In the second half of Cell, Clay's ragtag group continue to bury and gain followers. First, the phone-crazies demonstrate their growing prowess b making Head commit a rather gruesome suicide. While traveling on the road they meet two sprinters, and recognizing them as the Gaiten bunch from their dreams refuse aid when offered. The sprinters catch up to them again, killing Alice. With Alice's death the phone-crazies let Clay and his followers that the sprinters would be dealt with. Thus, reinforcing the message that the Gaiten bunch are not to be touched.

Alice's death is one of the moments in Cell that I felt it departing from a zombie narrivite. The phone-crazies communicating with the Gaiten bunch, that the Gaiten bunch is not to be touched, and that the phone-crazies push the them to their goals seems to much outside the scope of a zombie narrative to go unnoticed.

While traveling towards Kashwak, the phone-crazies continue do demonstrate the power of their telepathy. Pushing more followers to join Clay's group, and again influence the group to catch up with Clay when he decides to go his own way. The phone-crazies take to following the group to ensure that the telepathic persuasion remains consistent, and eventually levitate along side the bus as it drives towards Kashwak. The group is then lead to the Expo center where they wait for the phone-crazies to continue their plans with them. The Gaiten bunch decide that they have to do something, go out on their terms. They concoct their plan, and have Jordan drive the bus, conveniently filled with dynamite by one of their previous followers out to the middle of the phone-crazies. Jordan runs to saftey and Clay detonates the explosives.

After their immediate threat is dealt with, the group informs Clay that they intend to continue on to TR-90. Clay stays behind to look for his son, eventually finding he has been exposed to a mutated version of the Pulse. The last scene is Clay holding up the Cell phone he used to detotane the explosives to his sons ear, hoping that the Pulse will cancell out what his son was already exposed to.

After finishing Stephen King's Cell, I felt that the novel had moved away from a strictly zombie narrative to a more survival/horror oriented focus. While many of the scenes in the book seem classic of a zombie narrative, using propane tanks to kill the phone-crazies, a lone group struggling for survival, the interaction between the crazies and the normalizes robbed it of that classic zombie feel.

The book shifted from the group encountering immediate unrestricted chaos, to battling a specific threat, somewhat personalized threat. The phone crazies were certainly less than human, but certainly more than a mindless undead zombie. The phone crazies had their own identity that distinguished apart from zombies.