The Regulators (41 page)

Undoubtedly true, but Johnny no longer cared. He pointed a finger at Kim, who stared back at him along its length with hot, resentful eyes. “And while we're at it, the next time you call Belinda Josephson a black bitch, I'll knock your teeth down your throat.”

“Oh gosh, don't you think
your
shit comes out smoking,” Kim said, and rolled her eyes theatrically.

“Stop it, John,” Belinda said, and took his arm. “Right now. We've got more important things to—”

“Fat black bitch,” Kim Geller said. She didn't look at Belinda as she said it but at Johnny. Her eyes were still burning, but now she was smiling. He thought it was the most poisonous smile he had ever seen in his life. “Fat black
nigger
bitch.” That said, she pointed her own finger at her mouth and visible teeth, like a woman trying to get
suicide
across in a game of charades. Her daughter was looking at her with a stunned expression. “Okay? Did you hear it? So come on. Knock my teeth down my throat. Let's see you try.”

Johnny started forward, meaning to do just that. Brad grabbed one of his arms. Steve grabbed the other one.

“Get out of here, you idiot,” Old Doc said. His voice was harsh and dry. It got through to Kim, somehow, and she gave him a startled, considering look. “Get out of here right now.”

Kim rose from her chair, pulling Susi out of hers. For a moment it seemed they would go into the living
room together, but then Susi pulled away. Kim reached for her, but Susi continued to back off.

“What do you think you're doing?” Kim asked. “We're going into the living room! We're going to get away from these—”

“Not me,” Susi said, shaking her head quickly. “You, maybe. Not me. Uh-uh.”

Kim stared at her, then looked back at Johnny. Her face was sick with a kind of hateful confusion.

“Get out of here, Kim,” Johnny said. He could still see himself driving his fist into her mouth, but the madness was passing and his voice was almost steady. “You're not yourself.”

“Susi? You get over here. We're going away from these hateful people.”

Susi turned her back on her mother, trembling all over. Johnny supposed this did not change his opinion of the girl as a shallow, flighty creature . . . but she seemed a link or two up the food-chain from her mother, at least.

Slowly, like a rusty robot, Dave Reed raised his arms and put them around her. Cammie seemed about to object to this, then subsided.

“All right,” Kim said. Her voice was clear and composed again, the voice of someone giving a speech in a dream. “When you want me, I'll be in the living room.” Her eyes switched to Johnny, whom she seemed to have identified as the source of all her misery. “And you—”

“Stop it,” Audrey said harshly. Startled, they all turned to look at her, except for Kim, who slipped off
into the darkness of the living room. “We have no time for this
shit.
We might have a chance to get out of this—a small one—but if you fools stand around squabbling, all we're going to do is die.”

“Who're you, ma'am?” Steve asked.

“Audrey Wyler.” She was tall, her legs long and coltish and not unsexy below her blue shorts, but her face was pale and haggard. That face made Johnny think of the way the Carver kids looked as they lay sleeping in each other's arms, and suddenly he found himself trying to remember when he'd last seen Audrey, passed the time of day with her. He couldn't. It was as if she had dropped out of the casual, back-and-forth life of the street entirely.

Little bitty baby Smitty,
he thought suddenly,
I seen you bite your mommy's titty.
Then he thought of the vans that had been on the floor of the Wyler den the afternoon he'd spent some time watching
Bonanza
with Seth. And once he had that, a kind of landslide started in his head. Outlaws that looked like movie stars. Major Pike, a good nailien gone bad. The Western scenery. That most of all.
He loves the old Westerns,
Audrey had said that day. She'd picked up a few of his toys as she spoke, doing it the way people do stuff when they're nervous. Bonanza
and
The Rifleman
are his favorites, but anything they'll bring back on the cable, he'll watch. If it has horses in it, that is.

“It's your nephew, Audrey. Isn't it? It's Seth doing this.”

“No.” She raised a hand and wiped her eyes with it. “Not Seth. What's
inside
Seth.”

“I'll tell you what I can, but there's not much time. The Power Wagons will be back before long.”

“Who's inside them?” Old Doc asked. “Do you know, Aud?”

“Regulators. Outlaws. Sci-fi policemen. And this place where we are is partly the Old West as it exists on TV and partly a place called the Force Corridor, which only exists in a TV-cartoon version of the twenty-third century.” She took a deep breath and ran her hands through her hair. “I don't know everything, but—”

“Take us through as much as you can,” Johnny said.

She looked at her watch and made a sour face. “Stopped.”

“Mine, too,” Steve said. “Everybody's, I imagine.”

“I think there's time,” Audrey said. “Which is to say, I think it's too early for any . . . any
movement
just yet.” She laughed suddenly, startling Johnny. Startling all of them, from the look. It wasn't the hysterical undertone so much as the genuine merriness on top. She saw their stares and brought herself under control. “Sorry—it's a kind of pun. No reason you should understand. Yet, anyway. We have to wait. If he brings the regulators back in the meantime, we'll have to just . . . endure them, I suppose.”

“Are they getting stronger?” Cammie asked suddenly. “These regulators, are they getting more powerful?”

“Yes,” Audrey said. “And if the thing doing this caught the energy from the people who died out there in the woods, the next run will be the worst yet. I pray that didn't happen, but I think it probably did.”

She looked around at them, drew in a deep breath, and began.

“The thing inside Seth is named Tak.”

“Is it a demon, Aud?” Old Doc asked. “Some kind of demon?”

“No. It has no . . . no religion, I suppose you'd say. Unless TV counts. It's more like a tumor, I think. One that's conscious and enjoys cruelty and violence. It's been inside him for almost two years now. I heard a story once about a Vermont woman who found a black widow spider in her sink. It apparently came into the house in an empty box her husband brought home from the supermarket where he worked. The box had been full of bananas from South America. The spider had gotten in with them when they were packed. That's pretty much how Tak got to Poplar Street, I think. Except we're talking about a black widow with a voice. It called Seth when he and his family were crossing the desert. Crossing
Nevada.
It sensed him, someone it could use, passing close by, and
called
him.”

She looked down at her hands, which were knotted tightly together in her lap. Kim Geller was standing in
the living-room doorway now, drawn back by Audrey's story. Audrey looked up again. She spoke to them all, but it was Johnny her eyes kept returning to.

“I think it was weak at first, but not too weak to understand that Seth's family posed a threat to it. I don't know how much they knew or suspected, but I do know that my last phone conversation with my brother was
very
strange. I think Bill could have told me a lot . . . if Tak had let him.”

“It can do that?” Steve asked. “Impose control over people like that?”

She gestured at her swollen mouth. “My hand did this,” she said, “but I wasn't running it.”

“Christ,” Cynthia said. She looked nervously at the knives hanging on their magnetized steel runners over the kitchen counter. “That's bad.
Very.
”

“It could be worse, though,” Audrey said. “Tak can only physically control at short range.”

“How short?” Cammie asked.

“Usually no more than twenty or thirty feet. Beyond that, its physical influence runs out in a hurry.
Usually.
Now, all bets are off. Because it's never been so loaded with energy.”

“Let her tell her story,” Johnny said. He could feel time almost as a tangible thing, slipping away from them. He didn't know if he was getting that from Audrey or if it was coming from inside himself, and he didn't care. Time was short. He had never felt an intuition so strongly in his whole life. Time was short.

“There's a boy still in there,” she said, speaking slowly and with great emphasis. “A sweet, special
child named Seth Garin. And the most despicable thing is that Tak has used what the child loves to do its killing. In the case of my brother and his family, it was Tracker Arrow, one of the MotoKops' Power Wagons. They were in California, at the end of the trip that took them through Nevada, when it happened. I don't know where Tak got enough energy to summon Tracker Arrow out of Seth's thoughts and dreams at that stage of its development. Seth is its basic power-supply, but Seth isn't enough. It needs more in order to really crank up.”

“It's a vampire, isn't it?” Johnny said. “Only what it draws off is psychic energy instead of blood.”

She nodded. “And the energy it uses is most abundantly available when someone is in pain. In the case of Bill and the rest of his family, maybe someone in the neighborhood died or was hurt. Or—”

“Or maybe there was someone it could hurt itself,” Steve said. “A handy bum, for instance. Just some old wino pushing a shopping cart. Whoever it was, I bet he died with a smile on his face.”

Audrey looked at him, her face sad and sickened. “You know.”

“Not much, but what I know fits what you're saying,” Steve told her. “There's a guy like that back there.” He hooked a thumb in the general direction of the greenbelt. “Entragian recognized him. Said he'd been on the street two or three times before since the start of the summer. He got in your nephew's hooking range, didn't he? How?”

“I don't know,” she said dully. “I must have been away.”

“Where?” Cynthia asked. She'd had the idea that Mrs. Wyler was sort of a recluse.

“Never mind,” Audrey said. “Just a place I go. You wouldn't understand. The point is, Tak killed my brother Bill and the rest of his family. And it used one of the Power Wagons to do it.”

“Maybe he could only manage one lonely trombone then, but he's got the whole band playing now, doesn't he?” Johnny asked.

Audrey was looking away from them now, nibbling at lips that looked dry and sore. “Herb and I took him in, and in some ways—in many ways, actually—I was never sorry. We could never have children ourselves. He was a loving boy, a sweetheart of a boy—”

“Somebody probably loved Typhoid Mary, too,” Cammie Reed said in a dry, rasping voice.

Audrey looked at her, still biting at her lips, then looked back at Johnny, appealing with her eyes for understanding. He didn't
want
to understand, not after all that had happened, especially not after seeing the terrible distortion in Jim Reed's face as the bullet slammed into his brain, but he thought maybe he did a little, anyway. Like it or not.

“The first six months or so were the best. Although even then we knew
something
was wrong, of course.”

“Did you take him to the doctor?” Johnny asked.

“It wouldn't have done any good. Tak would have hidden. The tests would have shown nothing, I'm
almost sure of it. And then . . . later . . . when we got home . . .”

Johnny studied her swollen mouth and said, “It would have punished you.”

“Yes. Me and—” Her voice thickened, broke, resumed as little more than a whisper. “Me and Herb.”

“Herb didn't kill himself, did he?” Tom asked. “This Tak-thing murdered him.”

She nodded again. “Herb wanted us to get away from it. Tak sensed that. And it found it couldn't use Herb for . . . for something it wanted to do. To have sex . . .
experience
sex . . . with me. Herb wouldn't let it. That made Tak angry.”

“My God,” Brad said.

“It killed Herb and replenished itself. After that, Seth was its only hostage . . . but Seth was all it needed to keep me in line.”

“Because you love him,” Johnny said.

“Yes, that's right, because I love him.” It wasn't defiance Johnny heard in her voice but a weird and awful shame. Cynthia handed her a paper towel, but Audrey only held it in her hand, as if she had no idea what to use it for. “So in a way, I suppose my love's responsible for all that's happened. It's terrible, but it's probably true.” She turned her streaming eyes toward Cammie Reed, who sat on the floor with her arm around her remaining son. “I never believed it would come to this. You have to believe that. Even after it drove the Hobarts away and killed Herb, I had no idea of its powers. What its powers
could
be.”

Cammie looked at her, saying nothing and giving nothing out of her stone of a face.

“Since Herb died, Seth and I have lived a quiet life,” Audrey said. Johnny thought this was the first outright lie she had told them, although she had perhaps skirted the truth a time or two on her way to it. “Seth's eight, but school's not a problem. I fulfill certain home-education requirements and send in a form once a month to the Ohio Board of Education. It's a joke, really. Seth watches his movies and his TV shows over and over. That's his
real
education. He plays in the sandbox. He eats—hamburgers and Franco-American spaghetti, mostly—and drinks all the chocolate milk I'll make him. Mostly it
was
Seth.” She looked at them pleadingly. “Mostly it
was.
Except . . . all that time . . . Tak was inside. Growing. Pushing its roots deeper and deeper. Invading him.”