Cell: A Novel by Stephen King Read Free Book Online Page A

you-must-be-joking look. Clay was starting to think this guy could write a book— How to Be Disliked on Short Notice. “Radio in this place? In any downtown hotel? You must be joking.”
    From outside came a high-pitched wail of fear. The girl in the bloodstained white dress appeared at the door again and began pounding on it with the flat of her hand, looking over her shoulder as she did so. Clay started for her, fast.
    “No, he locked it again, remember?” Tom shouted at him.
    Clay hadn’t. He turned to the desk clerk. “Unlock it.”
    “No,” the desk clerk said, and crossed both arms firmly over his narrow chest to show how firmly he meant to oppose this course of action. Outside, the girl in the white dress looked over her shoulder again and pounded harder. Her blood-streaked face was tight with terror.
    Clay pulled the butcher knife out of his belt. He had almost forgotten it and was sort of astonished at how quickly, how naturally, it returned to mind. “Open it, you sonofabitch,” he told the desk clerk, “or I’ll cut your throat.”
     
    10
    “No time!” Tom yelled, and grabbed one of the high-backed, bogus Queen Anne chairs that flanked the lobby sofa. He ran it at the double doors with the legs up.
    The girl saw him coming and cringed away, raising both of her hands to protect her face. At the same instant the man who had been chasing her appeared in front of the door. He was an enormous construction-worker type with a slab of a gut pushing out the front of his yellow T-shirt and a greasy salt-and-pepper ponytail bouncing up and down on the back of it.
    The chair-legs hit the panes of glass in the double doors, the two legs on the left shattering through ATLANTIC AVENUE INN and the two on the right through BOSTON’S FINEST ADDRESS. The ones on the right punched into the construction-worker type’s meaty, yellow-clad left shoulder just as he grabbed the girl by the neck. The underside of the chair’s seat fetched up against the solid seam where the two doors met and Tom McCourt went staggering backward, dazed.
    The construction-worker guy was roaring out that speaking-in-tongues gibberish, and blood had begun to course down the freckled meat of his left biceps. The girl managed to pull free of him, but her feet tangled together and she went down in a heap, half on the sidewalk and half in the gutter, crying out in pain and fear.
    Clay was standing framed in one of the shattered glass door-panels with no memory of crossing the room and only the vaguest one of raking the chair out of his way. “Hey dickweed!” he shouted, and was marginally encouraged when the big man’s flood of crazy-talk ceased for a moment and he froze in his tracks. “Yeah, you!” Clay shouted. “I’m talking to you!” And then, because it was the only thing he could think of: “I fucked your mama, and she was one dry hump!”
    The large maniac in the yellow shirt cried out something that sounded eerily like what the Power Suit Woman had cried out just before meeting her end—eerily like Rast! —and whirled back toward the building that had suddenly grown teeth and a voice and attacked him. Whatever he saw, it couldn’t have been a grim, sweaty-faced man with a knife in his hand leaning out through a rectangular panel that had lately held glass, because Clay had to do no attacking at all. The man in the yellow shirt leaped onto the jutting blade of the butcher knife. The Swedish steel slid smoothly into the hanging, sunburned wattle beneath his chin and released a red waterfall. It doused Clay’s hand, amazingly hot—almost hot as a freshly poured cup of coffee, it seemed—and he had to fight off an urge to pull away. Instead he pushed forward, at last feeling the knife encounter resistance. It hesitated, but there was no buckle in that baby. It ripped through gristle, then came out through the nape of the big man’s neck. He fell forward—Clay couldn’t hold him back with one arm, no way in hell, the guy had to