The Regulators (13 page)

He's been making me pinch myself again, she
thought as she walked across to the sofa and picked up the blouse. Why? Because Cary Ripton, the kid who delivered the
Shopper,
had seen her without her top on? Yes, maybe. Probably. It was hazy, as always, but she was pretty sure that was it. Tak had been angry . . . the punishment had started . . . and away she had gone, to those fabulous days of old. As soon as he'd gone back into the den to watch his goddam movie again.

The pinching scared her a lot. The pain had been worse on other occasions, not to mention the crappy little humiliations—Tak was an artist when it came to those—but there was a clear sexual aspect to the nipple-pinching. And there was the way she was dressed . . . or undressed. More and more Tak was making her take her clothes off when it was angry with her, or just bored. As if it (or Seth, or both of them) sometimes saw her as its own private gatefold version of the tough but unremittingly wholesome Cassie Styles. Hey, kids, check out the tits on your favorite MotoKop!

She had almost no insight into the relationship between the host and the parasite, and that made her situation even worse. She thought Seth was a lot more interested in buckaroos than in breasts; he was only eight, after all. But how old was the thing inside him? And what did it want? There were possibilities, things far beyond pinching, that she didn't want to consider. Although, not long before Herb died—

No. She wouldn't think about that.

She slipped the blouse on and did up the buttons,
glancing at the clock on the mantel as she did so. Only 4:15; Jan had been right to say
so soon.
But the weather had certainly changed, Catskills or no Catskills. Thunder rolled, lightning flashed, and rain pelted so furiously against the living room's picture window that it looked like smoke.

The TV was playing in the den. The movie, of course. The horrible, hateful movie. They were on their fourth copy of
The Regulators.
Herb had brought the first one home from The Video Clip at the mall about a month before his suicide. And that old film had been, in some way she still didn't understand, the final piece in the puzzle, the final number in the combination. It had freed Tak in some way . . . or
focused
it, the way a magnifying lens can focus light and turn it into fire. But how could Herb have known that would happen? How could either of them have known? At that time they had barely suspected Tak's existence. It had been working on Herb, yes, she knew that now, but it had been doing so almost as silently as a leech that battens on a person below the waterline.

“You want to try me, Sheriff?” Rory Calhoun was gritting.

Murmuring under her breath, unaware she was doing it, Audrey said, “Why don't we just stand down? Think this thing over?”

“Why don't we just stand down?” John Payne said from the TV. Audrey could see light from the screen flickering against the curved arch between the two rooms. “Think this thing over?”

She tiptoed to the arch, tucking the blouse into the
waistband of her blue shorts (one of roughly a dozen pairs, all dark blue with white piping on the side-seams, there was certainly no shortage of blue shorts here at
casa
Wyler), and looked in. Seth was on the couch, naked except for a grimy pair of MotoKops Underoos. The walls, which Herb had panelled himself in first-quality finished pine, had been stippled with spikes Seth had found in Herb's garage workshop. Many of the pine boards were split vertically. Poked onto these badly pounded nails were pictures which Seth had cut from various magazines. They were mostly of cowboys, spacemen, and—of course—MotoKops. Interspersed among them was a scattering of Seth's own drawings, mostly landscapes done with black felt-tip pens. On the coffee table in front of him were glasses scummed with the residue of Hershey's chocolate milk, which was all Seth/Tak would drink, and jostling plates with half-eaten meals on them. All the meals were Seth's favorites: Chef Boyardee spaghetti and hamburger, Chef Boyardee Noodle-O's and hamburger, and tomato soup with big chunks of hamburger rising out of the gelling liquid like baked Pacific atolls where generations of atomic bombs had been tested.

Seth's eyes were open but blank—both he and Tak were gone, all right, maybe recharging the batteries, maybe sleeping open-eyed like a lizard on a hot rock, maybe just digging the goddamned movie in some deep and elemental way Audrey would never be able to comprehend. Or want to. The simple truth was that she didn't give a shit where he—it—was. Maybe she could get a meal in peace; that was enough for her.
The Regulators
had about twenty minutes left to run in this, its nine-billionth showing at
casa
Wyler, and Audrey thought she could count on at least that long. Time for a sandwich and maybe a few lines in the journal Tak might well kill her for keeping—if Tak ever found out about it, that was.

Escape. Stop thinking about it and do it, Aud.

She stopped halfway back across the living room, the salami and lettuce in the fridge temporarily forgotten. That voice was so clear that for a moment it didn't seem to be coming from her mind at all. For one moment she was convinced that Janice had somehow followed her back from 1982, was actually in the room with her. But when she turned, wide-eyed, there was no one. Only the voices from the TV, Rory Calhoun telling John Payne that the time for talking was done, John Payne saying “Well now, if that's the way you want it.” Very soon Karen Steele would run between them, screaming at them to stop it, just stop it. She would be killed by a bullet from Rory Calhoun's gun, one meant for John Payne, and then the final shootout would begin.
KA-POW
and
KA-BAM
all the way home.

No one here but her and her dead friends on the TV.

Open the front door and just run like hell.

How many times had she considered it? But there was Seth to think about; he was as much a hostage as she was, and maybe more. Autistic he might be, but he was still a human being. She didn't like to think what Tak might do to him, if it was crossed. And Seth
was
still there, all of him—she knew that. Parasites feed on
their hosts but don't kill them . . . unless it's on purpose. Because they're pissed off, maybe.

She had herself to think about, too. Janice could talk about escape, just opening the door and running like hell, but what Janice perhaps didn't understand was that if Tak caught her before she was able to get away, it would almost certainly kill her. And if she
did
get out of the house, how far would she have to go before she was safe? Across the street? To the bottom of the block? Terre Haute? New Hampshire? Micronesia? And even in Micronesia, she didn't think she would be able to hide. Because there was a mental link between them. The little red PlaySkool phone—the Tak-phone—proved that.

Yes, she wanted to get away. Oh yes, so much. But sometimes the devil you knew was better than the devil you didn't.

She started for the kitchen again, then stopped again, this time staring at the big window with its view of the street. She had thought the rain was pelting the glass hard enough to look like smoke, but actually the first fury of the storm was already passing. What she was seeing didn't just
look
like smoke; it
was
smoke.

She hurried to the window, looked down the street, and saw that the Hobart place was burning in the rain, sending big white clouds up into the gray sky. She saw no vehicles or people around it (and the smoke itself obscured her view of the dead boy and dog), so she looked up toward Bear Street. Where were the police cars? The fire engines? She didn't see them, but
she saw enough to make her cry out softly through hands—she didn't know how they had gotten there—that were cupped to her mouth.

A car, Mary Jackson's, she was quite sure, was on the grass between the Jackson house and Old Doc's place, its nose almost up against the stake fence between the two properties. The trunk-lid was popped, and the rear end looked trashed. The car wasn't what had made her cry out, though. Beyond it, sprawled on Doc's lawn like a fallen piece of statuary, was a woman's body. Audrey's mind made a brief attempt to persuade her it was something else—a department-store mannequin, perhaps, dumped for some reason on Billingsley's lawn—then gave it up. It was a body, all right. It was Mary Jackson, and she was as dead as . . . well, as dead as Audrey's own late husband.

Tak, she thought. Was it Tak? Has it been out?

You knew it's been getting ready for something, she thought coldly. You
knew
that. You've felt it gathering its forces, always in the sandpile playing with those damned vans or in front of the TV, eating hamburger meals, drinking chocolate milk, and watching, watching, watching. You've felt it, like a thunderstorm building up on a hot afternoon—

Beyond the woman, at the Carvers' house, were two more bodies. David Carver, who had sometimes played poker with Herb and Herb's friends on Thursday nights, lay on his front walk like a beached whale. There was an enormous hole in his stomach above the bathing suit he always wore when he washed the car. And, lying face-down on the Carver
stoop, there was a woman in white shorts. Yards of red hair spilled out around her head in a frizzy corona. Rain glistened on her bare back.

But she's not a woman, Audrey thought. She felt cold all over, as if her skin had been briskly rubbed with ice. That's just a girl, probably no more than seventeen. The one who was visiting over at the Reeds' this afternoon. Before I went away to 1982 for a little while. That was Susi Geller's friend.

Audrey glanced down the block, suddenly sure she was imagining the whole thing, and that reality would snap back into place like a released elastic as soon as she saw the Hobart place standing intact. But the Hobart place was still burning, still sending huge white clouds of cedar-fumed smoke into the air, and when she looked back up the street, she still saw bodies. The corpses of her neighbors.

“It's started,” she whispered, and from the den behind her, like a horribly prescient curse, Rory Calhoun screamed:
“We're gonna wipe this town off the map!”

Escape!
Jan screamed back, a voice inside her head instead of from the TV, but just as urgent.
You're not just about out of time, not anymore, you are out of it! Escape, Aud! Escape! Run! Escape!

Okay. She'd let go of her concern for Seth and run. That might come back to haunt her later—if there
was
a later—but for now . . .

She started for the front door and was reaching for the knob when a voice spoke up from behind her. It sounded like the voice of a child, but only because it
was coming to her through a child's vocal cords. Otherwise it was toneless, loveless, hideous.

Worst of all, it was not entirely without a sense of humor.

“Hold on, there, ma'am,” Tak said, the voice of Seth Garin imitating the voice of John Payne. “Why don't we just stand down, think this thing over?”

She tried to turn the doorknob, meaning to chance it anyway—she had gone too far to turn back now. She would hurl herself out into the pelting rain and just run. Where? Anywhere.

But instead of turning the knob, her hand fell back to her side, swinging like a nearly exhausted pendulum. Then she was turning around, resisting with all her will but turning anyway, to face the thing in the archway leading into the den . . . and she thought, considering what spent most of its time in there,
den
was exactly the right word for what the room had become.

She was back from her safe place.

God help her, she was back from her safe place, and the demon hiding inside her dead brother's autistic little boy had caught her trying to escape.

She felt Tak crawling inside her head, taking control, and although she saw it all and felt it all, she couldn't even scream.

Johnny lunged past the sprawled, face-down body of Susi Geller's redheaded friend, his head ringing from
a slug which had screamed past his left ear . . . and it really
had
seemed to scream. His heart was running like a rabbit in his chest. He had moved far enough in the direction of the Carvers' house to be caught in a kind of no-man's-land when the two vans opened fire, and knew he was extremely lucky to still be alive. For a moment there he had almost frozen, like an animal caught in a pair of oncoming headlights. Then the slug—something that had felt the size of a cemetery headstone—had gone past his ear and he had streaked for the open door of the Carver house, head down and arms pumping. Life had simplified itself amazingly. He had forgotten about Soderson and his goaty expression of half-drunk complicity, had forgotten his concern that Jackson not realize his freshly expired wife was apparently coming home from the sort of interlude about which country-western songs were written, had forgotten Entragian, Billingsley, all of them. His only thought had been that he was going to die in no-man's-land between the two houses, killed by psychotics who wore masks and weird outfits and shone like ghosts.

Now he was in a dark hall, just happy to realize he hadn't wet his pants, or worse. People were screaming somewhere behind him. Mounted on the wall was a jury of Hummel figures. They had been placed on little platforms . . . and the Carvers had seemed so normal in other respects, he thought. He started to giggle and shoved the heel of one hand against his lips to stifle the sound. This was definitely not a giggling situation. There was a taste on his skin, just the
taste of his own sweat, of course, but for a moment it seemed almost to be the taste of pussy, and he leaned forward, sure he was going to vomit. He realized he would almost certainly pass out if he did and that thought helped him to control the urge. He took his hand away from his mouth, and that helped more. He no longer felt much like laughing, either, and that was probably good.