The Regulators (42 page)

“And you didn't know any of this was going on?” Kim asked from the doorway. “Oh wait, I forgot. It killed your husband. But you just passed that off, didn't you? Probably as an acci—”

“You don't understand!”
Audrey nearly screamed. “You don't know what it was to live with him, and with it inside him! It would be Seth, and then I might have a thought that I didn't shield well enough and I'd find myself running into a wall over and over again, as if I were a wind-up toy and the kid who owned me wanted to smash me apart. Or I'd punch myself in the face, or twist my . . . my skin . . .”

Now she used the paper towel, not to wipe her eyes but to blot perspiration from her forehead.

“It made me fall downstairs once,” she said. “It was around Christmas, last year. All I did was tell him to stop shaking the packages under the tree. I thought it was Seth I was talking to, you see, that Tak was gone deep inside. Sleeping. Hibernating. Whatever it does. Then I saw his eyes were too dark, not Seth's eyes at all, but by then it was too late. I got out of my chair and walked up the stairs. I can't tell you what it's like, how horrible it is . . . like being a passenger in a car that's being driven by a maniac. I turned around at the top and then just . . . stepped off the landing. Like stepping off a diving board. I didn't break anything, because it cushioned the fall at the very last second. Or maybe it was Seth who did that. Either way, it was still a miracle I didn't break an arm or leg.”

“Or your neck,” Belinda said.

“Uh-huh, or my neck. All I'm trying to say was that, yes, I loved him—
him
—but I was terrified of
it.
”

“Seth was the carrot and Tak was the stick,” Johnny said.

“Right. And I had my place to go, too. When things got too crazy. Seth
did
help with that, I know he did. So the time just . . . passed. The way it does, maybe, for people who have cancer. You go on because there's no other choice. You get used to a certain level of pain and fear and you think that's where it's going to stop, where it
must
stop. I never knew it was planning
this.
You have to believe that. Most times I was able to shield my thoughts from it. It never occurred to me that Tak might have thoughts—
plans
—it was hiding from
me.
It waited . . . and then I suppose that bum
showed up at the house while I was away . . . visiting with my friend, Jan . . . and then . . .”

She stopped, almost visibly catching hold of herself, settling herself down.

“This nightmare we're in is a combination of
The Regulators,
his favorite Western movie, and
MotoKops 2200,
his favorite cartoon show. One episode in particular, the one about the Force Corridor. I've seen it lots of times; Seth's got it on not just one but
three
of his compilation tapes. It's very, very scary for a cartoon show. Very
intense.
Seth was terrified of it—he wet the bed three nights in a row after seeing it for the first time—but he was also exhilarated by it. Mostly because of the way the show's continuing characters, both good and bad, band together in order to destroy the scary aliens hiding in the Force Corridor. These aliens are in cocoons Colonel Henry first mistakes for power-generators, and the part where they come bursting out and attack the MotoKops would scare just about anybody. Only I think that in this telling of ‘The Force Corridor,' the cocoons are our
houses.
And
we . . .
”

“We're the scary aliens,” Johnny said. He nodded. It all made horridly perfect sense. “And I suppose what appeals most to both parts of him—or it—is the idea of forced cooperation. Get along, or else. Kids like the concept because it absolves them of judging functions, which most of them aren't very good at to begin with.”

Audrey was nodding, too. “Yes, that sounds right. Like how the characters from
The Regulators,
both
good and bad, have always gotten along with the MotoKops in Seth's sandbox play-fantasies. In his fantasies, even Sheriff Streeter and Jeb Murdock get along, although they're deadly enemies in the movie.”

“Is what's happening now still a play-fantasy to Seth?” Johnny asked. “What do you think, Aud?”

“I can't really tell,” she said, “because it's hard to know where Tak leaves off and Seth begins . . . you have to kind of
feel
for that point. I mean, on some level he probably knows better, the way a kid knows better than to believe in Santa Claus once he gets to be eight or nine . . . but we hate to give up some of those make-believes, don't we? There's a—” She broke off for a moment. Her lower lip trembled, then firmed again. “There's a sweetness to the best of them, something that helps get us over the rough spots. Tak has allowed Seth to play out his fantasies on a wider screen than most of us get, that's all.”

“Hell, he's getting to play them out in virtual reality,” Steve said. “That's what you're describing—the ultimate virtual-reality game.”

“There's another possibility,” Audrey said. “Seth may not be able to stop Tak anymore, or even put a brake on it. Tak may have tied Seth up, gagged him, and thrown him in a closet.”

“If Seth
could
stop Tak, would he?” Johnny asked. “What do you think? What do you
feel
?”

“I'm sure he would,” Audrey said at once. “I'm sure that, somewhere inside, he's terrified. Like Mickey Mouse in
Fantasia,
when the brooms got out of control?”

“Let's say you're right. Let's say Tak is driving this thing that's happening to us all by himself now.
Why
is he driving it? What does he get out of it? What's the payback?”

“It,” she said, her mouth drawing down in what Johnny thought was an entirely unconscious moue of disgust. “
It,
not he.”

“All right,
it.
To Seth, Poplar Street is the Force Corridor, the houses are cocoons, and we're the evil aliens that live inside them. It's a shootout at the O.K. Corral, interstellar version. But what does
Tak
get out of it?”

“Something all its own,” Audrey said, and Johnny suddenly thought of an old Beatles lyric:
What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you, but I know it's mine.
“The fantasies were always strictly for Seth, I think—they're the way Tak taps into Seth's powers, which complement its own. Tak . . . I think Tak just likes what happens to us.”

Silence in the room.

“Likes it,” Belinda said at last. She spoke in a low, considering tone. “What do you mean,
likes
it?”

“When we hurt. We give something off when we hurt, something it . . . it licks up, like ice cream. And when we die, that's even better. It doesn't have to lick then. It can just gobble the stuff down whole.”

“So we're dinner,” Cynthia said. “That's what you're saying, right? To Seth we're a video game and to this Tak we're dinner.”

“We're more,” Audrey said. “Think what food is to us: the source of energy. Tak is
making,
that's what Seth told me.
Making
and
building.
I don't think the
desert where Seth picked it up was its home; I think that was its prison. Its home is what it may ultimately try to re-create here.”

“On the basis of what I've seen so far, I don't even want to visit its neighborhood, let alone live there,” Steve said. “In fact—”

“Quit it,” Cammie said. Her voice was harsh and impatient. “How do we kill him? You said there might be a way.”

Audrey looked at her, shocked. “You're not killing
Seth,
” she said. “
No one
is killing
Seth.
You can get
that
thought right out of your mind. He's just a harmless little boy—”

Cammie leaped at her and grabbed her shoulders. It was done before Johnny could even think of moving. Her thumbs sank deeply into the tops of Audrey's breasts. “Tell it to Jimmy!” she shouted into Audrey's stunned face. “He's dead, my son is dead, so don't you go crying to me about how harmless your nephew is! Don't you
dare
! That thing is in him like a tapeworm in a horse's belly!
In him!
And if it won't come out—”

“But it will!” Audrey said. She began to regain control of herself, and her voice grew calm again. “It will.”

Cammie relaxed her grip slowly, and her look was not trusting. “How? When?”

Before Audrey could reply, Kim said: “I hear a humming sound. Like electric motors.” Her voice rose, trembling. “Oh God, they're coming back.”

Now Johnny could hear it, too. It was the same electric humming he had heard before, only it was louder
now. Somehow more vital. More threatening. He looked toward the cellar door and decided it was probably too late to try for the basement, especially with two sleeping children in the pantry.

“Down,” he said. “Everyone down on the floor.” He saw Cynthia take Steve's hand and point through the open pantry door with a finger which wasn't quite steady. Steve nodded and they went in to cover the children's bodies with their own.

The humming swelled.

“Pray,” Belinda said suddenly. “Everybody pray.” Johnny was too frightened to pray.

From Audrey Wyler's journal:

February 7, 1996

Have noticed something interesting, what may be a key way of deciding which of them is in charge, at any given time, of the body they share. They both care a great deal for the Cassandra Styles action figure, but Tak's caring is almost completely sexual. It strokes her plastic breasts & rubs her plastic legs. Two days ago 1 saw it sitting on the stairs & licking the crotch of her blue shorts & sporting an erection (hard to miss, when all it wears most days are underpants). And, of course, the fact that it wants me to wear Cassie-type clothes and has gotten me to dye my hair Cassie Styles red (horrible shade, too) has not escaped me.

Seth, on the other hand . . . when it's Seth, sometimes he just hugs the figure of Cassie, or strokes its stiff red hair, or kisses its cheek. He is pretending it's his mother. (I don't know how I know that, but I do.

Must stop now. Crying again.

As on their previous run, the vans appear like phantoms, only this time it's not mist from which they appear but blowing desert dust that shines like lamé in the glow of Old Mr. Cowpoke Moon.

Cassie's pink Dream Floater comes first, with Candy behind the wheel in his pinned-back cavalry hat and Cassie herself sitting beside him. On the roof, the Valentine-heart radar dish is turning briskly. Like a sign on a whorehouse roof, Johnny Marinville might have said had he seen it, but he does not; he is lying on the floor of the Carvers' kitchen next to Old Doc with his hands laced together over the top of his head and his eyes squeezed tightly shut; on his face is the expression of a man who expects Armageddon, and soon.

Dream Floater does not swing onto Desperation's
dusty Main Street from Hyacinth; Hyacinth is gone. Where it once ran there is now nothing but hardpan desert, almost featureless . . . as the sky overhead in this direction is almost completely starless. It's as if, when His eye turned south to the wastes beyond this tiny huddle of buildings, the Creator had lost most of His divine inspiration.

Dream Floater's stubby wings are extended, its wheels partially retracted; it cuts through the air about three feet above the wheel-ruts of the street. Its engine pulses steadily. As it passes the Lady Day on the corner, its firing port irises open. Laura DeMott from
The Regulators
leans out. In her delicate white hands is not her derringer but a shotgun. Just a double-barrelled shotgun, but when she fires it, the report is as loud as a detonating backpack missile. The report is followed by a short, high-pitched wail, and then the front of the saloon explodes. The batwing doors fly up, for a moment fluttering madly and looking like
real
wings. There's an instant of flicker across what remains of the saloon's front, almost like a heatwave, and for that one instant, anyone who had been looking would have seen the E-Z Stop behind the burning Lady Day like a ghost-building or a double exposure, the convenience store also half-demolished and also burning.

Behind Dream Floater comes Tracker Arrow, and behind Tracker Arrow comes Freedom. Freedom's polarized windshield slides down again. Major Pike, a good Canopalean gone bad, is currently behind the wheel of Bounty's van, but the Confederate uniform
and pinned-back hat are gone (Candy has the hat on now; the regulators are always trading accessories and bits of uniform back and forth, it's part of the fun). The Major is wearing his iridescent MotoKops uniform again, and without a hat, his blond Mohawk 'do shows to good advantage. Sitting beside him in the nav-pit is the grizzled trapper type Johnny spotted earlier: Sergeant Mathis, Jeb Murdock's chief aide after the beating and capture of Captain Candell.

Collie Entragian's house has been replaced by the Two Sisters Millinery, where can be found The Finest in Ladies' Fashions. Sarge leans out, draws a bead on the storefront with his shotgun, and yanks the triggers. There is another shattering double crash, and again that long, wailing shriek, as of a bomb falling dead-center-true down the gravity-well toward its target.

“Make it stop!”
Susi screams.
“Oh please someone
MAKE IT STOP
!”

The top half of Two Sisters seems to lift off in a storm of boards and shingles and glass and nails. Again there is that flicker, almost as quick as a hummingbird's wing, and in it Entragian's house may be glimpsed, even Cary Ripton's bike and plastic-covered body may be glimpsed, shimmering like the mirages they have now become. Then the house is gone and it's the Two Sisters (where in
The Regulators
we first see Laura DeMott, saloon lass with a heart of gold, surreptitiously buying cloth for a church dress) again, with half its roof gone and all its windows blown in.