The Regulators (richard bachman) Read online

  Then Dave sensed the lack of strength in the hands holding his neck and tore out of Brad’s grip. The boy showed no interest in Johnny, however. He charged at his mother instead.

  “You too!” he screamed. “You killed him, too!”

  She turned toward him, her face shocked and flabbergasted.

  “Why did you send us out here, Ma? Why?”

  He snatched the gun from her unresisting hand, held it up in front of his eyes for a moment, and then heaved it into the woods… except they weren’t woods, not anymore. The changes had continued all around them even while they had been striving one with the other, and they were now standing in a bristling, alien forest of cacti. Even the smell of the burning house had changed; it now smelled like burning mesquite, or maybe sagebrush.

  “Dave… Davey, I…”

  She fell silent, only staring at him. He stared back, just as white, just as drawn. It occurred to Brad that not long ago the boy had been standing on his lawn, laughing and throwing a Frisbee. Dave’s face began to contort. His mouth drew down and shuddered open. Gleaming strands of spit stretched between his lips. He began to wail. His mother put her arms around him and began to rock him. “No, it’s all right,” she said. Her own eyes were like smooth dark stones in a dry riverbed. “No, it’s all right. No, honey, it’s all right, Mom’s here and it’s all right.”

  Johnny stepped back on to the path. He looked briefly at the dead animal, which was now shimmering like something seen through a furnace-haze and oozing runnels of thick pink liquid. Then he looked at Cammie and her remaining son.

  “Cammie,” he said. “Mrs Reed. I did not shoot Jim. I swear I didn’t. What happened was-”

  “Be still,” she said, not looking at him. Dave was half a foot taller than his mother and had to outweigh her by seventy pounds, but she rocked him as easily now as she must have done when he was eight months old and colicky. “I don’t want to hear what happened. I don’t care what happened. Let’s just go back. Do you want to go back, David?”

  Weeping, not looking, he nodded against her shoulder.

  She turned her terrible dry eyes toward Brad. “Bring my other boy. We’re not leaving him out here with that thing.” She looked briefly at the fuming, stinking carcass of the mountain lion, then back at Brad. “Bring him, do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Brad said. “I absolutely do.”

  Tom Billingsley was standing at the kitchen door, peering out into the growing gloom toward his open back gate and trying to make sense of the sounds and voices he heard coming from beyond it. When a set of fingers tapped him on the shoulder, he almost had a heart attack.

  Once he would have spun gracefully and coldcocked the intruder with his fist or elbow before either of them knew what was happening, but the slim young man who had been capable of such speed and agility was long gone. He did strike out, but the redheaded woman in the blue shorts and sleeveless blouse had plenty of time to step back, and Tom’s arthritis-bunched knuckles coldcocked nothing but thin air.

  “Christ, woman!” he cried.

  “I’m sorry.” Audrey’s face, normally pretty, was haggard. There was a hand-shaped bruise on her left cheek and her nose was swollen, the nostrils caked with dried blood. “I was going to say something, but I thought that might scare you even worse.”

  What happened to you, Aud?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Where are the others?”

  “Some in the woods, some next door. It-” A wavering howl rose. The red light had faded from the air now, and all that remained was ashes of orange. “It doesn’t sound too good for the ones that’re out. A lot of screaming.” He thought of something. Where’s Gary?”

  She stood aside and pointed. Gary lay in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. He had passed out while still holding his wife’s hand. Now that the screaming and yelling from the greenbelt had stopped-at least temporarily-Old Doc could hear him snoring.

  “That’s Marielle under that coverlet?” Audrey asked.

  Tom nodded.

  “We have to get with the others, Tom. Before it starts again. Before they come back.”

  “Do you know what’s happening here, Aud?”

  “I don’t think anyone knows exactly what’s happening here, but I know some stuff, yes.” She pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead and closed her eyes. To Tom she looked like a math student wrestling with some massive equation. Then she dropped her hands and looked at him again. “We better go next door. We should all be together.”

  He lifted his chin toward the snoring Gary. “What about him?”

  “We couldn’t carry him, couldn’t lift him over David Carver’s back fence even if we could. You’ll be doing well to get over it yourself.”

  “I’ll manage,” he said, stung a little. “Don’t you worry about me, Aud, I’ll manage fine.”

  From the greenbelt there came a cry, another gunshot, and then an animal howling in agony. What seemed like a thousand coyotes howled in response.

  “They shouldn’t have gone out there,” Audrey said. “I know why they did, but it was a bad idea.”

  Old Doc nodded. “I think they know that now,” he said.

  Peter reached the fork in the path and looked into the desert, bone-white in the glare of a rising moon, beyond it. Then he looked down and saw the man in the patched khaki pants pinned to the cactus.

  “Hello… friend,” he said. He moved the bum’s shopping cart so he could sit down beside him. As he settled against the cactus spines, feeling them slide into his back, he heard a cry and a gunshot and an agonized howl. All from far away. Not important. He put his hand on the dead bum’s shoulder. Their grins were identical. “Hello… friend,” the erstwhile James Dickey scholar said again.

  He looked south. His remaining sight was almost gone, but there was enough left for him to see the perfectly round moon rising between the fangs of the black Crayola mountains. It was as silver as the back of an old-time pocket watch, and upon it was the smiling, one-eye-winked face of Mr Moon from a child’s book of Mother Goose rhymes.

  Only this version of Mr Moon appeared to be wearing a cowboy hat.

  “Hello… friend,” Peter said to it, and settled back further against the cactus. He did not feel the exaggerated spines that punctured his lungs, or the first trickles of blood that seeped out of his grinning mouth. He was with his friend. He was with his friend and now everything was all right, they were looking at Mr Cowpoke Moon and everything was all right.

  The light dropped out of the day with a speed that reminded Johnny of the tropics, and soon the spiny landscape around them was only a black blur. The path was clear, at least for the time being-a gray streak about two feet wide winding through the shadows-but if the moon hadn’t come up, they would probably be in even deeper shit than they already were. He had watched the weather forecast that morning and knew the moon was new, not full, but that little contradiction didn’t seem very important under the current circumstances.

  They went up the path two by two, like animals mounting the gangplank to Noah’s Ark: Cammie and her surviving son, then he and Brad (with the corpse of Jim Reed swinging between them), then Cynthia and the hippie, whose name was Steve. The girl had picked up the.30-.06, and when the coyote-a nightmare even more misbegotten than the mountain lion had been-came out of a cactus grove to the east of the path, it was the girl who settled its account.

  The moon was bringing out fantastic tangles of shadow everywhere, and for a moment

  Johnny thought the coyote was one of them. Then Brad yelled “Hey, look OUT!” and the girl fired almost at once. The recoil would have knocked her over like a bowling pin if the hippie hadn’t grabbed her by the back of her pants.

  The coyote yowled and flipped over backward, its mismatched legs spasming. There was enough moonlight for Johnny to see that its paws ended in appendages that looked horribly like human fingers, and that it wore a cartridge belt for a collar. Its mates raised their voices in h
owls of what might have been mourning or laughter.

  The thing began to decay at once, paw-fingers turning black, ribcage collapsing, eyes falling in like marbles. Steam began to rise from its fur, and the stench rose with it. A moment or two later, those thick pink streams began to ooze out of its liquefying corpse.

  Johnny and Brad set Jim Reed’s body gently down. Johnny reached for the.30-.06 and poked the barrel at the coyote. He blinked with surprise (moderate surprise; his capacity for any large emotional reaction seemed pretty well drained) as it slid past the darkening hide with no feeling of resistance at all.

  “It’s like prodding cigarette smoke,” he said, handing the gun back to Cynthia. “I don’t think it’s here at all. I don’t think any of it’s here, not really.”

  Steve Ames stepped forward, took Johnny’s hand, and guided it to the shoulder of his shirt. Johnny felt a line of ragged punctures made by the mountain lion’s claws. Blood had soaked through the cotton enough for it to squelch under Johnny’s fingers. “The thing that did this to me wasn’t cigarette smoke,” Steve said.

  Johnny started to reply, then was distracted by a strange rattling sound. It reminded him of cocktail shakers in the be-bop bars of his youth. Back in the fifties, that had been, when you couldn’t get smashed without a tie on if you were a member of the country club set. The sound was coming from Dave Reed, who was standing rigidly beside his mother. It was his teeth.

  “Come on,” Brad said. “Let’s get the hell back under cover before something else comes. Vampire bats, maybe, or-”

  “You want to stop right there,” Cynthia said. “I’m warning you, big boy.”

  “Sorry,” Brad said. Then, gently: “Get moving, Cammie, okay?”

  “Don’t you tell me to get moving!” she responded crossly. Her arm was around Dave’s waist. She might as well have been hugging an iron bar, so far as Johnny could see. Except for the shivering, that was. And that weird thing with the teeth. “Can’t you see he’s scared to death?”

  More howls drifted through the darkness. The stench of the coyote Cynthia had shot was rapidly becoming unbearable.

  “Yes, Cammie, I can,” Brad said. His voice was low and kind. Johnny thought the man could have made a fortune as a psychiatrist. “But you have to get moving. Else we’ll have to go on and leave you here. We have to get inside. We have to get to shelter. You know that, don’t you?”

  “See that you bring my other boy,” she said sharply. “You’re not leaving him beside the path for the… you’re just not leaving him beside the path. Not!”

  We’ll bring him,” Brad said in the same low, soothing voice. He bent and took hold of Jim Reed’s legs again. Won’t we, John?”

  “Yes,” Johnny said, wondering what was going to be left of poor old Collie Entragian come morning… assuming there would be a morning. Collie didn’t have a mother present to stand up for him.

  Cammie watched them lift her son’s corpse between them, then stood on tiptoe and whispered something into Dave’s ear. It must have been the right thing, because the kid got moving again.

  They had made only a few steps when there was a subdued rattle up ahead, the gritty crunch of a footstep on the new surface of the ground, then a muffled cry of exasperated pain. Dave Reed shrieked as piercingly as a starlet in a horror movie. This sound more than that of strangers in the woods made Johnny’s balls pull up against his groin. From the corner of his eye he saw the hippie grab hold of the rifle barrel when Cynthia brought it up. Steve pushed it back down again, murmuring for her to hold on, just hold on.

  “Don’t shoot!” a voice called from the tangle of shadows up ahead and to their left. It was a voice Johnny recognized. “We’re friends, so just take it easy. Okay?”

  “Doc?” Johnny, who had come close to dropping his end of Jim Reed, now renewed his grip in spite of his aching arms and shoulders. Before the sounds from up ahead had begun, he’d been thinking of something from Intruder in the Dust. People got heavier just after they died, Faulkner had written. It was as if death was the only way stupid thief gravity knew how to celebrate its existence. “Doc, that you?”

  “Yeah.” Two shapes appeared in the dark and moved cautiously toward them. “I stuck hell out of myself on a goddam cactus. What are cactuses doing in Ohio?”

  “Excellent question,” Johnny said. “Who’s that with you?”

  “Audrey Wyler from across the street,” a woman replied. “Can we get out of these woods, please?”

  Johnny suddenly knew that he could not carry his end of Jim Reed’s body all the way back to the Carver house, let alone help Brad boost it over the fence. He looked around. “Steve? Can you spell me on this for a whi-” He broke off, remembering Steve’s dance with the Picasso mountain lion. “Shit, you can’t, can you?”

  “Oh, Chri… ist.” Tom Billingsley’s voice made one syllable into two, then cracked on the second one like a teenager’s. “Which twin is that?”

  “Jim,” Johnny said. Then, as Tom stepped next to him: can’t, Tom, you’ll have a stroke, or something.”

  “I’ll help,” Audrey said, joining them. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Steve saw that the old veterinarian and the woman from across the street had come on to the path at the same place where he and Entragian had come on to it. There was a cow’s skull half-buried in the ground where the discarded batteries had been and an old rusty horseshoe where the potato-chip bag had been, but the wrapper from the baseball cards was still there. Steve bent, picked it up, and held it so the moonlight would strike it. Upper Deck cards. Albert Belle with the bat coiled behind his head and a predatory look in his eye. Steve realized an odd thing: this felt like the anachronism, not the cacti or the cow’s skull or even the freakish cat which had been hiding in the ravine. And us, he thought. We’re the abnormalities now, maybe.

  “What are you thinking about?” Cynthia asked.

  “Nothing.”

  He let the wrapper drop from his fingers. Halfway to the ground it suddenly spread, filling out like a sail, turning from what might have been light green (it was hard to tell in the moonlight) to bright white. He gasped. Cynthia, who had turned to check the path behind them, wheeled back in a hurry. “What?”

  “Did you see?”

  “No. What?”

  “This.” He bent and picked it up. The baseball card wrapper was now a sheet of rough paper. Staring out of it was a scruffy-bearded villain with hooded, half-bright eyes. WANTED, the poster blared. MURDER, BANK-ROBBERY, TRAIN-ROBBERY, THEFT OF RESERVATION FUNDS, MOLESTATION AND TERRORIZING, POISONING TOWN WELLS, CATTLE THEFT, HORSE THEFT, CLAIM-JUMPING. All that above the picture. Below it, in big black type, the villain’s name: JEBEDIAH MURDOCK.

  “Give me a break,” Cynthia said softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That isn’t a crook, it’s some actor. I’ve seen him on TV.”

  Steve looked up and saw the others were pulling away. He took Cynthia by the hand and they hurried after them.

  Tak dangled in the archway between the den and the living room with Seth’s dirty toes barely touching the carpet. Its eyes were bright and feverish; it used the boy’s lungs in quick, hard gasps. Seth’s hair stood on end, not just on his head but all over his body. When any of this fine fuzz of body-hair brushed against the wall, it made a faint crackling noise. The muscles of the boy’s body seemed not just to quiver but to thrum.

  The death of the cop had ripped Tak out of its TV-daze, and it had snatched for the cop’s essence quickly, instinctively, going all the way to the edge of its range… and then past, leaping for the prize like an outfielder stealing a home run that’s already over the centerfield fence. And getting it! Energy had boomed into it like napalm, another barrier had fallen, and it had found itself closer than ever to Seth Garin’s unique center. Not there yet-not quite-but now so close.

  And its perceptions had also boomed. It saw the boy with the smoking pistol in his hand, understood what had happened, felt the boy’s horror
and guilt, sensed the potential. Without thinking-Tak didn’t think, not really-it leaped into Jim Reed’s mind. It could not control him physically at this range, but all the fail-safe equipment guarding the boy’s emotional armory had temporarily shorted out, leaving that part of him wide open. Tak had only a second-two, at most-to get in and turn up all the dials, overloading the boy with feedback, but a second had been enough. The boy might even have done it, anyway. All Tak had done, after all, was to amplify emotions which had already been present.

  The energy released by Jim Reed’s suicide had lit Tak up like a flare and shot its borrowed nerves all the way into the red zone. Fresh energy-young energy-flooded in, replacing the enormous amounts it had expended thus far. And now it hung in the doorway, humming, totally loaded, ready to finish what it had started.

  Food first. It was ravenous. Tak floated halfway across the living room, then stopped.

  “Aunt Audrey?” it called in Seth’s voice. A sweet voice, perhaps because it was so little used. “Aunt Audrey, are you here?”

  No. It sensed she wasn’t. Aunt Audrey was able-with Seth’s help-to block off her mind sometimes, but never the steady pulse of that mind’s existence; its thereness. That was gone, now, but only from the house. She could be with the others, probably was, but she had gone no farther. Because Poplar Street was surrounded by Nevada desert, now… except it wasn’t exactly the real Nevada, more a Nevada of the mind, the one Tak had imagined into being. With Seth’s help, of course. It couldn’t have done any of this without Seth.

  Tak moved toward the kitchen again. Aunt Audrey’s leaving was probably for the best. It would make Seth easier to control, make it less likely that he’d become a distraction at a crucial moment. Not that the little feller could present much of a problem under any circumstances; he was powerful but in many crucial ways helpless. At first it had been an arm-wrestle between equally matched opponents… except they weren’t equally matched, not really. In the long run, raw strength is never a match for craft, and Tak had had long millennia in which to hone its hooks and wiles. Now, little by little, it was gaining the upper hand, using Seth Garin’s own extraordinary powers against him like a clever karate master matched against a strong but stupid opponent.