Cell by Stephen King

Author:Stephen King [King, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3, pdf
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1986-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

20

They slept until one in the afternoon. Then, after confirming that the body detail had finished its work and gone to join the rest of the foragers, they went down to the fieldstone pillars marking the entrance to Gaiten Academy. Alice had scoffed at Clay’s idea that he and Tom should do this on their own. “Never mind that Batman and Robin crap,” she said.

“Oh my, I always wanted to be the Boy Wonder,” Tom said with a trace of a lisp, but when she gave him a humorless look, her sneaker (now beginning to look a bit tattered) clasped in one hand, he wilted. “Sorry.”

“You can go across to the gas station on your own,” she said. “That much makes sense. But the rest of us will stand lookout on the other side.”

The Head had suggested that Jordan should stay behind at the Lodge. Before the boy could respond—and he looked ready to do so hotly—Alice asked, “How are your eyes, Jordan?”

He had given her a smile, once more accompanied by the slightly starry look. “Good. Fine.”

“And you’ve played video games? The ones where you shoot?”

“Sure, a ton.”

She handed him her pistol. Clay could see him quiver slightly, like a tapped tuning fork, when their fingers touched. “If I tell you to point and shoot—or if Headmaster Ardai tells you—will you do it?”

“Sure.”

Alice had looked at Ardai with a mixture of defiance and apology. “We need every hand.”

The Head had given in, and now here they were and there was the Academy Grove Citgo, on the other side of the street and just a little way back toward town. From here the other, slightly smaller, sign was easy to read: academy lp gas. The single car standing at the pumps with its driver’s door open already had a dusty, long-deserted look. The gas station’s big plate-glass window was broken. Off to the right, parked in the shade of what had to be one of northern New England’s few surviving elm trees, were two trucks shaped like giant propane bottles. Written on the side of each were the words Academy LP Gas and Serving Southern New Hampshire Since 1982.

There was no sign of foraging phone-crazies on this part of Academy Avenue, and although most of the houses Clay could see had shoes on their front stoops, several did not. The rush of refugees seemed to be drying up. Too early to tell, he cautioned himself.

“Sir? Clay? What’s that?” Jordan asked. He was pointing to the middle of the Avenue—which of course was still Route 102, although that was easy to forget on this sunny, quiet afternoon where the closest sounds were birds and the rustle of the wind in the leaves. There was something written in bright pink chalk on the asphalt, but from where they were, Clay couldn’t make it out. He shook his head.

“Are you ready?” he asked Tom.

“Sure,” Tom said. He was trying to sound casual, but a pulse beat rapidly on the side of his unshaven throat.

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