The Regulators (43 page)

From the badlands (sagebrush and huge tumbled
boulders of cartoon roundness) north of Poplar Street, where Bear Street now isn't, the silver Rooty-Toot Power Wagon appears. Rooty is behind the wheel, his eyes flashing on and off like traffic lights; Little Joe Cartwright is in the seat next to him, devil-may-care grin on his face, a shotgun chrome-plated with futuristic swoops and doodads in his hands. Directly behind Rooty-Toot comes the Justice Wagon, and behind Justice there appears a humming electric nightmare. In the bonelight of the moon, the Meatwagon looks wrapped in black silk. No Face is in the steering-pit. Countess Lili is in the nav-pit, her sexy eyes gleaming in her ashy vampire-maiden's face. Jeb Murdock is above them, in the Doom Turret. In the prime shooting-station.

Because he is the meanest.

And so the final Power Wagon assault begins, with three vans swinging into the Force Corridor from the north and three more from the south. Hideously amplified shotgun blasts shake the air; the whistling passage of the shells thrown from the muzzles of those guns sounds like a flock of banshees. The Cattlemen's Hotel (formerly the Soderson house) is shivered backward on its foundations; the left side first slumps, then actually crumples, spitting off dry boards and wooden shingles. The house north of it—a wattle-and-daub construction Brad Josephson would never have recognized as his own lovingly maintained split-level—seems to explode outward in all directions, shooting jagged chunks of wood and slabs of dried mud into the air.

On the other side of the street, the false front of Worrell's Market & Mercantile (once Tom Billingsley's house; the corpses of the Sodersons lie in an aisle of big round bags, all labelled
) disintegrates under a series of rifle shots from the Justice Wagon—each arriving round as loud as a mortar shell. Colonel Henry is driving; poked out of the firing trap and doing the shooting is Chuck Connors, also known as the Rifleman. His son is right next to him, grinning from ear to ear. “Good shootin, Paw!” he exclaims as smoking boards from the false front ignite the decade's worth of trash and dust that has been hiding behind it. Soon the entire building will be on fire.

“Thanks, son,” Lucas McCain says, and turns his missile-firing Winchester onto Lushan's Chinese Laundry. Lushan's, once the home of Peter and Mary Jackson, has been pretty well bashed about already by Rooty-Toot, but that doesn't deter the Rifleman. His son joins in, firing a pistol. It's a small one, but every round from it sounds like a bazooka shell, just the same.

At the end of the run, a haze of gunsmoke hangs over Main Street. Several of the houses on the west side of the street—the adobe
hacienda
where the Gellers once lived, the log cabin where the Reeds hung their assorted hats, the wattle-and-daub Brad and Belinda once called home—have been almost totally destroyed. The Cattlemen's is still standing—more or less—and so is the Two Sisters on the east side, but the Mercantile will soon join the Owl (formerly the Hobart place) as so much ash in the wind.

Only one house on the east side of the street remains as it was before the regulators came: the Carver place. There are bullet-holes in the siding and broken windows from the previous assault, but on this run it has been completely untouched.

Dream Floater, Tracker Arrow, and Freedom have reached the north end of what used to be Poplar Street's two-forty block. Rooty-Toot, Justice, and the Meatwagon have reached the south end. The firing slackens, then ceases entirely. The people in the Carver house can hear the crackle of fire from the other side of the fence—the Market & Mercantile they still think of as Old Doc's bungalow—but otherwise there is a deep quiet that lies like balm against their ringing ears. In it, the survivors cautiously raise their heads.

“Is it over, do you think?” Steve asks, in the tone of someone who doesn't want to come right out and say it wasn't as bad as he thought . . . but who is thinking it.

“We ought to—” Johnny begins.

“I hear it again!” Kim Geller cries from the living room. Her voice is high, shivering on the edge of hysteria, but the rest of them have no reason not to believe her; she is closest to the street, after all. “That awful humming!
Make it stop!
” She rushes through the door into the kitchen, her eyes bulging and crazed.
“Make it stop!”

“Get down, Mom!” Susi calls, but she herself does not stir from beside Dave Reed, who is lying with one arm around her and his hand (the one his creepy mother can't see from where she is) against her breast.
Susi doesn't mind his hand a bit; would mind, in fact, if he took it away. Her terror and her almost maternal concern for the surviving twin have combined to make her really horny for the first time in her life. All she really wants right now is to be with David in a place where they can take their pants off without being noticed.

Kim ignores her daughter. She goes to Audrey, grabs her by her hair, yanks her head back.
“Make him stop it!”
she shouts into Audrey's pale face.
“He's your kin, you brought him here,
NOW MAKE HIM STOP
!”

Belinda Josephson moves fast; she's up from where she's been lying, she's across the room, and she has Kim Geller's free arm twisted up behind her back almost before Brad can blink.

“Ow!”
Kim screams, immediately letting go of Audrey's hair.
“Ow, let go! Let go, you black bi—”

Belinda has taken all the tiresome racist shit she intends to for one day. She yanks Kim's arm up even further before she can finish. Susi's mom, who supports the Girl Scouts and never sends the Cancer Society lady away empty-handed, shrieks like a factory whistle at quitting time. Then Belinda turns her, hips her, and sends her flying back into the living room. Kim crashes into a wall. All around her more Hummel figures tumble to their doom.

“There,” Belinda says in a businesslike voice. “She had that coming. I don't have to put up with that kind of—”

“Never mind,” Johnny says. The humming is louder now, louder than it has ever been: a steady, cycling
beat like the sound of a huge electric transformer. “Get down, Bee. Right now. Everybody. Steve, Cynthia?
Cover those children!
” Then he looks, almost apologetically, at Seth Garin's aunt. “
Can
you make him stop, Aud?”

She shakes her head. “It's
not
him. Not now. It's Tak.” Before she puts her head back down, she sees Cammie Reed looking at her, and there is something in that dry glance that frightens her more than all of Kim Geller's shouting and hair-pulling. It's a
serious
look. No hysteria, only flat murder.

Who would Cammie murder, though? Her? Seth? Both? Audrey doesn't know. She only knows she cannot tell the others what she did before leaving, that simple thing that might solve so much—
if.
If the window of time she's hoping for opens; if she does the right thing when it does. She can't tell them there's hope, because if Tak is able to reach out and catch hold of their thoughts, all hopes will fail.

The thrumming grows louder. On Main Street, the Power Wagons are rolling again. Dream Floater, Tracker Arrow, and Freedom are closer to the Carver house and reach it first. They park in line, the red Tracker Arrow with Snake Hunter behind the wheel in the middle, blocking the driveway where the lord of the manor is lying dead (and looking much the worse for wear by this time). The other three—Rooty-Toot, Justice, and Meatwagon—come up from the south end of the street and lengthen the line of vehicles.

The Carver house (it is, perhaps ironically, a
ranch-style home) is now entirely blocked off by Power Wagons. From the firing pit of Dream Floater, Laura DeMott trains her shotgun on the smashed picture window; from the firing pit of Tracker Arrow, Hoss Cartwright and a very young Clint Eastwood—he is Rowdy Yates of
Rawhide
in this incarnation, as a matter of fact—have also got the house covered. Jeb Murdock stands in the Doom Turret of the Meatwagon with
two
shotguns, each sawed off four inches above the cocked triggers, the butts propped against the wishbones of his hips. He is grinning widely, his face that of Rory Calhoun in his prime.

Roof trapdoors bang open. Cowboys and aliens fill the remaining shooting-points.

“Gosh, Paw, looks like a damn turkey-shoot!” Mark McCain cries, and then utters a shrill laugh.

“Root-root-root!”

“
SHUT UP, ROOTY
!”
they all chorus, and the laugh becomes general.

At the sound of that laughter, something inside of Kim Geller, something which has only been badly bent up to now, finally snaps. She gets to her feet in the living room and marches to the screen door beyond which Debbie Ross still lies. Kim's sneakers grit through the broken china shards of Pie Carver's prized Hummels. The sound of the cycling motors out front—that weird beat-beat-beat, like some sort of electric heart—is driving her insane. Still, it's easier to focus on that than it is to think about how that uppity nigger woman first almost broke her arm and then
threw her into the other room as if she were a sack of laundry, or something.

The others are unaware she's left until they hear her voice, querulous and shrill: “You get out of here! You just stop it and get out of here
right now
! The police are already on their way, you know!”

At the sound of that voice, Susi forgets all about how nice it is to have Dave Reed touching her breast, and how she'd like to help him forget the death of his brother by taking him upstairs and balling him until his liver explodes. “Mummy!” she gasps, and starts to get up.

Dave hauls her back down, then clamps an arm around her waist to make completely sure she doesn't get up again. He has lost his brother, and he feels like that's enough for one day.

Come on, come on, come
on,
Audrey thinks . . . except she guesses it's actually a prayer. Her eyes are squeezed so tightly shut she can see exploding red dots behind the lids, and her hands are clamped into fists, the ragged remains of her nails digging into her palms. Come on, go to work the way you're supposed to, do your job, get started—

“Kick in,” she whispers, unaware she's speaking out loud. Johnny, who has raised his head at the sound of Kim's voice, now looks at Audrey. “Kick in, can't you? For Christ's sake,
kick in
!”

“What are you talking about?” he asks, but she doesn't answer.

Outside, Kim moves down the walk toward the Power Wagons, which are parked at the curb. This is
the only place along the former Poplar Street where there is any curb left.

“I'm giving you a chance,” she says, her eyes drifting from one weirdo to the next. Some are dressed in ridiculous outer-space masks, and the one behind the wheel of the lunch-wagon thingy is actually wearing a whole-body robot costume. It makes him look like an oversized version of R2D2 in the Star Wars movies. Others look like refugees from a class in Western line-dancing. A few even seem familiar . . . but this is no time to be distracted by such foolish ideas.

“I'm giving you a chance,” she repeats, coming to a stop just above the place where the Carvers' cement walk joins the remaining strip of Poplar Street sidewalk. “Go while you still can. Otherwise—”

The slide door of the Freedom van opens, and Sheriff Streeter steps out. His star gleams a dull moonlit silver on the left flap of his vest. He looks up at Jeb Murdock—old enemy, new ally—in the Doom Turret of the Meatwagon.

“Well, Streeter?” Murdock says. “What do you think?”

“I think you should take the yappy bitch,” Streeter says with a smile, and both of Murdock's sawed-offs explode with noise and white fire. At one moment Kim Geller is standing at the end of the Carvers' walk; at the next she's entirely gone. No; not quite gone. Her sneakers are still there, and her feet are still inside them.

A split-second later, something that could be a
bucket of dark, silty water but isn't hits the front of the Carver house. Then, with the sound of the twin shotgun blasts still rolling away, Streeter screams:
“Shoot! Shoot, goddammit! Wipe them off the map!”

“Get down!” Johnny shouts again, knowing it will do no good; the house is going to disappear like a child's sand-castle before a tidal wave, and they are going to disappear with it.

The regulators begin firing, and it's like nothing Johnny ever heard in Vietnam. This, he thinks, is what it must have been like to be in the trenches at Ypres, or in Dresden thirty years or so later. The noise is incredible, a ground-zero concatenation of
KA-POW
and
KA-BAM
, and although he feels he should be immediately deafened (or perhaps killed outright by raw decibels alone), Johnny is still able to hear the sounds of the house being blown apart all around them: bursting boards, breaking windows, china figurines exploding like targets in a shooting gallery, the brittle spatter of thrown laths. Very faintly, he can also hear people screaming. The bitter tang of gunsmoke fills his nostrils. Something unseen but huge passes through the kitchen above them, screaming as it goes, and suddenly much of the kitchen's rear wall is just rubble fanned across the backyard and floating on the surface of the Kmart pool.