Стивен Кинг. Клетка (engl)
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...ven filthier coverall pass beyond thedining room window, their bodies broken into segments by Venetian blinds
which had been dropped but not closed. Neither of them glanced toward the
house, and now George was so close behind the woman that he could have
bitten the nape of her neck. Alice, followed by Tom and Clay, moved up the
hall to Tom's little office. Here the blinds were closed, but Clay saw the
projected shadows of the two outside pass swiftly across them. Alice went on
up the hall, toward where the door to the enclosed porch stood open. The
comforter lay half on and half off the couch, as Clay had left it. The porch
was flooded with brilliant morning sunshine. It seemed to burn on the
boards.
"Alice, be careful!" Clay said. "Be-- "
But she had stopped. She was just looking. Then Tom was standing beside
her, almost exactly the same height. Seen that way, they could have been
brother and sister. Neither of them took any pains at all to avoid being
seen.
"Holy fucking shit," Tom said. He sounded as if the wind had been
knocked out of him. Beside him, Alice began to cry. It was the sort of
out-of-breath weeping a tired child might make. One who is becoming used to
punishment.
Clay caught up. The woman in the pants suit was cutting across Tom's
lawn. George was still behind her, matching her stride for stride. They were
almost in lockstep. That broke a little bit at the curb when George swung
out to her left, becoming her wingman instead of her back door.
Salem Street was full of crazy people.
Clay's first assessment was that there might be a thousand or more.
Then the observer part of him took over-- the coldhearted artist's eye-- and
he realized that was a wild overestimate, prompted by surprise at seeing
anyone at all on what he had expected would be an empty street, and shock at
realizing they were all them. There was no mistaking the vacant faces, the
eyes that seemed to look beyond everything, the dirty, bloody, disheveled
clothing (in several cases no clothing at all), the occasional cawing cry or
jerky gesture. There was the man dressed only in tighty-whity undershorts
and a polo shirt who seemed to be saluting repeatedly; the heavyset woman
whose lower lip was split and hung in two beefy flaps, revealing all of her
lower teeth; the tall teenage boy in blue jeans shorts who walked up the
center of Salem Street carrying what looked like a blood-caked tire-iron in
one hand; an Indian or Pakistani gentleman who passed Tom's house wriggling
his jaw from side to side and simultaneously chattering his teeth; a boy--
dear God, a boy Johnny's age-- who walked with absolutely no sign of pain
although one arm was flapping below the knob of his dislocated shoulder; a
pretty young woman in a short skirt and a shell top who appeared to be
eating from the red stomach of a crow. Some moaned, some made vocal noises
that might once have been words, and all were moving east. Clay had no idea
if they were being drawn by the braying alarm or the smell of food, but they
were all walking in the direction of Malden Center.
"Christ, it's zombie heaven," Tom said.
Clay didn't bother answering. The people out there weren't exactly
zombies, but Tom was pretty close, just the same. If any of them looks over
here, sees us and decides to come after us, we're done. We won't have a hope
in hell. Not even if we barricade ourselves in the cellar. And getting those
guns across the street? You can forget that.
The idea that his wife and son might be-- very likely were-- having to
deal with creatures such as these filled him with dread. But this was no
comic book and he was no hero: he was helpless. The three of them might be
safe in the house, but as far as the immediate future was concerned, it
didn't look like he and Tom and Alice were going anywhere.
14
"They're like birds," Alice said. She wiped the tears from her cheeks
with the heels of her hands. "A flock of birds."
Clay saw what she meant at once and gave her an impulsive hug. She had
put her finger on something that had first struck him as he'd watched George
the mechanic follow the woman instead of killing her, as he had the old man.
The two of them clearly vacant in the upper story, yet seeming to go out
front by some unspoken agreement.
"I don't get it," Tom said.
"You must have missed March of the Penguins," Alice said.
"Actually, I did," Tom said. "When I want to see someone waddle in a
tuxedo, I go to a French restaurant."
"But haven't you ever noticed the way birds are, especially in the
spring and fall?" Clay asked. "You must have. They'll all light in the same
tree or along the same telephone wire-- "
"Sometimes so many they make it sag," Alice said. "Then they all fly at
once. My dad says they must have a group leader, but Mr. Sullivan in Earth
Science-- back in middle school, this was-- told us it was a flock-mind
thing, like ants all going out from a hill or bees from a hive."
"The flock swoops right or left, all at the same time, and the
individual birds never hit each other," Clay said. "Sometimes the sky's
black with them and the noise is enough to drive you nuts." He paused. "At
least out in the country, where I live." He paused again. "Tom, do you . . .
do you recognize any of those people?"
"A few. That's Mr. Potowami, from the bakery," he said, pointing to the
Indian man who was wriggling his jaw and chattering his teeth. "That pretty
young woman . . . I believe she works in the bank. And do you remember me
mentioning Scottoni, the man who lives on the other side of the block from
me?"
Clay nodded.
Tom, now very pale, pointed to a visibly pregnant woman dressed only in
a food-stained smock that came down to her upper thighs. Blond hair hung
against her pimply cheeks, and a stud gleamed in her nose. "That's his
daughter-in-law," he said. "Judy. She has gone out of her way to be kind to
me." He added in a dry, matter-of-fact tone: "This breaks my heart."
From the direction of the town center there came a loud gunshot. Alice
cried out, but this time Tom didn't have to cover her mouth; she did it
herself. None of the people in the street glanced over, in any case. Nor did
the report-- Clay thought it had been a shotgun-- seem to disturb them. They
just kept walking, no faster and no slower. Clay waited for another shot.
Instead there was a scream, very brief, there and gone, as if cut off.
The three standing in the shadows just beyond the porch went on
watching, not talking. All of the people who passed were going east, and
although they did not precisely walk in formation, there was an unmistakable
order about them. For Clay it was best expressed not in his view of the
phone-crazies themselves, who often limped and sometimes shambled, who
gibbered and made odd gestures, but in the silent, ordered passage of their
shadows on the pavement. They made him think of World War II newsreel
footage he'd seen, where wave after wave of bombers flew across the sky. He
counted two hundred and fifty before giving up. Men, women, teenagers. Quite
a few children Johnny's age, too. Far more children than old people,
although he saw only a few kids younger than ten. He didn't like to think of
what must have happened to the little guys and gals who'd had no one to take
care of them when the Pulse occurred.
Or the little guys and gals who'd been in the care of people with cell
phones.
As for the vacant-eyed children he could see, Clay wondered how many
now passing before him had pestered their parents for cell phones with
special ring-tones last year, as Johnny had.
"One mind," Tom said presently. "Do you really believe that?"
"I sort of do," Alice said. "Because . . . like . . . what mind do they
have on their own?"
"She's right," Clay said.
The migration (once you'd seen it that way it was hard to think of it
as anything else) thinned but didn't stop, even after half an hour; three
men would pass walking abreast-- one in a bowling shirt, one in the remains
of a suit, one with his lower face mostly obliterated in a cake of dried
gore-- and then two men and a woman walking in a half-assed conga line, then
a middle-aged woman who looked like a librarian (if you ignored one bare
breast wagging in the wind, that was) walking in tandem with a half-grown,
gawky girl who might have been a library aide. There would be a pause and
then a dozen more would come, seeming almost to form a kind of hollow
square, like a fighting unit from the Napoleonic Wars. And in the distance
Clay began to hear warlike sounds-- a sporadic rattle of rifle-or
pistol-fire and once (and close, maybe from neighboring Medford or right
here in Maiden) the long, ripping roar of a large-caliber automatic weapon.
Also, more screams. Most were distant, but Clay was pretty sure that was
what they were.
There were still other sane people around these parts, plenty of them,
and some had managed to get their hands on guns. Those people were very
likely having themselves a phoner-shoot. Others, however, had not been lucky
enough to have been indoors when the sun came up and the crazies came out.
He thought of George the mechanic gripping the old man's head in his orange
hands, the twist, the snap, the little reading glasses flying into the beets
where they would stay. And stay. And stay.
"I think I want to go into the living room and sit down," Alice said.
"I don't want to look at them anymore. Listen, either. It makes me sick."
"Sure," Clay said. "Tom, why don't you-- ?"
"No," Tom said. "You go. I'll stay here and watch for a while. I think
one of us ought to watch, don't you?"
Clay nodded. He did.
"Then, in an hour or so, you can spell me. Turn and turn about."
"Okay. Done."
As they started back down the hall, Clay with his arm around Alice's
shoulders, Tom said: "One thing."
They looked back at him.
"I think we all ought to try and get as much rest as possible today. If
we're still planning on going north, that is."
Clay looked at him closely to make sure Tom was still in his right
mind. He appeared to be, but--
"Have you been seeing what's going on out there?" he asked. "Hearing
the shooting? The . . ." He didn't want to say the screams with Alice there,
although God knew it was a little late to be trying to protect her remaining
sensibilities. ". . . the yelling?"
"Of course," Tom said. "But the nutters went inside last night, didn't
they?"
For a moment neither Clay nor Alice moved. Then Alice began to pat her
hands together in soft, almost silent applause. And Clay began to smile. The
smile felt stiff and unfamiliar on his face, and the hope that went with it
was almost painful.
"Tom, you might just be a genius," he said.
Tom did not return the smile. "Don't count on it," he said. "I never
broke a thousand on the SATs."
15
Clearly feeling better-- and that had to be a good thing, Clay
reckoned-- Alice went upstairs to poke around in Tom's clothes for daywear.
Clay sat on the couch, thinking about Sharon and Johnny, trying to decide
what they would have done and where they would have gone, always supposing
they'd been fortunate enough to get together. He fell into a doze and saw
them clearly at Kent Pond Elementary, Sharon's school. They were barricaded
in the gym with two or three dozen others, eating sandwiches from the
cafeteria and drinking those little cartons of milk. They--
Alice roused him, calling from upstairs. He looked at his wristwatch
and saw he'd been sleeping on the couch for almost twenty minutes. He'd
drooled on his chin.
"Alice?" He went to the foot of the stairs. "Everything okay?" Tom, he
saw, was also looking.
"Yes, but can you come for a second?"
"Sure." He looked at Tom, shrugged, then went upstairs.
Alice was in a guest bedroom that looked like it hadn't seen many
guests, although the two pillows suggested that Tom had spent most of the
night here with her, and the rumpled look of the bedclothes further
suggested very bad rest. She had found a pair of khakis that almost fit and
a sweatshirt with canobie lake park written across the front below the
outline of a roller coaster. On the floor was the sort of large portable
sound system that Clay and his friends had once lusted after the way
Johnny-Gee had lusted after that red cell phone. Clay and his friends had
called such systems ghetto blasters or boomboxes.
"It was in the closet and the batteries look fresh," she said. "I
thought of turning it on and looking for a radio station, but then I was
afraid."
He looked at the ghetto blaster sitting there on the guest room's nice
hardwood floor, and he was afraid, too. It could have been a loaded gun. But
he felt an urge to reach out and turn the selector-knob, now pointed at CD,
to FM. He imagined Alice had felt the same urge, and that was why she'd
called him. The urge to touch a loaded gun would have been no different.
"My sister gave me that two birthdays ago," Tom said from the doorway,
and they both jumped. "I loaded it up with batteries last July and took it
to the beach. When I was a kid we all used to go to the beach and listen to
our radios, although I never had one that big."
"Me either," Clay said. "But I wanted one."
"I took it up to Hampton Beach in New Hampshire with a bunch of Van
Halen and Madonna CDs, but it wasn't the same. Not even close. I haven't
used it since. I imagine all the stations are off the air, don't you?"
"I bet some of them are still on," Alice said. She was biting at her
lower lip. Clay thought if she didn't stop soon, it would begin to bleed.
"The ones my friends call the robo-eighties stations. They have friendly
names like BOB and FRANK, but they all come from some giant radio-computer
in Colorado and then get beamed down by satellite. At least that's what my
friends say. And . . ." She licked at the place she had been biting. It was
shiny with blood just under the surface. "And that's the same way cell phone
signals get routed, isn't it? By satellite."
"I don't know," Tom said. "I guess the long-distance ones might . . .
and the transatlantic ones for sure . . . and I suppose the right genius
could hack the wrong satellite signal into all those microwave towers you
see . . . the ones that boost the signals along . . ."
Clay knew the towers he was talking about, steel skeletons with dishes
stuck all over them like gray suckers. They had popped up everywhere over
the last ten years.
Tom said, "If we could pick up a local station, we might be able to get
news. Some idea about what to do, where to go-- "
"Yes, but what if it's on the radio, too?" Alice said. "That's what I'm
saying. What if you tune into whatever my"-- She licked her lips again, then
resumed nibbling.-- "my mother heard? And my dad? Him, too, oh yes, he had a
brand-new cell phone, all the bells and whistles-- video, autodial, Internet
connection-- he loved that puppy!" She gave a laugh that was both hysterical
and rueful, a dizzy combination. "What if you tune into whatever they heard?
My folks and them out there? Do you want to risk that?"
At first Tom said nothing. Then he said-- cautiously, as if testing the
idea-- "One of us could risk it. The other two could leave and wait until--
"
"No," Clay said.
"Please no," Alice said. She was almost crying again. "I want you both.
I need you both."
They stood around the radio, looking at it. Clay found himself thinking
of science fiction novels he'd read as a teenager (sometimes at the beach,
listening to Nirvana instead of Van Halen on the radio). In more than a few
of them, the world ended. And then the heroes built it back up again. Not
without struggles and setbacks, but yes, they used the tools and the
technology and they built it back up again. He couldn't remember anywhere
the heroes just stood around in a bedroom looking at a radio. Sooner or
later someone is going to pick up a tool or turn on a radio, he thought,
because someone will have to.
Yes. But not this morning.
Feeling like a traitor to something larger than he could understand, he
picked up Tom's ghetto blaster, put it back in the closet, and closed the
door.
16
An hour or so later, the orderly migration to the east began to
collapse. Clay was on watch. Alice was in the kitchen, eating one of the
sandwiches they'd brought out of Boston-- she said they had to finish the
sandwiches before they ate any of the canned stuff in Tom's closet-sized
pantry, because none of them knew when they'd get fresh meat again-- and Tom
was sleeping in the living room, on the couch. Clay could hear him snoring
contentedly away.
He noticed a few people wandering against the general easterly flow,
then sensed a kind of slackening in the order out there in Salem Street,
something so subtle that his brain registered what his eye saw only as an
intuition. At first he dismissed it as a falsity caused by the few
wanderers-- even more deranged than the rest-- who were heading west instead
of east, and then he looked down at the shadows. The neat herringbone
patterns he had observed earlier had begun to distort. And soon they weren't
patterns at all.
More people were now heading west, and some of them were gnawing on
food that had been liberated from a grocery store, probably the Safeway Tom
had mentioned. Mr. Scottoni's daughter-in-law, Judy, was carrying a gigantic
tub of melting chocolate ice cream, which had covered the front of her smock
and coated her from knees to nose-stud; her chocolate-lathered face made her
look like Mrs. Bones in a minstrel show. And any vegetarian beliefs Mr.
Potowami might once have held were gone now; he strolled along noshing from
a great double handful of raw hamburger meat. A fat man in a dirty suit had
what looked like a partially defrosted leg of lamb, and when Judy Scottoni
tried to take it from him, the fat man hit her a vicious clip in the center
of the forehead with it. She fell as silently as a poleaxed steer, pregnant
belly first, on top of her mostly crushed tub of Breyers chocolate.
There was a great deal of milling now, and a good deal of violence to
go with it, but no return to the all-out viciousness of the afternoon
before. Not here, in any case. In Malden Center, the alarm, tired-sounding
to begin with, had long since run down. In the distance, gunfire continued
to pop sporadically, but there had been nothing close since that single
shotgun blast from the center of town. Clay watched to see if any of the
crazies would try breaking into any of the houses, but although they
occasionally walked on the lawns, they showed no signs of graduating from
trespass to burglary. What they did mostly was wander around, occasionally
trying to grab one another's food, sometimes fighting or biting one another.
Three or four-- the Scottoni woman, for one-- lay in the street, either dead
or unconscious. Most of those who had passed Tom's house earlier were still
in the town square, Clay guessed, having a street dance or maybe the First
Annual Malden Raw Meat Festival, and thank God for that. It was strange,
though, how that sense of purpose-- that sense of flocking-- had seemed to
loosen and fall apart.
After noon, when he began to feel seriously sleepy, he went into the
kitchen and found Alice dozing at the kitchen table with her head in her
arms. The little sneaker, the one she had called a Baby Nike, was loosely
clasped in one hand. When he woke her, she looked at him groggily and
clasped it to the breast of her sweatshirt, as if afraid he would try to
take it away.
He asked if she could watch from the end of the hallway for a while
without falling asleep again or being seen. She said she could. Clay took
her at her word and carried a chair for her. She paused for a moment at the
door to the living room. "Check it out," she said.
He looked in over her shoulder and saw the cat, Rafe, was sleeping on
Tom's belly. He grunted in amusement.
She sat where he put the chair, far enough inside the door so someone
who glanced at the house wouldn't see her. After a single look she said,
"They're not a flock anymore. What happened?"
"I don't know."
"What time is it?"
He glanced at his watch. "Twenty past twelve."
"What time did we notice they were flocking?"
"I don't know, Alice." He was trying to be patient with her but he
could hardly keep his eyes open. "Six-thirty? Seven? I don't know. Does it
matter?"
"If we could chart them, it might matter a lot, don't you think?"
He told her that he'd think about that when he'd had some sleep.
"Couple of hours, then wake me or Tom," he said. "Sooner, if something goes
wrong."
"It couldn't go much wronger," she said softly. "Go on upstairs. You
look really wasted."
He went upstairs to the guest bedroom, slipped off his shoes, and lay
down. He thought for a moment about what she'd said: If we could chart them.
She might have something there. Odds against, but maybe--
It was a pleasant room, very pleasant, full of sun. You lay in a room
like this and it was easy to forget there was a radio in the closet you
didn't dare turn on. Not so easy to forget your wife, estranged but still
loved, might be dead and your son-- not just loved but adored-- might be
crazy. Still, the body had its imperatives, didn't it? And if there had ever
been a room for an afternoon nap, this was the one. The panic-rat twitched
but didn't bite, and Clay was asleep almost as soon as he closed his eyes.
17
This time Alice was the one who shook him awake. The little purple
sneaker swung back and forth as she did it. She had tied it around her left
wrist, turning it into a rather creepy talisman. The light in the room had
changed. It was going the other way, and diminished. He had turned on his
side and he had to urinate, a reliable sign that he had slept for some time.
He sat up in a hurry and was surprised-- almost appalled-- to see it was
quarter of six. He had slept for over five hours. But of course last night
hadn't been his first night of broken rest; he'd slept poorly the night
before, as well. Nerves, on account of his presentation to the Dark Horse
comics people.
"Is everything all right?" he asked, taking her by the wrist. "Why'd
you let me sleep so long?"
"Because you needed it," she said. "Tom slept until two and I slept
until four. We've been watching together since then. Come down and look.
It's pretty amazing."
"Are they flocking again?"
She nodded. "But going the other way this time. And that's not all.
Come and see."
He emptied his bladder and hurried downstairs. Tom and Alice were
standing in the doorway to the porch with their arms around each other's
waist. There was no question of being seen, now; the sky had clouded over
and Tom's porch was already thick with shadows. Only a few people were left
on Salem Street, anyway. All of them were moving west, not quite running but
going at a steady clip. A group of four went past in the street itself,
marching over a sprawl of bodies and a litter of discarded food, which
included the leg of lamb, now gnawed down to the bone, a great many
torn-open cellophane bags and cardboard boxes, and a scattering of discarded
fruits and vegetables. Behind them came a group of six, the ones on the end
using the sidewalks. They didn't look at each other but were still so
perfectly together that when they passed Tom's house they seemed for an
instant to be only a single man, and Clay realized even their arms were
swinging in unison. After them came a youth of maybe fourteen, limping
along, bawling inarticulate cow-sounds, and trying to keep up.
"They left the dead and the totally unconscious ones," Tom said, "but
they actually helped a couple who were stirring."
Clay looked for the pregnant woman and didn't see her. "Mrs. Scottoni?"
"She was one of the ones they helped," Tom said.
"So they're acting like people again."
"Don't get that idea," Alice said. "One of the men they tried to help
couldn't walk, and after he fell down a couple of times, one of the guys
who'd been lifting him got tired of being a Boy Scout and just-- "
"Killed him," Tom said. "Not with his hands, either, like the guy in
the garden. With his teeth. Tore out his throat."
"I saw what was going to happen and looked away," Alice said, "but I
heard it. He . . . squealed."
"Easy," Clay said. He squeezed her arm gently. "Take it easy."
Now the street was almost entirely empty. Two more stragglers came
along, and although they moved more or less side by side, both were limping
so badly there was no sense of unison about them.
"Where are they going?" Clay asked.
"Alice thinks maybe inside," Tom said, and he sounded excited. "Before
it gets dark. She could be right."
"Where? Where are they going in? Have you seen any of them going into
houses along this block?"
"No." They said it together.
"They didn't all come back," Alice said. "No way did as many come back
up Salem Street as went down this morning. So a lot are still in Malden
Center, or beyond. They may have gravitated toward public buildings, like
school gymnasiums . . ."
School gymnasiums. Clay didn't like the sound of that.
"Did you see that movie, Dawn of the Dead?" she asked.
"Yes," Clay said. "You're not going to tell me someone let you in to
see it, are you?"
She looked at him as if he were nuts. Or old. "One of my friends had
the DVD. We watched it at a sleepover back in eighth grade." Back when the
Pony Express still rode and the plains were dark with buffalo, her tone
said. "In that movie, all the dead people-- well, not all, but a lot-- went
back to the mall when they woke up."
Tom McCourt goggled at her for a second, then burst out laughing. It
wasn't a little laugh, either, but a long series of guffaws, laughter so
hard he had to lean against the wall for support, and Clay thought it wise
to shut the door between the hall and the porch. There was no telling how
well the things straggling up the street might hear; all he could think of
at the moment was that the hearing of the lunatic narrator in Poe's "The
Tell-Tale Heart" had been extremely keen.
"Well they did," Alice said, putting her hands on her hips. The baby
sneaker flopped. "Straight to the mall." Tom laughed even harder. His knees
buckled and he oozed slowly down to the hall floor, howling and flapping his
hands against his shirt.
"They died . . . ," he gasped, ". . . and came back . . . to go to the
mall. Jesus Christ, does Jerry F-Falwell. . ." He went off into another
gale. Tears were now running down his cheeks in clear streams. He brought
himself under control enough to finish, "Does Jerry Falwell know heaven's
the Newcastle Mall?"
Clay also began to laugh. So did Alice, although Clay thought she was a
little bit pissed off that her reference had been greeted not with interest
or even mild good humor but outright howls. Still, when people started
laughing, it was hard not to join in. Even when you were pissed.
They had almost stopped when Clay said, apropos of nothing, "If heaven
ain't a lot like Dixie, I don't want to go."
That set them off again, all three. Alice was still laughing when she
said, "If they're flocking, then roosting for the night in gyms and churches
and malls, people could machine-gun them by the hundreds."
Clay stopped laughing first. Then Tom stopped. He looked at her, wiping
moisture out of his neat little mustache.
Alice nodded. The laughter had brought high color to her cheeks, and
she was still smiling. She had, at least for the moment, careened past
pretty and into genuine beauty. "By the thousands, maybe, if they're all
going to the same place."
"Jesus," Tom said. He took off his glasses and began to wipe them, too.
"You don't fool around."
"It's survival," Alice said matter-of-factly. She looked down at the
sneaker tied to her wrist, then up at the men. She nodded again. "We ought
to chart them. Find out if they 're flocking and when they're flocking, If
they're roosting and where they're roosting. Because if they can be
charted-- "
18
Clay had led them out of Boston, but when the three of them left the
house on Salem Street some twenty-four hours later, fifteen-year-old Alice
Maxwell was unquestionably in charge. The more Clay thought about it, the
less it surprised him.
Tom McCourt didn't lack for what his British cousins called bottle, but
he was not and never would be a natural leader. Clay had some leadership
qualities, but that evening Alice had an advantage beyond her intelligence
and desire to survive: she had suffered her losses and begun to move on. In
leaving the house on Salem Street, both men were dealing with new ones. Clay
had begun to suffer a rather frightening depression that at first he thought
was just the result of his decision-- unavoidable, really-- to leave his
portfolio behind. As the night went on, however, he realized it was a
profound dread of what he might find if and when he got to Kent Pond.
For Tom, it was simpler. He hated to leave Rafe.
"Prop the door open for him," Alice said-- the new and harder Alice,
who seemed more decisive by the minute. "He'll almost certainly be okay,
Tom. He'll find plenty of forage. It'll be a long time before the cats
starve or the phone-crazies work their way down the food-chain to cat-meat."
"He'll go feral," Tom said. He was sitting on the living room couch,
looking stylish and miserable in a belted raincoat and trilby hat. Rafer was
on his lap, purring and looking bored.
"Yeah, that's what they do," Clay said. "Think of all the dogs-- the
little ones and the oversized ones-- that are just going to flat die."
"I've had him for a long time. Since he was a kitten, really." He
looked up and Clay saw the man was on the verge of tears. "Also, I guess I
see him as my luck. My mojo. He saved my life, remember."
"Now we're your mojo," Clay said. He didn't want to point out that he
himself had almost certainly saved Tom's life once already, but it was true.
"Right, Alice?"
"Yep," she said. Tom had found a poncho for her, and she wore a
knapsack on her back, although there currently was nothing in it but
batteries for the flashlights . . . and, Clay was quite sure, that creepy
little sneaker, which was at least no longer tied to her wrist. Clay was
also carrying batteries in his pack, along with the Coleman lantern. They
had nothing else, at Alice's suggestion. She said there was no reason for
them to carry what they could pick up along the way. "We're the Three
Musketeers, Tom-- all for one and one for all. Now let's go over to the
Nickle-bys' house and see if we can get some muskets."
"Nickerson." He was still stroking the cat.
She was smart enough-- and compassionate enough, maybe that, too-- not
to say something like Whatever, but Clay could see she was getting low in
the patience department. He said, "Tom. Time to go."
"Yeah, I suppose." He started to put the cat aside, then picked it up
and kissed it firmly between the ears. Rafe bore it with no more than a
slight narrowing of the eyes. Tom put it down on the sofa and stood. "Double
rations in the kitchen by the stove, kiddo," he said. "Plus a big bowl of
milk, with the rest of the half 'n' half poured in for good measure. Back
door's open. Try to remember where home is, and maybe . . . hey, maybe I'll
see you."
The cat jumped down and walked out of the room toward the kitchen with
its tail up. And, true to its kind, it never looked back.
Clay's portfolio, bent and with a horizontal wrinkle running both ways
from the knife-slash in the middle, leaned against the living room wall. He
glanced at it on the way by and resisted an urge to touch it. He thought
briefly of the people inside he'd lived with so long, both in his little
studio and in the much wider (or so he liked to flatter himself) reaches of
his imagination: Wizard Flak, Sleepy Gene, Jumping Jack Flash, Poison Sally.
And the Dark Wanderer, of course. Two days ago he'd thought that maybe they
were going to be stars. Now they had a hole running through them and Tom
McCourt's cat for company.
He thought of Sleepy Gene leaving town on Robbie the Robo-Cayuse,
saying S-So l-long b-boys! Meh-Meh-Mebbe I'll b-be back this w-w-way again!
"So long, boys," he said out loud-- a little self-conscious but not
very. It was the end of the world, after all. As farewells went, it wasn't
much, but it would have to do. . . and as Sleepy Gene might also have said,
It sh-sh-sure beats a p-poke in the eye with a ruh-ruh-rusty b-brandin'-arn.
Clay followed Alice and Tom out onto the porch, into the sound of soft
autumn rain.
19
Tom had his trilby, there was a hood on Alice's poncho, and Tom had
found Clay a Red Sox cap that would keep his head dry for a while, at least,
if the light rain didn't get heavier. And if it did . . . well, forage
shouldn't be a problem, as Alice had pointed out. That would surely include
foul-weather gear. From the slight elevation of the porch they could see
roughly two blocks of Salem Street. It was impossible to be sure in the
failing light, but it appeared completely deserted except for a few bodies
and the food-litter the crazies had left behind.
Each of them was wearing a knife seated in scabbards Clay had made. If
Tom was right about the Nickersons, they would soon be able to do better.
Clay hoped so. He might be able to use the butcher knife from Soul Kitchen
again, but he still wasn't sure he would be able to use it in cold blood.
Alice held a flashlight in her left hand. She looked to make sure Tom
had one, too, and nodded. "Okay," she said. "You take us to the Nickerson
house, right?"
"Right," Tom said.
"And if we see someone on our way there, we stop right away and put our
lights on them." She looked at Tom, then Clay, with some anxiety. They had
been over this before. Clay guessed she probably obsessed the same way
before big tests . . . and of course this was a very big one.
"Right," Tom said. "We say, 'Our names are Tom, Clay, and Alice. We're
normal. What are your names?' "
Clay said, "If they have flashlights like us, we can almost assume-- "
"We can't assume anything," she said restlessly, querulously. "My
father says assume makes an ass out of you and me. Get it, u and-- "
"I get it," Clay said.
Alice brushed at her eyes, although whether to wipe away rain or tears
Clay wasn't sure. He wondered, briefly and painfully, if Johnny was
somewhere crying for him, right now. Clay hoped he was. He hoped his son was
still capable of tears. Of memory.
"If they can answer, if they can say their names, they're fine, and
they're probably safe," Alice said. "Right?"
"Right," Clay said.
"Yeah," Tom agreed, a little absently. He was looking at the street
where there were no people and no bobbing flashlight beams, near or far.
Someplace in the distance, gunshots popped. They sounded like
fireworks. The air stank of burning and char and had all day. Clay thought
they were smelling it more strongly now because it was wet. He wondered how
long before the smell of decaying flesh turned the fug hanging over greater
Boston into a reek. He supposed it depended on how warm the days ahead
turned out to be.
"If we meet normal people and they ask us what we're doing or where
we're going, remember the story," she said.
"We're looking for survivors," Tom said.
"That's right. Because they're our friends and neighbors. Any people we
meet will just be passing through. They'll want to keep moving. Later on
we'll probably want to hook up with other normal people, because there's
safety in numbers, but right now-- "
"Right now we'd like to get to those guns," Clay said. "If there are
any guns to get. Come on, Alice, let's do this."
She looked worriedly at him. "What's wrong? What am I missing? You can
tell me, I know I'm just a kid."
Patiently-- as patiently as he could with nerves that felt like
overtuned guitar-strings-- Clay said, "There's nothing wrong with it, honey.
I just want to get rolling. I don't think we're going to see anyone, anyway.
I think it's too soon."
"I hope you're right," she said. "My hair's a mess and I've chipped a
nail."
They looked at her silently for a moment, then laughed. After that it
was better among them, and stayed better until the end.
20
"No," Alice said. She made a gagging sound. "No. No, I can't." A louder
gagging sound. Then: "I'm going to throw up. I'm sorry."
She plunged out of the Coleman's glare and into the gloom of the
Nickersons' living room, which adjoined the kitchen via a wide arch. Clay
heard a soft thump as she went to her knees on the carpet, then more
gagging. A pause, a gasp, and then she was vomiting. He was almost relieved.
"Oh Christ," Tom said. He pulled in a long, gasping breath and this
time spoke in a wavering exhalation that was nearly a howl. "Oh
Chriiiiiist."
"Tom," Clay said. He saw how the little man was swaying on his feet and
understood he was on the verge of fainting. Why not? These bloody leavings
had been his neighbors.
"Tom!" He stepped between Tom and the two bodies on the kitchen floor,
between Tom and most of the splattered blood, which looked as black as India
ink in the Coleman's unforgiving white glare. He tapped the side of Tom's
face with his free hand. "Don't pass out!" And when he saw Tom steady on his
feet, he dropped his voice a little. "Go on in the other room and take care
of Alice. I'll take care of the kitchen."
"Why would you want to go in there?" Tom asked. "That's Beth Nickerson
with her brains . . . her b-brains all over . . ." He swallowed. There was
an audible click in his throat. "Most of her face is gone, but I recognize
the blue jumper with the white snowflakes on it. And that's Heidi on the
floor by the center island. Their daughter. I recognize her, even with . .
." He shook his head, as if to clear it, then repeated: "Why would you want
to?"
"I'm pretty sure I see what we came for," Clay said. He was astounded
by how calm he sounded.
"In the kitchen?"
Tom tried to look past him and Clay moved to block his view. "Trust me.
You see to Alice. If she can, you two start looking around for more guns.
Shout if you hit paydirt. And be careful, Mr. Nickerson may be here, too. I
mean, we could assume he was at work when all this went down, but as Alice's
dad says-- "
"Assume makes an ass out of you and me," Tom said. He managed a sickly
smile. "Gotcha." He started to turn away, then turned back. "I don't care
where we go, Clay, but I don't want to stay here any longer than we have to.
I didn't exactly love Arnie and Beth Nickerson, but they were my neighbors.
And they treated me a hell of a lot better than that idiot Scottoni from
around the block." "Understood."
Tom snapped on his flashlight and went into the Nickerson living room.
Clay heard him murmuring to Alice, comforting her.
Steeling himself, Clay walked into the kitchen with the Coleman lantern
held up, stepping around the puddles of blood on the hardwood floor. It had
dried now, but he still didn't want to put his shoes in any more of it than
he had to.
The girl lying on her back by the center island had been tall, but both
her pigtails and the angular lines of her body suggested a child two or
three years younger than Alice. Her head was cocked at a strenuous angle,
almost a parody of interrogation, and her dead eyes bulged. Her hair had
been broom straw-blond, but all of it on the left side of her head-- the
side that had taken the blow which had killed her-- was now the same dark
maroon as the stains on the floor.
Her mother reclined below the counter to the right of the stove, where
the handsome cherrywood cabinets came together to form a corner. Her hands
were ghost-white with flour and her bloody, bitten legs were indecorously
splayed. Once, before starting work on a limited-run comic called Battle
Hell, Clay had accessed a selection of fatal-gunshot photos on the Web,
thinking there might be something he could use. There was not. Gunshot
wounds spoke a terrible blank language of their own, and here it was again.
Beth Nickerson was mostly spray and gristle from her left eye on up. Her
right eye had drifted into the upper orbit of its socket, as if she had died
trying to look into her own head. Her back hair and a good deal of her
brain-matter was caked on the cherrywood cabinet against which she had
leaned in her brief moments of dying. A few flies were buzzing around her.
Clay began to gag. He turned his head and covered his mouth. He told
himself he had to control himself. In the other room Alice had stopped
vomiting-- in fact he could hear her and Tom talking together as they moved
deeper into the house-- and he didn't want to get her going again.
Think of them as dummies, props in a movie, he told himself, but he
knew he could never do that.
When he looked back, he looked at the other things on the floor
instead. That helped. The gun he had already seen. The kitchen was spacious
and the gun was all the way on the other side, lying between the fridge and
one of the cabinets with the barrel sticking out. His first impulse on
seeing the dead woman and the dead girl had been to avert his eyes; they'd
happened on the gun-barrel purely by accident.
But maybe I would have known there had to be a gun.
He even saw where it had been: a wall-mounted clip between the built-in
TV and the industrial-size can-opener. They were gadget-nuts as well as
gun-nuts, Tom had said, and a wall-mounted pistol in your kitchen just
waiting to leap into your hand . . . why, if that wasn't the best of both
worlds, what was?
"Clay?" That was Alice. Coming from some distance.
"What?"
There followed the sound of feet quickly ascending a set of stairs,
then Alice called from the living room. "Tom said you wanted to know if we
hit paydirt. We just did. There must be a dozen guns downstairs in the den.
Rifles and pistols both. They're in a cabinet with an alarm-company sticker
on it, so we'll probably get arrested . . . that's a joke. Are you coming?"
"In a minute, hon. Don't come out here."
"Don't worry. Don't you stay there and get grossed out."
He was beyond grossed out, far beyond. There were two other objects
lying on the bloody hardwood floor of the Nickerson kitchen. One was a
rolling pin, which made sense. There was a pie tin, a mixing bowl, and a
cheery yellow canister marked FLOUR sitting on the center island. The other
object on the floor, this one lying not too distant from one of Heidi
Nickerson's hands, was a cell phone only a teenager could love, blue with
big orange daisy decals plastered all over it.
Clay could see what had happened, little as he wanted to. Beth
Nickerson is making a pie. Does she know something awful has started to
happen in greater Boston, in America, maybe in the world? Is it on TV? If
so, the TV didn't send her a crazygram, Clay was sure of that.
Her daughter got one, though. Oh yes. And Heidi attacked her mother.
Did Beth Nickerson try to reason with her daughter before driving her to the
floor with a blow from the rolling pin, or did she just strike? Not in hate,
but in pain and fear? In any case, it wasn't enough. And Beth wasn't wearing
pants. She was wearing a jumper, and her legs were bare.
Clay pulled down the dead woman's skirt. He did it gently, covering the
plain working-at-home underwear that she had soiled at the end.
Heidi, surely no older than fourteen and perhaps only twelve, must have
been growling in that savage nonsense-language they seemed to learn all at
once after they got a full dose of Sane-B-Gone from their phones, saying
things like rast and eelah and kazzalah-CAN! The first blow from the rolling
pin had knocked her down but not out, and the mad girl had begun to work on
her mother's legs. Not little nips, either, but deep, searing bites, some
that had driven all the way to the bone. Clay could see not only toothmarks
but ghostly tattoos that must have been left by young Heidi's braces. And
so-- probably screaming, undoubtedly in agony, almost certainly not aware of
what she was doing-- Beth Nickerson had struck again, this time much harder.
Clay could almost hear the muffled crack as the girl's neck broke. Beloved
daughter, dead on the floor of the state-of-the-art kitchen, with braces on
her teeth and her state-of-the-art cell phone by one outstretched hand.
And had her mother stopped to consider before popping the gun from its
clip between the TV and the can-opener, where it had been waiting who knew
how long for a burglar or rapist to appear in this clean, well-lighted
kitchen? Clay thought not. Clay thought there would have been no pause, that
she would have wanted to catch up with her daughter's fleeing soul while the
explanation for what she had done was still fresh on her lips.
Clay went to the gun and picked it up. From a gadget-boy like Arnie
Nickerson he would have expected an automatic-- maybe even one with a laser
sight-- but this was a plain old Colt .45 revolver. He supposed it made
sense. His wife might feel more comfortable with this kind of gun; no
nonsense about making sure it was loaded if the gun was needed (or wasting
time fishing a clip out from behind the spatulas or spices if it wasn't),
then racking the slide to make sure there was a hot one in the chamber. No,
with this old whore you just had to swing the barrel out, which Clay did
with ease. He'd drawn a thousand variations of this very gun for Dark
Wanderer. As he'd expected, only one of the six chambers was empty. He shook
out one of the other loads, knowing just what he would find. Beth
Nickerson's .45 was loaded with highly illegal cop-killer bullets. Fraggers.
No wonder the top of her head was gone. The wonder was that she had any left
at all. He looked down at the remains of the woman leaning in the corner and
began to cry.
"Clay?" That was Tom, coming up the stairs from the basement. "Man,
Arnie had everything! There's an automatic weapon that would have gotten him
a stretch in Walpole, I bet. . . . Clay? Are you all right?"
"I'm coming," Clay said, wiping his eyes. He safetied the revolver and
stuck it in his belt. Then he took off the knife and laid it on Beth
Nickerson's counter, still in its homemade scabbard. It seemed they were
trading up. "Give me two more minutes."
"Yo."
Clay heard Tom clumping back to Arnie Nickerson's downstairs armory and
smiled in spite of the tears still running down his face. Here was something
he would have to remember: give a nice little gay guy from Malden a roomful
of guns to play with, he starts to say yo just like Sylvester Stallone.
Clay started going through drawers. In the third one he tried, he found
a heavy red box marked AMERICAN DEFENDER .45 CALIBER AMERICAN DEFENDER 50
ROUNDS. It was under the dishtowels. He put the box in his pocket and went
to join Tom and Alice. He wanted to get out of here now, and as quickly as
possible. The trick would be getting them to go without trying to take Arnie
Nickerson's entire gun collection along.
Halfway through the arch he paused and glanced back, holding the
Coleman lantern high, looking at the bodies. Pulling down the skirt of the
woman's jumper hadn't helped much. They were still just corpses, their
wounds as naked as Noah when his son had come upon him in liquor. He could
find something to cover them with, but once he started covering bodies,
where would it end? Where? With Sharon? With his son?
"God forbid," he whispered, but he doubted that God would simply
because he asked. He lowered the lantern and followed the dancing glow of
flashlights downstairs to Tom and Alice.
21
They both wore belts with large-caliber handguns in the holsters, and
these were automatics. Tom had also slung an ammunition bandolier over his
shoulder. Clay didn't know whether to laugh or start crying again. Part of
him felt like doing both at the same time. Of course if he did that, they
would think he was having hysterics. And of course they would be right.
The plasma TV mounted on the wall down here was the big-- very big--
brother of the one in the kitchen. Another TV, only slightly smaller, had a
multibrand videogame hookup Clay would, once upon a time, have loved to
examine. To fawn over, maybe. As if to balance it off, a vintage Seeberg
jukebox stood in the corner next to the Nickersons' Ping-Pong table, all its
fabulous colors dark and dead. And of course there were the gun cabinets,
two of them, still locked but with their glass fronts broken.
"There w...
