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Стивен Кинг. Клетка (engl)
Stephen King. Cell
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A NOVEL
SCRIBNER
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For Richard Matheson and George Romero
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents
either are products of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,
is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Stephen King All rights reserved, including the
right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9233-7 ISBN-10: 0-7432-9233-2
The id will not stand for a delay in gratification. It always feels the
tension of the unfulfilled urge.
Sigmund Freud
Human aggression is instinctual. Humans have not evolved any ritualized
aggression-inhibiting mechanisms to ensure the survival of the species. For
this reason man is considered a very dangerous animal.
konrad lorenz
Can you hear me now?
Verizon
CELL
Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track
of blood, but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the
most pessimistic futurist. It was as if it had been waiting to go. On
October 1, God was in His heaven, the stock market stood at 10,140, and most
of the planes were on time (except for those landing and taking off in
Chicago, and that was to be expected). Two weeks later the skies belonged to
the birds again and the stock market was a memory. By Halloween, every major
city from New York to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it
had been was a memory.
The Pulse
1
The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m.,
eastern standard time, on the afternoon of October 1. The term was a
misnomer, of course, but within ten hours of the event, most of the
scientists capable of pointing this out were either dead or insane. The name
hardly mattered, in any case. What mattered was the effect.
At three o'clock on that day, a young man of no particular importance
to history came walking-- almost bouncing-- east along Boylston Street in
Boston. His name was Clayton Riddell. There was an expression of undoubted
contentment on his face to go along with the spring in his step. From his
left hand there swung the handles of an artist's portfolio, the kind that
closes and latches to make a traveling case. Twined around the fingers of
his right hand was the drawstring of a brown plastic shopping bag with the
words small treasures printed on it for anyone who cared to read them.
Inside the bag, swinging back and forth, was a small round object. A
present, you might have guessed, and you would have been right. You might
further have guessed that this Clayton Riddell was a young man seeking to
commemorate some small (or perhaps even not so small) victory with a small
treasure, and you would have been right again. The item inside the bag was a
rather expensive glass paperweight with a gray haze of dandelion fluff
caught in its center. He had bought it on his walk back from the Copley
Square Hotel to the much humbler Atlantic Avenue Inn where he was staying,
frightened by the ninety-dollar pricetag on the paperweight's base, somehow
even more frightened by the realization that he could now afford such a
thing.
Handing his credit card over to the clerk had taken almost physical
courage. He doubted if he could have done it if the paperweight had been for
himself; he would have muttered something about having changed his mind and
scuttled out of the shop. But it was for Sharon. Sharon liked such things,
and she still liked him-- I'm pulling for you, baby, she'd said the day
before he left for Boston. Considering the shit they'd put each other
through over the last year, that had touched him. Now he wanted to touch
her, if that was still possible. The paperweight was a small thing (a small
treasure), but he was sure she'd love that delicate gray haze deep down in
the middle of the glass, like a pocket fog.
2
Clay's attention was attracted by the tinkle of an ice cream truck. It
was parked across from the Four Seasons Hotel (which was even grander than
the Copley Square) and next to the Boston Common, which ran along Boylston
for two or three blocks on this side of the street. The words MISTER SOFTEE
were printed in rainbow colors over a pair of dancing ice cream cones. Three
kids were clustered around the window, bookbags at their feet, waiting to
receive goodies. Behind them stood a woman in a pants suit with a poodle on
a leash and a couple of teenage girls in lowrider jeans with iPods and
earphones that were currently slung around their necks so they could murmur
together-- earnestly, no giggles.
Clay stood behind them, turning what had been a little group into a
short line. He had bought his estranged wife a present; he would stop at
Comix Supreme on the way home and buy his son the new issue of Spider-Man;
he might as well treat himself, as well. He was bursting to tell Sharon his
news, but she'd be out of reach until she got home, three forty-five or so.
He thought he would hang around the Inn at least until he talked to her,
mostly pacing the confines of his small room and looking at his latched-up
portfolio. In the meantime, Mister Softee made an acceptable diversion.
The guy in the truck served the three kids at the window, two Dilly
Bars and a monster chocolate-and-vanilla swirl sof-serve cone for the big
spender in the middle, who was apparently paying for all of them. While he
fumbled a rat's nest of dollar bills from the pocket of his fashionably
baggy jeans, the woman with the poodle and the power suit dipped into her
shoulder bag, came out with her cell phone-- women in power suits would no
more leave home without their cell phones than without their AmEx cards--
and flipped it open. Behind them, in the park, a dog barked and someone
shouted. It did not sound to Clay like a happy shout, but when he looked
over his shoulder all he could see were a few strollers, a dog trotting with
a Frisbee in its mouth (weren't they supposed to be on leashes in there, he
wondered), acres of sunny green and inviting shade. It looked like a good
place for a man who had just sold his first graphic novel-- and its sequel,
both for an amazing amount of money-- to sit and eat a chocolate ice cream
cone.
When he looked back, the three kids in the baggies were gone and the
woman in the power suit was ordering a sundae. One of the two girls behind
her had a peppermint-colored phone clipped to her hip, and the woman in the
power suit had hers screwed into her ear. Clay thought, as he almost always
did on one level of his mind or another when he saw a variation of this
behavior, that he was watching an act which would once have been considered
almost insufferably rude-- yes, even while engaging in a small bit of
commerce with a total stranger-- becoming a part of accepted everyday
behavior.
Put it in Dark Wanderer, sweetheart, Sharon said. The version of her he
kept in his mind spoke often and was bound to have her say. This was true of
the real-world Sharon as well, separation or no separation. Although not on
his cell phone. Clay didn't own one.
The peppermint-colored phone played the opening notes of that Crazy
Frog tune that Johnny loved-- was it called "Axel F"? Clay couldn't
remember, perhaps because he had blocked it out. The girl to whom the phone
belonged snatched it off her hip and said, "Beth?" She listened, smiled,
then said to her companion, "It's Beth." Now the other girl bent forward and
they both listened, nearly identical pixie haircuts (to Clay they looked
almost like Saturday-morning cartoon characters, the Powerpuff Girls, maybe)
blowing together in the afternoon breeze.
"Maddy?" said the woman in the power suit at almost exactly the same
time. Her poodle was now sitting contemplatively at the end of its leash
(the leash was red, and dusted with glittery stuff), looking at the traffic
on Boylston Street. Across the way, at the Four Seasons, a doorman in a
brown uniform-- they always seemed to be brown or blue-- was waving,
probably for a taxi. A Duck Boat crammed with tourists sailed by, looking
high and out of place on dry land, the driver bawling into his loudhailer
about something historic. The two girls listening to the peppermint-colored
phone looked at each other and smiled at something they were hearing, but
still did not giggle.
"Maddy? Can you hear me? Can you-- "
The woman in the power suit raised the hand holding the leash and
plugged a long-nailed finger into her free ear. Clay winced, fearing for her
eardrum. He imagined drawing her: the dog on the leash, the power suit, the
fashionably short hair . . . and one small trickle of blood from around the
finger in her ear. The Duck Boat just exiting the frame and the doorman in
the background, those things somehow lending the sketch its verisimilitude.
They would; it was just a thing you knew.
"Maddy, you're breaking up! I just wanted to tell you I got my hair
done at that new . . . my hair? . . . MY. . ."
The guy in the Mister Softee truck bent down and held out a sundae cup.
From it rose a white Alp with chocolate and strawberry sauce coursing down
its sides. His beard-stubbly face was impassive. It said he'd seen it all
before. Clay was sure he had, most of it twice. In the park, someone
screamed. Clay looked over his shoulder again, telling himself that had to
be a scream of joy. At three o'clock in the afternoon, a sunny afternoon on
the Boston Common, it pretty much had to be a scream of joy. Right?
The woman said something unintelligible to Maddy and flipped her cell
phone closed with a practiced flip of the wrist. She dropped it back into
her purse, then just stood there, as if she had forgotten what she was doing
or maybe even where she was.
"That's four-fifty," said the Mister Softee guy, still patiently
holding out the ice cream sundae. Clay had time to think how fucking
expensive everything was in the city. Perhaps the woman in the power suit
thought so, too-- that, at least, was his first surmise-- because for a
moment more she still did nothing, merely looked at the cup with its mound
of ice cream and sliding sauce as if she had never seen such a thing before.
Then there came another cry from the Common, not a human one this time
but something between a surprised yelp and a hurt yowl. Clay turned to look
and saw the dog that had been trotting with the Frisbee in its mouth. It was
a good-sized brown dog, maybe a Labrador, he didn't really know dogs, when
he needed to draw one he got a book and copied a picture. A man in a
business suit was down on his knees beside this one and had it in a necklock
and appeared to be-- surely I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing, Clay
thought-- chewing on its ear. Then the dog howled again and tried to spurt
away. The man in the business suit held it firm, and yes, that was the dog's
ear in the man's mouth, and as Clay continued to watch, the man tore it off
the side of the dog's head. This time the dog uttered an almost human
scream, and a number of ducks which had been floating on a nearby pond took
flight, squawking.
"Rast!" someone cried from behind Clay. It sounded like vast. It might
have been rat or roast, but later experience made him lean toward rast: not
a word at all but merely an inarticulate sound of aggression.
He turned back toward the ice cream truck in time to see Power Suit
Woman lunge through the serving window in an effort to grab Mister Softee
Guy. She managed to snag the loose folds at the front of his white tunic,
but his single startle-step backward was enough to break her hold. Her high
heels briefly left the sidewalk, and he heard the rasp of cloth and the
clink of buttons as the front of her jacket ran first up the little jut of
the serving window's counter and then back down. The sundae tumbled from
view. Clay saw a smear of ice cream and sauce on Power Suit Woman's left
wrist and forearm as her high heels clacked back to the sidewalk. She
staggered, knees bent. The closed-off, well-bred, out-in-public look on her
face-- what Clay thought of as your basic on-the-street-no-face look-- had
been replaced by a convulsive snarl that shrank her eyes to slits and
exposed both sets of teeth. Her upper lip had turned completely inside out,
revealing a pink velvet lining as intimate as a vulva. Her poodle ran into
the street, trailing its red leash with the hand-loop in the end. A black
limo came along and ran the poodle down before it got halfway across. Fluff
at one moment; guts at the next.
Poor damn thing was probably yapping in doggy heaven before it knew it
was dead, Clay thought. He understood in some clinical way he was in shock,
but that in no way changed the depth of his amazement. He stood there with
his portfolio hanging from one hand and his brown shopping bag hanging from
the other and his mouth hanging open.
Somewhere-- it sounded like maybe around the corner on Newbury Street--
something exploded.
The two girls had exactly the same haircut above their iPod headphones,
but the one with the peppermint-colored cell phone was blond and her friend
was brunette; they were Pixie Light and Pixie Dark. Now Pixie Light dropped
her phone on the sidewalk, where it shattered, and seized Power Suit Woman
around the waist. Clay assumed (so far as he was capable of assuming
anything in those moments) that she meant to restrain Power Suit Woman
either from going after Mister Softee Guy again or from running into the
street after her dog. There was even a part of his mind that applauded the
girl's presence of mind. Her friend, Pixie Dark, was backing away from the
whole deal, small white hands clasped between her breasts, eyes wide.
Clay dropped his own items, one on each side, and stepped forward to
help Pixie Light. On the other side of the street-- he saw this only in his
peripheral vision-- a car swerved and bolted across the sidewalk in front of
the Four Seasons, causing the doorman to dart out of the way. There were
screams from the hotel's forecourt. And before Clay could begin helping
Pixie Light with Power Suit Woman, Pixie Light had darted her pretty little
face forward with snakelike speed, bared her undoubtedly strong young teeth,
and battened on Power Suit Woman's neck. There was an enormous jet of blood.
The pixie-girl stuck her face in it, appeared to bathe in it, perhaps even
drank from it (Clay was almost sure she did), then shook Power Suit Woman
back and forth like a doll. The woman was taller and had to outweigh the
girl by at least forty pounds, but the girl shook her hard enough to make
the woman's head flop back and forth and send more blood flying. At the same
time the girl cocked her own blood-smeared face up to the bright blue
October sky and howled in what sounded like triumph.
She's mad, Clay thought. Totally mad.
Pixie Dark cried out, "Who are you? What's happening?"
At the sound of her friend's voice, Pixie Light whipped her bloody head
around. Blood dripped from the short dagger-points of hair overhanging her
forehead. Eyes like white lamps peered from blood-dappled sockets.
Pixie Dark looked at Clay, her eyes wide. "Who are you?" she repeated .
. . and then: "Who am I?"
Pixie Light dropped Power Suit Woman, who collapsed to the sidewalk
with her chewed-open carotid artery still spurting, then leaped at the girl
with whom she had been chummily sharing a phone only a few moments before.
Clay didn't think. If he had thought, Pixie Dark might have had her
throat opened like the woman in the power suit. He didn't even look. He
simply reached down and to his right, seized the top of the small treasures
shopping bag, and swung it at the back of Pixie Light's head as she leaped
at her erstwhile friend with her outstretched hands making claw-fish against
the blue sky. If he missed--
He didn't miss, or even hit the girl a glancing blow. The glass
paperweight inside the bag struck the back of Pixie Light's head dead-on,
making a muffled thunk. Pixie Light dropped her hands, one bloodstained, one
still clean, and fell to the sidewalk at her friend's feet like a sack of
mail.
"What the hell?" Mister Softee Guy cried. His voice was improbably
high. Maybe shock had given him that high tenor.
"I don't know," Clay said. His heart was hammering. "Help me quick.
This other one's bleeding to death."
From behind them, on Newbury Street, came the unmistakable hollow
bang-and-jingle of a car crash, followed by screams. The screams were
followed by another explosion, this one louder, concussive, hammering the
day. Behind the Mister Softee truck, another car swerved across three lanes
of Boylston Street and into the courtyard of the Four Seasons, mowing down a
couple of pedestrians and then plowing into the back of the previous car,
which had finished with its nose crumpled into the revolving doors. This
second crash shoved the first car farther into the revolving doors, bending
them askew. Clay couldn't see if anyone was trapped in there-- clouds of
steam were rising from the first car's breached radiator-- but the agonized
shrieks from the shadows suggested bad things. Very bad.
Mister Softee Guy, blind on that side, was leaning out his serving
window and staring at Clay. "What's going on over there?"
"I don't know. Couple of car wrecks. People hurt. Never mind. Help me,
man." He knelt beside Power Suit Woman in the blood and the shattered
remnants of Pixie Light's pink cell phone. Power Suit Woman's twitches had
now become weak, indeed.
"Smoke from over on Newbury," observed Mister Softee Guy, still not
emerging from the relative safety of his ice cream wagon. "Something blew up
over there. I mean bigtime. Maybe it's terrorists."
As soon as the word was out of his mouth, Clay was sure he was right.
"Help me."
"WHO AM I?" Pixie Dark suddenly screamed.
Clay had forgotten all about her. He looked up in time to see the girl
smack herself in the forehead with the heel of her hand, then turn around
rapidly three times, standing almost on the toes of her tennies to do it.
The sight called up a memory of some poem he'd read in a college lit class--
Weave a circle round him thrice. Coleridge, wasn't it? She staggered, then
ran rapidly down the sidewalk and directly into a lamppost. She made no
attempt to avoid it or even put up her hands. She struck it face-first,
rebounded, staggered, then went at it again.
"Stop that!" Clay roared. He shot to his feet, started to run toward
her, slipped in Power Suit Woman's blood, almost fell, got going again,
tripped on Pixie Light, and almost fell again.
Pixie Dark looked around at him. Her nose was broken and gushing blood
down her lower face. A vertical contusion was puffing up on her brow, rising
like a thunderhead on a summer day. One of her eyes had gone crooked in its
socket. She opened her mouth, exposing a ruin of what had probably been
expensive orthodontic work, and laughed at him. He never forgot it.
Then she ran away down the sidewalk, screaming.
Behind him, a motor started up and amplified bells began tinkling out
the Sesame Street theme. Clay turned and saw the Mister Softee truck pulling
rapidly away from the curb just as, from the top floor of the hotel across
the way, a window shattered in a bright spray of glass. A body hurtled out
into the October day. It fell to the sidewalk, where it more or less
exploded. More screams from the forecourt. Screams of horror; screams of
pain.
"No!" Clay yelled, running alongside the Mister Softee truck. "No, come
back and help me! I need some help here, you sonofabitch!"
No answer from Mister Softee Guy, who maybe couldn't hear over his
amplified music. Clay could remember the words from the days when he'd had
no reason not to believe his marriage wouldn't last forever. In those days
Johnny watched Sesame Street every day, sitting in his little blue chair
with his sippy cup clutched in his hands. Something about a sunny day,
keepin' the clouds away.
A man in a business suit came running out of the park, roaring wordless
sounds at the top of his lungs, his coattails flapping behind him. Clay
recognized him by his dogfur goatee. The man ran into Boylston Street. Cars
swerved around him, barely missing him. He ran on to the other side, still
roaring and waving his hands at the sky. He disappeared into the shadows
beneath the canopy of the Four Seasons forecourt and was lost to view, but
he must have gotten up to more dickens immediately, because a fresh volley
of screams broke out over there.
Clay gave up his chase of the Mister Softee truck and stood with one
foot on the sidewalk and the other planted in the gutter, watching as it
swerved into the center lane of Boylston Street, still tinkling. He was
about to turn back to the unconscious girl and dying woman when another Duck
Boat appeared, this one not loafing but roaring at top speed and yawing
crazily from port to starboard. Some of the passengers were tumbling back
and forth and howling-- pleading-- for the driver to stop. Others simply
clung to the metal struts running up the open sides of the ungainly thing as
it made its way up Boylston Street against the flow of traffic.
A man in a sweatshirt grabbed the driver from behind, and Clay heard
another of those inarticulate cries through the Duck Boat's primitive
amplification system as the driver threw the guy off with a mighty backward
shrug. Not "Rast!" this time but something more guttural, something that
sounded like "Gluh!" Then the Duck Boat driver saw the Mister Softee truck--
Clay was sure of it-- and changed course, aiming for it.
"Oh God please no!" a woman sitting near the front of the tourist craft
cried, and as it closed in on the tinkling ice cream truck, which was
approximately one-sixth its size, Clay had a clear memory of watching the
victory parade on TV the year the Red Sox won the World Series. The team
rode in a slow-moving procession of these same Duck Boats, waving to the
delirious multitudes as a cold autumn drizzle fell.
"God please no!" the woman shrieked again, and from beside Clay a man
said, almost mildly: "Jesus Christ."
The Duck Boat hit the ice cream truck broadside and flipped it like a
child's toy. It landed on its side with its own amplification system still
tinkling out the Sesame Street theme music and went skidding back toward the
Common, shooting up friction-generated bursts of sparks. Two women who had
been watching dashed to get out of the way, holding hands, and just made it.
The Mister Softee truck bounced onto the sidewalk, went briefly airborne,
then hit the wrought-iron fence surrounding the park and came to rest. The
music hiccuped twice, then stopped.
The lunatic driving the Duck Boat had, meanwhile, lost whatever
marginal control he might have had over his vehicle. It looped back across
Boylston Street with its freight of terrified, screaming passengers clinging
to the open sides, mounted the sidewalk across and about fifty yards down
from the point where the Mister Softee truck had tinkled its last, and ran
into the low brick retaining wall below the display window of a tony
furniture shop called City lights. There was a vast unmusical crash as the
window shattered. The Duck Boat's wide rear end {Harbor Mistress was written
on it in pink script) rose perhaps five feet in the air. Momentum wanted the
great waddling thing to go end-over-end; mass would not allow. It settled
back to the sidewalk with its snout poked among the scattered sofas and
expensive living room chairs, but not before at least a dozen people had
gone shooting forward, out of the Duck Boat and out of sight. Inside
Citylights, a burglar alarm began to clang.
"Jesus Christ," said the mild voice from Clay's right elbow a second
time. He turned that way and saw a short man with thinning dark hair, a tiny
dark mustache, and gold-rimmed spectacles. "What's going on?"
"I don't know," Clay said. Talking was hard. Very. He found himself
almost having to push words out. He supposed it was shock. Across the
street, people were running away, some from the Four Seasons, some from the
crashed Duck Boat. As he watched, a Duck Boat run-awayer collided with a
Four Seasons escapee and they both went crashing to the sidewalk. There was
time to wonder if he'd gone insane and was hallucinating all this in a
madhouse somewhere. Juniper Hill in Augusta, maybe, between Thorazine shots.
"The guy in the ice cream truck said maybe terrorists."
"I don't see any men with guns," said the short man with the mustache.
"No guys with bombs strapped to their backs, either."
Neither did Clay, but he did see his little small treasures shopping
bag and his portfolio sitting on the sidewalk, and he saw that the blood
from Power Suit Woman's opened throat-- ye gods, he thought, all that
blood-- had almost reached the portfolio. All but a dozen or so of his
drawings for Dark Wanderer were in there, and it was the drawings his mind
seized on. He started back that way at a speed-walk, and the short man kept
pace. When a second burglar alarm (some kind of alarm, anyway) went off in
the hotel, joining its hoarse bray to the clang of the Citylights alarm, the
little guy jumped.
"It's the hotel," Clay said.
"I know, it's just that. . .oh my God." He'd seen Power Suit Woman, now
lying in a lake of the magic stuff that had been running all her bells and
whistles-- what? Four minutes ago? Only two?
"She's dead," Clay told him. "At least I'm pretty sure she is. That
girl . . ." He pointed at Pixie Light. "She did it. With her teeth."
"You're joking."
"I wish I was."
From somewhere up Boylston Street there was another explosion. Both men
cringed. Clay realized he could now smell smoke. He picked up his small
treasures bag and his portfolio and moved them both away from the spreading
blood. "These are mine," he said, wondering why he felt the need to explain.
The little guy, who was wearing a tweed suit-- quite dapper, Clay
thought-- was still staring, horrified, at the crumpled body of the woman
who had stopped for a sundae and lost first her dog and then her life.
Behind them, three young men pelted past on the sidewalk, laughing and
hurrahing. Two had Red Sox caps turned around backward. One was carrying a
carton clutched against his chest. It had the word panasonic printed in blue
on the side. This one stepped in Power Suit Woman's spreading blood with his
right sneaker and left a fading one-foot trail behind him as he and his
mates ran on toward the east end of the Common and Chinatown beyond.
3
Clay dropped to one knee and used the hand not clutching his portfolio
(he was even more afraid of losing it after seeing the sprinting kid with
the panasonic carton) to pick up Pixie Light's wrist. He got a pulse at
once. It was slow but strong and regular. He felt great relief. No matter
what she'd done, she was just a kid. He didn't want to think he had
bludgeoned her to death with his wife's gift paperweight.
"Look out, look out!" the little guy with the mustache almost sang.
Clay had no time to look out. Luckily, this call wasn't even close. The
vehicle-- one of those big OPEC-friendly SUVs-- veered off Boylston and into
the park at least twenty yards from where he knelt, taking a snarl of the
wrought-iron fence in front of it and coming to rest bumper-deep in the
duck-pond.
The door opened and a young man floundered out, yelling gibberish at
the sky. He fell to his knees in the water, scooped some of it into his
mouth with both hands (Clay had a passing thought of all the ducks that had
happily shat in that pond over the years), then struggled to his feet and
waded to the far side. He disappeared into a grove of trees, still waving
his hands and bellowing his nonsense sermon.
"We need to get help for this girl," Clay said to the man with the
mustache. "She's unconscious but a long way from dead."
"What we need to do is get off the street before we get run over," said
the man with the mustache, and as if to prove this point, a taxi collided
with a stretch limo not far from the wrecked Duck Boat. The limo had been
going the wrong way but the taxi got the worst of it; as Clay watched from
where he still knelt on the sidewalk, the taxi's driver flew through his
suddenly glassless windshield and landed in the street, holding up a bloody
arm and screaming.
The man with the mustache was right, of course. Such rationality as
Clay could muster-- only a little managed to find its way through the
blanket of shock that muffled his thinking-- suggested that by far the
wisest course of action would be to get the hell away from Boylston Street
and under cover. If this was an act of terrorism, it was like none he had
ever seen or read about. What he-- they-- should do was get down and stay
down until the situation clarified. That would probably entail finding a
television. But he didn't want to leave this unconscious girl lying on a
street that had suddenly become a madhouse. Every instinct of his mostly
kind-- and certainly civilized-- heart cried out against it.
"You go on," he told the little man with the mustache. He said it with
immense reluctance. He didn't know the little man from Adam, but at least he
wasn't spouting gibberish and throwing his hands in the air. Or going for
Clay's throat with his teeth bared. "Get inside somewhere. I'll. . ." He
didn't know how to finish.
"You'll what?" the man with the mustache asked, then hunched his
shoulders and winced as something else exploded. That one came from directly
behind the hotel, it sounded like, and now black smoke began to rise over
there, staining the blue sky before it got high enough for the wind to pull
away.
"I'll call a cop," Clay said, suddenly inspired. "She's got a cell
phone." He cocked his thumb at Power Suit Woman, now lying dead in a pool of
her own blood. "She was using it before . . . you know, just before the
shit. . ."
He trailed off, replaying exactly what had happened just before the
shit hit the fan. He found his eyes wandering from the dead woman to the
unconscious girl and then on to the shards of the unconscious girl's
peppermint-colored cell phone.
Warbling sirens of two distinctly different pitches rose in the air.
Clay supposed one pitch belonged to police cars, the other to fire trucks.
He supposed you could tell the difference if you lived in this city, but he
didn't, he lived in Kent Pond, Maine, and he wished with all his heart that
he were there right now.
What happened just before the shit hit the fan was that Power Suit
Woman had called her friend Maddy to tell her she'd gotten her hair done,
and one of Pixie Light's friends had called her. Pixie Dark had listened in
to this latter call. After that all three of them had gone crazy.
You're not thinking--
From behind them, to the east, came the biggest explosion yet: a
terrific shotgun-blast of sound. Clay leaped to his feet. He and the little
man in the tweed suit looked wildly at each other, then toward Chinatown and
Boston's North End. They couldn't see what had exploded, but now a much
larger, darker plume of smoke was rising above the buildings on that
horizon.
While they were looking at it, a Boston PD radio-car and a
hook-and-ladder fire truck pulled up in front of the Four Seasons across the
street. Clay glanced that way in time to see a second jumper set sail from
the top story of the hotel, followed by another pair from the roof. To Clay
it looked as if the two coming from the roof were actually brawling with
each other on the way down.
"Jesus Mary and Joseph NO!" a woman screamed, her voice breaking. "Oh
NO, no MORE, no MORE!"
The first of the suicidal trio hit the rear of the police car,
splattering the trunk with hair and gore, shattering the back window. The
other two hit the hook and ladder as firemen dressed in bright yellow coats
scattered like improbable birds.
"NO!" the woman shrieked. "No MORE! No MORE! Dear GOD, no MORE!"
But here came a woman from the fifth or sixth floor, tumbling like a
crazy acrobat, striking a policeman who was peering up and surely killing
him even as she killed herself.
From the north there came another of those great roaring explosions--
the sound of the devil firing a shotgun in hell-- and once again Clay looked
at the little man, who was looking anxiously back up at him. More smoke was
rising in the sky, and in spite of the brisk breeze, the blue over there was
almost blotted out.
"They're using planes again," the little man said. "The dirty bastards
are using planes again."
As if to underline the idea, a third monstrous explosion came rolling
to them from the city's northeast.
"But. . . that's Logan over there." Clay was once again finding it hard
to talk, and even harder to think. All he really seemed to have in his mind
was some sort of half-baked joke: Did you hear the one about the [insert
your favorite ethnic group here} terrorists who decided to bring America to
its knees by blowing up the airport?
"So?" the little man asked, almost truculently.
"So why not the Hancock Building? Or the Pru?"
The little man's shoulders slumped. "I don't know. I only know I want
to get off this street."
As if to emphasize his point, half a dozen more young people sprinted
past them. Boston was a city of young people, Clay had noticed-- all those
colleges. These six, three men and three women, were running lootless, at
least, and they most assuredly weren't laughing. As they ran, one of the
young men pulled out his cell phone and stuck it to his ear.
Clay glanced across the street and saw that a second black-and-white
unit had pulled up behind the first. No need to use Power Suit Woman's cell
phone after all (which was good, since he'd decided he really didn't want to
do that). He could just walk across the street and talk to them except he
wasn't sure that he dared to cross Boylston Street just now. Even if he did,
would they come over here to look at one unconscious girl when they had God
knew how many casualties over there? And as he watched, the firemen began
piling back on board their hook-and-ladder unit; it looked like they were
heading someplace else. Over to Logan Airport, quite likely, or--
"Oh my God-Jesus, watch out for this one," said the little man with the
mustache, speaking in a low, tight voice. He was looking west along
Boylston, back toward downtown, in the direction Clay had been coming from
when his major object in life had been reaching Sharon on the phone. He'd
even known how he was going to start: Good news, hon-- no matter how it
comes out between us, there'll always be shoes for the kid. In his head it
had sounded light and funny-- like the old days.
There was nothing funny about this. Coming toward them-- not running
but walking in long, flat-footed strides-- was a man of about fifty, wearing
suit pants and the remains of a shirt and tie. The pants were gray. It was
impossible to tell what color the shirt and tie had been, because both were
now shredded and stained with blood. In his right hand the man held what
looked like a butcher knife with an eighteen-inch blade. Clay actually
believed he had seen this knife, in the window of a shop called Soul
Kitchen, on his walk back from his meeting at the Copley Square Hotel. The
row of knives in the window (SWEDISH STEEL! the little engraved card in
front of them proclaimed) had shone in the cunning glow of hidden
downlighters, but this blade had done a good deal of work since its
liberation-- or a bad deal of it-- and was now dull with blood.
The man in the tattered shirt swung the knife as he closed in on them
with his flat-footed strides, the blade cutting short up-and-down arcs in
the air. He broke the pattern only once, to slash at himself. A fresh rill
of blood ran through a new rip in his tattered shirt. The remains of his tie
flapped. And as he closed the distance he hectored them like a backwoods
preacher speaking in tongues at the moment of some divine godhead
revelation.
"Eyelab!" he cried. "Eeelah-eyelah-a-babbalah naz! A-babbalah why?
A-bunnaloo coy? Kazzalah! Kazzalah-CAN! Fie! SHY-fie!" And now he brought
the knife back to his right hip and then beyond it, and Clay, whose visual
sense was overdeveloped, at once saw the sweeping stroke that would follow.
The gutting stroke, made even as he continued his nuthouse march to nowhere
through the October afternoon in those flat-footed declamatory strides.
"Look out!" the little guy with the mustache screamed, but he wasn't
looking out, not the little guy with the mustache; the little guy with the
mustache, the first normal person with whom Clay Riddell had spoken since
this craziness began-- who had, in fact, spoken to him, which had probably
taken some courage, under the circumstances-- was frozen in place, his eyes
bigger than ever behind the lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles. And was
the crazy guy going for him because of the two men, the one with the
mustache was smaller and looked like easier prey? If so, maybe Mr.
Speaking-in-Tongues wasn't completely crazy, and suddenly Clay was mad as
well as scared, mad the way he might have been if he'd looked through a
schoolyard fence and seen a bully getting ready to tune up on a smaller,
younger kid.
"LOOK OUT!" the little man with the mustache almost wailed, still not
moving as his death swept toward him, death liberated from a shop called
Soul Kitchen where Diner's Club and Visa were no doubt accepted, along with
Your Personal Check If Accompanied By Bank Card.
Clay didn't think. He simply picked up his portfolio again by its
double handle and stuck it between the oncoming knife and his new
acquaintance in the tweed suit. The blade went all the way through with a
hollow thuck, but the tip stopped four inches short of the little man's
belly. The little man finally came to his senses and cringed aside, toward
the Common, shrieking for help at the top of his lungs.
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."
"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 ...
