The Regulators (24 page)

No, of course not.
Belinda
had said that. Not Bill Harris but Belinda Josephson. Just now.

Johnny cleared his mind with an effort and looked around. He was sitting on the living-room floor, holding one of Kirsten's hands in both of his. The hand was cold and still. Belinda was leaning over Kirstie with a dishtowel in her hand and a square of white linen—it
looked to Johnny like a for-best table napkin—folded over her shoulder like a waiter's towel. Belinda's eyes were tearless, but there was nevertheless an expression of love and sorrow on her face that moved Johnny's heart. She was wiping Kirsten's blood-masked face with the dishtowel, uncovering what remained of her features.

“Did you say—” Johnny began.

“You heard me.” Belinda held the stained dishtowel out without looking, and Brad took it. She took the napkin off her shoulder, unfolded it, and spread it over Kirsten's face. “God have mercy on her soul.”

“I second that,” Johnny said. There was something hypnotic about the small red poppies blooming on the white linen napkin, three on one side of the draped shape that was Kirsten's nose, two on the other, maybe half a dozen above her brow. Johnny put his hand to his own brow and wiped away a palmful of sweat. “Jesus, I'm so sorry.”

Belinda looked at him, then at her husband. “We're all sorry, I guess. The question is, what's next?”

Before either man could answer, Cammie Reed came into the room from the kitchen. Her face was pale but composed. “Mr. Marinville?”

He turned to her. “Johnny,” he said.

She had to mull it over—another classic case of shock-slowed thinking—before understanding that he wanted her to call him by his first name. Then she got it and nodded. “Johnny, okay, sure. Did you find the pistol? And are there bullets to go with it?”

“Yes to both.”

“Can
I have them? My boys want to go for help. I've thought it over and have decided to give them my permission. If you'll let them take David's gun, that is.”

“I don't have any objection to giving up the gun,” Johnny said, not knowing if he was telling the complete truth about that or not, “but leaving shelter could be extremely dangerous, don't you think?”

She gave him a level look, no sign of impatience in her eyes or voice, but she fingered a spot of blood on her blouse as she spoke. A souvenir of Ellen Carver's nosebleed. “I'm aware of the danger, and if it were a question of using the street, I'd say no. But the boys know a path which runs through the greenbelt behind the houses on this side. They can use it to go over to Anderson Avenue. There's a deserted building over there that used to be a moving company's warehouse—”

“Veedon Brothers,” Brad said, nodding.

“—and a waterpipe that runs from the lot behind it all the way over to Columbus Broad, where it empties into a stream. If nothing else, they can get to a working phone and report what's going on here.”

“Cam, do either of your boys know how to use a gun?” Brad asked.

Again the level stare, one which did not quite come out and ask Why do you insult my intelligence? “They both took a safety course with their dad two years ago. The primary focus was on rifles and hunting safety, but handguns were covered, yes.”

“If Jim and Dave know about this path, the shooters
who are doing this may, too,” Johnny said. “Have you thought about that?”

“Yes.” The impatience finally showing, but only a little. Johnny admired her control. “But these . . . lunatics . . . are strangers. They have to be. Have you ever seen any of those vans before today?”

I may have, at that, Johnny thought. I'm not sure where yet, but if I can just get a little time to think . . .

“No, but I believe—” Brad began.

“We moved here in 1982, when the boys were three,” Cammie said. “They say there's a path that hardly anyone knows about or uses except for kids, and they say there's a pipe. I believe them.”

Sure you do, Johnny thought, but that's secondary. So's the hope of their bringing back help. You just want them out of here, don't you? Of course you do, and I don't blame you.

“Johnny,” she said, perhaps assuming his silence meant he was against the idea, “there were boys not much older than my sons fighting in Vietnam not so long ago.”

“Some even younger,” he said. “I was there. I saw them.” He got up, pulled the pistol from the waistband of his slacks with one hand, pulled the box of cartridges out of his shirt pocket with the other. “I'll be glad to turn this over to your boys . . . but I'd like to go along with them.”

Cammie glanced down at Johnny's belly—not as large as Brad's, but still considerable. She didn't ask him why he wanted to go, or what good he thought he could do. Her mind was, at least for the time being,
colder than that. She said, “The boys play soccer in the fall and run track in the spring. Can you keep up with them?”

“Not in the mile or the four-forty, of course not,” he replied. “On a path through the woods, and maybe through a viaduct? I think so.”

“Are you kidding yourself, or what?” Belinda asked abruptly. It was Cammie she was talking to, not Johnny. “I mean, if there was still a working phone within earshot of Poplar Street, do you think we'd still be sitting here with dead people lying out front and a house burning to the ground?”

Cammie glanced at her, touched the blood-spot on her blouse again, then looked back at Johnny. Behind her, Ellie was peering around the corner into the living room. The girl's eyes were wide with shock and grief, her mouth and chin streaked with blood from her nose.

“If it's okay with the boys, it's okay with me,” Cammie said, not addressing Belinda's question at all. Cammie Reed currently had no interest in speculation. Maybe later, but not now. Now there was only one thing that did interest her: rolling the dice while she judged the odds were still heavily in her favor. Rolling them and getting her sons out the back door.

“It will be,” he said, and handed her the gun and the cartridges before heading back toward the kitchen. They were good boys, which was nice, and they were also boys who had been programmed to go along, in nine cases out of ten, with what their elders wanted. In this situation, that was even nicer. As Johnny walked,
he touched the object he had stowed in his left front pants pocket. “But before we go, it's important that I talk to someone. Very important.”

“Who?” Cammie asked.

Johnny picked Ellen Carver up. He hugged her, kissed one bloodstained cheek, and was glad when her arms went around his neck and she hugged him back fiercely. You couldn't buy a hug like that. “Ralphie Carver,” he said, and carried Ralphie's sister back into the kitchen.

As it happened, Tom Billingsley did have a couple of guns kicking around, but first he found Collie a shirt. It wasn't much—an old Cleveland Browns tee with a rip under one arm—but it was an XL, and better than trying the path through the greenbelt naked from the waist up. Collie had used the route often enough to know there were blackberry bushes, plus assorted other prickers and brambles, out there.

“Thanks,” he said, pulling the shirt on as Old Doc led them past the Ping-Pong table at the far end of his basement.

“Don't mention it,” Billingsley said, reaching up and tugging the string that turned on the fluorescents. “Can't even remember where it came from. I've always been a Bengals fan, myself.”

In the corner beyond the Ping-Pong table was a jumble of fishing equipment, a few orange hunting
vests, and an unstrung bow. Old Doc squatted with a grimace, moved the vests, and uncovered a quilt that had been rolled and tied with twine. Inside it were four rifles, but two of them were in pieces. Billingsley held up the ones that were whole. “Should do,” he said.

Collie took the .30–.06, which probably made a lot more sense for a woods patrol than his service pistol, anyway (and would raise fewer questions if he had to shoot someone). That left Ames with the other, smaller gun. A Mossberg. “It's only chambered for .22s,” Doc said apologetically as he rummaged in a cabinet mounted next to the fusebox and laid out cartons of cartridges on the Ping-Pong table, “but it's a damned fine gun, just the same. Holds nine in a row for more go. What do you think?”

Ames offered a grin Collie couldn't help liking. “I think oy vey, such a deal,” he said, taking the Mossy. Billingsley laughed at that—a cracked old man's chortle—and led them back upstairs.

Cynthia had put a pillow under Marielle's head, but she was still lying on the living-room floor (under the picture of Daisy, the mathematically inclined Corgi, actually). They hadn't dared move her; Billingsley was afraid his stitches might tear open again. She was still alive, which was good, and still unconscious, which might also be good, considering what had happened to her. But she was breathing in great, irregular gasps that did not sound good to Collie at all. It sounded like the kind of breathing that might stop any time.

Her husband, the charming Gary, was sitting in a
kitchen chair which he had turned around so he could at least look at his wife while he drank. Collie saw that the bottle he had found contained Mother DeLucca's Best Cooking Sherry, and felt his stomach turn over.

Gary saw him looking (or perhaps felt it), and looked over at Collie. His eyes were red and puffy. Sore-looking. Miserable. Collie hunted in his heart and found some sympathy for the man. Not much, though. “Losser damn arm,” he told Collie in a furry, confiding voice. “Gaw hepper.” Collie thought this over and translated it as Drunkish for either
Got to help her
or
God help her
.

“Yes,” he said. “We're going to get her some help.”

“Aw be here awreddy. Losser mahfuhn arm. Zin the mahfuhn
fritch
!”

“I know.”

Cynthia joined them. “You used to be a vet, didn't you, Mr. Billingsley?”

Billingsley nodded.

“I thought so. Could you come here? Take a look at something out the front door?”

“Do you think that's safe?”

“For the time being, I think so. The thing that's out there . . . well, I'd rather you looked for yourself.” She glanced at the other two men.
“Selves.”

She led Billingsley across the living room to the door looking out on Poplar Street. Collie glanced at Steve, who shrugged. Collie's assumption was that the girl wanted to show Billingsley how the houses across the street had changed, although what that had to do with Billingsley's being a vet he didn't know.

“Holy
shit” he said to Steve as they reached the door. “They've gone back to normal! Or did we just imagine they'd changed in the first place?” It was the Geller house he kept staring at. Ten minutes ago, when he and the hippie and the counter-girl had been looking out this same door, he could have sworn that the Geller place had turned into an adobe—the sort of thing you saw in pictures of New Mexico and Arizona back when they were territories. Now it was clad in plain old Ohio aluminum siding again.

“We didn't imagine it and things haven't gone back to normal,” Steve said. “At least, not all the way. Check that one.”

Collie followed Steve's pointing finger and stared at the Reed house. The modern aluminized siding had returned, replacing the logs, and the roof was once more neat asphalt shingles instead of whatever it had been before (sod, he thought); the mid-sized satellite dish was back on top of the carport. But the house's foundation was rough wood planking instead of brick, and all the windows were tightly shuttered. There were loopholes in those shutters, too, as if the inhabitants of the house expected their day-to-day problems to include marauding Indians as well as Seventh-day Adventists and wandering insurance salesmen. Collie couldn't say for sure, but he didn't think the Reed house had even had shutters before this afternoon, let alone ones with rifleport loopholes.

“Sa-aaay.” Billingsley sounded like a man who is finally getting the idea that all of this is a
Candid Camera
stunt. “Are those hitching-rails in front of Audrey's? They are, aren't they? What is all this?”

“Never
mind that,” Cynthia said. She reached up, took the old man's face between her hands, and turned it like a camera on a tripod so he was looking at the corpse of Peter Jackson's wife.

“Oh my God,” Collie said.

There was a large bird perched on the woman's bare thigh, its yellow talons buried in her skin. It had already snacked off most of her remaining face, and was now burrowing into the flesh under her chin. Collie had a brief, unwelcome memory of going after Kellie Eberhart in exactly the same place one night at the West Columbus Drive-In, her saying that if he gave her a hickey, her dad would probably shoot them both.

He didn't realize he had lifted the .30–.06 into firing position until Steve pushed the barrel back down with the palm of his hand. “No, man. I wouldn't. Better to keep quiet, maybe.”

He was right, but . . .
God
. It wasn't just what it was doing, but what it was.

“Losser goddam arm!” Gary announced from the kitchen, as if afraid they might forget this if he allowed them to. Old Doc ignored him. He had crossed the living room looking like a man who expects to be shot dead in his tracks at any moment, but now he seemed to have forgotten all about killers, weird vans, and transforming houses.

“My good gosh, look at that!” he exclaimed in a tone that sounded very much like awe. “I ought to
photograph it. Yes! Excuse me . . . I'll just get my camera . . .”

He began to turn away. Cynthia grabbed him by the shoulder. “The camera can wait, Mr. Billingsley.”

He seemed to come back a little to their situation at that. “Yes . . . I suppose, but . . .”

The bird turned, as if hearing them, and seemed to stare at the vet's bungalow with its red-rimmed eyes. Its pink skull appeared black with stubble. Its beak was a simple yellow hook.