Cell: A Novel

by Stephen King

  “Get up!” That was Tom, and he thought Tom was screaming, but his voice seemed to be coming from a mile away. He felt Tom’s delicate, long-fingered hands yanking at his arm. Then Alice was there, too. Alice was yanking on his other arm, and she was glaring in the light. He could see the sneaker dancing and bobbing from its string on her wrist. She was spattered with blood, bits of cloth, and gobbets of smoking flesh.

  Clay scrambled up, then went back to one knee, and Alice hauled him up again by main force. From behind them, propane roared like a dragon. And here came Jordan, with the Head tottering along right behind him, his face rosy and every wrinkle running with sweat.

  “No, Jordan, no, just get him out of the way!” Tom yelled, and Jordan pulled the Head aside for them, gripping the old man grimly around the waist when he tottered. A burning torso with a ring in its navel landed at Alice’s feet and she booted it off the ramp. Five years of soccer, Clay remembered her saying. A blazing piece of shirt landed on the back of her head and Clay swept it aside before it could set her hair on fire.

  At the top of the ramp, a blazing truck tire with half a sheared-off axle still attached leaned against the last row of reserved seats. If it had landed blocking their way, they might have cooked—the Head almost certainly would have. As it was, they were able to slide past, holding their breath against billows of oily smoke. A moment later they were lurching through the turnstile, Jordan on one side of the Head and Clay on the other, the two of them almost carrying the old man along. Clay had his ear boxed twice by the Head’s flailing cane, but thirty seconds after passing the tire they were standing beneath Tonney Arch, looking back at the huge column of fire rising above the bleachers and center press box with identical expressions of stupefied disbelief.

  A blazing rag of Homecoming bunting floated down to the pavement next to the main ticket booth, trailing a few sparks before coming to rest.

  “Did you know that would happen?” Tom asked. His face was white around the eyes, red across the forehead and cheeks. Half his mustache appeared to have been singed off. Clay could hear his voice, but it sounded distant. Everything did. It was as if his ears had been packed with cotton balls, or the shooter’s plugs Beth Nickerson’s husband Arnie had no doubt made her wear when he took her to their favorite target-range. Where they’d probably shot with their cell phones clipped to one hip and their pagers to the other.

  “Did you know?” Tom attempted to shake him, got nothing but a piece of his shirt, and tore it all the way down the front.

  “Fuck no, are you insane?” Clay’s voice was beyond hoarse, beyond parched; it sounded baked. “You think I would have stood there with a pistol if I’d known? If it hadn’t been for that concrete barrier, we would have been cut in two. Or vaporized.”

  Incredibly, Tom began to grin. “I tore your shirt, Batman.”

  Clay felt like knocking his head off. Also like hugging and kissing him just because he was still alive.

  “I want to go back to the Lodge,” Jordan said. The fear in his voice was unmistakable.

  “By all means let us remove to a safe distance,” the Head agreed. He was trembling badly, his eyes fixed on the inferno rising above the Arch and the bleachers. “Thank God the wind’s blowing toward Academy Slope.”

  “Can you walk, sir?” Tom asked.

  “Thank you, yes. If Jordan will assist me, I’m sure I can walk as far as the Lodge.”

  “We got them,” Alice said. She was wiping splatters of gore almost absently from her face, leaving smears of blood. Her eyes were like nothing Clay had ever seen except in a few photographs and some inspired comic art from the 1950s and ‘60s. He remembered going to a comics convention once, only a kid himself then, and listening to Wallace Wood talk about trying to draw something he called Panic Eye. Now Clay was seeing it in the face of a fifteen-year-old suburban schoolgirl.

  “Alice, come on,” he said. “We have to go back to the Lodge and get our shit together. We have to get out of here.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he had to say them again and hear if they had the ring of truth. The second time they sounded more than true; they sounded scared.

  She might not have heard. She looked exultant. Stuffed with triumph. Sick with it, like a kid who has eaten too much Halloween candy on the way home. The pupils of her eyes were full of fire. “Nothing could live through that.”

  Tom gripped Clay’s arm. It hurt the way a sunburn hurt. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I think we made a mistake,” Clay said.

  “Is it like in the gas station?” Tom asked him. Behind his crooked spectacles, his eyes were sharp. “When the man and woman were fighting over the damn Tw—”

  “No, I just think we made a mistake,” Clay said. Actually, it was stronger than that. He knew they had made a mistake. “Come on. We have to go tonight.”

  “If you say so, okay,” Tom said. “Come on, Alice.”

  She went with them a little way down the path toward the Lodge, where they had left a pair of gas lanterns burning in the big bay window, then turned back for another look. The press box was on fire now, and the bleachers. The stars over the soccer field were gone; even the moon was nothing but a ghost dancing a wild jig in the heat-haze above that fierce gas-jet. “They’re dead, they’re gone, they’re crispy,” she said. “Burn, baby, b—”

  That was when the cry rose, only now it wasn’t coming from Glen’s Falls or Littleton ten miles away. It was coming from right behind them. Nor was there anything spectral or wraithlike about it. It was a cry of agony, the scream of something—a single entity, and aware, Clay was certain of it—that had awakened from deep sleep to find it was burning alive.

  Alice shrieked and covered her ears, her eyes bulging in the firelight.

  “Take it back!” Jordan said, grasping the Head’s wrist. “Sir, we have to take it back!”

  “Too late, Jordan,” Ardai said.

  24

  Their knapsacks were a little plumper as they leaned against the front door of Cheatham Lodge an hour later. There were a couple of shirts in each one, plus bags of trail-mix, juice-boxes, and packets of Slim Jims as well as batteries and spare flashlights. Clay had harried Tom and Alice into sweeping their possessions together as quickly as possible, and now he was the one who kept darting into the living room to steal looks out the big window.

  The gas-jet over there was finally starting to burn low, but the bleachers were still blazing and so was the press box. Tonney Arch itself had caught and glared in the night like a horseshoe in a smithy. Nothing that had been on that field could still be alive—Alice had been right about that much, surely—but twice on their return to the Lodge (the Head shambling like an old drunk in spite of their best efforts to support him), they had heard those ghostly cries coming down the wind from other flocks. Clay told himself he didn’t hear anger in those cries, it was just his imagination—his guilty imagination, his murderer’s imagination, his mass murderer’s imagination—but he didn’t completely believe it.

  It had been a mistake, but what else could they have done? He and Tom had felt their gathering power just that afternoon, had seen it, and that had been only two of them, just two. How could they have let that go on? Just let it grow?

  “Damned if you do, damned if you stand pat,” he said under his breath, and turned from the window. He didn’t even know how long he’d been looking at the burning stadium and resisted the urge to check his watch. It would be easy to give in to the panic-rat, he was close to it now, and if he gave in, it would travel to the others quickly. Starting with Alice. Alice had managed to get herself back under some sort of control, but it was thin. Thin enough to read a newspaper through, his bingo-playing mother might have said. Although a kid herself, Alice had managed to keep herself shiny-side up mostly for the other kid’s sake, so he wouldn’t give way entirely.

  The other kid. Jordan.

  Clay hurried back into the front hall, noted there was still no fourth pack by the door, and saw Tom comi
ng down the stairs. Alone.

  “Where’s the kid?” Clay asked. His ears had started to clear a little, but his voice still sounded too far away, and like a stranger’s. He had an idea that was going to continue for a while. “You were supposed to be helping him put some stuff together—Ardai said he brought a pack over with him from that dorm of his—”

  “He won’t come.” Tom rubbed the side of his face. He looked tired, sad, distracted. With half his mustache gone, he looked ludicrous as well.

  “What?”

  “Lower your voice, Clay. I don’t make the news, I just report it.”

  “Then tell me what you’re talking about, for Christ’s sake.”

  “He won’t go without the Head. He said, ‘You can’t make me.’ And if you’re really serious about going tonight, I believe he’s right.”

  Alice came tearing out of the kitchen. She had washed up, tied her hair back, and put on a new shirt—it hung almost to her knees—but her skin glowed with the same burn Clay felt on his own. He supposed they should count themselves lucky that they weren’t popping blisters.

  “Alice,” he began, “I need you to exercise your womanly powers over Jordan. He’s being—”

  She steamed past as if he hadn’t spoken, fell on her knees, seized her pack, and tore it open. He watched, perplexed, as she began to pull out the stuff inside. He looked at Tom and saw an expression of understanding and sympathy dawning on Tom’s face.

  “What?” Clay asked. “What, for chrissake?” He had felt an all too similar exasperated annoyance toward Sharon during the last year they’d actually lived together—had felt it often—and hated himself for having that pop up now, of all times. But dammit, another complication was the last thing they needed now. He ran his hands through his hair. “What?”

  “Look at her wrist,” Tom said.

  Clay looked. The dirty piece of shoestring was still there, but the sneaker was gone. He felt an absurd sinking in his stomach. Or maybe it wasn’t so absurd. If it mattered to Alice, he supposed it mattered. So what if it was just a sneaker?

  The spare T-shirt and sweatshirt she had packed (gaiten boosters’ club printed across the front) went flying. Batteries rolled. Her spare flashlight hit the tile floor and the lens-cover cracked. That was enough to convince Clay. This wasn’t a Sharon Riddell tantrum because they were out of hazelnut coffee or Chunky Monkey ice cream; this was unvarnished terror.

  He went to Alice, knelt beside her, and took hold of her wrists. He could feel the seconds flying by, turning into minutes they should have been using to put this town behind them, but he could also feel the lightning sprint of her pulse under his fingers. And he could see her eyes. It wasn’t panic in them now but agony, and he realized she’d put everything in that sneaker: her mother and father, her friends, Beth Nickerson and her daughter, the Tonney Field inferno, everything.

  “It’s not in here!” she cried. “I thought I must have packed it, but I didn’t! I can’t find it anywhere!”

  “No, honey, I know.” Clay was still holding her wrists. Now he lifted the one with the shoelace around it. “Do you see?” He waited until he was sure her eyes had focused, then he flipped the ends beyond the knot, where there had been a second knot.

  “It’s too long now,” she said. “It wasn’t that long before.”

  Clay tried to remember the last time he’d seen the sneaker. He told himself it was impossible to remember a thing like that, given all that had been going on, then realized he could. Very clearly, too. It was when she’d helped Tom pull him up after the second truck had exploded. It had been dancing from its string then. She had been covered with blood, scraps of cloth, and little chunks of flesh, but the sneaker had still been on her wrist. He tried to remember if it was still there when she’d booted the burning torso off the ramp. He didn’t think so. Maybe that was hindsight, but he didn’t think so.

  “It came untied, honey,” he said. “It came untied and fell off.”

  “I lost it?” Her eyes, unbelieving. The first tears. “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure, yeah.”

  “It was my luck,” she whispered, the tears spilling over.

  “No,” Tom said, and put an arm around her. “We’re your luck.”

  She looked at him. “How do you know?”

  “Because you found us first,” Tom said. “And we’re still here.”

  She hugged them both and they stood that way for a while, the three of them, with their arms around each other in the hall with Alice’s few possessions scattered around their feet.

  25

  The fire spread to a lecture building the Head identified as Hackery Hall. Then, around four a.m., the wind dropped away and it spread no farther. When the sun came up, the Gaiten campus stank of propane, charred wood, and a great many burnt bodies. The bright sky of a perfect New England morning in October was obscured by a rising column of gray-black smoke. And Cheatham Lodge was still occupied. In the end it had been like dominoes: the Head couldn’t travel except by car, car travel was impossible, and Jordan would not go without the Head. Nor was Ardai able to persuade him. Alice, although resigned to the loss of her talisman, refused to go without Jordan. Tom would not go without Alice. And Clay was loath to go without the two of them, although he was horrified to find these newcomers in his life seemed at least temporarily more important than his own son, and although he continued to feel certain that they would pay a high price for what they’d done on Tonney Field if they stayed in Gaiten, let alone at the scene of the crime.

  He thought he might feel better about that last at daybreak, but he did not.

  The five of them watched and waited at the living room window, but of course nothing came out of the smoldering wreckage, and there was no sound but the low crackle of fire eating deep into the Athletic Department offices and locker rooms even as it finished off the bleachers above-ground. The thousand or so phone-crazies who had been roosting there were, as Alice had said, crispy. The smell of them was rich and stickin-your-throat awful. Clay had vomited once and knew the others had, as well—even the Head.

  We made a mistake, he thought again.

  “You guys should have gone on,” Jordan said. “We would have been all right—we were before, weren’t we, sir?”

  Headmaster Ardai ignored the question. He was studying Clay. “What happened yesterday when you and Tom were in that service station? I think something happened then to make you look as you do now.”

  “Oh? How do I look, sir?”

  “Like an animal that smells a trap. Did those two in the street see you?”

  “It wasn’t exactly that,” Clay said. He didn’t love being called an animal, but couldn’t deny that was what he was: oxygen and food in, carbon dioxide and shit out, pop goes the weasel.

  The Head had begun to rub restlessly at the left side of his midsection with one big hand. Like many of his gestures, Clay thought it had an oddly theatrical quality—not exactly phony, but meant to be seen at the back of the lecture hall. “Then what exactly was it?”

  And because protecting the others no longer seemed like an option, Clay told the Head exactly what they’d seen in the office of the Citgo station—a physical struggle over a box of stale treats that had suddenly turned into something else. He told about the fluttering papers, the ashes that had begun circling in the ashtray like water going down a bathtub drain, the keys jingling on the board, the nozzle that fell off the gas-pump.

  “I saw that,” Jordan said, and Alice nodded.

  Tom mentioned feeling short of breath, and Clay agreed. They both tried to explain the sense of something powerful building in the air.

  Clay said it was how things felt before a thunderstorm. Tom said the air just felt fraught, somehow. Too heavy.

  “Then he let her take a couple of the fucking things and it all went away,” Tom said. “The ashes stopped spinning, the keys stopped jingling, that thundery feeling went out of the air.” He looked to Clay for confirmation. Clay nodded.
<
br />   Alice said, “Why didn’t you tell us this before?”

  “Because it wouldn’t have changed anything,” Clay said. “We were going to burn the nest if we could, regardless.”

  “Yes,” Tom said.

  Jordan said suddenly, “You think the phone-crazies are turning into psionics, don’t you?”

  Tom said, “I don’t know what that word means, Jordan.”

  “People who can move things around just by thinking about it, for one thing. Or by accident, if their emotions get out of control. Only psionic abilities like telekinesis and levitation—”

  “Levitation?” Alice almost barked.

  Jordan paid no mind. “—are only branches. The trunk of the psionic tree is telepathy, and that’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it? The telepathy thing.”

  Tom’s fingers went to the place above his mouth where half of his mustache was gone and touched the reddened skin there. “Well, the thought has crossed my mind.” He paused, head cocked. “That might be witty. I’m not sure.”

  Jordan ignored this, as well. “Say that they are. Getting to be true telepaths, I mean, and not just zombies with a flocking instinct. So what? The Gaiten Academy flock is dead, and they died without a clue of who lit em up, because they died in whatever passes for sleep with them, so if you’re worrying that they telepathically faxed our names and descriptions to any of their buddies in the surrounding New England states, you can relax.”

  “Jordan—” the Head began, then winced. He was still rubbing his midsection.

  “Sir? Are you all right?”

  “Yes. Fetch my Zantac from the downstairs bathroom, would you? And a bottle of the Poland Spring water. There’s a good lad.”

  Jordan hurried away on the errand.

  “Not an ulcer, is it?” Tom asked.

  “No,” the Head replied. “It’s stress. An old… one cannot say friend… acquaintance?”

  “Your heart okay?” Alice asked, speaking in a low voice.

  “I suppose,” the Head agreed, and bared his teeth in a smile of disconcerting jollity. “If the Zantac doesn’t work, we may resuppose… but so far, the Zantac always has, and one doesn’t care to buy trouble when so much of it is on sale. Ah, Jordan, thank you.”