Стивен Кинг. Клетка (engl)
страница №8
... Makers playing "Baby ElephantWalk."
Then, from somewhere to the northwest-- maybe ten miles away, maybe
thirty, it was hard to tell how far the wind might have carried it-- came a
spectral, somehow mothlike moaning sound. There was silence . . . silence .
. . and then the not-waking, not-sleeping creatures on the Tonney soccer
field answered in kind. Their moan was much louder, a hollow, belling
ghost-groan that rose toward the black and starry sky.
Alice had covered her mouth. The baby sneaker jutted upward from her
hands. Her eyes bulged on either side of it. Jordan had thrown his arms
around the Head's waist and buried his face against the old man's side.
"Look, Clay!" Tom said. He got to his feet and tottered toward the
grassy aisle between the two shattered greenhouses, pointing at the sky as
he went. "Do you see? My God, do you see?"
To the northwest, from where the distant groan had risen, a reddish
orange glow had bloomed on the horizon. It strengthened as he watched, the
wind bore that terrible sound again . . . and once more it was answered with
a similar but much louder groan from Tonney Field.
Alice joined them, then the Head, walking with his arm around Jordan's
shoulders.
"What's over there?" Clay asked, pointing toward the glow. It had
already begun to wane again.
"It might be Glen's Falls," the Headmaster said. "Or it might be
Littleton."
"Wherever it is, there's shrimp on the barbie," Tom said. "They're
burning. And our bunch knows. They heard."
"Or felt," Alice said. She shuddered, then straightened and bared her
teeth. "I hope they did!"
As if in answer, there was another groan from Tonney Field: many voices
raised as one in a cry of sympathy and-- perhaps-- shared agony. The one
boombox-- it was the master, Clay assumed, the one with an actual compact
disc in it-- continued to play. Ten minutes later, the others joined in once
more. The music-- it now was "Close to You," by The Carpenters-- swooped up,
just as it had previously swooped down. By then Headmaster Ardai, limping
noticeably on his cane, had led them back to Cheatham Lodge. Not long after
that, the music stopped again . . . but this time it simply clicked off, as
it had the previous morning. From far away, carried across God alone knew
how many miles by the wind, came the faint pop of a gunshot. Then the world
was eerily and completely silent, waiting for the dark to give place to the
day.
19
As the sun began to spoke its first red rays through the trees on the
eastern horizon, they watched the phone-crazies once again begin leaving the
soccer field in close-order patterns, headed for downtown Gaiten and the
surrounding neighborhoods. They fanned out as they went, headed downhill
toward Academy Avenue as if nothing untoward had happened near the end of
the night. But Clay didn't trust that. He thought they had better do their
business at the Citgo station quickly, today, if they intended to do it at
all. Going out in the daylight might mean shooting some of them, but as long
as they only moved en masse at the beginning and end of the day, he was
willing to take that risk.
They watched what Alice called "the dawn of the dead" from the dining
room. Afterward, Tom and the Head went into the kitchen. Clay found them
sitting at the table in a bar of sunshine and drinking tepid coffee. Before
Clay could begin explaining what he wanted to do later in the day, Jordan
touched his wrist.
"Some of the crazies are still there," he said. And, in a lower voice:
"I went to school with some of them."
Tom said, "I thought they'd all be shopping Kmart by now, looking for
Blue Light Specials."
"You better check it out," Alice said from the doorway. "I'm not sure
it's another-- what-would-you-call-it, developmental step forward, but it
might be. It probably is."
"Sure it is," Jordan said gloomily.
The phone-crazies who had stayed behind-- Clay thought it was a squad
of about a hundred-- were removing the dead from beneath the bleachers. At
first they simply carried them off into the parking lot south of the field
and behind a long low brick building. They came back empty-handed.
"That building's the indoor track," the Head told them. "It's also
where all the sports gear is stored. There's a steep drop-off on the far
side. I imagine they're throwing the bodies over the edge."
"You bet," Jordan said. He sounded sick. "It's all marshy down there.
They'll rot."
"They were rotting anyway, Jordan," Tom said gently.
"I know," he said, sounding sicker than ever, "but they'll rot even
faster in the sun." A pause. "Sir?"
"Yes, Jordan?"
"I saw Noah Chutsky. From your Drama Reading Club."
The Head patted the boy's shoulder. He was very pale. "Never mind."
"It's hard not to," Jordan whispered. "He took my picture once. With
his . . . with his you-know."
Then, a new wrinkle. Two dozen of the worker-bees peeled off from the
main group with no pause for discussion and headed for the shattered
greenhouses, moving in a V-shape that reminded the watchers of migrating
geese. The one Jordan had identified as Noah Chutsky was among these. The
rest of the body-removal squad watched them go for a moment, then marched
back down the ramps, three abreast, and resumed fishing dead bodies out from
under the bleachers.
Twenty minutes later the greenhouse party returned, now spread out in a
single line. Some were still empty-handed, but most had acquired
wheelbarrows or handcarts of the sort used to transport large bags of lime
or fertilizer. Soon the phone-crazies were using the carts and barrows to
dispose of the bodies, and their work went faster.
"It's a step forward, all right," Tom said.
"More than one," the Head added. "Cleaning house; using tools to do
it."
Clay said, "I don't like this."
Jordan looked up at him, his face pale and tired and far older than its
years. "Join the club," he said.
20
They slept until one in the afternoon. Then, after confirming that the
body detail had finished its work and gone to join the rest of the foragers,
they went down to the fieldstone pillars marking the entrance to Gaiten
Academy. Alice had scoffed at Clay's idea that he and Tom should do this on
their own. "Never mind that Batman and Robin crap," she said.
"Oh my, I always wanted to be the Boy Wonder," Tom said with a trace of
a lisp, but when she gave him a humorless look, her sneaker (now beginning
to look a bit tattered) clasped in one hand, he wilted. "Sorry."
"You can go across to the gas station on your own," she said. "That
much makes sense. But the rest of us will stand lookout on the other side."
The Head had suggested that Jordan should stay behind at the Lodge.
Before the boy could respond-- and he looked ready to do so hotly-- Alice
asked, "How are your eyes, Jordan?"
He had given her a smile, once more accompanied by the slightly starry
look. "Good. Fine."
"And you've played video games? The ones where you shoot?"
"Sure, a ton."
She handed him her pistol. Clay could see him quiver slightly, like a
tapped tuning fork, when their fingers touched. "If I tell you to point and
shoot-- or if Headmaster Ardai tells you-- will you do it?"
"Sure."
Alice had looked at Ardai with a mixture of defiance and apology. "We
need every hand."
The Head had given in, and now here they were and there was the Academy
Grove Citgo, on the other side of the street and just a little way back
toward town. From here the other, slightly smaller, sign was easy to read:
academy lp gas. The single car standing at the pumps with its driver's door
open already had a dusty, long-deserted look. The gas station's big
plate-glass window was broken. Off to the right, parked in the shade of what
had to be one of northern New England's few surviving elm trees, were two
trucks shaped like giant propane bottles. Written on the side of each were
the words Academy LP Gas and Serving Southern New Hampshire Since 1982.
There was no sign of foraging phone-crazies on this part of Academy
Avenue, and although most of the houses Clay could see had shoes on their
front stoops, several did not. The rush of refugees seemed to be drying up.
Too early to tell, he cautioned himself.
"Sir? Clay? What's that?" Jordan asked. He was pointing to the middle
of the Avenue-- which of course was still Route 102, although that was easy
to forget on this sunny, quiet afternoon where the closest sounds were birds
and the rustle of the wind in the leaves. There was something written in
bright pink chalk on the asphalt, but from where they were, Clay couldn't
make it out. He shook his head.
"Are you ready?" he asked Tom.
"Sure," Tom said. He was trying to sound casual, but a pulse beat
rapidly on the side of his unshaven throat. "You Batman, me Boy Wonder."
They trotted across the street, pistols in hand. Clay had left the
Russian automatic weapon with Alice, more or less convinced it would spin
her around like a top if she actually had to use it.
The message scrawled in pink chalk on the macadam was
KASHWAK=NO-FO
"Does that mean anything to you?" Tom asked.
Clay shook his head. It didn't, and right now he didn't care. All he
wanted was to get out of the middle of Academy Avenue, where he felt as
exposed as an ant in a bowl of rice. It occurred to him, suddenly and not
for the first time, that he would sell his soul just to know that his son
was okay, and in a place where people weren't putting guns into the hands of
children who were good at video games. It was strange. He'd think he had his
priorities settled, that he was dealing with his personal deck one card at a
time, and then these thoughts would come, each as fresh and painful as an
unsettled grief.
Get out of here, Johnny. You don't belong here. Not your place, not
your time.
The propane trucks were empty and locked, but that was all right; today
their luck was running the right way. The keys were hanging on a board in
the office, below a sign reading NO TOWING BETWEEN MIDNITE AND 6 AM NO
EXEMPTIONS. A tiny propane bottle dangled from each keychain. Halfway back
to the door, Tom touched Clay's shoulder.
Two phone-crazies walked up the middle of the street, side by side but
by no means in lockstep. One was eating Twinkies from a box of them; his
face was lathered with cream, crumbs, and frosting. The other, a woman, was
holding a coffee-table-size book out in front of her. To Clay she looked
like a choir-member holding an oversize hymnal. On the front there appeared
to be a photograph of a collie jumping through a tire swing. The fact that
the woman held the book upside down gave Clay some comfort. The vacant,
blasted expressions on their faces-- and the fact that they were wandering
on their own, meaning midday was still a non-flocking time-- gave him more.
But he didn't like that book. No, he didn't like that book at all.
They wandered past the fieldstone pillars, and Clay could see Alice,
Jordan, and the Head peering out, wide-eyed. The two crazies walked over the
cryptic message chalked in the street-- KASHWAK=NO-FO-- and the woman
reached for her companion's Twinkies. The man held the box away from her.
The woman cast her book aside (it landed rightside up and Clay saw it was
100 Best Loved Dogs of the World) and reached again. The man slapped her
face hard enough to make her filthy hair fly, the sound very loud in the
stillness of the day. All this time they were walking. The woman made a
sound: "Aw!" The man replied (it sounded to Clay like a reply): "Eeeen!" The
woman reached for the box of Twinkies. Now they were passing the Citgo. The
man punched her in the neck this time, a looping overhand blow, and then
dove a hand into his box for another treat. The woman stopped. Looked at
him. And a moment later the man stopped. He had pulled a bit ahead, so his
back was mostly to her.
Clay felt something in the sunwarmed stillness of the gas station
office. No, he thought, not in the office, in me. Shortness of breath, like
after you climb a flight of stairs too fast.
Except maybe it was in the office, too, because-- Tom stood on his toes
and whispered in his ear, "Do you feel that?" Clay nodded and pointed at the
desk. There was no wind, no discernible draft, but the papers there were
fluttering. And in the ashtray, the ashes had begun to circle lazily, like
water going down a bathtub drain. There were two butts in there-- no,
three-- and the moving ashes seemed to be pushing them toward the center.
The man turned toward the woman. He looked back at her. She looked at
him. They looked at each other. Clay could read no expression on either
face, but he could feel the hairs on his arms stirring, and he heard a faint
jingling. It was the keys on the board below the NO TOWING sign. They were
stirring, too-- chittering against each other just the tiniest bit.
"Aw!" said the woman. She held out her hand.
"Eeen!" said the man. He was wearing the fading remains of a suit. On
his feet were dull black shoes. Six days ago he might have been a middle
manager, a salesman, or an apartment-complex manager. Now the only real
estate he cared about was his box of Twinkies. He held it to his chest, his
sticky mouth working.
"Aw!" the woman insisted. She held out both hands instead of just one,
the immemorial gesture signifying gimme, and the keys were jingling louder.
Overhead there was a bzzzzt as a fluorescent light for which there was no
power flickered and then went out again. The nozzle fell off the middle gas
pump and hit the concrete island with a dead-metal clank.
"Aw," the man said. His shoulders slumped and all the tension went out
of him. The tension went out of the air. The keys on the board fell silent.
The ashes made one final, slowing circuit of their dented metal reliquary
and came to a stop. You would not have known anything had happened, Clay
thought, if not for the fallen nozzle out there and the little cluster of
cigarette butts in the ashtray on the desk in here.
"Aw," the woman said. She was still holding out her hands. Her
companion advanced to within reach of them. She took a Twinkie in each and
began to eat them, wrappings and all. Once more Clay was comforted, but only
a little. They resumed their slow shuffle toward town, the woman pausing
long enough to spit a filling-caked piece of cellophane from the side of her
mouth. She showed no interest in 100 Best Loved Dogs of the World.
"What was that?" Tom asked in a low and shaken voice when the two of
them were almost out of sight.
"I don't know, but I didn't like it," Clay said. He had the keys to the
propane trucks. He handed one set to Tom. "Can you drive a standard shift?"
"I learned on a standard. Can you?"
Clay smiled patiently. "I'm straight, Tom. Straight guys know how to
drive standards without instruction. It's instinct with us."
"Very funny." Tom wasn't really listening. He was looking after the
departed odd couple, and that pulse in the side of his throat was going
faster than ever. "End of the world, open season on the queers, why not,
right?"
"That's right. It's gonna be open season on straights, too, if they get
that shit under control. Come on, let's do it."
He started out the door, but Tom held him back a minute. "Listen. The
others may have felt that over there, or they may not have. If they didn't,
maybe we should keep it to ourselves for the time being. What do you think?"
Clay thought about how Jordan wouldn't let the Head out of his sight
and how Alice always kept the creepy little sneaker somewhere within reach.
He thought about the circles under their eyes, and then about what they were
planning to do tonight. Armageddon was probably too strong a word for it,
but not by much. Whatever they were now, the phone-crazies had once been
human beings, and burning a thousand of them alive was burden enough. Even
thinking about it hurt his imagination.
"Fine by me," he said. "Go up the hill in low gear, all right?"
"Lowest one I can find," Tom said. They were walking to the big
bottle-shaped trucks now. "How many gears do you think a truck like that
has?"
"One forward should be enough," Clay said.
"Based on the way they're parked, I think you're going to have to start
by finding reverse."
"Fuck it," Clay said. "What good is the end of the world if you can't
drive through a goddam board fence?"
And that was what they did.
21
Academy Slope was what Headmaster Ardai and his one remaining pupil
called the long, rolling hill that dropped from the campus to the main road.
The grass was still bright green and only beginning to be littered with
fallen leaves. When afternoon gave way to early evening and
Academy Slope was still empty-- no sign of returning phone-crazies--
Alice began to pace the main hall of Cheatham Lodge, pausing in each circuit
only long enough to look out the bay window of the living room. It offered a
fine view of the Slope, the two main lecture halls, and Tonney Field. The
sneaker was once more tied to her wrist.
The others were in the kitchen, sipping Cokes from cans. "They're not
coming back," she told them at the end of one of her circuits. "They got
wind of what we were planning-- read our minds or something-- and they're
not coming."
Two more circuits of the long downstairs hall, each with a pause to
look out the big living room window, and then she looked in on them again.
"Or maybe it's a general migration, did you guys ever think of that? Maybe
they go south in the winter like the goddam robins."
She was gone without waiting for a reply. Up the hall and down the
hall. Up and down the hall.
"She's like Ahab on the prod for Moby," the Head remarked.
"Eminem might have been a jerk, but he was right about that guy," Tom
said morosely.
"I beg your pardon, Tom?" the Head asked.
Tom waved it away.
Jordan glanced at his watch. "They didn't come back last night until
almost half an hour later than it is right now," he said. "I'll go tell her
that, if you want."
"I don't think it would do any good," Clay said. "She's got to work
through it, that's all."
"She's pretty freaked-out, isn't she, sir?"
"Aren't you, Jordan?"
"Yes," Jordan said in a small voice. "I'm Freak City."
The next time Alice came back to the kitchen she said, "Maybe it's best
if they don't come back. I don't know if they're rebooting their brains some
new way, but for sure there's some bad voodoo going on. I felt it from those
two this afternoon. The woman with the book and the man with the Twinkies?"
She shook her head. "Bad voodoo."
She plunged off on hall patrol again before anyone could reply, the
sneaker swinging from her wrist.
The Head looked at Jordan. "Did you feel anything, son?"
Jordan hesitated, then said, "I felt something. The hair on my neck
tried to stand up."
Now the Head turned his gaze to the men on the other side of the table.
"What about you two? You were far closer."
Alice saved them from having to answer. She ran into the kitchen, her
cheeks flushed, her eyes wide, the soles of her sneakers squeaking on the
tiles. "They're coming," she said.
22
From the bay window the four of them watched the phone-crazies come up
Academy Slope in converging lines, their long shadows making a huge
pin-wheel shape on the green grass. As they neared what Jordan and the Head
called Tonney Arch, the lines drew together and the pinwheel seemed to spin
in the late golden sunlight even as it contracted and solidified.
Alice could no longer stand not holding the sneaker. She had torn it
from her wrist and was squeezing it compulsively. "They'll see what we did
and they'll turn around," she said, speaking low and rapidly. "They've
gotten at least that smart, if they're picking up books again, they must
have."
"We'll see," Clay said. He was almost positive the phone-crazies would
go onto Tonney Field, even if what they saw there disquieted their strange
group mind; it would be dark soon and they had nowhere else to go. A
fragment of a lullaby his mother used to sing him floated through his mind:
Little man, you've had a busy day.
"I hope they go and I hope they stay," she said, lower than ever. "I
feel like I'm going to explode." She gave a wild little laugh. "Only it's
them that's supposed to explode, isn't it? Them." Tom turned to look at her
and she said, "I'm all right. I'm fine, so just close your mouth."
"All I was going to say is that it'll be what it is," he said.
"New Age crap. You sound like my father. The Picture Frame King." A
tear rolled down one cheek and she rubbed it impatiently away with the heel
of her hand.
"Just calm down, Alice. Watch."
"I'll try, okay? I'll try."
"And stop with the sneaker," Jordan said-- irritably, for him. "That
squelchy sound is making me crazy."
She looked down at the sneaker, as if surprised, then slipped it around
her wrist on its loop again. They watched as the phone-crazies converged at
Tonney Arch and passed beneath it with less pushing and confusion than any
crowd attending the Homecoming Weekend soccer match could ever have
equaled-- Clay was sure of that. They watched as the crazies spread out
again on the far side, crossing the concourse and filing down the ramps.
They waited to see that steady march slow and stop, but it never did. The
last stragglers-- most of them hurt and helping each other along, but still
walking in those close groups-- were in long before the reddening sun had
passed below the dormitories on the west side of the Gaiten Academy campus.
They had returned once more, like homing pigeons to their nests or the
swallows to Capistrano. Not five minutes after the evening star became
visible in the darkening sky, Dean Martin began singing "Everybody Loves
Somebody Sometime."
"I was worried for nothing, wasn't I?" Alice said. "Sometimes I'm a
putz. That's what my father says."
"No," the Head told her. "All the putzes had cell phones, dear. That's
why they're out there and you're in here, with us."
Tom said: "I wonder if Rafe's still making out okay."
"I wonder if Johnny is," Clay said. "Johnny and Sharon."
23
At ten o'clock on that windy autumn night, under a moon now entering
its last quarter, Clay and Tom stood in the band alcove at the home end of
the Tonney soccer field. Directly in front of them was a waist-high concrete
barrier that had been heavily padded on the playing-field side. On their
side were a few rusting music stands and a drift of litter that was
ankle-deep; the wind blew the torn bags and scraps of paper in here, and
here they came to rest. Behind and above them, back at the turnstiles, Alice
and Jordan flanked the Head, a tall figure propped on a slender rod of cane.
Debby Boone's voice rolled across the field in amplified waves of comic
majesty. Ordinarily she would be followed by Lee Ann Womack singing "I Hope
You Dance," then back to Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers, but
perhaps not tonight.
The wind was freshening. It brought them the smell of rotting bodies
from the marsh behind the indoor-track building and the aroma of dirt and
sweat from the living ones packed together on the field beyond the band
alcove. If you can call that living, Clay thought, and flashed himself a
small and bitter inside smile. Rationalization was a great human sport,
maybe the great human sport, but he would not fool himself tonight: of
course they called it living. Whatever they were or whatever they were
becoming, they called it living just as he did.
"What are you waiting for?" Tom murmured.
"Nothing," Clay murmured back. "Just. . . nothing."
From the holster Alice had found in the Nickerson basement, Clay drew
Beth Nickerson's old-fashioned Colt .45 revolver, now once more fully
loaded. Alice had offered him the automatic rifle-- which so far they had
not even test-fired-- and he had refused, saying that if the pistol didn't
do the job, probably nothing would.
"I don't know why the auto wouldn't be better, if it squirts thirty or
forty bullets a second," she said. "You could turn those trucks into
cheese-graters."
He had agreed that this might be so, but reminded Alice that their
object tonight was not destruction per se but ignition. Then he'd explained
the highly illegal nature of the ammunition Arnie Nickerson had obtained for
his wife's .45 fraggers. What had once been called dumdum bullets.
"Okay, but if it doesn't work, you can still try Sir Speedy," she'd
said. "Unless the guys out there just, you know . . ." She wouldn't actually
use the word attack, but had made a little walking motion with the fingers
of the hand not holding the sneaker. "In that case, beat feet."
The wind tore a tattered strip of Homecoming Weekend bunting free of
the Scoreboard and sent it dancing above the packed sleepers. Around the
field, seeming to float in the dark, were the red eyes of the boomboxes, all
but one playing without benefit of CDs. The bunting struck the bumper of one
of the propane trucks, flapped there several seconds, then slipped free and
flew off into the night. The trucks were parked side by side in the middle
of the field, rising from the mass of packed forms like weird metal mesas.
The phone-crazies slept beneath them and so closely around them that some
were crammed up against the wheels. Clay thought again of passenger pigeons,
and the way nineteenth-century hunters had brained them on the ground with
clubs. The whole species had been wiped out by the beginning of the
twentieth . . . but of course they'd only been birds, with little
bird-brains, incapable of rebooting.
"Clay?" Tom asked, low. "Are you sure you want to go through with
this?"
"No," Clay said. Now that he was face-to-face with it, there were too
many unanswered questions. What they would do if it went wrong was only one
of them. What they would do if it went right was another. Because passenger
pigeons were incapable of revenge. Those things out there, on the other
hand--
"But I'm going to."
"Then do it," Tom said. "Because, all else aside, 'You Light Up My
Life' blows dead rats in hell."
Clay raised the .45 and held his right wrist firmly with his left hand.
He centered the gunsight on the tank of the truck on the left. He would fire
twice into that one, then twice into the other one. That would leave one
more bullet for each, if necessary. If that didn't work, he could try the
automatic weapon Alice had taken to calling Sir Speedy.
"Duck if it goes up," he told Tom.
"Don't worry," Tom said. His face was drawn into a grimace,
anticipating the report of the gun and whatever might follow.
Debby Boone was building to a big finish. It suddenly seemed very
important to Clay that he beat her. If you miss at this range, you're a
monkey, he thought, and pulled the trigger.
There was no chance for a second shot and no need of one. A bright red
flower bloomed in the center of the tank, and by its light he saw a deep
dent in the previously smooth metal surface. Hell appeared to be inside, and
growing. Then the flower was a river, red turning orange-white.
"Down!" he shouted, and pushed Tom's shoulder. He fell on top of the
smaller man just as the night became desert noon. There was a huge,
whooshing roar followed by a guttering BANG that Clay felt in every bone of
his body. Shrapnel shot overhead. He thought Tom screamed but he wasn't
sure, because there was another of those whooshing roars and suddenly the
air was growing hot, hot, hot.
He seized Tom partly by the scruff of the neck and partly by the collar
of his shirt and began to drag him backward up the concrete ramp leading to
the turnstiles, his eyes slitted almost completely shut against the enormous
glare flowing from the center of the soccer field. Something enormous landed
in the auxiliary stands to his right. He thought maybe an engine block. He
was pretty sure the shattered bits and twists of metal under his feet had
once been Gaiten Academy music stands.
Tom was screaming and his glasses were askew, but he was on his feet
and he looked intact. The two of them ran up the ramp like escapees from
Gomorrah. Clay could see their shadows, long and spider-thin in front of
them, and realized objects were falling all around them: arms, legs, a piece
of bumper, a woman's head with the hair blazing. From behind them came a
second tremendous BANG-- or maybe it was a third-- and this time he was the
one who screamed. His feet tangled and he went sprawling. The whole world
was rapidly building heat and the most incredible light: he felt as if he
were standing on God's personal soundstage.
We didn't know what we were doing, he thought, looking at a wad of gum,
a tromped Junior Mints box, a blue Pepsi Cola cap. We didn't have a clue and
we're going to pay with our fucking lives.
"Get up!" That was Tom, and he thought Tom was screaming, but his voice
seemed to be coming from a mile away. He felt Tom's delicate, long-fingered
hands yanking at his arm. Then Alice was there, too. Alice was yanking on
his other arm, and she was glaring in the light. He could see the sneaker
dancing and bobbing from its string on her wrist. She was spattered with
blood, bits of cloth, and gobbets of smoking flesh.
Clay scrambled up, then went back to one knee, and Alice hauled him up
again by main force. From behind them, propane roared like a dragon. And
here came Jordan, with the Head tottering along right behind him, his face
rosy and every wrinkle running with sweat.
"No, Jordan, no, just get him out of the way!" Tom yelled, and Jordan
pulled the Head aside for them, gripping the old man grimly around the waist
when he tottered. A burning torso with a ring in its navel landed at Alice's
feet and she booted it off the ramp. Five years of soccer, Clay remembered
her saying. A blazing piece of shirt landed on the back of her head and Clay
swept it aside before it could set her hair on fire.
At the top of the ramp, a blazing truck tire with half a sheared-off
axle still attached leaned against the last row of reserved seats. If it had
landed blocking their way, they might have cooked-- the Head almost
certainly would have. As it was, they were able to slide past, holding their
breath against billows of oily smoke. A moment later they were lurching
through the turnstile, Jordan on one side of the Head and Clay on the other,
the two of them almost carrying the old man along. Clay had his ear boxed
twice by the Head's flailing cane, but thirty seconds after passing the tire
they were standing beneath Tonney Arch, looking back at the huge column of
fire rising above the bleachers and center press box with identical
expressions of stupefied disbelief.
A blazing rag of Homecoming bunting floated down to the pavement next
to the main ticket booth, trailing a few sparks before coming to rest.
"Did you know that would happen?" Tom asked. His face was white around
the eyes, red across the forehead and cheeks. Half his mustache appeared to
have been singed off. Clay could hear his voice, but it sounded distant.
Everything did. It was as if his ears had been packed with cotton balls, or
the shooter's plugs Beth Nickerson's husband Arnie had no doubt made her
wear when he took her to their favorite target-range. Where they'd probably
shot with their cell phones clipped to one hip and their pagers to the
other.
"Did you know?" Tom attempted to shake him, got nothing but a piece of
his shirt, and tore it all the way down the front.
"Fuck no, are you insane?" Clay's voice was beyond hoarse, beyond
parched; it sounded baked. "You think I would have stood there with a pistol
if I'd known? If it hadn't been for that concrete barrier, we would have
been cut in two. Or vaporized."
Incredibly, Tom began to grin. "I tore your shirt, Batman."
Clay felt like knocking his head off. Also like hugging and kissing him
just because he was still alive.
"I want to go back to the Lodge," Jordan said. The fear in his voice
was unmistakable.
"By all means let us remove to a safe distance," the Head agreed. He
was trembling badly, his eyes fixed on the inferno rising above the Arch and
the bleachers. "Thank God the wind's blowing toward Academy Slope."
"Can you walk, sir?" Tom asked.
"Thank you, yes. If Jordan will assist me, I'm sure I can walk as far
as the Lodge."
"We got them," Alice said. She was wiping splatters of gore almost
absently from her face, leaving smears of blood. Her eyes were like nothing
Clay had ever seen except in a few photographs and some inspired comic art
from the 1950s and '60s. He remembered going to a comics convention once,
only a kid himself then, and listening to Wallace Wood talk about trying to
draw something he called Panic Eye. Now Clay was seeing it in the face of a
fifteen-year-old suburban schoolgirl.
"Alice, come on," he said. "We have to go back to the Lodge and get our
shit together. We have to get out of here." As soon as the words were out of
his mouth, he had to say them again and hear if they had the ring of truth.
The second time they sounded more than true; they sounded scared.
She might not have heard. She looked exultant. Stuffed with triumph.
Sick with it, like a kid who has eaten too much Halloween candy on the way
home. The pupils of her eyes were full of fire. "Nothing could live through
that."
Tom gripped Clay's arm. It hurt the way a sunburn hurt. "What's wrong
with you?"
"I think we made a mistake," Clay said.
"Is it like in the gas station?" Tom asked him. Behind his crooked
spectacles, his eyes were sharp. "When the man and woman were fighting over
the damn Tw-- "
"No, I just think we made a mistake," Clay said. Actually, it was
stronger than that. He knew they had made a mistake. "Come on. We have to go
tonight."
"If you say so, okay," Tom said. "Come on, Alice."
She went with them a little way down the path toward the Lodge, where
they had left a pair of gas lanterns burning in the big bay window, then
turned back for another look. The press box was on fire now, and the
bleachers. The stars over the soccer field were gone; even the moon was
nothing but a ghost dancing a wild jig in the heat-haze above that fierce
gas-jet. "They're dead, they're gone, they're crispy," she said. "Burn,
baby, b-- "
That was when the cry rose, only now it wasn't coming from Glen's Falls
or Littleton ten miles away. It was coming from right behind them. Nor was
there anything spectral or wraithlike about it. It was a cry of agony, the
scream of something-- a single entity, and aware, Clay was certain of it--
that had awakened from deep sleep to find it was burning alive.
Alice shrieked and covered her ears, her eyes bulging in the firelight.
"Take it back!" Jordan said, grasping the Head's wrist. "Sir, we have
to take it back!"
"Too late, Jordan," Ardai said.
24
Their knapsacks were a little plumper as they leaned against the front
door of Cheatham Lodge an hour later. There were a couple of shirts in each
one, plus bags of trail-mix, juice-boxes, and packets of Slim Jims as well
as batteries and spare flashlights. Clay had harried Tom and Alice into
sweeping their possessions together as quickly as possible, and now he was
the one who kept darting into the living room to steal looks out the big
window.
The gas-jet over there was finally starting to burn low, but the
bleachers were still blazing and so was the press box. Tonney Arch itself
had caught and glared in the night like a horseshoe in a smithy. Nothing
that had been on that field could still be alive-- Alice had been right
about that much, surely-- but twice on their return to the Lodge (the Head
shambling like an old drunk in spite of their best efforts to support him),
they had heard those ghostly cries coming down the wind from other flocks.
Clay told himself he didn't hear anger in those cries, it was just his
imagination-- his guilty imagination, his murderer's imagination, his mass
murderer's imagination-- but he didn't completely believe it.
It had been a mistake, but what else could they have done? He and Tom
had felt their gathering power just that afternoon, had seen it, and that
had been only two of them, just two. How could they have let that go on?
Just let it grow?
"Damned if you do, damned if you stand pat," he said under his breath,
and turned from the window. He didn't even know how long he'd been looking
at the burning stadium and resisted the urge to check his watch. It would be
easy to give in to the panic-rat, he was close to it now, and if he gave in,
it would travel to the others quickly. Starting with Alice. Alice had
managed to get herself back under some sort of control, but it was thin.
Thin enough to read a newspaper through, his bingo-playing mother might have
said. Although a kid herself, Alice had managed to keep herself shiny-side
up mostly for the other kid's sake, so he wouldn't give way entirely.
The other kid. Jordan.
Clay hurried back into the front hall, noted there was still no fourth
pack by the door, and saw Tom coming down the stairs. Alone.
"Where's the kid?" Clay asked. His ears had started to clear a little,
but his voice still sounded too far away, and like a stranger's. He had an
idea that was going to continue for a while. "You were supposed to be
helping him put some stuff together-- Ardai said he brought a pack over with
him from that dorm of his-- "
"He won't come." Tom rubbed the side of his face. He looked tired, sad,
distracted. With half his mustache gone, he looked ludicrous as well.
"What?"
"Lower your voice, Clay. I don't make the news, I just report it."
"Then tell me what you're talking about, for Christ's sake."
"He won't go without the Head. He said, 'You can't make me.' And if
you're really serious about going tonight, I believe he's right."
Alice came tearing out of the kitchen. She had washed up, tied her hair
back, and put on a new shirt-- it hung almost to her knees-- but her skin
glowed with the same burn Clay felt on his own. He supposed they should
count themselves lucky that they weren't popping blisters.
"Alice," he began, "I need you to exercise your womanly powers over
Jordan. He's being-- "
She steamed past as if he hadn't spoken, fell on her knees, seized her
pack, and tore it open. He watched, perplexed, as she began to pull out the
stuff inside. He looked at Tom and saw an expression of understanding and
sympathy dawning on Tom's face.
"What?" Clay asked. "What, for chrissake?" He had felt an all too
similar exasperated annoyance toward Sharon during the last year they'd
actually lived together-- had felt it often-- and hated himself for having
that pop up now, of all times. But dammit, another complication was the last
thing they needed now. He ran his hands through his hair. "What?"
"Look at her wrist," Tom said.
Clay looked. The dirty piece of shoestring was still there, but the
sneaker was gone. He felt an absurd sinking in his stomach. Or maybe it
wasn't so absurd. If it mattered to Alice, he supposed it mattered. So what
if it was just a sneaker?
The spare T-shirt and sweatshirt she had packed (gaiten boosters' club
printed across the front) went flying. Batteries rolled. Her spare
flashlight hit the tile floor and the lens-cover cracked. That was enough to
convince Clay. This wasn't a Sharon Riddell tantrum because they were out of
hazelnut coffee or Chunky Monkey ice cream; this was unvarnished terror.
He went to Alice, knelt beside her, and took hold of her wrists. He
could feel the seconds flying by, turning into minutes they should have been
using to put this town behind them, but he could also feel the lightning
sprint of her pulse under his fingers. And he could see her eyes. It wasn't
panic in them now but agony, and he realized she'd put everything in that
sneaker: her mother and father, her friends, Beth Nickerson and her
daughter, the Tonney Field inferno, everything.
"It's not in here!" she cried. "I thought I must have packed it, but I
didn't! I can't find it anywhere!"
"No, honey, I know." Clay was still holding her wrists. Now he lifted
the one with the shoelace around it. "Do you see?" He waited until he was
sure her eyes had focused, then he flipped the ends beyond the knot, where
there had been a second knot.
"It's too long now," she said. "It wasn't that long before."
Clay tried to remember the last time he'd seen the sneaker. He told
himself it was impossible to remember a thing like that, given all that had
been going on, then realized he could. Very clearly, too. It was when she'd
helped Tom pull him up after the second truck had exploded. It had been
dancing from its string then. She had been covered with blood, scraps of
cloth, and little chunks of flesh, but the sneaker had still been on her
wrist. He tried to remember if it was still there when she'd booted the
burning torso off the ramp. He didn't think so. Maybe that was hindsight,
but he didn't think so.
"It came untied, honey," he said. "It came untied and fell off."
"I lost it?" Her eyes, unbelieving. The first tears. "Are you sure?"
"Pretty sure, yeah."
"It was my luck," she whispered, the tears spilling over.
"No," Tom said, and put an arm around her. "We're your luck."
She looked at him. "How do you know?"
"Because you found us first," Tom said. "And we're still here."
She hugged them both and they stood that way for a while, the three of
them, with their arms around each other in the hall with Alice's few
possessions scattered around their feet.
25
The fire spread to a lecture building the Head identified as Hackery
Hall. Then, around four a.m., the wind dropped away and it spread no
farther. When the sun came up, the Gaiten campus stank of propane, charred
wood, and a great many burnt bodies. The bright sky of a perfect New England
morning in October was obscured by a rising column of gray-black smoke. And
Cheatham Lodge was still occupied. In the end it had been like dominoes: the
Head couldn't travel except by car, car travel was impossible, and Jordan
would not go without the Head. Nor was Ardai able to persuade him. Alice,
although resigned to the loss of her talisman, refused to go without Jordan.
Tom would not go without Alice. And Clay was loath to go without the two of
them, although he was horrified to find these newcomers in his life seemed
at least temporarily more important than his own son, and although he
continued to feel certain that they would pay a high price for what they'd
done on Tonney Field if they stayed in Gaiten, let alone at the scene of the
crime.
He thought he might feel better about that last at daybreak, but he did
not.
The five of them watched and waited at the living room window, but of
course nothing came out of the smoldering wreckage, and there was no sound
but the low crackle of fire eating deep into the Athletic Department offices
and locker rooms even as it finished off the bleachers above-ground. The
thousand or so phone-crazies who had been roosting there were, as Alice had
said, crispy. The smell of them was rich and stick-in-your-throat awful.
Clay had vomited once and knew the others had, as well-- even the Head.
We made a mistake, he thought again.
"You guys should have gone on," Jordan said. "We would have been all
right-- we were before, weren't we, sir?"
Headmaster Ardai ignored the question. He was studying Clay. "What
happened yesterday when you and Tom were in that service station? I think
something happened then to make you look as you do now."
"Oh? How do I look, sir?"
"Like an animal that smells a trap. Did those two in the street see
you?"
"It wasn't exactly that," Clay said. He didn't love being called an
animal, but couldn't deny that was what he was: oxygen and food in, carbon
dioxide and shit out, pop goes the weasel.
The Head had begun to rub restlessly at the left side of his midsection
with one big hand. Like many of his gestures, Clay thought it had an oddly
theatrical quality-- not exactly phony, but meant to be seen at the back of
the lecture hall. "Then what exactly was it?"
And because protecting the others no longer seemed like an option, Clay
told the Head exactly what they'd seen in the office of the Citgo station--
a physical struggle over a box of stale treats that had suddenly turned into
something else. He told about the fluttering papers, the ashes that had
begun circling in the ashtray like water going down a bathtub drain, the
keys jingling on the board, the nozzle that fell off the gas-pump.
"I saw that," Jordan said, and Alice nodded.
Tom mentioned feeling short of breath, and Clay agreed. They both tried
to explain the sense of something powerful building in the air.
Clay said it was how things felt before a thunderstorm. Tom said the
air just felt fraught, somehow. Too heavy.
"Then he let her take a couple of the fucking things and it all went
away," Tom said. "The ashes stopped spinning, the keys stopped jingling,
that thundery feeling went out of the air." He looked to Clay for
confirmation. Clay nodded.
Alice said, "Why didn't you tell us this before?"
"Because it wouldn't have changed anything," Clay said. "We were going
to burn the nest if we could, regardless."
"Yes," Tom said.
Jordan said suddenly, "You think the phone-crazies are turning into
psionics, don't you?"
Tom said, "I don't know what that word means, Jordan."
"People who can move things around just by thinking about it, for one
thing. Or by accident, if their emotions get out of control. Only psionic
abilities like telekinesis and levitation-- "
"Levitation?" Alice almost barked.
Jordan paid no mind. "-- are only branches. The trunk of the psionic
tree is telepathy, and that's what you're afraid of, isn't it? The telepathy
thing."
Tom's fingers went to the place above his mouth where half of his
mustache was gone and touched the reddened skin there. "Well, the thought
has crossed my mind." He paused, head cocked. "That might be witty. I'm not
sure."
Jordan ignored this, as well. "Say that they are. Getting to be true
telepaths, I mean, and not just zombies with a flocking instinct. So what?
The Gaiten Academy flock is dead, and they died without a clue of who lit em
up, because they died in whatever passes for sleep with them, so if you're
worrying that they telepathically faxed our names and descriptions to any of
their buddies in the surrounding New England states, you can relax."
"Jordan-- " the Head began, then winced. He was still rubbing his
midsection.
"Sir? Are you all right?"
"Yes. Fetch my Zantac from the downstairs bathroom, would you? And a
bottle of the Poland Spring water. There's a good lad."
Jordan hurried away on the errand.
"Not an ulcer, is it?" Tom asked.
"No," the Head replied. "It's stress. An old . . . one cannot say
friend . . . acquaintance?"
"Your heart okay?" Alice asked, speaking in a low voice.
"I suppose," the Head agreed, and bared his teeth in a smile of
disconcerting jollity. "If the Zantac doesn't work, we may resuppose . . .
but so far, the Zantac always has, and one doesn't care to buy trouble when
so much of it is on sale. Ah, Jordan, thank you."
"Quite welcome, sir." The boy handed him the glass and the pill with
his usual smile.
"I think you ought to go with them," Ardai told him after swallowing
the Zantac.
"Sir, with all respect, I'm telling you there's no way they could know,
no way."
The Head looked a question at Tom and Clay. Tom raised his hands. Clay
only shrugged. He could say what he felt right out loud, could articulate
what they surely must know he felt-- we made a mistake, and staying here is
compounding it-- but saw no point. Jordan's face was set and stubborn on
top, scared to death just beneath. They were not going to persuade him. And
besides, it was day again. Day was their time.
He rumpled the boy's hair. "If you say so, Jordan. I'm going to catch
some winks."
Jordan looked almost sublimely relieved. "That sounds like a good idea.
I think I will, too."
"I'm going to have a cup of Cheatham Lodge's world-famous tepid cocoa
before I come up," Tom said. "And I believe I'll shave off the rest of this
mustache. The wailing and lamentation you hear will be mine."
"Can I watch?" Alice asked. "I always wanted to watch a grown man wail
and lament."
26
Clay and Tom were sharing a small bedroom on the third floor; Alice had
been given th...
