Стивен Кинг - Cell

Alice could no longer stand not holding the sneaker. She had torn it from her wrist and was squeezing it compulsively. "They'll see what we did and they'll turn around," she said, speaking low and rapidly. "They've gotten at least that smart, if they're picking up books again, they must have."

"We'll see," Clay said. He was almost positive the phone-crazies would go onto Tonney Field, even if what they saw there disquieted their strange group mind; it would be dark soon and they had nowhere else to go. A fragment of a lullaby his mother used to sing him floated through his mind: Little man, you've had a busy day.

"I hope they go and I hope they stay," she said, lower than ever. "I feel like I'm going to explode." She gave a wild little laugh. "Only it's them that's supposed to explode, isn't it? Them." Tom turned to look at her and she said, "I'm all right. I'm fine, so just close your mouth."

"All I was going to say is that it'll be what it is," he said.

"New Age crap. You sound like my father. The Picture Frame King." A tear rolled down one cheek and she rubbed it impatiently away with the heel of her hand.

"Just calm down, Alice. Watch."

"I'll try, okay? I'll try."

"And stop with the sneaker," Jordan said—irritably, for him. "That squelchy sound is making me crazy."

She looked down at the sneaker, as if surprised, then slipped it around her wrist on its loop again. They watched as the phone-crazies converged at Tonney Arch and passed beneath it with less pushing and confusion than any crowd attending the Homecoming Weekend soccer match could ever have equaled—Clay was sure of that. They watched as the crazies spread out again on the far side, crossing the concourse and filing down the ramps. They waited to see that steady march slow and stop, but it never did. The last stragglers—most of them hurt and helping each other along, but still walking in those close groups—were in long before the reddening sun had passed below the dormitories on the west side of the Gaiten Academy campus. They had returned once more, like homing pigeons to their nests or the swallows to Capistrano. Not five minutes after the evening star became visible in the darkening sky, Dean Martin began singing "Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime."

"I was worried for nothing, wasn't I?" Alice said. "Sometimes I'm a putz. That's what my father says."

"No," the Head told her. "All the putzes had cell phones, dear. That's why they're out there and you're in here, with us."

Tom said: "I wonder if Rafe's still making out okay."

"I wonder if Johnny is," Clay said. "Johnny and Sharon."

At ten o'clock on that windy autumn night, under a moon now entering its last quarter, Clay and Tom stood in the band alcove at the home end of the Tonney soccer field. Directly in front of them was a waist-high concrete barrier that had been heavily padded on the playing-field side. On their side were a few rusting music stands and a drift of litter that was ankle-deep; the wind blew the torn bags and scraps of paper in here, and here they came to rest. Behind and above them, back at the turnstiles, Alice and Jordan flanked the Head, a tall figure propped on a slender rod of cane. Debby Boone's voice rolled across the field in amplified waves of comic majesty. Ordinarily she would be followed by Lee Ann Womack singing "I Hope You Dance," then back to Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers, but perhaps not tonight.

The wind was freshening. It brought them the smell of rotting bodies from the marsh behind the indoor-track building and the aroma of dirt and sweat from the living ones packed together on the field beyond the band alcove. If you can call that living, Clay thought, and flashed himself a small and bitter inside smile. Rationalization was a great human sport, maybe the great human sport, but he would not fool himself tonight: of course they called it living. Whatever they were or whatever they were becoming, they called it living just as he did.

"What are you waiting for?" Tom murmured.

"Nothing," Clay murmured back. "Just. . . nothing."

From the holster Alice had found in the Nickerson basement, Clay drew Beth Nickerson's old-fashioned Colt .45 revolver, now once more fully loaded. Alice had offered him the automatic rifle—which so far they had not even test-fired—and he had refused, saying that if the pistol didn't do the job, probably nothing would.

"I don't know why the auto wouldn't be better, if it squirts thirty or forty bullets a second," she said. "You could turn those trucks into cheese-graters."

He had agreed that this might be so, but reminded Alice that their object tonight was not destruction per se but ignition. Then he'd explained the highly illegal nature of the ammunition Arnie Nickerson had obtained for his wife's .45 fraggers. What had once been called dumdum bullets.

"Okay, but if it doesn't work, you can still try Sir Speedy," she'd said. "Unless the guys out there just, you know . . ." She wouldn't actually use the word attack, but had made a little walking motion with the fingers of the hand not holding the sneaker. "In that case, beat feet."

The wind tore a tattered strip of Homecoming Weekend bunting free of the Scoreboard and sent it dancing above the packed sleepers. Around the field, seeming to float in the dark, were the red eyes of the boomboxes, all but one playing without benefit of CDs. The bunting struck the bumper of one of the propane trucks, flapped there several seconds, then slipped free and flew off into the night. The trucks were parked side by side in the middle of the field, rising from the mass of packed forms like weird metal mesas. The phone-crazies slept beneath them and so closely around them that some were crammed up against the wheels. Clay thought again of passenger pigeons, and the way nineteenth-century hunters had brained them on the ground with clubs. The whole species had been wiped out by the beginning of the twentieth . . . but of course they'd only been birds, with little bird-brains, incapable of rebooting.

"Clay?" Tom asked, low. "Are you sure you want to go through with this?"

"No," Clay said. Now that he was face-to-face with it, there were too many unanswered questions. What they would do if it went wrong was only one of them. What they would do if it went right was another. Because passenger pigeons were incapable of revenge. Those things out there, on the other hand—

"But I'm going to."

"Then do it," Tom said. "Because, all else aside, 'You Light Up My Life' blows dead rats in hell."

Clay raised the .45 and held his right wrist firmly with his left hand. He centered the gunsight on the tank of the truck on the left. He would fire twice into that one, then twice into the other one. That would leave one more bullet for each, if necessary. If that didn't work, he could try the automatic weapon Alice had taken to calling Sir Speedy.

"Duck if it goes up," he told Tom.

"Don't worry," Tom said. His face was drawn into a grimace, anticipating the report of the gun and whatever might follow.

Debby Boone was building to a big finish. It suddenly seemed very important to Clay that he beat her. If you miss at this range, you're a monkey, he thought, and pulled the trigger.

There was no chance for a second shot and no need of one. A bright red flower bloomed in the center of the tank, and by its light he saw a deep dent in the previously smooth metal surface. Hell appeared to be inside, and growing. Then the flower was a river, red turning orange-white.

"Down!" he shouted, and pushed Tom's shoulder. He fell on top of the smaller man just as the night became desert noon. There was a huge, whooshing roar followed by a guttering BANG that Clay felt in every bone of his body. Shrapnel shot overhead. He thought Tom screamed but he wasn't sure, because there was another of those whooshing roars and suddenly the air was growing hot, hot, hot.