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"He meant the human programming," Clay murmured in the dark bedroom, smelling that sweet, faint aroma of sachet. "The human programming, saved somewhere way down deep. All of it." He was going now, drifting off. If he was going to dream, he hoped it would not be of the carnage at the Northern Counties Expo.

His last thought before sleep took him was that maybe in the long run, the phoners would have been better. Yes, they had been born in violence and in horror, but birth was usually difficult, often violent, and sometimes horrible. Once they had begun flocking and mind-melding, the violence had subsided. So far as he knew, they hadn't actually made war on the normies, unless one considered forcible conversion an act of war; the reprisals following the destruction of their flocks had been gruesome but perfectly understandable. If left alone, they might eventually have turned out to be better custodians of the earth than the so-called normies. They certainly wouldn't have been falling all over themselves to buy gas-guzzling SUVs, not with their levitation skills (or with their rather primitive consumer appetites, for that matter). Hell, even their taste in music had been improving at the end.

But what choice did we have? Clay thought. Survival is like love. Both are blind.

Sleep took him then, and he didn't dream of the slaughter at the Expo. He dreamed he was in a bingo tent, and as the caller a

Not all of the rage had gone out of the phoner refugees, nor had the wild talents entirely departed, either. Around noon of the next day, which was cold and raw, with a foretaste of November in the air, Clay stopped to watch two of them fighting furiously on the shoulder of the road. They punched, then clawed, then finally grappled together, butting heads and biting at each other's cheeks and necks. As they did, they began to rise slowly off the road. Clay watched, mouth hanging open, as they attained a height of approximately ten feet, still fighting, their feet apart and braced, as if standing on an invisible floor. Then one of them sank his teeth into the nose of his opponent, who was wearing a ragged, bloodstained T-shirt with the words HEAVY FUELprinted across the front. Nose-Biter pushed HEAVY FUELbackward. HEAVY FUELstaggered, then dropped like a rock down a well. Blood streamed upward from his ruptured nose as he fell. Nose-Biter looked down, seemed to realize for the first time that he was a second story's height above the road, and went down himself. Like Dumbo losing his magic feather, Clay thought. Nose-Biter wrenched his knee and lay in the dust, lips pulled back from his bloodstained teeth, snarling at Clay as he passed.

Yet these two were an exception. Most of the phoners Clay passed (he saw no normies at all that day or all the following week) seemed lost and bewildered with no flock mind to support them. Clay thought again and again of something Jordan had said before getting back in the van and heading into the north woods where there was no cell phone coverage: If the worm's continuing to mutate, their newest conversions aren't going to be either phoners or normies, not really.

Clay thought that meant like Pixie Dark, only a little further gone. Who are you? Who am I? He could see these questions in their eyes, and he suspected—no, he knew —it was these questions they were trying to ask when they spouted their gibberish.

He continued to ask Have you seen a boy and to try to send Joh

It can't be, he thought, but he began to walk faster, and when he got a little closer—close enough to be almost sure that the figure was that of a child and not just a small adult—he began to run. His new pack began to bounce up and down on his back. His feet found the place where Gurleyville's short length of sidewalk commenced and began clapping on the concrete.

It was a boy.

A very ski

"Joh

The boy turned toward the sound of the shout, startled. His mouth hung open in a vacant gawp. There was nothing in his eyes but vague alarm. He looked as if he was thinking about ru

"Joh

And at some point—perhaps only because the man holding him had begun to swing him around in a circle—the child put his hands around Clay's neck and hung on. He said something, as well. Clay refused to believe it was empty vocalization, as meaningless as wind blowing across the mouth of an empty pop-bottle. It was a word. It might have been tieey, as if the boy was trying to say tired.

Or it might have been Dieey, which was the way he had, as a sixteen-month-old, first named his father.

Clay chose to hang on to that. To believe the pallid, dirty, malnourished child clinging to his neck had called him Daddy.

It was little enough to hang on to, he thought a week later. one sound that might have been a word, one word that might have been Daddy. Now the boy was sleeping on a cot in a bedroom closet, because Joh

Outside, under a gray evening sky, snow was spitting down. A cold wind sent it up Springvale's lightless Main Street in undulating snakes. It seemed too early for snow, but of course it wasn't, especially this far north. When it came before Thanksgiving you always griped, and when it came before Halloween you griped double, and then somebody reminded you that you were living in Maine, not on the isle of Capri.

He wondered where Tom, Jordan, Dan, and Denise were tonight. He wondered how Denise would do when it came time to have her baby. He thought she'd probably do okay—tough as a boiled owl, that one. He wondered if Tom and Jordan thought about him as often as he thought about them, and if they missed him as much as he missed them—Jordan's solemn eyes, Tom's ironic smile. He hadn't seen half enough of that smile; what they'd been through hadn't been all that fu

He wondered if this last week with his broken son had been the loneliest of his life. He thought the answer to that was yes.

Clay looked down at the cell phone in his hand. More than anything else, he wondered about that. Whether to make one more call. There were bars on its little panel when he powered up, three good bars, but the charge wouldn't last forever, and he knew it. Nor could he count on the Pulse to continue forever. The batteries sending the signal up to the corn-satellites (if that was what was happening, and if it was still happening) might give out. Or the Pulse might mutate into no more than a simple carrier wave, an idiot hum or the kind of high-pitched shriek you used to get when you called someone's fax line by mistake.