The Regulators (16 page)

“Gary!” It sounded like the yap of a dog that has run a long way on a dusty road and pretty much barked itself out. “Stop fucking around and help me! My arm . . .” She continued to hold it out, and what Steve thought of now—he didn't want to but couldn't help it—was Mucci's Fine Meats in Newton. Guy in a white shirt, white cap, and bloodstained apron, holding out a peeled joint of meat to his mother.
Serve it medium-rare with a little mint jelly on the side, Mrs. Ames, and your family will never ask for roast chicken again. I guarantee it.

“Gary!”

The skinny guy with the gin on his breath took a step toward her, then looked back at Steve and
Cynthia. The tight, knowing smile was gone. Now he only looked sick. “I don't know what to do for her,” he said.

“Gary, you diseased ratbrain,” Marielle said in a low, hopeless voice. “You total dumbwit.” Her face was growing ever whiter. She had gone, in fact, that fabled faded whiter shade of pale. There were brown patches beneath her eyes—they seemed to be unfurling like wings—and her left sneaker was now a solid red instead of white.

She's going to die if she doesn't get help right away, Steve thought. The idea made him feel both amazed and somehow stupid.
Professional
help was what he was thinking about, he supposed,
E.R.
guys in green suits who said things like “ten cc's of epi, stat.” But there were no guys like that around, and apparently none coming. He could still hear no sirens, only the sound of thunder retreating slowly into the east.

On the wall to his left was a framed photograph of a small brown dog with eerily intelligent eyes. On the matting beneath the photo, carefully printed in block letters, was
DAISY, PEMBROKE CORGI, AGE 9. COULD COUNT. SHOWED APPARENT ABILITY TO ADD SMALL NUMBERS.
To the left of Daisy, its glass now splattered with the thin woman's blood, was a Collie that seemed to be grinning for the camera. The printed legend beneath this one read:
CHARLOTTE, BORDER COLLIE, AGE 6. COULD SORT PHOTOS AND CULL OUT THOSE OF HUMANS KNOWN TO HER
.

To the left of Charlotte was a photograph of a parrot which appeared to be smoking a Camel.

“None of this is happening,” Steve said in a conversational—almost jovial—tone of voice. He didn't know if he was talking to Cynthia or to himself. “I think I'm in a hospital somewhere. I had a head-on in the truck out on the thruway, that's what I think. It's like
Alice in Wonderland,
only the Nine Inch Nails version.”

Cynthia opened her mouth to reply and then the old guy—the one who had presumably observed Daisy the Pembroke Corgi adding six and two and coming up with eight,

ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM FOR DAISY—

came in carrying an old black bag. The cop (was his name actually Collie, Steve wondered, or was that just some weird fantasy engendered by the photographs on the walls of this room?) followed him, pulling his belt out of its loops. Last in line, drifting, looking dazed, came Peter What's-His-Face, husband of the woman who was lying dead out there.

“Help her!” Gary yelled, forgetting Steve and his conspiracy theories, at least for the time being. “Help her, Doc, she's bleedin like a stuck pig!”

“You know I'm not a real physician, don't you, Gary? Just an old horse-doctor is all I—”

“Don't you call me a pig,” Marielle interrupted him. Her voice was almost too low to be heard, but her eyes, fixed on her husband, glowed with baleful life. She tried to straighten up, couldn't, and slipped
lower against the wall instead. “Don't you . . . call me that.”

The old horse-doctor turned to the cop, who was standing just inside the kitchen doorway, barechested with the belt now stretched between his fists. He looked like the bouncer in a leather-bar where Steve had once worked the board for a group called The Big Chrome Holes.

“I have to?” the barechested cop asked. He was pretty pale himself, but Steve thought he looked game, at least so far.

Billingsley nodded and put his bag down on the big easy-chair that sprawled in front of the television. He snapped it open and began rummaging through it. “And hurry. The more blood she loses, the worse her chances become.” He looked up, a spool of suture in one gnarled old hand, a pair of bentnosed surgical scissors in the other. “This is no fun for me, either. The last time I saw a patient in anything like this situation, it was a pony that had been mistaken for a deer and shot in the foreleg. Get it as high on her shoulder as you can. Turn the buckle toward the breast and pull it
tight.
”

“Where's Mary?” Peter asked. “Where's Mary? Where's Mary?
Where's Mary?
” Each time he asked the question his voice grew more plaintive. The fourth repetition was a little more than a falsetto squeak. Abruptly he clutched his face in his hands and turned away from all of them, leaning his forehead against the wall between BARON, a Labrador retriever that could spell its name with blocks, and
DIRTYFACE
, a
morose-looking goat that was apparently able to play a number of rudimentary tunes on the harmonica. It occurred to Steve that if he ever heard a goat playing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” on a Hohner, he would probably fucking kill himself.

Marielle Soderson, meanwhile, was staring at Billingsley with the intensity of a vampire looking at a man with a shaving cut. “Hurts,” she croaked. “Give me something for it.”

“Yes,” Billingsley said, “but first we tourniquet.”

He nodded impatiently at the cop. The cop started forward. He had the tongue of his belt threaded through the buckle now, making a loop. He reached out gingerly to the skinny woman, whose blond hair had gone two shades darker with sweat. She reached out with her good arm and pushed him with surprising strength. The cop wasn't expecting it. He went back two steps, hit the arm of the old guy's sprawled-out easy-chair, and fell into it. He looked like a comic who's just taken a pratfall in a movie.

The skinny woman didn't give him a second glance. Her attention was focused on the old guy, and the old guy's black bag.

“Now!” she barked at him, and it really
did
sound as if she were barking. “Give me something for it
now,
you quacky old fuck, it's killing me!”

The cop struggled out of the chair and caught Steve's eye. Steve got the message, nodded, and began edging toward the woman named Marielle, drifting in from the right, flanking her. Be careful, he told himself, she's
flipped out, apt to scratch or bite or any damn thing, so be careful.

Marielle thrust herself away from the wall, swayed, steadied, and advanced on the old guy. She was once more holding her arm out in front of her, as if it were Exhibit A in a trial. Billingsley backed up a step, looking nervously from the barechested cop to Steve.

“Give me some Demerol, you weasel!” she cried in her barking, exhausted voice. “You give it to me or I'll choke you until you bark like a bloodhound! I'll—”

The cop nodded to Steve again and sprang forward on the left. Steve moved with him and threw an arm around the woman's neck. He didn't want to choke her, but he was scared to go around her back, maybe grabbing her wounded arm by mistake and hurting it worse. “Hold still!” he shouted. He didn't mean to shout, he meant to just say it, but that wasn't how it came out. At the same moment the cop slipped the loop of his belt over her left hand and up her arm.

“Hold her, buddy!” the cop cried. “Hold her still!”

For a second or two Steve did, and then a drop of sweat, warm and stinging, ran into his eye, and he relaxed his choke-hold just as Collie Entragian ran the makeshift belt tourniquet tight. Marielle lurched to the right, her baleful falcon's gaze still fixed on the old guy, and her arm came off in the barechested cop's hands. Steve could see her wristwatch, an Indiglo with the second-hand stopped dead between the four and the five. The belt held on at her shoulder
for a moment and then dropped to the floor, a loop with nothing in it. The counter-girl shrieked, her huge eyes fixed on the arm. The cop looked down at it with his mouth open.

“Get it on ice!” Gary bawled. “Get it on ice right away! Right aw—” Then, all at once, he seemed to really realize what had happened. What the cop was holding. He opened his mouth, twisted his head in a peculiar way, and unloaded on the photo of the cigarette-smoking parrot.

Marielle noticed none of it. She staggered toward the clearly terrified veterinarian, her remaining hand outstretched. “I want a shot and I want it
now
!” she croaked. “Do you hear me, you old woman? I want a fucking shuh-shuh—”

She collapsed onto her knees. Her head drooped, hung. Then, with an immense effort, she got her chin up again. For a moment her gimlet gaze met Steve's. “Who the fuck're you?” she asked in a clear, perfectly understandable voice, then slid forward on her face. The top of her head came to rest inches from the heels of Peter, the man who had lost his wife. Jackson, Steve thought suddenly. That's his last name, Jackson. Peter Jackson was still turned to the wall with his face clutched in his hands. If he takes a step backward, Steve thought, he'll trip over her.

“Fuck a duck,” the cop said in a low, amazed voice. Then he looked down and realized he was still holding the woman's arm. He walked stiffly toward the kitchen with it held out in front of him. The sound of rain hissing down seemed very loud in Steve's ears.

“Come
on,” the old party said, rousing himself. “We're not done yet. Get that belt on her, son. Buckle in toward the breast. You game?”

“I guess,” Steve said, but he was very relieved when Cynthia the counter-girl picked the belt up and then knelt beside the unconscious woman with it in her hands.

From “The Force Corridor,” Episode 55 of MotoKops 2200, original teleplay by Allen Smithee:

ACT 2

FADE IN ON:

INT.   CRISIS CENTER, MOTOKOPS' HQ

The room is dominated, is always, by the huge Situscreen. Standing before it on a floatpad is
COLONEL HENRY
,
looking grave. Sitting at the horse-shoe-shaped Crisis Desk are the rest
of the MotoKops squad:
SNAKE HUNTER, BOUNTY, MAJOR PIKE, ROOTY, AND CASSIE.

On the Situscreen we see a
SPACE VIEW.
In the distance is Earth, just a blue-green coin at this distance. It looks peaceful enough.

SNAKE HUNTER
(with customary scorn)

So what's the big deal? I don't see anything that looks very—
What the—??!!

Suddenly the
FORCE CORRIDOR
appears on the Situscreen, almost filling it, blotting out the stars on either side. It's like watching the arrival
of Darth Vader's dreadnought at the beginning of the first Star Wars movie; in a word, awesome!

The
CORRIDOR
consists of two long metal plates with big square protrusions sticking out at intervals. The
CORRIDOR HUMS OMINOUSLY
,
and
BLUE FIRE CRACKLES
from side to side between the square protrusions.

CASSIE STYLES
gasps, looks at the Situscreen with dismay.
COLONEL HENRY
pushes a button on his hand-control, and the screen goes into
FREEZE MODE
.
We can still see Earth, but with the corridor on either side, it looks caught in a potentially lethal
WEB OF ELECTRICITY
!

COLONEL HENRY
(
to
SNAKE HUNTER
)

That's
the big deal! The Force Corridor, artifact of a long-vanished alien race! Destructive . . . and headed
directly toward Earth!

CASSIE
(
dismay
)

Oh, gosh!

COLONEL HENRY

Relax, Cassie—it's still over 150,000 light-years away. This is a composite shot.

MAJOR PIKE

Yeah, but how fast is it moving?

COLONEL HENRY

That's the problem. Let's just say that if we don't resolve this crisis in the next seventy-two hours, I think you can cancel your weekend plans.

ROOTY

Root-root-root-root!

SNAKE HUNTER

Shut up, Rooty.

(
to
COLONEL HENRY
)

So what's
our
plan?

COLONEL HENRY
takes the floatpad further up, so he can use his high-lighter to circle a couple of the protrusions on the inner sides of the corridor.

COLONEL HENRY

Drone telemetry reports that the Force Corridor itself is over 200,000 miles long and 50,000 miles wide, a hallway of death in which nothing can live! But it may have a
weakness! I think these square shapes are power-generators. If we could knock 'em out—

BOUNTY

Are we talkin' Power Wagon assault, boss?

We move in on
COLONEL HENRY'S
grim face.

COLONEL HENRY

It's Earth's only chance.

INT.   CRISIS DESK, WITH THE MOTOKOPS

SNAKE HUNTER

A deep-space Power Wagon assault? Could be a quick trip to that Boot Hill in the sky!

ROOTY

Root-root-root-root!

ALL

Shut up, Rooty!

INT.   A HALLWAY IN THE CRISIS CENTER

COLONEL HENRY
and
CASSIE STYLES
are in the lead, the other MotoKops behind them.
ROOTY
,
as usual, is bumbling along in the rear.