Cell: A Novel by Stephen King

from Alice to Clay, and Clay saw that the upper lip beneath the mustache was trembling slightly. “Shall we go?”
    “Yes,” Clay said.
    “Wow,” Alice said, once they were walking toward the Salem Street ramp again, Mister Big’s Giant Discount Liquor falling behind them. “You grew up with someone like that?”
    “My mother and both of her sisters,” Tom said. “First N.E. Church of Christ the Redeemer. They took Jesus as their personal savior, and the church took them as its personal pigeons.”
    “Where is your mother now?” Clay asked.
    Tom glanced at him briefly. “Heaven. Unless they rooked her on that one, too. I’m pretty sure the bastards did.”
     
    5
    Near the stop sign at the foot of the ramp, two men were fighting over a keg of beer. If forced to guess, Clay would have said it had probably been liberated from Mister Big’s Giant Discount Liquor. Now it lay forgotten against the guardrails, dented and leaking foam, while the two men—both brawny and both bleeding—battered each other with their fists. Alice shrank against him, and Clay put his arm around her, but there was something almost reassuring about these brawlers. They were angry—enraged—but not crazy. Not like the people back in the city.
    One of them was bald and wearing a Celtics jacket. He hit the other a looping overhand blow that mashed his opponent’s lips and knocked him flat. When the man in the Celtics jacket advanced on the downed man, the downed man scrambled away, then got up, still backing off. He spat blood. “Take it, ya fuck!” he yelled in a thick, weepy Boston accent. “Hope it chokes ya!”
    The bald man in the Celtics jacket made as if to charge him, and the other went running up the ramp toward Route One. Celtics Jacket started to bend down for his prize, registered Clay, Alice, and Tom, and straightened up again. It was three to one, he had a black eye, and blood was trickling down the side of his face from a badly torn earlobe, but Clay saw no fear in that face, although he had only the diminishing light of the Revere fire to go by. He thought his grandfather would have said the guy’s Irish was up, and certainly that went with the big green shamrock on the back of his jacket.
    “The fuck you lookin at?” he asked.
    “Nothing—just going by you, if that’s all right,” Tom said mildly. “I live on Salem Street.”
    “You can go to Salem Street or hell, far as I’m concerned,” the bald man in the Celtics jacket said. “Still a free country, isn’t it?”
    “Tonight?” Clay said. “Too free.”
    The bald man thought it over and then laughed, a humorless double ha-ha. “The fuck happened? Any-a youse know?”
    Alice said, “It was the cell phones. They made people crazy.”
    The bald man picked up the keg. He handled it easily, tipping it so the leak stopped. “Fucking things,” he said. “Never cared to own one. Rollover minutes. The fuck’re those?”
    Clay didn’t know. Tom might’ve—he’d owned a cell phone, so it seemed possible—but Tom said nothing. Probably didn’t want to get into a long discussion with the bald man, and probably a good idea. Clay thought the bald man had some of the characteristics of an unexploded grenade.
    “City burning?” the bald man asked. “Is, isn’t it?”
    “Yes,” Clay said. “I don’t think the Celtics will be playing at the Fleet this year.”
    “They ain’t shit, anyway,” the man said. “Doc Rivers couldn’t coach a PAL team.” He stood watching them, the keg on his shoulder, blood running down the side of his face. Yet now he seemed peaceable enough, almost serene. “Go on,” he said. “But I wouldn’t stay this close to the city for long. It’s gonna get worse before it gets better. There’s gonna be a lot more fires, for one thing. You think everybody who hightailed it north remembered to turn off the gas stove? I fuckin doubt it.”
    The three of them started walking, then Alice stopped. She pointed to the keg.