The Regulators (richard bachman)

by Stephen King

  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.

  Yes, Johnny thinks. This is it, this is the end. And maybe that is just as well.

  But then a strange thing begins to happen. The shooting doesn’t stop, but it begins to diminish, as if someone is turning down the volume control. This isn’t just true of the gunshots themselves, but of the screaming sound the shells make as they pass overhead. And it happens fast. Less than ten seconds after he first notices the diminution-and it might be more like five-the sounds are gone entirely. So is the queer, humming beat of the Power Wagons” engines.

  They raise their heads and look around at each other. In the pantry, Cynthia sees that she and Steve are both as white as ghosts. She raises her arm and blows. Powder puffs up from her skin.

  “Flour,” she says.

  Steve rakes through his long hair and holds an unsteady hand out to her. There’s a cluster of shiny black things in the palm. “Flour’s not so bad,” he says. “I got olives.”

  She thinks she’ll begin to laugh, but before she can, an amazing and totally unexpected thing happens.

  Seth’s Place/Seth’s Time

  Of all the passages he has dug for himself during the reign of Tak-Tak the Thief, Tak the Cruel, Tak the Despot-this is the longest. He has, in a way, re-created his own version of Rattlesnake Number One. The shaft goes deep into some black earth which he supposes is himself, then rises again toward the surface like a hope. At the end of it is a door of iron bands. He doesn’t try to open it, but not for fear he will find it locked. Quite the opposite. This is a door he must not touch until he is completely ready; once through it, there will never be any coming back.

  He prays it goes where he thinks it does.

  Enough light comes through the cracks between the door’s iron lengths to illuminate the place where he stands. There are pictures on the strange, fleshy walls; one a group portrait of his family with him sitting between his brother and sister, one a photo of him standing between Aunt Audrey and Uncle Herb on the lawn of this house. They are smiling. Seth, as always, is solemn, distant, not quite there. There is also a photograph of Allen Symes, standing beside (and dwarfed by) one of Miss Mo’s treads. Mr Symes is wearing his Deep Earth hardhat and grinning. No such photograph as this exists, but that doesn’t matter. This is Seth’s place, Seth’s time, Seth’s mind, and he decorates it as he likes. Not so long ago, there would have been pictures of the MotoKops and the characters from The Regulators hung, not just here, but all along the length of the tunnel. No longer. They have lost their charm for him.

  I outgrew them, he thinks, and that is the truth of it. Autistic or not, only eight or not, he has gotten too old for shoot-'em-up Westerns and Saturday-morning cartoons. He suddenly understands that this is almost certainly the bottom truth, and one Tak would never understand: he outgrew them. He has the Cassie Styles figure in his pocket (when he needs a pocket he just imagines one; it’s handy) because he still loves her a little, but otherwise? No. The only question is whether or not he can escape them, sweet fantasies which might have been laced with poison all along.

  And the time has come to find that out.

  Beside the photo of Allen Symes, a little shelf just out of the wall. Seth has seen and admired the shelves in the Carver hallway, each dedicated to its own Hummel figure, and this one was created with those in mind. Enough light seeps through the cracks in the door to see what’s on it-not a Hummel shepherd or milkmaid but a red PlaySkool telephone.

  He picks it up and spins out two-four-eight on the plastic phone’s rotary dial. It’s the Carvers” house number. In his ear the toy phone rings… rings… rings. But is it ringing on the other end? Does she hear it? Do any of them hear it?

  “Come on,” he whispers. He is entirely aware and alert; in this deep-inside place he’s no more autistic than Steve Ames or Belinda Josephson or Johnny Marinville… is, in fact, something of a genius.

  A frightened genius, right now.

  “Come on… please, Aunt Audrey, please hear… please answer…”

  Because time is short, and the time is now.

  Main Street, Desperation/Regulator Time

  The telephone in the Carver living room begins to ring, and as if this is some kind of signal aimed directly at his deepest and most delicate neural centers, Johnny Marinville’s unique ability to see and sequence breaks down for the first time in his life. His perspective shivers like the shapes in a kaleidoscope when the tube is twirled, then falls apart in prisms and bright shards. If this is how the rest of the world sees and experiences during times of stress, he thinks, it’s no wonder people make so many bad decisions when the heat is on. He doesn’t like experiencing things this way. It’s like having a high fever and seeing half a dozen people standing around your bed. You know that four of them are actually there… but which four? Susi Geller is crying and screaming her mother’s name. The Carver kids are both awake again, of course; Ellen, her capacity to endure in relative stoicism finally gone, seems to be having a kind of emotional convulsion, screaming at the top of her lungs and pounding Steve’s back as he tries to embrace and comfort her. And Ralphie wants to whale on his big sister! “Stop huggin Margrit!” he storms at Steve as Cynthia attempts to restrain him. “Stop huggin Margrit the Maggot! She shoulda give
me all the candybar! She shoulda give me ALLLLL of it'n none a this would happen!” Brad starts for the living room-to answer the phone, presumably-and Audrey grabs his arm. “No,” she says, and then, with a kind of surreal politeness: “It’s for me.” And Susi is on her feet now, Susi is running down the hall toward the front door to see what’s happened to her mother (a very unwise idea, in Johnny’s humble opinion). Dave Reed tries to restrain her again and this time can’t, so he follows her instead, calling her name. Johnny expects the boy’s mother to restrain him, but Cammie lets him go while from out back coyotes that look like no coyotes which ever existed on God’s earth lift their crooked snouts and sing mad love songs to the moon.

  All of this at once, swirling like litter caught in a cyclone.

  He’s on his feet without even realizing it, following Brad and Belinda into the living room, which looks as if the Green Giant stomped through it in a snit. The kids are still shrieking from the pantry, and Susi is howling from the end of the entry hall. Welcome to the wonderful world of stereophonic hysteria, Johnny thinks.

  Audrey, meanwhile, is looking for the phone, which is no longer on its little table beside the couch. The little table itself is no longer beside the couch, in fact; it’s in a far corner, split in half. The phone lies beside it in a strew of broken glass. It’s off the hook, the handset lying as far from the base as the cord will allow, but it’s still ringing.

  “Mind the glass, Aud,” Johnny says sharply as she crosses to it.

  Tom Billingsley goes to the jagged hole in the west wall where the picture window used to be, stepping over the smoking and exploded ruins of the TV in order to get there. “They’re gone,” he says. “The vans.” He pauses, then adds: “Unfortunately, Poplar Street’s gone, too. It looks like Deadwood, South Dakota out there. Right around the time Jack McCall shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back.”

  Audrey picks up the telephone. Behind them, Ralphie Carver is now shrieking: “I hate you, Margrit the Maggot! Make Mummy and Daddy come back or I’ll hate you forever! I hate you, Margrit the Maggot!” Beyond Audrey, Johnny can see Susi’s struggles to get away from Dave Reed subsiding; he is hugging her out of horror and toward tears with a patience that, given the circumstances, Johnny can only admire.

  “Hello?” Audrey says. She listens, her pale face tense and solemn. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I will. Right away. I… “She listens some more, and this time her eyes lift to Johnny Marinville’s face. “Yes, all right, just him. Seth? I love you.”

  She doesn’t hang the telephone up, simply drops it. Why not? Johnny traces its connection-wire and sees that the concussion which tore apart the table and flung the phone into the corner has also pulled the jack out of the wall.

  “Come on,” Audrey says to him. “We’re going across the street, Mr Marinville. Just the two of us. Everyone else stays here.”

  “But-” Brad begins.

  “No arguments, no time,” she tells him. “We have to go right now. Johnny, are you ready?”

  “Should I get the gun they brought from next door? It’s in the kitchen.”

  “A gun wouldn’t do any good. Come on.”

  She holds out her hand. Her face is set and sure… except for her eyes. They are terrified, pleading with him not to make her do this thing, whatever it is, on her own. Johnny takes the offered hand, his feet shuffling through rubble and broken glass. Her skin is cold, and her knuckles feel slightly swollen under his fingers. It’s the hand the little monster made her hit herself with, he thinks.

  They go out the living room’s lower entrance and past the teenagers, who stand silently hugging each other. Johnny pushes open the screen door and lets Audrey precede him out and over the body of Debbie Ross. The front of the house, the stoop, and the dead girl’s back are splattered with the remains of Kim Geller-streaks and daubs and lumps that look black in the light of the moon-but neither of them mentions this. Ahead, beyond the walk and the short section of curb where the Power Wagons no longer stand, is a broad and deeply rutted dirt street. A breath of breeze touches the side of Johnny’s face-it carries a smoky smell with it and a tumbleweed goes bouncing by, as if on a hidden spring. To Johnny it looks straight out of a Max Fleischer cartoon, but that doesn’t surprise him. That is where they are, isn’t it? In a kind of cartoon? Give me a lever and I’ll move the world, Archimedes said; the thing across the street probably would have agreed. Of course, it was only a single block of Poplar Street it had wanted to move, and given the lever of Seth Garin’s fantasies to pry with, it had accomplished that without much trouble.

  Whatever may await them, there is a certain relief just in being out of the house and away from the noise.

  The stoop of the Wyler house looks about the same, but that’s all. The rest is now a long, low building made of logs. Hitching posts are ranged along the front. Smoke puffs from the stone chimney in spite of the night’s warmth. “Looks like a bunkhouse,” he says.

  Audrey nods. “The bunkhouse at the Ponderosa.”

  Why did they go away, Audrey? Seth’s regulators and future cops? What made them go away?”

  “In at least one way, Tak’s like the villain in a Grimms “fairy-tale,” she says, leading him into the street. Dust puffs up from beneath their shoes. The wheelruts are dry and as hard as iron. “It has an Achilles heel, something you’d never suspect if you hadn’t lived with it as long as I have. It hates to be in Seth when Seth moves his bowels. I don’t know if it’s some weird kind of aesthetic thing or a psychological phobia, or maybe even a physical fact of its existence-the way we can’t help flinching if someone makes like to punch us, for instance-and I don’t care.”

  “How sure of this are you?” he asks. They have reached the other side of the broad Main Street now. Johnny looks both ways and sees no vans; just massed, rocky badlands to the right and emptiness-a kind of uncreation-to the left.

  “Very,” she says grimly. The cement walk leading up to 247 Poplar has become a flagstone path. Halfway up it, Johnny sees the broken-off rowel of some rangehand’s spur glinting in the moonlight. “Seth has told me-I hear him in my head sometimes.”

  “Tele pathy.”

  “Uh-huh, I guess. And when Seth talks on that level, he has no mental problems whatever. On that level he’s so bright it’s scary.”

  “But are you completely sure it was Seth talking to you? And even if it was, are you sure Tak was letting him tell the truth?”

  She stops halfway to the bunkhouse door. She is still holding one of his hands; now she takes the other, turning him to face her.

  “Listen, because there’s only time for me to say this once and no time at all for you to ask questions. Sometimes when Seth talks to me, he lets Tak listen in… because, I think, that way Tak believes it hears all our mental conversations. It doesn’t, though.” She sees him start to speak and squeezes his hands to shut him up. “And I know Tak leaves him when he moves his bowels. It doesn’t just go deep, it comes out of him. I’ve seen it happen. It comes out of his eyes.”

  “Out of his eyes,” Johnny whispers, fascinated and horrified and a little awed.

  “I’m telling you because I want you to know it if you see it,” she says. “Dancing red dots, like embers from a campfire. Okay?”

  “Christ,” Johnny mutters, then: “Okay.”

  “Seth loves chocolate milk,” Audrey says, pulling him into motion again. “The kind you make with Hershey’s syrup. And Tak loves what Seth loves… to a fault, I guess you could say.”

  “You put Ex-Lax in it, didn’t you?” Johnny asks. Tou put Ex-Lax in his chocolate milk.” He almost feels like joining the coyotes in a good howl at the moon. Only he’d be howling with laughter. Life’s more surrealistic possibilities never exhaust themselves, it seems; their one chance to survive this is a summer-camp stunt on a level with snipe hunts and short-sheeting the counsellor’s bed.

  “Seth told me what to do and I did it,” she says. “Now come on. While he’s still crapping his brains out. While there’s
still time. We’ve got to grab him and just run. Get him out of Tak’s range before it can get back inside him. We can do it, too. Its range is short. We’ll go down the hill. You carry him. And I’ll bet that before we even get to where the store used to be, we’re going to see one big fucking change in our environment. Just remember, the key is to be quick. Once we get started, no hesitation or pulling up allowed.”

  She reaches for the door and Johnny restrains her. She stares at him with a mixture of fear and fury.

  “Did you hear me say we had to go right now?”

  “Yes, but there’s one question you have to answer, Aud.”

  They’re being watched anxiously from across the street. Belinda Josephson breaks away from the little cluster doing the watching and goes back into the kitchen to see how Steve and Cynthia are making out with the little kids. Not bad, it appears. Ellen is sniffling but otherwise under control again, and Ralphie seems to have blown himself out, like a hurricane that moves inland. Belinda glances briefly around the empty kitchen, which is now open to the backyard, then turns to go back down the hall to the others. She takes a single step, then pauses. A narrow vertical crease-Bee’s thought-line, her husband calls it-appears in the center of her forehead. It’s not entirely dark down there by the screen door, there’s moonlight… and these are her neighbors, of course. It’s not very hard to tell them apart. Brad is easy to identify because he’s her closest neighbor, so close she’s been able to reach out and nudge him in the night for twenty-five years. Dave and Susi are easy because they’re still hugging. Old Doc is easy because he’s so thin. But Cammie isn’t easy. Cammie isn’t easy because Cammie isn’t there. Not here in the kitchen, either. Has she gone upstairs or stepped outside through the hole in the kitchen wall? Maybe. And-

  “You two!” she calls into the pantry, suddenly afraid.

  What?” Steve asks, sounding a bit impatient. In truth he feels a little impatient. They’re finally getting the kids soothed down, and if this woman screws that up, he thinks he will brain her with the first pot or pan he can lay grip to.