Cell

  The man in the shredded shirt and tie--he was getting a bit jowly in the cheek and heavy in the neck, as if his personal equation of good meals and good exercise had stopped balancing about two years ago--abruptly ceased his nonsense peroration. His face took on a look of vacuous perplexity that stopped short of surprise, let alone amazement.

  What Clay felt was a species of dismal outrage. That blade had gone through all of his Dark Wanderer pictures (to him they were always pictures, never drawings or illustrations), and it seemed to him that the thuck sound might as well have been the blade penetrating a special chamber of his heart. That was stupid when he had repros of everything, including the four color splash-pages, but it didn't change how he felt. The madman's blade had skewered Sorcerer John (named after his own son, of course), the Wizard Flak, Frank and the Posse Boys, Sleepy Gene, Poison Sally, Lily Astolet, Blue Witch, and of course Ray Damon, the Dark Wanderer himself. His own fantastic creatures, living in the cave of his imagination and poised to set him free from the drudgery of teaching art in a dozen rural Maine schools, driving thousands of miles a month and practically living out of his car.

  He could swear he had heard them moan when the madman's Swedish blade pierced them where they slept in their innocency.

  Furious, not caring about the blade (at least for the moment), he drove the man in the shredded shirt rapidly backward, using the portfolio as a kind of shield, growing angrier as it bent into a wide V-shape around the knife-blade.

  "Blet!" the lunatic hollered, and tried to pull his blade back. It was caught too firmly for him to do so. "Blet ky-yam doe-ram kazzalah a-babbalah!"

  "I'll a-babbalah your a-kazzalah, you fuck!" Clay shouted, and planted his left foot behind the lunatic's backpedaling legs. It would occur to him later that the body knows how to fight when it has to. That it's a secret the body keeps, just as it does the secrets of how to run or jump a creek or throw a fuck or--quite likely--die when there's no other choice. That under conditions of extreme stress it simply takes over and does what needs doing while the brain stands off to one side, unable to do anything but whistle and tap its foot and look up at the sky. Or contemplate the sound a knife makes going through the portfolio your wife gave you for your twenty-eighth birthday, for that matter.

  The lunatic tripped over Clay's foot just as Clay's wise body meant him to do and fell to the sidewalk on his back. Clay stood over him, panting, with the portfolio still held in both hands like a shield bent in battle. The butcher knife still stuck out of it, handle from one side, blade from the other.

  The lunatic tried to get up. Clay's new friend scurried forward and kicked him in the neck, quite hard. The little fellow was weeping loudly, the tears gushing down his cheeks and fogging the lenses of his spectacles. The lunatic fell back on the sidewalk with his tongue sticking out of his mouth. Around it he made choking sounds that sounded to Clay like his former speaking-in-tongues babble.

  "He tried to kill us!" the little man wept. "He tried to kill us!"

  "Yes, yes," Clay said. He was aware that he had once said yes, yes to Johnny in exactly the same way back when they'd still called him Johnny-Gee and he'd come to them up the front walk with his scraped shins or elbows, wailing I got BLOOD!

  The man on the sidewalk (who had plenty of blood) was on his elbows, trying to get up again. Clay did the honors this time, kicking one of the guy's elbows out from under him and putting him back down on the pavement. This kicking seemed like a stopgap solution at best, and a messy one. Clay grabbed the handle of the knife, winced at the slimy feel of half-jellied blood on the handle--it was like rubbing a palm through cold bacon-grease--and pulled. The knife came a little bit, then either stopped or his hand slipped. He fancied he heard his characters murmuring unhappily from the darkness of the portfolio, and he made a painful noise himself. He couldn't help it. And he couldn't help wondering what he meant to do with the knife if he got it out. Stab the lunatic to death with it? He thought he could have done that in the heat of the moment, but probably not now.

  "What's wrong?" the little man asked in a watery voice. Clay, even in his own distress, couldn't help being touched by the concern he heard there. "Did he get you? You had him blocked out for a few seconds and I couldn't see. Did he get you? Are you cut?"

  "No," Clay said. "I'm all r--"

  There was another gigantic explosion from the north, almost surely from Logan Airport on the other side of Boston Harbor. Both of them hunched their shoulders and winced.

  The lunatic took the opportunity to sit up and was scrambling to his feet when the little man in the tweed suit administered a clumsy but effective sideways kick, planting a shoe squarely in the middle of the lunatic's shredded tie and knocking him back down. The lunatic roared and snatched at the little man's foot. He would have pulled the little guy over, then perhaps into a crushing embrace, had Clay not seized his new acquaintance by the shoulder and pulled him away.

  "He's got my shoe!" the little man yelped. Behind them, two more cars crashed. There were more screams, more alarms. Car alarms, fire alarms, hearty clanging burglar alarms. Sirens whooped in the distance. "Bastard got my sh--"

  Suddenly a policeman was there. One of the responders from across the street, Clay assumed, and as the policeman dropped to one blue knee beside the babbling lunatic, Clay felt something very much like love for the cop. That he'd take the time to come over here! That he'd even noticed!

  "You want to be careful of him," the little man said nervously. "He's--"

  "I know what he is," the cop replied, and Clay saw the cop had his service automatic in his hand. He had no idea if the cop had drawn it after kneeling or if he'd had it out the whole time. Clay had been too busy being grateful to notice.

  The cop looked at the lunatic. Leaned close to the lunatic. Almost seemed to offer himself to the lunatic. "Hey, buddy, how ya doin?" he murmured. "I mean, what the haps?"

  The lunatic lunged at the cop and put his hands on the cop's throat. The instant he did this, the cop slipped the muzzle of his gun into the hollow of the lunatic's temple and pulled the trigger. A great spray of blood leaped through the graying hair on the opposite side of the lunatic's head and he fell back to the sidewalk, throwing both arms out melodramatically: Look, Ma, I'm dead.

  Clay looked at the little man with the mustache and the little man with the mustache looked at him. Then they looked back at the cop, who had holstered his weapon and was taking a leather case from the breast pocket of his uniform shirt. Clay was glad to see that the hand he used to do this was shaking a little. He was now frightened of the cop, but would have been more frightened still if the cop's hands had been steady. And what had just happened was no isolated case. The gunshot seemed to have done something to Clay's hearing, cleared a circuit in it or something. Now he could hear other gunshots, isolated cracks punctuating the escalating cacophony of the day.

  The cop took a card--Clay thought it was a business card--from the slim leather case, then put the case back in his breast pocket. He held the card between the first two fingers of his left hand while his right hand once more dropped to the butt of his service weapon. Near his highly polished shoes, blood from the lunatic's shattered head was pooling on the sidewalk. Close by, Power Suit Woman lay in another pool of blood, which was now starting to congeal and turn a darker shade of red.

  "What's your name, sir?" the cop asked Clay.

  "Clayton Riddell."

  "Can you tell me who the president is?"

  Clay told him.

  "Sir, can you tell me today's date?"

  "It's the first of October. Do you know what's--"

  The cop looked at the little man with the mustache. "Your name?"

  "I'm Thomas McCourt, 140 Salem Street, Maiden. I--"

  "Can you name the man who ran against the president in the last election?"

  Tom McCourt did so.

  "Who is Brad Pitt married to?"

  McCourt threw up his hands. "How should I know? Some movie star, I think." br />
  "Okay." The cop handed Clay the card he'd been holding between his fingers. "I'm Officer Ulrich Ashland. This is my card. You may be called on to testify about what just happened here, gentlemen. What happened was you needed assistance, I rendered it, I was attacked, I responded."

  "You wanted to kill him," Clay said.

  "Yes, sir, we're putting as many of them out of their misery as fast as we can," Officer Ashland agreed. "And if you tell any court or board of inquiry that I said that, I'll deny it. But it has to be done. These people are popping up everywhere. Some only commit suicide. Many others attack." He hesitated, then added: "So far as we can tell, all the others attack." As if to underline this, there was another gunshot from across the street, a pause, then three more, in rapid succession, from the shadowed forecourt of the Four Seasons Hotel, which was now a tangle of broken glass, broken bodies, crashed vehicles, and spilled blood. "It's like the fucking Night of the Living Dead." Officer Ulrich Ashland started back toward Boylston Street with his hand still on the butt of his gun. "Except these people aren't dead. Unless we help them, that is."

  "Rick!" It was a cop on the other side of the street, calling urgently. "Rick, we gotta go to Logan! All units! Get over here!"

  Officer Ashland checked for traffic, but there was none. Except for the wrecks, Boylston Street was momentarily deserted. From the surrounding area, however, came the sound of more explosions and automotive crashes. The smell of smoke was getting stronger. He started across the street, got halfway, then turned back. "Get inside somewhere," he said. "Get under cover. You've been lucky once. You may not be lucky again."

  "Officer Ashland," Clay said. "Your guys don't use cell phones, do you?"

  Ashland regarded him from the center of Boylston Street--not, in Clay's opinion, a safe place to be. He was thinking of the rogue Duck Boat. "No, sir," he said. "We have radios in our cars. And these." He patted the radio in his belt, hung opposite his holster. Clay, a comic-book fiend since he could read, thought briefly of Batman's marvelous utility belt.

  "Don't use them," Clay said. "Tell the others. Don't use the cell phones."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "Because they were." He pointed to the dead woman and the unconscious girl. "Just before they went crazy. And I'll bet you anything that the guy with the knife--"

  "Rick!" the cop on the other side shouted again. "Hurry the fuck up!"

  "Get under cover," Officer Ashland repeated, and trotted to the Four Seasons side of the street. Clay wished he could have repeated the thing about the cell phones, but on the whole he was just glad to see the cop out of harm's way. Not that he believed anyone in Boston really was, not this afternoon.

  4

  "What are you doing?" Clay asked Tom McCourt. "Don't touch him, he might be, I don't know, contagious."

  "I'm not going to touch him," Tom said, "but I need my shoe."

  The shoe, lying near the splayed fingers of the lunatic's left hand, was at least away from the exit-spray of blood. Tom hooked his fingers delicately into the back and pulled it to him. Then he sat down on the curb of Boylston Street--right where the Mister Softee truck had been parked in what now seemed to Clay like another lifetime--and slipped his foot into it. "The laces are broken," he said. "That damn nutball broke the laces." And he started crying again.

  "Do the best you can," Clay said. He began working the butcher knife out of the portfolio. It had been slammed through with tremendous force, and he found he had to wiggle it up and down to free it. It came out reluctantly, in a series of jerks, and with ugly scraping sounds that made him want to cringe. He kept wondering who inside had gotten the worst of it. That was stupid, nothing but shock-think, but he couldn't help it. "Can't you tie it down close to the bottom?"

  "Yeah, I think s--"

  Clay had been hearing a mechanical mosquito whine that now grew to an approaching drone. Tom craned up from his place on the curb. Clay turned around. The little caravan of BPD cars pulling away from the Four Seasons halted in front of Citylights and the crashed Duck Boat with their gumballs flashing. Cops leaned out the windows as a private plane--something midsize, maybe a Cessna or the kind they called a Twin Bonanza, Clay didn't really know planes--came cruising slowly over the buildings between Boston Harbor and the Boston Common, dropping fast. The plane banked drunkenly over the park, its lower wing almost brushing the top of one autumn-bright tree, then settled into the canyon of Charles Street, as if the pilot had decided that was a runway. Then, less than twenty feet above the ground, it tilted left and the wing on that side struck the facade of a gray stone building, maybe a bank, on the corner of Charles and Beacon. Any sense that the plane was moving slowly, almost gliding, departed in that instant. It spun around on the caught wing as savagely as a tetherball nearing the end of its rope, slammed into the redbrick building standing next to the bank, and disappeared in bright petals of red-orange fire. The shockwave hammered across the park. Ducks took wing before it.

  Clay looked down and saw he was holding the butcher knife in his hand. He had pulled it free while he and Tom McCourt were watching the plane crash. He wiped it first one way and then the other on the front of his shirt, taking pains not to cut himself (now his hands were shaking). Then he slipped it--very carefully--into his belt, all the way down to the handle. As he did this, one of his early comic-book efforts occurred to him... a bit of juvenilia, actually.

  "Joxer the Pirate stands here at your service, my pretty one," he murmured.

  "What?" Tom asked. He was now beside Clay, staring at the boiling inferno of the airplane on the far side of Boston Common. Only the tail stuck out of the fire. On it Clay could read the number LN6409B. Above it was what looked like some sports team's logo.

  Then that was gone, too.

  He could feel the first waves of heat begin to pump gently against his face.

  "Nothing," he told the little man in the tweed suit. "Leave us boogie."

  "Huh?"

  "Let's get out of here."

  "Oh. Okay."

  Clay started to walk along the southern side of the Common, in the direction he'd been heading at three o'clock, eighteen minutes and an eternity ago. Tom McCourt hurried to keep up. He really was a very short man. "Tell me," he said, "do you often talk nonsense?"

  "Sure," Clay said. "Just ask my wife."

  5

  "Where are we going?" Tom asked. "I was headed for the T." He pointed to a green-painted kiosk about a block ahead. A small crowd of people were milling there. "Now I'm not sure being underground is such a hot idea."

  "Me, either," Clay said. "I've got a room at a place called the Atlantic Avenue Inn, about five blocks further up."

  Tom brightened. "I think I know it. On Louden, actually, just off Atlantic."

  "Right. Let's go there. We can check the TV And I want to call my wife."

  "On the room phone."

  "The room phone, check. I don't even have a cell phone."

  "I have one, but I left it home. It's broken. Rafe--my cat--knocked it off the counter. I was meaning to buy a new one this very day, but... listen. Mr. Riddell--"

  "Clay."

  "Clay, then. Are you sure the phone in your room will be safe?"

  Clay stopped. He hadn't even considered this idea. But if the landlines weren't okay, what would be? He was about to say this to Tom when a sudden brawl broke out at the T station up ahead. There were cries of panic, screams, and more of that wild babbling--he recognized it for what it was now, the signature scribble of madness. The little knot of people that had been milling around the gray stone pillbox and the steps going below-ground broke up. A few of them ran into the street, two with their arms around each other, snatching looks back over their shoulders as they went. More--most--ran into the park, all in different directions, which sort of broke Clay's heart. He felt better somehow about the two with their arms around each other.

  Still at the T station and on their feet were two men and two women.

  Clay was pretty sure i
t was they who had emerged from the station and driven off the rest. As Clay and Tom stood watching from half a block away, these remaining four fell to fighting with each other. This brawl had the hysterical, killing viciousness he had already seen, but no discernible pattern. It wasn't three against one, or two against two, and it certainly wasn't the boys against the girls; in fact, one of the "girls" was a woman who looked to be in her middle sixties, with a stocky body and a no-nonsense haircut that made Clay think of several women teachers he'd known who were nearing retirement.

  They fought with feet and fists and nails and teeth, grunting and shouting and circling the bodies of maybe half a dozen people who had already been knocked unconscious, or perhaps killed. One of the men stumbled over an outstretched leg and went to his knees. The younger of the two women dropped on top of him. The man on his knees swept something up from the pavement at the head of the stairs--Clay saw with no surprise whatever that it was a cell phone--and slammed it into the side of the woman's face. The cell phone shattered, tearing the woman's cheek open and showering a freshet of blood onto the shoulder of her light jacket, but her scream was of rage rather than pain. She grabbed the kneeling man's ears like a pair of jughandles, dropped her own knees into his lap, and shoved him backwards into the gloom of the T's stairwell. They went out of sight locked together and thrashing like cats in heat.

  "Come on," Tom murmured, twitching Clay's shirt with an odd delicacy. "Come on. Other side of the street. Come on."

  Clay allowed himself to be led across Boylston Street. He assumed that either Tom McCourt was watching where they were going or he was lucky, because they got to the other side okay. They stopped again in front of Colonial Books (Best of the Old, Best of the New), watching as the unlikely victor of the T station battle went striding into the park in the direction of the burning plane, with blood dripping onto her collar from the ends of her zero-tolerance gray hair. Clay wasn't a bit surprised that the last one standing had turned out to be the lady who looked like a librarian or Latin teacher a year or two away from a gold watch. He had taught with his share of such ladies, and the ones who made it to that age were, more often than not, next door to indestructible.