Стивен Кинг - Cell

No. Bullshit. You felt watched.

Really? And even if he had, was that the sort of intuition that could be relied upon, acted upon, after a day like this one? The idea was ridiculous.

"Tom, listen. One of us'll walk up to this guy Nackleson's house tomorrow, after it's full daylight—"

"It's Nickerson, and I don't think that's a very smart idea, especially since Swami McCourt sees him kneeling inside his living room window with a fully automatic rifle he's been saving for the end of the world. Which seems to have rolled around."

"I'll do it," Clay said. "And I won't do it if we hear any gunshots from the Nickerson place tonight or tomorrow morning. I certainly won't do it if I see any bodies on the guy's lawn, with or without gunshot wounds. I watched all those old Twilight Zone episodes, too—the ones where civilization turns out to be nothing more than a thin layer of shellac."

"If that," Tom said gloomily. "Idi Amin, Pol Pot, the prosecution rests."

"I'll go with my hands raised. Ring the doorbell. If someone answers, I'll say I just want to talk. What's the worst that can happen? He tells me to get lost."

"No, the worst that can happen is he can shoot you dead on his fucking welcome mat and leave me with a motherless teenage girl," Tom said sharply. "Smart off about old Twilight Zone episodes all you want, just don't forget those people you saw today, fighting outside the T station in Boston."

"That was . . . I don't know what it was, but those people were clinically insane. You can't doubt that, Tom."

"What about Bible-Thumping Bertha? And the two men fighting over the keg? Were they insane?"

No, of course they hadn't been, but if there was a gun in that house across the street, he still wanted it. And if there was more than one, he wanted Tom and Alice each to have one, too.

"I'm thinking about going north over a hundred miles," Clay said. "We might be able to boost a car and drive some of it, but we might have to walk the whole way. Do you want to go with just knives for protection? I'm asking you as one serious man to another, because some of the people we run into are going to have guns. I mean, you know that."

"Yes," Tom said. He ran his hands through his neatly trimmed hair, giving it a comic ruffle. "And I know that Arnie and Beth are probably not home. They were gadget-nuts as well as gun-nuts. He was always gabbing on his cell phone when he went by in that big Dodge Ram Detroit phallus of his."

"See? There you go."

Tom sighed. "All right. Depending on how things look in the morning. Okay?"

"Okay." Clay picked up his sandwich again. He felt a little more like eating now.

"Where did they go?" Tom asked. "The ones you call the phone-crazies. Where did they go?"

"I don't know."

"I'll tell you what I think," Tom said. "I think they crawled into the houses and the buildings around sundown and died."

Clay looked at him doubtfully.

"Look at it reasonably and you'll see I'm right," Tom said. "This was almost certainly some sort of terrorist act, would you agree?"

"That seems the most likely explanation, although I'll be damned if I know how any signal, no matter how subversive, could have been programmed to do what this one did."

"Are you a scientist?"

"You know I'm not. I'm an artist."

"So when the government tells you they can guide computerized smart-bombs through bunker doors in the floor of the desert from aircraft carriers that are maybe two thousand miles away, all you can do is look at the photos and accept that the technology exists."

"Would Tom Clancy lie to me?" Clay asked, unsmiling.

"And if that technology exists, why not accept this one, at least on a provisional basis?"

"Okay, spell it out. Small words, please."

"At about three o'clock this afternoon, a terrorist organization, maybe even a tinpot government, generated some sort of signal or pulse. For now we have to assume that this signal was carried by every cell phone operating in the entire world. We'll hope that wasn't the case, but for now I think we have to assume the worst."

"Is it over?"

"I don't know," Tom said. "Do you want to pick up a cell phone and find out?"

"Touchy," Clay said. "That's how my little boy says touchй." And please, God, how he's still saying it.

"But if this group could transmit a signal that would send everyone hearing it insane," Tom said, "isn't it possible that the signal could also contain a directive for those receiving it to kill themselves five hours later? Or perhaps to simply go to sleep and stop breathing?"

"I would say that's impossible."

"I would have said a madman coming at me with a knife across from the Four Seasons Hotel was impossible," Tom said. "Or Boston burning flat while the city's entire population—that part of it lucky enough not to have cell phones, that is—left by the Mystic and the Zakim."

He leaned forward, looking at Clay intently. He wants to believe this, Clay thought. Don't waste a lot of time trying to talk him out of it, because he really, really wants to.

"In a way, this is no different from the bioterrorism the government was so afraid of after nine-eleven," he said. "By using cell phones, which have become the dominant form of communication in our daily lives, you simultaneously turn the populace into your own conscript army—an army that's literally afraid of nothing, because it's insane—and you break down the infrastructure. Where's the National Guard tonight?"

"Iraq?" Clay ventured. "Louisiana?"

It wasn't much of a joke and Tom didn't smile. "It's nowhere. How do you use a homeland force that now depends almost entirely on the cellular network to even mobilize? As for airplanes, the last one I've seen flying was the little one that crashed on the corner of Charles and Beacon." He paused, then went on, looking straight across the table into Clay's eyes. "All this they did . . . whoever they is. They looked at us from wherever it is they live and worship their gods, and what did they see?"

Clay shook his head, fascinated by Tom's eyes, shining behind his spectacles. They were almost the eyes of a visionary.

"They saw we had built the Tower of Babel all over again . . . and on nothing but electronic cobwebs. And in a space of seconds, they brushed those cobwebs aside and our Tower fell. All this they did, and we three are like bugs that happened, by dumb dim luck alone, to have avoided the fall of a giant's foot. All this they did, and you think they could not have encoded a signal telling the affected ones to simply fall asleep and stop breathing five hours later? What's that trick, compared to the first one? Not much, I'd say."

Clay said, "I'd say it's time we got some sleep."

For a moment Tom remained as he was, hunched across the table a little, looking at Clay as if unable to understand what Clay had said. Then he laughed. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, you've got a point. I get wound up. Sorry."

"Not at all," Clay said. "I hope you're right about the crazies being dead." He paused, then said: "I mean . . . unless my boy . . . Johnny-Gee . . ." He couldn't finish. Partly or maybe mostly because if Johnny had tried to use his phone this afternoon and had gotten the same call as Pixie Light and Power Suit Woman, Clay wasn't sure he wanted his son to still be alive.

Tom reached across the table to him and Clay took the other man's delicate, long-fingered hand in both of his. He saw this happening as if he were outside his body, and when he spoke, he didn't seem to be the one speaking, although he could feel his mouth moving and the tears that had begun to fall from his eyes.

"I'm so scared for him," his mouth was saying. "I'm scared for both of them, but mostly for my kid."