The Regulators (22 page)

“Is she going to die?” Collie asks.

“I don't know,” Billingsley says. He pauses, takes his own look at Gary, sighs, runs his hands through his Albert Einstein tangle of white hair. “Probably. Certainly, if she doesn't get to a hospital soon. She needs a lot of help. Most of all, a transfusion. And there's someone hurt next door, by the sound. Kirsten, I think. And maybe she's not the only one.”

Collie nods.

“Mr. Entragian, what do you think is going on here?”

“I don't have the slightest idea.”

Cynthia grabs a newspaper (it's the Columbus
Dispatch,
not the Wentworth
Shopper
) that has fallen to the living-room floor during the rumpus, rolls it up, and crawls slowly to the front door. She uses the newspaper to sweep broken glass—there is a surprising amount of it—out of her way as she goes.

Steve thinks of objecting, asking her if she maybe has a deathwish, then stows it. Sometimes he gets ideas about things. Pretty strong ones, as a matter of fact. Once, while peaceably reading palms on the boardwalk in Wildwood, he had an idea so strong that he quit the job that very night. It was an idea about a laughing seventeen-year-old girl with ovarian cancer. Malignant, advanced, maybe a month beyond any possible human remedy. Not the sort of idea you wanted to have about a pretty green-eyed high-school kid if your life's motto was

NO PROBLEM.

The idea he's
having now is every bit as strong as that one but quite a bit more optimistic: the shooters are gone, at least for the time being. There's no way he can know that, but he feels certain of it, just the same.

Instead of calling Cynthia back, he joins her. The inside door has been blown open by several gunshots (it has also been so severely warped that Steve doubts it will ever close again), and the breeze coming through the shattered screen is heaven—sweet and cool on his sweaty face. The kids are still crying next door, but the screaming has stopped, at least for the time being, and that's a relief.

“Where is he?” Cynthia asks, sounding stunned. “Look, there's his wife”—she points to Mary's body, which is now lying in the street, close enough to the far side so that tendrils of her hair are wavering in the water rushing down the west gutter—“but where's
he
? Mr. Jackson?”

Steve points through the torn lower half of the screen. “In that house. Must be. See his glasses on the path?”

Cynthia squints, then nods.

“Who lives there?” Steve asks her.

“I don't know. I haven't been here anywhere near long enough to—”

“Mrs. Wyler and her nephew,” Collie says from behind them. They turn and see him squatting on his hunkers, looking out between them. “The boy's autistic or dyslexic or catatonic . . . one of those damned icks, I can never keep them straight. Her husband died last year, so it's
just the two of them. Jackson . . . must . . . must have . . .” He doesn't break off but runs down, the words getting smaller and smaller, finally diminishing into silence. When he speaks again, his voice is still low . . . and very thoughtful. “What the hell?”

“What?” Cynthia asks uneasily. “What?”

“Are you kidding me? You don't see?”

“See what? I see the woman, and I see her husband's gla . . .” Now it's her turn to run down.

Steve starts to ask what the deal is, then understands—sort of. He supposes he would have seen it earlier, even though he's a stranger to the street, if his attention hadn't been diverted by the body, the dropped spectacles, and his concern for Mrs. Soderson. He knows what he must do about that, and more than anything else he has been nerving himself up to do it.

Now, though, he simply looks across the street, letting his eyes move slowly from the E-Z Stop to the next building up, from that one to the one where the kids were playing Frisbee when he turned onto the street, and then on to the one directly opposite them, the one where Jackson must have gone to ground when the shooting got too hot.

There has been a change over there since the coming of the shooters in the vans.

Just how much he cannot tell, mostly because he is a stranger here, he
doesn't
know the street, partly because the smoke from the burning house and the mist still rising off the wet street give the houses over there a look which is almost spectral, like houses seen in a mirage . . . but there
has
been a change.

Siding has been replaced with logs on the Wyler house, and where there was a picture window there are now three more conventional—old-fashioned, one might almost say—multi-pane windows. The door has wooden supports hammered across its vertical boards in a Z-shape. The house next to it on the left . . .

“Tell me something,” Collie says, looking at the same one. “Since when did the Reeds live in a log-fucking-cabin?”

“Since when did the Gellers live in an adobe
hacienda
?” Cynthia responds, looking at one farther down.

“You guys're kidding,” Steve says. Then, weakly: “Aren't you?”

Neither of them replies. They look almost hypnotized.

“I'm not sure I'm really seeing it,” Collie says at last. His voice is uncharacteristically hesitant. “It's . . .”

“Shimmery,” the girl says.

He turns to her. “Yeah. Like when you look at something over the top of an incinerator, or—”

“Somebody help my wife!” Gary calls to them from the shadows of the living room. He has found a bottle of something—Steve can't see what—and is standing by the photo of Hester, a pigeon who liked to finger-paint. Not, Steve thinks, that pigeons exactly have fingers. Gary isn't steady on his feet and his words sound slurry. “Somebody help Mar'elle! Losser damn arm!”

“We need to get help for her,” Collie says, nodding. “And—”

“—for the rest of us,” Steve finishes. He's relieved, actually, to know that someone else realizes this, that maybe he won't have to go on his own. The boy next
door has stopped crying, but Steve can still hear the girl, sobbing in big, watery hitches. Margrit the Maggot, he thinks. That's what her brother called her. Margrit the Maggot loves Ethan Hawke, he said.

Steve has a sudden urge, as strong as it is unaccustomed, to go next door and find that little girl. To kneel in front of her and take her in his arms and hug her and tell her she can love anyone she pleases. Ethan Hawke or Newt Gingrich or just anybody. He looks down the street instead. The E-Z Stop, so far as he can tell, hasn't changed; its style is still Late Century Convenience Store, sometimes known as Pastel Cinderblock, sometimes known as Still Life with Dumpster. Not beautiful, far from it, but a known quantity, and under the circumstances, that's a relief. The Ryder truck is still parked in front, the blue phone-sign is still hanging down from its hook, the Marlboro Man is still on the door, and . . .

 . . . and the bike rack is gone.

Well, not
gone,
exactly; replaced.

By something that looks suspiciously like a hitching-rail in a Western movie.

With an effort, he drags first his eyes and then his mind back to the cop, who is saying Steve is right, they all need help. At the Carvers' as well as at Old Doc's, by the sound.

“There's a greenbelt behind the houses on this side of the street,” Collie says. “There's a path that runs through it. Kids use it, mostly, but I'm partial to it myself. It forks behind the Jacksons' house. One arm runs down to Hyacinth. Comes out by the bus shelter halfway down the block. The other one goes east, over
to Anderson Avenue. If Anderson's, pardon my French, fucked up—”

“Why should it be?” Cynthia asks. “There hasn't been any shooting from that direction.”

He gives her a strange, patient look. “There hasn't been any
help
from that direction, either. And our street is fucked up in ways the shooting had nothing to do with, in case you haven't noticed.”

“Oh,” she says in a small voice.

“Anyway, if Anderson Avenue's as crazy as Poplar—I hope it isn't, but if it is—there's a viaduct that runs at least under the street, maybe farther. It could go all the way to Columbus Broad. There's got to be people there.” He doesn't look as if he really believes it, though.

“I'll go with you,” Steve says.

The cop looks surprised at the offer, then considering. “You sure that's a good idea?”

“Actually, yes. I think the bad guys're gone, at least for the time being.”

“What makes you think that?”

Steve, who has absolutely no intention of bringing up his brief career as a boardwalk fortune-teller, says it's just a hunch. He sees Collie Entragian thinking it over, and knows the cop is going to agree even before he opens his mouth. Nothing psychic about it, either. Four people have been killed on Poplar Street this afternoon (not to mention Hannibal the Frisbee-stealing dog), more have been wounded, a house is burning flat without a single goddam fire-engine to attend it, there are crazy people running in the
streets—homicidal maniacs—and the guy would have to be insane to want to go creeping alone through the woods between here and the next block.

“What about him?” Cynthia asks, jerking a thumb at Gary.

Collie grimaces. “Shape he's in, I wouldn't go to the movies with him, let alone into the woods with shit like this going down. But if you're serious, Mr. . . . Ames, is it?”

“Make it Steve. And I'm serious.”

“Okay. Let's see if Old Doc's got a gun or two kicking around his basement. I bet he does.”

They start back across the living room, bent low. Cynthia turns to follow them, then movement catches her eye. She turns back and her mouth drops open. Revulsion follows surprise, and she has to put a hand to her mouth to stifle the cry that wants to come out. She thinks of calling the men back, then doesn't. What would it change?

A buzzard—it
might
be a buzzard, although it looks like nothing she's ever seen in a book or a movie—has come cruising out of the billowing smoke from the Hobart house and landed in the street next to Mary Jackson. It's a huge unnatural awkwardness with an ugly, peeled head. It walks around the corpse, looking for all the world like a diner reconnoitering the buffet before actually grabbing a plate, and then it darts its head forward and pulls off most of the woman's nose.

Cynthia closes her eyes and tries to tell herself this is a dream, just a dream. It would be nice if she could believe it.

From Audrey Wyler's journal:

June 10, 1995

Scared tonight. So scared. it's been quiet lately—with Seth, I mean—but now all that's changed.

At first neither of us knew what was wrong—Herb as mystified as I was. We went out for ice cream at Milly's On The Square, part of our regular Saturday ritual if Seth is being “good” (which means if Seth is being Seth), and he was fine. Then, when we turned into the driveway, he started the sniffing thing he does sometimes—kind of raises his nose in the air and sniffs like a dog. I hate seeing him do that and so does Herb. The way farmers hate to hear tornado warnings on the radio, I suppose. I've read that the parents of epileptics learn to look for similar signs before seizures . . . obsessive head-scratching, swearing, even nose-picking. With Seth it's that sniffing thing. But it's not epileptic seizures. I only wish it was.

Herb asked him what was wrong as soon as he saw him doing it and got zilch, not even the
usual vocalizing stuff he does. Same when I tried. No words; no gabble, even. Just more sniffing. And once he was in the house, that
stalking
thing—walking from place to place as if his legs won't bend. He went out back to the sandbox, he went upstairs to his room, he went downcellar, all in that ominous silence. Herb followed his for awhile, asking what was wrong, then gave up. While I was emptying the dishwasher, Herb came in waving a religious tract he found sticking out of the milkbox around at the side door & yelling “Hallelujah!
Yes,
Jesus!” He is a dear man, always trying to cheer me up, although I know he isn't doing all that well himself. His skin has gotten very pale, and I'm scared by all the weight he's lost, mostly since January or so. It must be at least 20 lbs and might be as much as 30, but whenever I ask him about it, he just laughs it off.

Anyway, the tract was typical Baptist bullshit. Had a picture on the front of a man in agony, with his tongue sticking out and sweat running down his face and his eyes rolled up.
IMAGINE A MILLION YEARS WITHOUT ONE DRINK OF WATER
! it says over the face. And under it,
WELCOME TO HELL
! I checked on the back and sure enough, Zion's Covenant Baptist Church. That bunch from Elder. “Look,” Herb says, “it's my dad before he combs his hair in the morning.”

I wanted to laugh—I know it makes him happy when he can make me laugh—but I just couldn't. I could feel Seth all around us, almost crackling on our skin. The way you can sometimes feel a storm building up, you know.

Just then he walked in—
stalked
in—with that horrible frown he gets on his face when something happens that doesn't fit into his general plan of life. Except it
isn't
him, it
isn't
. Seth is the sweetest, kindest, most accepting child I can imagine. But he has this other personality that we see more and more. The stiff-legged one. The one that sniffs the air like a dog.

Herb asked him what was wrong, what was on his mind, and then all at once he—Herb, I mean—reached up and grabbed his own lower lip. Pulled it out like a windowshade and started twisting it. Until it bled. And all the time his poor eyes were watering with pain and bugging out with fear and Seth was staring at him with that hateful frown he gets, the one that says “I'll do anything I please, you can't stop me.” And maybe we can't, but I think that—sometimes, at least—Seth can.