Стивен Кинг - Cell

If he got to you, Share, if Johnny got to you, you better be taking care of him. You just better be.

But suppose he'd had his phone? Suppose he'd taken the red cell phone to school? Might he not have been taking it a little more often lately? Because so many of the other kids took theirs?

Christ.

"Clay? You all right?" Tom asked.

"Sure. Why?"

"I don't know. You looked a little . . . grim."

"Dead guy behind the counter. He's not pretty."

"Look here," Alice said, tracing a thread on the map. It squiggled across the state line and then appeared to join New Hampshire Route 38 a little east of Pelham. "That looks pretty good to me," she said. "If we go west on the highway out there for eight or nine miles"—she pointed at 110, where both the cars and the tar were gleaming faintly in a misty drizzle—"we should hit it. What do you think?"

"I think that sounds good," Tom said.

She looked from him to Clay. The little sneaker was put away—probably in her backpack—but Clay could see her wanting to squeeze it. He supposed it was good she wasn't a smoker, she'd be up to four packs a day. "If they've got the way across guarded—" she began.

"We'll worry about that if we have to," Clay said, but he wasn't worrying. One way or another, he was getting to Maine. If it meant crawling through some puckerbrush, like an illegal crossing the Canadian border to pick apples in October, he would do it. If Tom and Alice decided to stay behind, that would be too bad. He'd be sorry to leave them . . . but he would go. Because he had to know.

The red squiggle Alice had found on the Sweet Valley maps had a name—Dostie Stream Road—and it was almost wide-open. It was a four-mile hike to the state line, and they came upon no more than five or six abandoned vehicles and only a single wreck. They also passed two houses where they could see lights and hear the roar of generators. They considered stopping at these, but not for long.

"We'd probably get into a firefight with some guy defending his hearth and home," Clay said. "Always assuming there's anyone there. Those generators were probably set to come on when the county juice failed, and they'll run until they're out of gas."

"Even if there are sane people and they let us in, which would hardly be a sane act, what are we going to do?" Tom said. "Ask to use the phone?"

They discussed stopping somewhere and trying to liberate a vehicle (liberate was Tom's word), but in the end decided against that, too. If the state line was being defended by deputies or vigilantes, driving up to it in a Chevy Tahoe might not be the smoothest move.

So they walked, and of course there was nothing at the state line but a billboard (a small one, as befitted a two-lane blacktop road winding through farm country) reading YOU ARE NOW ENTERING NEW HAMPSHIRE and bienvenue! There was no sound but the drip of moisture in the woods on either side of them, and an occasional sigh of breeze. Maybe the rustle of an animal. They stopped briefly to read the sign and then walked on, leaving Massachusetts behind.

Any sense of being alone ended along with the dostie stream road, at a signpost reading NH ROUTE 38 and MANCHESTER 19 MI. There were still only a few travelers on 38, but when they switched to 128—a wide, wreck-littered road that headed almost due north—half an hour later, that trickle became part of a steady stream of refugees. They traveled mostly in little groups of three and four, and with what struck Clay as a rather shabby lack of interest in anyone other than themselves.

They encountered a woman of about forty and a man maybe twenty years older pushing shopping carts, each containing a child. The one in the man's cart was a boy, and too big for the conveyance, but he had found a way to curl up inside and fall asleep. While Clay and his party were passing this jackleg family, a wheel came off the man's shopping cart. It tipped sideways, spilling out the boy, who looked about seven. Tom caught him by the shoulder and broke the worst of the kid's fall, but he scraped one knee. And of course he was frightened. Tom picked him up, but the boy didn't know him and struggled to get away, crying harder than ever.

"That's okay, thanks, I've got him," the man said. He took the child and sat down at the side of the road with him, where he made much of what he called the boo-boo, a term Clay didn't think he'd heard since he was seven. The man said, "Gregory kiss it, make it all better." He kissed the child's scrape, and the boy laid his head against the man's shoulder. He was already going to sleep again. Gregory smiled at Tom and Clay and nodded. He looked weary almost to death, a man who might have been a trim and Nautilus-toned sixty last week and now looked like a seventy-five-year-old Jew trying to get the hell out of Poland while there was still time.

"We'll be all right," he said. "You can go now."

Clay opened his mouth to say, Why shouldn't we all go on together? Why don't we hook up? What do you think, Greg? It was the sort of thing the heroes of the science fiction novels he'd read as a teenager were always saying: Why don't we hook up?

"Yeah, go on, what are you waiting for?" the woman asked before he could say that or anything else. In her shopping cart a girl of about five still slept. The woman stood beside the cart protectively, as if she had grabbed some fabulous sale item and was afraid Clay or one of his friends might try to wrest it from her. "You think we got something you want?"

"Natalie, stop," Gregory said with tired patience.

But Natalie didn't, and Clay realized what was so dispiriting about this little scene. Not that he was getting his lunch—his midnight lunch—fed to him by a woman whose exhaustion and terror had led to paranoia; that was understandable and forgivable. What made his spirits sink to his shoetops was the way people just kept on walking, swinging their flashlights, and talking low among themselves in their own little groups, swapping the occasional suitcase from one hand to the other. Some yob on a pocket-rocket motorbike wove his way up the road between the wrecks and over the litter, and people made way for him, muttering resentfully. Clay thought it would have been the same if the little boy had fallen out of the shopping cart and broken his neck instead of just scraping his knee. He thought it would have been the same if that heavyset guy up there panting along the side of the road with an overloaded duffelbag dropped with a thunderclap coronary. No one would try to resuscitate him, and of course the days of 911 were done.

No one even bothered to yell You tell im, lady! or Hey dude, why don't you tell her to shut up? They just went on walking.

"—cause all we got is these kids, a responsibility we didn't ask for when we can hardly take care of ourselfs, he has a pacemaker, what are we supposed to do when the baddery runs out, I'd like to know? And now these kids! You want a kid?" She looked around wildly. "Hey! Anyone want a kid?"

The little girl began to stir.

"Natalie, you're disturbing Portia," Gregory said.

The woman named Natalie began to laugh. "Well tough shitl It's a disturbing-ass world!" Around them, people continued doing the Refugee Walk. No one paid any attention and Clay thought, So this is how we act. This is how it goes when the bottom drops out. When there are no cameras turning, no buildings burning, no Anderson Cooper saying "Now back to the CNN studios in Atlanta." This is how it goes when Homeland Security's been canceled due to lack of sanity.

"Let me take the boy," Clay said. "I'll carry him until you find something better to put him in. That cart's shot." He looked at Tom. Tom shrugged and nodded.