Стивен Кинг: Cell

"Right. Make sure you spray it extra big, with an arrow, if you change roads. If you take a dirt road, spray it on trees, always on the right-hand side of the road. That's where I'll be looking. Have you got that?"

"Always on the right," Tom said. "Come with us, Clay. Please."

"No. Don't make this harder for me than it already is. Every time you have to abandon a vehicle, leave it in the middle of the road and spray it T-J-D. Okay?"

"Okay," Jordan said. "You better find us."

"I will. This is going to be a dangerous world for a while, but not quite as dangerous as it's been. Jordan, I need to ask you something."

"All right."

"If I find Johnny and the worst that's happened to him is a trip through their conversion-point, what should I do?"

Jordan gaped. "How would I know? Jesus, Clay! I mean . . . Jesus!"

"You knew they were rebooting," Clay said.

"I made a guess!"

Clay knew it had been a lot more than that. A lot better than that. He also knew Jordan was exhausted and terrified. He dropped to one knee in front of the boy and took his hand. "Don't be afraid. It can't be any worse for him than it already is. God knows it can't."

"Clay, I . . ." Jordan looked at Tom. "People aren't like computers, Tom! Tell him!"

"But computers are like people, aren't they?" Tom said. "Because we build what we know. You knew about the reboot and you knew about the worm. So tell him what you think. He probably won't find the kid, anyway. If he does . . ." Tom shrugged. "Like he said. How much worse can it be?"

Jordan thought about this, biting his lip. He looked terribly tired, and there was blood on his shirt.

"Are you guys coming?" Dan called.

"Give us another minute," Tom said. And then, in a softer tone: "Jordan?"

Jordan was quiet a moment longer. Then he looked at Clay and said, "You'd need another cell phone. And you'd need to take him to a place where there's coverage . . ."

Clay stood in the middle of route 160, in what would have been the billboard's shadow on a sunny day, and watched the taillights until they were out of sight. He couldn't shake the idea that he would never see Tom and Jordan again ( fading roses, his mind whispered), but he refused to let it grow into a premonition. They had come together twice, after all, and didn't people say the third time was the charm?

A passing phoner bumped him. It was a man with blood congealing on one side of his face—the first injured refugee from the Northern Counties Expo that he'd seen. He would see more if he didn't stay ahead of them, so he set off along Route 160, heading south again. He had no real reason to think his kid had gone south, but hoped that some vestige of Johnny's mind—his old mind—told him home lay in that direction. And it was a direction Clay knew, at least.

About half a mile south of the feeder road he encountered another phoner, this one a woman, who was pacing rapidly back and forth across the highway like a captain on the foredeck of her ship. She looked around at Clay with such sharp regard that he raised his hands, ready to grapple with her if she attacked him.

She didn't. "Who fa-Da?" she asked, and in his mind, quite clearly, he heard: Who fell? Daddy, who fell?

"I don't know," he said, easing past her. "I didn't see."

"Where na?" she asked, pacing more furiously than ever, and in his mind he heard: Where am I now? This he made no attempt to answer, but in his mind he thought of Pixie Dark asking, Who are you? Who am 1?

Clay walked faster, but not quite fast enough. The pacing woman called after him, chilling him: "Who Pih' Da?"

And in his mind, he heard this question echo with chilling clarity. Who is Pixie Dark?

There was no gun in the first house he broke into, but there was a long-barreled flashlight, and he shone it on every straggling phoner he encountered, always asking the same question, trying simultaneously to throw it with his mind like a magic-lantern slide on a screen: Have you seen a boy? He got no answers and heard only fading fragments of thought in his head. At the second house there was a nice Dodge Ram in the driveway, but Clay didn't dare take it. If Johnny was on this road, he'd be walking. If Clay was driving, he might miss his boy even if he was driving slow. In the pantry he found a Daisy canned ham, which he unzipped with the attached key and munched as he hit the road again. He was about to throw the balance into the weeds after he'd eaten his fill when he saw an elderly phoner standing beside a mailbox, watching him with a sad and hungry eye. Clay held out the ham and the old man took it. Then, speaking slowly and clearly, trying to picture Johnny in his mind, Clay said: "Have you seen a boy?"

The old man chewed ham. Swallowed. Appeared to consider. Said: "Ganna the wishy."

"The wishy," Clay said. "Right. Thanks." He walked on.

In the third house, a mile or so farther south, he found a .30-30 in the basement, along with three boxes of shells. In the kitchen he found a cell phone sitting in its charging cradle on the counter. The charger was dead—of course—but when he pushed the button on the phone, it beeped and powered up immediately. He only got a single bar, but this didn't surprise him. The phoners' conversion-point had been at the edge of the grid.

He started for the door with the loaded rifle in one hand, the flashlight in the other, and the cell phone clipped to his belt when simple exhaustion overwhelmed him. He staggered sideways, as if struck by the head of a padded hammer. He wanted to go on, but such sense as his tired mind was able to muster told him he had to sleep now, and maybe sleep even made sense. If Johnny was out here, the chances were good he was sleeping, too.

"Switch over to the day shift, Clayton," he muttered. "You're not going to find jackshit in the middle of the night with a flashlight."

It was a small house—the home of an elderly couple, he thought, judging by the pictures in the living room and the single bedroom and the rails surrounding the toilet in the single bathroom. The bed was neatly made. He lay down on it without opening the covers, only taking off his shoes. And once he was down, the exhaustion seemed to settle on him like a weight. He could not imagine getting up for anything. There was a smell in the room, some old woman's sachet, he thought. A grandmotherly smell. It seemed almost as tired as he felt. Lying here in this silence, the carnage at the Expo grounds seemed distant and unreal, like an idea for a comic he would never write. Too gruesome. Stick with Dark Wanderer, Sharon might have said—his old, sweet Sharon. Stick with your apocalypse cowboys.

His mind seemed to rise and float above his body. It returned—lazily, without hurry—to the three of them standing beside the Tyco Water Purification van, just before Tom and Jordan had climbed back aboard. Jordan had repeated what he'd said back at Gaiten, about how human brains were really just big old hard drives, and the Pulse had wiped them clean. Jordan said the Pulse had acted on human brains like an EMP

Nothing left but the core, Jordan had said. And the core was murder. But because brains are organic hard drives, they started to build themselves back up again. To reboot. Only there was a glitch in the signal-code. I don't have proof, but I'm positive that the flocking behavior, the telepathy, the levitation . . . all that came from the glitch. The glitch was there from the start, so it became part of the reboot. Are you following this?

Clay had nodded. Tom had, too. The boy looking at them, his blood-smeared face tired and earnest.