by Стивен Кинг
"Right," Clay said. He was smiling. "That's why the Raggedy Man let me keep this phone. He didn't know what I wanted it for—I'm not sure they exactly think, anyway—"
"Not like us, they don't," Jordan said. "And they never will."
"—but he didn't care, because he knew it wouldn't work. I couldn't even Pulse myself with it, because Kashwak equals no-fo. No-fo-me-me."
"Then why the smile?" Denise asked.
"Because I know something he doesn't," Clay said. "Something they don't." He turned to Jordan. "Can you drive?"
Jordan looked startled. "Hey, I'm twelve. I mean, hello?"
"You've never driven a go-kart? An ATV? A snowmobile?"
"Well, sure . . . there's a dirt go-kart track at this pitch-n-putt place outside Nashua, and once or twice . . ."
"That'll work. We're not talking about very far. Assuming, that is, they left the bus at the Parachute Drop. And I bet they did. I don't think they know how to drive any more than they know how to think."
Tom said, "Clay, have you lost your mind?"
"No," he said. "They may hold their mass flock-killer executions in that virtual stadium of theirs tomorrow, but we're not going to be part of it. We're getting out of here."
9
The little windows were thick, but dan's crowbar was a match for the glass. He, Tom, and Clay took turns with it, working until all the shards were knocked out. Then Denise took the sweater she'd been wearing and laid it over the bottom of the frame.
"You okay with this, Jordan?" Tom asked.
Jordan nodded. He was frightened—there was no color in his lips at all—but seemed composed. Outside, the phoners' lullaby music had cycled around to Pachelbel's Canon again—what Denise had called the sound of memories.
"I'm okay," Jordan said. "I will be, anyway. I think. Once I get going."
Clay said, "Tom might be able to squeeze through—"
Behind Jordan's shoulder, Tom looked at the small window, no more than eighteen inches wide, and shook his head.
"I'll be okay," Jordan said.
"All right. Tell it to me again."
"Go around and look in the back of the bus. Make sure there's explosives, but don't touch any of it. Look for the other cell phone."
"Right. Make sure it's on. And if it's not on—"
"I know, turn it on." Jordan gave Clay an I'm-no-dummy look. "Then start the motor—"
"No, don't get ahead of yourself—"
"Pull the driving seat forward so I can reach the pedals, then start the motor."
"Right."
"Drive between the Parachute Drop and the funhouse. Go super slow. I'll run over some pieces of the funhouse and they may break—snap under the tires—but don't let that stop me."
"Right on."
"Get as close to them as I can."
"Yes, that's right. Then come around back again, to this window. So the hall is between you and the explosion."
"What we hope will be an explosion," Dan said.
Clay could have done without this, but let it pass. He stooped and kissed Jordan on the cheek. "I love you, you know," he said.
Jordan hugged him briefly, fiercely. Then Tom. Then Denise.
Dan put out his hand, then said, "Oh, what the hell," and enfolded Jordan in a bearhug. Clay, who had never warmed very much to Dan Hartwick, liked him better for that.
10
Clay made a step with his hands and boosted jordan up. "Remember," he said, "it's going to be like a dive, only into hay instead of water. Hands up and out."
Jordan put his hands over his head, extending them through the broken window and into the night. His face underneath his thick fall of hair was paler than ever; the first red blemishes of adolescence stood out there like tiny burns. He was scared, and Clay didn't blame him. He was in for a ten-foot drop, and even with the hay, the landing was apt to be hard. Clay hoped Jordan would remember to keep his hands out and his head tucked; he'd do none of them any good lying beside Kashwakamak Hall with a broken neck.
"You want me to count three, Jordan?" he asked.
"Fuck, no! Just do it before I pee myself!"
"Then keep your hands out, go!" Clay cried, and thrust his locked hands upward. Jordan shot through the window and disappeared. Clay didn't hear him land; the music was too loud.
The others crowded up to the window, which was just above their heads. "Jordan?" Tom called. "Jordan, you there?"
For a moment there was nothing, and Clay was sure Jordan really had broken his neck. Then he said shakily, "I'm here. Jeez, that hurts. I croggled my elbow. The left one. That arm's all weird. Wait a minute . . ."
They waited. Denise took Clay's hand and squeezed it hard.
"It moves," Jordan said. "It's okay, I guess, but maybe I ought to see the school nurse."
They all laughed too hard.
Tom had tied the bus's ignition key to a double line of thread from his shirt, and the thread to the buckle of his belt. Now Clay laced his fingers together again and Tom stepped up. "I'm going to lower the key to you, Jordan. Ready?"
"Yeah."
Tom gripped the edge of the window, looked down, and then lowered his belt. "Okay, you got it," he said. "Now listen to me. All we ask is do it if you can. If you can't, no penalty minutes. Got that?"
"Yes."
"Go on, then. Scat." He watched a moment, then said, "He's on his way. God help him, he's a brave kid. Put me down."
11
Jordan had gone out on the side of the building away from the roosting flock. Clay, Tom, Denise, and Dan crossed the room to the midway side. The three men tipped the already vandalized snack machine over on its side and shoved it against the wall. Clay and Dan could easily see out the high windows by standing on it, Tom by standing on tiptoes. Clay added a crate so Denise could also see, praying she wouldn't topple off it and go into labor.
They saw Jordan cross to the edge of the sleeping multitude, stand there a minute as if debating, and then move off to his left. Clay thought he continued seeing movement long after his rational mind told him that Jordan must be gone, skirting the edge of the massive flock.
"How long will it take him to get back, do you think?" Tom asked.
Clay shook his head. He didn't know. It depended on so many variables—the size of the flock was only one of them.
"What if they looked in the back of the bus?" Denise asked.
"What ifJordy looks in the back of the bus and there's nothing there?" Dan asked, and Clay had to restrain himself from telling the man to keep his negative vibe to himself.
Time passed, giving itself up by inches. The little red light on the tip of the Parachute Drop blinked. Pachelbel once more gave way to Faurй and Faurй to Vivaldi. Clay found himself remembering the sleeping boy who had come spilling out of the shopping cart, how the man with him—probably not his father—had sat down with him at the side of the road and said Gregory kiss it, make it all better. He remembered the man with the rucksack listening to "Baby Elephant Walk" and saying Dodge had a good time, too. He remembered how, in the bingo tents of his childhood, the man with the microphone would invariably exclaim It's the sunshine vitamin! when he pulled B-12 out of the hopper with the dancing Ping-Pong balls inside. Even though the sunshine vitamin was D.
The time now gave itself up in what seemed quarter-inches, and Clay began losing hope. If they were going to hear the sound of the bus's engine, they should have heard it by now.
"It's gone wrong somehow," Tom said in a low voice.
"Maybe not," Clay said. He tried to keep his heart's heaviness out of his voice.
"No, Tommy's right," Denise said. She was on the verge of tears. "I love him to death, and he was ballsier than Lord Satan on his first night in hell, but if he was coming, he'd be on his way by now."
Dan's take was surprisingly positive. "We don't know what he might have run into. Just take a deep breath and try to put your imaginations on hold."
Clay tried that and failed. Now the seconds dripped by.
Schubert's "Ave Maria" boomed through the big concert speakers. He thought, Iwould sell my soul for some honest rock and roll —Chuck Berry doing "Oh, Carol," U2 doing "When Love Comes to Town" . . .
Outside, nothing but dark, and stars, and that one tiny red battery-driven light.
"Boost me up over there," Tom said, hopping down from the snack machine. "I'll squeeze through that window somehow and see if I can't go get him."
Clay began, "Tom, if I was wrong about there being explosives in the back of the bus—"
"Fuck the back of the bus and fuck the explosives!" Tom said, distraught. "I just want to find Jor—"
"Hey!" Dan shouted, and then: "Hey, all right! BABY-NOW!" He slammed one fist against the wall beside the window.
Clay turned and saw headlights had bloomed in the dark. A mist had begun to rise from the blanket of comatose bodies on the acres of mall, and the bus's headlights seemed to be shining through smoke. They flicked bright, then dim, then bright again, and Clay could see Jordan with brilliant clarity, sitting in the driver's seat of the minibus and trying to figure out which controls did which.
Now the headlights began to creep forward. High beams.
"Yeah, honey," Denise breathed. "Do it, my sweetheart." Standing on her crate, she grabbed Dan's hand on one side and Clay's on the other. "You're beautiful, just keep on coming."
The headlights jogged away from them, now illuminating the trees far to the left of the open space with its carpet of phoners.
"What's he doing?" Tom almost moaned.
"That's where the side of the funhouse takes a jog," Clay said. "It's all right." He hesitated. "I think it's all right." If his foot doesn't slip. If he doesn'tmix up the brake and the accelerator, run the bus into the side of the damn funhouse, and stick it there.
They waited, and the headlights swung back, spearing the side of Kashwakamak Hall on the dead level. And in the glare of the high beams, Clay saw why it had taken Jordan so long. Not all of the phoners were down. Dozens of them—the ones with bad programming, he assumed—were up and moving. They walked aimlessly toward any and every point of the compass, black silhouettes moving outward in expanding ripples, struggling to make their way over the bodies of the sleepers, stumbling, falling, getting up and walking on again while Schubert's "Ave" filled the night. One of them, a young man with a long red gash running across the middle of his forehead like a worry line, reached the Hall and felt his way along the side like a blind man.
"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.
They had installed it on the tip of the Parachute Drop.
12
Dan recrossed the hall, got up on the snack machine, and looked out. "They're three deep around the bus," he reported. "Four deep in front of the headlights. It's like they think there's some big pop star hiding inside. The ones they're standing on must be getting crushed." He turned to Clay and nodded at the dirty Motorola cell phone Clay was now holding. "If you're going to try this, I suggest you try it now, before one of them decides to get in and try driving the damn bus away."
