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...e apologizing toJordan for Johnny's poor spelling and composition skills-- reminding Jordan
that his son must have written under terrible stress, crouched on the stoop,
scribbling while his friends stood watching chaos swirl below.
Now Jordan lowered the note and said, "What does your son look like?"
Clay almost asked why, then decided he didn't want to know. At least
not yet. "Johnny's almost a foot shorter than you. Stocky. Dark brown hair."
"Not skinny. Not blond."
"No, that sounds like his friend George."
Jordan and Tom exchanged a look. It was a grave look, but Clay thought
there was relief in it, too.
"What?" he asked. "What? Tell me."
"The other side of the street," Tom said. "You didn't see because you
were running. There's a dead boy about three houses down. Skinny, blond, red
backpack-- "
"That's George Gendron," Clay said. He knew George's red backpack as
well as he knew Johnny's blue one with the strips of reflecting tape on it.
"He and Johnny made a Puritan village together for their fourth-grade
history project. They got an A-plus. George can't be dead." But he almost
certainly was. Clay sat down on the stoop, which gave its old familiar creak
under his weight, and put his face in his hands.
3
The Town Hall was at the intersection of Pond and Mill streets, in
front of the town common and the body of water that gave the little village
its name. The parking lot was almost empty except for the spaces reserved
for employees, because both streets leading to the big white Victorian
building were jammed with stalled vehicles. People had gotten as close as
they could, then walked the rest of the way. For latecomers like Clay, Tom,
and Jordan, it was a slow slog. Within two blocks of the Town Hall, not even
the lawns were free of cars. Half a dozen houses had burned down. Some were
still smoldering.
Clay had covered the body of the boy on Livery Lane-- it had indeed
been Johnny's friend George-- but they could do nothing for the scores of
swollen and putrefying dead they encountered as they made their slow way
toward the Kent Pond Town Hall. There were hundreds, but in the dark Clay
saw none that he recognized. That might have been true even in daylight. The
crows had put in a busy week and a half.
His mind kept going back to George Gendron, who had been lying facedown
in a clot of bloody leaves. In his note, John had said that George and
Mitch, his other good friend this year in the seventh grade, had been with
him. So whatever had happened to George must have happened after Johnny
taped that note to the storm door and the three of them left the Riddell
house. And since only George had been in those bloody leaves, Clay could
assume Johnny and Mitch had gotten off Livery Lane alive.
Of course assume makes an ass out of you and me, he thought. The gospel
according to Alice Maxwell, may she rest in peace.
And it was true. George's killer might have chased them and gotten them
somewhere else. On Main Street, or Dugway Street, maybe neighboring Laurel
Way. Stabbed them with a Swedish butcher knife or a couple of car aerials .
. .
They had reached the edge of the Town Hall parking lot. On their left
was a pickup truck that had tried to reach it overland and wound up mired in
a boggy ditch less than five yards from an acre of civilized (and largely
deserted) asphalt. On their right was a woman with her throat torn out and
her features pecked away to black holes and bloody ribbons by the birds. She
was still wearing her Portland Sea Dogs baseball cap, and her purse was
still over her arm.
Killers weren't interested in money anymore.
Tom put a hand on his shoulder, startling him. "Stop thinking about
what might have happened."
"How did you know-- "
"It doesn't take a mind reader. If you find your son-- you probably
won't, but if you do-- I'm sure he'll tell you the whole story. Otherwise .
. . does it matter?"
"No. Of course not. But Tom . . . I knew George Gendron. The kids used
to call him Connecticut sometimes, because his family moved from there. He
ate hot dogs and hamburgers in our backyard. His dad used to come over and
watch the Patriots with me."
"I know," Tom said. "I know." And, to Jordan, sharply: "Stop looking at
her, Jordan, she's not going to get up and walk."
Jordan ignored him and kept staring at the crow-picked corpse in the
Sea Dogs hat. "The phoners started trying to take care of their own as soon
as they got back some base-level programming," he said. "Even if it was only
fishing them out from under the bleachers and throwing them into the marsh,
they tried to do something. But they don't take care of ours. They leave
ours to rot where they fell." He turned to face Clay and Tom. "No matter
what they say or what they promise, we can't trust them," he said fiercely.
"We can't, okay?"
"I'm totally down with that," Tom said.
Clay nodded. "Me too."
Tom tipped his head toward the Town Hall, where a few emergency lights
with long-life batteries still shone, casting a sickly yellow glow on the
employees' cars, which now stood in drifts of leaves. "Let's go in there and
see what they left behind."
"Yes, let's do it," Clay said. Johnny would be gone, he had no doubt of
that, but some small part of him, some small, childish, never-say-die part,
still continued to hope that he would hear a cry of "Daddy!" and his son
would spring into his arms, a living thing, real weight in the midst of this
nightmare.
4
They knew for sure the Town Hall was deserted when they saw what had
been painted across the double doors. In the fading glow of the
battery-powered emergency lights, the large, sloppy strokes of red paint
looked like more dried blood:
KASHWAK=N0-F0
"How far away is this Kashwak place?" Tom asked.
Clay thought about it. "I'd say eighty miles, almost due north. You'd
take Route 160 most of the way, but once you get on the TR, I don't know."
Jordan asked, "What exactly is a TR?"
"TR-90's an unincorporated township. There are a couple of little
villages, some quarries, and a two-bit Micmac rez up north, but mostly it's
just woods, bear, and deer." Clay tried the door and it opened to his hand.
"I'm going to check this place out. You guys really don't have to come if
you don't want to-- you can be excused."
"No, we'll come," Tom said. "Won't we, Jordan?"
"Sure." Jordan sighed like a boy confronted with what may be a
difficult chore. Then he smiled. "Hey, electric lights. Who knows when we'll
get to see them again."
5
No Johnny Riddell came hurtling out of a dark room to throw himself
into his father's arms, but the Town Hall was still redolent of the cooking
that had been done on gas grills and hibachis by the people who'd gathered
here following the Pulse. Outside the big main room, on the long bulletin
board where notices of town business and upcoming events usually hung,
perhaps two hundred notes had been posted. Clay, so tense he was nearly
panting, began to study these with the intensity of a scholar who believes
he may have found the lost Gospel of Mary Magdalene. He was afraid of what
he might find and terrified of what he might not. Tom and Jordan retreated
tactfully to the main meeting room, which was still littered with the
remains of the refugees who had apparently spent several nights here,
waiting for a rescue that had never come.
In the posted notes, Clay saw the survivors had come to believe that
they could hope for more than rescue. They believed that salvation awaited
them in Kashwak. Why that particular townlet, when probably all of TR-90
(certainly the northern and western quadrants) was dead to cell phone
transmission and reception? The notes on the bulletin board weren't clear on
that. Most seemed to assume that any readers would understand without
needing to be told; it was a case of "everybody knows, everybody goes." And
even the clearest of the correspondents had obviously been struggling to
keep terror and elation balanced and under control; most messages amounted
to little more than follow the Yellow Brick Road to Kashwak and salvation as
soon as you can.
Three-quarters of the way down the board, half-hidden by a note from
Iris Nolan, a lady Clay knew quite well (she volunteered at the tiny town
library), he saw a sheet with his son's familiar, looping scrawl and
thought, Oh, dear God, thank you. Thank you so much. He pulled it off the
board, being careful not to tear it.
This note was dated: Oct 3. Clay tried to remember where he had been on
the night of October 3 and couldn't quite do it. Had it been the barn in
North Reading, or the Sweet Valley Inn, near Methuen? He thought the barn,
but he couldn't be absolutely certain-- it all ran together and if he
thought too hard about it, it began to seem that the man with the
flashlights on the sides of his head had also been the young man jabbing the
car aerials, that Mr. Ricardi had killed himself by gobbling broken glass
instead of hanging himself, and it had been Alice in Tom's garden, eating
cucumbers and tomatoes.
"Stop it," he whispered, and focused on the note. It was better spelled
and a little better composed, but there was no mistaking the agony in it.
Oct 3 Dear Dad,
I hope you are alive & get this. Me & Mitch made it okay but
Hughie Darden got George, I think he killed him. Me & Mitch just outran
faster.
I felt like it was my fault but Mitch, he said how could you know he
was just a Phoner like the others its not your fault.
Daddy there is worse. Mom is one of them, I saw her with one of the
"flocks" today. (That is what they call them, flocks.) She doesnt look as
bad as some but I know if I went out there she wouldnt even no me and would
kill me soon as look at me. IF YOU SEE HER DON'T BE FOOLED, I'M SORRY BUT
ITS TRUE.
We're going to Kashwak (its up north) tomorow or next day, Mitch's mom
is here I could kill him I'm so ennveous. Daddy I know you dont have a cell
phone and everyone knows about Kashwak how it's a safe place. If you get
this note PLEASE COME GET ME.
I love you with all my Heart, Your Son, John Gavin Riddell
Even after the news about Sharon, Clay was doing all right until he got
to I love you with all my Heart. Even then he might have been all right if
not for that capital H. He kissed his twelve-year-old son's signature,
looked at the bulletin board through eyes that had become untrustworthy--
things doubled, tripled, then shivered completely apart-- and let out a
hoarse cry of pain. Tom and Jordan came running.
"What, Clay?" Tom said. "What is it?" He saw the sheet of paper-- a
ruled yellow page from a legal pad-- and slipped it out of Clay's hand. He
and Jordan scanned it quickly.
"I'm going to Kashwak," Clay said hoarsely.
"Clay, that's probably not such a hot idea," Jordan said cautiously.
"Considering, you know, what we did at Gaiten Academy."
"I don't care. I'm going to Kashwak. I'm going to find my son."
6
The refugees who had taken shelter in the Kent Pond Town Hall had left
plenty of supplies behind when they decamped, presumably en masse, for TR-90
and Kashwak. Clay, Tom, and Jordan made a meal of canned chicken salad on
stale bread, with canned fruit salad for dessert.
As they were finishing, Tom leaned over to Jordan and murmured
something. The boy nodded. The two of them got up. "Would you excuse us for
a few minutes, Clay? Jordan and I need to have a little talk."
Clay nodded. While they were gone, he cracked another fruit salad cup
and read Johnny's letter over for the ninth and tenth times. He was already
well on the way to having it memorized. He could remember Alice's death just
as clearly, but that now seemed to have happened in another life, and to a
different version of Clayton Riddell. An earlier draft, as it were.
He finished his meal and stowed the letter away just as Tom and Jordan
returned from the hall, where they had held what he supposed lawyers had
called a sidebar, back in the days when there were lawyers. Tom once more
had his arm around Jordan's narrow shoulders. Neither of them looked happy,
but both looked composed.
"Clay," Tom began, "we've talked it over, and-- "
"You don't want to go with me. Perfectly understandable."
Jordan said, "I know he's your son and all, but-- "
"And you know he's all I've got left. His mother . . ." Clay laughed, a
single humorless bark. "His mother. Sharon. It's ironic, really. After all
the worry I put in about Johnny getting a blast from that goddam little red
rattlesnake. If I had to pick one, I would have picked her." There, it was
out. Like a chunk of meat that had been caught in his throat and was
threatening to block his windpipe. "And you know how that makes me feel?
Like I offered to make a deal with the devil, and the devil actually came
through for me."
Tom ignored this. When he spoke, he did so carefully, as if he were
afraid of setting Clay off like an unexploded land mine. "They hate us. They
started off hating everyone and progressed to just hating us. Whatever's
going on up there in Kashwak, if it's their idea, it can't be good."
"If they're rebooting to some higher level, they may get to a
live-and-let-live plane," Clay said. All of this was pointless, surely they
both must see that. He had to go.
"I doubt it," Jordan said. "Remember that stuff about the chute leading
to the slaughterhouse?"
"Clay, we're normies and that's strike one," Tom said. "We torched one
of their flocks. That's strike two and strike three combined. Live and let
live won't apply to us."
"Why should it?" Jordan added. "The Raggedy Man says we're insane."
"And not to be touched," Clay said. "So I should be fine, right?"
After that there didn't seem to be any more to say.
7
Tom and Jordan had decided to strike out due west, across New Hampshire
and into Vermont, putting KASHWAK=NO-FO at their backs-- and over the
horizon-- as soon as possible. Clay said that Route 11, which made an
elbow-bend at Kent Pond, would serve them both as a starting-point. "It'll
take me north to 160," he said, "and you guys can follow it all the way to
Laconia, in the middle of New Hampshire. It's not exactly a direct route,
but what the hell-- you don't exactly have a plane to catch, have you?"
Jordan dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbed them, then
brushed the hair back from his forehead, a gesture Clay had come to know
well-- it signaled tiredness and distraction. He would miss it. He would
miss Jordan. And Tom even more.
"I wish Alice was still here," Jordan said. "She'd talk you out of
this."
"She wouldn't," Clay said. Still, he wished with all his heart that
Alice could have had her chance. He wished with all his heart that Alice
could have had her chance at a lot of things. Fifteen was no age at which to
die.
"Your current plans remind me of act four in Julius Caesar," Tom said.
"In act five, everyone falls on their swords." They were now making their
way around (and sometimes over) the stalled cars jamming Pond Street. The
emergency lights of the Town Hall were slowly receding behind them. Ahead
was the dead traffic light marking the center of town, swaying in a slight
breeze.
"Don't be such a fucking pessimist," Clay said. He had promised himself
not to become annoyed-- he wouldn't part with his friends that way if he
could possibly help it-- but his resolve was being tried.
"Sorry I'm too tired to cheerlead," Tom said. He stopped beside a
road-sign reading JCT RT 112 MI. "And-- may I be frank?-- too heartsick at
losing you."
"Tom, I'm sorry."
"If I thought there was one chance in five that you had a happy ending
in store . . . hell, one in fifty . . . well, never mind." Tom shone his
flashlight at Jordan. "What about you? Any final arguments against this
madness?"
Jordan considered, then shook his head slowly. "The Head told me
something once," he said. "Do you want to hear it?"
Tom made an ironic little salute with his flashlight. The beam skipped
off the marquee of the Ioka, which had been showing the new Tom Hanks
picture, and the pharmacy next door. "Have at it."
"He said the mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart
knows what the heart knows."
"Amen," Clay said. He said it very softly.
They walked east on Market Street, which was also Route 19A, for two
miles. After the first mile, the sidewalks ended and the farms began. At the
end of the second there was another dead stoplight and a sign marking the
Route 11 junction. There were three people sitting bundled up to the neck in
sleeping bags at the crossroads. Clay recognized one of them as soon as he
put the beam of his flashlight on him: an elderly gent with a long,
intelligent face and graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. The Miami
Dolphins cap the other man was wearing looked familiar, too. Then Tom put
his beam on the woman next to Mr. Ponytail and said, "You."
Clay couldn't tell if she was wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt with
cutoff sleeves, the sleeping bag was pulled up too high for that, but he
knew there was one in the little pile of packs lying near the Route 11 sign
if she wasn't. Just as he knew she was pregnant. He had dreamed of these two
in the Whispering Pines Motel, two nights before Alice had been killed. He
had dreamed of them in the long field, under the lights, standing on the
platforms.
The man with the gray hair stood up, letting his sleeping bag slither
down his body. There were rifles with their gear, but he raised his hands to
show they were empty. The woman did the same, and when the sleeping bag
dropped to her feet, there was no doubt about her pregnancy. The guy in the
Dolphins cap was tall and about forty. He also raised his hands.
The three of them stood that way for a few seconds in the beams of the
flashlights, and then the gray-haired man took a pair of black-rimmed
spectacles from the breast pocket of his wrinkled shirt and put them on. His
breath puffed out white in the chilly night air, rising to the Route 11
sign, where arrows pointed both west and north.
"Well, well," he said. "The President of Harvard said you'd probably
come this way, and here you are. Smart fellow, the President of Harvard,
although a trifle young for the job, and in my opinion he could use some
plastic surgery before going out to meet with potential big-ticket donors."
"Who are you?" Clay asked.
"Get that light out of my face, young man, and I'll be happy to tell
you."
Tom and Jordan lowered their flashlights. Clay also lowered his, but
kept one hand on the butt of Beth Nickerson's .45.
"I'm Daniel Hartwick, of Haverhill, Mass," the gray-haired man said.
"The young lady is Denise Link, also of Haverhill. The gentleman on her
right is Ray Huizenga, of Groveland, a neighboring town."
"Meetcha," Ray Huizenga said. He made a little bow that was funny,
charming, and awkward. Clay let his hand fall off the butt of his gun.
"But our names don't actually matter anymore," Daniel Hartwick said.
"What matters is what we are, at least as far as the phoners are concerned."
He looked at them gravely. "We are insane. Like you."
8
Denise and Ray rustled a small meal over a propane cooker ("These
canned sausages don't taste too bad if you boil em up ha'aad," Ray said)
while they talked-- while Dan talked, mostly. He began by telling them it
was twenty past two in the morning, and at three he intended to have his
"brave little band" back on the road. He said he wanted to make as many
miles as possible before daylight, when the phoners started moving around.
"Because they do not come out at night," he said. "We have that much
going for us. Later, when their programming is complete, or nears
completion, they may be able to, but-- "
"You agree that's what's happening?" Jordan asked. For the first time
since Alice had died, he looked engaged. He grasped Dan's arm. "You agree
that they're rebooting, like computers whose hard drives have been-- "
"-- wiped, yes, yes," Dan said, as if this were the most elementary
thing in the world.
"Are you-- were you-- a scientist of some sort?" Tom asked.
Dan gave him a smile. "I was the entire sociology department at
Haverhill Arts and Technical," he said. "If the President of Harvard has a
worst nightmare, that would be me."
Dan Hartwick, Denise Link, and Ray Huizenga had destroyed not just one
flock but two. The first, in the back lot of a Haverhill auto junkyard, they
had stumbled on by accident, when there had been half a dozen in their group
and they were trying to find a way out of the city. That had been two days
after the onset of the Pulse, when the phone-people had still been the
phone-crazies, confused and as apt to kill each other as any wandering
normies they encountered. That first had been a small flock, only about
seventy-five, and they had used gasoline.
"The second time, in Nashua, we used dynamite from a construction-site
shed," Denise said. "We'd lost Charlie, Ralph, and Arthur by then. Ralph and
Arthur just took off on their own. Charlie-- poor old Charlie had a heart
attack. Anyhow, Ray knew how to rig the dynamite, from when he worked on a
road crew."
Ray, hunkered over his cooker and stirring the beans next to the
sausages, raised his free hand and gave it a flip.
"After that," Dan Hartwick said, "we began to see those Kashwak No-Fo
signs. Sounded good to us, didn't it, Denni?"
"Yep," Denise said. "Olly-olly-in-for-free. We were headed north, same
as you, and when we started seeing those signs, we headed north faster. I
was the only one who didn't absolutely love the idea, because I lost my
husband during the Pulse. Those fucks are the reason my kid's going to grow
up not knowing his daddy." She saw Clay wince and said, "Sorry. We know your
boy's gone to Kashwak."
Clay gaped.
"Oh yes," Dan said, taking a plate as Ray began passing them around.
"The President of Harvard knows all, sees all, has dossiers on all. . . or
so he'd like us to believe." He gave Jordan a wink, and Jordan actually
grinned.
"Dan talked me around," Denise said. "Some terrorist group-- or maybe
just a couple of inspired nutcases working in a garage-- set this thing off,
but no one had any idea it would lead to this. The phoners are just playing
out their part in it. They weren't responsible when they were insane, and
they aren't really responsible now, because-- "
"Because they're in the grip of some group imperative," Tom said. "Like
migration."
"It's a group imperative, but it ain't migration," Ray said, sitting
down with his own plate. "Dan says it's pure survival. I think he's right.
Whatever it is, we gotta find a place to get in out of the rain. You know?"
"The dreams started coming after we burned the first flock," Dan said.
"Powerful dreams. Ecce homo, insanus-- very Harvard. Then, after we bombed
the Nashua flock, the President of Harvard showed up in person with about
five hundred of his closest friends." He ate in quick, neat bites.
"And left a lot of melted boomboxes on your doorstep," Clay said.
"Some were melted," Denise said. "Mostly what we got were bits and
pieces." She smiled. It was a thin smile. "That was okay. Their taste in
music sucks."
"You call him the President of Harvard, we call him the Raggedy Man,"
Tom said. He had set his plate aside and opened his pack. He rummaged and
brought out the drawing Clay had made on the day the Head had been forced to
kill himself. Denise's eyes got round. She passed the drawing to Ray
Huizenga, who whistled.
Dan took it last and looked up at Tom with new respect. "You drew
this?"
Tom pointed to Clay.
"You're very talented," Dan said.
"I took a course once," Clay said. "Draw Fluffy." He turned to Tom, who
also kept their maps in his pack. "How far is it between Gaiten and Nashua?"
"Thirty miles, tops."
Clay nodded and turned back to Dan Hartwick. "And did he speak to you?
The guy in the red hoodie?"
Dan looked at Denise and she looked away. Ray turned back to his little
cooker-- presumably to shut it down and pack it up-- and Clay understood.
"Which one of you did he speak through?"
"Me," Dan said. "It was horrible. Have you experienced it?"
"Yeah. You can stop it from happening, but not if you want to know
what's on his mind. Does he do it to show how strong he is, do you think?"
"Probably," Dan said, "but I don't think that's all. I don't think they
can talk. They can vocalize, and I'm sure they think-- although not as they
did, it would be a terrible mistake to think of them as having human
thoughts-- but I don't think they can actually speak words."
"Yet," Jordan said.
"Yet," Dan agreed. He glanced at his watch, and that prompted Clay to
look at his own. It was already quarter to three.
"He told us to go north," Ray said. "He told us Kashwak No-Fo. He said
our flock-burnin days were over because they were settin up guards-- "
"Yes, we saw some in Rochester," Tom said.
"And you've seen plenty of Kashwak No-Fo signs."
They nodded.
"Purely as a sociologist, I began to question those signs," Dan said.
"Not how they began-- I'm sure the first No-Fo signs were posted soon after
the Pulse, by survivors who'd decided a place like that, where there was no
cell phone coverage, would be the best place on earth to go. What I
questioned was how the idea-- and the graffiti-- could spread so quickly in
a cata-strophically fragmented society where all normal forms of
communication-- other than my mouth to your ear, of course-- had broken
down. The answer seemed clear, once one admitted that a new form of
communication, available to only one group, had entered the picture."
"Telepathy." Jordan almost whispered the word. "Them. The phoners. They want
us to go north to Kashwak." He turned his frightened eyes to Clay. "It
really is a frigging slaughterhouse chute. Clay, you can't go up there! This
is all the Raggedy Man's idea!"
Before Clay could respond, Dan Hartwick was speaking again. He did it
with a teacher's natural assumptions: lecturing was his responsibility,
interruption his privilege.
"I'm afraid I really must hurry this along, sorry. We have something to
show you-- something the President of Harvard has demanded we show you,
actually-- "
"In your dreams, or in person?" Tom asked.
"Our dreams," Denise said quietly. "We've only seen him once in person
since we burned the flock in Nashua, and that was at a distance."
"Checkin up on us," Ray said. "That's what I think."
Dan waited with a look of exasperated patience for this exchange to
conclude. When it had, he resumed. "We were willing to comply, since this
was on our way-- "
"You're going north, then?" Clay was the one to interrupt this time.
Dan, looking more exasperated now, flicked another quick glance at his
watch. "If you look at that route-sign closely, you'll see that it offers a
choice. We intend to go west, not north."
"Fuckin right," Ray muttered. "I may be stupid, but I'm not crazy."
"What I show you will be for our purposes rather than theirs," Dan
said. "And by the way, talking about the President of Harvard-- or the
Raggedy Man, if you prefer-- showing up in person is probably a mistake.
Maybe a bad one. He's really no more than a pseudopod that the group mind,
the overflock, puts out front to do business with ordinary normies and
special insane normies like us. I theorize that there are overflocks all
over the world now, and each may have put forward such a pseudopod. Maybe
even more than one. But don't make the mistake of thinking that when you're
talking to your Raggedy Man you're talking to an actual man. You're talking
to the flock."
"Why don't you show us what he wants us to see?" Clay asked. He had to
work to sound calm. His mind was roaring. The one clear thought in it was
that if he could get to his son before Johnny got to Kashwak-- and whatever
was going on there-- he might still have a chance to save him. Rationality
told him that Johnny must be in Kashwak already, but another voice (and it
wasn't entirely irrational) said something might have held up Johnny and
whatever group he was traveling with. Or they might have gotten cold feet.
It was possible. It was even possible that nothing more sinister than
segregation was going on up there in TR-90, that the phone-people were just
creating a rez for normies. In the end, he supposed it went back to what
Jordan had said, quoting Headmaster Ardai: the mind could calculate, but the
spirit yearned.
"Come this way," Dan said. "It's not far." He produced a flashlight and
began walking up the shoulder of Route 11-- North with the beam aimed at his
feet.
"Pardon me if I don't go," Denise said. "I've seen. Once was enough."
"I think this was supposed to please you, in a way," Dan said. "Of
course it was also supposed to underline the point-- to my little group as
well as yours-- that the phoners are now the ones with the power, and they
are to be obeyed." He stopped. "Here we are; in this particular
sleep-o-gram, the President of Harvard made very sure we all saw the dog, so
we couldn't get the wrong house." The flashlight beam nailed a roadside
mailbox with a collie painted on the side. "I'm sorry Jordan has to see
this, but it's probably best that you know what you're dealing with." He
raised his flashlight higher. Ray joined his beam to Dan's. They lit up the
front of a modest one-story wooden house, sitting neatly on a postage stamp
of lawn.
Gunner had been crucified between the living room window and the front
door. He was naked except for a pair of bloodstained Joe Boxers. Nails big
enough to be rail spikes jutted from his hands, feet, forearms, and knees.
Maybe they were rail spikes, Clay thought. Sitting splay-legged at Gunner's
feet was Harold. Like Alice when they met her, Harold was wearing a bib of
blood, but his hadn't come from his nose. The wedge of glass he'd used to
cut his throat after crucifying his running buddy still twinkled in one
hand.
Hung around Gunner's neck on a loop of string was a piece of cardboard
with three words scrawled on it in dark capital letters: JUSTITIA EST
COMMODATUM.
9
"In case you don't read Latin-- " Dan Hartwick began.
"I remember enough from high school to read that," Tom said. " 'Justice
is served.' This is for killing Alice. For daring to touch one of the
untouchables."
"Right you are," Dan said, snapping off his light. Ray did the same.
"It also serves as a warning to others. And they didn't kill them, although
they most certainly could have."
"We know," Clay said. "They took reprisals in Gaiten after we burned
their flock."
"They did the same in Nashua," Ray said somberly. "I'll remember the
screams until my dyin day. Fuckin horrible. This shit is, too." He gestured
toward the dark shape of the house. "They got the little one to crucify the
big one, and the big one to hold still for it. And when it was done, they
got the little one to cut his own throat."
"It's like with the Head," Jordan said, and took Clay's hand.
"That's the power of their minds," Ray said, "and Dan thinks that's
part of what's sendin everybody north to Kashwak-- maybe part of what kept
us movin north even when we told ourselves it was only to show you this and
persuade you to hook up with us. You know?"
Clay said, "Did the Raggedy Man tell you about my son?"
"No, but if he had I'm sure it would have been that he's with the other
normies, and that you and he will have a happy reunion in Kashwak," Dan
said. "You know, just forget about those dreams of standing on a platform
while the President tells the cheering crowd you're insane, that ending's
not for you, it can't be for you. I'm sure by now you've thought of all the
possible happy-ending scenarios, the chief one being how Kashwak and who
knows how many other cell phone dead zones are the normie equivalent of
wildlife refuges, places where folks who didn't get a blast on the day of
the Pulse will be left alone. I think what your young friend said about the
chute leading to the slaughterhouse is far more likely, but even supposing
normies are to be left alone up there, do you think the phoners will forgive
people like us? The flock-killers?"
Clay had no answer for this.
In the dark, Dan looked at his watch again. "It's gone three," he said.
"Let's walk back. Denise will have us packed up by now. The time has come
when we've either got to part company or decide to go on together."
But when you talk about going on together, you're asking me to part
company from my son, Clay thought. And that he would never do unless he
discovered Johnny-Gee was dead.
Or changed.
10
"How can you hope to get west?" Clay asked as they walked back to the
junction sign. "The nights still may be ours for a while, but the days
belong to them, and you see what they can do."
"I'm almost positive we can keep them out of our heads when we're
awake," Dan said. "It takes a little work, but it can be done. We'll sleep
in shifts, at least for a while. A lot depends on keeping away from the
flocks."
"Which means getting into western New Hampshire and then into Vermont
as fast as we can," Ray said. "Away from built-up areas." He shone his light
on Denise, who was reclining on the sleeping bags. "We set, darlin?"
"All set," she said. "I just wish you'd let me carry something."
"You're carryin your kid," Ray said fondly. "That's enough. And we can
leave the sleepin bags."
Dan said, "There are places where driving may actually make sense. Ray
thinks some of the back roads could be clear for as much as a dozen miles at
a stretch. We've got good maps." He dropped to one knee and shouldered his
pack, looking up at Clay with a small and bitter half-smile as he did it. "I
know the chances aren't good; I'm not a fool, in case you wondered. But we
wiped out two of their flocks, killed hundreds of them, and I don't want to
wind up on one of those platforms."
"We've got something else going for us," Tom said. Clay wondered if Tom
realized he'd just put himself in the Hartwick camp. Probably. He was far
from stupid. "They want us alive."
"Right," Dan said. "We might really make it. This is still early times
for them, Clay-- they're still weaving their net, and I'm betting there are
plenty of holes in it."
"Hell, they haven't even changed their clothes yet," Denise said. Clay
admired her. She looked like she was six months along, maybe more, but she
was a tough little thing. He wished Alice could have met her.
"We could slip through," Dan said. "Cross into Canada from Vermont or
New York, maybe. Five is better than three, but six would be better than
five-- three to sleep, three to stand watch in the days, fight off the bad
telepathy. Our own little flock. So what do you say?"
Clay shook his head slowly. "I'm going after my son."
"Think it over, Clay," Tom said. "Please."
"Let him alone," Jordan said. "He's made up his mind." He put his arms
around Clay and hugged him. "I hope you find him," he said. "But even if you
do, I guess you'll never find us again."
"Sure I will," Clay said. He kissed Jordan on the cheek, then stood
back. "I'll hogtie me a telepath and use him like a compass. Maybe the
Raggedy Man himself." He turned to Tom and held out his hand.
Tom ignored it and put his arms around Clay. He kissed him first on one
cheek, then the other. "You saved my life," he whispered into Clay's ear.
His breath was hot and ticklish. His cheek rasped against Clay's. "Let me
save yours. Come with us."
"I can't, Tom. I have to do this."
Tom stood back and looked at him. "I know," he said. "I know you do."
He wiped his eyes. "Goddam, I suck at goodbyes. I couldn't even say goodbye
to my fucking cat."
11
Clay stood beside the junction sign and watched their lights dwindle.
He kept his eyes fixed on Jordan's, and it was the last to disappear. For a
moment or two it was alone at the top of the first hill to the west, a
single small spark in the black, as if Jordan had paused there to look back.
It seemed to wave. Then it was also gone, and the darkness was complete.
Clay sighed-- an unsteady, tearful sound-- then shouldered his own pack and
started walking north along the dirt shoulder of Route 11. Around quarter to
four he crossed the North Berwick town line and left Kent Pond behind.
PHONE-BINGO
1
There was no reason not to resume a more normal life and start
traveling days; Clay knew the phone-people wouldn't hurt him. He was
off-limits and they actually wanted him up there in Kashwak. The problem was
he'd become habituated to a nighttime existence. All I need is a coffin and
a cape to wrap around myself when I lie down in it, he thought.
When dawn came up red and cold on the morning after his parting from
Tom and Jordan, he was on the outskirts of Springvale. There was a little
house, probably a caretaker's cottage, next to the Springvale Logging
Museum. It looked cozy. Clay forced the lock on the side door and let
himself in. He was delighted to find both a woodstove and a hand-pump in the
kitchen. There was also a shipshape little pantry, well stocked and
untouched by foragers. He celebrated this find with a large bowl of oatmeal,
using powdered milk, adding heaps of sugar, and sprinkling raisins on top.
In the pantry he also found concentrated bacon and eggs in foil
packets, stored as neatly on their shelf as paperback books. He cooked one
of these and stuffed his pack with the rest. It was a much better meal than
he had expected, and once in the back bedroom, Clay fell asleep almost
immediately.
2
There were long tents on both sides of the highway.
This wasn't Route 11 with its farms and towns and open fields, with its
pump-equipped convenience store every fifteen miles or so, but a highway
somewhere out in the williwags. Deep woods crowded all the way up to the
roadside ditches. People stood in long lines on both sides of the white
center-stripe.
Left and right, an amplified voice was calling. Left and right, form
two lines.
It sounded a little like the amplified voice of the bingo-caller at the
Akron State Fair, but as Clay drew closer, walking up the road's
center-stripe, he realized all the amplification was going on in his head.
It was the voice of the Raggedy Man. Only the Raggedy Man was just a-- what
had Dan called him?-- just a pseudopod. And what Clay was hearing was the
voice of the flock.
Left and right, two lines, that's correct. That's doing it.
Where am I? Why doesn't anybody look at me, say "Hey buddy, no cutting
in front, wait your turn"?
Up ahead the two lines curved off to either side like turnpike exit
ramps, one going into the tent on the left side of the road, one going into
the tent on the right. They were the kind of long tents caterers put up to
shade outdoor buffets on hot afternoons. Clay could see that just before
each line reached the tents, the people were splitting into ten or a dozen
shorter lines. Those people looked like fans waiting to have their tickets
ripped so they could go into a concert venue.
Standing in the middle of the road at the point where the double line
split and curved off to the right and the left, still wearing his threadbare
red hoodie, was the Raggedy Man himself.
Left and right, ladies and gentlemen. Mouth not moving. Telepathy that
was all jacked up, amped by the power of the flock. Move right along.
Everyone gets a chance to call a loved one before you go into the no-fo
zone.
That gave Clay a shock, but it was the shock of the known-- like the
punchline of a good joke you'd heard for the first time ten or twenty years
ago. "Where is this?" he asked the Raggedy Man. "What are you doing? What
the hell is going on?"
But the Raggedy Man didn't look at him, and of course Clay knew why.
This was where Route 160 entered Kashwak, and he was visiting it in a dream.
As for what was going on . . .
It's phone-bingo, he thought. It's phone-bingo, and those are the tents
where the game is played.
Let's keep it moving, ladies and gents, the Raggedy Man sent. We've got
two hours until sunset, and we want to process as many of you as we can
before we have to quit for the night.
Process.
Was this a dream?
Clay followed the line curving toward the pavilion-style tent on the
left side of the road, knowing what he was going to see even before he saw
it. At the head of each shorter line stood one of the phone-people, those
connoisseurs of Lawrence Welk, Dean Martin, and Debby Boone. As each person
in line reached the front, the waiting usher-- dressed in filthy clothes,
often much more horribly disfigured by the survival-struggles of the last
eleven days than the Raggedy Man-- would hold out a cell phone.
As Clay watched, the man closest to him took the offered phone, punched
it three times, then held it eagerly to his ear. "Hello?" he said. "Hello,
Ma? Ma? Are you th-- " Then he fell silent. His eyes emptied and slackness
loosened his face. The cell sagged away from his ear slightly. The
facilitator-- that was the best word Clay could think of-- took the phone
back, gave the man a push to start him forward, and motioned for the next
person in line to step forward.
Left and right, the Raggedy Man was calling. Keep it moving.
The guy who'd been trying to call his mom plodded out from beneath the
pavilion. Beyond it, Clay saw, hundreds of other people were milling around.
Sometimes someone would get in someone else's way and there would be a
little weak slapping. Nothing like before, however. Because--
Because the signal's been modified.
Left and right, ladies and gentlemen, keep it moving, we've got a lot
of you to get through before dark.
Clay saw Johnny. He was wearing jeans, his Little League hat, and his
favorite Red Sox T-shirt, the one with Tim Wakefield's name and number on
the back. He had just reached the head of the line two stations down from
where Clay was standing.
Clay ran for him, but at first his path was blocked. "Get out of my
way!" he shouted, but of course the man in his way, who was shuffling
nervously from foot to foot as if he needed to go to the bathroom, couldn't
hear him. This was a dream and besides, Clay was a normie-- he had no
telepathy.
He darted between the restless man and the woman behind him. He pushed
through the next line as well, too fixated on reaching Johnny to know if the
people he was pushing had substance or not. He reached Johnny just as a
woman-- he saw with mounting horror that it was Mr. Scottoni's
daughter-in-law, still pregnant but now missing an eye-- handed the boy a
Motorola cell phone.
Just dial 911, she said without moving her mouth. All calls go through
911.
"No, Johnny, don't!" Clay shouted, and grabbed for the phone as
Johnny-Gee began punching in the number, surely one he'd been taught long
ago to call if he was ever in trouble. "Don't do that!"
Johnny turned to his left, as if to shield his call from the pregnant
facilitator's one dully staring eye, and Clay missed. He probably couldn't
have stopped Johnny in any case. This was a dream, after all.
Johnny finished (punching three keys didn't take long), pushed the SEND
button, and put the phone to his ear. "Hello? Dad? Dad, are you there? Can
you hear me? If you can hear me, please come get m-- " Turned away as he
was, Clay could only see one of his son's eyes, but one was enough when you
were watching the lights go out. Johnny's shoulders slumped. The phone
sagged away from his ear. Mr. Scottoni's daughter-in-law snatched the phone
from him with a dirty hand, then gave Johnny-Gee an unloving push on the
back of the neck to get him moving into Kashwak, along with all the others
who had come here to be safe. She motioned for the next person in line to
come forward and make his call.
Left and right, form two lines, the Raggedy Man thundered in the middle
of Clay's head, and he woke up screaming his son's name in the caretaker's
cottage as late-afternoon light streamed in the windows.
3
At midnight Clay reached the little town of North Shapleigh. By then a
nasty cold rain that was almost sleet-- what Sharon had called "Slurpee
rain"-- had begun to fall. He heard oncoming motors and stepped off the
highway (still good old Route 11; no dream highway here) onto the tarmac of
a 7-Eleven store. When the headlights showed, turning the drizzle to silver
lines, it was a pair of sprinters running side by side, actually racing in
the dark. Madness. Clay stood behind a gas pump, not exactly hiding but not
going out of his way to be seen, either. He watched them fly past like a
vision of the gone world, sending up thin sprays of water. One of the racers
looked like a vintage Corvette, although with only a single failing
emergency light on the corner of the store to see by, it was impossible to
tell for sure. The racers shot beneath North Shapleigh's entire
traffic-control system (a dead blinker), were neon cherries in the dark for
a moment, then were gone.
Clay thought again: Madness. And as he swung back onto the shoulder of
the road: You're a fine one to talk about madness.
True. Because his phone-bingo dream hadn't been a dream, or not
entirely a dream. He was sure of it. The phoners were using their
strengthening telepathic abilities to keep track of as many of the
flock-killers as they could. That only made sense. They might have a problem
with groups like Dan Hartwick's, ones that actually tried to fight them, but
he doubted if they were having any trouble with him. The thing was, the
telepathy was also oddly like a phone-- it seemed to work both ways. Which
made him . . . what? The ghost in the machine? Something like that. While
they were keeping an eye on him, he was able to keep an eye on them. At
least in his sleep. In his dreams.
Were there actual tents at the Kashwak border, with normies lining up
to get their brains blasted? Clay thought there were, both in Kashwak and
places like Kashwak all over the country and the world. Business would be
slowing down by now, but the checkpoints-- the changing-points-- might still
be there.
The phoners used group-speak telepathy to coax the normies into coming.
To dream them into coming. Did that make the phoners smart, calculating? Not
unless you called a spider smart because it could spin a web, or an
alligator calculating because it could lie still and look like a log.
Walking north along Route 11 toward Route 160, the road that would take him
to Kashwak, Clay thought the telepathic signal the phoners sent out like a
low siren-call (or a pulse) must contain at least three separate messages.
Come, and you'll be safe-- your struggle to survive can cease.
Come, and you'II be with your own kind, in your own place.
Come, and you can speak to your loved ones.
Come. Yes. Bottom line. And once you got close enough, any choice
ceased. That telepathy and the dream of safety just took you over. You lined
up. You listened as the Raggedy Man told you to keep it moving, everyone
gets to call a loved one but we've got a lot of you to process before the
sun goes down and we crank up Bette Midler singing "The Wind Beneath My
Wings."
And how could they continue doing this, even though the lights had
failed and the cities had burned and civilization had slid into a pit of
blood? How could they go on replacing the millions of phoners lost in the
original convulsion and in the destruction of the flocks that had followed?
They could continue because the Pulse wasn't over. Somewhere-- in that
outlaw lab or nutcase's garage-- some gadget was still running on batteries,
some modem was still putting out its squealing, insane signal. Sending it up
to the satellites that flew around the globe or to the microwave relay
towers that cinched it like a steel belt. And where could you call and be
sure your call would still go through, even if the voice answering was only
on a battery-powered answering machine?
911, apparently.
And that had almost certainly happened to Johnny-Gee.
He knew it had. He was already too late.
So why was he still walking north through the drizzling dark? Up ahead
was Newfield, not far, and there he'd leave Route 11 ...
