Стивен Кинг - Cell

It was jordan: clay knew at once. he took one look back over his shoulder at Tom as he pulled on his jeans, but Tom hadn't moved. Out for the count, Clay thought. He opened the door, slipped through, and closed it behind him.

Alice, wearing a Gaiten Academy T-shirt as a nightgown, was sitting on the second-floor landing with the boy cradled in her arms. Jordan's face was pressed against her shoulder. She looked up at the sound of Clay's bare feet on the stairs and spoke before Clay said something he might have regretted later: Is it the Head?

"He had a bad dream," she said.

Clay said the first thing that came to him. At that moment it seemed vitally important. "Did you?"

Her brow creased. Bare-legged, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail and her face sunburned as if from a day at the beach, she looked like Jordan's eleven-year-old sister. "What? No. I heard him crying in the hall. I guess I was waking up anyway, and—"

"Just a minute," Clay said. "Stay right there."

He went back to his third-floor room and snatched his sketch off the desk. This time Tom's eyes sprang open. He looked around with a mixture of fright and disorientation, then fixed on Clay and relaxed. "Back to reality," he said. Then, rubbing a hand over his face and getting up on one elbow: "Thank God. Jesus. What time is it?"

"Tom, did you have a dream? A bad dream?"

Tom nodded. "I think so, yeah. I heard crying. Was that Jordan?"

"Yes. What did you dream? Do you remember?"

"Somebody called us insane," Tom said, and Clay felt his stomach drop. "Which we probably are. The rest is gone. Why? Did you—"

Clay didn't wait for any more. He hurried back out and down the stairs again. Jordan looked around at him with a kind of dazed timidity when Clay sat down. There was no sign of the computer whiz now; if Alice looked eleven with her ponytail and sunburn, Jordan had regressed to nine.

"Jordan," Clay said. "Your dream . . . your nightmare. Do you remember it?"

"It's going away now," Jordan said. "They had us up on stands. They were looking at us like we were . . . I don't know, wild animals . . . only they said—"

"That we were insane."

Jordan's eyes widened. "Yeah!"

Clay heard footfalls behind him as Tom came down the stairs. Clay didn't look around. He showed Jordan his sketch. "Was this the man in charge?"

Jordan didn't answer. He didn't have to. He winced away from the picture, grabbing for Alice and turning his face against her chest again.

"What is it?" Alice asked, bewildered. She reached for the sketch, but Tom took it first.

"Christ," he said, and handed it back. "The dream's almost gone, but I remember the torn cheek."

"And his lip," Jordan said, the words muffled against Alice's chest. "The way his lip hangs down. He was the one showing us to them. To them." He shuddered. Alice rubbed his back, then crossed her hands over his shoulder blades so she could hold him more tightly.

Clay put the picture in front of Alice. "Ring any bells? Man of your dreams?"

She shook her head and started to say no. Before she could, there was a loud, protracted rattling and a loose series of thuds from outside Cheatham Lodge's front door. Alice screamed. Jordan clutched her tighter, as if he would burrow into her, and cried out. Tom clutched at Clay's shoulder. "Oh man, what the fuck —"

There was more rattling thunder outside the door, long and loud. Alice screamed again.

"Guns!" Clay shouted. "Guns!"

For a moment they were all paralyzed there on the sunny landing, and then another of those long, loud rattles came, a sound like rolling bones. Tom bolted for the third floor and Clay followed him, skidding once in his stocking feet and grabbing the banister to regain his balance. Alice pushed Jordan away from her and ran for her own room, the hem of the shirt fluttering around her legs, leaving Jordan to huddle against the newel post, staring down the stairs and into the front hall with huge wet eyes.

" Easy," Clay said. "Let's just take this easy, okay?"

The three of them stood at the foot of the stairs not two minutes after the first of those long, loose rattling sounds had come from beyond the front door. Tom had the unproven Russian assault rifle they had taken to calling Sir Speedy, Alice was holding a nine-millimeter automatic in each hand, and Clay had Beth Nickerson's .45, which he had somehow managed to hold on to the previous night (although he had no memory of tucking it back into his belt, where he later found it). Jordan still huddled on the landing. Up there he couldn't see the downstairs windows, and Clay thought that was probably a good thing. The afternoon light in Cheatham Lodge was much dimmer than it should have been, and that was most definitely not a good thing.

It was dimmer because there were phone-crazies at every window they could see, crowded up to the glass and peering in at them: dozens, maybe hundreds of those strange blank faces, most marked by the battles they had been through and the wounds they had suffered during the last anarchic week. Clay saw missing eyes and teeth, torn ears, bruises, burns, scorched skin, and hanging wads of blackened flesh. They were silent. There was a kind of haunted avidity about them, and that feeling was back in the air, that breathless sense of some enormous, spinning power barely held in check. Clay kept expecting to see their guns fly out of their hands and begin to fire on their own.

At us, he thought.

"Now I know how the lobsters feel in the tank at Harbor Seafood on Twofer Tuesday," Tom said in a small, tight voice.

"Just take it easy," Clay repeated. "Let them make the first move."

But there was no first move. There was another of those long, rattling thumps—the sound of something being off-loaded on the front porch was what it sounded like to Clay—and then the creatures at the windows drew back, as if at some signal only they could hear. They did this in orderly rows. This wasn't the time of day during which they ordinarily flocked, but things had changed. That seemed obvious.

Clay walked to the bay window in the living room, holding the revolver at his side. Tom and Alice followed. They watched the phone-crazies (who no longer seemed crazy at all to Clay, at least not in any way he understood) retreat, walking backward with eerie, limber ease, each never losing the little envelope of space around him– or herself. They settled to a stop between Cheatham Lodge and the smoking remains of the Tonney soccer stadium, like some raggedy-ass army battalion on a leaf-strewn parade ground. Every not-quite-vacant eye rested upon the Headmaster's residence.

"Why are their hands and feet all smudgy?" a timid voice asked. They looked around. It was Jordan. Clay himself hadn't even noticed the soot and char on the hands of the silent hundreds out there, but before he could say so, Jordan answered his own question. "They went to see, didn't they? Sure. They went to see what we did to their friends. And they're mad. I can feel it. Can you feel it?"

Clay didn't want to say yes, but of course he could. That heavy, charged feeling in the air, that sense of turning thunder barely contained in a net of electricity: that was rage. He thought about Pixie Light battening on Power Suit Woman's neck and the elderly lady who'd won the Battle of the Boylston Street T Station, the one who'd gone striding off into Boston Common with blood dripping out of her cropped iron-gray hair. The young man, naked except for his sneakers, who had been jabbing a car aerial in each hand as he ran. All that rage—did he think it had just disappeared when they started to flock? Well, think again.