Cell

by Stephen King

The rising moon was full and ultimately hideous. Sometimes the smoke masked it, but all too often that bulging dragon’s eye swam free and peered down, casting a bleary orange light. Clay thought it a horror-comic moon, but didn’t say so.

He closed his eyes, but that was worse. Now Rafer’s green eyes floated disembodied in the dark, like the eyes of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat: We’re all mad here, dear Alice. And under the steady hiss of the Coleman lamp, he could still hear it purring.

He didn’t love being called an animal, but couldn’t deny that was what he was: oxygen and food in, carbon dioxide and shit out, pop goes the weasel.

“He said the mind can calculate, but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows.”

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.

Clay could hardly hear him over the noisy chuckle of the brook.

Crows rose from the trees in a multitude. Clay hadn’t even known they were there, but now they scolded the autumn air with their cries. For a little while he drowned them out with his own.

So he leaned his head against the wood with the steel core hiding inside, and closed his eyes, and visualized a comic splash-page. Not a page from Dark Wanderer—Dark Wanderer was kaput and nobody knew it better than him—but from a new comic. Call it Cell, for want of a better title, a thrilling end-of-the-world saga of the phoner hordes versus the last few normies—

“But computers are like people, aren’t they?” Tom said. “Because we build what we know.

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.

Survival is like love. Both are blind.