Стивен Кинг - Cell

"Don't be such a fucking pessimist," Clay said. He had promised himself not to become annoyed—he wouldn't part with his friends that way if he could possibly help it—but his resolve was being tried.

"Sorry I'm too tired to cheerlead," Tom said. He stopped beside a road-sign reading JCT RT 112 MI. "and—may i be frank?—too heartsick at losing you."

"Tom, I'm sorry."

"If I thought there was one chance in five that you had a happy ending in store . . . hell, one in fifty . . . well, never mind." Tom shone his flashlight at Jordan. "What about you? Any final arguments against this madness?"

Jordan considered, then shook his head slowly. "The Head told me something once," he said. "Do you want to hear it?"

Tom made an ironic little salute with his flashlight. The beam skipped off the marquee of the Ioka, which had been showing the new Tom Hanks picture, and the pharmacy next door. "Have at it."

"He said the mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows."

"Amen," Clay said. He said it very softly.

They walked east on Market Street, which was also Route 19A, for two miles. After the first mile, the sidewalks ended and the farms began. At the end of the second there was another dead stoplight and a sign marking the Route 11 junction. There were three people sitting bundled up to the neck in sleeping bags at the crossroads. Clay recognized one of them as soon as he put the beam of his flashlight on him: an elderly gent with a long, intelligent face and graying hair pulled back in a ponytail. The Miami Dolphins cap the other man was wearing looked familiar, too. Then Tom put his beam on the woman next to Mr. Ponytail and said, "You."

Clay couldn't tell if she was wearing a Harley-Davidson T-shirt with cutoff sleeves, the sleeping bag was pulled up too high for that, but he knew there was one in the little pile of packs lying near the Route 11 sign if she wasn't. Just as he knew she was pregnant. He had dreamed of these two in the Whispering Pines Motel, two nights before Alice had been killed. He had dreamed of them in the long field, under the lights, standing on the platforms.

The man with the gray hair stood up, letting his sleeping bag slither down his body. There were rifles with their gear, but he raised his hands to show they were empty. The woman did the same, and when the sleeping bag dropped to her feet, there was no doubt about her pregnancy. The guy in the Dolphins cap was tall and about forty. He also raised his hands.

The three of them stood that way for a few seconds in the beams of the flashlights, and then the gray-haired man took a pair of black-rimmed spectacles from the breast pocket of his wrinkled shirt and put them on. His breath puffed out white in the chilly night air, rising to the Route 11 sign, where arrows pointed both west and north.

"Well, well," he said. "The President of Harvard said you'd probably come this way, and here you are. Smart fellow, the President of Harvard, although a trifle young for the job, and in my opinion he could use some plastic surgery before going out to meet with potential big-ticket donors."

"Who are you?" Clay asked.

"Get that light out of my face, young man, and I'll be happy to tell you."

Tom and Jordan lowered their flashlights. Clay also lowered his, but kept one hand on the butt of Beth Nickerson's .45.

"I'm Daniel Hartwick, of Haverhill, Mass," the gray-haired man said. "The young lady is Denise Link, also of Haverhill. The gentleman on her right is Ray Huizenga, of Groveland, a neighboring town."

"Meetcha," Ray Huizenga said. He made a little bow that was funny, charming, and awkward. Clay let his hand fall off the butt of his gun.

"But our names don't actually matter anymore," Daniel Hartwick said. "What matters is what we are, at least as far as the phoners are concerned." He looked at them gravely. "We are insane. Like you."

Denise and ray rustled a small meal over a propane cooker ("These canned sausages don't taste too bad if you boil em up ha'aad," Ray said) while they talked—while Dan talked, mostly. He began by telling them it was twenty past two in the morning, and at three he intended to have his "brave little band" back on the road. He said he wanted to make as many miles as possible before daylight, when the phoners started moving around.

"Because they do not come out at night," he said. "We have that much going for us. Later, when their programming is complete, or nears completion, they may be able to, but—"

"You agree that's what's happening?" Jordan asked. For the first time since Alice had died, he looked engaged. He grasped Dan's arm. "You agree that they're rebooting, like computers whose hard drives have been—"

"—wiped, yes, yes," Dan said, as if this were the most elementary thing in the world.

"Are you—were you—a scientist of some sort?" Tom asked.

Dan gave him a smile. "I was the entire sociology department at Haverhill Arts and Technical," he said. "If the President of Harvard has a worst nightmare, that would be me."

Dan Hartwick, Denise Link, and Ray Huizenga had destroyed not just one flock but two. The first, in the back lot of a Haverhill auto junkyard, they had stumbled on by accident, when there had been half a dozen in their group and they were trying to find a way out of the city. That had been two days after the onset of the Pulse, when the phone-people had still been the phone-crazies, confused and as apt to kill each other as any wandering normies they encountered. That first had been a small flock, only about seventy-five, and they had used gasoline.

"The second time, in Nashua, we used dynamite from a construction-site shed," Denise said. "We'd lost Charlie, Ralph, and Arthur by then. Ralph and Arthur just took off on their own. Charlie—poor old Charlie had a heart attack. Anyhow, Ray knew how to rig the dynamite, from when he worked on a road crew."

Ray, hunkered over his cooker and stirring the beans next to the sausages, raised his free hand and gave it a flip.

"After that," Dan Hartwick said, "we began to see those Kashwak No-Fo signs. Sounded good to us, didn't it, Denni?"

"Yep," Denise said. "Olly-olly-in-for-free. We were headed north, same as you, and when we started seeing those signs, we headed north faster. I was the only one who didn't absolutely love the idea, because I lost my husband during the Pulse. Those fucks are the reason my kid's going to grow up not knowing his daddy." She saw Clay wince and said, "Sorry. We know your boy's gone to Kashwak."

Clay gaped.

"Oh yes," Dan said, taking a plate as Ray began passing them around. "The President of Harvard knows all, sees all, has dossiers on all. . . or so he'd like us to believe." He gave Jordan a wink, and Jordan actually grinned.

"Dan talked me around," Denise said. "Some terrorist group—or maybe just a couple of inspired nutcases working in a garage—set this thing off, but no one had any idea it would lead to this. The phoners are just playing out their part in it. They weren't responsible when they were insane, and they aren't really responsible now, because—"

"Because they're in the grip of some group imperative," Tom said. "Like migration."

"It's a group imperative, but it ain't migration," Ray said, sitting down with his own plate. "Dan says it's pure survival. I think he's right. Whatever it is, we gotta find a place to get in out of the rain. You know?"

"The dreams started coming after we burned the first flock," Dan said. "Powerful dreams. Ecce homo, insanus —very Harvard. Then, after we bombed the Nashua flock, the President of Harvard showed up in person with about five hundred of his closest friends." He ate in quick, neat bites.