— CELL —
by Stephen King

 

10

“Once we left the city, I didn’t see anyone with a gun,” Clay said. “At first I wasn’t really looking, and then I was.”

“You know why, don’t you? Except maybe for California, Massachusetts has got the toughest gun law in the country.”

Clay remembered seeing billboards proclaiming that at the state line a few years ago. Then they’d been replaced by ones saying that if you got picked up for driving under the influence, you’d have to spend a night in jail.

Tom said, “If the cops find a concealed handgun in your car—meaning like in the glove compartment with your registration and insurance card—they can put you away for I think seven years. Get stopped with a loaded rifle in your pickup, even in hunting season, and you could get slapped with a ten-thousand-dollar fine and two years of community service.” He picked up the remains of his sandwich, inspected it, put it back down again. “You can own a handgun and keep it in your home if you’re not a felon, but a license to carry? Maybe if you’ve got Father O’Malley of the Boys’ Club to cosign, but maybe not even then.”

“No guns might have saved some lives, coming out of the city.”

“I agree with you completely,” Tom said. “Those two guys fighting over the keg of beer? Thank God neither of them had a .38.”

Clay nodded.

Tom rocked back in his chair, crossed his arms on his narrow chest, and looked around. His glasses glinted. The circle of light thrown by the Coleman lantern was brilliant but small. “Right now, however, I wouldn’t mind having a pistol. Even after seeing the mess they make. And I consider myself a pacifist.”

“How long have you lived here, Tom?”

“Almost twelve years. Long enough to see Malden go a long way down the road to Shitsville. It’s not there yet, but boy, it’s going.”

“Okay, so think about it. Which of your neighbors is apt to have a gun or guns in their house?”

Tom answered promptly. “Arnie Nickerson, across the street and three houses up. NRA bumper sticker on his Camry—along with a couple of yellow ribbon decals and an old Bush-Cheney sticker—”

“Goes without saying—”

“And two NRA stickers on his pickup, which he equips with a camper cap in November and takes hunting up in your part of the world.”

“And we’re happy to have the revenue his out-of-state hunting license provides,” Clay said. “Let’s break into his house tomorrow and take his guns.”

Tom McCourt looked at him as though he were mad. “The man isn’t as paranoid as some of those militia types out in Utah—I mean, he does live in Taxachusetts—but he’s got one of those burglar alarm signs on his lawn that basically says DO YOU FEEL LUCKY, PUNK, and I’m sure you must be familiar with the NRA’s stated policy as to just when their guns will be taken away from them.”

“I think it has something to do with prying their cold dead fingers—”

“That’s the one.”

Clay leaned forward and stated what to him had been obvious from the moment they’d come down the ramp from Route One: Malden was now just one more fucked-up town in the Unicel States of America, and that country was now out of service, off the hook, so sorry, please try your call again later. Salem Street was deserted. He had felt that as they approached . . . hadn’t he?

No. Bullshit. You felt watched.

Really? And even if he had, was that the sort of intuition that could be relied upon, acted upon, after a day like this one? The idea was ridiculous.

“Tom, listen. One of us’ll walk up to this guy Nackleson’s house tomorrow, after it’s full daylight—”

“It’s Nickerson, and I don’t think that’s a very smart idea, especially since Swami McCourt sees him kneeling inside his living room window with a fully automatic rifle he’s been saving for the end of the world. Which seems to have rolled around.”

“I’ll do it,” Clay said. “And I won’t do it if we hear any gunshots from the Nickerson place tonight or tomorrow morning. I certainly won’t do it if I see any bodies on the guy’s lawn, with or without gunshot wounds. I watched all those old Twilight Zone episodes, too—the ones where civilization turns out to be nothing more than a thin layer of shellac.”

“If that,” Tom said gloomily. “Idi Amin, Pol Pot, the prosecution rests.”

“I’ll go with my hands raised. Ring the doorbell. If someone answers, I’ll say I just want to talk. What’s the worst that can happen? He tells me to get lost.”

“No, the worst that can happen is he can shoot you dead on his fucking welcome mat and leave me with a motherless teenage girl,” Tom said sharply. “Smart off about old Twilight Zone episodes all you want, just don’t forget those people you saw today, fighting outside the T station in Boston.”

“That was . . . I don’t know what it was, but those people were clinically insane. You can’t doubt that, Tom.”

“What about Bible-Thumping Bertha? And the two men fighting over the keg? Were they insane?”

No, of course they hadn’t been, but if there was a gun in that house across the street, he still wanted it. And if there was more than one, he wanted Tom and Alice each to have one, too.

“I’m thinking about going north over a hundred miles,” Clay said. “We might be able to boost a car and drive some of it, but we might have to walk the whole way. Do you want to go with just knives for protection? I’m asking you as one serious man to another, because some of the people we run into are going to have guns. I mean, you know that.”

“Yes,” Tom said. He ran his hands through his neatly trimmed hair, giving it a comic ruffle. “And I know that Arnie and Beth are probably not home. They were gadget-nuts as well as gun-nuts. He was always gabbing on his cell phone when he went by in that big Dodge Ram Detroit phallus of his.”

“See? There you go.”

Tom sighed. “All right. Depending on how things look in the morning. Okay?”

“Okay.” Clay picked up his sandwich again. He felt a little more like eating now.

“Where did they go?” Tom asked. “The ones you call the phone-crazies. Where did they go?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Tom said. “I think they crawled into the houses and the buildings around sundown and died.”

Clay looked at him doubtfully.

“Look at it reasonably and you’ll see I’m right,” Tom said. “This was almost certainly some sort of terrorist act, would you agree?”

“That seems the most likely explanation, although I’ll be damned if I know how any signal, no matter how subversive, could have been programmed to do what this one did.”

“Are you a scientist?”

“You know I’m not. I’m an artist.”

“So when the government tells you they can guide computerized smart-bombs through bunker doors in the floor of the desert from aircraft carriers that are maybe two thousand miles away, all you can do is look at the photos and accept that the technology exists.”

“Would Tom Clancy lie to me?” Clay asked, unsmiling.

“And if that technology exists, why not accept this one, at least on a provisional basis?”

“Okay, spell it out. Small words, please.”

“At about three o’clock this afternoon, a terrorist organization, maybe even a tinpot government, generated some sort of signal or pulse. For now we have to assume that this signal was carried by every cell phone operating in the entire world. We’ll hope that wasn’t the case, but for now I think we have to assume the worst.”

“Is it over?”

“I don’t know,” Tom said. “Do you want to pick up a cell phone and find out?”

“Touchy,” Clay said. “That’s how my little boy says touché.” And please, God, how he’s still saying it.

“But if this group could transmit a signal that would send everyone hearing it insane,” Tom said, “isn’t it possible that the signal could also contain a directive for those receiving it to kill themselves five hours later? Or perhaps to simply go to sleep and stop breathing?”

“I would say that’s impossible.”

“I would have said a madman coming at me with a knife across from the Four Seasons Hotel was impossible,” Tom said. “Or Boston burning flat while the city’s entire population—that part of it lucky enough not to have cell phones, that is—left by the Mystic and the Zakim.”

He leaned forward, looking at Clay intently. He wants to believe this, Clay thought. Don’t waste a lot of time trying to talk him out of it, because he really, really wants to.

“In a way, this is no different from the bioterrorism the government was so afraid of after nine-eleven,” he said. “By using cell phones, which have become the dominant form of communication in our daily lives, you simultaneously turn the populace into your own conscript army—an army that’s literally afraid of nothing, because it’s insane—and you break down the infrastructure. Where’s the National Guard tonight?”

“Iraq?” Clay ventured. “Louisiana?”

It wasn’t much of a joke and Tom didn’t smile. “It’s nowhere. How do you use a homeland force that now depends almost entirely on the cellular network to even mobilize? As for airplanes, the last one I’ve seen flying was the little one that crashed on the corner of Charles and Beacon.” He paused, then went on, looking straight across the table into Clay’s eyes. “All this they did . . . whoever they is. They looked at us from wherever it is they live and worship their gods, and what did they see?”

Clay shook his head, fascinated by Tom’s eyes, shining behind his spectacles. They were almost the eyes of a visionary.

“They saw we had built the Tower of Babel all over again . . . and on nothing but electronic cobwebs. And in a space of seconds, they brushed those cobwebs aside and our Tower fell. All this they did, and we three are like bugs that happened, by dumb dim luck alone, to have avoided the fall of a giant’s foot. All this they did, and you think they could not have encoded a signal telling the affected ones to simply fall asleep and stop breathing five hours later? What’s that trick, compared to the first one? Not much, I’d say.”

Clay said, “I’d say it’s time we got some sleep.”

For a moment Tom remained as he was, hunched across the table a little, looking at Clay as if unable to understand what Clay had said. Then he laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, you’ve got a point. I get wound up. Sorry.”

“Not at all,” Clay said. “I hope you’re right about the crazies being dead.” He paused, then said: “I mean . . . unless my boy . . . Johnny-Gee . . .” He couldn’t finish. Partly or maybe mostly because if Johnny had tried to use his phone this afternoon and had gotten the same call as Pixie Light and Power Suit Woman, Clay wasn’t sure he wanted his son to still be alive.

Tom reached across the table to him and Clay took the other man’s delicate, long-fingered hand in both of his. He saw this happening as if he were outside his body, and when he spoke, he didn’t seem to be the one speaking, although he could feel his mouth moving and the tears that had begun to fall from his eyes.

“I’m so scared for him,” his mouth was saying. “I’m scared for both of them, but mostly for my kid.”

“It’ll be all right,” Tom said, and Clay knew he meant well, but the words struck terror into his heart just the same, because it was just one of those things you said when there was really nothing else. Like You’ll get over it or He’s in a better place.

 

 

11

Alice’s shrieks woke Clay from a confused but not unpleasant dream of being in the Bingo Tent at the Akron State Fair. In the dream he was six again—maybe even younger but surely no older—and crouched beneath the long table where his mother was seated, looking at a forest of lady-legs and smelling sweet sawdust while the caller intoned, “B-12, players, B-12! It’s the sunshine vitamin!”

There was one moment when his subconscious mind tried to integrate the girl’s cries into the dream by insisting he was hearing the Saturday noon whistle, but only a moment. Clay had let himself go to sleep on Tom’s porch after an hour of watching because he was convinced that nothing was going to happen out there, at least not tonight. But he must have been equally convinced that Alice wouldn’t sleep through, because there was no real confusion once his mind identified her shrieks for what they were, no groping for where he was or what was going on. At one moment he was a small boy crouching under a bingo table in Ohio; at the next he was rolling off the comfortably long couch on Tom McCourt’s enclosed front porch with the comforter still wrapped around his lower legs. And somewhere in the house, Alice Maxwell, howling in a register almost high enough to burst crystal, articulated all the horror of the day just past, insisting with one scream after another that such things surely could not have happened and must be denied.

Clay tried to rid his lower legs of the comforter and at first it wouldn’t let go. He found himself hopping toward the inside door and pulling at it in a kind of panic while he looked out at Salem Street, sure that lights would start going on up and down the block even though he knew the power was out, sure that someone—maybe the gun-owning, gadget-loving Mr. Nickerson from up the street—would come out on his lawn and yell for someone to for chrissake shut that kid up. Don’t make me come down there! Arnie Nickerson would yell. Don’t make me come down there and shoot her!

Or her screams would draw the phone-crazies like moths to a bug-light. Tom might think they were dead, but Clay believed it no more than he believed in Santa’s workshop at the North Pole.

But Salem Street—their block of it, anyway, just west of the town center and below the part of Malden Tom had called Granada Highlands—remained dark and silent and without movement. Even the glow of the fire from Revere seemed to have diminished.

Clay finally rid himself of the comforter and went inside and stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up into the blackness. Now he could hear Tom’s voice—not the words, but the tone, low and calm and soothing. The girl’s chilling shrieks began to be broken up by gasps for breath, then by sobs and inarticulate cries that became words. Clay caught one of them, nightmare. Tom’s voice went on and on, telling lies in a reassuring drone: everything was all right, she would see, things would look better in the morning. Clay could picture them sitting side by side on the guest-room bed, each dressed in a pair of pajamas with TM monograms on the breast pockets. He could have drawn them like that. The idea made him smile.

When he was convinced she wasn’t going to resume screaming, he went back to the porch, which was a bit chilly but not uncomfortable once he was wrapped up snugly in the comforter. He sat on the couch, surveying what he could see of the street. To the left, east of Tom’s house, was a business district. He thought he could see the traffic light marking the entrance into the town square. The other way—which was the way they’d come—more houses. All of them still in this deep trench of night.

“Where are you?” he murmured. “Some of you headed north or west, and still in your right minds. But where did the rest of you go?”

No answer from the street. Hell, maybe Tom was right—the cell phones had sent them a message to go crazy at three and drop dead at eight. It seemed too good to be true, but he remembered feeling the same way about recordable CDs.

Silence from the street in front of him; silence from the house behind him. After a while, Clay leaned back on the couch and let his eyes close. He thought he might doze, but doubted he would actually go to sleep again. Eventually, however, he did, and this time there were no dreams. Once, shortly before first light, a mongrel dog came up Tom McCourt’s front walk, looked in at him as he lay snoring in his cocoon of comforter, and then moved on. It was in no hurry; pickings were rich in Malden that morning and would be for some time to come.

 

 

12

“Clay. Wake up.”

A hand, shaking him. Clay opened his eyes and saw Tom, dressed in a pair of blue jeans and a gray work-shirt, bending over him. The front porch was lit by strong pale light. Clay glanced at his wristwatch as he swung his feet off the couch and saw it was twenty past six.

“You need to see this,” Tom said. He looked pale, anxious, and grizzled on both sides of his mustache. The tail of his shirt was untucked on one side and his hair was still standing up in back.

Clay looked at Salem Street, saw a dog with something in its mouth trotting past a couple of dead cars half a block west, saw nothing else moving. He could smell a faint smoky funk in the air and supposed it was either Boston or Revere. Maybe both, but at least the wind had died. He turned his gaze to Tom.

“Not out here,” Tom said. He kept his voice low. “In the backyard. I saw when I went in the kitchen to make coffee before I remembered coffee’s out, at least for the time being. Maybe it’s nothing, but . . . man, I don’t like this.”

“Is Alice still sleeping?” Clay was groping under the comforter for his socks.

“Yes, and that’s good. Never mind your socks and shoes, this ain’t dinner at the Ritz. Come on.”

He followed Tom, who was wearing a pair of comfortable-looking scuffs, down the hall to the kitchen. A half-finished glass of iced tea was standing on the counter.

Tom said, “I can’t get started without some caffeine in the morning, you know? So I poured myself a glass of that stuff—help yourself, by the way, it’s still nice and cold—and I pushed back the curtain over the sink to take a look out at my garden. No reason, just wanted to touch base with the outside world. And I saw . . . but look for yourself.”

Clay peered out through the window over the sink. There was a neat little brick patio behind the house with a gas grill on it. Beyond the patio was Tom’s yard, half-grass and half-garden. At the back was a high board fence with a gate in it. The gate was open. The bolt holding it closed must have been shot across because it now hung askew, looking to Clay like a broken wrist. It occurred to him that Tom could have made coffee on the gas grill, if not for the man sitting in his garden beside what had to be an ornamental wheelbarrow, eating the soft inside of a split pumpkin and spitting out the seeds. He was wearing a mechanic’s coverall and a greasy cap with a faded letter B on it. Written in faded red script on the left breast of his coverall was George. Clay could hear the soft smooching sounds his face made every time he dove into the pumpkin.

“Fuck,” Clay said in a low voice. “It’s one of them.”

“Yes. And where there’s one there’ll be more.”

“Did he break the gate to get in?”

“Of course he did,” Tom said. “I didn’t see him do it, but it was locked when I left yesterday, you can depend on that. I don’t have the world’s best relationship with Scottoni, the guy who lives on the other side. He has no use for ‘fellas like me,’ as he’s told me on several occasions.” He paused, then went on in a lower voice. He had been speaking quietly to begin with, and now Clay had to lean toward him to hear him. “You know what’s crazy? I know that guy. He works at Sonny’s Texaco, down in the Center. It’s the only gas station in town that still does repairs. Or did. He replaced a radiator hose for me once. Told me about how he and his brother made a trip to Yankee Stadium last year, saw Curt Schilling beat the Big Unit. Seemed like a nice enough guy. Now look at him! Sitting in my garden eating a raw pumpkin!”

“What’s going on, you guys?” Alice asked from behind them.

Tom turned around, looking dismayed. “You don’t want to see this,” he said.

“That won’t work,” Clay said. “She’s got to see it.”

He smiled at Alice, and it wasn’t that hard to smile. There was no monogram on the pocket of the pajamas Tom had loaned her, but they were blue, just as he had imagined, and she looked most dreadfully cute in them, with her feet bare and the pants legs rolled up to her shins and her hair tousled with sleep. In spite of her nightmares, she looked better rested than Tom. Clay was willing to bet she looked better rested than he did, too.

“It’s not a car wreck, or anything,” he said. “Just a guy eating a pumpkin in Tom’s backyard.”

She stood between them, putting her hands on the lip of the sink and rising up on the balls of her feet to look out. Her arm brushed Clay’s, and he could feel the sleep-warmth still radiating from her skin. She looked for a long time, then turned to Tom.

“You said they all killed themselves,” she said, and Clay couldn’t tell if she was accusing or mock scolding. She probably doesn’t know herself, he thought.

“I didn’t say for sure,” Tom replied, sounding lame.

“You sounded pretty sure to me.” She looked out again. At least, Clay thought, she wasn’t freaking out. In fact he thought she looked remarkably composed—if a little Chaplinesque—in her slightly outsize pajamas. “Uh . . . guys?”

“What?” they said together.

“Look at the little wheelbarrow he’s sitting next to. Look at the wheel.”

Clay had already seen what she was talking about—the litter of pumpkin-shell, pumpkin-meat, and pumpkin seeds.

“He smashed the pumpkin on the wheel to break it open and get to what’s inside,” Alice said. “I guess he’s one of them—”

“Oh, he’s one of them, all right,” Clay said. George the mechanic was sitting in the garden with his legs apart, allowing Clay to see that since yesterday afternoon he’d forgotten all his mother had taught him about dropping trou before you did number one.

“—but he used that wheel as a tool. That doesn’t seem so crazy to me.”

“One of them was using a knife yesterday,” Tom said. “And there was another guy jabbing a couple of car aerials.”

“Yes, but . . . this seems different, somehow.”

“More peaceful, you mean?” Tom glanced back at the intruder in his garden. “I wouldn’t want to go out there and find out.”

“No, not that. I don’t mean peaceful. I don’t know exactly how to explain it.”

Clay thought he had an idea of what she was talking about. The aggression they had witnessed yesterday had been a blind, forward-rushing thing. An anything-that-comes-to-hand thing. Yes, there had been the businessman with the knife and the muscular young guy jabbing the car aerials in the air as he ran, but there had also been the man in the park who’d torn off the dog’s ear with his teeth. Pixie Light had also used her teeth. This seemed a lot different, and not just because it was about eating instead of killing. But like Alice, Clay couldn’t put his finger on just how it was different.

“Oh God, two more,” Alice said.

Through the open back gate came a woman of about forty in a dirty gray pants suit and an elderly man dressed in jogging shorts and a T-shirt with GRAY POWER printed across the front. The woman in the pants suit had been wearing a green blouse that now hung in tatters, revealing the cups of a pale green bra beneath. The elderly man was limping badly, throwing his elbows out in a kind of buck-and-wing with each step to keep his balance. His scrawny left leg was caked with dried blood, and that foot was missing its running shoe. The remains of an athletic sock, grimed with dirt and blood, flapped from his left ankle. The elderly man’s longish white hair hung around his vacant face in a kind of cowl. The woman in the pants suit was making a repetitive noise that sounded like “Goom! Goom!” as she surveyed the yard and the garden. She looked at George the Pumpkin Eater as though he were of no account at all, then strode past him toward the remaining cucumbers. Here she knelt, snatched one from its vine, and began to munch. The old man in the GRAY POWER shirt marched to the edge of the garden and then only stood there awhile like a robot that has finally run out of juice. He was wearing tiny gold glasses—reading glasses, Clay thought—that gleamed in the early light. He looked to Clay like someone who had once been very smart and was now very stupid.

The three people in the kitchen crowded together, staring out the window, hardly breathing.

The old man’s gaze settled on George, who threw away a piece of pumpkin-shell, examined the rest, and then plowed his face back in and resumed his breakfast. Far from behaving aggressively toward the newcomers, he seemed not to notice them at all.

The old man limped forward, bent, and began to tug at a pumpkin the size of a soccer ball. He was less than three feet from George. Clay, remembering the pitched battle outside the T station, held his breath and waited.

He felt Alice grasp his arm. All the sleep-warmth had departed her hand. “What’s he going to do?” she asked in a low voice.

Clay only shook his head.

The old man tried to bite the pumpkin and only bumped his nose. It should have been funny but wasn’t. His glasses were knocked askew and he pushed them back into place. It was a gesture so normal that for a brief moment Clay felt all but positive that he was the one who was crazy.

“Goom!” cried the woman in the tattered blouse, and threw away her half-eaten cucumber. She had spied a few late tomatoes and crawled toward them with her hair hanging in her face. The seat of her pants was badly soiled.

The old man had spied the ornamental wheelbarrow. He took his pumpkin to it, then seemed to register George, sitting there beside it. He looked at him, head cocked. George gestured with one orange-coated hand at the wheelbarrow, a gesture Clay had seen a thousand times.

“Be my guest,” Tom murmured. “I’ll be damned.”

The old man fell on his knees in the garden, a movement that obviously caused him considerable pain. He grimaced, raised his lined face to the brightening sky, and uttered a chuffing grunt. Then he lifted the pumpkin over the wheel. He studied the line of descent for several moments, elderly biceps trembling, and brought the pumpkin down, smashing it open. It fell in two meaty halves. What happened next happened fast. George dropped his own mostly eaten pumpkin in his lap, rocked forward, grabbed the old man’s head in his big, orange-stained hands, and twisted it. They heard the crack of the old man’s breaking neck even through the glass. His long white hair flew. His small spectacles disappeared into what Clay thought were beets. His body spasmed once, then went limp. George dropped it. Alice began to scream and Tom covered her mouth with his hand. Her eyes, bulging with terror, peered over the top of it. Outside in the garden, George picked up a fresh chunk of pumpkin and began calmly to eat.

The woman in the shredded blouse looked around for a moment, casually, then plucked another tomato and bit into it. Red juice ran from her chin and trickled down the dirty line of her throat. She and George sat there in Tom McCourt’s backyard garden, eating vegetables, and for some reason the name of one of his favorite paintings popped into Clay’s mind: The Peaceable Kingdom.

He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until Tom looked at him bleakly and said: “Not anymore.”