Стивен Кинг - Cell

"Yeah, but a stroke victim, even someone who has a bad one, is light-years different from what happened to people who were on their cells during the Pulse," Jordan replied. "Me and the Head—the Head and I —think that in addition to stripping people's brains all the way to that one unerasable line of code, the Pulse also kicked something on. Something that's probably been sitting inside all of us for millions of years, buried in that ninety-eight percent of dormant hard drive."

Clay's hand stole to the butt of the revolver he had picked up off the floor in Beth Nickerson's kitchen. "A trigger," he said.

Jordan lit up. "Yeah, exactly! A mutative trigger. It never could have happened without this, like, total erasure on a grand scale. Because what's emerging, what's building up in those people out there . . . only they're no longer people, what's building up is—"

"It's a single organism," the Head interrupted. "This is what we believe."

"Yes, but more than just a flock," Jordan said. "Because what they can do with the CD players may only be the start, like a little kid learning to put his shoes on. Think about what they might be able to do in a week. Or a month. Or a year."

"You could be wrong," Tom said, but his voice was as dry as a breaking stick.

"He could also be right," Alice said.

"Oh, I'm sure he's right," the Head put in. He sipped his spiked hot chocolate. "Of course, I'm an old man and my time is almost over in any case. I'll abide by any decision you make." A slight pause. The eyes flicked from Clay to Alice to Tom. "As long as it's the right one, of course."

Jordan said: "The flocks will try to come together, you know. If they don't hear each other already, they will real soon."

"Crap," Tom said uneasily. "Ghost stories."

"Maybe," Clay said, "but here's something to think about. Right now the nights are ours. What if they decide they need less sleep? Or that they're not afraid of the dark?"

No one said anything for several moments. A wind was rising outside. Clay sipped his hot chocolate, which had never been much more than tepid and was now almost cold. When he looked up again, Alice had put hers aside and was holding her Nike talisman instead.

"I want to wipe them out," she said. "The ones on the soccer field, I want to wipe them out. I don't say kill them because I think Jordan's right, and I don't want to do it for the human race. I want to do it for my mother and my dad, because he's gone, too. I know he is, I feel it. I want to do it for my friends Vickie and Tess. They were good friends, but they had cell phones, they never went anywhere without them, and I know what they're like now and where they're sleeping: someplace just like that fucking soccer field." She glanced at the Head, flushing. "'Scuse me, sir."

The Head waved her apology away.

"Can we do that?" she asked him. "Can we wipe them out?"

Charles Ardai, who had been winding down his career as Gaiten Academy's interim Headmaster when the world ended, bared his eroded teeth in a grin Clay would have given much to have captured with pen or brush; there was not a single ounce of pity in it. "Miss Maxwell, we can try," he said.

At four o'clock the next morning, tom mccourt sat on a picnic table between the two Gaiten Academy greenhouses, which had both sustained serious damage since the Pulse. His feet, now wearing the Reeboks he'd donned back in Malden, were on one of the benches, and his head lay on his arms, which rested on his knees. The wind blew his hair first one way, then the other. Alice sat across from him with her chin propped on her hands and the rays of several flashlights striking angles and shadows across her face. The harsh light made her look pretty in spite of her obvious weariness; at her age, all light was still flattering. The Head, sitting next to her, only looked exhausted. In the closer of the two greenhouses, two Coleman gas-lanterns floated like uneasy spirits.

The Colemans converged at the near end of the greenhouse. Clay and Jordan used the door, although huge holes in the glass paneling had been opened on either side. A moment later, Clay sat down next to Tom and Jordan resumed his usual spot next to the Head. The boy smelled of gasoline and fertilizer, even more strongly of dejection. Clay dropped several sets of keys on the table amid the flashlights. As far as he was concerned, they could stay there until some archaeologist discovered them four millennia from now.

"I'm sorry," Headmaster Ardai said softly. "It seemed so simple."

"Yeah," Clay said. It had seemed simple: fill the greenhouse sprayers with gasoline, load the sprayers into the back of a pickup truck, drive across Tonney Field, wetting down both sides as they went, toss a match. He thought to tell Ardai that George W Bush's Iraq adventure had probably looked equally simple—load the sprayers, toss a match—and didn't. It would have been pointlessly cruel.

"Tom?" Clay asked. "You okay?" He had already realized that Tom didn't have great reserves of stamina.

"Yeah, just tired." He raised his head and gave Clay a smile. "Not used to the night shift. What do we do now?"

"Go to bed, I guess," Clay said. "It'll be dawn in another forty minutes or so." The sky had already begun to lighten in the east.

"It's not fair," Alice said. She brushed angrily at her cheeks. "It's not fair, we tried so hard!"

They had tried hard, but nothing had come easily. Every small (and ultimately meaningless) victory had been the sort of maddening struggle his mother had called a Bolshie shit-pull. Part of Clay did want to blame the Head . . . also himself, for not taking Ardai's sprayer idea with a grain of salt. Part of him now thought that going along with an elderly English teacher's plan to firebomb a soccer field was a little like taking a knife to a gunfight. Still . . . yeah, it had seemed like a good idea.

Until, that was, they discovered the motor pool's gasoline storage tank was inside a locked shed. They'd spent nearly half an hour in the nearby office, scrounging by lantern-light through maddeningly unmarked keys on a board behind the superintendent's desk. It was Jordan who finally found the key that unlocked the shed door.

Then they discovered that One would only have to pull a plug was not exactly the case. There was a cap, not a plug. And like the shed in which the tank resided, the cap was locked. Back to the office; another scrounge by lantern-light; finally a key that did indeed seem to fit the cap. It was Alice who pointed out that since the cap was on the bottom of the tank, assuring gravity-feed in case of a power outage, they would have a flood on their hands without a hose or a siphon. They spent an hour looking for a hose that might fit and couldn't find anything that looked even close. Tom found a small funnel, which sent them all into moderate hysterics.

And because none of the truck keys were marked (at least in ways non-motor-pool employees could understand), locating the right set became another process of trial and error. This one went faster, at least, because there were only eight trucks parked behind the garage.

And last, the greenhouses. There they discovered only eight sprayers, not a dozen, with a capacity of not thirty gallons each but ten. They might be able to fill them from the gasoline storage tank, but they would be drenched in the process, and the result would be a mere eighty gallons of usable, sprayable gas. It was the idea of wiping out a thousand phone-crazies with eighty gallons of regular that had driven Tom, Alice, and the Head out to the picnic bench. Clay and Jordan had hung in a while longer, looking for bigger sprayers, but they had found none.

"We found a few little leaf-sprayers, though," Clay said. "You know, what they used to call flit-guns."