Clay’s attention was attracted by the tinkle of an ice cream truck. It was
parked across from the Four Seasons Hotel (which was even grander than the
Copley Square) and next to the Boston Common, which ran along Boylston for
two or three blocks on this side of the street. The words mister softee
were printed in rainbow colors over a pair of dancing ice cream cones.
Three kids were clustered around the window, bookbags at their feet,
waiting to receive goodies. Behind them stood a woman in a pants suit with
a poodle on a leash and a couple of teenage girls in lowrider jeans with
iPods and earphones that were currently slung around their necks so they
could murmur together – earnestly, no giggles.
Clay stood behind them, turning what had been a little group into a short
line. He had bought his estranged wife a present; he would stop at Comix
Supreme on the way home and buy his son the new issue of Spider-Man; he
might as well treat himself, as well. He was bursting to tell Sharon his
news, but she’d be out of reach until she got home, three forty-five or
so. He thought he would hang around the Inn at least until he talked to
her, mostly pacing the confines of his small room and looking at his
latched-up portfolio. In the meantime, Mister Softee made an acceptable
diversion.
The guy in the truck served the three kids at the window, two Dilly Bars
and a monster chocolate-and-vanilla swirl sof’-serve cone for the big
spender in the middle, who was apparently paying for all of them. While he
fumbled a rat’s nest of dollar bills from the pocket of his fashionably
baggy jeans, the woman with the poodle and the power suit dipped into her
shoulder bag, came out with her cell phone – women in power suits would
no more leave home without their cell phones than without their AmEx cards
– and flipped it open. Behind them, in the park, a dog barked and someone
shouted. It did not sound to Clay like a happy shout, but when he looked
over his shoulder all he could see were a few strollers, a dog trotting
with a Frisbee in its mouth (weren’t they supposed to be on leashes in
there, he wondered), acres of sunny green and inviting shade. It looked
like a good place for a man who had just sold his first graphic novel – and
its sequel, both for an amazing amount of money – to sit and eat a
chocolate ice cream cone.
When he looked back, the three kids in the baggies were gone and the woman
in the power suit was ordering a sundae. One of the two girls behind her
had a peppermint-colored phone clipped to her hip, and the woman in the
power suit had hers screwed into her ear. Clay thought, as he almost
always did on one level of his mind or another when he saw a variation of
this behavior, that he was watching an act which would once have been
considered almost insufferably rude – yes, even while engaging in a small
bit of commerce with a total stranger – becoming a part of accepted
everyday behavior.
Put it in Dark Wanderer, sweetheart, Sharon said. The version of her he
kept in his mind spoke often and was bound to have her say. This was true
of the real-world Sharon as well, separation or no separation. Although
not on his cell phone. Clay didn’t own one.
The peppermint-colored phone played the opening notes of that Crazy Frog
tune that Johnny loved – was it called “Axel F”? Clay couldn’t remember,
perhaps because he had blocked it out. The girl to whom the phone belonged
snatched it off her hip and said, “Beth?” She listened, smiled, then said
to her companion, “It’s Beth.” Now the other girl bent forward and they
both listened, nearly identical pixie haircuts (to Clay they looked almost
like Saturday-morning cartoon characters, the Powerpuff Girls, maybe)
blowing together in the afternoon breeze.
“Maddy?” said the woman in the power suit at almost exactly the same time.
Her poodle was now sitting contemplatively at the end of its leash (the
leash was red, and dusted with glittery stuff), looking at the traffic on
Boylston Street. Across the way, at the Four Seasons, a doorman in a brown
uniform – they always seemed to be brown or blue – was waving, probably
for a taxi. A Duck Boat crammed with tourists sailed by, looking high and
out of place on dry land, the driver bawling into his loudhailer about
something historic. The two girls listening to the peppermint-colored
phone looked at each other and smiled at something they were hearing, but
still did not giggle.
“Maddy? Can you hear me? Can you -”
The woman in the power suit raised the hand holding the leash and plugged
a long-nailed finger into her free ear. Clay winced, fearing for her
eardrum. He imagined drawing her: the dog on the leash, the power suit,
the fashionably short hair … and one small trickle of blood from around
the finger in her ear. The Duck Boat just exiting the frame and the
doorman in the background, those things somehow lending the sketch its
verisimilitude. They would; it was just a thing you knew.
“Maddy, you’re breaking up! I just wanted to tell you I got my hair done
at that new … my hair? … MY …”
The guy in the Mister Softee truck bent down and held out a sundae cup.
From it rose a white Alp with chocolate and strawberry sauce coursing down
its sides. His beard-stubbly face was impassive. It said he’d seen it all
before. Clay was sure he had, most of it twice. In the park, someone
screamed. Clay looked over his shoulder again, telling himself that had to
be a scream of joy. At three o’clock in the afternoon, a sunny afternoon
on the Boston Common, it pretty much had to be a scream of joy. Right?
The woman said something unintelligible to Maddy and flipped her cell
phone closed with a practiced flip of the wrist. She dropped it back into
her purse, then just stood there, as if she had forgotten what she was
doing or maybe even where she was.
“That’s four-fifty,” said the Mister Softee guy, still patiently holding
out the ice cream sundae. Clay had time to think how fucking expensive
everything was in the city. Perhaps the woman in the power suit thought
so, too – that, at least, was his first surmise – because for a moment
more she still did nothing, merely looked at the cup with its mound of ice
cream and sliding sauce as if she had never seen such a thing before.
Then there came another cry from the Common, not a human one this time but
something between a surprised yelp and a hurt yowl. Clay turned to look
and saw the dog that had been trotting with the Frisbee in its mouth. It
was a good-sized brown dog, maybe a Labrador, he didn’t really know dogs,
when he needed to draw one he got a book and copied a picture. A man in a
business suit was down on his knees beside this one and had it in a
necklock and appeared to be – surely I’m not seeing what I think I’m
seeing, Clay thought – chewing on its ear. Then the dog howled again and
tried to spurt away. The man in the business suit held it firm, and yes,
that was the dog’s ear in the man’s mouth, and as Clay continued to watch,
the man tore it off the side of the dog’s head. This time the dog uttered
an almost human scream, and a number of ducks which had been floating on a
nearby pond took flight, squawking.
“Rast!” someone cried from behind Clay. It sounded like rast. It might
have been rat or roast, but later experience made him lean toward rast:
not a word at all but merely an inarticulate sound of aggression.
He turned back toward the ice cream truck in time to see Power Suit Woman
lunge through the serving window in an effort to grab Mister Softee Guy.
She managed to snag the loose folds at the front of his white tunic, but
his single startle-step backward was enough to break her hold. Her high
heels briefly left the sidewalk, and he heard the rasp of cloth and the
clink of buttons as the front of her jacket ran first up the little jut of
the serving window’s counter and then back down. The sundae tumbled from
view. Clay saw a smear of ice cream and sauce on Power Suit Woman’s left
wrist and forearm as her high heels clacked back to the sidewalk. She
staggered, knees bent. The closed-off, well-bred, out-in-public look on
her face – what Clay thought of as your basic on-the-street-no-face look
– had been replaced by a convulsive snarl that shrank her eyes to slits
and exposed both sets of teeth. Her upper lip had turned completely inside
out, revealing a pink velvet lining as intimate as a vulva. Her poodle ran
into the street, trailing its red leash with the hand-loop in the end. A
black limo came along and ran the poodle down before it got halfway
across. Fluff at one moment; guts at the next.
Poor damn thing was probably yapping in doggy heaven before it knew it was
dead, Clay thought. He understood in some clinical way he was in shock,
but that in no way changed the depth of his amazement. He stood there with
his portfolio hanging from one hand and his brown shopping bag hanging
from the other and his mouth hanging open.
Somewhere – it sounded like maybe around the corner on Newbury Street – something
exploded.
The two girls had exactly the same haircut above their iPod headphones,
but the one with the peppermint-colored cell phone was blond and her
friend was brunette; they were Pixie Light and Pixie Dark. Now Pixie Light
dropped her phone on the sidewalk, where it shattered, and seized Power
Suit Woman around the waist. Clay assumed (so far as he was capable of
assuming anything in those moments) that she meant to restrain Power Suit
Woman either from going after Mister Softee Guy again or from running into
the street after her dog. There was even a part of his mind that applauded
the girl’s presence of mind. Her friend, Pixie Dark, was backing away from
the whole deal, small white hands clasped between her breasts, eyes wide.
Clay dropped his own items, one on each side, and stepped forward to help
Pixie Light. On the other side of the street – he saw this only in his
peripheral vision – a car swerved and bolted across the sidewalk in front
of the Four Seasons, causing the doorman to dart out of the way. There
were screams from the hotel’s forecourt. And before Clay could begin
helping Pixie Light with Power Suit Woman, Pixie Light had darted her
pretty little face forward with snakelike speed, bared her undoubtedly
strong young teeth, and battened on Power Suit Woman’s neck. There was an
enormous jet of blood. The pixie-girl stuck her face in it, appeared to
bathe in it, perhaps even drank from it (Clay was almost sure she did),
then shook Power Suit Woman back and forth like a doll. The woman was
taller and had to outweigh the girl by at least forty pounds, but the girl
shook her hard enough to make the woman’s head flop back and forth and
send more blood flying. At the same time the girl cocked her own
blood-smeared face up to the bright blue October sky and howled in what
sounded like triumph.
She’s mad, Clay thought. Totally mad.
Pixie Dark cried out, “Who are you? What’s happening?”
At the sound of her friend’s voice, Pixie Light whipped her bloody head
around. Blood dripped from the short dagger-points of hair overhanging her
forehead. Eyes like white lamps peered from blood-dappled sockets.
Pixie Dark looked at Clay, her eyes wide. “Who are you?” she
repeated … and then: “Who am I?”
Pixie Light dropped Power Suit Woman, who collapsed to the sidewalk with
her chewed-open carotid artery still spurting, then leaped at the girl
with whom she had been chummily sharing a phone only a few moments before.
Clay didn’t think. If he had thought, Pixie Dark might have had her throat
opened like the woman in the power suit. He didn’t even look. He simply
reached down and to his right, seized the top of the small treasures
shopping bag, and swung it at the back of Pixie Light’s head as she leaped
at her erstwhile friend with her outstretched hands making claw-fish
against the blue sky. If he missed –
He didn’t miss, or even hit the girl a glancing blow. The glass
paperweight inside the bag struck the back of Pixie Light’s head dead-on,
making a muffled thunk. Pixie Light dropped her hands, one bloodstained,
one still clean, and fell to the sidewalk at her friend’s feet like a sack
of mail.
“What the hell?” Mister Softee Guy cried. His voice was improbably high.
Maybe shock had given him that high tenor.
“I don’t know,” Clay said. His heart was hammering. “Help me quick. This
other one’s bleeding to death.”
From behind them, on Newbury Street, came the unmistakable hollow
bang-and-jingle of a car crash, followed by screams. The screams were
followed by another explosion, this one louder, concussive, hammering the
day. Behind the Mister Softee truck, another car swerved across three
lanes of Boylston Street and into the courtyard of the Four Seasons,
mowing down a couple of pedestrians and then plowing into the back of the
previous car, which had finished with its nose crumpled into the revolving
doors. This second crash shoved the first car farther into the revolving
doors, bending them askew. Clay couldn’t see if anyone was trapped in
there – clouds of steam were rising from the first car’s breached
radiator – but the agonized shrieks from the shadows suggested bad
things. Very bad.
Mister Softee Guy, blind on that side, was leaning out his serving window
and staring at Clay. “What’s going on over there?”
“I don’t know. Couple of car wrecks. People hurt. Never mind. Help me,
man.” He knelt beside Power Suit Woman in the blood and the shattered
remnants of Pixie Light’s pink cell phone. Power Suit Woman’s twitches had
now become weak, indeed.
“Smoke from over on Newbury,” observed Mister Softee Guy, still not
emerging from the relative safety of his ice cream wagon. “Something blew
up over there. I mean bigtime. Maybe it’s terrorists.”
As soon as the word was out of his mouth, Clay was sure he was right.
“Help me.”
“WHO AM I?” Pixie Dark suddenly screamed.
Clay had forgotten all about her. He looked up in time to see the girl
smack herself in the forehead with the heel of her hand, then turn around
rapidly three times, standing almost on the toes of her tennies to do it.
The sight called up a memory of some poem he’d read in a college lit class
– Weave a circle round him thrice. Coleridge, wasn’t it? She staggered,
then ran rapidly down the sidewalk and directly into a lamppost. She made
no attempt to avoid it or even put up her hands. She struck it face-first,
rebounded, staggered, then went at it again.
“Stop that!” Clay roared. He shot to his feet, started to run toward her,
slipped in Power Suit Woman’s blood, almost fell, got going again, tripped
on Pixie Light, and almost fell again.
Pixie Dark looked around at him. Her nose was broken and gushing blood
down her lower face. A vertical contusion was puffing up on her brow,
rising like a thunderhead on a summer day. One of her eyes had gone
crooked in its socket. She opened her mouth, exposing a ruin of what had
probably been expensive orthodontic work, and laughed at him. He never
forgot it.
Then she ran away down the sidewalk, screaming.
Behind him, a motor started up and amplified bells began tinkling out the
Sesame Street theme. Clay turned and saw the Mister Softee truck pulling
rapidly away from the curb just as, from the top floor of the hotel across
the way, a window shattered in a bright spray of glass. A body hurtled out
into the October day. It fell to the sidewalk, where it more or less
exploded. More screams from the forecourt. Screams of horror; screams of
pain.
“No!” Clay yelled, running alongside the Mister Softee truck. “No, come
back and help me! I need some help here, you sonofabitch!”
No answer from Mister Softee Guy, who maybe couldn’t hear over his
amplified music. Clay could remember the words from the days when he’d had
no reason not to believe his marriage wouldn’t last forever. In those days
Johnny watched Sesame Street every day, sitting in his little blue chair
with his sippy cup clutched in his hands. Something about a sunny day,
keepin’ the clouds away.
A man in a business suit came running out of the park, roaring wordless
sounds at the top of his lungs, his coattails flapping behind him. Clay
recognized him by his dogfur goatee. The man ran into Boylston Street.
Cars swerved around him, barely missing him. He ran on to the other side,
still roaring and waving his hands at the sky. He disappeared into the
shadows beneath the canopy of the Four Seasons forecourt and was lost to
view, but he must have gotten up to more dickens immediately, because a
fresh volley of screams broke out over there.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Cell
by Stephen King
Copyright © 2006 by Stephen King .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Scribner
Copyright © 2006
Stephen King
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-7432-9233-2
