The Regulators (34 page)

“Let me go!”
he bawled.
“Let me go, you son of a bitch! He killed my brother! He killed Jimmy!”

Mrs. Reed's keening stopped. She looked up and the still, questioning expression on her white face frightened Cynthia. “What?” she said, so low that she might have been speaking to herself. “
What
did you say?”

“He killed Jimmy!”
Dave Reed bawled. His head was bent strenuously forward under the pressure Brad was exerting on his neck, but he still pointed unerringly at Johnny, who was getting to his feet. Blood trickled from one of the writer's nostrils.

“No,” Johnny said heavily. The woman wasn't listening to him, Cynthia saw that clearly in her white and frozen face, but Marinville didn't. “I understand how you feel, David, but—”

The woman looked down. Cynthia looked down with her. They saw the .45 on the path at the same moment, and both of them went for it. Cynthia dropped to her knees and actually got her hand on it first, but it did her no good. Fingers as cold as marble and as strong as the talons of an eagle closed over her hand and plucked the pistol away.

“—it was all a terrible accident,” Johnny was mumbling. He seemed to be speaking mostly to Dave. He looked ill, on the verge of fainting. “That's how you have to think of it. As—”

“Look out!” Steve cried, then: “Jesus Christ, lady, no! Don't!”

“You killed Jimmy?” the woman asked in a deadly-cold voice. “Why? Why would you do that?”

But she wasn't interested in the answer, it seemed. She lifted the .45, centering it on Johnny Marinville's forehead. There was no question in Cynthia's mind that she meant to kill him.
Would
have killed him, if not for the new arrival, who came between Cammie and her intended target just before she could squeeze the trigger.

Brad recognized the zombie in spite of its hitching, shambling walk and distorted face. He didn't know what kind of force had been responsible for changing the amiable college English teacher from down the block into the thing he was looking at now, and didn't want to know. Looking was bad enough. It was as if someone whose prodigious strength was only overmatched by his sadistic cruelty had gripped Peter Jackson's head between his hands and squeezed. The man's eyes bulged from their sockets; the left had actually burst and lay on his cheek. His grin was even worse, a grotesque ear-to-ear rictus that made Brad think of The Joker in the Batman comic books.

They all stopped moving; Coleridge's Ancient Mariner with his glittering, enchanted gaze might have entered their company. Brad felt his fingers, laced together at the nape of Dave's neck, loosen, but Dave made no immediate effort to pull away. The longhair in the bloodstained tee-shirt was partially blocking
Peter's way, and for a moment Brad thought there was going to be a collision. At the last second the hippie managed a single shaky backward step, making room. Peter turned his strangely distended head toward him. The fading light shone on his bulging eyeballs and grinning teeth.

“Find . . . my . . . friend,” Peter said to the hippie. His voice was faint and queasy, as if he had been gassed enough to fuck him up but not quite enough to put him down. “Sit . . . down . . . with . . . my friend.”

“Do it, man, knock yourself out,” the hippie said in an unsteady voice, then hunched his shoulder in, away from the grinning man. The hippie had been wounded somehow and it obviously hurt him to do that, but he did it anyway. Brad didn't blame him. He wouldn't have wanted to be touched by that thing, either, even in passing.

It went on up the path, kicking the leg of the outstretched animal, and Brad saw a weird thing: the animal—it had been some sort of cat—was decaying with the speed of time-lapse photography, its pelt turning black and beginning to send up tendrils of nasty-smelling steam or smoke.

They remained frozen—the hippie with his bloody shoulders hunched; the counter-girl on one knee; Cammie standing in front of the girl and pointing the gun; Johnny with his hands up, as if he intended to try catching the bullet; Brad and Dave Reed caught in their wrestling pose—as Peter drifted south along the path, his back now to them. The evening was utterly still, poised on a diminishing
shaft of daylight. Even the coyotes had gone still, at least for the moment.

Then Dave sensed the lack of strength in the hands holding his neck and tore out of Brad's grip. The boy showed no interest in Johnny, however. He charged at his mother instead.

“You too!”
he screamed.
“You killed him, too!”

She turned toward him, her face shocked and flabbergasted.

“Why did you send us out here, Ma? Why?”

He snatched the gun from her unresisting hand, held it up in front of his eyes for a moment, and then heaved it into the woods . . . except they
weren't
woods, not anymore. The changes had continued all around them even while they had been striving one with the other, and they were now standing in a bristling, alien forest of cacti. Even the smell of the burning house had changed; it now smelled like burning mesquite, or maybe sagebrush.

“Dave . . . Davey, I . . .”

She fell silent, only staring at him. He stared back, just as white, just as drawn. It occurred to Brad that not long ago the boy had been standing on his lawn, laughing and throwing a Frisbee. Dave's face began to contort. His mouth drew down and shuddered open. Gleaming strands of spit stretched between his lips. He began to wail. His mother put her arms around him and began to rock him. “No, it's all right,” she said. Her own eyes were like smooth dark stones in a dry riverbed. “No, it's all right. No, honey, it's all right, Mom's here and it's all right.”

Johnny stepped back onto the path. He looked briefly at the dead animal, which was now shimmering like something seen through a furnace-haze and oozing runnels of thick pink liquid. Then he looked at Cammie and her remaining son.

“Cammie,” he said. “Mrs. Reed. I did not shoot Jim. I swear I didn't. What happened was—”

“Be still,” she said, not looking at him. Dave was half a foot taller than his mother and had to outweigh her by seventy pounds, but she rocked him as easily now as she must have done when he was eight months old and colicky. “I don't want to hear what happened. I don't care what happened. Let's just go back. Do you want to go back, David?”

Weeping, not looking, he nodded against her shoulder.

She turned her terrible dry eyes toward Brad. “Bring my other boy. We're not leaving him out here with that thing.” She looked briefly at the fuming, stinking carcass of the mountain lion, then back at Brad. “Bring him, do you understand?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Brad said. “I absolutely do.”

Tom Billingsley was standing at the kitchen door, peering out into the growing gloom toward his open back gate and trying to make sense of the sounds and voices he heard coming from beyond it. When a set of fingers tapped him on the shoulder, he almost had a heart attack.

Once he would have spun gracefully and coldcocked the intruder with his fist or elbow before either of them knew what was happening, but the slim young man who had been capable of such speed and agility was long gone. He did strike out, but the redheaded woman in the blue shorts and sleeveless blouse had plenty of time to step back, and Tom's arthritis-bunched knuckles coldcocked nothing but thin air.

“Christ, woman!” he cried.

“I'm sorry.” Audrey's face, normally pretty, was haggard. There was a hand-shaped bruise on her left cheek and her nose was swollen, the nostrils caked with dried blood. “I was going to say something, but I thought that might scare you even worse.”

“What happened to you, Aud?”

“It doesn't matter. Where are the others?”

“Some in the woods, some next door. It—” A howl rose. The red light had faded from the air now, and all that remained was ashes of orange. “It doesn't sound too good for the ones that're out. A lot of screaming.” He thought of something. “Where's Gary?”

She stood aside and pointed. Gary lay in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. He had passed out while still holding his wife's hand. Now that the screaming and yelling from the greenbelt had stopped—at least temporarily—Old Doc could hear him snoring.

“That's Marielle under that coverlet?” Audrey asked.

Tom nodded.

“We have to get with the others, Tom. Before it starts again. Before they come back.”

“Do you know what's happening here, Aud?”

“I don't think anyone knows exactly what's happening here, but I know some stuff, yes.” She pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead and closed her eyes. To Tom she looked like a math student wrestling with some massive equation. Then she dropped her hands and looked at him again. “We better go next door. We should all be together.”

He lifted his chin toward the snoring Gary. “What about him?”

“We couldn't carry him, couldn't lift him over David Carver's back fence even if we could. You'll be doing well to get over it yourself.”

“I'll manage,” he said, stung a little. “Don't you worry about me, Aud, I'll manage fine.”

From the greenbelt there came a cry, another gunshot, and then an animal howling in agony. What seemed like a thousand coyotes howled in response.

“They shouldn't have gone out there,” Audrey said. “I know why they did, but it was a bad idea.”

Old Doc nodded. “I think they know that now,” he said.

Peter reached the fork in the path and looked into the desert, bone-white in the glare of a rising moon, beyond it. Then he looked down and saw the man in the patched khaki pants pinned to the cactus.

“Hello . . . friend,” he said. He moved the bum's
shopping cart so he could sit down beside him. As he settled against the cactus spines, feeling them slide into his back, he heard a cry and a gunshot and an agonized howl. All from far away. Not important. He put his hand on the dead bum's shoulder. Their grins were identical. “Hello . . . friend,” the erstwhile James Dickey scholar said again.

He looked south. His remaining sight was almost gone, but there was enough left for him to see the perfectly round moon rising between the fangs of the black Crayola mountains. It was as silver as the back of an old-time pocket watch, and upon it was the smiling, one-eye-winked face of Mr. Moon from a child's book of Mother Goose rhymes.

Only this version of Mr. Moon appeared to be wearing a cowboy hat.

“Hello . . . friend,” Peter said to it, and settled back further against the cactus. He did not feel the exaggerated spines that punctured his lungs, or the first trickles of blood that seeped out of his grinning mouth. He was with his friend. He was with his friend and now everything was all right, they were looking at Mr. Cowpoke Moon and everything was all right.

The light dropped out of the day with a speed that reminded Johnny of the tropics, and soon the spiny landscape around them was only a black blur. The path was clear, at least for the time being—a gray
streak about two feet wide winding through the shadows—but if the moon hadn't come up, they would probably be in even deeper shit than they already were. He had watched the weather forecast that morning and knew the moon was new, not full, but that little contradiction didn't seem very important under the current circumstances.

They went up the path two by two, like animals mounting the gangplank to Noah's ark: Cammie and her surviving son, then he and Brad (with the corpse of Jim Reed swinging between them), then Cynthia and the hippie, whose name was Steve. The girl had picked up the .30–.06, and when the coyote—a nightmare even more misbegotten than the mountain lion had been—came out of a cactus grove to the east of the path, it was the girl who settled its account.

The moon was bringing out fantastic tangles of shadow everywhere, and for a moment Johnny thought the coyote was one of them. Then Brad yelled
“Hey, look
OUT
!”
and the girl fired almost at once. The recoil would have knocked her over like a bowling pin if the hippie hadn't grabbed her by the back of her pants.

The coyote yowled and flipped over backward, its mismatched legs spasming. There was enough moonlight for Johnny to see that its paws ended in appendages that looked horribly like human fingers, and that it wore a cartridge belt for a collar. Its mates raised their voices in howls of what might have been mourning or laughter.

The thing began to decay at once, paw-fingers turning black, ribcage collapsing, eyes falling in like marbles. Steam began to rise from its fur, and the stench rose with it. A moment or two later, those thick pink streams began to ooze out of its liquefying corpse.

Johnny and Brad set Jim Reed's body gently down. Johnny reached for the .30–.06 and poked the barrel at the coyote. He blinked with surprise (
moderate
surprise; his capacity for any large emotional reaction seemed pretty well drained) as it slid past the darkening hide with no feeling of resistance at all.

“It's like prodding cigarette smoke,” he said, handing the gun back to Cynthia. “I don't think it's here at all. I don't think
any
of it's here, not really.”

Steve Ames stepped forward, took Johnny's hand, and guided it to the shoulder of his shirt. Johnny felt a line of ragged punctures made by the mountain lion's claws. Blood had soaked through the cotton enough for it to squelch under Johnny's fingers. “The thing that did this to me wasn't cigarette smoke,” Steve said.

Johnny started to reply, then was distracted by a strange rattling sound. It reminded him of cocktail shakers in the be-bop bars of his youth. Back in the fifties, that had been, when you couldn't get smashed without a tie on if you were a member of the country club set. The sound was coming from Dave Reed, who was standing rigidly beside his mother. It was his teeth.