Стивен Кинг: Cell

But meanwhile, the Pulse keeps on pulsing, right? Because somewhere there's acomputer running on battery power, and it keeps running that program. The program's rotten, so the glitch in it continues to mutate. Eventually the signal may quit or the program may get so rotten it'll shut down. In the meantime, though . . . you might be able to use it. I say might, you got that? It all depends on whether or not brains do what seriously protected computers do when they're hit with an EMP.

Tom had asked what that was. And Jordan had given him a wan smile.

They save to system. All data. If that happens with people, and if you could wipe the phoner program, the old programming might eventually reboot.

"He meant the human programming," Clay murmured in the dark bedroom, smelling that sweet, faint aroma of sachet. "The human programming, saved somewhere way down deep. All of it." He was going now, drifting off. If he was going to dream, he hoped it would not be of the carnage at the Northern Counties Expo.

His last thought before sleep took him was that maybe in the long run, the phoners would have been better. Yes, they had been born in violence and in horror, but birth was usually difficult, often violent, and sometimes horrible. Once they had begun flocking and mind-melding, the violence had subsided. So far as he knew, they hadn't actually made war on the normies, unless one considered forcible conversion an act of war; the reprisals following the destruction of their flocks had been gruesome but perfectly understandable. If left alone, they might eventually have turned out to be better custodians of the earth than the so-called normies. They certainly wouldn't have been falling all over themselves to buy gas-guzzling SUVs, not with their levitation skills (or with their rather primitive consumer appetites, for that matter). Hell, even their taste in music had been improving at the end.

But what choice did we have? Clay thought. Survival is like love. Both are blind.

Sleep took him then, and he didn't dream of the slaughter at the Expo. He dreamed he was in a bingo tent, and as the caller announced B-12— It's the sunshine vitamin! —he felt a tug on the leg of his pants. He looked under the table. Johnny was there, smiling up at him. And somewhere a phone was ringing.

Not all of the rage had gone out of the phoner refugees, nor had the wild talents entirely departed, either. Around noon of the next day, which was cold and raw, with a foretaste of November in the air, Clay stopped to watch two of them fighting furiously on the shoulder of the road. They punched, then clawed, then finally grappled together, butting heads and biting at each other's cheeks and necks. As they did, they began to rise slowly off the road. Clay watched, mouth hanging open, as they attained a height of approximately ten feet, still fighting, their feet apart and braced, as if standing on an invisible floor. Then one of them sank his teeth into the nose of his opponent, who was wearing a ragged, bloodstained T-shirt with the words HEAVY FUELprinted across the front. Nose-Biter pushed HEAVY FUELbackward. HEAVY FUELstaggered, then dropped like a rock down a well. Blood streamed upward from his ruptured nose as he fell. Nose-Biter looked down, seemed to realize for the first time that he was a second story's height above the road, and went down himself. Like Dumbo losing his magic feather, Clay thought. Nose-Biter wrenched his knee and lay in the dust, lips pulled back from his bloodstained teeth, snarling at Clay as he passed.

Yet these two were an exception. Most of the phoners Clay passed (he saw no normies at all that day or all the following week) seemed lost and bewildered with no flock mind to support them. Clay thought again and again of something Jordan had said before getting back in the van and heading into the north woods where there was no cell phone coverage: If the worm's continuing to mutate, their newest conversions aren't going to be either phoners or normies, not really.

Clay thought that meant like Pixie Dark, only a little further gone. Who are you? Who am I? He could see these questions in their eyes, and he suspected—no, he knew —it was these questions they were trying to ask when they spouted their gibberish.

He continued to ask Have you seen a boy and to try to send Johnny's picture, but he had no hope of an answer that made sense now. Most times he got no answer at all. He stayed the next night in a trailer about five miles north of Gurleyville, and the next morning at a little past nine he spied a small figure sitting on the curb outside the Gurleyville Cafe, in the middle of the town's one-block business district.

It can't be, he thought, but he began to walk faster, and when he got a little closer—close enough to be almost sure that the figure was that of a child and not just a small adult—he began to run. His new pack began to bounce up and down on his back. His feet found the place where Gurleyville's short length of sidewalk commenced and began clapping on the concrete.

It was a boy.

A very skinny boy with long hair almost down to the shoulders of his Red Sox T-shirt.

"Johnny!" Clay shouted. "Johnny, Johnny-Gee!"

The boy turned toward the sound of the shout, startled. His mouth hung open in a vacant gawp. There was nothing in his eyes but vague alarm. He looked as if he was thinking about running, but before he could even begin to put his legs in gear, Clay had swept him up and was covering his grimy, unresponsive face and slack mouth with kisses.

"Johnny," Clay said. "Johnny, I came for you. I did. I came for you. I came for you."

And at some point—perhaps only because the man holding him had begun to swing him around in a circle—the child put his hands around Clay's neck and hung on. He said something, as well. Clay refused to believe it was empty vocalization, as meaningless as wind blowing across the mouth of an empty pop-bottle. It was a word. It might have been tieey, as if the boy was trying to say tired.

Or it might have been Dieey, which was the way he had, as a sixteen-month-old, first named his father.

Clay chose to hang on to that. To believe the pallid, dirty, malnourished child clinging to his neck had called him Daddy.

It was little enough to hang on to, he thought a week later. one sound that might have been a word, one word that might have been Daddy. Now the boy was sleeping on a cot in a bedroom closet, because Johnny would settle there and because Clay was tired of fishing him out from under the bed. The almost womblike confines of the closet seemed to comfort him. Perhaps it was part of the conversion he and the others had been through. Some conversion. The phoners at Kashwak had turned his son into a haunted moron without even a flock for comfort.

Outside, under a gray evening sky, snow was spitting down. A cold wind sent it up Springvale's lightless Main Street in undulating snakes. It seemed too early for snow, but of course it wasn't, especially this far north. When it came before Thanksgiving you always griped, and when it came before Halloween you griped double, and then somebody reminded you that you were living in Maine, not on the isle of Capri.

He wondered where Tom, Jordan, Dan, and Denise were tonight. He wondered how Denise would do when it came time to have her baby. He thought she'd probably do okay—tough as a boiled owl, that one. He wondered if Tom and Jordan thought about him as often as he thought about them, and if they missed him as much as he missed them—Jordan's solemn eyes, Tom's ironic smile. He hadn't seen half enough of that smile; what they'd been through hadn't been all that funny.