The Regulators (richard bachman) Read online

  “It,” she said, her mouth drawing down in what Johnny thought was an entirely unconscious moue of disgust. “It, not he.”

  “All right, it. To Seth, Poplar Street is the Force Corridor, the houses are cocoons, and we’re the evil aliens that live inside them. It’s a shootout at the OK Corral, interstellar version. But what does Tak get out of it?”

  “Something all its own,” Audrey said, and Johnny suddenly thought of an old Beatles lyric: What do you see when you turn out the light? I can’t tell you, but I know it’s mine. “The fantasies were always strictly for Seth, I think-they’re the way Tak taps into Seth’s powers, which complement its own. Tak… I think Tak just likes what happens to us.”

  Silence in the room.

  “Likes it,” Belinda said at last. She spoke in a low, considering tone. “What do you mean, likes it?”

  When we hurt. We give something off when we hurt, some thing it… it licks up, like ice-cream. And when we die, that’s even better. It doesn’t have to lick then. It can just gobble the stuff down whole.”

  “So we’re dinner,” Cynthia said. “That’s what you’re saying, right? To Seth we’re a video game and to this Tak… we’re dinner.”

  We’re more,” Audrey said. “Think what food is to us: the source of energy. Tak is making, that’s what Seth told me. Making and building. I don’t think the desert where Seth picked it up was its home; I think that was its prison. Its home is what it may ultimately try to re-create here.”

  “On the basis of what I’ve seen so far, I don’t even want to visit its neighborhood, let alone live there,” Steve said. “In fact-”

  “Quit it,” Cammie said. Her voice was harsh and impatient. “How do we kill him? You said there might be a way.”

  Audrey looked at her, shocked. “You’re not killing Seth,” she said. “No one is killing Seth. You can get that thought right out of your mind. He’s just a harmless little boy-”

  Cammie leaped at her and grabbed her shoulders. It was done before Johnny could even think of moving. Her thumbs sank deeply into the tops of Audrey’s breasts. “Tell it to Jimmy!” she shouted into Audrey’s stunned face. “He’s dead, my son is dead, so don’t you go crying to me about how harmless your nephew is! Don’t you dare! That thing is in him like a tapeworm in a horse’s belly! In him! And if it won’t come out-”

  “But it will!” Audrey said. She began to regain control of herself, and her voice grew calm again. “It will.”

  Cammie relaxed her grip slowly, and her look was not trusting. “How? When?”

  Before Audrey could reply, Kim said: “I hear a humming sound. Like electric motors.” Her voice rose, trembling. “Oh God, they’re coming back.”

  Now Johnny could hear it, too. It was the same electric humming he had heard before, only it was louder now. Somehow more vital. More threatening. He looked toward the cellar door and decided it was probably too late to try for the basement, especially with two sleeping children in the pantry.

  “Down,” he said. “Everyone down on the floor.” He saw Cynthia take Steve’s hand and point through the open pantry door with a finger which wasn’t quite steady. Steve nodded and they went in to cover the children’s bodies with their own.

  The humming swelled.

  “Pray,” Belinda said suddenly. “Everybody pray.”

  Johnny was too frightened to pray.

  From Audrey Wyler’s journal February 7, 1996

  Have noticed something interesting, what may be a key way of deciding which of them is in charge, at any given time, of the body they share. They both care a great deal for the Cassandra Styles action figure, but Tak’s caring is almost completely sexual. It strokes her plastic breasts amp; rubs her plastic legs. Two days ago I saw it sitting on the stairs amp; licking the crotch of her blue shorts amp; sporting an erection (hard to miss, when all it wears most days are underpants). And, of course, the fact that it wants me to wear Cassie-type clothes and has gotten me to dye my hair Cassie Styles red (horrible shade, too) has not escaped me.

  Seth, on the other hand… when it’s Seth, sometimes he just hugs the figure of Cassie, or strokes its stiff red hair, or kisses its cheek. He is pretending it’s his mother. I don’t know how I know that, but I do.

  Must stop now. Crying again.

  Chapter Twelve

  MAIN STREET, DESPERATION/REGULATOR TIME

  As on their previous run, the vans appear like phantoms, only this time it’s not mist from which they appear but blowing desert dust that shines like lame in the glow of Old Mr Cowpoke Moon.

  Cassie’s pink Dream Floater comes first, with Candy behind the wheel in his pinned-back cavalry hat and Cassie herself sitting beside him. On the roof, the Valentine-heart radar dish is turning briskly. Like a sign on a whorehouse roof, Johnny Marinville might have said had he seen it, but he does not; he is lying on the floor of the Carvers” kitchen next to Old Doc with his hands laced together over the top of his head and his eyes squeezed tightly shut; on his face is the expression of a man who expects Armageddon, and soon.

  Dream Floater does not swing on to Desperation’s dusty Main Street from Hyacinth; Hyacinth is gone. Where it once ran there is now nothing but hardpan desert, almost featureless… as the sky overhead in this direction is almost completely starless. It’s as if, when His eye turned south to the wastes beyond this tiny huddle of buildings, the Creator had lost most of His divine inspiration.

  Dream Floater’s stubby wings are extended, its wheels partially retracted; it cuts through the air about three feet above the wheel-ruts of the street. Its engine pulses steadily. As it passes The Lady Day on the corner, its firing port irises open. Laura DeMott from The Regulators leans out. In her delicate white hands is not her Derringer but a shotgun. Just a double-barrelled shotgun, but when she fires it, the report is as loud as a detonating backpack missile. The report is followed by a short, high-pitched wail, and then the front of the saloon explodes. The batwing doors fly up, for a moment fluttering madly and looking like real wings. There’s an instant of flicker across what remains of the saloon’s front, almost like a heatwave, and for that one instant, anyone who had been looking would have seen the E-Z Stop behind the burning Lady Day like a ghost-building or a double exposure, the convenience store also half-demolished and also burning.

  Behind Dream Floater comes Tracker Arrow, and behind Tracker Arrow comes Freedom. Freedom’s polarized windshield slides down again. Major Pike, a good Canopalean gone bad, is currently behind the wheel of Bounty’s van, but the Confederate uniform and pinned-back hat are gone (Candy has the hat on now; the regulators are always trading accessories and bits of uniform back and forth, it’s part of the fun). The Major is wearing his iridescent MotoKops uniform again, and without a hat, his blond Mohawk “do shows to good advantage. Sitting beside him in the nav-pit is the grizzled trapper type Johnny spotted earlier: Sergeant Mathis, Jeb Murdock’s chief aide after the beating and capture of Captain Candell.

  Collie Entragian’s house has been replaced by the Two Sisters Millinery, where can be found The Finest in Ladies” Fashions. Serge leans out, draws a bead on the storefront with his shotgun, and yanks the triggers. There is another shattering double crash, and again that long, wailing shriek, as of a bomb falling dead-center-true down the gravity-well toward its target.

  “Make it stop!” Susi screams. “Oh please someone MAKE IT STOP!”

  The top half of Two Sisters seems to lift off in a storm of boards and shingles and glass and nails. Again there is that flicker, almost as quick as a hummingbird’s wing, and in it Entragian’s house may be glimpsed, even Gary Ripton’s bike and plastic-covered body may be glimpsed, shimmering like the mirages they have now become. Then the house is gone and it’s the Two Sisters (where in The Regulators we first see Laura DeMott, saloon lass with a heart of gold, surreptitiously buying cloth for a church dress) again, with half its roof gone and all its windows blown in.

  From the badlands (sagebrush and huge tumbled boulders of
cartoon roundness) north of Poplar Street, where Bear Street now isn’t, the silver Rooty-Toot Power Wagon appears. Rooty is behind the wheel, his eyes flashing on and off like traffic lights; Little Joe Cartwright is in the seat next to him, devil-may-care grin on his face, a shotgun chrome-plated with futuristic swoops and doodads in his hands. Directly behind Rooty-Toot comes the Justice Wagon, and behind Justice there appears a humming electric nightmare. In the bonelight of the moon, the Meatwagon looks wrapped in black silk. No Face is in the steering-pit. Countess Lili is in the nav-pit, her sexy eyes gleaming in her ashy vampire-maiden’s face. Jeb Murdock is above them, in the Doom Turret. In the prime shooting-station.

  Because he is the meanest.

  And so the final Power Wagon assault begins, with three vans swinging into the Force Corridor from the north and three more from the south. Hideously amplified shotgun blasts shake the air; the whistling passage of the shells thrown from the muzzles of those guns sounds like a flock of banshees. The Cattlemen’s Hotel (formerly the Soderson house) is shivered backward on its foundations; the left side first slumps, then actually crumples, spitting off dry boards and wooden shingles. The house north of it-a wattle-and-daub construction Brad Josephson would never have recognized as his own lovingly maintained split-level-seems to explode outward in all directions, shooting jagged chunks of wood and slabs of dried mud into the air.

  On the other side of the street, the false front of Worrell’s Market amp; Mercantile (once Tom Billingsley’s house; the corpses of the Sodersons lie in an aisle of big round bags, all labelled disintegrates under a series of rifle shots from the Justice Wagon-each arriving round as loud as a mortar shell. Colonel Henry is driving; poked out of the firing trap and doing the shooting is Chuck Connors, also known as The Rifleman. His son is right next to him, grinning from ear to ear. “Good shootin, Paw!” he exclaims as smoking boards from the false front ignite the decade’s worth of trash and dust that has been hiding behind it. Soon the entire building will be on fire.

  “Thanks, son,” Lucas McCain says, and turns his missile-firing Winchester on to Lushan’s Chinese Laundry. Lushan’s, once the home of Peter and Mary Jackson, has been pretty well bashed about already by Rooty-Toot, but that doesn’t deter The Rifleman. His son joins in, firing a pistol. It’s a small one, but every round from it sounds like a bazooka shell, just the same.

  At the end of the run, a haze of gunsmoke hangs over Main Street. Several of the houses on the west side of the street-the adobe hacienda where the Gellers once lived, the log cabin where the Reeds hung their assorted hats, the wattle-and-daub Brad and Belinda once called home-have been almost totally destroyed. The Cattlemen’s is still standing-more or less-and so is the Two Sisters on the east side, but the Mercantile will soon join the Owl (formerly the Hobart place) as so much ash in the wind.

  Only one house on the east side of the street remains as it was before the regulators came: the Carver place. There are bullet-holes in the siding and broken windows from the previous assault, but on this run it has been completely untouched.

  Dream Floater, Tracker Arrow, and Freedom have reached the north end of what used to be Poplar Street’s two-forty block. Rooty-Toot, Justice, and the Meatwagon have reached the south end. The firing slackens, then ceases entirely. The people in the Carver house can hear the crackle of fire from the other side of the fence-the Market amp; Mercantile they still think of as Old Doc’s bungalow-but otherwise there is a deep quiet that lies like balm against their ringing ears. In it, the survivors cautiously raise their heads.

  “Is it over, do you think?” Steve asks, in the tone of someone who doesn’t want to come right out and say it wasn’t as bad as he thought… but who is thinking it.

  “We ought to-” Johnny begins.

  “I hear it again!” Kim Geller cries from the living room. Her voice is high, shivering on the edge of hysteria, but the rest of them have no reason not to believe her; she is closest to the street, after all. “That awful humming! Make it stop!” She rushes through the door into the kitchen, her eyes bulging and crazed. “Make it stop!”

  “Get down, Mom!” Susi calls, but she herself does not stir from beside Dave Reed, who is lying with one arm around her and his hand (the one his creepy mother can’t see from where she is) against her breast. Susi doesn’t mind his hand a bit; would mind, in fact, if he took it away. Her terror and her almost maternal concern for the surviving twin have combined to make her really horny for the first time in her life. All she really wants right now is to be with David in a place where they can take their pants off without being noticed.

  Kim ignores her daughter. She goes to Audrey, grabs her by her hair, yanks her head back. “Make him stop it!” she shouts into Audrey’s pale face. “He’s your kin, you brought him here, NOW MAKE HIM STOP!”

  Belinda Josephson moves fast; she’s up from where she’s been lying, she’s across the room, and she has Kim Geller’s free arm twisted up behind her back almost before Brad can blink.

  “Ow!” Kim screams, immediately letting go of Audrey’s hair. “Ow, let go! Let go, you black bi-”

  Belinda has taken all the tiresome racist shit she intends to for one day. She yanks Kirn’s arm up even further before she can finish. Susi’s mom, who supports the Girl Scouts and never sends the Cancer Society lady away empty-handed, shrieks like a factory whistle at quitting time. Then Belinda turns her, hips her, and sends her flying back into the living room. Kim crashes into a wall. All around her more Hummel figures tumble to their doom.

  “There,” Belinda says in a businesslike voice. “She had that coming. I don’t have to put up with that kind of-”

  “Never mind,” Johnny says. The humming is louder now, louder than it has ever been: a steady, cycling beat like the sound of a huge electric transformer. “Get down, Bee. Right now. Everybody. Steve, Cynthia? Cover those children!” Then he looks, almost apologetically, at Seth Garin’s aunt. “Can you make him stop, Aud?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s not him. Not now. It’s Tak.” Before she puts her head back down, she sees Cammie Reed looking at her, and there is something in that dry glance that frightens her more than all of Kirn Geller’s shouting and hair-pulling. It’s a serious look. No hysteria, only flat murder.

  Who would Cammie murder, though? Her? Seth? Both? Audrey doesn’t know. She only knows she cannot tell the others what she did before leaving, that simple thing that might solve so much-if. If the window of time she’s hoping for opens; if she does the right thing when it does. She can’t tell them there’s hope, because if Tak is able to reach out and catch hold of their thoughts, all hopes will fail.

  The thrumming grows louder. On Main Street, the Power Wagons are rolling again. Dream Floater, Tracker Arrow, and Freedom are closer to the Carver house and reach it first. They park in line, the red Tracker Arrow with Snake Hunter behind the wheel in the middle, blocking the driveway where the lord of the manor is lying dead (and looking much the worse for wear by this time). The other three-Rooty-Toot, Justice, and Meatwagon-come up from the south end of the street and lengthen the line of vehicles.

  The Carver house (it is, perhaps ironically, a ranch-style home) is now entirely blocked off by Power Wagons. From the firing pit of Dream Floater, Laura DeMott trains her shotgun on the smashed picture window; from the firing pit of Tracker Arrow, Hoss Cartwright and a very young Glint Eastwood-he is Rowdy Yates of Rawhide in this incarnation, as a matter of fact-have also got the house covered. Jeb Murdock stands in the Doom Turret of the Meatwagon with two shotguns, each sawed off four inches above the cocked triggers, the butts propped against the wishbones of his hips. He is grinning widely, his face that of Rory Calhoun in his prime.

  Roof trapdoors bang open. Cowboys and aliens fill the remaining shooting-points.

  “Gosh, Paw, looks like a damn turkey-shoot!” Mark McCain cries, and then utters a shrill laugh.

  “Root-root-root!”

  “SHUT UP, ROOTY!” they all chorus, and the laugh becomes
general.

  At the sound of that laughter, something inside of Kim Geller, something which has only been badly bent up to now, finally snaps. She gets to her feet in the living room and marches to the screen door beyond which Debbie Ross still lies. Kirn’s sneakers grit through the broken china shards of Pie Carver’s prized Hummels. The sound of the cycling motors out front-that weird beat-beat-beat, like some sort of electric heart-is driving her insane. Still, it’s easier to focus on that than it is to think about how that uppity nigger woman first almost broke her arm and then threw her into the other room as if she were a sack of laundry, or something.

  The others are unaware she’s left until they hear her voice, querulous and shrill: “You get out of here! You just stop it and get out of here right now The police are already on their way, you know!”

  At the sound of that voice, Susi forgets all about how nice it is to have Dave Reed touching her breast, and how she’d like to help him forget the death of his brother by taking him upstairs and balling him until his liver explodes. “Mummy!” she gasps, and starts to get up.

  Dave hauls her back down, then clamps an arm around her waist to make completely sure she doesn’t get up again. He has lost his brother, and he feels like that’s enough for one day.

  Come on, come on, come on, Audrey thinks… except she guesses it’s actually a prayer. Her eyes are squeezed so tightly shut she can see exploding red dots behind the lids, and her hands are clamped into fists, the ragged remains of her nails digging into her palms. Come on, go to work the way you’re supposed to, do your job, get started-

  “Kick in,” she whispers, unaware she’s speaking out loud. Johnny, who has raised his head at the sound of Kirn’s voice, now looks at Audrey. “Kick in, can’t you? For Christ’s sake, kick in!”