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Process.
Was this a dream?
Clay followed the line curving toward the pavilion-style tent on the left side of the road, knowing what he was going to see even before he saw it. At the head of each shorter line stood one of the phone-people, those co
As Clay watched, the man closest to him took the offered phone, punched it three times, then held it eagerly to his ear. "Hello?" he said. "Hello, Ma? Ma? Are you th—" Then he fell silent. His eyes emptied and slackness loosened his face. The cell sagged away from his ear slightly. The facilitator—that was the best word Clay could think of—took the phone back, gave the man a push to start him forward, and motioned for the next person in line to step forward.
Left and right, the Raggedy Man was calling. Keep it moving.
The guy who'd been trying to call his mom plodded out from beneath the pavilion. Beyond it, Clay saw, hundreds of other people were milling around. Sometimes someone would get in someone else's way and there would be a little weak slapping. Nothing like before, however. Because—
Because the signal's been modified.
Left and right, ladies and gentlemen, keep it moving, we've got a lot of you to get through before dark.
Clay saw Joh
Clay ran for him, but at first his path was blocked. "Get out of my way!" he shouted, but of course the man in his way, who was shuffling nervously from foot to foot as if he needed to go to the bathroom, couldn't hear him. This was a dream and besides, Clay was a normie—he had no telepathy.
He darted between the restless man and the woman behind him. He pushed through the next line as well, too fixated on reaching Joh
Just dial 911, she said without moving her mouth. All calls go through 911.
"No, Joh
Joh
Joh
Left and right, form two lines, the Raggedy Man thundered in the middle of Clay's head, and he woke up screaming his son's name in the caretaker's cottage as late-afternoon light streamed in the windows.
At midnight clay reached the little town of north shapleigh. by then a nasty cold rain that was almost sleet—what Sharon had called "Slurpee rain"—had begun to fall. He heard oncoming motors and stepped off the highway (still good old Route 11; no dream highway here) onto the tarmac of a 7-Eleven store. When the headlights showed, turning the drizzle to silver lines, it was a pair of sprinters ru
Clay thought again: Madness. And as he swung back onto the shoulder of the road: You're a fine one to talk about madness.
True. Because his phone-bingo dream hadn't been a dream, or not entirely a dream. He was sure of it. The phoners were using their strengthening telepathic abilities to keep track of as many of the flock-killers as they could. That only made sense. They might have a problem with groups like Dan Hartwick's, ones that actually tried to fight them, but he doubted if they were having any trouble with him. The thing was, the telepathy was also oddly like a phone—it seemed to work both ways. Which made him . . . what? The ghost in the machine? Something like that. While they were keeping an eye on him, he was able to keep an eye on them. At least in his sleep. In his dreams.
Were there actual tents at the Kashwak border, with normies lining up to get their brains blasted? Clay thought there were, both in Kashwak and places like Kashwak all over the country and the world. Business would be slowing down by now, but the checkpoints—the changing- points– might still be there.
The phoners used group-speak telepathy to coax the normies into coming. To dream them into coming. Did that make the phoners smart, calculating? Not unless you called a spider smart because it could spin a web, or an alligator calculating because it could lie still and look like a log. Walking north along Route 11 toward Route 160, the road that would take him to Kashwak, Clay thought the telepathic signal the phoners sent out like a low siren-call (or a pulse) must contain at least three separate messages.
Come, and you'll be safe —your struggle to survive can cease.
Come, and you'II be with your own kind, in your own place.
Come, and you can speak to your loved ones.
Come. Yes. Bottom line. And once you got close enough, any choice ceased. That telepathy and the dream of safety just took you over. You lined up. You listened as the Raggedy Man told you to keep it moving, everyone gets to call a loved one but we've got a lot of you to process before the sun goes down and we crank up Bette Midler singing "The Wind Beneath My Wings."
And how could they continue doing this, even though the lights had failed and the cities had burned and civilization had slid into a pit of blood? How could they go on replacing the millions of phoners lost in the original convulsion and in the destruction of the flocks that had followed? They could continue because the Pulse wasn't over. Somewhere—in that outlaw lab or nutcase's garage—some gadget was still ru