Стивен Кинг: Cell

"That's far enough, Jordan," Clay murmured as the headlights neared the speaker-standards on the far side of the open area. "Park it and get your ass back here."

It seemed that Jordan heard him. The headlights came to a stop. For a moment the only things moving out there were the restless shapes of the wakeful phoners and the mist rising from the warm bodies of the others. Then they heard the bus's engine rev—even over the music they heard it—and the headlights leaped forward. "No, Jordan, what are you doing?" Tom screamed.

Denise recoiled and would have tumbled off her crate if Clay hadn't caught her around the waist.

The bus jounced into the sleeping flock. Onto the sleeping flock. The headlights began to pogo up and down, now pointing at them, now lifting briefly upward, now coming back to dead level again. The bus slewed left, came back on course, then slewed right. For a moment one of the night-walkers was illuminated in its four glaring high beams as clearly as something cut from black construction paper. Clay saw the phoner's arms go up, as if it wanted to signal a successful field goal, and then it was borne under the bus's charging grille.

Jordan drove the bus into the middle of them and there it stopped, headlights glaring, grille dripping. By raising a hand to block the worst of the shine, Clay was able to see a small dark form—distinguishable from the rest by its agility and purpose—emerge from the side door of the bus and begin making its way toward Kashwakamak Hall. Then Jordan fell and Clay thought he was gone. A moment later Dan rapped, "There he is, there!" and Clay picked him up again, ten yards closer and considerably to the left of where he'd lost sight of the kid. Jordan must have crawled for some distance over the sleeping bodies before trying his feet again.

When Jordan came back into the hazy cone of radiance thrown by the bus's headlights, tacked to the end of a forty-foot shadow, they could see him clearly for the first time. Not his face, because of the backlighting, but the crazy-graceful way he was running over the bodies of the phoners. The ones who were down were still dead to the world. The ones who were awake but not close to Jordan paid no attention. Several of those who were close, however, made grabs at him. Jordan dodged two of these, but the third, a woman, got him by the tangled mop of his hair.

"Let him alone!" Clay roared. He couldn't see her, but he was insanely positive it was the woman who had once been his wife. "Let him go!"

She didn't, but Jordan grabbed her wrist, twisted it, went to one knee, and scrambled past. The woman made another grab, just missed the back of his shirt, and then tottered off in her own direction.

Many of the infected phoners, Clay saw, were gathering around the bus. The headlights seemed to be drawing them.

Clay leaped off the snack machine (this time it was Dan Hartwick who saved Denise from a tumble) and grabbed the crowbar. He leaped back up and smashed out the window he'd been looking through.

"Jordan!" he bawled. 'Around back! Get around back!"

Jordan looked up at the sound of Clay's voice and tripped over something—a leg, an arm, maybe a neck. As he was getting back up, a hand came out of the breathing darkness and clutched the kid's throat.

"Please God, no," Tom whispered.

Jordan lunged forward like a fullback trying for a first down, pistoning with his legs, and broke the hand's grip. He stumbled onward. Clay could see his staring eyes and the way his chest was heaving. As he neared the hall, Clay could hear Jordan's sobbing gasps for air.

Never make it, he thought. Never. And he's so close now, so close.

But Jordan did make it. The two phoners currently staggering along the side of the building showed no interest in him at all as he lunged past them and around to the far side. The four of them were off the snack machine at once and racing across the hall like a relay team, Denise and her belly in the lead.

"Jordan!" she cried, bouncing up and down on her toe-tips. "Jordan, Jordy, are you there? For chrissake, kid, tell us you're there!"

"I'm"—he tore a great gasp of breath out of the air—"here." Another whooping gasp. Clay was distantly aware of Tom laughing and pounding him on the back. "Never knew"— Whooo-oooop! —"running over people was so . . . hard."

"What did you think you were doing?" Clay shouted. It was killing him not to be able to grab the kid, first to embrace him, then shake him, then kiss him all over his stupid brave face. Killing him to not even be able to see him. "I said get close to them, not drive right the fuck into them!"

"I did it"— Whooo-ooop! —"for the Head." There was defiance as well as zbreathlessness in Jordan's voice now. "They killed the Head. Them and their Raggedy Man. Them and their stupid President of Harvard. I wanted to make them pay. I want him to pay."

"What took you so long to get going?" Denise asked. "We waited and waited!"

"There are dozens of them up and around," Jordan said. "Maybe hundreds. Whatever's wrong with them . . . or right. . .or just changing . . . it's spreading really fast now. They're walking every which way, like totally lost. I had to keep changing course. I ended up coming to the bus from halfway down the midway. Then—" He laughed breathlessly. " Itwouldn't start! Do you believe it? I turned the key and turned the key and got nothing but a click every time. I just about freaked, but I wouldn't let myself. Because I knew the Head would be disappointed if I did that."

"Ah, Jordy . . ." Tom breathed.

"You know what it was? I had to buckle the stupid seatbelt. You don't need em for the passenger seats, but the bus won't start unless the driver's wearing his. Anyway, I'm sorry it took me so long, but here I am."

"And may we assume that the luggage compartment wasn't empty?" Dan asked.

"You can assume the shit out of that. It's full of what look like red bricks. Stacks and stacks of them." Jordan was getting his breath back now. "They're under a blanket. There's a cell phone lying on top of them. Ray attached it to a couple of those bricks with an elastic strap, like a bungee cord. The phone's on, and it's the kind with a port, like for a fax or so you can download data to a computer. The power-cord runs down into the bricks. I didn't see it, but I bet the detonator's in the middle." He grabbed another deep breath. "And there were bars on the phone. Three bars."

Clay nodded. He'd been right. Kashwakamak was supposed to be a cell dead zone once you got beyond the feeder-road leading to the Northern Counties Expo. The phoners had plucked that knowledge from the heads of certain normies and had used it. The Kashwak=No-Fo graffiti had spread like smallpox. But had any of the phoners actually tried making a cell-call from the Expo fairgrounds? Of course not. Why would they? When you were telepathic, phones were obsolete. And when you were one member of the flock—one part of the whole—they became doubly obsolete, if such a thing was possible.

But cell phones did work within this one small area, and why? Because the carnies were setting up, that was why—carnies working for an outfit called the New England Amusement Corporation. And in the twenty-first century, carnies—like rock-concert roadies, touring stage productions, and movie crews on location—depended on cell phones, especially in isolated places where landlines were in short supply. Were there no cell phone towers to relay signals onward and upward? Fine, they would pirate the necessary software and install one of their own. Illegal? Of course, but judging by the three bars Jordan was reporting, it had been workable, and because it was battery-powered, it was still workable. They had installed it on the Expo's highest point.