The Regulators Page 8

  I might have let it go at that if he hadn’t sounded so funny and vague, so really unlike himself. You know your own kin, don’t you? Or you think you do. And Bill was always outgoing and bubbly or indrawn and pouty. There wasn’t much middle ground. Except during that phone call, it seemed to be all middle ground. So I kept after him about it, which I wouldn’t have done ordinarily. I said that AN AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH sounded like one specific event. So he said that well, yes, something had happened not too far from Ely, which is one of the few good-sized towns north of Las Vegas. Just after they went by a road sign pointing the way to a burg called Desperation (charming names they have out there, I must say, makes you just wild to visit), Seth “kinda freaked out.” That’s how Bill put it. They were on Route 50, the non-turnpike route, and there was this huge ridge of earth on their left, south of the highway.

  Bill thought it was sort of interesting, but no more. Seth, though—when he turned in that direction and saw it, he went nuts. Started waving his arms and gabbling in that private language of his. To me it always sounds like talk on a tape that someone is playing backward.

  Bill and June and the two older kids went along with him the way they do—did—when he gets excited and starts verbalizing, which is rare but far from unheard-of. You know, kind of like Yeah, Seth, you bet, Seth, it sure is wild, Seth—and all the time they’re doing it, that embankment is slipping farther and farther behind them. Until finally Seth—get this—speaks up, not in gibberish but in English. He really talks, says “Stop, Daddy, go back, Seth want to see mountain, Seth want to see Hoss and Little Joe.” Hoss and Little Joe, in case you don’t remember, are two of the main characters on Bonanza.

  Bill said it was more real words than Seth had put together in his whole life, and some time spent around Seth has convinced me of how unusual it would be for him to say so much in clear language at one time. But . . . AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH? I don’t want to be mean or anything, but it was hardly the Gettysburg Address, was it? I couldn’t make it jibe then, and I can’t now. On his postcard, Bill sounds so pumped he’s just about blowing his stack; on the phone he sounded like a pod-person in The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Plus one other thing. On the card he says “more later,” as if he can’t wait to spill the whole thing, but once I had him on the phone, I just about have to drag it out of him. Weird!

  Bill said what happened made him think of an old joke about a couple who think their son is mute. Then one day, when the kid’s six or so, he speaks up at the dinner table. “Please, mother, may I have another ear of corn?” he says. The parents fall all over him and ask why he’s never spoken up before. “I never had anything to say,” he tells them. Bill told me the joke (I’d heard it before, I think back around the time they burned Joan of Arc at the stake) and then gave out with the phony cocktail-party laugh again, ha-ha-ha. Like that closed the subject for good and all. Only I wasn’t ready for it to be closed.

  “So did you ask him, Bill?” I asked.

  “Ask him what?” he says.

  “Why he never spoke before.”

  “But he does talk.”

  “Not like this, though. He doesn’t talk like this, which is why you sent me the excited postcard, right?” I was getting mad at him by then. I don’t know why, but I was. “So did you ask him why he hadn’t ever strung fifteen or twenty words of clear English together before?”

  “Well, no,” he says. “I didn’t.”

  “And did you go back? Did you take him to Desperation so he could look for the Ponderosa Ranch or whatever?”

  “We really couldn’t do that, Aud,” he says after another of those long silences. It was like waiting for a chess computer to catch up with a tough move. I don’t like to be talking this way about my brother, who I loved and will miss for the rest of my life, but I want you to understand how really strange that last conversation was. The truth? It was hardly like talking to my brother at all. I wish I could explain why that was, but I can’t.

  “What do you mean, you couldn’t?” I ask him.

  “Couldn’t means couldn’t,” he says. I think he was a little pissed at me but I didn’t mind; he sounded a little more like himself, anyway. “I wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City before dark, which we wouldn’t have done if I’d turned around and backtracked to that little town he was so excited about. Everyone kept telling me how treacherous 50 can be after sundown, and I didn’t want to put my family into a dangerous situation.” Like he’d been crossing the Gobi Desert instead of central Nevada.

  And that’s all there is. We talked a little more and then he said, “Take it easy, babe” the way he always did, and that’s the last I’ll ever hear from him . . . in this world, at least. Just take it easy, babe, and then he disappeared down the barrel of some travelling asshole’s gun. All of them did, except for Seth. The police haven’t even been able to identify the caliber of the guns they used yet, did I tell you that? Life is so unfinished compared to books and movies! Like a fucking salad.

  Still, that last conversation nags me. More than anything I keep coming back to that stupid cocktail-party laugh. Bill—my Bill—never laughed like that in his life.

  I wasn’t the only one that noticed he was a little off the beam, either. His friend Joe, the one they were out there visiting, said the whole family seemed off, except for Seth. I had a conversation with him at the undertaker’s, while Herb was signing the transferral forms. Joe said he kept wondering if they had a virus, or the flu. “Except for the little one,” he said. “He had lots of zip, always out there in the sandbox with his toys.”

  Okay, I’ve written enough—way, way too much, probably. But think all of this over, would you? Put those good inventive brains of yours to work, because THIS IS REALLY BUGGIN’ ME! Talking to Herb is no good; he calls it displaced grief. I thought about talking to J. Marinville from across the street—he seems both kind and perceptive—but I don’t know him well enough. So it has to be you. You see that, don’t you?

  Love you, J-girl. Miss you. And sometimes, especially lately, I wish that we were young again, with all the dirty cards life can deal you still buried well down in the deck. Remember how it was in college, when we thought we’d live forever and only our stupid periods ever caught us by surprise?

  I’ve got to stop or I’ll be crying again.

  XXX (and tons more),

  CHAPTER 5

  1

  Standing bare-chested at the bathroom mirror that afternoon before the world dropped into hell like a bucket on a broken string, Collie Entragian had made three large resolutions. The first was to quit going around unshaven on weekdays. The second was to quit drinking, at least until he got his life back on an even keel—he was doing far too much boozing, enough to make him uneasy, and it had to stop. The third was to stop procrastinating about looking for a job. There were three security firms in the Columbus area, people he knew worked for two of them, and it was time to get cracking. He hadn’t died, after all; it was time to quit yowling and get on with his life.

  Now, as the Hobart house burned merry hell down the street and the two bizarre vans approached, all he cared about was holding on to that life. Mostly it was the black vehicle creeping along behind the pink one that galvanized him, that engaged every instinct to immediately relocate, possibly to Outer Mongolia. He didn’t catch more than a rain-blurred glimpse of the figures in the black van’s turret, but the van itself was enough. It looked like a hearse in a science-fiction movie, he thought.

  “Inside!” he heard himself screaming—some part of him apparently still wanted to be in charge. “Everybody inside now!”

  At that point he lost track of the people clustered around the late postman and his keening, shrieking wife—Mrs. Geller, Susi, Susi’s friend, the Josephsons, Mrs. Reed. Marinville, the writer, was a little closer, but Collie lost track of him, too. His focus shrank to the ones in front of Old Doc’s bungalow: Peter Jackson, the Sodersons, the store clerk, the longhair from the Ryder truck, and Old Doc himself, wh
o had retired from veterinary practice the year before with absolutely no clue that something like this was waiting for him.

  “Go!” Collie screamed into Gary’s wet, gaping, half-drunk face. In that moment he wanted to kill the man, just haul off and kill him, set him on fire or something. “Go in the fucking HOUSE!” Behind him he could hear Marinville screaming the same thing, although it was presumably the Carvers’ house he had in mind.

  “What—” Marielle began, stepping to her husband’s side; then she looked past Gary and her eyes widened. Her splay-fingered hands rose to the sides of her face, her mouth dropped open and for one mad moment Collie expected her to drop to her knees and start singing “Mammy” like Al Jolson. She screamed instead. And as if that had been all their attackers had been waiting for, the gunfire began—harsh, compact explosions that no one could have mistaken for thunder.

  The hippie guy grabbed Peter Jackson by Peter’s right wrist and tried to haul him away from his dead wife. Peter didn’t want to let go of her. He was still howling, and seemed completely unaware of what was happening around him. There was a KA-POW, as deafening as dynamite, followed by the sound of shattering glass. A KA-BAM, even louder, followed by a shriek of either fear or pain. Collie’s dough was on fear . . . this time, at least. A third report, and Billingsley’s ceramic German shepherd disappeared from the forelegs up. Old Doc’s inner front door stood open behind a screen with a scrolly, ornamental B in the middle of it. That dark rectangular hole—an opening which might lead to a cave of safety—looked a thousand miles away.

  Collie ran for Peter first, with no thought of bravery so much as crossing his mind; it was just where he went first. Another deafening report, and he was tightening his back and buttocks against a potentially lethal hit even while his mind was informing him that one, at least, was thunder. The next one wasn’t. It was another whiplash KA-POW, and he felt something slap a groove in the air past his right ear.

  First time shot at, he thought. Nine years as a cop before they stuck it to me and broke it off—four beat, four plainclothes, one IA—and never shot at until now.

  Another report. One of Billingsley’s living-room windows blew in, billowing the white curtains like ghost-arms. Guns going off behind him like artillery now, just bam-bam-bam-bam, and he felt another hot load go hustling by, this one to the left of his hand, and a black hole appeared in the siding below the broken window. To Collie the hole looked like a big startled eye. The next one hummed by his hip. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead, just couldn’t believe it. He could smell burning cedar shingles and had time to think about October afternoons spent in the backyard with his dad, burning leaves in smouldery aromatic piles.

  He had been running for hours, he felt like a goddam ceramic duck in a goddam shooting gallery, and he hadn’t even reached Peter Jackson yet, what the fuck was going on here?

  It’s been five seconds since the shooting started, the colder side of his mind informed him. Maybe only three.

  The hippie guy was still yanking Peter’s wrist, and now the girl, Cynthia, muckled on above the hippie guy’s grip. But Peter was actively resisting them, Collie saw. Peter wanted to stay with his wife, who had chosen a divinely bad time to arrive back home.

  Still picking up speed (and he could boogie pretty good when he really wanted to), Collie bent and hooked a hand under the kneeling man’s left armpit on the way by. Just call me the mail train, he thought. Peter thrashed backward, trying to stop the three of them from pulling him from his wife. Collie’s hand began to slip. Oh fuck, he thought. Fuck us all. Sideways.

  There was another shriek from behind him, at the Carvers’. In the corner of his eye he saw the pink van, now past them and speeding up, accelerating down the hill toward Hyacinth Street.

  “Mary!” Peter screamed. “She’s hurt!”

  “I got her, Pete, don’t worry, I got her!” Old Doc screamed cheerfully, and although he had no one—was, in fact, running past Mary’s sprawled body without so much as a glance down at it—Peter nodded, looking relieved. It was the tone, Collie thought. That crazily cheerful tone of voice.

  The hippie guy was actually helping now instead of just trying to. He had Peter by the belt, for one thing, and that was working better. “Help out, fella,” the hippie guy told Peter. “Just a little.”

  Peter ignored him. He stared at Collie with huge, glazed eyes. “He’s getting her, right? Old Doc. He’s helping her.”

  “That’s right!” Collie shouted. He tried for Doc’s tone of good cheer—a kind of sprinting bedside manner—and heard only terror. The pink van was gone but the black one was still there, rolling slowly, almost stopped. There were figures—too bright, almost fluorescent—in the turret. “Billingsley—”

  Marielle Soderson bashed past him on the left, almost knocking Collie flat in her sprint toward Old Doc’s front door. Gary blew by on the right, hitting the store-girl with his shoulder and knocking her to one knee. She cried out in pain, mouth pulling down in a bow-shape as something—probably her ankle—twisted. Gary did not so much as spare her a glance; his eyes were on the prize. The girl was up again in a flash. The pain-grimace was still on her face but she was holding gamely to Peter’s arm, still trying to help out. Collie was gaining an appreciation for her, schizo tu-tone hair or not.

  Onward sprinted the Sodersons. It had taken them a moment or two to get the general idea, but it had certainly clicked for them now, Collie saw.

  There was another report. The longhair shouted in surprise and pain, grabbing at his right leg. Collie saw blood, amazingly bright in the gray gloom of the storm, seeping through his fingers. The girl was staring at him, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

  “I’m okay,” the hippie said, regaining his balance. “It’s just a graze. Go on, go on!”

  Peter was finally finding his feet, both literally and metaphorically. “What in the fuck . . . is going on?” he asked Collie. He sounded drugged.

  Before Collie could say anything, there was a final shot from the black van and a sound—he would have sworn it—like the whistle of an artillery shell. Marielle Soderson, who had reached the stoop (Gary had already disappeared inside, no gentleman he), screamed and staggered sideways against the door. Her left arm flew bonelessly upward. Blood splashed Doc’s aluminum siding; the rain began to wash it down the side of the house in membranes. Collie heard the store-girl scream, and felt a little like screaming himself. The slug had taken Marielle in the shoulder and torn her left arm almost entirely off her body. It flopped back down and dangled precariously from a glistening knot of flesh with a mole on it. It was the mole—a flaw Gary might have lovingly kissed in his younger, less pickled days—that made it somehow real. She stood in the doorway, shrieking, her left arm hanging beside her like a door which has been ripped off two of its three hinges. And behind her, the black van now also accelerated down the hill, the turret sliding closed as it went. It disappeared into the rain and the billowing smoke from the empty Hobart house, where the roof was now sharing its gift of fire with the walls.

  2

  She had a place to go.

  Sometimes that seemed like a blessing, sometimes (because it extended things, kept the hellish game going) like a curse, but either way, it was the only reason she was still herself, at least some of the time; the only reason she hadn’t been eaten alive from the inside out. The way Herb had been. In the end, though, Herb had been able to find himself one more time. Had been able to hold on to himself long enough to go out to the garage and put a bullet in his brain.

  Or so she wanted to believe.

  Sometimes, however, she believed otherwise. Sometimes she would think of the endless evenings before the gunshot from the garage and she would see Seth in his chair, the one with the horse-and-rider decals she and Herb had put on when they came to realize just how much the boy loved “Wessurns.” Seth just sitting there, ignoring whatever was on TV (unless it was an oat-opera or a space-show, that was), looking at Herb with his horrible mud-brown eyes, t
he eyes of a creature that has lived its whole life in a swamp. Sitting there in the chair which his aunt and uncle had decorated so lovingly back in the early days, before the nightmare had started. Before they’d known it had started, at least. Sitting there and looking at Herb, hardly ever at her, at least not then. Looking at him. Thinking at him. Sucking him dry, like a vampire in a horror film. And that was what the thing inside Seth really was, wasn’t it? A vampire. And their lives here together on Poplar Street, that was the film. Poplar Street, for God’s sake, where there was probably still at least one Carpenters album in every home. Nice neighbors, the kind of folks that drop everything when they hear on the radio that the Red Cross is getting low on O, and none of them knew that Audrey Wyler, the quiet widow who lived between the Sodersons and the Reeds, was now starring in her own Hammer film.

  On good days she would think that Herb, whose sense of humor had served as both a shield and a goad to the thing inside of Seth, had held on long enough to escape. On bad ones she knew that was bullshit, that Seth had simply used all of Herb there was to use and had then sent him out to the garage with a self-destruct program flashing away in his head like a neon Schlitz sign in a taproom window.

  It wasn’t Seth, though, not really; not the Seth who had sometimes (in the early days) hugged them and given them brief openmouthed kisses that felt like bursting soap-bubbles. “I ’owboy,” he would occasionally say while sitting in the special chair, words rising out of his usual unintelligible babble and making them feel, however fleetingly, that they were getting somewhere: I’m a cowboy. That Seth had been sweet; lovable not just in spite of his autism but partly because of it. That Seth had also been a medium, however, like contaminated blood which simultaneously nourishes a virus and transports it.

  The virus—the vampire—was Tak. A little gift from the Great American Desert. According to Bill, the Garin family had never turned back to Desperation, had never stopped to investigate what was behind the bulwark of earth they had seen from the road, the bulwark that had excited Seth enough for him to briefly transcend his usual gabble and speak in clear English. We really couldn’t do that, And, Bill had said. I wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City by dark. But Bill had lied. She knew because of a letter she’d gotten from a man named Allen Symes.