bedroom and the rails surrounding the toilet in the single bathroom. The bed was neatly made. He lay down on it without opening the covers, only taking off his shoes. And once he was down, the exhaustion seemed to settle on him like a weight. He could not imagine getting up for anything. There was a smell in the room, some old woman's sachet, he thought. A grandmotherly smell. It seemed almost as tired as he felt. Lying here in this silence, the carnage at the Expo grounds seemed distant and unreal, like an idea for a comic he would never write. Too gruesome. Stick with Dark Wanderer, Sharon might have said—his old, sweet Sharon. Stick with your apocalypse cowboys.

His mind seemed to rise and float above his body. It returned—lazily, without hurry—to the three of them standing beside the Tyco Water Purification van, just before Tom and Jordan had climbed back aboard. Jordan had repeated what he'd said back at Gaiten, about how human brains were really just big old hard drives, and the Pulse had wiped them clean. Jordan said the Pulse had acted on human brains like an EMP

Nothing left but the core, Jordan had said. And the core was murder. But because brains are organic hard drives, they started to build themselves back up again. To reboot. Only there was a glitch in the signal-code. I don't have proof, but I'm positive that the flocking behavior, the telepathy, the levitation . . . all that came from the glitch. The glitch was there from the start, so it became part of the reboot. Are you following this?

Clay had nodded. Tom had, too. The boy looking at them, his blood-smeared face tired and earnest.

But meanwhile, the Pulse keeps on pulsing, right? Because somewhere there's a computer running on battery power, and it keeps running that program. The program's rotten, so the glitch in it continues to mutate. Eventually the signal may quit or the program may get so rotten it'll shut down. In the meantime, though . . . you might be able to use it. I say might, you got that? It all depends on whether or not brains do what seriously protected computers do when they're hit with an EMP.

Tom had asked what that was. And Jordan had given him a wan smile.

They save to system. All data. If that happens with people, and if you could wipe the phoner program, the old programming might eventually reboot.

'He meant the human programming,' Clay murmured in the dark bedroom, smelling that sweet, faint aroma of sachet. 'The human programming, saved somewhere way down deep. All of it.' He was going now, drifting off. If he was going to dream, he hoped it would not be of the carnage at the Northern Counties Expo.

His last thought before sleep took him was that maybe in the long run, the phoners would have been better. Yes, they had been born in violence and in horror, but birth was usually difficult, often violent, and sometimes horrible. Once they had begun flocking and mind-melding, the violence had subsided. So far as he knew, they hadn't actually made war on the normies, unless one considered forcible conversion an act of war; the reprisals following the destruction of their flocks had been gruesome but perfectly understandable. If left alone, they might eventually have turned out to be better custodians of the earth than the so-called normies. They certainly wouldn't have been falling all over themselves to buy gas-guzzling SUVs, not with their levitation skills (or with their rather primitive consumer appetites, for that matter). Hell, even their taste in music had been improving at the end.

But what choice did we have? Clay thought. Survival is like love. Both are blind.

Sleep took him then, and he didn't dream of the slaughter at the Expo. He dreamed he was in a bingo tent, and as the caller announced B-12—It's the sunshine vitamin! —he felt a tug on the leg of his pants. He looked under the table. Johnny was there, smiling up at him. And somewhere a phone was ringing.

3

Not all of the rage had gone out of the phoner refugees, nor had the wild talents entirely departed, either. Around noon of the next day, which was cold and raw, with a foretaste of November in the air, Clay stopped to watch two of them fighting furiously on the shoulder of the road. They punched, then clawed, then finally grappled together, butting heads and biting at each other's cheeks and necks. As they did, they began to rise slowly off the road. Clay watched, mouth hanging open, as they attained a height of approximately ten feet, still fighting, their feet apart and braced, as if standing on an invisible floor. Then one of them sank his teeth into the nose of his opponent, who was wearing a ragged, bloodstained T-shirt with the words HEAVY FUELprinted across the front. Nose-Biter pushed HEAVY FUELbackward. HEAVY FUELstaggered, then dropped like a rock down a well. Blood streamed upward from his ruptured nose as he fell. Nose-Biter looked down, seemed to realize for the first time that he was a second story's height above the road, and went down himself. Like Dumbo losing his magic feather, Clay thought. Nose-Biter wrenched his knee and lay in the dust, lips pulled back from his bloodstained teeth, snarling at Clay as he passed.

Yet these two were an exception. Most of the phoners Clay passed (he saw no normies at all that day or all the following week) seemed lost and bewildered with no flock mind to support them. Clay thought again and again of something Jordan had said before getting back in the van and heading into the north woods where there was no cell phone coverage: If the worm's continuing to mutate, their newest conversions aren't going to be either phoners or normies, not really.

Clay thought that meant like Pixie Dark, only a little further gone. Who are you? Who am I? He could see these questions in their eyes, and he suspected—no, he knew —it was these questions they were trying to ask when they spouted their gibberish.

He continued to ask Have you seen a boy and to try to send Johnny's picture, but