The Regulators (33 page)

Oh Herb I'm so sorry, I love you, I'm sorry.

October 19, 1995

Got an answer to my letter today, ages after I'd given up expecting one. My respondent was a mining engineer named Allen Symes. He works at a place called the China Pit, in the town of Desperation, Nevada. Says he saw Bill and his family, but nothing happened, he just showed them the mine and they went on, nothing happened.

He's lying. I'll probably never know why, or what happened out there, but I know that much. He's lying.

God help me.

It all happened fast, but Johnny's half-wonderful, half-terrible ability to see and sequence kept up.

Entragian, dying but too badly hurt to know it, was crawling toward one of the primitive cacti at the left side of the path, his head hanging so low it left a swath of blood on the ground-growth. His skull gleamed between hanging flaps of hair like a bleary pearl. He looked scalped.

In the middle of the path, a bizarre waltz was going on. The creature from the ravine—a sinister Picasso mountain lion with jutting orange teeth—was up on its hind legs, paws on Steve Ames's shoulders. If Steve had dropped his arms when the cat clawed the puny .22 away from him, he would have been dead already. He had crossed them over his chest instead, however, and now his elbows and forearms were against the cat's chest.

“Shoot it!”
he screamed.
“For Christ's sake, shoot it!”

Neither twin made a move for the dropped pistol. They were not identical twins, but their faces now wore identical expressions of anguish.

The mountain lion (it hurt Johnny's eyes just to look at it) uttered a womanish shrieking cry and darted its triangular head forward. Steve snapped his own head back and tried to throw the creature off to one side. It held on with its claws and the two of them tangoed drunkenly, the cat's claws digging deeper into Steve's shoulders, and now Johnny could see blood-blossoms spreading on his shirt where the claws—as wildly exaggerated as its teeth, only black instead of orange—were dug in. Its tail lashed madly back and forth.

They did another half-turn, and Steve's feet tangled in each other. For a moment he tottered on the edge of balance, still holding off the lunging mountain lion with his crossed arms. Beyond them, Entragian had reached the cactus. He butted the top of his bleeding and horribly distended head into its spines, then collapsed and rolled over on his side. To Johnny he looked like a machine that has finally run down. Coyotes wailed, still out of sight but closer now; the air was tangy with smoke from the burning house.

“Shoot this fucking thing!”
Steve yelled. He had managed to catch his balance, but before long would be all out of backing-up room; he was at the edge of the path. One step into the thorny underbrush, two at most, and he would go over. Then the nightmare would rip his throat out.
“Shoot it, please, it's tearin me apart!”

Johnny had never been so terrified in his life, but he nonetheless discovered that only the first step was actually hard; once the lock on his body was broken, the terror didn't seem to matter much. After all, the worst thing the creature could do to him was kill him, and dying would at least stop the feeling that an earthquake was going on inside his mind.

He scooped up Entragian's rifle—considerably larger than the one the cat had ripped out of the longhair's hands—saw the safety was on, and flicked it the other way with his thumb. Then he socked the .30–.06's muzzle against the side of the mountain lion's bulging head.

“Push!”
he bellowed, and Steve pushed. The cat's head rocked up and away from his throat. Its bristle of teeth shone like poison coral. The sunset light was in its green eyes, making them look as if they were on fire. Johnny had time to wonder if Entragian had chambered a round—he was probably never going to write another Pat the Kitty-Cat book if Entragian hadn't—then turned his head slightly away and pulled the trigger. There was a satisfying whipcrack sound, a lick of fire from the barrel, and then Johnny could smell frying hair as well as burning house. The mountain lion fell sideways, its head mostly gone, the fur on the back of its neck smouldering. What was inside its lifted skull was not blood, bone, and tissue but fibrous pink stuff that reminded Johnny of the blown-in insulation he'd gotten for the second floor and attic of his new house the year after he'd moved in.

Steve tottered, waving his arms for balance. Marinville reached out a hand, but he was dazed and it was only a token effort. Steve went sprawling in the bushes at the side of the path, beside the mountain lion's twitching rear paws. Johnny bent down, grabbed his wrist, and hauled. Black spots flocked in front of his eyes, and for one awful second he thought he was going to pass out. Then Steve was on his feet and Johnny's vision was clearing again.

Wh-wh-whoooooo . . .

Johnny looked around nervously. He could still see nothing, but the sons of bitches sounded closer than ever.

Dave Reed kept thinking that pretty soon he would wake up. Never mind that he could smell the cop's blood and sweat as he knelt beside him, never mind the tortured sound of the cop's breathing (and his own), the cop's one dying eye, or the sight of his brain—his gray and wrinkled brain—pushing through a shattered window in his skull. It
had
to be a dream. Surely his brother could not have shot the guy from across the street, a crooked cop, yes, but also the guy who had once told Cary Ripton to try throwing a baseball with his fingers across the seams instead of lying along them . . . and who had then demonstrated by throwing a brain-busting rainbow change.

Smells like he shit his pants, Dave thought, and
suddenly felt like vomiting. He controlled it. He didn't want to vomit again, even in a dream.

The cop reached up and hooked his fingers into Dave's shirt.

“Hurt,” he whispered hoarsely.
“Hurt.”

“Don't”—Dave swallowed, cleared his throat—”try to talk.”

Behind him, incredibly, he could hear Johnny Marinville and the hippie guy talking about whether or not they should go on. They were insane, had to be. And Marinville . . . where had Marinville been? How could he have let this happen? He was a fucking
adult
!

With a shudder of effort, Collie Entragian got up on one elbow. His remaining eye stared at the boy with ferocious concentration. “Never,” he whispered.
“Never—”

“Sir . . . Mr. Entragian . . . you'd better just . . .”

Wh-wh-whoooooooo!

Close enough this time to make Dave Reed's skin feel as if it were freezing. He felt like ripping Johnny Marinville's face off for not stopping this before it had become irrevocable. Yet the cop's eye held him like a bug on a pin, and one of the cop's blood-streaked hands had knotted a handful of Dave's shirt into a loose fist. He could tear away from him, maybe, but . . .

But that was a lie.
He felt
like a bug on a pin.

“Never took drugs . . . sold them . . . any of it,” Collie whispered. “Never took a dime. Framed. IA shooflies on the take . . . I found out.”

“You—” Dave began.

“
I found out!
You understand . . . what I'm saying?” He held up the hand that wasn't knotted in Dave's shirt, opened it, appeared to examine it. “Hands . . . clean.”

“Yeah, okay,” Dave said. “But you better not try to talk. You got . . . well, a little crease, and—”

“Jim, no!”
Marinville screamed from behind him.
“Don't!”

Dave suddenly discovered he could pull away from the dying man quite easily.

“What do we do?” Johnny asked the longhair as, on the other side of the path, the dark-haired twin knelt by the man his brother had shot. Johnny could hear the faint sound of Entragian murmuring, as if he wanted to make a good confession before he died. Johnny had relearned a gruesome fact this afternoon: people died hard, by and large, and when they went out, they left without much dignity . . . and probably without realizing they were leaving at all.

“Do?”
Steve asked. He stared at Johnny, almost comically amazed, and ran a hand through his hair, smearing red in with the gray. More blood was spreading on the shoulders of his shirt where the cat's claws had sunk in. “What do you mean,
do
?”

“Do we go on or do we go back?” Johnny asked. His voice was rough, urgent. “What's up ahead? What did you see?”

“Nothing,” Steve said. “No, I take that back. It's worse than nothing. It—” His eyes shifted past Johnny and widened.

Johnny turned, thinking the hippie must have seen the coyotes, they had finally arrived, but it wasn't coyotes.
“Jim, no!”
he screamed.
“Don't!”
Knowing it was already too late, seeing it on young Jim Reed's pale face, where everything had been cancelled.

The boy stood there with the pistol pressed against the side of his head just long enough for Steve Ames to hope that maybe he wasn't going to do it, that he'd had a change of heart at the penultimate moment, that last little vestibule of maybe not before the endless hallway of too late, and then Jim pulled the trigger. His face contorted as if he had been struck with a gas-pain of moderate intensity. His skin seemed to pop sideways on his skull, the left cheek puffing out. Then his head blew apart, his ambitions to write great essays (not to mention those of getting into Susi Geller's pants) so much vapor in the strange sunset air, red goo that splattered across one of the insane cacti like spit. He staggered forward a step on buckling knees, the gun tumbling from his hand, then went down. Steve turned his thunderstruck face to Johnny's, thinking: I didn't see what I just saw. Rewind the tape, play it again, and
you'll see, too. I didn't see what I just saw. Neither of us did. No, man. No.

Except he had. The kid, overcome with remorse and horror at what he had done to the guy from down the street, had just committed impulse suicide in front of him.

“You should have stopped him!”
Dave Reed screamed, hurling himself at Johnny.
“You should have stopped him, why didn't you? Why didn't you stop him?”

Steve tried to grab the kid on his way by, but the pain in his shoulders was excruciating. He could only watch helplessly as Dave Reed grabbed Johnny and bore him to the ground. They rolled over twice, from one side of the path to the other. Johnny wound up on top, at least for a moment. “David, listen to me—”

“No! No! You should have stopped him! You should have stopped him!”

The kid slapped Johnny first with his right hand, then his left. He was sobbing, tears streaming down his pale cheeks. Steve tried again to help and succeeded only in distracting Johnny, who had been trying to pin the boy's arms with his knees. Dave rocked up hard on one hip, throwing Johnny off the path to the left. Johnny put out a hand to break his fall and got a palmful of cactus spines instead. He roared in pain and surprise.

Steve got hold of Dave Reed's shoulder with his right hand—that arm was at least responding a little—but the boy shook him off easily, not even looking around, and then sprang onto Johnny Marinville's broad back, got his hands around his throat, and
began to choke him. And, all around them in the swiftly darkening day, the coyotes howled—perfect round howls, the kind Steve had never heard when he was growing up, although he had been born and raised in Texas.

Howls like these you only heard in the movies.

Both men had wanted to come with her, but Cynthia wouldn't have it—one was old, the other drunk. The gate at the bottom of the lawn was still open. A moment after going through it, she was fighting her way through the underbrush toward the path. She saw several cacti before she got there (there were more of them now, and they were driving out the normal greenbelt vegetation), but didn't register them. She could hear the sounds of a struggle up ahead: harsh, strained breathing, a cry of pain, the thud of a landed blow. And coyotes. She didn't see them, but they sounded as if they were everywhere.

As she reached the path, a trim little blonde in jeans blew past her without so much as a glance. Cynthia knew who she was—Cammie Reed, the twins' mother. Following her and panting heavily was Brad Josephson. Rivulets of sweat were running down his cheeks; the late light made him look as if he were crying tears of blood.

Sun's going down, Cynthia thought as she turned onto the path and ran after the others. If we don't get
out of here soon, we're apt to get lost. And wouldn't
that
be fun.

Then there was a scream from just ahead of her. No, not a scream but a
shriek.
Horror and grief mingled. The Reed woman. Cynthia heard Brad say “Oh no, oh fuck” just as she reached him.

For a moment Josephson's broad back obscured what was going on, and then he bent beside Cammie and Cynthia saw two bodies lying sprawled on either side of the path. In the thickening shadows she couldn't tell who they were—only that they had been male, and looked as if they had died unpleasantly—but she could see Steve standing to one side of the melee at the left of the path, and the sight of him made her feel glad. Almost at his feet was the carcass of a horribly misshapen animal with half its head blown away.

Cammie Reed was on her knees beside one of the corpses, not touching it but holding her shaking hands out over it, palms up, wailing. On her face was an expression of murderous agony. Cynthia saw the Eddie Bauer shorts and understood it was one of her sons.

But they had such perfect teeth, Cynthia thought stupidly. Must have cost her and her husband a fortune.

Brad worked at getting the other twin (Dave, Cynthia thought his name was, or maybe it was Doug) off Johnny Marinville. The big black man had gotten his arms under the teenager's arms, and had locked his large hands together behind Dave's neck, giving him full-nelson leverage. Still, the Reed boy did not come easily.