Cell

  Ray reached into the pocket of his chinos and brought out a cell phone and a scrap of paper. The phone was gray with grime, as if it had spent most of its life in a working environment.

  "Put it in your pocket. When the time comes, call the number on that slip. You'll know the time. I gotta hope you'll know."

  Clay took the phone. It was either take it or drop it. The little slip of paper escaped his fingers.

  "Get that!" Ray whispered fiercely.

  Clay bent and picked up the scrap of paper. Ten digits were scrawled on it. The first three were the Maine area code. "Ray, they read minds! If I have this--"

  Ray's mouth stretched in a terrible parody of a grin. "Yeah!" he whispered. "They peek in your head and find out you're thinkin about a fuckin cell phone! What else is anyone thinkin about since October first? Those of us who can still fuckin think, that is?"

  Clay looked at the dirty, battered cell phone. There were two DYMO-tape strips on the casing. The top one read MR. FOGARTY. The bottom one read PROP. GURLEYVILLE QUARRY DO NOT REMOVE.

  "Put it in your fuckin pocket!"

  It wasn't the urgency of the command that made him obey. It was the urgency of those desperate eyes. Clay began to put the phone and the scrap of paper in his pocket. He was wearing jeans, which made the pocket a tighter fit than Ray's chinos. He was looking down to open the pocket wider when Ray reached forward and pulled Clay's .45 from its holster. When Clay looked up, Ray already had the barrel under his chin.

  "You'll be doin your kid a favor, Clay. Believe it. That's no fuckin way to live."

  "Ray, no!"

  Ray pulled the trigger. The soft-nosed American Defender round took off the entire top half of his head. Crows rose from the trees in a multitude. Clay hadn't even known they were there, but now they scolded the autumn air with their cries.

  For a little while he drowned them out with his own.

  4

  They had barely started scraping him a grave in the soft dark earth under the firs when the phoners reached into their heads. Clay was feeling that combined power for the first time. It was as Tom had said, like being nudged in the back by a powerful hand. If, that was, both the hand and the back were inside your head. No words. Just that push.

  "Let us finish!" he shouted, and immediately responded to himself in a slightly higher register that he recognized at once. "No. Go. Now."

  "Five minutes!" he said.

  This time the flock voice used Denise. "Go. Now."

  Tom tumbled Ray's body--the remains of the head wrapped in one of the headrest-covers from the bus--into the hole and kicked in some dirt. Then he grabbed the sides of his head, grimacing. "Okay, okay," he said, and immediately answered himself, "Go. Now."

  They walked back down the hiking path to the picnic area, Jordan leading the way. He was very pale, but Clay didn't think he was as pale as Ray had been in the last minute of his life. Not even close. That's no fuckin way to live: his final words.

  Standing at parade rest across the road, in a line that stretched to both horizon-lines, maybe half a mile in all, were phoners. There had to be four hundred of them, but Clay didn't see the Raggedy Man. He supposed the Raggedy Man had gone on to prepare the way, for in his house there were many mansions.

  With a phone extension in every one, Clay thought.

  As they trooped toward the minibus, he saw three of the phoners fall out of line. Two of them began biting and fighting and tearing at each other's clothes, snarling what could have been words--Clay thought he heard the phrase bitch-cake, but he supposed it might just have been a coincidental occurrence of syllables. The third simply turned and began walking away, hiking down the white line toward Newfield.

  "That's right, fall out, sojer!" Denise yelled hysterically. "All of you fall out!"

  But they didn't, and before the deserter--if that was what he was--had gotten to the curve where Route 160 swept out of sight to the south, an elderly but powerfully built phoner simply shot out his arms, grasped the hiker's head, and twisted it to one side. The hiker collapsed to the pavement.

  "Ray had the keys," Dan said in a tired voice. Most of his ponytail had come undone, and his hair spilled over his shoulders. "Somebody will have to go back and--"

  "I got them," Clay said. "And I'll drive." He opened the side door of the little bus, feeling that steady beat-beat-beat, push-push-push in his head. There was blood and dirt on his hands. He could feel the weight of the cell phone in his pocket and had a funny thought: maybe Adam and Eve had picked a few apples before being driven out of Eden. A little something to munch while on the long and dusty road to seven hundred television channels and backpack bombs in the London subway system. "Get in, everybody."

  Tom gave him a look. "You don't have to sound so goddam cheerful, van Gogh."

  "Why not?" Clay said, smiling. He wondered if his smile looked like Ray's--that awful end-of-life rictus. "At least I won't have to listen to your bullshit much longer. Hop aboard. Next stop, Kashwak-No-Fo."

  But before anyone got on the bus, they were made to throw away their guns.

  This didn't come as a mental command, nor was their motor-control overridden by some superior force--Clay didn't have to watch as something made his hand reach down and pluck the .45 from its holster. He didn't think the phoners could do that, at least not yet; they couldn't even do the ventriloquism thing unless they were allowed to. Instead he felt something like an itch, a terrible one, just short of intolerable, inside his head.

  "Oh, Mary!" Denise cried in a low voice, and threw the little .22 she carried in her belt as far as she could. It landed in the road. Dan threw his own pistol after it, then added his hunting knife for good measure. The knife flew blade-first almost to the far side of Route 160, but none of the phoners standing there flinched.

  Jordan dropped the pistol he was carrying to the ground beside the bus. Then, whining and twitching, he tore into his pack and tossed away the one Alice had been carrying. Tom added Sir Speedy.

  Clay contributed the .45 to the other weapons beside the bus. It had been unlucky for two people since the Pulse, and he wasn't terribly sorry to see it go.

  "There," he said. He spoke to the watching eyes and dirty faces--many of them mutilated--that were watching from across the road, but it was the Raggedy Man he was visualizing. "That's all of them. Are you satisfied?" And answered himself at once. "Why. Did. He do it?"

  Clay swallowed. It wasn't just the phoners who wanted to know; Dan and the others were watching him, too. Jordan, he saw, was holding on to Tom's belt, as if he feared Clay's answer the way a toddler might fear a busy street. One full of speeding trucks.

  "He said your way was no way to live," Clay said. "He took my gun and blew his head off before I could stop him."

  Silence, except for the cawing of crows. Then Jordan spoke, flat and declamatory. "Our way. Is the only way."

  Dan was next. Just as flat. Unless they feel rage, they feel nothing, Clay thought. "Get on. The bus."

  They got on the bus. Clay slid behind the wheel and started the engine. He headed north on Route 160. He had been rolling less than a minute when he became aware of movement on his left. It was the phoners. They were moving north along the shoulder--above the shoulder--in a straight line, as if on an invisible conveyor belt running maybe eight inches over the dirt. Then, up ahead, where the road crested, they rose much higher, to perhaps fifteen feet, making a human arch against the dull, mostly cloudy sky. Watching the phoners disappear over the top of the hill was like watching people ride the mild swell of an invisible roller coaster.

  Then the graceful symmetry broke. One of the rising figures fell like a bird shot from a duck-blind, dropping at least seven feet to the side of the road. It was a man in the tattered remains of a jogging suit. He spun furiously in the dirt, kicking with one leg, dragging the other. As the bus rolled past him at a steady fifteen miles an hour, Clay saw the man's face was drawn down in a grimace of fury and his mouth was working as he spewed out what was almo
st surely his dying declaration.

  "So now we know," Tom said hollowly. He was sitting with Jordan on the bench at the back of the bus, in front of the luggage area where their packs were stowed. "Primates give rise to man, man gives rise to phoners, phoners give rise to levitating telepaths with Tourette's syndrome. Evolution complete."

  Jordan said, "What's Tourette's syndrome?"

  Tom said, "Fucked if I know, son," and incredibly, they were all laughing. Soon they were roaring--even Jordan, who didn't know what he was laughing at--while the little yellow bus rolled slowly north with the phoners passing it and then rising, rising, in a seemingly endless procession.

  KASHWAK

  1

  An hour after leaving the picnic area where Ray had shot himself with Clay's gun, they passed a sign reading

  NORTHERN COUNTIES EXPO

  OCTOBER 5-15

  COME ONE, COME ALL!!!

  VISIT KASHWAKAMAK HALL

  AND DON'T FORGET THE UNIQUE "NORTH END"

  *SLOTS (INCLUDING TEXAS HOLD 'EM)

  *"INDIAN BINGO"

  YOU'LL SAY "WOW!!!"

  "Oh my God," Clay said. "The Expo. Kashwakamak Hall. Christ. If there was ever a place for a flock, that's it."

  "What's an expo?" Denise asked.

  "Your basic county fair," Clay said, "only bigger than most of them and quite a lot wilder, because it's on the TR, which is unincorporated. Also, there's that North End business. Everyone in Maine knows about the North End at the Northern Counties Expo. In its own way, it's as notorious as the Twilight Motel."

  Tom wanted to know what the North End was, but before Clay could explain, Denise said, "There's two more. Mary-and-Jesus, I know they're phoners, but it still makes me sick."

  A man and a woman lay in the dust at the side of the road. They had died either in an embrace or a bitter battle, and embracing did not seem to go with the phoner lifestyle. They had passed half a dozen other bodies on their run north, almost certainly casualties from the flock that had come down to get them, and had seen twice that number wandering aimlessly south, sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs. One of the pairs, clearly confused about where they wanted to go, had actually tried to hitchhike the bus as it passed.

  "Wouldn't it be nice if they'd all either fall out or drop dead before what they've got planned for us tomorrow?" Tom said.

  "Don't count on it," Dan said. "For every casualty or deserter we've seen, we've seen twenty or thirty who are still with the program. And God knows how many are waiting in this Kashwacky place."

  "Don't count it out, either," Jordan said from his place beside Tom. He spoke a little sharply. "A bug in the program--a worm--is not a small thing. It can start out as a minor pain in the ass and then boom, everything's down. I play this game, Star-Mag? Well, you know--I used to play it--and this sore sport out in California got so mad about losing all the time that he put a worm in the system and it took down all the servers in a week. Almost half a million gamers back to computer cribbage because of that jamhead."

  "We don't have a week, Jordan," Denise said.

  "I know," he said. "And I know they're not all apt to go wheels-up overnight... but it's possible. And I won't stop hoping. I don't want to end up like Ray. He stopped... you know, hoping." A single tear rolled down Jordan's cheek.

  Tom gave him a hug. "You won't end up like Ray," he said. "You're going to grow up to be like Bill Gates."

  "I don't want to grow up to be like Bill Gates," Jordan said morosely. "I bet Bill Gates had a cell phone. In fact I bet he had a dozen." He sat up straight. "One thing I'd give a lot to know is how so many cell phone transmission towers can still be working when the fucking power's down."

  "FEMA," Dan said hollowly.

  Tom and Jordan turned to look at him, Tom with a tentative smile on his lips. Even Clay glanced up into the rearview mirror.

  "You think I'm joking," Dan said. "I wish I was. I read an article about it in a newsmagazine while I was in my doctor's office, waiting for that disgusting exam where he puts on a glove and then goes prospecting--"

  "Please," Denise said. "Things are bad enough. You can skip that part. What did the article say?"

  "That after 9/11, FEMA requested and got a sum of money from Congress--I don't remember how much, but it was in the tens of millions--to equip cell phone transmission towers nationwide with long-life emergency generators to make sure the nation's ability to communicate wouldn't go to hell in the event of coordinated terrorist attacks." Dan paused. "I guess it worked."

  "FEMA," Tom said. "I don't know whether to laugh or cry."

  "I'd tell you to write your congressman, but he's probably insane," Denise said.

  "He was insane well before the Pulse," Tom answered, but he spoke absently. He was rubbing the back of his neck and looking out the window. "FEMA," he said. "You know, it sort of makes sense. Fucking FEMA."

  Dan said, "I'd give a lot just to know why they've made such a business of collaring us and bringing us in."

  "And making sure the rest of us don't follow Ray's example," Denise said. "Don't forget that." She paused. "Not that I would. Suicide's a sin. They can do whatever they want to me here, but I'm going to heaven with my baby. I believe that."

  "The Latin's the part that gives me the creeps," Dan said. "Jordan, is it possible that the phoners could take old stuff--stuff from before the Pulse, I mean--and incorporate it into their new programming? If it fit their... mmmm, I don't know... their long-term goals?"

  "I guess," Jordan said. "I don't really know, because we don't know what sort of commands might have been encoded in the Pulse. This isn't like ordinary computer programming in any case. It's self-generating. Organic. Like learning. I guess it is learning. 'It satisfies the definition,' the Head would say. Only they're all learning together, because--"

  "Because of the telepathy," Tom said.

  "Right," Jordan agreed. He looked troubled.

  "Why does the Latin give you the creeps?" Clay asked, looking at Dan in the rearview mirror.

  "Tom said Latin's the language of justice, and I guess that's true, but this feels much more like vengeance to me." He leaned forward. Behind his glasses, his eyes were tired and troubled. "Because, Latin or no Latin, they can't really think. I'm convinced of that. Not yet, anyway. What they depend on instead of rational thought is a kind of hive mind born out of pure rage."

  "I object, Your Honor, Freudian speculation!" Tom said, rather merrily.

  "Maybe Freud, maybe Lorenz," Dan said, "but give me the benefit of the doubt either way. Would it be surprising for such an entity--such a raging entity--to confuse justice and vengeance?"

  "Would it matter?" Tom asked.

  "It might to us," Dan said. "As someone who once taught a block course on vigilantism in America, I can tell you that vengeance usually ends up hurting more."

  2

  Not long after this conversation, they came to a place Clay recognized. Which was unsettling, because he had never been in this part of the state before. Except once, in his dream of the mass conversions.

  Written across the road in broad strokes of bright green paint was KASHWAK=NO-FO. The van rolled over the words at a steady thirty miles an hour as the phoners continued to stream past in their stately, witchy procession on the left.

  That was no dream, he thought, looking at the drifts of trash caught in the bushes at the sides of the road, the beer and soda cans in the ditches. Bags that had contained potato chips, Doritos, and Cheez Doodles crackled under the tires of the little bus. The normies stood here in a double line, eating their snacks and drinking their drinks, feeling that funny itch in their heads, that weird sense of a mental hand pushing on their backs, waiting their turns to call some loved one who got lost in the Pulse. They stood here and listened to the Raggedy Man say "Left and right, two lines, that's correct, that's doing it, let's keep moving, we've got a lot of you to process before dark."

  Up ahead the trees drew back on either side of the road. What had been some far
mer's hard-won grazeland for cows or sheep had now been flattened and churned down to bare earth by many passing feet. It was almost as though there had been a rock concert here. One of the tents was gone--blown away--but the other had caught on some trees and flapped in the dull early-evening light like a long brown tongue.

  "I dreamed of this place," Jordan said. His voice was tight.

  "Did you?" Clay said. "So did I."

  "The normies followed the Kashwak equals No-Fo signs, and this is what they came to," Jordan said. "It was like tollbooths, wasn't it, Clay?"

  "Kind of," Clay said. "Kind of like tollbooths, yeah."

  "They had big cardboard boxes full of cell phones," Jordan said. This was a detail Clay didn't remember from his own dream, but he didn't doubt it. "Heaps and heaps of them. And every normie got to make a call. What a bunch of lucky ducks."

  "When did you dream this, Jordy?" Denise asked.

  "Last night." Jordan's eyes met Clay's in the rearview mirror. "They knew they weren't going to be talking to the people they wanted to talk to. Down deep they knew. But they did it anyway. They took the phones anyway. Took em and listened. Most of em didn't even put up a fight. Why, Clay?"

  "Because they were tired of fighting, I suppose," Clay said. "Tired of being different. They wanted to hear 'Baby Elephant Walk' with new ears."

  They were past the beaten-down fields where the tents had been. Ahead, a paved byroad split off from the highway. It was broader and smoother than the state road. The phoners were streaming up this byway and disappearing into a slot in the woods. Looming high above the trees half a mile or so farther on was a steel gantrylike structure Clay recognized at once from his dreams. He thought it had to be some sort of amusement attraction, maybe a Parachute Drop. There was a billboard at the junction of the highway and the byroad, showing a laughing family--dad, mom, sonny, and little sis--walking into a wonderland of rides, games, and agricultural exhibits.

  NORTHERN COUNTIES EXPO

  GALA FIREWORKS SHOW OCTOBER 5TH

  VISIT KASHWAKAMAK HALL

  THE "NORTH END" OPEN "24/7" OCTOBER 5-15

  YOU'LL SAY "WOW!!!"

  Standing below this billboard was the Raggedy Man. He raised one hand and held it out in a stop gesture.