Cell: A Novel by Stephen King Page A

“Was that yours?”
    The bald man looked at her reasonably. “Ain’t no was at times like this, sweetie pie. Ain’t no was left. There’s just now and maybe-tomorrow. It’s mine now, and if there’s any left it’ll be mine maybe-tomorrow. Go on now. The fuck out.”
    “Seeya,” Clay said, and raised one hand.
    “Wouldn’t want to be ya,” the bald man replied, unsmiling, but he raised his own hand in return. They had passed the stop sign and were crossing to the far side of what Clay assumed was Salem Street when the bald man called after them again: “Hey, handsome!”
    Both Clay and Tom turned to look, then glanced at each other, amused. The bald guy with the keg was now only a dark shape on the rising ramp; he could have been a caveman carrying a club.
    “Where are the loonies now?” the bald guy asked. “You’re not gonna tell me they’re all dead, are ya? Cause I don’t fuckin believe it.”
    “That’s a very good question,” Clay said.
    “You’re fuckin-A right it is. Watch out for the little sweetie pie there.” And without waiting for them to reply, the man who’d won the battle of the beer keg turned and merged with the shadows.
     
    6
    “This is it,” Tom said no more than ten minutes later, and the moon emerged from the wrack of cloud and smoke that had obscured it for the last hour or so as if the little man with the spectacles and the mustache had just given the Celestial Lighting Director a cue. Its rays—silver now instead of that awful infected orange—illuminated a house that was either dark blue, green, or perhaps even gray; without the streetlights to help, it was hard to tell for sure. What Clay could tell for sure was that the house was trim and handsome, although maybe not as big as your eye first insisted. The moonlight aided in that deception, but it was mostly caused by the way the steps rose from Tom McCourt’s well-kept lawn to the only pillared porch on the street. There was a fieldstone chimney on the left. From above the porch, a dormer looked down on the street.
    “Oh, Tom, it’s beautiful!” Alice said in a too-rapturous voice. To Clay she sounded exhausted and bordering on hysteria. He himself didn’t think it beautiful, but it certainly looked like the home of a man who owned a cell phone and all the other twenty-first-century bells and whistles. So did the rest of the houses on this part of Salem Street, and Clay doubted if many of the residents had had Tom’s fantastic good luck. He looked around nervously. All the houses were dark—the power was out now—and they might have been deserted, except he seemed to feel eyes, surveying them.
    The eyes of crazies? Phone-crazies? He thought of Power Suit Woman and Pixie Light; of the lunatic in the gray pants and the shredded tie; the man in the business suit who had bitten the ear right off the side of the dog’s head. He thought of the naked man jabbing the car aerials back and forth as he ran. No, surveying was not in the phone-crazies’ repertoire. They just came at you. But if there were normal people holed up in these houses— some of them, anyway—where were the phone-crazies?
    Clay didn’t know.
    “I don’t know if I’d exactly call it beautiful,” Tom said, “but it’s still standing, and that’s good enough for me. I’d pretty well made up my mind that we’d get here and find nothing but a smoking hole in the ground.” He reached in his pocket and brought out a slim ring of keys. “Come on in. Be it ever so humble, and all that.”
    They started up the walk and had gone no more than half a dozen steps when Alice cried, “Wait!”
    Clay wheeled around, feeling both alarm and exhaustion. He thought he was beginning to understand combat fatigue a little. Even his adrenaline felt tired. But no one was there—no phone-crazies, no bald man with blood flowing down the side of his face from a shredded ear, not even a little old lady with the talkin apocalypse blues. Just Alice, down on one