The Regulators (richard bachman) Read online

  “You all right, Doc?” Audrey asked.

  “Yeah,” Billingsley said. “Right as rain. Aren’t I, Susi?”

  “Sure,” Susi Geller agreed nervously. Then, through the fence: “Mrs Wyler, is that you? Where did you come from?”

  “That doesn’t matter right now. We need to-”

  “What happened out there? Is everyone all right? My mom is having a cow. A large one.”

  Is everyone all right? That was a question Brad didn’t want to answer. No one else did either, from the look.

  “Mrs Reed?” Johnny asked. “Dave next, then you?”

  Cammie gave him her dry stare, then turned back to Dave. She murmured in his ear once more, stroking his hair as she did so. Dave listened with a troubled expression, then murmured back, just loud enough for Brad to hear, “I don’t want to.” She murmured again, more vehemently this time. Brad caught the words your brother near the end. This time Dave reached up, grabbed the top of the fence, and swung himself smoothly over to the other side. He did it, so far as Brad could see, with no expression save that look of faint unease on his face. Cammie went next, Audrey and Cynthia boosting. As she gained the top, Dave’s hands rose to meet her. Cammie slipped into them, making no effort to keep hold of the fence for safety’s sake. Brad had an idea that at this point she might have actually welcomed a fall. Maybe even a broken neck. Why did you send us out here, Ma? the kid had shouted, perhaps intuiting that his own eagerness to go-and Jim’s-would never serve as a mitigating circumstance in her mind. Cammie would always blame herself, and he would probably always be willing to let her.

  “Brad?” That was a voice he was glad to hear, although he rarely heard it sound so soft and worried. “You there, hon?”

  “I’m here, Bee.”

  “You okay?”

  “Fine. Listen, Bee, and don’t lose your cool. Jim Reed is dead. So’s Entragian from down the street.”

  There was a gasp, and then Susi Geller was screaming Jim’s name over and over again. To Brad, who was emotionally as well as physically exhausted, those screams roused annoyance rather than pity… and the fear that they might draw something even less pleasant than the big cat or the coyote with the human fingers.

  “Susi?” The alarmed voice of Kim Geller from the house. Then she was screaming, too, the sound seeming to cut the moonlit air like a sharp whirling blade: “Soooooo-zeeeeee! Sooooozeeeeee!”

  “Shut up!” Johnny yelled. “Jesus, Kim, SHUT UP!”

  For a wonder she did, but the girl went on and on, shrieking like a misbegotten fifth-act Juliet.

  “Dear God,” Audrey muttered. She put her palms over her ears and ran her fingers into her hair.

  “Bee,” Brad said through the fence, “shut that Chicken Little up. I don’t care how.”

  “JIM!” Susi screamed. “OHHHH GAWWWD, JIM! OH GAWWWD NO! OH-”

  There was a slap. The screams were cut off almost at once. Then:

  “You can’t hit my daughter! You can’t hit my daughter, you bitch, I don’t care what ideas you’ve gotten from… from affirmative action! You fat black bitch!”

  “Oh, fuck me til I cry,” Cynthia said. She clutched her own double-dyed hair and squeezed her eyes shut like a kid who doesn’t want to watch the final few minutes of a scary movie.

  Brad kept his open and held his breath, waiting for Bee to go nuclear. Instead, Bee ignored the woman, calling softly through the fence: “Are you sending his body over, Bradley?” She sounded completely composed, for which Brad was completely thankful.

  “Yeah. You and his mother and his brother catch hold of him when we do.”

  “We will.” Still cool as a cucumber fresh out of the crock.

  “Kim?” Brad called through the stakes of the fence. “Mrs Geller? Why don’t you go on in the house, ma’am?”

  “Yes!” Kim said pleasantly. “I think that’s a good idea. We’ll just go in the house, won’t we, Susi? Some cold water on our faces will make us feel better.”

  There were footfalls. The snuffling began to diminish, which was good. Then the coyotes began to howl again, which was bad. Brad looked over his shoulder and saw chips of moving silver light in the tangled darkness of the greenbelt. Eyes.

  “We’ve got to hurry,” Cynthia said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Audrey said.

  Brad thought: That’s what I’m afraid of. He turned and took hold of Jim Reed’s shoulders. He could smell, very faintly, the shampoo and aftershave the kid had used that morning. Probably he’d been thinking about the girls as he applied them. Johnny took a nervous look behind them-at those moving chips of light, Brad assumed-then moved down Jim’s body until he had one arm around the dead boy’s waist and the other supporting his butt. Audrey and Cynthia took his legs.

  “Ready?” Johnny asked.

  They nodded.

  “On three, then. One… two… three.”

  They raised the body like a quartet doing a team bench-lift. For one horrible moment Brad thought his back, having supported a shamefully large gut for the last ten years or so, was going to lock up on him. Then they had Jim’s body up to the top of the fence. The dead boy’s arms hung out to either side, the posture of a circus acrobat inviting applause at the climax of a fabulous stunt. His open palms were full of moonlight.

  Beside Brad, Johnny sounded on the verge of cardiac arrest. Jim’s head lolled limply backward on his neck. A drop of half-congealed blood fell and struck Brad’s cheek. It made him think of mint jelly, for some mad reason, and his stomach clenched like a hand in a slick glove.

  “Help us!” Cynthia gasped. “For Christ’s sake, someone-

  Hands appeared, hovered above the blunt fence-stakes for a moment, then broke apart into fingers which grasped Jim’s shirt and the waistband of his shorts. Just as Brad knew he couldn’t hold the body another second (never until now had he really understood the concept of dead weight), it was pulled away from him. There was a meaty thud, and from a little distance away (the Carvers” back porch was Brad’s guess), Susi Geller voiced another brief scream.

  Johnny looked at him, and Brad was almost convinced the man was smiling. “Sounds like they dropped him,” Johnny said in a low voice. He wiped an arm across his sweaty face, then lowered it. The smile-if it had been there in the first place-was gone.

  “Whoops,” Brad said.

  “Yeah. Whoops-a-fuckin-daisy.”

  “Hey, Doc!” Cynthia cried in a low voice. “Catch! Don’t worry, safety’s on!” She lifted the.30-.06, stock first, standing on her toes in order to tip it over the fence.

  “Got it,” Billingsley said. Then, in a lower voice: “That woman and her idiot daughter finally went in the house.”

  Cynthia climbed the fence and swung easily over the top. Audrey needed a push and a hand on her hip for balance, and then she was over, as well. Steve went next, using Brad’s and Johnny’s interlaced hands as a stirrup and then sitting up top a moment, waiting for the pain in his clawed shoulders to subside a little. When it had, he swung over the fence to the Carvers” side and pushed off, jumping rather than trying to let himself down.

  “I can’t get over there,” Johnny said. “No way. If there was a ladder in the garage-”

  Wh-wh-WHOOOOO!…Wh-wh-WHOOOOOOO!

  From almost directly behind them. The two men jumped into each other’s arms as unselfconsciously as small children. Brad turned his head and saw shapes closing in. Each was hulked up behind a pair of those glinting semi-circular moonchips.

  “Cynthia!” Johnny shouted. “Shoot the gun!”

  When her voice came back it sounded scared and uncertain. “You mean come back over the-” “No! No! Just shoot it into the sky!” She triggered the.30-.06 twice, the blasts whipcracking the air. The bitter tang of gunsmoke seeped through the fence-stakes. The shapes coming toward them through the greenbelt paused. Didn’t draw back, but at least paused.

  “You still pooped, John?” Brad asked softly.

  Johnny was looking b
ack at the shapes in the shadows. There was a strange, shaky smile on his mouth. “Nah,” he said. “Got my second wind. I… what do you think you’re doing?”

  What’s it look like?” Brad asked. He was down on his hands and knees at the base of the fence. “Hurry up, Daddy-O.”

  Johnny stepped on to his back. “Jesus,” he said, “I feel like the President of South Africa.”

  Brad didn’t seem to understand at first. When he did, he began giggling. His back hurt like hell, Johnny Marinville seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds, the man’s heels felt as if they were leaving divots in Brad’s outraged spine, but the giggles poured out of him just the same; he couldn’t help it. Here was a white American intellectual with a prep school education of excruciating correctness-a writer who had once partied with the Panthers at

  Lenny Bernstein’s pad-using a black man as a footstool. If it wasn’t a liberal’s idea of hell, Brad had never heard of one. He thought of moaning and crying, “Hurry up, massa, you killin dis po boy!” and his giggles became outright laughter. He was terrified of losing a section of his tender upturned ass to one of the slinkers back there in the woods, but he laughed anyway. I’ll give him a chorus of “Old Black Joe”, he thought, and howled like a coyote himself. Tears poured from his eyes. He pounded his fist on the ground.

  “Brad, what’s wrong?” Johnny whispered from above him.

  “Never mind!” he said, still giggling. “Just get off my back! Holy shit, what you got on those shoes? Cleats?”

  Then, blessedly, the weight was gone. There were grunting sounds as Johnny struggled to get his leg over the fence. Brad got up, rode through a scary moment when his back again seemed about to lock, then got one meaty shoulder planted under Johnny’s ass. A moment later he could hear another grunt of effort and a muffled cry from Johnny as he came down.

  Which left him, all alone and with no footstool.

  Brad eyed the top of the fence and thought it looked about ninety feet high. Then he glanced behind him and saw the shapes on the move again, tightening around him in a collapsing crescent.

  He seized two of the stakes, and as he did, something snarled behind him. Underbrush rattled. He looked back over his shoulder and saw a creature that looked more like a wild boar than a coyote… except what it really looked like was a badly made child’s drawing, nothing more than a hurried scribble, really, that had somehow come to life. Its legs were all of different lengths and ended in blunt clubs unlike either paws or fingers. Its tail seemed to jut up from the middle of its back. Its eyes were blank silver circles. Its nose was a pig-pug. Only its teeth seemed really real, huge croggled things which spouted from either side of the beast’s mouth.

  Adrenaline hit Brad’s nervous system like something shot from one of Old Doc’s horse syringes. He forgot all about his back and yanked himself upward, tucking his knees between his chest and the fence when he heard the thing charge. It hit just below his feet, hard enough to shake the whole fence. Then Johnny had one of his wrists and Dave Reed had the other and Brad scrabbled to the top of the fence, leaving generous amounts of skin behind. He tried to get his left leg over the top and thumped the ankle on one of the blunt stakes instead. Then he was falling, tearing his shirt all the way down one side in his useless struggle to hold on to the top of the fence with his right hand. He let go in time to keep from breaking his arm, but when he landed (partly on top of Johnny, mostly on top of his admirably padded wife), he could feel blood trickling down from his armpit.

  “Want to think about getting off me, handsome?” the admirably padded lady herself asked, sounding breathless. “I mean, if it wouldn’t discommode you any?”

  Brad crawled off them both, collapsed in a heap, then rolled over on his back. He looked up at alien stars, swollen things that blinked on and off like the Christmas lights they strung over small-town Main Streets every year on the day after Thanksgiving. What he was looking at were no more real stars than he was the King of Prussia… but they were up there, just the same. Yes they were, right over his head, and how bad was your situation when the sky itself was part of the damned conspiracy?

  Brad closed his eyes so he wouldn’t look at them anymore. In his mind’s eye-the one that opened widest when the other two closed-he saw Gary Ripton tossing him his Shopper. Saw his own hand, the one not holding the hose, go up and catch it. Good one, Mr Josephson! Gary called, honestly admiring. It came from far away, that voice, like something echoing down a canyon. Closer by, he heard howls from the greenbelt side of the fence (except now it was the desertbelt). These were followed by a series of hard thuds as the boar-coyotes threw themselves at it.

  Christ.

  “Brad,” Johnny said. Low voice, leaning over him, from the sound.

  “What.”

  “You all right?”

  “Fine as paint.” Still not opening his eyes.

  “Brad.”

  “What!”

  “I had an idea. For a movie.”

  “You’re a maniac, John.” Eyes still shut. Things were better that way. “But I’ll bite. What’s it going to be called, this movie I can be in?”

  “Black Men Can’t Climb Fences,” Johnny said, and began laughing wildly. It had an exhausted, half-crazy sound to it. I’m gonna get Mario Fucking Van Peebles to direct. Larry Fishburne’s gonna play you.”

  “Sure,” Brad said, sitting up painfully. “I love Larry Fishburne. Very intense. Offer him a million up front. Who could resist?”

  “Right, right,” Johnny agreed, now laughing so hard he could barely talk… only tears were streaming down his face, and Brad didn’t think they were tears of laughter. Not ten minutes ago, Cammie Reed had come within a hair of blowing his head off, and Brad doubted if Johnny had forgotten that. Brad doubted if Johnny forgot much of anything, in fact. It was probably a talent he would have traded, if given the opportunity.

  Brad got on his feet, took Bee’s hand, and helped her up. There were more thuds at the fence, more howls, then gnawing sounds, as if the hungry abortions over there were trying to eat their way through the stakes.

  “So what do you think?” Johnny asked, letting Brad help him up as well. He staggered, found his balance, wiped his streaming eyes.

  “I think that when the chips were down, I climbed just fine,” Brad said. He slipped an arm around his wife, then looked at Johnny. “Come on, honky. You climbed to success over your first black man, you must be all tuckered out. Let’s get in the house.”

  2

  The thing which hopped unsteadily through the gate at the rear of Tom Billingsley’s backyard was a child’s version of the gila monster Jeb Murdock blows off a rock during his shooting contest with Candy about halfway through The Regulators. Its head, however, was that of an escapee from Jurassic Park.

  It hopped up the back steps, slithered to the screen, and pushed at it with its snout. Nothing happened; the screen opened outward. The gila stretched its saurian head forward and began chomping at the bottom panel of the door with its teeth. Three bites was all it took, and then it was in Old Doc’s kitchen.

  Gary Soderson became distantly aware of a rotten breeze blowing into his face. He tried to wave it away, but it only grew stronger. He raised one hand, touched something that felt like an alligator shoe-a very large alligator shoe-and opened his eyes. What he saw leaning over him at kissing distance, staring at him with a curiosity which was almost human, was so grotesque that he could not even scream. The lizard-thing’s eyes were bright orange.

  Here it is, Gary thought, my first major attack of the dt’s. Ahoy, mateys, A.A. dead ahead.

  He closed his eyes. He tried to tell himself that he didn’t smell swamp-breath or hear the toneless clickety-click of a tail dragging across kitchen linoleum. He held his dead wife’s cold hand. He said, “Nothing there. Nothing there. Noth-”

  Before he could finish the third repetition (and everyone knows the third time’s the charm), the monster had plunged its teeth into his throat and torn it open.

/>   3

  Johnny saw small feet through the open pantry door and looked in. Ellie and Ralphie were lying in there on what looked like a futon, holding each other. They were fast asleep, gunshots from out back notwithstanding, but even in slumber they had not entirely escaped what was happening; their faces were white and strained, their breathing had a watery sound that made him think of stifled sobs, and Ralphie’s feet twitched, as if he dreamed of running.

  Johnny guessed that Ellen must have found the futon and brought it into the pantry for herself and her little brother to lie on; certainly Kim Geller hadn’t done it. Kim and her daughter had resumed their former places by the wall, only now sitting in kitchen chairs instead of on the floor.

  “Is Jim really dead?” Susi asked, looking at Johnny with wet, shiny eyes as Johnny came in behind Brad and Belinda. “I just can’t believe it, we were playing Frisbee like we always do, and we were going out to the movies tonight-”

  Johnny was completely out of patience with her. “Why don’t you go out on the back porch and have a look for yourself?”

  “Why are you being such a bastard?” Kim asked angrily. “My daughter may never get over serious trauma like this. She’s had a profound shock!”

  “She’s not the only one,” Johnny said. “And while we’re at it-”

  “Quit it, man, we don’t need to get fighting,” Steve Ames said.

  Undoubtedly true, but Johnny no longer cared. He pointed a finger at Kim, who stared back at him along its length with hot, resentful eyes. “And while we’re at it, the next time you call Belinda Josephson a black bitch, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.”

  “Oh, gosh, don’t you think your shit comes out smoking,” Kim said, and rolled her eyes theatrically.

  “Stop it, John,” Belinda said, and took his arm. “Right now. We’ve got more important things to-”

  “Fat black bitch,” Kim Geller said. She didn’t look at Belinda as she said it but at Johnny. Her eyes were still burning, but now she was smiling. He thought it was the most poisonous smile he had ever seen in his life. “Fat black nigger bitch.” That said, she pointed her own finger at her mouth and visible teeth, like a woman trying to get suicide across in a game of charades. Her daughter was looking at her with a stunned expression. “Okay? Did you hear it? So come on. Knock my teeth down my throat. Let’s see you try.”