Стивен Кинг. Клетка (engl)
страница №3
...ago, cellphones as they now exist would have seemed like science fiction to most
people."
"I'm pretty sure it's something like that," Clay said. "You can get
enough of it to screw you up righteously if you even overhear a call." He
was thinking of Pixie Dark. "But the insidious thing is that when people see
things going wrong all around them-- "
"Their first impulse is to reach for their cell phones and try to find
out what's causing it," Tom said.
"Yeah," Clay said. "I saw people doing it."
Tom looked at him bleakly. "So did I."
"What all this has to do with you leaving the safety of the hotel,
especially with dark coming on, I don't know," Mr. Ricardi said.
As if in answer, there came another explosion. It was followed by half
a dozen more, marching off to the southeast like the diminishing footsteps
of a giant. From above them came another thud, and a faint cry of rage.
"I don't think the crazy ones will have the brains to leave the city
any more than that guy up there can find his way to the stairs," Clay said.
For a moment he thought the look on Tom's face was shock, and then he
realized it was something else. Amazement, maybe. And dawning hope. "Oh,
Christ," he said, and actually slapped the side of his face with one hand.
"They won't leave. I never thought of that."
"There might be something else," Alice said. She was biting her lip and
looking down at her hands, which were working together in a restless knot.
She forced herself to look up at Clay. "It might actually be safer to go
after dark."
"Why's that, Alice?"
"If they can't see you-- if you can get behind something, if you can
hide-- they forget about you almost right away."
"What makes you think that, honey?" Tom asked.
"Because I hid from the man who was chasing me," she said in a low
voice. "The guy in the yellow shirt. This was just before I saw you. I hid
in an alley. Behind one of those Dumpster thingies? I was scared, because I
thought there might not be any way back out if he came in after me, but it
was all I could think of to do. I saw him standing at the mouth of the
alley, looking around, walking around and around-- walking the worry-circle,
my grampa would say-- and at first I thought he was playing with me, you
know? Because he had to've seen me go into the alley, I was only a few feet
ahead of him . . . just a few feet . . . almost close enough to grab . . ."
Alice began to tremble. "But once I was in there, it was like . . . I dunno
. . ."
"Out of sight, out of mind," Tom said. "But if he was that close, why
did you stop running?"
"Because I couldn't anymore," Alice said. "I just couldn't. My legs
were like rubber, and I felt like I was going to shake myself apart from the
inside. But it turned out I didn't have to run, anyway. He walked the
worry-circle a few more times, muttering that crazy talk, and then just
walked off. I could hardly believe it. I thought he had to be trying to fake
me out. . . but at the same time I knew he was too crazy for anything like
that." She glanced briefly at Clay, then back down at her hands again. "My
problem was running into him again. I should have stuck with you guys the
first time. I can be pretty stupid sometimes."
"You were sca-- " Clay began, and then the biggest explosion yet came
from somewhere east of them, a deafening KER-WHAM! that made them all duck
and cover their ears. They heard the window in the lobby shatter.
"My . . . God," Mr. Ricardi said. His wide eyes underneath that bald
head made him look to Clay like Little Orphan Annie's mentor, Daddy
Warbucks. "That might have been the new Shell superstation they put in over
on Kneeland. The one all the taxis and the Duck Boats use. It was the right
direction."
Clay had no idea if Ricardi was right, he couldn't smell burning
gasoline (at least not yet), but his visually trained mind's eye could see a
triangle of city concrete now burning like a propane torch in the latening
day.
"Can a modern city burn?" he asked Tom. "One made mostly of concrete
and metal and glass? Could it burn the way Chicago did after Mrs. O'Leary's
cow kicked over the lantern?"
"That lantern-kicking business was nothing but an urban legend," Alice
said. She was rubbing the back of her neck as if she were getting a bad
headache. "Mrs. Myers said so, in American History."
"Sure it could," Tom said. "Look what happened to the World Trade
Center, after those airplanes hit it."
"Airplanes full of jet fuel," Mr. Ricardi said pointedly.
As if the bald desk clerk had conjured it, the smell of burning
gasoline began to come to them, wafting through the shattered lobby windows
and sliding beneath the door to the inner office like bad mojo.
"I guess you were on the nose about that Shell station," Tom remarked.
Mr. Ricardi went to the door between his office and the lobby. He
unlocked it and opened it. What Clay could see of the lobby beyond already
looked deserted and gloomy and somehow irrelevant. Mr. Ricardi sniffed
audibly, then closed the door and locked it again. "Fainter already," he
said.
"Wishful thinking," Clay said. "Either that or your nose is getting
used to the aroma."
"I think he might be right," Tom said. "That's a good west wind out
there-- by which I mean the air's moving toward the ocean-- and if what we
just heard was that new station they put in on the corner of Kneeland and
Washington, by the New England Medical Center-- "
"That's the one, all right," Mr. Ricardi said. His face registered glum
satisfaction. "Oh, the protests! The smart money fixed that, believe you m--
"
Tom overrode him. "-- then the hospital will be on fire by now . . .
along with anybody left inside, of course . . ."
"No," Alice said, then put a hand over her mouth.
"I think yes. And the Wang Center's next in line. The breeze may drop
by full dark, but if it doesn't, everything east of the Mass Pike is apt to
be so much toasted cheese by ten p.m."
"We're west of there," Mr. Ricardi pointed out.
"Then we're safe enough," Clay said. "At least from that one." He went
to Mr. Ricardi's little window, stood on his toes, and peered out onto Essex
Street.
"What do you see?" Alice asked. "Do you see people?"
"No . . . yes. One man. Other side of the street."
"Is he one of the crazy ones?" she asked.
"I can't tell." But Clay thought he was. It was the way he ran, and the
jerky way he kept looking back over his shoulder. Once, just before he went
around the corner and onto Lincoln Street, the guy almost ran into a fruit
display in front of a grocery store. And although Clay couldn't hear him, he
could see the man's lips moving. "Now he's gone."
"No one else?" Tom asked.
"Not at the moment, but there's smoke." Clay paused. "Soot and ash,
too. I can't tell how much. The wind's whipping it around."
"Okay, I'm convinced," Tom said. "I've always been a slow learner but
never a no-learner. The city's going to burn and nobody's going to stand pat
but the crazy people."
"I think that's right," Clay said. And he didn't think this was true of
just Boston, but for the time being, Boston was all he could bear to
consider. In time he might be able to widen his view, but not until he knew
Johnny was safe. Or maybe the big picture was always going to be beyond him.
He drew small pictures for a living, after all. But in spite of everything,
the selfish fellow who lived like a limpet on the underside of his mind had
time to send up a clear thought. It came in colors of blue and dark
sparkling gold. Why did it have to happen today, of all days? Just after I
finally made a solid strike?
"Can I come with you guys, if you go?" Alice asked.
"Sure," Clay said. He looked at the desk clerk. "You can, too, Mr.
Ricardi."
"I shall stay at my post," Mr. Ricardi said. He spoke loftily, but
before they shifted away from Clay's, his eyes looked sick.
"I don't think you'll get in Dutch with the management for locking up
and leaving under these circumstances," Tom said. He spoke in the gentle
fashion Clay was so much coming to like.
"I shall stay at my post," he said again. "Mr. Donnelly, the day
manager, went out to make the afternoon deposit at the bank and left me in
charge. If he comes back, perhaps then . . ."
"Please, Mr. Ricardi," Alice said. "Staying here is no good."
But Mr. Ricardi, who had once more crossed his arms over his thin
chest, only shook his head.
15
They moved one of the Queen Anne chairs aside, and Mr. Ricardi unlocked
the front doors for them. Clay looked out. He could see no people moving in
either direction, but it was hard to tell for sure because the air was now
full of fine dark ash. It danced in the breeze like black snow.
"Come on," he said. They were only going next door to start with, to
the Metropolitan Cafe.
"I'm going to relock the door and put the chair back in place," Mr.
Ricardi said, "but I'll be listening. If you run into trouble-- if there are
more of those . . .people . . . hiding in the Metropolitan, for instance--
and you have to retreat, just remember to shout, 'Mr. Ricardi, Mr. Ricardi,
we need you!' That way I'll know it's safe to open the door. Is that
understood?"
"Yes," Clay said. He squeezed Mr. Ricardi's thin shoulder. The desk
clerk flinched, then stood firm (although he showed no particular sign of
pleasure at being so saluted). "You're all right. I didn't think you were,
but I was wrong."
"I hope I do my best," the bald man said stiffly. "Just remember-- "
"We'll remember," Tom said. "And we'll be over there maybe ten minutes.
If anything goes wrong over here, you give a shout."
"All right." But Clay didn't think he would. He didn't know why he
thought that, it made no sense to think a man wouldn't give a shout to save
himself if he was in trouble, but Clay did think it.
Alice said, "Please change your mind, Mr. Ricardi. It's not safe in
Boston, you must know that by now."
Mr. Ricardi only looked away. And Clay thought, not without wonder,
This is how a man looks when he's deciding that the risk of death is better
than the risk of change.
"Come on," Clay said. "Let's make some sandwiches while we've still got
electricity to see by."
"Some bottled water wouldn't hurt, either," Tom said.
16
The electricity failed just as they were wrapping the last of their
sandwiches in the Metropolitan Cafe's tidy, white-tiled little kitchen. By
then Clay had tried three more times to get through to Maine: once to his
old house, once to Kent Pond Elementary, where Sharon taught, and once to
Joshua Chamberlain Middle School, which Johnny now attended. In no case did
he get further than Maine's 207 area code.
When the lights in the Metropolitan went out, Alice screamed in what at
first seemed to Clay like total darkness. Then the emergency lights came on.
Alice was not much comforted. She was clinging to Tom with one arm. In the
other she was brandishing the bread-knife she'd used to cut the sandwiches
with. Her eyes were wide and somehow flat.
"Alice, put that knife down," Clay said, a little more harshly than
he'd intended. "Before you cut one of us with it."
"Or yourself," Tom said in that mild and soothing voice of his. His
spectacles glinted in the glare of the emergency lights.
She put it down, then promptly picked it up again. "I want it," she
said. "I want to take it with me. You have one, Clay. I want one."
"All right," he said, "but you don't have a belt. We'll make you one
from a tablecloth. For now, just be careful."
Half the sandwiches were roast beef and cheese, half ham and cheese.
Alice had wrapped them in Saran Wrap. Under the cash register Clay found a
stack of sacks with DOGGY BAG written on one side and people bag written on
the other. He and Tom tumbled the sandwiches into a pair of these. Into a
third bag they put three bottles of water.
The tables had been made up for a dinner-service that was never going
to happen. Two or three had been tumbled over but most stood perfect, with
their glasses and silver shining in the hard light of the emergency boxes on
the walls. Something about their calm orderliness hurt Clay's heart. The
cleanliness of the folded napkins, and the little electric lamps on each
table. Those were now dark, and he had an idea it might be a long time
before the bulbs inside lit up again.
He saw Alice and Tom gazing about with faces as unhappy as his felt,
and a desire to cheer them up-- almost manic in its urgency-- came over him.
He remembered a trick he used to do for his son. He wondered again about
Johnny's cell phone and the panic-rat took another nip out of him. Clay
hoped with all his heart the damned phone was lying forgotten under
Johnny-Gee's bed among the dust-kitties, with its battery flat-flat-flat.
"Watch this carefully," he said, setting his bag of sandwiches aside,
"and please note that at no time do my hands leave my wrists." He grasped
the hanging skirt of a tablecloth.
"This is hardly the time for parlor tricks," Tom said.
"I want to see," Alice said. For the first time since they'd met her,
there was a smile on her face. It was small but it was there.
"We need the tablecloth," Clay said, "it won't take a second, and
besides, the lady wants to see." He turned to Alice. "But you have to say a
magic word. Shazam will do."
"Shazam!" she said, and Clay pulled briskly with both hands.
He hadn't done the trick in two, maybe even three years, and it almost
didn't work. And yet at the same time, his mistake-- some small hesitation
in the pull, no doubt-- actually added to the charm of the thing. Instead of
staying where they were while the tablecloth magically disappeared from
beneath them, all the place-settings on the table moved about four inches to
the right. The glass nearest to where Clay was standing actually wound up
with its circular base half on and half off the table.
Alice applauded, now laughing. Clay took a bow with his hands held out.
"Can we go now, O great Vermicelli?" Tom asked, but even Tom was
smiling. Clay could see his small teeth in the emergency lights.
"Soon's I rig this," Clay said. "She can carry the knife on one side
and a bag of sandwiches on the other. You can tote the water." He folded the
tablecloth over into a triangle shape, then rolled it quickly into a belt.
He slipped a bag of sandwiches onto this by the bag's carrier handles, then
put the tablecloth around the girl's slim waist, having to take a turn and a
half and tie the knot in back to make the thing secure. He finished by
sliding the serrated bread-knife home on the right side.
"Say, you're pretty handy," Tom said.
"Handy is dandy," Clay said, and then something else blew up outside,
close enough to shake the cafe. The glass that had been standing half on and
half off the table lost its balance, tumbled to the floor, and shattered.
The three of them looked at it. Clay thought to tell them he didn't believe
in omens, but that would only make things worse. Besides, he did.
17
Clay had his reasons for wanting to go back to the Atlantic Avenue Inn
before they set off. One was to retrieve his portfolio, which he'd left
sitting in the lobby. Another was to see if they couldn't find some sort of
makeshift scabbard for Alice's knife-- he reckoned even a shaving kit would
do, if it was long enough. A third was to give Mr. Ricardi another chance to
join them. He was surprised to find he wanted this even more than he wanted
the forgotten portfolio of drawings. He had taken an odd, reluctant liking
to the man.
When he confessed this to Tom, Tom surprised him by nodding. "It's the
way I feel about anchovies on pizza," he said. "I tell myself there's
something disgusting about a combination of cheese, tomato sauce, and dead
fish . . . but sometimes that shameful urge comes over me and I can't stand
against it."
A blizzard of black ash and soot was blowing up the street and between
the buildings. Car alarms warbled, burglar alarms brayed, and fire alarms
clanged. There seemed to be no heat in the air, but Clay could hear the
crackle of fire to the south and east of them. The smell of burning was
stronger, too. They heard voices shouting, but these were back toward the
Common, where Boylston Street widened.
When they got next door to the Atlantic Avenue Inn, Tom helped Clay
push one of the Queen Anne chairs away from one of the broken glass
door-panels. The lobby beyond was now a pool of gloom in which Mr. Ricardi's
desk and the sofa were only darker shadows; if Clay hadn't already been in
there, he would have had no idea what those shadows represented. Above the
elevators a single emergency light guttered, the boxed battery beneath it
buzzing like a horsefly.
"Mr. Ricardi?" Tom called. "Mr. Ricardi, we came back to see if you
changed your mind."
There was no reply. After a moment, Alice began carefully to knock out
the glass teeth that still jutted from the windowframe.
"Mr. Ricardi!" Tom called again, and when there was still no answer, he
turned to Clay. "You're going in there, are you?"
"Yes. To get my portfolio. It's got my drawings in it."
"You don't have copies?"
"Those are the originals," Clay said, as if this explained everything.
To him it did. And besides, there was Mr. Ricardi. He'd said, I'll be
listening.
"What if Thumper from upstairs got him?" Tom asked.
"If that had happened, I think we'd have heard him thumping around down
here," Clay said. "For that matter, he would have come running at the sound
of our voices, babbling like the guy who tried to carve us up back by the
Common."
"You don't know that," Alice said. She was gnawing at her lower lip.
"It's way too early for you to think you know all the rules."
Of course she was right, but they couldn't stand around out here
discussing it, that was no good, either.
"I'll be careful," he said, and put a leg over the bottom of the
window. It was narrow, but plenty wide enough for him to climb through.
"I'll just poke my head into his office. If he's not there, I won't go
hunting around for him like a chick in a horror movie. I'll just grab my
portfolio and we'll boogie."
"Keep yelling," Alice said. "Just say 'Okay, I'm okay,' something like
that. The whole time."
"All right, but if I stop yelling, just go. Don't come in after me."
"Don't worry," she said, unsmiling. "I saw all those movies, too. We've
got Cinemax."
18
"I'm okay," Clay shouted, picking up his portfolio and then putting it
down on the reception desk. Good to go, he thought. But not quite yet.
He looked over his shoulder as he went around the desk and saw the one
unblocked window glimmering, seeming to float in the thickening gloom, with
two silhouettes cut into the day's last light. "I'm okay, still okay, just
going in to check his office now, still okay, still o-- "
"Clay?" Tom's voice was alarmed, but for a moment Clay couldn't respond
and set Tom's mind at rest. There was an overhead light fixture in the
middle of the inner office's high ceiling. Mr. Ricardi was hanging from it
by what looked like a drape-cord. There was a white bag pulled down over his
head. Clay thought it was the kind of plastic bag the hotel gave you to put
your dirty laundry and dry cleaning in. "Clay, are you all right?"
"Clay?" Alice sounded shrill, ready to be hysterical.
"Okay," he heard himself say. His mouth seemed to be operating itself,
with no help from his brain. "Still right here." He was thinking of how Mr.
Ricardi had looked when he said I shall stay at my post. The words had been
lofty, but the eyes had been scared and somehow humble, the eyes of a small
raccoon driven into a corner of the garage by a large and angry dog. "I'm
coming out now."
He backed away, as if Mr. Ricardi might slip his homemade drape-cord
noose and come after him the second he turned his back. He was suddenly more
than afraid for Sharon and Johnny; he was homesick for them with a depth of
feeling that made him think of his first day at school, his mother leaving
him at the playground gate. The other parents had walked their kids inside.
But his mother said, You just go in there, Clayton, it's the first room,
you'll be fine, boys should do this part alone. Before he did what she told
him he had watched her going away, back up Cedar Street. Her blue coat. Now,
standing here in the dark, he was renewing acquaintance with the knowledge
that the second part of homesick was sick for a reason.
Tom and Alice were fine, but he wanted the people he loved.
Once he was around the reception desk, he faced the street and crossed
the lobby. He got close enough to the long broken window to see the
frightened faces of his new friends, then remembered he had forgotten his
fucking portfolio again and had to go back. Reaching for it, he felt certain
that Mr. Ricardi's hand would steal out of the gathering darkness behind the
desk and close over his. That didn't happen, but from overhead came another
of those thumps. Something still up there, something still blundering around
in the dark. Something that had been human until three o'clock this
afternoon.
This time when he was halfway to the door, the lobby's single
battery-powered emergency light stuttered briefly, then went out. That's a
Fire Code violation, Clay thought. I ought to report that.
He handed out his portfolio. Tom took it.
"Where is he?" Alice asked. "Wasn't he there?"
"Dead," Clay said. It had crossed his mind to lie, but he didn't think
he was capable. He was too shocked by what he had seen. How did a man hang
himself? He didn't see how it was even possible. "Suicide."
Alice began to cry, and it occurred to Clay that she didn't know that
if it had been up to Mr. Ricardi, she'd probably be dead herself now. The
thing was, he felt a little like crying himself. Because Mr. Ricardi had
come around. Maybe most people did, if they got a chance.
From west of them on the darkening street, back toward the Common, came
a scream that seemed too great to have issued from human lungs. It sounded
to Clay almost like the trumpeting of an elephant. There was no pain in it,
and no joy. There was only madness. Alice cringed against him, and he put an
arm around her. The feel of her body was like the feel of an electrical wire
with a strong current passing through it.
"If we're going to get out of here, let's do it," Tom said. "If we
don't run into too much trouble, we should be able to get as far north as
Maiden, and spend the night at my place."
"That's a hell of a good idea," Clay said.
Tom smiled cautiously. "You really think so?"
"I really do. Who knows, maybe Officer Ashland's already there."
"Who's Officer Ashland?" Alice asked.
"A policeman we met back by the Common," Tom said. "He . . . you know,
helped us out." The three of them were now walking east toward Atlantic
Avenue, through the falling ash and the sound of alarms. "We won't see him,
though. Clay's just trying to be funny."
"Oh," she said. "I'm glad somebody's trying to be." Lying on the
pavement by a litter barrel was a blue cell phone with a cracked casing.
Alice kicked it into the gutter without breaking stride.
"Good one," Clay said.
Alice shrugged. "Five years of soccer," she said, and at that moment
the streetlights came on, like a promise that all was not yet lost.
MALDEN
1
Thousands of people stood on the Mystic River Bridge and watched as
everything between Comm Ave and Boston Harbor took fire and burned. The wind
from the west remained brisk and warm even after the sun was down and the
flames roared like a furnace, blotting out the stars. The rising moon was
full and ultimately hideous. Sometimes the smoke masked it, but all too
often that bulging dragon's eye swam free and peered down, casting a bleary
orange light. Clay thought it a horror-comic moon, but didn't say so.
No one had much to say. The people on the bridge only looked at the
city they had so lately left, watching as the flames reached the pricey
harborfront condos and began engulfing them. From across the water came an
interwoven tapestry of alarms-- fire alarms and car alarms, mostly, with
several whooping sirens added for spice. For a while an amplified voice had
told citizens to GET OFF THE STREETS, and then another had begun advising
them to LEAVE THE CITY ON FOOT BY MAJOR ARTERIES WEST AND NORTH. These two
contradictory pieces of advice had competed with each other for several
minutes, and then GET OFF THE STREETS had ceased. About five minutes later,
LEAVE THE CITY ON FOOT had also quit. Now there was only the hungry roar of
the wind-driven fire, the alarms, and a steady low crumping sound that Clay
thought must be windows imploding in the enormous heat.
He wondered how many people had been trapped over there. Trapped
between the fire and the water.
"Remember wondering if a modern city could burn?" Tom McCourt said. In
the light of the fire, his small, intelligent face looked tired and sick.
There was a smudge of ash on one of his cheeks. "Remember that?"
"Shut up, come on," Alice said. She was clearly distraught, but like
Tom, she spoke in a low voice. It's like we're in a library, Clay thought.
And then he thought, No-- a funeral home. "Can't we please go? Because this
is kicking my ass."
"Sure," Clay said. "You bet. How far to your place, Tom?"
"From here, less than two miles," he said. "But it's not all behind us,
I'm sorry to say." They had turned north now, and he pointed ahead and to
the right. The glow blooming there could almost have been orange-tinted
arc-sodium streetlights on a cloudy night, except the night was clear and
the streetlights were now out. In any case, streetlights did not give off
rising columns of smoke.
Alice moaned, then covered her mouth as if she expected someone among
the silent multitude watching Boston burn might reprimand her for making too
much noise.
"Don't worry," Tom said with eerie calm. "We're going to Maiden and
that looks like Revere. The way the wind's blowing, Maiden should still be
all right."
Stop right there, Clay urged him silently, but Tom did not.
"For now," he added.
2
There were several dozen abandoned cars on the lower deck of the span,
and a fire truck with EAST BOSTON lettered on its avocado-green side that
had been sideswiped by a cement truck (both were abandoned), but mostly this
level of the bridge belonged to the pedestrians. Except now you probably
have to call them refugees, Clay thought, and then realized there was no
them about it. Us. Call us refugees.
There was still very little talk. Most people just stood and watched
the city burn in silence. Those who were moving went slowly, looking back
frequently over their shoulders. Then, as they neared the far end of the
bridge (he could see Old Ironsides-- at least he thought it was Old
Ironsides-- riding at anchor in the Harbor, still safe from the flames), he
noticed an odd thing. Many of them were also looking at Alice. At first he
had the paranoid idea that people must think he and Tom had abducted the
girl and were spiriting her away for God knew what immoral purposes. Then he
had to remind himself that these wraiths on the Mystic Bridge were in shock,
even more uprooted from their normal lives than the Hurricane Katrina
refugees had been-- those unfortunates had at least had some warning-- and
were unlikely to be capable of considering such fine ideas. Most were too
deep in their own heads for moralizing. Then the moon rose a little higher
and came out a little more strongly, and he got it: she was the only
adolescent in sight. Even Clay himself was young compared to most of their
fellow refugees. The majority of people gawking at the torch that had been
Boston or plodding slowly toward Maiden and Danvers were over forty, and
many looked eligible for the Golden Ager discount at Denny's. He saw a few
people with little kids, and a couple of babies in strollers, but that was
pretty much it for the younger set.
A little farther on, he noticed something else. There were cell phones
lying discarded in the roadway. Every few feet they passed another one, and
none were whole. They had either been run over or stomped down to nothing
but wire and splinters of plastic, like dangerous snakes that had been
destroyed before they could bite again.
3
"What's your name, dear?" asked a plump woman who came angling across
to their side of the highway. This was about five minutes after they had
left the bridge. Tom said another fifteen would bring them to the Salem
Street exit, and from there it was only four blocks to his house. He said
his cat would be awfully glad to see him, and that had brought a wan smile
to Alice's face. Clay thought wan was better than nothing.
Now Alice looked with reflexive mistrust at the plump woman who had
detached herself from the mostly silent groups and little lines of men and
women-- hardly more than shadows, really, some with suitcases, some carrying
shopping bags or wearing backpacks-- that had crossed the Mystic and were
walking north on Route One, away from the great fire to the south and all
too aware of the new one taking hold in Revere, off to the northeast.
The plump woman looked back at her with sweet interest. Her graying
hair was done in neat beauty-shop curls. She wore cat's-eye glasses and what
Clay's mother would have called a "car coat." She carried a shopping bag in
one hand and a book in the other. There seemed to be no harm in her. She
certainly wasn't one of the phone-crazies-- they hadn't seen a single one of
those since leaving the Atlantic Avenue Inn with their sacks of grub-- but
Clay felt himself go on point, just the same. To be approached as if they
were at a get-acquainted tea instead of fleeing a burning city didn't seem
normal. But under these circumstances, just what was? He was probably losing
it, but if so, Tom was, too. He was also watching the plump, motherly woman
with go-away eyes.
"Alice?" Alice said at last, just when Clay had decided the girl wasn't
going to reply at all. She sounded like a kid trying to answer what she
fears may be a trick question in a class that's really too tough for her.
"My name is Alice Maxwell?"
"Alice," the plump woman said, and her lips curved in a maternal smile
as sweet as her look of interest. There was no reason that smile should have
set Clay on edge more than he already was, but it did. "That's a lovely
name. It means 'blessed of God.' "
"Actually, ma'am, it means 'of the royalty' or 'regally born,' " Tom
said. "Now could you excuse us? The girl has just lost her mother today,
and-- "
"We've all lost someone today, haven't we, Alice?" the plump woman said
without looking at Tom. She kept pace with Alice, her beauty-shop curls
bouncing with every step. Alice was eyeing her with a mixture of unease and
fascination. Around them others paced and sometimes hurried and often
plodded with their heads down, little more than wraiths in this unaccustomed
darkness, and Clay still saw nobody young except for a few babies, a few
toddlers, and Alice. No adolescents because most adolescents had cell
phones, like Pixie Light back at the Mister Softee truck. Or like his own
son, who had a red Nextel with a ring-tone from The Monster Club and a
teacher workamommy who might be with him or might be just about anyw--
Stop it. Don't you let that rat out. That rat can do nothing but run,
bite, and chase its own tail.
The plump woman, meanwhile, kept nodding. Her curls bounced along.
"Yes, we've all lost someone, because this is the time of the great
Tribulation. It's all in here, in Revelation." She held up the book she was
carrying, and of course it was a Bible, and now Clay thought he was getting
a better look at the sparkle in the eyes behind the plump woman cat's-eye
glasses. That wasn't kindly interest; that was lunacy.
"Oh, that's it, everybody out of the pool," Tom said. In his voice Clay
heard a mixture of disgust (at himself, for letting the plump woman bore in
and get close to begin with, quite likely) and dismay.
The plump woman took no notice, of course; she had fixed Alice with her
stare, and who was there to pull her away? The police were otherwise
occupied, if there were any left. Here there were only the shocked and
shuffling refugees, and they could care less about one elderly crazy lady
with a Bible and a beauty-shop perm.
"The Vial of Insanity has been poured into the brains of the wicked,
and the City of Sin has been set afire by the cleansing torch of
Yee-ho-vah!" the plump lady cried. She was wearing red lipstick. Her teeth
were too even to be anything but old-fashioned dentures. "Now you see the
unrepentant flee, yea, verily, even as maggots flee the burst belly of-- "
Alice put her hands over her ears. "Make her stop!" she cried, and
still the ghost-shapes of the city's recent residents filed past, only a few
sparing a dull, incurious glance before looking once more into the darkness
where somewhere ahead New Hampshire lay.
The plump woman was starting to work up a sweat, Bible raised, eyes
blazing, beauty-shop curls nodding and swaying. "Take your hands down, girl,
and hear the Word of God before you let these men lead you away and
fornicate with you in the open doorway of Hell itself! 'For I saw a star
blaze in the sky, and it was called Wormwood, and those that followed it
followed upon Lucifer, and those that followed upon Lucifer walked downward
into the furnace of-- ' "
Clay hit her. He pulled the punch at the last second, but it was still
a solid clip to the jaw, and he felt the impact travel all the way up to his
shoulder. The plump woman's glasses rose off her pug nose and then settled
back. Behind them, her eyes lost their glare and rolled up in their sockets.
Her knees came unhinged and she buckled, her Bible tumbling from her
clenched fist. Alice, still looking stunned and horrified, nevertheless
dropped her hands from her ears fast enough to catch the Bible. And Tom
McCourt caught the woman under her arms. The punch and the two subsequent
catches were so neatly done they could have been choreographed.
Clay was suddenly closer to undone than at any time since things had
started going wrong. Why this should have been worse than the throat-biting
teenage girl or the knife-wielding businessman, worse than finding Mr.
Ricardi hanging from a light fixture with a bag over his head, he didn't
know, but it was. He had kicked the knife-wielding businessman, Tom had,
too, but the knife-wielding businessman had been a different kind of crazy.
The old lady with the beauty-shop curls had just been a. . .
"Jesus," he said. "She was just a nut, and I coldcocked her." He was
starting to shake.
"She was terrorizing a young girl who lost her mother today," Tom said,
and Clay realized it wasn't calmness he heard in the small man's voice but
an extraordinary coldness. "You did exactly the right thing. Besides, you
can't keep an old iron horse like this down for long. She's coming around
already. Help me get her over to the side of the road."
4
They had reached the part of Route One-- sometimes called the Miracle
Mile, sometimes Sleaze Alley-- where limited-access highway yielded to a
jostle of liquor marts, cut-rate clothing stores, sporting-goods outlets,
and eateries with names like Fuddruckers. Here the six lanes were littered,
if not quite choked, with vehicles that had either been piled up or just
abandoned when their operators panicked, tried their cell phones, and went
insane. The refugees wove their various courses silently among the remains,
reminding Clay Riddell more than a little of ants evacuating a hill that has
been demolished by the careless passing boot-stride of some heedless human.
There was a green reflectorized sign reading malden salem st. exit 1/4
MI at the edge of a low pink building that had been broken into; it was
fronted by a jagged skirting of broken glass, and a battery-powered burglar
alarm was even now in the tired last stages of running down. A glance at the
dead sign on the roof was all Clay needed to tell him what had made the
place a target in the aftermath of the day's disaster: mister big's giant
discount liquor.
He had one of the plump woman's arms. Tom had the other, and Alice
supported the muttering woman's head as they eased her to a sitting position
with her back against one of the exit sign's legs. Just as they got her
down, the plump woman opened her eyes and looked at them dazedly.
Tom snapped his fingers in front of her eyes, twice, briskly. She
blinked, then turned her eyes to Clay. "You . . . hit me," she said. Her
fingers rose to touch the rapidly puffing spot on her jaw.
"Yes, I'm sor-- " Clay began.
"He may be, but I'm not," Tom said. He spoke with that same cold
briskness. "You were terrorizing our ward."
The plump woman laughed softly, but tears were in her eyes. "Ward! I've
heard a lot of words for it, but never that one. As if I don't know what men
like you want with a tender girl like this, especially in times like these.
'They repented not their fornications, nor their sodomies, nor their-- ' "
"Shut up," Tom said, "or I'll hit you myself. And unlike my friend, who
was I think lucky enough not to grow up among the holy Hannahs and thus does
not recognize you for what you are, I won't pull my punch. Fair warning--
one more word." He held his fist before her eyes, and although Clay had
already concluded that Tom was an educated man, civilized, and probably not
much of a puncher under ordinary circumstances, he could not help feeling
dismay at the sight of that small, tight fist, as if he were looking at an
omen of the coming age.
The plump lady looked and said nothing. One large tear spilled down her
rouged cheek.
"That's enough, Tom, I'm okay," Alice said.
Tom dropped the plump lady's shopping bag of possessions into her lap.
Clay hadn't even realized Tom had salvaged it. Then Tom took the Bible from
Alice, picked up one of the plump lady's be-ringed hands, and smacked the
Bible into it, spine first. He started away, then turned back.
"Tom, that's enough, let's go," Clay said.
Tom ignored him. He bent toward the woman sitting with her back against
the sign's leg. His hands were on his knees, and to Clay the two of them--
the plump, spectacled woman looking up, the small, spectacled man bending
over with his hands on his knees-- looked like figures in some lunatic's
parody of the early illustrations from the Charles Dickens novels.
"Some advice, sister," Tom said. "The police will no longer protect you
as they did when you and your self-righteous, holy-rolling friends marched
on the family planning centers or the Emily Cathcart Clinic in Waltham-- "
"That abortion mill!" she spat, and then raised her Bible, as if to
block a blow.
Tom didn't hit her, but he was smiling grimly. "I don't know about the
Vial of Insanity, but there's certainly beaucoup crazy making the rounds
tonight. May I be clear? The lions are out of their cages, and you may well
find that they'll eat the mouthy Christians first. Somebody canceled your
right of free speech around three o'clock this afternoon. Just a word to the
wise." He looked from Alice to Clay, and Clay saw that the upper lip beneath
the mustache was trembling slightly. "Shall we go?"
"Yes," Clay said.
"Wow," Alice said, once they were walking toward the Salem Street ramp
again, Mister Big's Giant Discount Liquor falling behind them. "You grew up
with someone like that?"
"My mother and both of her sisters," Tom said. "First N.E. Church of
Christ the Redeemer. They took Jesus as their personal savior, and the
church took them as its personal pigeons."
"Where is your mother now?" Clay asked.
Tom glanced at him briefly. "Heaven. Unless they rooked her on that
one, too. I'm pretty sure the bastards did."
Near the stop sign at the foot of the ramp, two men were fighting over
a keg of beer. If forced to guess, Clay would have said it had probably been
liberated from Mister Big's Giant Discount Liquor. Now it lay forgotten
against the guardrails, dented and leaking foam, while the two men-- both
brawny and both bleeding-- battered each other with their fists. Alice
shrank against him, and Clay put his arm around her, but there was something
almost reassuring about these brawlers. They were angry-- enraged-- but not
crazy. Not like the people back in the city.
One of them was bald and wearing a Celtics jacket. He hit the other a
looping overhand blow that mashed his opponent's lips and knocked him flat.
When the man in the Celtics jacket advanced on the downed man, the downed
man scrambled away, then got up, still backing off. He spat blood. "Take it,
ya fuck!" he yelled in a thick, weepy Boston accent. "Hope it chokes ya!"
The bald man in the Celtics jacket made as if to charge him, and the
other went running up the ramp toward Route One. Celtics Jacket started to
bend down for his prize, registered Clay, Alice, and Tom, and straightened
up again. It was three to one, he had a black eye, and blood was trickling
down the side of his face from a badly torn earlobe, but Clay saw no fear in
that face, although he had only the diminishing light of the Revere fire to
go by. He thought his grandfather would have said the guy's Irish was up,
and certainly that went with the big green shamrock on the back of his
jacket.
"The fuck you lookin at?" he asked.
"Nothing-- just going by you, if that's all right," Tom said mildly. "I
live on Salem Street."
"You can go to Salem Street or hell, far as I'm concerned," the bald
man in the Celtics jacket said. "Still a free country, isn't it?"
"Tonight?" Clay said. "Too free."
The bald man thought it over and then laughed, a humorless double
ha-ha. "The fuck happened? Any-a youse know?"
Alice said, "It was the cell phones. They made people crazy."
The bald man picked up the keg. He handled it easily, tipping it so the
leak stopped. "Fucking things," he said. "Never cared to own one. Rollover
minutes. The fuck're those?"
Clay didn't know. Tom might've-- he'd owned a cell phone, so it seemed
possible-- but Tom said nothing. Probably didn't want to get into a long
discussion with the bald man, and probably a good idea. Clay thought the
bald man had some of the characteristics of an unexploded grenade.
"City burning?" the bald man asked. "Is, isn't it?"
"Yes," Clay said. "I don't think the Celtics will be playing at the
Fleet this year."
"They ain't shit, anyway," the man said. "Doc Rivers couldn't coach a
PAL team." He stood watching them, the keg on his shoulder, blood running
down the side of his face. Yet now he seemed peaceable enough, almost
serene. "Go on," he said. "But I wouldn't stay this close to the city for
long. It's gonna get worse before it gets better. There's gonna be a lot
more fires, for one thing. You think everybody who hightailed it north
remembered to turn off the gas stove? I fuckin doubt it."
The three of them started walking, then Alice stopped. She pointed to
the keg. "Was that yours?"
The bald man looked at her reasonably. "Ain't no was at times like
this, sweetie pie. Ain't no was left. There's just now and maybe-tomorrow.
It's mine now, and if there's any left it'll be mine maybe-tomorrow. Go on
now. The fuck out."
"Seeya," Clay said, and raised one hand.
"Wouldn't want to be ya," the bald man replied, unsmiling, but he
raised his own hand in return. They had passed the stop sign and were
crossing to the far side of what Clay assumed was Salem Street when the bald
man called after them again: "Hey, handsome!"
Both Clay and Tom turned to look, then glanced at each other, amused.
The bald guy with the keg was now only a dark shape on the rising ramp; he
could have been a caveman carrying a club.
"Where are the loonies now?" the bald guy asked. "You're not gonna tell
me they're all dead, are ya? Cause I don't fuckin believe it."
"That's a very good question," Clay said.
"You're fuckin-A right it is. Watch out for the little sweetie pie
there." And without waiting for them to reply, the man who'd won the battle
of the beer keg turned and merged with the shadows.
6
"This is it," Tom said no more than ten minutes later, and the moon
emerged from the wrack of cloud and smoke that had obscured it for the last
hour or so as if the little man with the spectacles and the mustache had
just given the Celestial Lighting Director a cue. Its rays-- silver now
instead of that awful infected orange-- illuminated a house that was either
dark blue, green, or perhaps even gray; without the streetlights to help, it
was hard to tell for sure. What Clay could tell for sure was that the house
was trim and handsome, although maybe not as big as your eye first insisted.
The moonlight aided in that deception, but it was mostly caused by the way
the steps rose from Tom McCourt's well-kept lawn to the only pillared porch
on the street. There was a fieldstone chimney on the left. From above the
porch, a dormer looked down on the street.
"Oh, Tom, it's beautiful!" Alice said in a too-rapturous voice. To Clay
she sounded exhausted and bordering on hysteria. He himself didn't think it
beautiful, but it certainly looked like the home of a man who owned a cell
phone and all the other twenty-first-century bells and whistles. So did the
rest of the houses on this part of Salem Street, and Clay doubted if many of
the residents had had Tom's fantastic good luck. He looked around nervously.
All the houses were dark-- the power was out now-- and they might have been
deserted, except he seemed to feel eyes, surveying them.
The eyes of crazies? Phone-crazies? He thought of Power Suit Woman and
Pixie Light; of the lunatic in the gray pants and the shredded tie; the man
in the business suit who had bitten the ear right off the side of the dog's
head. He thought of the naked man jabbing the car aerials back and forth as
he ran. No, surveying was not in the phone-crazies' repertoire. They just
came at you. But if there were normal people holed up in these houses-- some
of them, anyway-- where were the phone-crazies?
Clay didn't know.
"I don't know if I'd exactly call it beautiful," Tom said, "but it's
still standing, and that's good enough for me. I'd pretty well made up my
mind that we'd get here and find nothing but a smoking hole in the ground."
He reached in his pocket and brought out a slim ring of keys. "Come on in.
Be it ever so humble, and all that."
They started up the walk and had gone no more than half a dozen steps
when Alice cried, "Wait!"
Clay wheeled around, feeling both alarm and exhaustion. He thought he
was beginning to understand combat fatigue a little. Even his adrenaline
felt tired. But no one was there-- no phone-crazies, no bald man with blood
flowing down the side of his face from a shredded ear, not even a little old
lady with the talkin apocalypse blues. Just Alice, down on one knee at the
place where Tom's walk left the sidewalk.
"What is it, honey?" Tom asked.
She stood up, and Clay saw she was holding a very small sneaker. "It's
a Baby Nike," she said. "Do you-- "
Tom shook his head. "I live alone. Except for Rafe, that is. He thinks
he's the king, but he's only the cat."
"Then who left it?" She looked from Tom to Clay with wondering, tired
eyes.
Clay shook his head. "No telling, Alice. Might as well toss it."
But Clay knew she would not; it was dйjа vu at its disorienting worst.
She still held it in her hand, curled against her waist, as she went to
stand behind Tom, who was on the steps, picking slowly through his keys in
the scant light.
Now we hear the cat, Clay thought. Rafe. And sure enough, there was the
cat that had been Tom McCourt's salvation, waowing a greeting from inside.
7
Tom bent down and Rafe or Rafer-- both short for Rafael-- leaped into
his arms, purring loudly and stretching his head up to sniff Tom's carefully
trimmed mustache.
"Yeah, missed you, too," Tom said. "All is forgiven, believe me." He
carried Rafer across the enclosed porch, stroking the top of his head. Alice
followed. Clay came last, closing the door and turning the knob on the lock
before catching up to the others.
"Follow along down to the kitchen," Tom said when they were in the
house proper. There was a pleasant smell of furniture polish and, Clay
thought, leather, a smell he associated with men living calm lives that did
not necessarily include women. "Second door on the right. Stay close. The
hallway's wide, and there's nothing on the floor, but there are tables on
both sides and it's as black as your hat. As I think ...
