Read Online Cell: A Novel by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page B

you even overhear a call.” He was thinking of Pixie Dark. “But the insidious thing is that when people see things going wrong all around them—”
    “Their first impulse is to reach for their cell phones and try to find out what’s causing it,” Tom said.
    “Yeah,” Clay said. “I saw people doing it.”
    Tom looked at him bleakly. “So did I.”
    “What all this has to do with you leaving the safety of the hotel, especially with dark coming on, I don’t know,” Mr. Ricardi said.
    As if in answer, there came another explosion. It was followed by half a dozen more, marching off to the southeast like the diminishing footsteps of a giant. From above them came another thud, and a faint cry of rage.
    “I don’t think the crazy ones will have the brains to leave the city any more than that guy up there can find his way to the stairs,” Clay said.
    For a moment he thought the look on Tom’s face was shock, and then he realized it was something else. Amazement, maybe. And dawning hope. “Oh, Christ,” he said, and actually slapped the side of his face with one hand. “They won’t leave. I never thought of that.”
    “There might be something else,” Alice said. She was biting her lip and looking down at her hands, which were working together in a restless knot. She forced herself to look up at Clay. “It might actually be safer to go after dark.”
    “Why’s that, Alice?”
    “If they can’t see you—if you can get behind something, if you can hide—they forget about you almost right away.”
    “What makes you think that, honey?” Tom asked.
    “Because I hid from the man who was chasing me,” she said in a low voice. “The guy in the yellow shirt. This was just before I saw you. I hid in an alley. Behind one of those Dumpster thingies? I was scared, because I thought there might not be any way back out if he came in after me, but it was all I could think of to do. I saw him standing at the mouth of the alley, looking around, walking around and around—walking the worry-circle, my grampa would say—and at first I thought he was playing with me, you know? Because he had to’ve seen me go into the alley, I was only a few feet ahead of him… just a few feet… almost close enough to grab…” Alice began to tremble. “But once I was in there, it was like… I dunno…”
    “Out of sight, out of mind,” Tom said. “But if he was that close, why did you stop running?”
    “Because I couldn’t anymore,” Alice said. “I just couldn’t. My legs were like rubber, and I felt like I was going to shake myself apart from the inside. But it turned out I didn’t have to run, anyway. He walked the worry-circle a few more times, muttering that crazy talk, and then just walked off. I could hardly believe it. I thought he had to be trying to fake me out… but at the same time I knew he was too crazy for anything like that.” She glanced briefly at Clay, then back down at her hands again. “My problem was running into him again. I should have stuck with you guys the first time. I can be pretty stupid sometimes.”
    “You were sca—” Clay began, and then the biggest explosion yet came from somewhere east of them, a deafening KER-WHAM! that made them all duck and cover their ears. They heard the window in the lobby shatter.
    “My… God, ” Mr. Ricardi said. His wide eyes underneath that bald head made him look to Clay like Little Orphan Annie’s mentor, Daddy Warbucks. “That might have been the new Shell superstation they put in over on Kneeland. The one all the taxis and the Duck Boats use. It was the right direction.”
    Clay had no idea if Ricardi was right, he couldn’t smell burning gasoline (at least not yet), but his visually trained mind’s eye could see a triangle of city concrete now burning like a propane torch in the latening day.
    “Can a modern city burn?” he asked Tom. “One made mostly of concrete and metal and glass? Could it burn the way Chicago did after Mrs.