Стивен Кинг - Cell

Jordan gave him a wan smile. "Well, I imagine there are plenty of people with satellite dishes, but otherwise . . . bingo."

"I don't get it," Alice said. "Why would they want to send us to a no-cell zone where everyone should be more or less all right?"

"Might as well ask why they let us live in the first place," Tom said.

"Maybe they want to turn us into living guided missiles and use us to bomb the joint," Jordan said. "Get rid of us and them. Two birds with one stone."

They considered this in silence for a moment.

"Let's go and find out," Alice said, "but I'm not bombing anybody."

Jordan eyed her bleakly. "You saw what they did to the Head. If it comes right down to it, do you think you'll have any choice?"

There were still shoes on most of the stoops across from the fieldstone pillars marking the entrance to Gaiten Academy, but the doors of the nice-looking homes either stood open or had been torn off their hinges. A few of the dead they saw littered on those lawns as they once more began their trek north were phone-crazies, but most had been innocent pilgrims who had happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were the ones with no shoes on their feet, but there was really no need to look as far as their feet; many of the reprisal victims had literally been torn limb from limb.

Beyond the school, where Academy Avenue once more became Route 102, there was carnage on both sides for half a mile. Alice walked with her eyes resolutely closed, allowing Tom to lead her as if she were blind. Clay offered to do the same for Jordan, but he only shook his head and walked stolidly up the centerline, a skinny kid with a pack on his back and too much hair on his head. After a few cursory glances at the kill-off, he looked down at his sneakers.

"There are hundreds," Tom said once. It was eight o'clock and full dark, but they could still see far more than they wanted to. Lying curled around a stop-sign at the corner of Academy and Spofford was a girl in red pants and a white sailor blouse. She looked no more than nine, and she was shoeless. Twenty yards away stood the open door of the house from which she had probably been dragged, screaming for mercy. "Hundreds."

"Maybe not that many," Clay said. "Some of our kind were armed. They shot quite a few of the bastards. Knifed a few more. I even saw one with an arrow sticking out of his—"

"We caused this," Tom said. "Do you think we have a kind anymore?"

This question was answered while they were eating their cold lunch at a roadside picnic spot four hours later. By then they were on Route 156, and according to the sign, this was a Scenic Turnout, offering a view of Historic Flint Hill to the west. Clay imagined the view was good, if you were eating lunch here at noon rather than midnight, with gas lanterns at either end of your picnic table to see by.

They had reached the dessert course—stale Oreos—when a party of half a dozen came toiling along, all of them older folks. Three were pushing shopping carts full of supplies and all were armed. These were the first other travelers they had seen since setting out again.

"Hey!" Tom called, giving them a wave. "Got another picnic table over here, if you want to sit a spell!"

They looked over. The older of the two women in the party, a grandmotherly type with lots of white, fluffy hair that shone in the starlight, started to wave. Then she stopped.

"That's them," one of the men said, and Clay did not mistake either the loathing or the fear in the man's voice. "That's the Gaiten bunch."

One of the other men said, "Go to hell, buddy." They kept on walking, even moving a little faster, although the grandmotherly type was limping, and the man beside her had to help her past a Subaru that had locked bumpers with somebody's abandoned Saturn.

Alice jumped up, almost knocking over one of the lanterns. Clay grabbed her arm. "Don't bother, kiddo."

She ignored him. "At least we did something?' she shouted after them. "What did you do? Just what the fuck did you do?"

"Tell you what we didn't do," one of the men said. The little group was past the scenic turnout now, and he had to look back over his shoulder to talk to her. He could do this because the road was free of abandoned vehicles for a couple of hundred yards here. "We didn't get a bunch of normies killed. There are more of them than us, in case you didn't notice—"

"Oh bullshit, you don't know if that's true!" Jordan shouted. Clay realized it was the first time the kid had spoken since they'd passed the Gaiten town limits.

"Maybe it is and maybe it isn't," the man said, "but they can do some very weird and powerful shit. You gotta buy that for a dollar. They say they'll leave us alone if we leave them alone . . . and you alone. We say fine."

"If you believe anything they say—or think at you—then you're an idiot," Alice said.

The man faced forward, raised his hand in the air, shook it in a combined fuck-off/bye-bye gesture, and said no more.

The four of them watched the shopping-cart people out of sight, then gazed at each other across the picnic table with its intaglios of old initials.

"So now we know," Tom said. "We're outcasts."

"Maybe not if the phone people want us to go where the rest of the– what did he call them?—the rest of the normies are going," Clay said. "Maybe we're something else."

"What?" Alice asked.

Clay had an idea, but he didn't like to put it into words. Not at midnight. "Right now I'm more interested in Kent Pond," he said. "I want—I need to see if I can find my wife and son."

"It's not very likely that they're still there, is it?" Tom asked in his low, kind voice. "I mean, no matter which way things went for them, normal or phoner, they've probably moved on."

"If they're all right, they will have left word," Clay said. "In any case, it's a place to go."

And until they got there and that part of it was done, he wouldn't have to consider why the Raggedy Man would send them to a place of safety if the people there hated and feared them.

Or how, if the phone people knew about it, Kashwak No-Fo could be safe at all.

They were edging slowly east toward route 19, a highway that would take them across the state line and into Maine, but they didn't make it that night. All the roads in this part of New Hampshire seemed to pass through the small city of Rochester, and Rochester had burned to the ground. The fire's core was still alive, putting out an almost radioactive glow. Alice took over, leading them around the worst of the fiery ruins in a half-circle to the west. Several times they saw KASHWAK=NO-FOscrawled on the sidewalks; once spray-painted on the side of a U.S. mailbox.

"That's a bazillion-dollar fine and life in prison at Guantanamo Bay," Tom said with a wan smile.

Their course eventually took them through the vast parking lot of the Rochester Mall. Long before they reached it, they could hear the over-amplified sound of an uninspired New Age jazz trio playing the sort of stuff Clay thought of as music to shop by. The parking lot was buried in drifts of moldering trash; the remaining cars stood up to their hubcaps in litter. They could smell the blown and fleshy reek of dead bodies on the breeze.

"Flock here somewhere," Tom commented.

It was in the cemetery next to the mall. Their course was going to take them south and west of it, but when they left the mall parking lot, they were close enough to see the red eyes of the boomboxes through the trees.

"Maybe we ought to do em up," Alice proposed suddenly as they stepped back onto North Main Street. "There must be a propane truck that isn't working around here somewhere."