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.Those fucks are the reason my kid’s going to grow up not knowing his daddy.” She saw Clay wince and said, “Sorry.We know your boy’s gone to Kashwak.”Clay gaped.“Oh yes,” Dan said, taking a plate as Ray began passing them around.“The President of Harvard knows all, sees all, has dossiers on all or so he’d like us to believe.” He gave Jordan a wink, and Jordan actually grinned.“Dan talked me around,” Denise said.“Some terrorist group-or maybe just a couple of inspired nutcases working in a garage-set this thing off, but no one had any idea it would lead to this.The phoners are just playing out their part in it.They weren’t responsible when they were insane, and they aren’t really responsible now, because-”“Because they’re in the grip of some group imperative,” Tom said.“Like migration.”“It’s a group imperative, but it ain’t migration,” Ray said, sitting down with his own plate.“Dan says it’s pure survival.I think he’s right.Whatever it is, we gotta find a place to get in out of the rain.You know?”“The dreams started coming after we burned the first flock,” Dan said.“Powerful dreams.Ecce homo, insanus-very Harvard.Then, after we bombed the Nashua flock, the President of Harvard showed up in person with about five hundred of his closest friends.” He ate in quick, neat bites.“And left a lot of melted boomboxes on your doorstep,” Clay said.“Some were melted,” Denise said.“Mostly what we got were bits and pieces.” She smiled.It was a thin smile.“That was okay.Their taste in music sucks.”“You call him the President of Harvard, we call him the Raggedy Man,” Tom said.He had set his plate aside and opened his pack.He rummaged and brought out the drawing Clay had made on the day the Head had been forced to kill himself.Denise’s eyes got round.She passed the drawing to Ray Huizenga, who whistled.Dan took it last and looked up at Tom with new respect.“You drew this?”Tom pointed to Clay.“You’re very talented,” Dan said.“I took a course once,” Clay said.“Draw Fluffy.” He turned to Tom, who also kept their maps in his pack.“How far is it between Gaiten and Nashua?”“Thirty miles, tops.”Clay nodded and turned back to Dan Hartwick.“And did he speak to you? The guy in the red hoodie?”Dan looked at Denise and she looked away.Ray turned back to his little cooker-presumably to shut it down and pack it up-and Clay understood.“Which one of you did he speak through?”“Me,” Dan said.“It was horrible.Have you experienced it?”“Yeah.You can stop it from happening, but not if you want to know what’s on his mind.Does he do it to show how strong he is, do you think?”“Probably,” Dan said, “but I don’t think that’s all.I don’t think they can talk.They can vocalize, and I’m sure they think-although not as they did, it would be a terrible mistake to think of them as having human thoughts-but I don’t think they can actually speak words.”“Yet,” Jordan said.“Yet,” Dan agreed.He glanced at his watch, and that prompted Clay to look at his own.It was already quarter to three.“He told us to go north,” Ray said.“He told us Kashwak No-Fo.He said our flock-burnin days were over because they were settin up guards-”“Yes, we saw some in Rochester,” Tom said.“And you’ve seen plenty of Kashwak No-Fo signs.”They nodded.“Purely as a sociologist, I began to question those signs,” Dan said.“Not how they began-I’m sure the first No-Fo signs were posted soon after the Pulse, by survivors who’d decided a place like that, where there was no cell phone coverage, would be the best place on earth to go.What I questioned was how the idea-and the graffiti-could spread so quickly in a cata-strophically fragmented society where all normal forms of communication-other than my mouth to your ear, of course-had broken down.The answer seemed clear, once one admitted that a new form of communication, available to only one group, had entered the picture.”“Telepathy.” Jordan almost whispered the word.“Them.The phoners.They want us to go north to Kashwak.” He turned his frightened eyes to Clay.“It really is a frigging slaughterhouse chute.Clay, you can’t go up there! This is all the Raggedy Man’s idea!”Before Clay could respond, Dan Hartwick was speaking again [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]