Or the little guys and gals who'd been in the care of people with cell phones.

As for the vacant-eyed children he could see, Clay wondered how many now passing before him had pestered their parents for cell phones with special ring-tones last year, as Johnny had.

"One mind," Tom said presently. "Do you really believe that?"

"I sort of do," Alice said. "Because . . . like . . . what mind do they have on their own?"

"She's right," Clay said.

The migration (once you'd seen it that way it was hard to think of it as anything else) thinned but didn't stop, even after half an hour; three men would pass walking abreast—one in a bowling shirt, one in the remains of a suit, one with his lower face mostly obliterated in a cake of dried gore—and then two men and a woman walking in a half-assed conga line, then a middle-aged woman who looked like a librarian (if you ignored one bare breast wagging in the wind, that was) walking in tandem with a half-grown, gawky girl who might have been a library aide. There would be a pause and then a dozen more would come, seeming almost to form a kind of hollow square, like a fighting unit from the Napoleonic Wars. And in the distance Clay began to hear warlike sounds—a sporadic rattle of rifle-or pistol-fire and once (and close, maybe from neighboring Medford or right here in Maiden) the long, ripping roar of a large-caliber automatic weapon. Also, more screams. Most were distant, but Clay was pretty sure that was what they were.

There were still other sane people around these parts, plenty of them, and some had managed to get their hands on guns. Those people were very likely having themselves a phoner-shoot. Others, however, had not been lucky enough to have been indoors when the sun came up and the crazies came out. He thought of George the mechanic gripping the old man's head in his orange hands, the twist, the snap, the little reading glasses flying into the beets where they would stay. And stay. And stay.

"I think I want to go into the living room and sit down," Alice said. "I don't want to look at them anymore. Listen, either. It makes me sick."

"Sure," Clay said. "Tom, why don't you—?"

"No," Tom said. "You go. I'll stay here and watch for a while. I think one of us ought to watch, don't you?"

Clay nodded. He did.

"Then, in an hour or so, you can spell me. Turn and turn about."

"Okay. Done."

As they started back down the hall, Clay with his arm around Alice's shoulders, Tom said: "One thing."

They looked back at him.

"I think we all ought to try and get as much rest as possible today. If we're still planning on going north, that is."

Clay looked at him closely to make sure Tom was still in his right mind. He appeared to be, but—

"Have you been seeing what's going on out there?" he asked. "Hearing the shooting? The . . ." He didn't want to say the screams with Alice there, although God knew it was a little late to be trying to protect her remaining sensibilities. ". . . the yelling?"

"Of course," Tom said. "But the nutters went inside last night, didn't they?"

For a moment neither Clay nor Alice moved. Then Alice began to pat her hands together in soft, almost silent applause. And Clay began to smile. The smile felt stiff and unfamiliar on his face, and the hope that went with it was almost painful.

"Tom, you might just be a genius," he said.

Tom did not return the smile. "Don't count on it," he said. "I never broke a thousand on the SATs."

Clearly feeling better—and that had to be a good thing, clay reckoned—Alice went upstairs to poke around in Tom's clothes for daywear. Clay sat on the couch, thinking about Sharon and Johnny, trying to decide what they would have done and where they would have gone, always supposing they'd been fortunate enough to get together. He fell into a doze and saw them clearly at Kent Pond Elementary, Sharon's school. They were barricaded in the gym with two or three dozen others, eating sandwiches from the cafeteria and drinking those little cartons of milk. They—

Alice roused him, calling from upstairs. He looked at his wristwatch and saw he'd been sleeping on the couch for almost twenty minutes. He'd drooled on his chin.

"Alice?" He went to the foot of the stairs. "Everything okay?" Tom, he saw, was also looking.

"Yes, but can you come for a second?"

"Sure." He looked at Tom, shrugged, then went upstairs.

Alice was in a guest bedroom that looked like it hadn't seen many guests, although the two pillows suggested that Tom had spent most of the night here with her, and the rumpled look of the bedclothes further suggested very bad rest. She had found a pair of khakis that almost fit and a sweatshirt with canobie lake park written across the front below the outline of a roller coaster. On the floor was the sort of large portable sound system that Clay and his friends had once lusted after the way Johnny-Gee had lusted after that red cell phone. Clay and his friends had called such systems ghetto blasters or boomboxes.

"It was in the closet and the batteries look fresh," she said. "I thought of turning it on and looking for a radio station, but then I was afraid."

He looked at the ghetto blaster sitting there on the guest room's nice hardwood floor, and he was afraid, too. It could have been a loaded gun. But he felt an urge to reach out and turn the selector-knob, now pointed at CD, to FM. He imagined Alice had felt the same urge, and that was why she'd called him. The urge to touch a loaded gun would have been no different.

"My sister gave me that two birthdays ago," Tom said from the doorway, and they both jumped. "I loaded it up with batteries last July and took it to the beach. When I was a kid we all used to go to the beach and listen to our radios, although I never had one that big."

"Me either," Clay said. "But I wanted one."

"I took it up to Hampton Beach in New Hampshire with a bunch of Van Halen and Madonna CDs, but it wasn't the same. Not even close. I haven't used it since. I imagine all the stations are off the air, don't you?"

"I bet some of them are still on," Alice said. She was biting at her lower lip. Clay thought if she didn't stop soon, it would begin to bleed. "The ones my friends call the robo-eighties stations. They have friendly names like BOB and FRANK, but they all come from some giant radio-computer in Colorado and then get beamed down by satellite. At least that's what my friends say. And . . ." She licked at the place she had been biting. It was shiny with blood just under the surface. "And that's the same way cell phone signals get routed, isn't it? By satellite."

"I don't know," Tom said. "I guess the long-distance ones might . . . and the transatlantic ones for sure . . . and I suppose the right genius could hack the wrong satellite signal into all those microwave towers you see . . . the ones that boost the signals along . . ."

Clay knew the towers he was talking about, steel skeletons with dishes stuck all over them like gray suckers. They had popped up everywhere over the last ten years.

Tom said, "If we could pick up a local station, we might be able to get news. Some idea about what to do, where to go—"

"Yes, but what if it's on the radio, too?" Alice said. "That's what I'm saying. What if you tune into whatever my"—She licked her lips again, then resumed nibbling.—"my mother heard? And my dad? Him, too, oh yes, he had a brand-new cell phone, all the bells and whistles—video, autodial, Internet connection—he loved that puppy!" She gave a laugh that was both hysterical and rueful, a dizzy combination. "What if you tune into whatever they heard? My folks and them out there? Do you want to risk that?"

At first Tom said nothing. Then he said—cautiously, as if testing the idea—"One of us could risk it. The other two could leave and wait until—"