Malinche

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Scanned & Semi-Proofed by Cozette

STEPHEN KING

CELL
A NOVEL
SCRIBNER New York London Toronto Sydney

For Richard Matheson and George Romero

SCRIBNER

1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Anyresemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead,

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is entirely coincidental. Copyright © 2006 by Stephen King All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. SCRIBNERand design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work. DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING Text set in Garamond No. 3 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com Manufactured in the United States of America 13579 108642 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9233-7 ISBN-10: 0-7432-9233-2

The id will not stand for a delay in gratification. It always feels the tension of the unfulfilled urge. Sigmund Freud Human aggression is instinctual. Humans have not evolved any ritualized aggression-inhibiting mechanisms to ensure the survival of the species. For thisreason man is considered a very dangerous animal. konrad lorenz Can you hear me now? Verizon

CELL
Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood, but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. It was as if it had been waiting to go. Onfile:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Mike/My%20Documents/Downloads/King,%20Stephen%20-%20Cell.htm (2 of 208)3/4/2006 8:33:57 PM

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October 1, God was in His heaven, the stock market stood at 10,140, and most of the planes were on time (except for those landing and taking off in Chicago, and that was to be expected). Two weeks later the skies belonged to the birds again and the stock market was a memory. By Halloween, every major city from NewYork to Moscow stank to the empty heavens and the world as it had been was a memory.

The Pulse
1
The event that came to be known as The Pulse began at 3:03 p.m., eastern standard time, on the afternoon
of October 1. The term was a misnomer, of course, but within ten hours of the event, most of the scientists capable of pointing this out were either dead or insane. The name hardly mattered, inany case. What mattered was the effect. At three o'clock on that day, a young man of no particular importance to history came walking— almost bouncing—east along Boylston Street in Boston. His name was Clayton Riddell. There was an expression of undoubted contentment on his face to go along with the spring in his step. From his left hand there swung the handles of an artist's portfolio, the kindthat closes and latches to make a traveling case. Twined around the fingers of his right hand was the drawstring of a brown plastic shopping bag with the words small treasures printed on it for anyone who cared to read them. Inside the bag, swinging back and forth, was a small round object. A present, you might have guessed, and you would have been right. You might further have guessed that thisClayton Riddell was a young man seeking to commemorate some small (or perhaps even not so small) victory with a small treasure, and you would have been right again. The item inside the bag was a rather expensive glass paperweight with a gray haze of dandelion fluff caught in its center. He had bought it on his walk back from the Copley Square Hotel to the much humbler Atlantic Avenue Inn where he...