Стивен Кинг - Cell

"Stop it!" Tom almost groaned.

The Head gave him a look of tight-lipped scorn, then worked the tip of his cane into the cap the young man was holding. He flicked it away. The cap sailed about ten feet and landed on the face of a middle-aged woman. Clay watched, fascinated, as it slid partially aside, revealing one rapt and blinkless eye.

The young man reached up with dreamy slowness and clutched the hand that had been holding the cap into a fist. Then he subsided.

"He thinks he's holding it again," Clay whispered, fascinated.

"Perhaps," the Head replied, without much interest. He poked the tip of his cane against one of the young man's infected bites. It should have hurt like hell, but the young man didn't react, only went on staring up at the sky as Bette Midler gave way to Dean Martin. "I could put my cane right through his throat and he wouldn't try to stop me. Nor would those around him spring to his defense, although in the daytime I have no doubt they'd tear me limb from limb."

Tom was squatting by one of the ghetto blasters. "There are batteries in this," he said. "I can tell by the weight."

"Yes. In all of them. They do seem to need batteries." The Head considered, then added something Clay could have done without. "At least so far."

"We could wade right in, couldn't we?" Clay said. "We could wipe them out the way hunters exterminated passenger pigeons back in the 1880s."

The Head nodded. "Bashed their little brains out as they sat on the ground, didn't they? Not a bad analogy. But I'd make slow work of it with my cane. You'd make slow work of it even with your automatic weapon, I'm afraid."

"I don't have enough bullets, in any case. There must be . . ." Clay ran his eye over the packed bodies again. Looking at them made his head hurt. "There must be six or seven hundred. And that's not even counting the ones under the bleachers."

"Sir? Mr. Ardai?" It was Tom. "When did you . . . how did you first . . .? "

"How did I determine the depth of this trance state? Is that what you're asking me?"

Tom nodded.

"I came out the first night to observe. The flock was much smaller then, of course. I was drawn to them out of simple but overwhelming curiosity. Jordan wasn't with me. Switching to a nighttime existence has been rather hard for him, I'm afraid."

"You risked your life, you know," Clay said.

"I had little choice," the Head replied. "It was like being hypnotized. I quickly grasped the fact that they were unconscious even though their eyes were open, and a few simple experiments with the tip of my cane confirmed the depth of the state."

Clay thought of the Head's limp, thought of asking him if he'd considered what would have happened to him if he'd been wrong and they'd come after him, and held his tongue. The Head would no doubt reiterate what he'd already said: no knowledge obtained without risk. Jordan was right—this was one very old-school dude. Clay certainly wouldn't have wanted to be fourteen and standing on his disciplinary carpet.

Ardai, meanwhile, was shaking his head at him. "Six or seven hundred's a very low estimate, Clay. This is a regulation-size soccer field. That's six thousand square yards."

"How many?"

"The way they're packed together? I should say a thousand at the very least."

"And they're not really here at all, are they? You're sure of that."

"I am. And what comes back—a little more each day, Jordan says the same, and he's an acute observer, you may trust me on that—is not what they were. Which is to say, not human."

"Can we go back to the Lodge now?" Tom asked. He sounded sick.

"Of course," the Head agreed.

"Just a second," Clay said. He knelt beside the young man in the NASCAR T-shirt. He didn't want to do it—he couldn't help thinking that the hand which had clutched for the red cap would now clutch at him – but he made himself. Down here at ground level the stink was worse. He had believed he was getting used to it, but he had been wrong.

Tom began, "Clay, what are you—"

"Quiet." Clay leaned toward the young man's mouth, which was partly open. He hesitated, then made himself lean closer, until he could see the dim shine of spit on the man's lower lip. At first he thought it might only be his imagination, but another two inches—he was now almost close enough to kiss the not-sleeping thing with Ricky Craven on its chest– took care of that.

It's just little, Jordan had said. Not hardly a whisper. . . but you can hear it.

Clay heard it, the vocal by some trick just a syllable or two ahead of the one coming from the linked boomboxes: Dean Martin singing "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime."

He stood up, nearly screaming at the pistol-shot sound of his own knees cracking. Tom held up his lantern, looking at him, stare-eyed. "What? What? You're not going to say that kid was—"

Clay nodded. "Come on. Let's go back."

Halfway up the ramp he grabbed the Head roughly by the shoulder. Ardai turned to face him, seemingly not disturbed to be handled so.

"You're right, sir. We have to get rid of them. As many as we can, and as fast as we can. This may be the only chance we get. Or do you think I'm wrong?"

"No," the Head replied. "Unfortunately, I don't. As I said, this is war—or so I believe—and what one does in war is kill one's enemies. Why don't we go back and talk it over? We could have hot chocolate. I like a tiny splash of bourbon in mine, barbarian that I am."

At the top of the ramp, Clay spared one final look back. Tonney Field was dark, but under strong northern starlight not too dark to make out the carpet of bodies spread from end to end and side to side. He thought you might not know what you were looking at if you just happened to stumble on it, but once you did . . . once you did . . .

His eyes played him a funny trick and for a moment he almost thought he could see them breathing—all eight hundred or a thousand of them– as one organism. That frightened him badly and he turned to catch up to Tom and Headmaster Ardai, almost running.

The head made hot chocolate in the kitchen and they drank it in the formal parlor, by the light of two gas lanterns. Clay thought the old man would suggest they go out to Academy Avenue later on, trolling for more volunteers in Ardai's Army, but he seemed satisfied with what he had.

The gasoline-pump at the motor pool, the Head told them, drew from a four-hundred-gallon overhead tank—all they'd have to do was pull a plug. And there were thirty-gallon sprayers in the greenhouse. At least a dozen. They could load up a pickup truck with them, perhaps, and back it down one of the ramps—

"Wait," Clay said. "Before we start talking strategy, if you have a theory about all this, sir, I'd like to hear it."

"Nothing so formal," the old man said. "But Jordan and I have observation, we have intuition, and we have a fair amount of experience between the two of us—"

"I'm a computer geek," Jordan said over his mug of hot chocolate. Clay found the child's glum assurance oddly charming. "A total McNerd. Been on em my whole life, just about. Those things're rebooting, all right. They might as well have software installation, please stand by blinking on their foreheads."

"I don't understand you," Tom said.

"I do," Alice said. "Jordan, you think the Pulse really was a Pulse, don't you? Everyone who heard it. . . they got their hard drives wiped."

"Well, yeah," Jordan said. He was too polite to say Well, duh.

Tom looked at Alice, perplexed. Only Clay knew Tom wasn't dumb, and he didn't believe Tom was that slow.

"You had a computer," Alice said. "I saw it in your little office."

"Yes—"