Cell

by Stephen King

  "Stop it," he whispered, and focused on the note. It was better spelled and a little better composed, but there was no mistaking the agony in it.

  Oct 3

  Dear Dad,

  I hope you are alive & get this. Me & Mitch made it okay but Hughie Darden got George, I think he killed him. Me & Mitch just outran faster.

  I felt like it was my fault but Mitch, he said how could you know he was just a Phoner like the others its not your fault.

  Daddy there is worse. Mom is one of them, I saw her with one of the "flocks" today. (That is what they call them, flocks.) She doesnt look as bad as some but I know if I went out there she wouldnt even no me and would kill me soon as look at me. IF YOU SEE HER DON'T BE FOOLED, I'M SORRY BUT ITS TRUE.

  We're going to Kashwak (its up north) tomorow or next day, Mitch's mom is here I could kill him I'm so ennveous. Daddy I know you dont have a cell phone and everyone knows about Kashwak how it's a safe place. If you get this note PLEASE COME GET ME.

  I love you with all my Heart,

  Your Son,

  John Gavin Riddell

  Even after the news about Sharon, Clay was doing all right until he got to I love you with all my Heart. Even then he might have been all right if not for that capital H. He kissed his twelve-year-old son's signature, looked at the bulletin board through eyes that had become untrustworthy--things doubled, tripled, then shivered completely apart--and let out a hoarse cry of pain. Tom and Jordan came running.

  "What, Clay?" Tom said. "What is it?" He saw the sheet of paper--a ruled yellow page from a legal pad--and slipped it out of Clay's hand. He and Jordan scanned it quickly.

  "I'm going to Kashwak," Clay said hoarsely.

  "Clay, that's probably not such a hot idea," Jordan said cautiously. "Considering, you know, what we did at Gaiten Academy."

  "I don't care. I'm going to Kashwak. I'm going to find my son."

  6

  The refugees who had taken shelter in the Kent Pond Town Hall had left plenty of supplies behind when they decamped, presumably en masse, for TR-90 and Kashwak. Clay, Tom, and Jordan made a meal of canned chicken salad on stale bread, with canned fruit salad for dessert.

  As they were finishing, Tom leaned over to Jordan and murmured something. The boy nodded. The two of them got up. "Would you excuse us for a few minutes, Clay? Jordan and I need to have a little talk."

  Clay nodded. While they were gone, he cracked another fruit salad cup and read Johnny's letter over for the ninth and tenth times. He was already well on the way to having it memorized. He could remember Alice's death just as clearly, but that now seemed to have happened in another life, and to a different version of Clayton Riddell. An earlier draft, as it were.

  He finished his meal and stowed the letter away just as Tom and Jordan returned from the hall, where they had held what he supposed lawyers had called a sidebar, back in the days when there were lawyers. Tom once more had his arm around Jordan's narrow shoulders. Neither of them looked happy, but both looked composed.

  "Clay," Tom began, "we've talked it over, and--"

  "You don't want to go with me. Perfectly understandable."

  Jordan said, "I know he's your son and all, but--"

  "And you know he's all I've got left. His mother..." Clay laughed, a single humorless bark. "His mother. Sharon. It's ironic, really. After all the worry I put in about Johnny getting a blast from that goddam little red rattlesnake. If I had to pick one, I would have picked her." There, it was out. Like a chunk of meat that had been caught in his throat and was threatening to block his windpipe. "And you know how that makes me feel? Like I offered to make a deal with the devil, and the devil actually came through for me."

  Tom ignored this. When he spoke, he did so carefully, as if he were afraid of setting Clay off like an unexploded land mine. "They hate us. They started off hating everyone and progressed to just hating us. Whatever's going on up there in Kashwak, if it's their idea, it can't be good."

  "If they're rebooting to some higher level, they may get to a live-and-let-live plane," Clay said. All of this was pointless, surely they both must see that. He had to go.

  "I doubt it," Jordan said. "Remember that stuff about the chute leading to the slaughterhouse?"

  "Clay, we're normies and that's strike one," Tom said. "We torched one of their flocks. That's strike two and strike three combined. Live and let live won't apply to us."

  "Why should it?" Jordan added. "The Raggedy Man says we're insane."

  "And not to be touched," Clay said. "So I should be fine, right?"

  After that there didn't seem to be any more to say.

  7

  Tom and Jordan had decided to strike out due west, across New Hampshire and into Vermont, putting KASHWAK=NO-FO at their backs--and over the horizon--as soon as possible. Clay said that Route 11, which made an elbow-bend at Kent Pond, would serve them both as a starting-point. "It'll take me north to 160," he said, "and you guys can follow it all the way to Laconia, in the middle of New Hampshire. It's not exactly a direct route, but what the hell--you don't exactly have a plane to catch, have you?"

  Jordan dug the heels of his hands into his eyes, rubbed them, then brushed the hair back from his forehead, a gesture Clay had come to know well--it signaled tiredness and distraction. He would miss it. He would miss Jordan. And Tom even more.

  "I wish Alice was still here," Jordan said. "She'd talk you out of this."

  "She wouldn't," Clay said. Still, he wished with all his heart that Alice could have had her chance. He wished with all his heart that Alice could have had her chance at a lot of things. Fifteen was no age at which to die.

  "Your current plans remind me of act four in Julius Caesar," Tom said. "In act five, everyone falls on their swords." They were now making their way around (and sometimes over) the stalled cars jamming Pond Street. The emergency lights of the Town Hall were slowly receding behind them. Ahead was the dead traffic light marking the center of town, swaying in a slight breeze.

  "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."

  8

  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.

  "And left a lot of melted boomboxes on your doorstep," Clay said.

  "Some were melted," Denise said. "Mostly what we got were bits and pieces." She smiled. It was a thin smile. "That was okay. Their taste in music sucks."

  "You call him the President of Harvard, we call him the Raggedy Man," Tom said. He had set his plate aside and opened his pack. He rummaged and brought out the drawing Clay had made on the day the Head had been forced to kill himself. Denise's eyes got round. She passed the drawing to Ray Huizenga, who whistled.

  Dan took it last and looked up at Tom with new respect. "You drew this?"

  Tom pointed to Clay.

  "You're very talented," Dan said.

  "I took a course once," Clay said. "Draw Fluffy." He turned to Tom, who also kept their maps in his pack. "How far is it between Gaiten and Nashua?"

  "Thirty miles, tops."

  Clay nodded and turned back to Dan Hartwick. "And did he speak to you? The guy in the red hoodie?"

  Dan looked at Denise and she looked away. Ray turned back to his little cooker--presumably to shut it down and pack it up--and Clay understood. "Which one of you did he speak through?"

  "Me," Dan said. "It was horrible. Have you experienced it?"

  "Yeah. You can stop it from happening, but not if you want to know what's on his mind. Does he do it to show how strong he is, do you think?"

  "Probably," Dan said, "but I don't think that's all. I don't think they can talk. They can vocalize, and I'm sure they think--although not as they did, it would be a terrible mistake to think of them as having human thoughts--but I don't think they can actually speak words."

  "Yet," Jordan said.

  "Yet," Dan agreed. He glanced at his watch, and that prompted Clay to look at his own. It was already quarter to three.

  "He told us to go north," Ray said. "He told us Kashwak No-Fo. He said our flock-burnin days were over because they were settin up guards--"

  "Yes, we saw some in Rochester," Tom said.

  "And you've seen plenty of Kashwak No-Fo signs."

  They nodded.

  "Purely as a sociologist, I began to question those signs," Dan said. "Not how they began--I'm sure the first No-Fo signs were posted soon after the Pulse, by survivors who'd decided a place like that, where there was no cell phone coverage, would be the best place on earth to go. What I questioned was how the idea--and the graffiti--could spread so quickly in a cata-strophically fragmented society where all normal forms of communication--other than my mouth to your ear, of course--had broken down. T
he answer seemed clear, once one admitted that a new form of communication, available to only one group, had entered the picture."

  "Telepathy." Jordan almost whispered the word. "Them. The phoners. They want us to go north to Kashwak." He turned his frightened eyes to Clay. "It really is a frigging slaughterhouse chute. Clay, you can't go up there! This is all the Raggedy Man's idea!"

  Before Clay could respond, Dan Hartwick was speaking again. He did it with a teacher's natural assumptions: lecturing was his responsibility, interruption his privilege.

  "I'm afraid I really must hurry this along, sorry. We have something to show you--something the President of Harvard has demanded we show you, actually--"

  "In your dreams, or in person?" Tom asked.

  "Our dreams," Denise said quietly. "We've only seen him once in person since we burned the flock in Nashua, and that was at a distance."

  "Checkin up on us," Ray said. "That's what I think."

  Dan waited with a look of exasperated patience for this exchange to conclude. When it had, he resumed. "We were willing to comply, since this was on our way--"

  "You're going north, then?" Clay was the one to interrupt this time.

  Dan, looking more exasperated now, flicked another quick glance at his watch. "If you look at that route-sign closely, you'll see that it offers a choice. We intend to go west, not north."

  "Fuckin right," Ray muttered. "I may be stupid, but I'm not crazy."

  "What I show you will be for our purposes rather than theirs," Dan said. "And by the way, talking about the President of Harvard--or the Raggedy Man, if you prefer--showing up in person is probably a mistake. Maybe a bad one. He's really no more than a pseudopod that the group mind, the overflock, puts out front to do business with ordinary normies and special insane normies like us. I theorize that there are overflocks all over the world now, and each may have put forward such a pseudopod. Maybe even more than one. But don't make the mistake of thinking that when you're talking to your Raggedy Man you're talking to an actual man. You're talking to the flock."