Стивен Кинг - Cell

"What's going on, you guys?" Alice asked from behind them.

Tom turned around, looking dismayed. "You don't want to see this," he said.

"That won't work," Clay said. "She's got to see it."

He smiled at Alice, and it wasn't that hard to smile. There was no monogram on the pocket of the pajamas Tom had loaned her, but they were blue, just as he had imagined, and she looked most dreadfully cute in them, with her feet bare and the pants legs rolled up to her shins and her hair tousled with sleep. In spite of her nightmares, she looked better rested than Tom. Clay was willing to bet she looked better rested than he did, too.

"It's not a car wreck, or anything," he said. "Just a guy eating a pumpkin in Tom's backyard."

She stood between them, putting her hands on the lip of the sink and rising up on the balls of her feet to look out. Her arm brushed Clay's, and he could feel the sleep-warmth still radiating from her skin. She looked for a long time, then turned to Tom.

"You said they all killed themselves," she said, and Clay couldn't tell if she was accusing or mock scolding. She probably doesn't know herself, he thought.

"I didn't say for sure," Tom replied, sounding lame.

"You sounded pretty sure to me." She looked out again. At least, Clay thought, she wasn't freaking out. In fact he thought she looked remarkably composed—if a little Chaplinesque—in her slightly outsize pajamas. "Uh . . . guys?"

"What?" they said together.

"Look at the little wheelbarrow he's sitting next to. Look at the wheel."

Clay had already seen what she was talking about—the litter of pumpkin-shell, pumpkin-meat, and pumpkin seeds.

"He smashed the pumpkin on the wheel to break it open and get to what's inside," Alice said. "I guess he's one of them—"

"Oh, he's one of them, all right," Clay said. George the mechanic was sitting in the garden with his legs apart, allowing Clay to see that since yesterday afternoon he'd forgotten all his mother had taught him about dropping trou before you did number one.

"—but he used that wheel as a tool. That doesn't seem so crazy to me."

"One of them was using a knife yesterday," Tom said. "And there was another guy jabbing a couple of car aerials."

"Yes, but . . . this seems different, somehow."

"More peaceful, you mean?" Tom glanced back at the intruder in his garden. "I wouldn't want to go out there and find out."

"No, not that. I don't mean peaceful. I don't know exactly how to explain it."

Clay thought he had an idea of what she was talking about. The aggression they had witnessed yesterday had been a blind, forward-rushing thing. An anything-that-comes-to-hand thing. Yes, there had been the businessman with the knife and the muscular young guy jabbing the car aerials in the air as he ran, but there had also been the man in the park who'd torn off the dog's ear with his teeth. Pixie Light had also used her teeth. This seemed a lot different, and not just because it was about eating instead of killing. But like Alice, Clay couldn't put his finger on just how it was different.

"Oh God, two more," Alice said.

Through the open back gate came a woman of about forty in a dirty gray pants suit and an elderly man dressed in jogging shorts and a T-shirt with gray power printed across the front. The woman in the pants suit had been wearing a green blouse that now hung in tatters, revealing the cups of a pale green bra beneath. The elderly man was limping badly, throwing his elbows out in a kind of buck-and-wing with each step to keep his balance. His scrawny left leg was caked with dried blood, and that foot was missing its running shoe. The remains of an athletic sock, grimed with dirt and blood, flapped from his left ankle. The elderly man's longish white hair hung around his vacant face in a kind of cowl. The woman in the pants suit was making a repetitive noise that sounded like "Goom! Goom!" as she surveyed the yard and the garden. She looked at George the Pumpkin Eater as though he were of no account at all, then strode past him toward the remaining cucumbers. Here she knelt, snatched one from its vine, and began to munch. The old man in the gray power shirt marched to the edge of the garden and then only stood there awhile like a robot that has finally run out of juice. He was wearing tiny gold glasses—reading glasses, Clay thought—that gleamed in the early light. He looked to Clay like someone who had once been very smart and was now very stupid.

The three people in the kitchen crowded together, staring out the window, hardly breathing.

The old man's gaze settled on George, who threw away a piece of pumpkin-shell, examined the rest, and then plowed his face back in and resumed his breakfast. Far from behaving aggressively toward the newcomers, he seemed not to notice them at all.

The old man limped forward, bent, and began to tug at a pumpkin the size of a soccer ball. He was less than three feet from George. Clay, remembering the pitched battle outside the T station, held his breath and waited.

He felt Alice grasp his arm. All the sleep-warmth had departed her hand. "What's he going to do?" she asked in a low voice.

Clay only shook his head.

The old man tried to bite the pumpkin and only bumped his nose. It should have been funny but wasn't. His glasses were knocked askew and he pushed them back into place. It was a gesture so normal that for a brief moment Clay felt all but positive that he was the one who was crazy.

"Goom!" cried the woman in the tattered blouse, and threw away her half-eaten cucumber. She had spied a few late tomatoes and crawled toward them with her hair hanging in her face. The seat of her pants was badly soiled.

The old man had spied the ornamental wheelbarrow. He took his pumpkin to it, then seemed to register George, sitting there beside it. He looked at him, head cocked. George gestured with one orange-coated hand at the wheelbarrow, a gesture Clay had seen a thousand times.

"Be my guest," Tom murmured. "I'll be damned."

The old man fell on his knees in the garden, a movement that obviously caused him considerable pain. He grimaced, raised his lined face to the brightening sky, and uttered a chuffing grunt. Then he lifted the pumpkin over the wheel. He studied the line of descent for several moments, elderly biceps trembling, and brought the pumpkin down, smashing it open. It fell in two meaty halves. What happened next happened fast. George dropped his own mostly eaten pumpkin in his lap, rocked forward, grabbed the old man's head in his big, orange-stained hands, and twisted it. They heard the crack of the old man's breaking neck even through the glass. His long white hair flew. His small spectacles disappeared into what Clay thought were beets. His body spasmed once, then went limp. George dropped it. Alice began to scream and Tom covered her mouth with his hand. Her eyes, bulging with terror, peered over the top of it. Outside in the garden, George picked up a fresh chunk of pumpkin and began calmly to eat.

The woman in the shredded blouse looked around for a moment, casually, then plucked another tomato and bit into it. Red juice ran from her chin and trickled down the dirty line of her throat. She and George sat there in Tom McCourt's backyard garden, eating vegetables, and for some reason the name of one of his favorite paintings popped into Clay's mind: The Peaceable Kingdom.

He didn't realize he'd spoken aloud until Tom looked at him bleakly and said: "Not anymore."

The three of them were still standing there at the kitchen window five minutes later when an alarm began to bray at some distance. It sounded tired and hoarse, as though it would run down soon.

"Any idea what that might be?" Clay asked. In the garden, George had abandoned the pumpkins and dug up a large potato. This had brought him closer to the woman, but he showed no interest in her. At least not yet.