Cell

On a sunny October afternoon in Boston, graphic artist Clayton Riddell walks along Boylston Street in high spirits, having just sold his first graphic novel. He carries an artist's portfolio and a glass paperweight bought as a gift for his estranged wife, Sharon, who lives with their 12-year-old son, Johnny, in Kent Pond, Maine. Clay stops at an ice cream truck near Boston Common, where a woman in a power suit talks on her cell phone and two teenage girls share another. At 3:03 p.m., a catastrophic event later called the Pulse strikes: Every person using or overhearing a cell phone is driven instantly and violently insane. The woman attacks the ice cream vendor; one teenage girl bites open the woman's throat. Clay swings the bag containing the paperweight and knocks the attacker unconscious.

Boston descends into chaos. Cars crash into buildings, people leap from windows, and explosions shake the city as planes fall from the sky at Logan Airport. A bespectacled man named Tom McCourt approaches Clay, and the two form an alliance. A knife-wielding phone-crazy charges them; a Boston police officer named Ulrich Ashland arrives and shoots the attacker. Clay warns Ashland not to use cell phones, having connected the violence to the calls he witnessed.

Clay and Tom fight their way to Clay's hotel, the Atlantic Avenue Inn, where they are joined by Alice Maxwell, a bloodstained teenage girl whose mother went insane after making a cell phone call. Clay tries to reach his family in Maine but cannot get through; he agonizes over Johnny, who owns a cell phone the boy often left uncharged. The desk clerk refuses to leave the hotel and later hangs himself. The three set out northward as Boston burns.

They cross the Mystic River Bridge, joining a stream of mostly older refugees; few teenagers are visible, since most owned cell phones. At Tom's house in Malden, they observe a startling development at dawn: the phone-crazies emerge and flock in coordinated groups, moving with the eerie synchronization of migrating birds. Alice identifies this as a "flock-mind" phenomenon and proposes charting it. By afternoon the formation breaks down, then reforms at evening as the crazies return to roost.

They leave that night, heading north. At a neighbor's house they find a .45 revolver loaded with illegal armor-piercing rounds and an automatic weapon. Armed and supplied, they travel by night. Along the way they hear rumors about Kashwak, a cell-phone dead zone in northern Maine where survivors will supposedly be safe. The phrase KASHWAK=NO-FO appears scrawled everywhere.

In Gaiten, New Hampshire, they find Gaiten Academy, a prep school where the retired headmaster, Charles Ardai, whom they call "the Head," and his last remaining student, a 12-year-old scholarship boy named Jordan, have been observing roughly a thousand phone-crazies roosting nightly on the school's soccer field. The crazies lie in open-eyed trance while boomboxes ring the perimeter playing music with no CDs and no wires; the phone-crazies broadcast the sound telepathically. Jordan frames the phenomenon in computer terms: the Pulse wiped human brains like an electromagnetic pulse erasing a hard drive, and the crazies are "rebooting," collectively rebuilding new programming that includes telepathy and the beginnings of a group mind.

The Head argues they must destroy the flock before it grows too powerful. After a gasoline plan fails, Clay remembers two propane trucks at a nearby gas station. They park the trucks amid the sleeping flock, and Clay fires an armor-piercing round into a tank. The explosion kills the phone-crazies, and a collective scream rises, answered by groans from distant flocks. Hundreds of replacements arrive the next day, led by a figure from the group's shared dreams: a thin Black man in a torn red Harvard hoodie, whom they call the Raggedy Man. He leaves melted boomboxes and Alice's lost sneaker on their doorstep, proving the phone-people know who destroyed the flock. As reprisal, he orders a massacre of innocent refugees below the school. The Head is found dead, forced to write "insane" in 14 languages before driving a fountain pen through his own eye. Clay realizes the Head also intended his death to free Jordan from the boy's obligation to stay.

They bury the Head and flee, branded as pariahs. Other refugees shun them as "the Gaiten bunch." When confronted, Alice fires back: "At least we did something." On the road to Maine, a hostile man named Gunner, whom they had previously fought, ambushes them and hurls a cinderblock chunk that fatally strikes Alice in the head. They bury her under an apple tree. At Kent Pond, Clay finds two notes from Johnny. The first explains that Sharon took Johnny's cell phone; the second, dated two days after the Pulse, reports that Sharon is one of the phone-people and begs Clay to come to Kashwak. Clay resolves to go north.

Clay parts from Tom, Jordan, and three fellow flock-killers: Dan Hartwick, pregnant Denise Link, and Ray Huizenga, who head west while Clay goes north alone. But the Raggedy Man uses telepathic manipulation to force the others back north, and Clay finds them waiting at a road junction, their wills overridden. Along the way, Jordan theorizes that a software worm embedded in the original Pulse signal is progressively mutating, corrupting the phone-people's programming and causing increasing numbers to malfunction and die. Before they reach the Northern Counties Expo, a fairground at Kashwak, Ray secretly loads their schoolbus with explosives, gives Clay a cell phone rigged as a detonator, and shoots himself to keep the plan hidden from the phone-people, who can read minds. The Raggedy Man mocks Clay, confident that cell phones cannot function in the dead zone.

At the Expo, they are locked inside Kashwakamak Hall while thousands of phone-crazies settle into trance outside. Clay realizes what the Raggedy Man does not know: carnival workers installed an illegal, battery-powered cell tower on the Parachute Drop ride, meaning phones work here. Jordan squeezes through a small high window, navigates the sleeping mass, drives the explosive-laden bus into the center of the flock, and crawls back to safety. Clay dials the detonator. The blast kills the vast majority of the flock, and they find the Raggedy Man's shredded hoodie draped over wreckage.

Clay separates from his friends to search for Johnny. Jordan shares a final theory: If Johnny has been converted, exposing him to the Pulse signal again might reverse the damage, since the mutated worm could cause the new and old programs to destroy each other, allowing the original human mind to reassert itself. After days of searching, Clay finds Johnny on a curb, alive but vacant-eyed and unresponsive.

Clay takes Johnny to a cottage in Springvale. The boy sleeps in closets, screams nightly, and shows no recognition of his father. After a week, Clay makes his decision. Remembering Alice's defiance and Jordan's theory, he wakes Johnny, dials 911 on a working cell phone, whispers "Fo-fo-you-you," echoing a playful family phrase from Johnny's toddlerhood, and presses the phone to his son's ear. The novel ends on this ambiguous act, without revealing whether the call restores Johnny or destroys him.