The Regulators

Chapter Seven

They seem to come out of the mist rising off the street like materializing metal dinosaurs. Windows slide down; the porthole on the flank of the pink Dream Floater irises open again; the windshield of Bounty’s blue Freedom van retracts into a smooth darkness from which three grayish shotgun barrels bristle.

Thunder rumbles and somewhere a bird cries harshly. There is a beat of silence, and then the shooting begins.

It’s like the thunderstorm all over again, only worse, because this time it’s personal. And the guns are louder than before; Collie Entragian, lying face-down in the doorway between Billingsley’s kitchen and living room, is the first to notice this, but the others are not long in realizing it for themselves. Each shot is almost like a grenade blast, and each is followed by a low moaning sound, something caught between a buzz and a whistle.

Two shots from the red Tracker Arrow and the top of Collie Entragian’s chimney is nothing but maroon dust in the wind and pebble-sized chunks of brick pattering down on his roof. A shot strikes the plastic spread over Gary Ripton, making it ripple like a parachute, and another tears off the rear wheel of his bike. Ahead of Tracker Arrow is the silver van, the one that looks like an old-fashioned lunch-wagon. Part of its roof rises at an angle, and a silver figure-it appears to be a robot in a Confederate infantryman’s uniform-leans out. It mails three shotgun rounds special express into the burning Hobart house. Each report seems as loud as a dynamite blast.

Coming downhill from Bear Street, Dream Floater and the Justice Wagon pour fire into 251 and 249-the Josephson house and the Soderson house. The windows blow in. The doors blow open. A round that sounds like something thrown from a small anti-aircraft gun hits the back of Gary’s old Saab. The back end crumples in, shards of red taillight glass fly, and there’s a whoomp! as the gas-tank explodes, engulfing the little car in a ball of smoky orange flame. The bumper-stickers-I MAY BE SLOW BUT I’M AHEAD OF YOU on the right, MAFIA STAFF CAR on the left-shimmer in the heat like mirages. The south-moving trio of vans and the trio moving north meet, cross, and stop in front of the stake fences separating the Billingsley place from the Carver house above it and the Jackson house below it.

Audrey Wyler, who was eating a sandwich and drinking a can of lite beer in the kitchen when the shooting started, stands in the living room, staring out at the street with wide eyes, unaware that she’s still holding half of a salami and lettuce on rye in one hand. The firing has merged into one continuous, ear-splitting World War III roar, but she is in no danger; all of it is currently being directed at the two houses across from her.

She sees Ralphie Carver’s red wagon-Buster-rise into the air with one side blown into a twisted metal flower. It cartwheels over David Carver’s soggy corpse, lands with its wheels up and spinning, and then another hit bends it almost double and sends it into the flowers to the left of the driveway. Another round blows the Carver screen door off its hinges and hammers it down the hall; two more from Bounty’s Freedom van vaporize most of Pie’s prized Hummel figures.

Holes open in the crushed back deck of Mary Jackson’s Lumina, and then it too explodes, flames belching up and swallowing the car back to front. Bullets tear off two of Old Doc’s shutters. A hole the size of a baseball appears in the mailbox mounted beside his door; the box drops to the welcome mat, smoking. Inside it, a Kmart circular and a letter from the Ohio Veterinary Society are blazing. Another KA-BAM and the bungalow’s door-knocker-a silver St Bernard’s head-disappears as conclusively as a coin in a magician’s hand. Seeming oblivious of all this, Peter Jackson struggles to his feet with his dead wife in his arms. His round rimless glasses, the lenses spotted with water, glint in the strengthening light. His pale face is more than distracted; it is the face of a man whose entire bank of fuses has burned out. But he’s standing there, Audrey sees, miraculously whole, miraculously-

Aunt Audrey!

Seth. Very faint, but definitely Seth.

Aunt Audrey, can you hear me?

Yes! Seth, what’s happening?

Never mind! The voice sounds on the edge of panic. You have the place you go, don’t you?

The safe place?

Mohonk? Did he mean Mohonk? He must, she decided.

Yes, I-

Go there! the faint voice cries. Go there NOW! Because-

The voice doesn’t finish, and doesn’t have to. She has turned away from the furious shooting-gallery in the street, turned toward the den, where the movie-The Movie-is playing again. The volume has been cranked, somehow, far beyond what their Zenith should be able to produce. Seth’s shadow bounces ecstatically up and down on the wall, elongated and somehow horrible; it reminds her of what scared her most as a child, the horned demon from the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of Fantasia. It’s as if Tak is twisting inside the child’s body, warping it, stretching it, driving it ruthlessly beyond its ordinary limits and boundaries.

Nor is that all that’s happening. She turns back to the window, stares out. At first she thinks it’s her eyes, something wrong with her eyes-perhaps Tak has melted them somehow, or warped the lenses-but she holds her hands up in front of her and they look all right. No, it’s Poplar Street that’s wrong. It seems to be twisting out of perspective in some way she can’t quite define, angles changing, corners bulging, colors blurring. It’s as if reality is on the verge of liquefying, and she thinks she knows why: Tak’s long period of preparation and quiet growth is over. The time of action has come. Tak is making, Tak is building. Seth told her to get out, at least for a while, but where can Seth go?

Seth! she tries, concentrating as hard as she can. Seth, come with me!

I can’t! Go, Aunt Audrey! Go now!

The agony in that voice is more than she can endure. She turns toward the arch again, the one which leads into the den, but sees a meadow slanting down to a rock wall instead. There are wild roses; she smells them and feels the sexy, delicate heat of spring now tending toward summer. And then Janice is beside her and Janice is asking her what her all-time favorite Simon and Garfunkel song is and soon they are deep in a discussion of “Homeward Bound” and “I Am a Rock”, the one that goes “If I’d never loved, I never would have cried.”

In the Carver kitchen, the refugees lie on the floor with their hands laced over the backs of their heads and their faces pressed to the floor; around them the world seems to be tearing itself apart. Glass shatters, furniture falls, something explodes. There are horrible punching sounds as bullets pound through the walls.

Suddenly Pie Carver can stand Ellie’s clinging to her no more. She loves Ellen, of course she does, but it’s Ralphie she wants now, and Ralphie she must have; smart, sassy Ralphie, who looks so much like his father. She pushes Ellen roughly away, ignoring the girl’s cry of startled dismay, and bolts for the niche between the stove and the fridge, where Jim is hunched over the frantic, screaming Ralphie, holding one hand over the back of Ralphie’s head like a cap.

“Mommmmeeee!” Ellen wails, and attempts to run after her. Cammie Reed pushes away from the pantry door, grabs the little girl around the waist, and drops her back to the floor just as something that sounds like a monster locust drones across the kitchen, strikes the kitchen faucet, and backflips it like a majorette’s baton. Most of the spinning faucet tears through the screen and the spider’s web on the other side. Water spouts up from what’s left, at first almost all the way to the ceiling.

“Give him to me!” Pie screams. “Give me my son! Give me my s-”

Another approaching drone, this one followed by a loud, unmusical clang as one of the copper pots hanging by the stove is hammered into a hulk of twisted fragments and flying shrapnel. And Pie is suddenly just screaming, no words now, just screaming. Her hands are clapped to her face. Blood pours through her fingers and down her neck. Threads of copper litter the front of her misbuttoned blouse. More copper is in her hair, and a large chunk quivers in the center of her forehead like the blade of a thrown knife.

“I can’t see!” she shrieks, and drops her hands. Of course she can’t; her eyes are gone. So is most of her face. Quills of copper bristle from her cheeks, her lips, her chin. “Help me, I can’t see! Help me, David! Where are you?”

Johnny, lying face-down beside Brad in Ellen’s room upstairs can hear her screaming and understands that something terrible has happened. Bullets hemstitch the air above them. On the far wall is a picture of Eddie Vedder; as Johnny starts to wriggle toward the doorway to the hall, a huge bullet-hole appears in Eddie’s chest. Anothe r one hits the child-sized vanity mirror over Ellen’s dresser and hammers it to sparkling fragments. Somewhere on the block, blending hellishly with the sounds of Pie Carver’s screams from downstairs, comes the bray of a car alarm. And still the gunfire goes on.

As he crawls out into the toy-littered hall, he hears Brad beside him, panting harshly. This has been a hell of an aerobic day for a fellow with such a big stomach, Johnny thinks… but then that thought, the sound of the woman screaming downstairs, and the roar of the gunfire are all driven from his mind. For a moment he feels as if he has walked into a Mike Tyson right hand.

“It’s the same guy,” he whispers. “Oh Jesus-God, it’s the same fucking one.”

“Get down, fool!” Brad grabs his arm and yanks. Johnny collapses forward like a car slipping off a badly placed jack, not realizing he’s been up on his hands and knees until he comes crashing back down again. Unseen bullets hunt the air over his head. The glass on a framed wedding picture at the head of the stairs shatters; the picture itself falls face-down on the carpet with a thump. A second later, the wooden ball atop the banister’s newel-post disintegrates, spewing a deadly bouquet of splinters. Brad ducks down, covering his face, but Johnny only stares at something on the hallway floor, oblivious of everything else.

“What’s wrong with you?” Brad asks him. “You want to die?”

“It’s him, Brad,” Johnny repeats. He curls his fingers into his hair and gives a brief hard tug, as if to assure himself that all this is really happening. “The-” There’s a vicious buzz, almost like a plucked guitar-string, over their heads, and the hall light-fixture explodes, showering glass down on them. “The guy that was driving the blue van,” he finishes. “The other one shot her-the human-but this is the guy who was driving.”

He reaches out and picks up one of Ralphie Carver’s action figures from the hall floor, which is now littered with glass and splinters as well as toys. It’s an alien with a bulging forehead, almond-shaped eyes that are dark and huge, and a mouth that isn’t a mouth at all but a kind of fleshy horn. It’s dressed in a greenish iridescent uniform. The head is bald except for a stiff blond strip of hair. To Johnny it looks like the comb on a Roman Centurion’s helmet. Where’s your hat? he thinks at the little figure as the bullets whine through the air above him, punching through the wallpaper, shattering the laths beneath. The figure looks a little like Spielberg’s ET. Where’s your pinned-back cavalry hat, bub?

“What are you talking about?” Brad asks. He’s lying full-length on his stomach. Now he takes the figure, which is perhaps seven inches tall, from Johnny and looks at it. There is a cut on one of Brad’s plump cheeks. Falling glass from the light-fixture, Johnny assumes. Downstairs, the screaming woman falls silent. Brad looks at the alien, then stares at Johnny with eyes that are almost comically round. “You’re full of shit,” he says.

“No,” Johnny says. Tm not. With God as my witness I’m not. I never forget a face.”

What are you saying? That the people doing this are wearing masks so the survivors can’t identify them later?”

The idea hasn’t occurred to Johnny until this moment, but it’s a pretty good one. “I suppose that must be it. But-”

“But what?”

“It didn’t look like a mask. That’s all. It didn’t look like a mask.”

Brad stares at him a moment longer, then tosses the figure aside and begins wriggling toward the stairwell. Johnny picks it up, looks at it for a moment, then winces as another slug comes through the window at the end of the hall-the one facing the street-and drones directly over his head. He tucks the action figure into the pants pocket not holding the oversized slug and begins to wriggle after Brad.

On the lawn of Old Doc’s house, Peter Jackson stands with his wife in his arms, woundless at the center of the firestorm. He sees the vans with their dark glass and futuristic contours, he sees the shotgun barrels, their muzzles belching fire, and between the silvery one and the red one he can see Gary Soderson’s old shitbox Saab burning in the Soderson driveway. None of it makes much of an impression on him. He is thinking about how he just got home from work. That seems like a very big deal to him, for some reason. He thinks he will begin every account of this terrible afternoon (it has not occurred to him that he may not survive the terrible afternoon, at least not yet) by saying I just got home from work . This phrase already has become a kind of magical structure inside his head; a bridge back to the sane and orderly world which he assumed, only an hour ago, was his by right and would be for years and decades to come: I just got home from work .

He is also thinking of Mary’s father, a professor at the Meermont College of Dentistry in Brooklyn. He has always been rather terrified of Henry Kaepner, of Henry Kaepner’s somehow daunting integrity; in his heart Peter has always known that Henry Kaepner considers him unworthy of his daughter (and in his heart this is an opinion with which Peter Jackson has always concurred). And now Peter is standing in the firestorm with his feet in the wet grass, wondering how he’ll ever be able to tell Mr Kaepner that his father-in-law’s worst unspoken fear has become reality: his unworthy son-in-law has gotten his only child killed.

It’s not my fault, though, Peter thinks. Perhaps I can make him see that if I start by saying I just got home from w-

“Jackson.”

The voice wipes out his worries, makes him sway on his feet, makes him feel like screaming. It is as if an alien mouth has opened inside his mind, tearing a hole in it. Mary slips in his arms, trying to slither out of his grip, and Peter hugs her tight against him again, ignoring the ache in his arms. At the same time he comes back to some vague appreciation of reality. Most of the vans are on the move again, but very slowly, still firing. The pink one and the yellow one are now pouring fire into the Reed and Geller residences, shattering birdbaths, blasting away faucet bibs, breaking basement windows, shredding flowers and bushes, slicing through raingutters that drop, slanting, to the lawns below.

One of them, however, is not moving. The black one. It is parked on the other side of the street, blocking most of the Wyler house from view. The turret has slid back, and now a shining figure, all bright gray and dead black, issues from it like a spook from the window of a haunted house. Except, Peter sees, the figure is standing on something. It looks like a floating pillow and seems to be humming.

Is it a man? He can’t exactly tell. It appears to be wearing a Nazi uniform, all black, glossy fabric and silver rigging, but there is no human face above the wings of its collar; there is no face of any kind, in fact.

Just blackness.

“Jackson! Get over here, partner.”

He tries to resist, to stand his ground, and when the voice comes again it isn’t like a mouth but a fishhook, yanking inside his head, tearing his thoughts open. Now he knows what a hooked trout feels like.

“Get a move-on, pard!”

Peter walks across the rain-washed remains of a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk (Ellen Carver and her friend Mindy from a block over made it that very morning), then steps into the gutter. Rushing water fills one shoe, but he doesn’t even feel it. In his mind he is now hearing a very strange thing, a kind of soundtrack. It’s being played by a twanging guitar, sort of like an old Duane Eddy instrumental. A tune he knows but can’t identify. It is the final maddening touch.

The bright figure on the floating pillow descends to street-level. As Peter draws closer, he expects to see the black cloth (perhaps nylon, perhaps silk) covering the man’s face, giving him that spooky look of absence, but he doesn’t see it, and as the plate-glass window of the EZ Stop explodes down the street, he realizes an awful thing: he doesn’t see it because it isn’t there. The man from the black wagon really has no face.

“Oh God,” he moans in a voice so low he can barely hear it himself. “Oh my God, please.”

Two other figures are looking down from the turret of the black van. One is a bearded guy wearing the ruins of what looks like a Civil War uniform. The other is a woman with lank black hair and cruel, beautiful features. She’s as pale as a comic-book vampire. Her uniform, like that of the faceless man, is black and silver, Gestapo-ish. Some sort of trumpery gem-it’s as big as a pigeon’s egg-hangs from a chain around her neck, flashing like a remnant of the psychedelic sixties.

She’s a cartoon, Peter thinks. Some pubescent boy’s first hesitant try at a sex-fantasy.

As he draws closer to the man with no face, he realizes an even more awful thing: he’s not really there at all. Neither are the other two, and neither is the black van. He remembers a Saturday matinee-he couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old-when he walked all the way down to the movie screen and stared up at it, realizing for the first time how cheesy the trick was. From twenty inches away the images were just gauze; the only reality was the bright reflective foundation of the screen, which was itself utterly blank, as featureless as a snowbank. It had to be, for the illusion to succeed. This is the same, and Peter feels the same sort of stupid surprise now that he felt then. I can see Herbie Wyler’s house, he thinks. I can see it right through the van.

“JACKSON!”

But that is real, that voice, just as the bullet which took Mary’s life was real. He screams through a grin of pain, jerking her body closer to his chest for a moment and then dropping her to the street in a tumble without even being aware of it. It is as if someone pressed the end of an electric bullhorn to one of his ears, turned the volume up all the way, and then bellowed his name into it. Blood bursts from his nose and begins to seep from the corners of his eyes.

“THATAWAY, PARD!” The black-and-silver figure, now insubstantial but still threatening, points at the Wyler house. The voice is the only reality, but it is all the reality Peter needs; it’s like the blade of a chainsaw. He jerks his head back so hard his glasses fall askew on his face. “WE GOT US SOME HOORAWIN TO DO! BEST GIT STARTED!”

He doesn’t walk toward Herbie and Audrey’s house; he is pulled towards it, reeled in. As he walks through the black, faceless figure, a crazy image fills his mind for just a moment: spaghetti, the unnaturally red kind that comes in a can, and hamburger. All mixed together in a white bowl with Warner Bros cartoon figures-Bugs, Elmer, Daffy-dancing around the rim. Just thinking about that kind of food usually nauseates him, but for the moment the image holds in his mind, he is desperately hungry; he lusts for those pallid strands of pasta and that unnatural red sauce. For that moment even the pain in his head ceases to exist.

He walks through the projected image of the black van just as it starts to roll again, and then he’s moving up the cement path to the house. His glasses finally give up their tenuous hold and fall off; he doesn’t notice. He can still hear a few isolated gunshots, but they are distant, in another world. The twangy guitar is still playing in his head, and as the door to the Wyler house opens all by itself, the guitar is joined by horns and he places the tune. It’s the theme to that old TV show, Bonanza.

I just got home from work, he thinks, stepping into a dark, fetid room that smells of sweat and old hamburger. I just got home from work, and the door slams shut behind him. I just got home from work, and he’s crossing the living room, headed for the arch and the sound of the TV. “What are you wearing that uniform for?” someone asks. “War’s been over near-bout three years, ain’t you heard?”

I just got home from work, Peter thinks, as if that explained everything-his dead wife, the shooting, the man with no face, the rancid air of this little room-and then the thing sitting in front of the TV turns around to face him and Peter thinks nothing at all.

Out on the street, the vans which have composed the fire-corridor accelerate, the black one quickly catching up with Dream Floater and the Justice Wagon. The bearded man in the turret throws one final round. It hits the blue US mailbox outside the E-Z Stop, putting a hole the size of a softball in it. Then the raiders turn left on Hyacinth and are gone. Rooty-Toot, Freedom, and Tracker Arrow leave on Bear Street, disappearing into the mist which first blurs them and then swallows them.

In the Carver house, Ralphie and Ellen are shrieking at the sight of their mother, who has collapsed in the doorway leading to the hall. She isn’t unconscious, however; her body snaps furiously from side to side as convulsions tear through her. It is as if her nervous system is being swept by hard squalls. Blood spatters from her shattered face in ropes, and she is making a complicated sound deep in her throat, a kind of singing growl.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Ralphie screams, and Jim Reed is losing his battle to keep the twisting, struggling boy from running to the woman dying in the kitchen doorway.

Johnny and Brad are coming down the stairs on their fannies-a riser at a time, like kids playing a game-but when Johnny gets to the bottom and understands what has happened, what is still happening, he gets to his feet and runs, first kicking aside the battered-in screen door, then crunching through the remains of Kirsten’s beloved Hummels.

“No, get down!” Brad yells at him, but Johnny pays no attention. He’s thinking only one thing, and that is to separate the dying woman from her kids as fast as he can. They don’t need to see the rest of her suffering.

“Mommeeeee!” Ellen howls, trying to wriggle out from under Cammie. The girl’s nose is bleeding. Her eyes are wild but hellishly aware. “Mommmeeeeeee!”

Unhearing, her days of caring about her children and her husband and her secret ambition to someday create beautiful Hummel figures of her own (most, she has thought, will probably look like her gorgeous son) all behind her, Kirsten Carver jitters mindlessly in the doorway, feet kicking, hands rising and falling, drumming briefly in her lap and then flying up again like startled birds. She growls and sings, growls and sings, sounds which are almost words.

“Get her out!” Cammie yells at Johnny. She stares at Pie with terror and pity. “Get her away from the kids, for Christ’s sake!”

He bends, lifts, and then Belinda is there to help him. They carry Kirsten into her living room and set her on a couch that she agonized over for weeks and which is now bleeding stuffing from a gaping hole. Brad backs up before them to give them room, throwing nervous glances over his shoulder at the street, which appears once again to be deserted.

“Don’t ask me to sew it,” Pie says in an arch tone of voice, and then gives a horrible choked laugh.

“Kirsten,” Belinda says, bending over her and taking one of her hands. “You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be fine.”

“Don’t ask me to sew it,” the woman on the couch repeats. This time she sounds as if she is lecturing. The cushion under her head is growing dark, the bloodstain spreading visibly as the three of them stand looking down at her. To Johnny it looks like the kind of nimbus that Renaissance painters sometimes put around their Madonnas. And then the convulsions resume.

Belinda bends and seizes Kirsten’s twisting shoulders. “Help me with her!” she chokes furiously at Johnny and her husband. She is weeping again. “Oh, you stupids, I can’t do it alone, help me with her!”

In the house next door, Tom Billingsley has gone on trying to save Marielle’s life even at the height of the attack, working with the aplomb of a battlefield surgeon. Now she is sewn up, and the bleeding is down to a muddy seep through a triple fold of gauze, but when he looks up at Collie, Old Doc shakes his head. He is actually more upset by the cries from next door than by the operation he has just performed. He doesn’t have much feeling about Marielle Soderson one way or the other, but he’s almost positive the woman crying out over there is Kirstie Carver, and Kirstie he likes very much. “Boy oh boy,” he says out loud. T mean boy-howdy.”

Collie looks toward Gary, wanting to make sure he’s out of earshot, and spots him poking around in Doc’s kitchenette, oblivious to the screaming and the weeping children next door, unaware that the operation on his wife is finished; he’s opening and closing cupboards with the thoroughness of a dedicated alcoholic hunting for booze. His look into the fridge for beer or maybe some chilled vodka was an understandably short one; his wife’s arm is there, on the second shelf. Collie put it in himself, sliding stuff around-salad dressing, pickles, the mayonnaise, some left-over sliced pork in Saran Wrap-until there was room for it. He doesn’t think it will ever be reattached, not even in this age of miracles and wonders can such a thing be done, but he still couldn’t bring himself to put it in Doc’s pantry. Too warm. It would draw flies.

“Is she going to die?” Collie asks.

“I don’t know,” Billingsley says. He pauses, takes his own look at Gary, sighs, runs his hands through his Albert Einstein tangle of white hair. “Probably. Certainly, if she doesn’t get to a hospital soon. She needs a lot of help. Most of all, a transfusion. And there’s someone hurt next door, by the sound. Kirsten, I think. And maybe she’s not the only one.”

Collie nods.

“Mr Entragian, what do you think is going on here?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea.”

Cynthia grabs a newspaper (it’s the Columbus Dispatch, not the Wentworth Shopper) that has fallen to the living-room floor during the rumpus, rolls it up, and crawls slowly to the front door. She uses the newspaper to sweep broken glass-there is a surprising amount of it-out of her way as she goes.

Steve thinks of objecting, asking her if she maybe has a deathwish, then stows it. Sometimes he gets ideas about things. Pretty strong ones, as a matter of fact. Once, while peaceably reading palms on the boardwalk in Wildwood, he had an idea so strong that he quit the job that very night. It was an idea about a laughing seventeen-year-old girl with ovarian cancer. Malignant, advanced, maybe a month beyond any possible human remedy. Not the sort of idea you wanted to have about a pretty green-eyed high-school kid if your life’s motto was

The idea he’s having now is every bit as strong as that one but quite a bit more optimistic: the shooters are gone, at least for the time being. There’s no way he can know that, but he feels certain of it, just the same.

Instead of calling Cynthia back, he joins her. The inside door has been blown open by several gunshots (it has also been so severely warped that Steve doubts it will ever close again), and the breeze coming through the shattered screen is heaven-sweet and cool on his sweaty face. The kids are still crying next door, but the screaming has stopped, at least for the time being, and that’s a relief.

“Where is he?” Cynthia asks, sounding stunned. “Look, there’s his wife-” she points to Mary’s body, which is now lying in the street, close enough to the far side so that tendrils of her hair are wavering in the water rushing down the west gutter-“but where’s he? Mr Jackson?”

Steve points through the torn lower half of the screen. “In that house. Must be. See his glasses on the path?”

Cynthia squints, then nods.

“Who lives there?” Steve asks her.

“I don’t know. I haven’t been here anywhere near long enough to-”

“Mrs Wyler and her nephew,” Collie says from behind them. They turn and see him squatting on his hunkers, looking out between them. “The boy’s autistic or dyslexic or catatonic… one of those damned icks, I can never keep them straight. Her husband died last year, so it’s just the two of them. Jackson… must… must have… “He doesn’t break off but runs down, the words getting smaller and smaller, finally diminishing into silence. When he speaks again, his voice is still low… and very thoughtful. “What the hell?”

“What?” Cynthia asks uneasily. “What?”

“Are you kidding me? You don’t see?”

“See what? I see the woman, and I see her husband’s gla-” Now it’s her turn to run down.

Steve starts to ask what the deal is, then understands-sort of. He supposes he would have seen it earlier, even though he’s a stranger to the street, if his attention hadn’t been diverted by the body, the dropped spectacles, and his concern for Mrs Soderson. He knows what he must do about that, and more than anything else he has been nerving himself up to do it.

Now, though, he simply looks across the street, letting his eyes move slowly from the E-Z Stop to the next building up, from that one to the one where the kids were playing Frisbee when he turned on to the street, and then on to the one directly opposite them, the one where Jackson must have gone to ground when the shooting got too hot.

There has been a change over there since the coming of the shooters in the vans.

Just how much he cannot tell, mostly because he is a stranger here, he doesn’t know the street, partly because the smoke from the burning house and the mist still rising off the wet street give the houses over there a look which is almost spectral, like houses seen in a mirage… but there has been a change.

Siding has been replaced with logs on the Wyler house, and where there was a picture window there are now three more conventional-old-fashioned, one might almost say-multi-pane windows. The door has wooden supports hammered across its vertical boards in a Z-shape. The house next to it on the left…

“Tell me something,” Collie says, looking at the same one. “Since when did the Reeds live in a log-fucking-cabin?”

“Since when did the Gellers live in an adobe hacienda!” Cynthia responds, looking one farther down.

“You guys’re kidding,” Steve says. Then, weakly: “Aren’t you?”

Neither of them replies. They look almost hypnotized.

“I’m not sure I’m really seeing it,” Collie says at last. His voice is uncharacteristically hesitant. “It’s…”

“Shimmery,” the girl says.

He turns to her. “Yeah. Like when you look at something over the top of an incinerator, or-”

“Somebody help my wife!” Gary calls to them from the shadows of the living room. He has found a bottle of something-Steve can’t see what-and is standing by the photo of Hester, a pigeon who liked to fingerpaint. Not, Steve thinks, that pigeons exactly have fingers. Gary isn’t steady on his feet and his words sound slurry. “Somebody help Mar'elle! Losser damn arm!”

“We need to get help for her,” Collie says, nodding. “And-”

“-for the rest of us,” Steve finishes. He’s relieved, actually, to know that someone else realizes this, that maybe he won’t have to go on his own. The boy next door has stopped crying, but Steve can still hear the girl, sobbing in big, watery hitches. Margrit the Maggot, he thinks. That’s what her brother called her. Margrit the Maggot loves Ethan Hawke, he said.

Steve has a sudden urge, as strong as it is unaccustomed, to go next door and find that little girl. To kneel in front of her and take her in his arms and hug her and tell her she can love anyone she pleases. Ethan Hawke or Newt Gingrich or just anybody. He looks down the street instead. The E-Z Stop, so far as he can tell, hasn’t changed; its style is still Late-century Convenience Store, sometimes known as Pastel Cinderblock, sometimes known as Still Life with Dumpster. Not beautiful, far from it, but a known quantity, and under the circumstances, that’s a relief. The Ryder truck is still parked in front, the blue phone-sign is still hanging down from its hook, the Marlboro Man is still on the door, and…

… and the bike rack is gone.

Well, not gone, exactly; replaced.

By something that looks suspiciously like a hitching-rail in a Western movie.

With an effort, he drags first his eyes and then his mind back to the cop, who is saying Steve is right, they all need help. At the Carvers” as well as at Old Doc’s, by the sound.

“There’s a greenbelt behind the houses on this side of the street,” Collie says. “There’s a path that runs through it. Kids use it, mostly, but I’m partial to it myself. It forks behind the Jacksons” house. One arm runs down to Hyacinth. Comes out by the bus shelter halfway down the block. The other one goes east, over to Anderson Avenue. If Anderson’s, pardon my French, fucked up-”

“Why should it be?” Cynthia asks. “There hasn’t been any shooting from that direction.”

He gives her a strange, patient look. “There hasn’t been any help from that direction, either.

And our street is fucked up in ways the shooting had nothing to do with, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Oh,” she says in a small voice.

“Anyway, if Anderson Avenue’s as crazy as Poplar-I hope it isn’t, but if it is-there’s a viaduct that runs at least under the street, maybe farther. It could go all the way to Columbus Broad. There’s got to be people there.” He doesn’t look as if he really believes it, though.

“I’ll go with you,” Steve says.

The cop looks surprised at the offer, then considering. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

“Actually, yes. I think the bad guys’re gone, at least for the time being.”

“What makes you think that?”

Steve, who has absolutely no intention of bringing up his brief career as a boardwalk fortune-teller, says it’s just a hunch. He sees Collie Entragian thinking it over, and knows the cop is going to agree even before he opens his mouth. Nothing psychic about it, either. Three people have been killed on Poplar Street this afternoon (not to mention Hannibal the Frisbee-stealing dog), more have been wounded, a house is burning flat without a single goddam fire-engine to attend it, there are crazy people running in the streets-homicidal maniacs-and the guy would have to be insane to want to go creeping alone through the woods between here and the next block.

“What about him?” Cynthia asks, jerking a thumb at Gary.

Collie grimaces. “Shape he’s in, I wouldn’t go to the movies with him, let alone into the woods with shit like this going down. But if you’re serious, Mr… Ames, is it?”

“Make it Steve. And I’m serious.”

“Okay. Let’s see if Old Doc’s got a gun or two kicking around his basement. I bet he does.”

They start back across the living room, bent low. Cynthia turns to follow them, then movement catches her eye. She turns back and her mouth drops open. Revulsion follows surprise, and she has to put a hand to her mouth to stifle the cry that wants to come out. She thinks of calling the men back, then doesn’t. What would it change?

A buzzard-it might be a buzzard, although it looks like nothing she’s ever seen in a book or a movie-has come cruising out of the billowing smoke from the Hobart house and landed in the street next to Mary Jackson. It’s a huge unnatural awkwardness with an ugly, peeled head. It walks around the corpse, looking for all the world like a diner reconnoitering the buffet before actually grabbing a plate, and then it darts its head forward and pulls off most of the woman’s nose.

Cynthia closes her eyes and tries to tell herself this is a dream, just a dream. It would be nice if she could believe it.

From Audrey Wyler’s journal: June 10, 1995

Scared tonight. So scared. It’s been quiet lately-with Seth, I mean-but now all that’s changed.

At first neither of us knew what was wrong-Herb as mystified as I was. We went out for ice cream at Milly’s on The Square, part of our regular Saturday ritual if Seth is being “good” (which means if Seth is being Seth), and he was fine. Then, when we turned into the driveway, he started the sniffing thing he does sometimes-kind of raises his nose in the air and sniffs like a dog. I hate seeing him do that and so does Herb. The way farmers hate to hear tornado warnings on the radio, I suppose. I’ve read that the parents of epileptics learn to look for similar signs before seizures… obsessive head-scratching, swearing, even nose-picking. With Seth it’s that sniffing thing. But it’s not epileptic seizures. I only wish it was.

Herb asked him what was wrong as soon as he saw him doing it and got zilch, not even the usual vocalizing stuff he does. Same when I tried. No words; no gabble, even. Just more sniffing. And once he was in the house, that stalking thing-walking from place to place as if his legs won’t bend. He went out back to the sandbox, he went upstairs to his room, he went downcellar, all in that ominous silence. Herb followed him for a while, asking what was wrong, then gave up. While I was emptying the dishwasher, Herb came in waving a religious tract he found sticking out of the milkbox around at the side door amp; yelling “Hallelujah! Tes, Jesus!” He is a dear man, always trying to cheer me up, although I know he isn’t doing all that well himself. His skin has gotten very pale, and I’m scared by all the weight he’s lost, mostly since January or so. It must be at least 20 lbs and might be as much as 30, but whenever I ask him about it, he just laughs it off.

Anyway, the tract was typical Baptist bullshit. Had a picture on the front of a man in agony, with his tongue sticking out and sweat running down his face and his eyes rolled up. IMAGINE A MILLION YEARS WITHOUT ONE DRINK OF WATER! it says over the face. And under it, WELCOME TO HELL! I checked on the back and sure enough, Zion’s Covenant Baptist Church. That bunch from Elder. “Look,” Herb says, “it’s my dad before he combs his hair in the morning.”

I wanted to laugh-I know it makes him happy when he can make me laugh-but I just couldn’t. I could feel Seth all around us, almost crackling on our skin. The way you can sometimes feel a storm building up, you know.

Just then he walked in-stalked in-with that horrible frown he gets on his face when something happens that doesn’t fit into his general plan of life. Except it isn’t him, it isn’t. Seth is the sweetest, kindest, most accepting child I can imagine. But he has this other personality that we see more and more. The stiff-legged one. The one that sniffs the air like a dog.

Herb asked him what was wrong, what was on his mind, and then all at once he-Herb, I mean-reached up and grabbed his own lower lip. Pulled it out like a windowshade and started twisting it. Until it bled. And all the time his poor eyes were watering with pain and bugging out with fear and Seth was staring at him with that hateful frown he gets, the one that says: “I’ll do anything I please, you can’t stop me.” And maybe we can’t, but I think that-sometimes, at least-Seth can.

“Stop making him do that!” I shouted at him. “You just stop it right now!”

When the other one, the not-Seth, gets really mad, his eyes seem to go from brown to black. He turned that look on me then, and all at once my hand came up and I slapped myself across the face. So hard my eye watered on that side.

“Make him stop, Seth,” I said. “It’s not fair. Whatever is wrong, we’re not responsible for it.

We don’t even know what it is.”

Nothing at first. Just more of the black look. My hand went up again, and then the hateful way he was looking at me changed a little. Not much, but enough. My hand went down and Seth turned and looked up into the open cabinet over the sink where we keep the glasses. My mother’s are on the top shelf, nice Waterford crystal that I only take down for the holidays. They were up there, anyway. They burst when Seth looked at them, one after the other, like ducks in a shooting gallery. When they were gone, the eleven of them that were left, he looked at me with that mean, gloating smi le he gets sometimes when you cross him and he hurts you for it. His eyes so black and somehow old in his child’s face.

I started to cry. Couldn’t help it. Called him a bad boy amp; told him to go away. The smile slipped, at that. He doesn’t like to be told anything, but that least of all. I thought he might make me hurt myself again, but then Herb stepped in front of me and told, him the same thing, to go away and calm down and then come back and maybe we could help him fix whatever was wrong.

Seth went off, and I could tell even before he got across the living room to the stairs that the other one was either gone or going. He wasn’t walking in that horrible stiff way anymore. (Herb calls it “Seth’s Rooty the Robot walk”.) Then, later, we could hear him crying in his room-Herb helped me clean up the glasses, me bawling like a fool the whole time. He didn’t try to comfort me or jolly me out of it with any of his jokes, either. Sometimes he can be very wise. When it was done (neither of us got a single cut, sort of a miracle), he said the obvious, that Seth had lost something. I said no shit Sherlock, what was your first clue? Then felt bad and hugged him and said I was sorry, I didn’t mean to be a bitch. Herb said he knew that, then turned over the stupid Baptist tract and wrote on the back on it: “What are we going to do?”

I shook my head. Lots of times we don’t even dare say stuff out loud for fear he’s listening-the not-Seth, I mean. Herbie crumpled the tract amp; threw it in the trash, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I took it out amp; tore it to shreds. But first I found myself looking at the sweaty, tortured face on the front of it. WELCOME TO HELL

Is that Herb? Is it me? I want to say no, but sometimes it feels like hell. A lot of times, actually. Why else am I keeping this diary?

June 11, 1995

Seth sleeping. Exhausted, maybe. Herbie outside in the back yard, looking everywhere. Although I think Seth has already been looking. We know what’s missing now, at least: his Dream Floater Power Wagon. He’s got all the MotoKops shit-action figures, HQ Crisis Center, Cassie’s Party Pad, Power Wagon Corral, two stun pistols, even “floatpad sheets” for his bed. But more than anything he loves the Power Wagons. They’re battery-powered vans, quite large, very futuristic. Most have wings he can pop out by pushing a lever on the bottom, plus radar dishes that really turn on the roofs (the one on Cassie Styles’s Dream Floater is shaped like a Valentine, this after about thirty years” worth of talking about equal rights amp; female role-models for girls; I could just about puke), flashing lights, siren noises, space-blaster noises, etc… etc.

Anyway, Seth came back from California with all six that are currently on the market: the red one (Tracker Arrow), the yellow one (Justice Wagon), the blue one (Freedom), the black one (Meatwagon, belongs to the bad guy), the silver one (Rooty-Toot, amp;just think, someone gets paid, to think this shit up), and the stupid pink one, driven by Cassie Styles, the love of our young nephew’s life. His crush is actually sorta funny amp; sweet, but there’s nothing funny about what’s currently going on around here: Seth’s “Dweem Fwoatah” is gone, and all this is a kind of tantrum.

Herbie shook me awake at six this morning, pulled me out of bed. His hand was cold as ice. I asked him what it was, what was wrong, and he wouldn’t say. Just pulled me over to the window amp; asked me if I saw anything out there. I could tell what he meant was did I see what he was seeing?

I saw it, all right. It was Dream Floater, which looks sorta art deco, like something from the old Batman comic books. But it wasn’t Seth’s Dream Floater, not the toy. That’s about two feet long amp; maybe a foot high. The one we were seeing was full-sized, probably twelve feet long and maybe seven feet high. The roof-hatch was partway up, amp; the heart-shaped radar dish was turning, just as it does on the show.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Where did that come from?” All I could think was that it must have flown in on its stubby little retractable wings. It was like getting out of bed with one eye open and discovering a flying saucer has landed in your back yard. I couldn’t get my breath. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach!

At first when he told me it wasn’t there I didn’t understand what he meant, and then the sun came up a little more and I realized I could see the aspens behind our fence right through it. It really wasn’t there. But at the same time it was.

“He’s showing us what he couldn’t tell us,” Herb said.

I asked if Seth was awake amp; Herb said no, he’d been down the hall to check and he was fast asleep. That gave me a chill I can’t describe. Because it meant we were standing there at our bedroom window in our pj’s amp; looking out at our nephew’s dream. It was there in the back yard like a big pink soap-bubble.

We stood there for about twenty minutes, watching it. I don’t know if we expected Cassie Styles to come out or what, but nothing like that happened. The pink van just sat there with its roof-hatch partway up and its radar dish turning, and then it started to fade until it was just a shimmer. By the end you couldn’t have told what it was, if you hadn’t seen it when it was brighter. Then we heard Seth getting up and going down the hall. By the time the toilet flushed, it was gone.

At breakfast, Herb pulled his chair over next to Seth’s, the way he does when he really wants to talk to him. In some ways I think Herb is braver than I ever could be. Especially since it’s Herb that-

No, I won’t put that down.

Anyway, Herbie puts his face close to Seth’s-so that Seth has to look at him- amp; then talks in a low, kind voice. He tells Seth we know what’s wrong, why he’s so upset, but not to worry because Cassie’s Power Wagon is sure to be in the house or in the back yard somewhere. We’ll find it, he says.

All during this Seth was fine. He kept eating his cereal amp; his face didn’t change, but sometimes you just know it’s him, and that he’s listening and understanding at least a little. Then Herb said, “And if we absolutely can’t find it, we’ll get you a new one,” amp; everything went to hell.

Seth’s cereal bowl went flipping across the room, spilling milk and cereal all over the kitchen floor. It hit the wall amp; broke. The drawer under the stove came open, and all the things I keep under there-frying pans, cookie-sheets, muffin-tins-came flying out. The sink faucets turned on. The dishwasher supposedly can’t start with the door open, but it did amp; water went all over the floor. The vase I keep on the window-shelf over the sink flew all the way across the room amp; broke against the wall. Scariest of all was the toaster. It was on, I was making a couple of slices to have with my o.j… amp; all at once it glowed bright red inside the slots, as if it was a furnace instead of a little counter-gadget. The handle went up amp; the toast flew all the way up to the ceiling. It was black and smoking. Looked nuclear. It landed in the sink.

Seth got up and walked out of the room. His stalky walk. Herb and I just looked at each other for a second or two, amp; then he said, “That toast would probably taste okay with a little peanut butter on it.” I just gaped at him at first but then I started laughing. That got him started. We laughed amp; laughed, with our heads down on the kitchen table. Trying to keep him from hearing, I guess, except that’s stupid-Seth doesn’t always have to hear to know. I’m not sure it’s mind-reading he does, exactly, but it’s something.

When I finally got control of myself enough to look up, Herb was getting the mop for under the dishwasher. He was still kind of chuckling and wiping at his eyes. Thank God for him. I went to get the dustpan and brush for the broken vase.

“I guess he’s sort of committed to the old Dream Floater,” is all Herb said. And why say anymore'? That pretty well covers it.

Now it’s three in the afternoon and we have “been all over the geedee house”, as my old school-friend Jan would say. Seth has tried to help, in his own peculiar way. It kinda broke my heart to see him turning up the sofa cushions, as if his missing van could’ve slipped under there like a quarter or a crust of pizza. Herb started out hopeful, saying it was too big amp; bright to miss, amp; I thought he was right. As a matter of fact I still think he’s right, so how come we can’t find it? From where I’m writing at the kitchen table I can see Herb down on his knees by the hedge at the back of the yard, poking along with the handle of a rake. I’d like to tell him to stop-it’s the third time he’s been along there-but I don’t have the heart.

Noises upstairs. Seth’s getting up from his nap, so I need to finish this. Put it out of sight. Try to put it out of mind, too. That should be okay, though. I think Seth has more success picking up what Herb is thinking than he does with me. No real reason, but the feeling is strong. And I’ve been careful not to tell Herb that I’m keeping a journal.

I know what anyone reading the journal would say: we’re nuts. Nuts to keep him. Something is wrong with him. Badly wrong, and we don’t know what it is. We know it’s dangerous, though. So why do it? Why go on? I don’t know, exactly. Because we love him? Because he’s controlling us? No. Sometimes there are things like that (Herb twisting his lip or me slapping myself), things like a powerful hypnosis, but not often. He’s mostly just Seth, a child in the prison of his own mind. He’s also the last little bit of my brother.

But sure, beyond all that (and over it, and under it, and around it) is just loving. And every night when Herb and I lie down, I see in my husband’s eyes what he must see in mine-that we made it thru another one, amp; if we made it thru today, we can make it thru tomorrow. At night it’s easy to tell yourself that it’s just another aspect of Seth’s autism, really no big deal.

Footsteps overhead. He’s going to the bathroom. When he finishes, he’ll come downstairs, hoping we’ve found his missing toy. But which one will hear the bad news'? Seth, who’ll only look disappointed (and maybe cry a little)? Or the other one? The stalky one who throws things when he can’t have what he wants?

I have thought about taking him back to the doctor, sure, of course, I’m sure Herb has, too… but not seriously. Not after the last time. We were both there amp; we both saw the way the other one, the not-Seth, hides. How Seth makes it possible for it to hide: autism is one hell of a big shield. But the real problem here is not autism, it doesn’t matter what all the doctors in the world see or don’t see. When I open my mind amp; set aside all I hope amp; all I wish, I know that. And when we tried to talk to the doctor, tried to tell him why we were really there, we couldn’t. If anyone ever reads this, I wonder if you’ll be able to understand how horrible that is, to have something that feels like a hand laid over the back of your mouth, a guard between your vocal cords and your tongue. WE COULDN’T FUCKING TALK.

I’m so afraid.

Afraid of the stalky one, yes, but afraid of other things, as well.

Some I can’t even express, and some I can express all too well. But for now, the thing I’m most afraid of is what might happen to us if we can’t find Dream Floater. That stupid goddam pink van. Where can the damned thing be? If only we could find it-