Стивен Кинг - Cell

Then Tom was shaking him, telling him it was past nine by his watch, the moon was up, and if they were going to do some more walking they ought to get at it. Clay had never been so glad to wake up. On the whole, he preferred dreams of the Bingo Tent.

Alice was looking at him oddly.

"What?" Clay said, checking to make sure their automatic weapon was safetied—that was already becoming second nature to him.

"You were talking in your sleep. You were saying, 'Don't answer it, don't answer it.' "

"Nobody should have answered it," Clay said. "We all would have been better off."

"Ah, but who can resist a ringing phone?" Tom asked. "And there goes your ballgame."

"Thus spake fuckin Zarathustra," Clay said. Alice laughed until she cried.

With the moon racing in and out of the clouds—like an illustration in a boy's novel of pirates and buried treasure, Clay thought—they left the horse-farm behind and resumed their walk north. That night they began to meet others of their own kind again.

Because this is our time now, Clay thought, shifting the automatic rifle from one hand to the other. Fully loaded, it was damned heavy. The phone- crazies own the days; when the stars come out, that's us. We're like vampires. We've been banished to the night. Up close we know each other because we can still talk; at a little distance we can be pretty sure of each other by the packs we wear and the guns more and more of us carry; but at a distance, the one sure sign is the waving flashlight beam. Three days ago we not only ruled the earth, we had survivor's guilt about all the other species we'd wiped out on our climb to the nirvana of round-the-clock cable news and microwave popcorn. Now we're the Flashlight People.

He looked over at Tom. "Where do they go?" he asked. "Where do the crazies go after sundown?"

Tom gave him a look. "North Pole. All the elves died of mad reindeer disease and these guys are helping out until the new crop shows up."

"Jesus," Clay said, "did someone get up on the wrong side of the haystack tonight?"

But Tom still wouldn't smile. "I'm thinking about my cat," he said. "Wondering if he's all right. No doubt you think that's quite stupid."

"No," Clay said, although, having a son and a wife to worry about, he sort of did.

They got a road atlas in a card-and-book shop in the two-stoplight burg of Ballardvale. They were now traveling north, and very glad they had decided to stay in the more-or-less bucolic V between Interstates 93 and 95. The other travelers they met—most moving west, away from 1-95—told of horrendous traffic-jams and terrible wrecks. One of the few pilgrims who was moving east said that a tanker had crashed near the Wakefield exit of 1-93 and the resulting fire had caused a chain of explosions that had incinerated nearly a mile of northbound traffic. The stench, he said, was like "a fish-fry in hell."

They met more Flashlight People as they trudged through the outskirts of Andover and heard a rumor so persistent it was now repeated with the assurance of fact: the New Hampshire border was closed. New Hampshire State Police and special deputies were shooting first and asking questions afterward. It didn't matter to them whether you were crazy or sane.

"It's just a new version of the fucking motto they've had on their fucking license plates since forever," said a bitter-faced elderly man with whom they walked for a while. He was wearing a small pack over his expensive topcoat and carrying a long-barreled flashlight. Poking out of his topcoat pocket was the butt of a handgun. "If you're in New Hampshire, you can live free. If you want to come to New Hampshire, you can fucking die."

"That's just . . . really hard to believe," Alice said.

"Believe what you want, Missy," said their temporary companion. "I met some people who tried to go north like you folks, and they turned back south in a hurry when they saw some people shot out of hand trying to cross into New Hampshire north of Dunstable."

"When?" Clay asked.

"Last night."

Clay thought of several other questions, but held his tongue instead. At Andover, the bitter-faced man and most of the other people with whom they had been sharing their vehicle-clogged (but passable) route turned onto Highway 133, toward Lowell and points west. Clay, Tom, and Alice were left on Andover's main street—deserted except for a few flashlight-waving foragers—with a decision to make.

"Do you believe it?" Clay asked Alice.

"No," she said, and looked at Tom.

Tom shook his head. "Me either. I thought the guy's story had an alligators-in-the-sewers feel to it."

Alice was nodding. "News doesn't travel that fast anymore. Not without phones."

"Yep," Tom said. "Definitely the next-generation urban myth. Still, we are talking about what a friend of mine likes to call New Hamster.

Which is why I think we should cross the border at the most out-of-the-way spot we can find."

"Sounds like a plan," Alice said, and with that they moved on again, using the sidewalk as long as they were in town and there was a sidewalk to use.

On the outskirts of andover, a man with a pair of flashlights rigged in a kind of harness (one light at each temple) stepped out through the broken display window of the IGA. He waved to them in companionable fashion, then picked a course toward them between a jumble of shopping carts, dropping canned goods into what looked like a newsboy's pouch as he walked. He stopped beside a pickup truck lying on its side, introduced himself as Mr. Roscoe Handt of Methuen, and asked where they were going. When Clay told them Maine, Handt shook his head.

"New Hampshire border's closed. I met two people not half an hour ago who got turned back. He said they're trying to tell the difference between the phone-crazies and people like us, but they're not trying too hard."

"Did these two people actually see this with their own eyes?" Tom asked.

Roscoe Handt looked at Tom as though he might be crazy. "You got to trust the word of others, man," he said. "I mean, you can't exactly phone someone up and ask for verification, can you?" He paused. "They're burning the bodies at Salem and Nashua, that's what these folks told me. And it smells like a pig-roast. They told me that, too. I've got a party of five I'm taking west, and we want to make some miles before sunup. The way west is open."

"That the word you're hearing, is it?" Clay asked.

Handt looked at him with mild contempt. "That's the word, all right. And a word to the wise is sufficient, my ma used to say. If you really mean to go north, make sure you get to the border in the middle of the night. The crazies don't go out after dark."

"We know," Tom said.

The man with the flashlights affixed to the sides of his head ignored Tom and went on talking to Clay. He had pegged Clay as the trio's leader. "And they don't carry flashlights. Wave your flashlights back and forth. Talk. Yell. They don't do those things, either. I doubt the people at the border will let you through, but if you're lucky, they won't shoot you, either."

"They're getting smarter," Alice said. "You know that, don't you, Mr. Handt?"

Handt snorted. "They're traveling in packs and they're not killing each other anymore. I don't know if that makes them smarter or not. But they're still killing us, I know that."

Handt must have seen doubt on Clay's face, because he smiled. His flashlights turned it into something unpleasant.

"I saw them catch a woman out this morning," he said. "With my own eyes, okay?"

Clay nodded. "Okay."

"I think I know why she was on the street. This was in Topsfield, about ten miles east of here? Me and my people, we were in a Motel 6. She was walking that way. Only not really walking. Hurrying. Almost running. Looking back over her shoulder. I saw her because I couldn't sleep." He shook his head. "Getting used to sleeping days is a bitch."