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...lmost as loud as thatlong-ago AC/DC concert (although Debby Boone making her sweet schoolgirl way
through "You Light Up My Life" was quite a stretch from "Hell's Bells," even
at full volume), but mostly it was pure shock. He thought that after the
Pulse and their subsequent retreat from Boston he'd be prepared for
anything, but he was wrong.
He didn't think prep schools like this indulged in anything so plebeian
(and so smashmouth) as football, but soccer had apparently been a big deal.
The stands stacking up on either side of Tonney Field looked as if they
could seat as many as a thousand, and they were decked with bunting that was
only now beginning to look bedraggled by the showery weather of the last few
days. There was an elaborate Scoreboard at the far end of the field with big
letters marching along the top. Clay couldn't read the message in the dark
and probably wouldn't have taken it in even if it had been daylight. There
was enough light to see the field itself, and that was all that mattered.
Every inch of grass was covered with phone-crazies. They were lying on
their backs like sardines in a can, leg to leg and hip to hip and shoulder
to shoulder. Their faces stared up into the black predawn sky.
"Oh my Lord Jesus," Tom said. His voice was muffled because one fist
was pressed against his mouth.
"Catch the girl!" the Head rapped. "She's going to faint!"
"No-- I'm all right," Alice said, but when Clay put his arm around her
she slumped against him, breathing fast. Her eyes were open but they had a
fixed, druggy look.
"They're under the bleachers, too," Jordan said. He spoke with a
studied, almost showy calm that Clay did not believe for a minute. It was
the voice of a boy assuring his pals that he's not grossed out by the
maggots boiling in a dead cat's eyes . . . just before he leans over and
blows his groceries. "Me and the Head think that's where they put the hurt
ones that aren't going to get better."
"The Head and I, Jordan."
"Sorry, sir."
Debby Boone achieved poetic catharsis and ceased. There was a pause and
then Lawrence Welk's Champagne Music Makers once more began to play "Baby
Elephant Walk." Dodge had a good time, too, Clay thought.
"How many of those boomboxes have they got rigged together?" he asked
Headmaster Ardai. "And how did they do it? They're brainless, for Christ's
sake, zombies!" A terrible idea occurred to him, illogical and persuasive at
the same time. "Did you do it? To keep them quiet, or. . .I don't know . .
."
"He didn't do it," Alice said. She spoke quietly from her safe place
within the circle of Clay's arm.
"No, and both of your premises are wrong," the Head told him.
"Both? I don't-- "
"They must be dedicated music-lovers," Tom mused, "because they don't
like to go inside buildings. But that's where the CDs are, right?"
"Not to mention the boomboxes," Clay said.
"There's no time to explain now. Already the sky has begun to lighten,
and . . . tell them, Jordan."
Jordan replied dutifully, with the air of one who recites a lesson he
does not understand, "All good vampires must be in before cockcrow, sir."
"That's right-- before cockcrow. For now, only look. That's all you
need to do. You didn't know there were places like this, did you?"
"Alice knew," Clay said.
They looked. And because the night had begun to wane, Clay realized
that the eyes in all those faces were open. He was pretty sure they weren't
seeing; they were just . . . open.
Something bad's going on here, he thought. The flocking was only the
beginning of it.
Looking at the packed bodies and empty faces (mostly white; this was
New England, after all) was awful, but the blank eyes turned up to the night
sky filled him with unreasoning horror. Somewhere, not too distant, the
morning's first bird began to sing. It wasn't a crow, but the Head still
jerked, then tottered. This time it was Tom who steadied him.
"Come on," the Head told them. "It's only a short walk to Cheatham
Lodge, but we ought to start. The damp has made me stiffer than ever. Take
my elbow, Jordan."
Alice broke free of Clay and went to the old man's other side. He gave
her a rather forbidding smile and a shake of his head. "Jordan can take care
of me. We take care of each other now-- ay, Jordan?"
"Yes, sir."
"Jordan?" Tom asked. They were nearing a large (and rather pretentious)
Tudor-style dwelling that Clay presumed was Cheatham Lodge.
"Sir?"
"The sign over the Scoreboard-- I couldn't read it. What did it say?"
"welcome alumni to homecoming weekend." Jordan almost smiled, then
remembered there would be no Homecoming Weekend this year-- the bunting on
the stands had already begun to tatter-- and the brightness left his face.
If he hadn't been so tired, he might still have held his composure, but it
was very late, almost dawn, and as they made their way up the walk to the
Headmaster's residence, the last student at Gaiten Academy, still wearing
his colors of maroon and gray, burst into tears.
14
"That was incredible, sir," Clay said. He had fallen into Jordan's mode
of address very naturally. So had Tom and Alice. "Thank you."
"Yes," Alice said. "Thanks. I've never eaten two burgers in my life--
at least not big ones like that."
It was three o'clock the following afternoon. They were on the back
porch of Cheatham Lodge. Charles Ardai-- the Head, as Jordan called him--
had grilled the hamburgers on a small gas grill. He said the meat was
perfectly safe because the generator powering the cafeteria's freezer had
run until noon yesterday (and indeed, the patties he took from the cooler
Tom and Jordan had carried in from the pantry had still been white with
frost and as hard as hockey pucks). He said that grilling the meat would
probably be safe until five o'clock, although prudence dictated an early
meal.
"They'd smell the cooking?" Clay asked.
"Let's just say that we have no desire to find out," the Head replied.
"Have we, Jordan?"
"No, sir," Jordan said, and took a bite of his second burger. He was
slowing down, but Clay thought he'd manage to do his duty. "We want to be
inside when they wake up, and inside when they come back from town. That's
where they go, to town. They're picking it clean, like birds in a field of
grain. That's what the Head says."
"They were flocking back home earlier when we were in Malden," Alice
said. "Not that we knew where home for them was." She was eyeing a tray with
pudding cups on it. "Can I have one of those?"
"Yes, indeed." The Head pushed the tray toward her. "And another
hamburger, if you'd like. What we don't eat soon will just spoil."
Alice groaned and shook her head, but she took a pudding cup. So did
Tom.
"They seem to leave at the same time each morning, but the
home-flocking behavior has been starting later," Ardai said thoughtfully.
"Why would that be?"
"Slimmer pickings?" Alice asked.
"Perhaps . . ." He took a final bite of his own hamburger, then covered
the remains neatly with a paper napkin. "There are many flocks, you know.
Maybe as many as a dozen within a fifty-mile radius. We know from people
going south that there are flocks in Sandown, Fremont, and Candia. They
forage about almost aimlessly in the daytime, perhaps for music as well as
food, then go back to where they came from."
"You know this for sure," Tom said. He finished one pudding cup and
reached for another.
Ardai shook his head. "Nothing is for sure, Mr. McCourt." His hair, a
long white tangle (an English professor's hair for sure, Clay thought),
rippled a bit in the mild afternoon breeze. The clouds were gone. The back
porch gave them a good view of the campus, and so far it was deserted.
Jordan went around the house at regular intervals to scout the hill sloping
down to Academy Avenue and reported all quiet there, as well. "You've not
seen any of the other roosting places?"
"Nope," Tom said.
"But we're traveling in the dark," Clay reminded him, "and now the dark
is really dark."
"Yes," the Head agreed. He spoke almost dreamily. "As in le moyen вge.
Translation, Jordan?"
"The middle age, sir."
"Good." He patted Jordan's shoulder.
"Even big flocks would be easy to miss," Clay said. "They wouldn't have
to be hiding."
"No, they're not hiding," Headmaster Ardai agreed, steepling his
fingers. "Not yet, at any rate. They flock . . . they forage . . . and their
group mind may break down a bit while they forage . . . but perhaps less.
Every day perhaps less."
"Manchester burned to the ground," Jordan said suddenly. "We could see
the fire from here, couldn't we, sir?"
"Yes," the Head agreed. "It's been very sad and frightening."
"Is it true that people trying to cross into Massachusetts are being
shot at the border?" Jordan asked. "That's what people are saying. People
are saying you have to go to Vermont, only that way is safe."
"It's a crock," Clay said. "We heard the same thing about the New
Hampshire border."
Jordan goggled at him for a moment, then burst out laughing. The sound
was clear and beautiful in the still air. Then, in the distance, a gun went
off. And closer, someone shouted in either rage or horror.
Jordan stopped laughing.
"Tell us about that weird state they were in last night," Alice said
quietly. "And the music. Do all the other flocks listen to music at night?"
The Head looked at Jordan.
"Yes," the boy said. "It's all soft stuff, no rock, no country-- "
"I should guess nothing classical, either," the Head put in. "Not of a
challenging nature, at any rate."
"It's their lullabies," Jordan said. "That's what the Head and me
think, isn't it, sir?"
"The Head and I, Jordan."
"Head and I, yes, sir."
"But it is indeed what we think," the Head agreed. "Although I suspect
there may be more to it than that. Yes, quite a bit more."
Clay was flummoxed. He hardly knew how to go on. He looked at his
friends and saw on their faces what he was feeling-- not just puzzlement,
but a dreadful reluctance to be enlightened.
Leaning forward, Headmaster Ardai said, "May I be frank? I must be
frank; it is the habit of a lifetime. I want you to help us do a terrible
thing here. The time to do it is short, I think, and while one such act
alone may come to nothing, one never knows, does one? One never knows what
sort of communication may flow between these . . . flocks. In any case, I
will not stand idly by while these . . . things . . . steal away not only my
school but the very daylight itself. I might have attempted it already, but
I'm old and Jordan is very young. Too young. Whatever they are now, they
were human not long ago. I won't let him be a part of this."
"I can do my share, sir!" Jordan said. He spoke as stoutly, Clay
thought, as any Muslim teenager who ever strapped on a suicide belt stuffed
with explosives.
"I salute your courage, Jordan," the Head told him, "but I think not."
He looked at the boy kindly, but when he returned his gaze to the others,
his eyes had hardened considerably. "You have weapons-- good ones-- and I
have nothing but an old single-shot .22 rifle that may not even work
anymore, although the barrel's open-- I've looked. Even if it does work, the
cartridges I have for it may not fire. But we have a gasoline pump at our
little motor-pool, and gasoline might serve to end their lives."
He must have seen the horror in their faces, because he nodded. To Clay
he no longer looked like kindly old Mr. Chips; he looked like a Puritan
elder in an oil-painting. One who could have sentenced a man to the stocks
without batting an eye. Or a woman to be burned at the stake as a witch.
He nodded at Clay in particular. Clay was sure of it. "I know what I'm
saying. I know how it sounds. But it wouldn't be murder, not really; it
would be extermination. And I have no power to make you do anything. But in
any case . . . whether you help me burn them or not, you must pass on a
message."
"To who?" Alice asked faintly.
"To everyone you meet, Miss Maxwell." He leaned over the remains of
their meal, those hanging-judge eyes sharp and small and burning hot. "You
must tell what's happening to them-- to the ones who heard the infernal
message on their devil's intercoms. You must pass this on. Everyone who has
had the daylight robbed away from them must hear, and before it's too late."
He passed a hand over his lower face, and Clay saw the fingers were shaking
a little. It would be easy to dismiss that as a sign of the man's age, but
he hadn't seen any tremors before. "We're afraid it soon will be. Aren't we,
Jordan?"
"Yes, sir." Jordan certainly thought he knew something; he looked
terrified.
"What? What's happening to them?" Clay asked. "It's got something to do
with the music and those wired-together boomboxes, doesn't it?"
The Head sagged, suddenly looking tired. "They're not wired together,"
he said. "Don't you remember me telling you that both of your premises were
wrong?"
"Yes, but I don't understand what you m-- "
"There's one sound-system with a CD in it, about that you're certainly
right. A single compilation disc, Jordan says, which is why the same songs
play over and over."
"Lucky us," Tom muttered, but Clay barely heard him. He was trying to
get the sense of what Ardai had just said-- they're not wired together. How
could that be? It couldn't.
"The sound-systems-- the boomboxes, if you like-- are placed all around
the field," the Head went on, "and they're all on. At night you can see
their little red power lamps-- "
"Yes," Alice said. "I did notice some red lights, I just didn't think
anything of it."
"-- but there's nothing in them-- no compact discs or cassette tapes--
and no wires linking them. They're just slaves that pick up the master-disc
audio and rebroadcast it."
"If their mouths are open, the music comes from them, too," Jordan
said. "It's just little . . . not hardly a whisper . . . but you can hear
it."
"No," Clay said. "That's your imagination, kiddo. Gotta be."
"I haven't heard that myself," Ardai said, "but of course my ears
aren't what they were back when I was a Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps fan.
'Back in the day,' Jordan and his friends would say."
"You're very old-school, sir," Jordan said. He spoke with gentle
solemnity and unmistakable affection.
"Yes, Jordan, I am," the Head agreed. He clapped the boy on the
shoulder, then turned his attention to the others. "If Jordan says he's
heard it ... I believe him."
"It's not possible," Clay said. "Not without a transmitter."
"They are transmitting," the Head replied. "It is a skill they seem to
have picked up since the Pulse."
"Wait," Tom said. He raised one hand like a traffic cop, lowered it,
began to speak, raised it again. From his place of dubious shelter at
Headmaster Ardai's side, Jordan watched him closely. At last Tom said, "Are
we talking telepathy here?"
"I should guess that's not exactly le mot juste for this particular
phenomenon," the Head answered, "but why stick at technicalities? I would be
willing to wager all the frozen hamburgers remaining in my cooler that the
word has been used among you before today."
"You'd win double burgers," Clay said.
"Well yeah, but the flocking thing is different," Tom said.
"Because?" The Head raised his tangled brows.
"Well, because . . ." Tom couldn't finish, and Clay knew why. It wasn't
different. The flocking wasn't human behavior and they'd known it from the
moment they'd observed George the mechanic following the woman in the filthy
pants suit across Tom's front lawn to Salem Street. He'd been walking so
closely behind her that he could have bitten her neck . . . but he hadn't.
And why? Because for the phone-crazies, biting was done, flocking had begun.
At least, biting their own kind was done. Unless--
"Professor Ardai, at the beginning they killed everyone . . ."
"Yes," the Head agreed. "We were very lucky to escape, weren't we,
Jordan?"
Jordan shuddered and nodded. "The kids ran everywhere. Even some of the
teachers. Killing . . . biting . . . babbling nonsense stuff. . . I hid in
one of the greenhouses for a while."
"And I in the attic of this very house," the Head added. "I watched out
of the small window up there as the campus-- the campus I love-- literally
went to hell."
Jordan said, "Most of the ones who didn't die ran away toward downtown.
Now a lot of them are back. Over there." He nodded his head in the general
direction of the soccer field.
"All of which leads us to what?" Clay asked.
"I think you know, Mr. Riddell."
"Clay."
"Clay, fine. I think what's happening now is more than temporary
anarchy. I think it's the start of a war. It's going to be a short but
extremely nasty one."
"Don't you think you're overstating-- "
"I don't. While I have only my own observations to go on-- mine and
Jordan's-- we've had a very large flock to observe, and we've seen them
going and coming as well as. . .resting, shall we say. They've stopped
killing each other, but they continue to kill the people we would classify
as normal. I call that warlike behavior."
"You've actually seen them killing normals?" Tom asked. Beside him,
Alice opened her pack, removed the Baby Nike, and held it in her hand.
The Head looked at him gravely. "I have. I'm sorry to say that Jordan
has, too."
"We couldn't help," Jordan said. His eyes were leaking. "There were too
many. It was a man and a woman, see? I don't know what they were doing on
campus so close to dark, but they sure couldn't've known about Tonney Field.
She was hurt. He was helping her along. They ran into about twenty of them
on their way back from town. The man tried to carry her." Jordan's voice
began to break. "On his own he might have gotten away, but with her. . . he
only made it as far as Horton Hall. That's a dorm. That's where he fell down
and they caught them. They-- "
Jordan abruptly buried his head against the old man's coat-- a charcoal
gray number this afternoon. The Head's big hand stroked the back of Jordan's
smooth neck.
"They seem to know their enemies," the Head mused. "It may well have
been part of the original message, don't you think?"
"Maybe," Clay said. It made a nasty sort of sense.
"As to what they are doing at night as they lie there so still and
open-eyed, listening to their music . . ." The Head sighed, took a
handkerchief from one of his coat pockets, and wiped the boy's eyes with it
in matter-of-fact fashion. Clay saw he was both very frightened and very
sure of whatever conclusion he had drawn. "I think they're rebooting," he
said.
15
"You note the red lamps, don't you?" the Head asked in his carrying
I-will-be-heard-all-the-way-to-the-back-of-the-lecture-hall voice. "I count
at least sixty-thr-- "
"Hush up!" Tom hissed. He did everything but clap a hand over the old
man's mouth.
The Head looked at him calmly. "Have you forgotten what I said last
night about musical chairs, Tom?"
Tom, Clay, and Ardai were standing just beyond the turnstiles, with the
Tonney Field archway at their backs. Alice had stayed at Cheatham Lodge with
Jordan, by mutual agreement. The music currently drifting up from the
prep-school soccer field was a jazz-instrumental version of "The Girl from
Ipanema." Clay thought it was probably cutting-edge stuff if you were a
phone-crazy.
"No," Tom said. "As long as the music doesn't stop, we have nothing to
worry about. I just don't want to be the guy who gets his throat torn out by
an insomniac exception to the rule."
"You won't."
"How can you be so positive, sir?" Tom asked.
"Because, to make a small literary pun, we cannot call it sleep. Come."
He started down the concrete ramp the players once took to reach the
field, saw that Tom and Clay were hanging back, and looked at them
patiently. "Little knowledge is gained without risk," he said, "and at this
point, I would say knowledge is critical, wouldn't you? Come."
They followed his rapping cane down the ramp toward the field, Clay a
little ahead of Tom. Yes, he could see the red power-lamps of the boomboxes
circling the field. Sixty or seventy looked about right. Good-sized
sound-systems spotted at ten- or fifteen-foot intervals, each one surrounded
with bodies. By starlight those bodies were an eye-boggling sight. They
weren't stacked-- each had his or her own space-- but not so much as an inch
had been wasted. Even the arms had been interwoven, so that the impression
was one of paper dolls carpeting the field, rank on rank, while that music--
Like something you'd hear in a supermarket, Clay thought-- rose in the dark.
Something else rose, as well: a sallow smell of dirt and rotting vegetables,
with a thicker odor of human waste and putrefaction lingering just beneath.
The Head skirted the goal, which had been pushed aside, overturned, its
netting shredded. Here, where the lake of bodies started, lay a young man of
about thirty with jagged bite-marks running up one arm to the sleeve of his
NASCAR T-shirt. The bites looked infected. In one hand he held a red cap
that made Clay think of Alice's pet sneaker. He stared dully up at the stars
as Bette Midler once more began singing about the wind beneath her wings.
"Hi!" the Head cried in his rusty, piercing voice. He poked the young
man briskly in the middle with the tip of his cane, pushing in until the
young man broke wind. "Hi, I say!"
"Stop it!" Tom almost groaned.
The Head gave him a look of tight-lipped scorn, then worked the tip of
his cane into the cap the young man was holding. He flicked it away. The cap
sailed about ten feet and landed on the face of a middle-aged woman. Clay
watched, fascinated, as it slid partially aside, revealing one rapt and
blinkless eye.
The young man reached up with dreamy slowness and clutched the hand
that had been holding the cap into a fist. Then he subsided.
"He thinks he's holding it again," Clay whispered, fascinated.
"Perhaps," the Head replied, without much interest. He poked the tip of
his cane against one of the young man's infected bites. It should have hurt
like hell, but the young man didn't react, only went on staring up at the
sky as Bette Midler gave way to Dean Martin. "I could put my cane right
through his throat and he wouldn't try to stop me. Nor would those around
him spring to his defense, although in the daytime I have no doubt they'd
tear me limb from limb."
Tom was squatting by one of the ghetto blasters. "There are batteries
in this," he said. "I can tell by the weight."
"Yes. In all of them. They do seem to need batteries." The Head
considered, then added something Clay could have done without. "At least so
far."
"We could wade right in, couldn't we?" Clay said. "We could wipe them
out the way hunters exterminated passenger pigeons back in the 1880s."
The Head nodded. "Bashed their little brains out as they sat on the
ground, didn't they? Not a bad analogy. But I'd make slow work of it with my
cane. You'd make slow work of it even with your automatic weapon, I'm
afraid."
"I don't have enough bullets, in any case. There must be . . ." Clay
ran his eye over the packed bodies again. Looking at them made his head
hurt. "There must be six or seven hundred. And that's not even counting the
ones under the bleachers."
"Sir? Mr. Ardai?" It was Tom. "When did you . . . how did you first . .
.?"
"How did I determine the depth of this trance state? Is that what
you're asking me?"
Tom nodded.
"I came out the first night to observe. The flock was much smaller
then, of course. I was drawn to them out of simple but overwhelming
curiosity. Jordan wasn't with me. Switching to a nighttime existence has
been rather hard for him, I'm afraid."
"You risked your life, you know," Clay said.
"I had little choice," the Head replied. "It was like being hypnotized.
I quickly grasped the fact that they were unconscious even though their eyes
were open, and a few simple experiments with the tip of my cane confirmed
the depth of the state."
Clay thought of the Head's limp, thought of asking him if he'd
considered what would have happened to him if he'd been wrong and they'd
come after him, and held his tongue. The Head would no doubt reiterate what
he'd already said: no knowledge obtained without risk. Jordan was right--
this was one very old-school dude. Clay certainly wouldn't have wanted to be
fourteen and standing on his disciplinary carpet.
Ardai, meanwhile, was shaking his head at him. "Six or seven hundred's
a very low estimate, Clay. This is a regulation-size soccer field. That's
six thousand square yards."
"How many?"
"The way they're packed together? I should say a thousand at the very
least."
"And they're not really here at all, are they? You're sure of that."
"I am. And what comes back-- a little more each day, Jordan says the
same, and he's an acute observer, you may trust me on that-- is not what
they were. Which is to say, not human."
"Can we go back to the Lodge now?" Tom asked. He sounded sick.
"Of course," the Head agreed.
"Just a second," Clay said. He knelt beside the young man in the NASCAR
T-shirt. He didn't want to do it-- he couldn't help thinking that the hand
which had clutched for the red cap would now clutch at him-- but he made
himself. Down here at ground level the stink was worse. He had believed he
was getting used to it, but he had been wrong.
Tom began, "Clay, what are you-- "
"Quiet." Clay leaned toward the young man's mouth, which was partly
open. He hesitated, then made himself lean closer, until he could see the
dim shine of spit on the man's lower lip. At first he thought it might only
be his imagination, but another two inches-- he was now almost close enough
to kiss the not-sleeping thing with Ricky Craven on its chest-- took care of
that.
It's just little, Jordan had said. Not hardly a whisper. . . but you
can hear it.
Clay heard it, the vocal by some trick just a syllable or two ahead of
the one coming from the linked boomboxes: Dean Martin singing "Everybody
Loves Somebody Sometime."
He stood up, nearly screaming at the pistol-shot sound of his own knees
cracking. Tom held up his lantern, looking at him, stare-eyed. "What? What?
You're not going to say that kid was-- "
Clay nodded. "Come on. Let's go back."
Halfway up the ramp he grabbed the Head roughly by the shoulder. Ardai
turned to face him, seemingly not disturbed to be handled so.
"You're right, sir. We have to get rid of them. As many as we can, and
as fast as we can. This may be the only chance we get. Or do you think I'm
wrong?"
"No," the Head replied. "Unfortunately, I don't. As I said, this is
war-- or so I believe-- and what one does in war is kill one's enemies. Why
don't we go back and talk it over? We could have hot chocolate. I like a
tiny splash of bourbon in mine, barbarian that I am."
At the top of the ramp, Clay spared one final look back. Tonney Field
was dark, but under strong northern starlight not too dark to make out the
carpet of bodies spread from end to end and side to side. He thought you
might not know what you were looking at if you just happened to stumble on
it, but once you did . . . once you did . . .
His eyes played him a funny trick and for a moment he almost thought he
could see them breathing-- all eight hundred or a thousand of them-- as one
organism. That frightened him badly and he turned to catch up to Tom and
Headmaster Ardai, almost running.
16
The Head made hot chocolate in the kitchen and they drank it in the
formal parlor, by the light of two gas lanterns. Clay thought the old man
would suggest they go out to Academy Avenue later on, trolling for more
volunteers in Ardai's Army, but he seemed satisfied with what he had.
The gasoline-pump at the motor pool, the Head told them, drew from a
four-hundred-gallon overhead tank-- all they'd have to do was pull a plug.
And there were thirty-gallon sprayers in the greenhouse. At least a dozen.
They could load up a pickup truck with them, perhaps, and back it down one
of the ramps--
"Wait," Clay said. "Before we start talking strategy, if you have a theory
about all this, sir, I'd like to hear it."
"Nothing so formal," the old man said. "But Jordan and I have
observation, we have intuition, and we have a fair amount of experience
between the two of us-- "
"I'm a computer geek," Jordan said over his mug of hot chocolate. Clay
found the child's glum assurance oddly charming. "A total McNerd. Been on em
my whole life, just about. Those things're rebooting, all right. They might
as well have software installation, please stand by blinking on their
foreheads."
"I don't understand you," Tom said.
"I do," Alice said. "Jordan, you think the Pulse really was a Pulse,
don't you? Everyone who heard it. . . they got their hard drives wiped."
"Well,yeah," Jordan said. He was too polite to say Well, duh.
Tom looked at Alice, perplexed. Only Clay knew Tom wasn't dumb, and he
didn't believe Tom was that slow.
"You had a computer," Alice said. "I saw it in your little office."
"Yes-- "
"And you've installed software, right?"
"Sure, but-- " Tom stopped, looking at Alice fixedly. She looked back.
"Their brains'? You mean their brains'?"
"What do you think a brain is?" Jordan said. "A big old hard drive.
Organic circuitry. No one knows how many bytes. Say giga to the power of a
googolplex. An infinity of bytes." He put his hands to his ears, which were
small and neatly made. "Right in between here."
"I don't believe it," Tom said, but he spoke in a small voice and there
was a sick look on his face. Clay thought he did believe it. Thinking back
to the madness that had convulsed Boston, Clay had to admit the idea was
persuasive. It was also terrible: millions, perhaps even billions, of brains
all wiped clean at the same time, the way you could wipe an old-fashioned
computer disc with a powerful magnet.
He found himself remembering Pixie Dark, the friend of the girl with
the peppermint-colored cell phone. Who are you? What's happening? Pixie Dark
had cried. Who are you? Who am I? Then she had smacked herself repeatedly in
the forehead with the heel of her hand and had gone running full tilt into a
lamppost, not once but twice, smashing her expensive orthodontic work to
jagged pieces.
Who are you? Who am I?
It hadn't been her cell phone. She had only been listening in and
hadn't gotten a full dose.
Clay, who thought in images rather than words a good deal of the time,
now got a vivid mental picture of a computer screen filling up with those
words: WHO ARE YOU WHO AM I WHO ARE YOU WHO AM I WHO ARE YOU who AM I who
ARE YOU WHO am I, and finally, at the bottom, as bleak and inarguable as
Pixie Dark's fate:
SYSTEM FAILURE.
Pixie Dark as a partially wiped hard drive? It was horrible, but it
felt like the stone truth.
"I majored in English, but as a young man I read a great deal of
psychology," the Head told them. "I began with Freud, of course, everyone
begins with Freud . . . then Jung . . . Adler . . . worked my way around the
whole ballfield from there. Lurking behind all theories of how the mind
works is a greater theory: Darwin's. In Freud's vocabulary, the idea of
survival as the prime directive is expressed by the concept of the id. In
Jung's, by the rather grander idea of blood consciousness. Neither man, I
think, would argue with the idea that if all conscious thought, all memory,
all ratiocinative ability, were to be stripped from a human mind in a
moment, what would remain would be pure and terrible."
He paused, looking around for comment. None of them said anything. The
Head nodded as if satisfied and resumed.
"Although neither the Freudians nor the Jungians come right out and say
it, they strongly suggest that we may have a core, a single basic carrier
wave, or-- to use language with which Jordan is comfortable-- a single line
of written code which cannot be stripped."
"The PD," Jordan said. "The prime directive."
"Yes," the Head agreed. "At bottom, you see, we are not Homo sapiens at
all. Our core is madness. The prime directive is murder. What Darwin was too
polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we
were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the
craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle. And that is what the
Pulse exposed five days ago."
17
"I refuse to believe that we were lunatics and murderers before we were
anything else," Tom said. "Christ, man, what about the Parthenon? What about
Michelangelo's David? What about that plaque on the moon that says, 'We came
in peace for all mankind'?"
"That plaque also has Richard Nixon's name on it," Ardai said drily. "A
Quaker, but hardly a man of peace. Mr. McCourt-- Tom-- I have no interest in
handing down an indictment of mankind. If I did, I'd point out that for
every Michelangelo there's a Marquis de Sade, for every Gandhi an Eichmann,
for every Martin Luther King an Osama bin Laden. Leave it at this: man has
come to dominate the planet thanks to two essential traits. One is
intelligence. The other has been the absolute willingness to kill anyone and
anything that gets in his way."
He leaned forward, surveying them with his bright eyes.
"Mankind's intelligence finally trumped mankind's killer instinct, and
reason came to rule over mankind's maddest impulses. That, too, was
survival. I believe the final showdown between the two may have come in
October of 1963, over a handful of missiles in Cuba, but that is a
discussion for another day. The fact is, most of us had sublimated the worst
in us until the Pulse came along and stripped away everything but that red
core."
"Someone let the Tasmanian devil out of its cage," Alice murmured.
"Who?"
"That need not concern us, either," the Head replied. "I suspect they
had no idea of what they were doing . . . or how much they were doing. Based
upon what must have been hurried experiments over a few years-- perhaps even
months-- they may have thought they would unleash a destructive storm of
terrorism. Instead they unleashed a tsunami of untold violence, and it's
mutating. Horrible as the current days may now seem, we may later view them
as a lull between one storm and the next. These days may also be our only
chance to make a difference."
"What do you mean, mutating?" Clay asked.
But the Head didn't answer. Instead he turned to twelve-year-old
Jordan. "If you please, young man."
"Yes. Well." Jordan paused to think. "Your conscious mind only uses a
tiny percentage of your brain's capacity. You guys know that, right?"
"Yes," Tom said, a bit indulgently. "So I've read."
Jordan nodded. "Even when you add in all the autonomic functions they
control, plus the subconscious stuff-- dreams, blink-think, the sex drive,
all that jazz-- our brains are barely ticking over."
"Holmes, you astound me," Tom said.
"Don't be a wiseass, Tom!" Alice said, and Jordan gave her a decidedly
starry-eyed smile.
"I'm not," Tom said. "The kid is good."
"Indeed he is," the Headmaster said drily. "Jordan may have occasional
problems with the King's English, but he did not get his scholarship for
excelling at tiddlywinks." He observed the boy's discomfort and gave
Jordan's hair an affectionate scruff with his bony fingers. "Continue,
please."
"Well. . ." Jordan struggled, Clay could see it, and then seemed to
find his rhythm again. "If your brain really was a hard drive, the can would
be almost empty." He saw only Alice understood this. "Put it this way: the
info strip would say something like 2 percent in use, 98 percent
available. No one has any real idea what that ninety-eight percent is
for, but there's plenty of potential there. Stroke victims, for instance . .
. they sometimes access previously dormant areas of their brains in order to
walk and talk again. It's like their brains wire around the blighted area.
The lights go on in a similar area of the brain, but on the other side."
"You study this stuff?" Clay asked.
"It's a natural outgrowth of my interest in computers and cybernetics,"
Jordan said, shrugging. "Also, I read a lot of cyberpunk science fiction.
William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley-- "
"Neal Stephenson?" Alice asked.
Jordan grinned radiantly. "Neal Stephenson's a god."
"Back on message," the Head chided . . . but gently.
Jordan shrugged. "If you wipe a computer hard drive, it can't
regenerate spontaneously . . . except maybe in a Greg Bear novel." He
grinned again, but this time it was quick and, Clay thought, rather nervous.
Part of it was Alice, who clearly knocked the kid out. "People are
different."
"But there's a huge leap between learning to walk again after a stroke
and being able to power a bunch of boomboxes by telepathy," Tom said. "A
quantum leap." He looked around self-consciously as the word telepathy came
out of his mouth, as if expecting them to laugh. No one did.
"Yeah, but a stroke victim, even someone who has a bad one, is
light-years different from what happened to people who were on their cells
during the Pulse," Jordan replied. "Me and the Head-- the Head and I-- think
that in addition to stripping people's brains all the way to that one
unerasable line of code, the Pulse also kicked something on. Something
that's probably been sitting inside all of us for millions of years, buried
in that ninety-eight percent of dormant hard drive."
Clay's hand stole to the butt of the revolver he had picked up off the
floor in Beth Nickerson's kitchen. "A trigger," he said.
Jordan lit up. "Yeah, exactly! A mutative trigger. It never could have
happened without this, like, total erasure on a grand scale. Because what's
emerging, what's building up in those people out there . . . only they're no
longer people, what's building up is-- "
"It's a single organism," the Head interrupted. "This is what we
believe."
"Yes, but more than just a flock," Jordan said. "Because what they can
do with the CD players may only be the start, like a little kid learning to
put his shoes on. Think about what they might be able to do in a week. Or a
month. Or a year."
"You could be wrong," Tom said, but his voice was as dry as a breaking
stick.
"He could also be right," Alice said.
"Oh, I'm sure he's right," the Head put in. He sipped his spiked hot
chocolate. "Of course, I'm an old man and my time is almost over in any
case. I'll abide by any decision you make." A slight pause. The eyes flicked
from Clay to Alice to Tom. "As long as it's the right one, of course."
Jordan said: "The flocks will try to come together, you know. If they
don't hear each other already, they will real soon."
"Crap," Tom said uneasily. "Ghost stories."
"Maybe," Clay said, "but here's something to think about. Right now the
nights are ours. What if they decide they need less sleep? Or that they're
not afraid of the dark?"
No one said anything for several moments. A wind was rising outside.
Clay sipped his hot chocolate, which had never been much more than tepid and
was now almost cold. When he looked up again, Alice had put hers aside and
was holding her Nike talisman instead.
"I want to wipe them out," she said. "The ones on the soccer field, I
want to wipe them out. I don't say kill them because I think Jordan's right,
and I don't want to do it for the human race. I want to do it for my mother
and my dad, because he's gone, too. I know he is, I feel it. I want to do it
for my friends Vickie and Tess. They were good friends, but they had cell
phones, they never went anywhere without them, and I know what they're like
now and where they're sleeping: someplace just like that fucking soccer
field." She glanced at the Head, flushing. "'Scuse me, sir."
The Head waved her apology away.
"Can we do that?" she asked him. "Can we wipe them out?"
Charles Ardai, who had been winding down his career as Gaiten Academy's
interim Headmaster when the world ended, bared his eroded teeth in a grin
Clay would have given much to have captured with pen or brush; there was not
a single ounce of pity in it. "Miss Maxwell, we can try," he said.
18
At four o'clock the next morning, Tom McCourt sat on a picnic table
between the two Gaiten Academy greenhouses, which had both sustained serious
damage since the Pulse. His feet, now wearing the Reeboks he'd donned back
in Malden, were on one of the benches, and his head lay on his arms, which
rested on his knees. The wind blew his hair first one way, then the other.
Alice sat across from him with her chin propped on her hands and the rays of
several flashlights striking angles and shadows across her face. The harsh
light made her look pretty in spite of her obvious weariness; at her age,
all light was still flattering. The Head, sitting next to her, only looked
exhausted. In the closer of the two greenhouses, two Coleman gas-lanterns
floated like uneasy spirits.
The Colemans converged at the near end of the greenhouse. Clay and
Jordan used the door, although huge holes in the glass paneling had been
opened on either side. A moment later, Clay sat down next to Tom and Jordan
resumed his usual spot next to the Head. The boy smelled of gasoline and
fertilizer, even more strongly of dejection. Clay dropped several sets of
keys on the table amid the flashlights. As far as he was concerned, they
could stay there until some archaeologist discovered them four millennia
from now.
"I'm sorry," Headmaster Ardai said softly. "It seemed so simple."
"Yeah," Clay said. It had seemed simple: fill the greenhouse sprayers
with gasoline, load the sprayers into the back of a pickup truck, drive
across Tonney Field, wetting down both sides as they went, toss a match. He
thought to tell Ardai that George W Bush's Iraq adventure had probably
looked equally simple-- load the sprayers, toss a match-- and didn't. It
would have been pointlessly cruel.
"Tom?" Clay asked. "You okay?" He had already realized that Tom didn't
have great reserves of stamina.
"Yeah, just tired." He raised his head and gave Clay a smile. "Not used
to the night shift. What do we do now?"
"Go to bed, I guess," Clay said. "It'll be dawn in another forty
minutes or so." The sky had already begun to lighten in the east.
"It's not fair," Alice said. She brushed angrily at her cheeks. "It's
not fair, we tried so hard!"
They had tried hard, but nothing had come easily. Every small (and
ultimately meaningless) victory had been the sort of maddening struggle his
mother had called a Bolshie shit-pull. Part of Clay did want to blame the
Head . . . also himself, for not taking Ardai's sprayer idea with a grain of
salt. Part of him now thought that going along with an elderly English
teacher's plan to firebomb a soccer field was a little like taking a knife
to a gunfight. Still . . . yeah, it had seemed like a good idea.
Until, that was, they discovered the motor pool's gasoline storage tank
was inside a locked shed. They'd spent nearly half an hour in the nearby
office, scrounging by lantern-light through maddeningly unmarked keys on a
board behind the superintendent's desk. It was Jordan who finally found the
key that unlocked the shed door.
Then they discovered that One would only have to pull a plug was not
exactly the case. There was a cap, not a plug. And like the shed in which
the tank resided, the cap was locked. Back to the office; another scrounge
by lantern-light; finally a key that did indeed seem to fit the cap. It was
Alice who pointed out that since the cap was on the bottom of the tank,
assuring gravity-feed in case of a power outage, they would have a flood on
their hands without a hose or a siphon. They spent an hour looking for a
hose that might fit and couldn't find anything that looked even close. Tom
found a small funnel, which sent them all into moderate hysterics.
And because none of the truck keys were marked (at least in ways
non-motor-pool employees could understand), locating the right set became
another process of trial and error. This one went faster, at least, because
there were only eight trucks parked behind the garage.
And last, the greenhouses. There they discovered only eight sprayers,
not a dozen, with a capacity of not thirty gallons each but ten. They might
be able to fill them from the gasoline storage tank, but they would be
drenched in the process, and the result would be a mere eighty gallons of
usable, sprayable gas. It was the idea of wiping out a thousand
phone-crazies with eighty gallons of regular that had driven Tom, Alice, and
the Head out to the picnic bench. Clay and Jordan had hung in a while
longer, looking for bigger sprayers, but they had found none.
"We found a few little leaf-sprayers, though," Clay said. "You know,
what they used to call flit-guns."
"Also," Jordan said, "the big sprayers in there are all full of
weed-killer or plant-food or something. We'd have to start by dumping them
all out, and that would mean putting on masks just to make sure we didn't
gas ourselves or something."
"Reality bites," Alice said morosely. She looked at her baby sneaker
for a moment, then tucked it away in her pocket.
Jordan picked up the keys they had matched to one of the maintenance
pickups. "We could drive downtown," he said. "There's a Trustworthy
Hardware. They must have sprayers."
Tom shook his head. "It's over a mile and the main drag's full of
wrecks and abandoned vehicles. We might be able to get around some, but not
all. And driving over the lawns is out of the question. The houses are just
too close together. There are reasons everybody's on foot." They had seen a
few people on bicycles, but not many; even the ones equipped with lights
were dangerous if ridden at any speed.
"Would it be possible for a light truck to negotiate the side streets?"
the Head asked.
Clay said, "We could explore the possibility tomorrow night, I suppose.
Scout out a path in advance, on foot, then come back for the truck." He
considered. "They'd probably have all sorts of hose in a hardware store,
too."
"You don't sound exactly jazzed," Alice said.
Clay sighed. "It doesn't take much to block little streets. We'd end up
doing a lot of donkey-work even if we got luckier than we did tonight. I
just don't know. Maybe it'll look better to me after some rest."
"Of course it will," the Head agreed, but he sounded hollow. "To all of
us."
"What about the gas station across from the school?" Jordan asked
without much hope.
"What gas station?" Alice asked.
"He's talking about the Citgo," the Head replied. "Same problem,
Jordan-- plenty of gasoline in the tanks under the pumps, but no power. And
I doubt if they have much in the way of containers beyond a few two- or
five-gallon gasoline cans. I really think-- " But he didn't say what he
really thought. He broke off. "What is it, Clay?"
Clay was remembering the trio ahead of them limping past that gas
station, one of the men with an arm around the woman's waist. "Academy Grove
Citgo," he said. "That's the name, isn't it?"
"Yes-- "
"But they didn't just sell gasoline, I think." He didn't just think, he
knew. Because of the two trucks parked on the side. He had seen them and
hadn't thought anything of them. Not then, he hadn't. No reason to.
"I don't know what you-- " the Head began, then stopped. His eyes met
Clay's. His eroded teeth once more made their appearance in that singularly
pitiless smile. "Oh," he said. "Oh. Oh my. Oh my, yes."
Tom was looking between them with mounting perplexity. So was Alice.
Jordan merely waited.
"Would you mind telling the rest of us what you two are communing
about?" Tom asked.
Clay was ready to-- he already saw clearly how it would work, and it
was too good not to share-- when the music from Tonney Field died away. It
didn't click off, as it usually did when they woke up in the morning; it
went in a kind of swoop, as if someone had just kicked the source down an
elevator shaft.
"They're up early," Jordan said in a low voice.
Tom gripped Clay's forearm. "It's not the same," he said. "And one of
those damned ghetto blasters is still playing . . . I can hear it, very
faint."
The wind was strong, and Clay knew it was blowing from the direction of
the soccer field because of the ripe smells it carried: decaying food,
decaying flesh, hundreds of unwashed bodies. It also carried the ghostly
sound of Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music...
