The Regulators

by Stephen King

  Cammie glanced down at Johnny’s belly—not as large as Brad’s, but still considerable. She didn’t ask him why he wanted to go, or what good he thought he could do. Her mind was, at least for the time being, colder than that. She said, “The boys play soccer in the fall and run track in the spring. Can you keep up with them?”

  “Not in the mile or the four-forty, of course not,” he replied. “On a path through the woods, and maybe through a viaduct? I think so.”

  “Are you kidding yourself, or what?” Belinda asked abruptly. It was Cammie she was talking to, not Johnny. “I mean, if there was still a working phone within earshot of Poplar Street, do you think we’d still be sitting here with dead people lying out front and a house burning to the ground?”

  Cammie glanced at her, touched the blood-spot on her blouse again, then looked back at Johnny. Behind her, Ellie was peering around the corner into the living room. The girl’s eyes were wide with shock and grief, her mouth and chin streaked with blood from her nose.

  “If it’s okay with the boys, it’s okay with me,” Cammie said, not addressing Belinda’s question at all. Cammie Reed currently had no interest in speculation. Maybe later, but not now. Now there was only one thing that did interest her: rolling the dice while she judged the odds were still heavily in her favor. Rolling them and getting her sons out the back door.

  “It will be,” he said, and handed her the gun and the cartridges before heading back toward the kitchen. They were good boys, which was nice, and they were also boys who had been programmed to go along, in nine cases out of ten, with what their elders wanted. In this situation, that was even nicer. As Johnny walked, he touched the object he had stowed in his left front pants pocket. “But before we go, it’s important that I talk to someone. Very important.”

  “Who?” Cammie asked.

  Johnny picked Ellen Carver up. He hugged her, kissed one bloodstained cheek, and was glad when her arms went around his neck and she hugged him back fiercely. You couldn’t buy a hug like that. “Ralphie Carver,” he said, and carried Ralphie’s sister back into the kitchen.

  2

  As it happened, Tom Billingsley did have a couple of guns kicking around, but first he found Collie a shirt. It wasn’t much—an old Cleveland Browns tee with a rip under one arm—but it was an XL, and better than trying the path through the greenbelt naked from the waist up. Collie had used the route often enough to know there were blackberry bushes, plus assorted other prickers and brambles, out there.

  “Thanks,” he said, pulling the shirt on as Old Doc led them past the Ping-Pong table at the far end of his basement.

  “Don’t mention it,” Billingsley said, reaching up and tugging the string that turned on the fluorescents. “Can’t even remember where it came from. I’ve always been a Bengals fan, myself.”

  In the corner beyond the Ping-Pong table was a jumble of fishing equipment, a few orange hunting vests, and an unstrung bow. Old Doc squatted with a grimace, moved the vests, and uncovered a quilt that had been rolled and tied with twine. Inside it were four rifles, but two of them were in pieces. Billingsley held up the ones that were whole. “Should do,” he said.

  Collie took the .30–.06, which probably made a lot more sense for a woods patrol than his service pistol, anyway (and would raise fewer questions if he had to shoot someone). That left Ames with the other, smaller gun. A Mossberg. “It’s only chambered for .22s,” Doc said apologetically as he rummaged in a cabinet mounted next to the fusebox and laid out cartons of cartridges on the Ping-Pong table, “but it’s a damned fine gun, just the same. Holds nine in a row for more go. What do you think?”

  Ames offered a grin Collie couldn’t help liking. “I think oy vey, such a deal,” he said, taking the Mossy. Billingsley laughed at that—a cracked old man’s chortle—and led them back upstairs.

  Cynthia had put a pillow under Marielle’s head, but she was still lying on the living-room floor (under the picture of Daisy, the mathematically inclined Corgi, actually). They hadn’t dared move her; Billingsley was afraid his stitches might tear open again. She was still alive, which was good, and still unconscious, which might also be good, considering what had happened to her. But she was breathing in great, irregular gasps that did not sound good to Collie at all. It sounded like the kind of breathing that might stop any time.

  Her husband, the charming Gary, was sitting in a kitchen chair which he had turned around so he could at least look at his wife while he drank. Collie saw that the bottle he had found contained Mother DeLucca’s Best Cooking Sherry, and felt his stomach turn over.

  Gary saw him looking (or perhaps felt it), and looked over at Collie. His eyes were red and puffy. Sore-looking. Miserable. Collie hunted in his heart and found some sympathy for the man. Not much, though. “Losser damn arm,” he told Collie in a furry, confiding voice. “Gaw hepper.” Collie thought this over and translated it as Drunkish for either Got to help her or God help her.

  “Yes,” he said. “We’re going to get her some help.”

  “Aw be here awreddy. Losser mahfuhn arm. Zin the mahfuhn fritch!”

  “I know.”

  Cynthia joined them. “You used to be a vet, didn’t you, Mr. Billingsley?”

  Billingsley nodded.

  “I thought so. Could you come here? Take a look at something out the front door?”

  “Do you think that’s safe?”

  “For the time being, I think so. The thing that’s out there . . . well, I’d rather you looked for yourself.” She glanced at the other two men. “Selves.”

  She led Billingsley across the living room to the door looking out on Poplar Street. Collie glanced at Steve, who shrugged. Collie’s assumption was that the girl wanted to show Billingsley how the houses across the street had changed, although what that had to do with Billingsley’s being a vet he didn’t know.

  “Holy shit” he said to Steve as they reached the door. “They’ve gone back to normal! Or did we just imagine they’d changed in the first place?” It was the Geller house he kept staring at. Ten minutes ago, when he and the hippie and the counter-girl had been looking out this same door, he could have sworn that the Geller place had turned into an adobe—the sort of thing you saw in pictures of New Mexico and Arizona back when they were territories. Now it was clad in plain old Ohio aluminum siding again.

  “We didn’t imagine it and things haven’t gone back to normal,” Steve said. “At least, not all the way. Check that one.”

  Collie followed Steve’s pointing finger and stared at the Reed house. The modern aluminized siding had returned, replacing the logs, and the roof was once more neat asphalt shingles instead of whatever it had been before (sod, he thought); the mid-sized satellite dish was back on top of the carport. But the house’s foundation was rough wood planking instead of brick, and all the windows were tightly shuttered. There were loopholes in those shutters, too, as if the inhabitants of the house expected their day-to-day problems to include marauding Indians as well as Seventh-day Adventists and wandering insurance salesmen. Collie couldn’t say for sure, but he didn’t think the Reed house had even had shutters before this afternoon, let alone ones with rifleport loopholes.

  “Sa-aaay.” Billingsley sounded like a man who is finally getting the idea that all of this is a Candid Camera stunt. “Are those hitching-rails in front of Audrey’s? They are, aren’t they? What is all this?”

  “Never mind that,” Cynthia said. She reached up, took the old man’s face between her hands, and turned it like a camera on a tripod so he was looking at the corpse of Peter Jackson’s wife.

  “Oh my God,” Collie said.

  There was a large bird perched on the woman’s bare thigh, its yellow talons buried in her skin. It had already snacked off most of her remaining face, and was now burrowing into the flesh under her chin. Collie had a brief, unwelcome memory of going after Kellie Eberhart in exactly the same place one night at the West Columbus Drive-In, her saying that if he gave her a hickey, her dad would p
robably shoot them both.

  He didn’t realize he had lifted the .30–.06 into firing position until Steve pushed the barrel back down with the palm of his hand. “No, man. I wouldn’t. Better to keep quiet, maybe.”

  He was right, but . . . God. It wasn’t just what it was doing, but what it was.

  “Losser goddam arm!” Gary announced from the kitchen, as if afraid they might forget this if he allowed them to. Old Doc ignored him. He had crossed the living room looking like a man who expects to be shot dead in his tracks at any moment, but now he seemed to have forgotten all about killers, weird vans, and transforming houses.

  “My good gosh, look at that!” he exclaimed in a tone that sounded very much like awe. “I ought to photograph it. Yes! Excuse me . . . I’ll just get my camera . . .”

  He began to turn away. Cynthia grabbed him by the shoulder. “The camera can wait, Mr. Billingsley.”

  He seemed to come back a little to their situation at that. “Yes . . . I suppose, but . . .”

  The bird turned, as if hearing them, and seemed to stare at the vet’s bungalow with its red-rimmed eyes. Its pink skull appeared black with stubble. Its beak was a simple yellow hook.

  “Is that a buzzard?” Cynthia asked. “Or maybe a vulture?”

  “Buzzard? Vulture?” Old Doc looked startled. “Good gosh, no. I’ve never seen a bird like that in my life.”

  “In Ohio, you mean,” Collie said, knowing that wasn’t what Billingsley meant, but wanting to hear it for himself.

  “I mean anywhere.”

  The hippie looked from the bird to Billingsley and then back to the bird again. “What is it, then? A new species?”

  “New species my fanny! Excuse my French, young lady, but that’s a fucking mutant!” Billingsley stared, rapt, as the bird opened its wings, flapping them in order to help it move a little farther up Mary’s leg. “Look how big its body is, and how short its wings are in relation to it—damned thing makes an ostrich look like a miracle of aerodynamics! I don’t think the wings are even the same length!”

  “No,” Collie said. “I don’t think they are, either.”

  “How can it fly?” Doc demanded. “How can it possibly fly?”

  “I don’t know, but it does.” Cynthia pointed down toward the thick billows which had now blotted out all vestiges of the world below Hyacinth Street. “It flew out of the smoke. I saw it.”

  “I’m sure you did, I didn’t think someone pulled up in a . . . a Birdmobile and dropped it off, but how it can possibly fly is beyond all—” He broke off, peering at the thing. “Although I can understand how you might have thought it was a buzzard before the inevitable second thoughts set in.” Collie thought Old Doc was mostly talking to himself by this point, but he listened intently just the same. “It does look a little like a buzzard. As a child might draw it, anyway.”

  “Huh?” Cynthia said.

  “As a child might draw it,” Billingsley repeated. “Perhaps one who got it all mixed up in his mind with a bald eagle.”

  3

  The sight of Ralphie Carver hurt Johnny’s heart. Put aside by Jim Reed, whose solicitude had been superseded by his excitement at the impending mission, Ralphie stood between the stove and the refrigerator with his thumb in his mouth and a big wet spot spreading on the front of his shorts. All his bratty bluster had departed. His eyes were huge and still and shiny. He looked to Johnny like drug addicts he had known.

  Johnny stopped inside the kitchen door and put Ellie down. She didn’t want to go, but at last he managed to pry her hands gently off his neck. Her eyes were also shocked, but held none of the merciful glaze Johnny could see in her brother’s. He looked past her and saw Kim and Susi Geller sitting on the floor with their arms around each other. Probably suits Mom just fine, Johnny thought, remembering how the woman had seemed to struggle with young David Reed for possession of the girl. He had won then, but now David had bigger fish to fry; he was bound for Anderson Avenue and parts unknown. That didn’t change the fact that there were two little kids here who had become orphans since lunch, however.

  “Kim?” he asked. “Could you maybe help a little with—”

  “No,” she said. No more, no less. And calm. No defiance in her gaze, no hysteria in her tone . . . but no fellow feeling, either. She had an arm around her daughter, her daughter had an arm around her, cozy as can be, just a coupla white girls sittin around and waitin for the clouds to roll by. Understandable, maybe, but Johnny was furious with her, nevertheless; she was suddenly everyone he had ever known who looked bored when the conversation came around to AIDS, or homeless children, or the defoliation of the rain forests; she was everyone who had ever stepped over a homeless man or woman sleeping on the sidewalk without so much as a single glance down. As he had on occasion done himself. Johnny could picture himself grabbing her by the arms, hauling her to her feet, whirling her around, and planting a swift kick square in the middle of her narrow midwestern ass. Maybe that would wake her up. Even if it didn’t, it would certainly make him feel a little better.

  “No,” he repeated, feeling his temples throb with stupid rage.

  “No,” she agreed, and gave him a wan little at-last-you-understand smile. Then she turned her head toward Susi and began to stroke the girl’s hair.

  “Come on, dear heart,” Belinda said to Ellen, leaning down and opening her arms. “Come over here and spend some time with Bee.” The girl came, silent, her face twisting in an awful cramp of grief that made the silence somehow even worse, and Belinda enfolded her.

  The Reed twins watched this, but really didn’t see. They were standing by the back door, looking bright-eyed and excited. Cammie approached them, stood in front of them, appraised them with an expression Johnny at first mistook for dourness. A moment more and he realized what it really was: terror so large it could only be partially concealed.

  “All right,” she said at last. Her voice was dry and businesslike. “Which one carries it?”

  The boys looked at each other, and Johnny had a sense of communication between them—brief but complex, perhaps the sort of thing in which only twins could engage. Or perhaps, he thought, it’s just that your brains have boiled, John. That was not actually so farfetched. They certainly felt boiled.

  Jim held out his hand. For just a moment his mother’s upper lip trembled. Then it firmed and she passed him David Carver’s pistol. Dave took the shells and opened the box while his brother rolled the .45’s cylinder and held the gun up to the light, checking to make sure the chambers were empty just as Johnny had done. We’re careful because we understand the potential a gun has to maim and kill, Johnny thought, but it’s more than that. On some level we know they’re evil. Devilish. Even their biggest fans and partisans sense it.

  Dave was holding out a palmful of shells to his brother. Jim took them one at a time, loading the gun.

  “You act like your father was with you every minute,” Cammie said as he did it. “If you think of doing something he wouldn’t let you do if he was here, don’t. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Mom.” Jim snapped the pistol’s cylinder closed and then held it at the end of his arm with his finger outside the trigger-guard and the muzzle pointing at the floor. He looked both embarrassed by his mother’s orders—she sounded like the C.O. in an old Leon Uris novel, laying down the law for a couple of green privates—and wildly excited at the prospect of what lay ahead.

  She turned her attention to the other twin. “David?”

  “Yes, Mom?”

  “If you see people—strangers—in the woods, come right back. That’s the most important thing. Don’t ask questions, don’t respond to anything they might say, don’t even approach them.”

  Jim began, “Mom, if they don’t have guns—”

  “Don’t ask questions, don’t approach them,” she repeated. She didn’t speak much louder, but there was something in her voice they both flinched back from a little. Something that finished the discussion.

  “Supp
ose they see cops, Mrs. Reed?” Brad asked. “The police may have decided the greenbelt is their best approach to the street.”

  “Safest to stay away,” Johnny said. “Any cops we run into are apt to be . . . well, nervous. Nervous cops have been known to hurt innocent people. They never mean to, but it’s better to be safe. Avoid accidents.”

  “Are you coming with us, Mr. Marinville?” Jim asked.

  “Yes.”

  Neither twin said anything, but Johnny liked the relief he saw in their eyes.

  Cammie gave Johnny a forbidding look—Are you done? May I get back to business? it said—and then resumed her instructions. “Go to Anderson Avenue. If everything looks all right there . . .” She faltered a moment, as if realizing how unlikely that was, and then pushed on.”. . . ask to use someone’s phone and call the police. But if Anderson Avenue’s like it is here, or if things seem even the slightest bit . . . well . . .”

  “Hinky,” Johnny said. In Vietnam they’d had as many words for the feeling she was talking about as Indians had for variations in the weather, and it was funny how they all came back, turning on like neon signs in a dark room. Hinky. Weirded-out. Bent. Snafu’d. Dinky-dau. Yeah, doc, it’s all coming back to me now. Pretty soon I’ll be whipping a bandanna into a rope and tying it around my forehead to keep back the sweat, maybe leading the congregation in the Fish Cheer.

  Cammie was still looking at her boys. Johnny hoped she’d hurry up. They were still looking back at her with respect (and a little fear), but most of what she had to say from this point on would go in one ear and out the other just the same.

  “If you don’t like what you see on Anderson Avenue, use that pipe you know about. Get over to Columbus Broad. Call the police. Tell them what’s happened here. And don’t you even think of coming back to Poplar Street!”