The Regulators

Chapter Eleven

Old Doc was the first one over the Carvers” back fence. He surprised them all (including himself) by going up easily, needing only a single boost in the butt from Johnny to get him started. He paused at the top for a second or two, setting his hands to his liking. To Brad Josephson he looked like a skinny monkey in the moonlight. He dropped. There was a soft grunt from the other side of the stakes.

“You all right, Doc?” Audrey asked.

“Yeah,” Billingsley said. “Right as rain. Aren’t I, Susi?”

“Sure,” Susi Geller agreed nervously. Then, through the fence: “Mrs Wyler, is that you? Where did you come from?”

“That doesn’t matter right now. We need to-”

“What happened out there? Is everyone all right? My mom is having a cow. A large one.”

Is everyone all right? That was a question Brad didn’t want to answer. No one else did either, from the look.

“Mrs Reed?” Johnny asked. “Dave next, then you?”

Cammie gave him her dry stare, then turned back to Dave. She murmured in his ear once more, stroking his hair as she did so. Dave listened with a troubled expression, then murmured back, just loud enough for Brad to hear, “I don’t want to.” She murmured again, more vehemently this time. Brad caught the words your brother near the end. This time Dave reached up, grabbed the top of the fence, and swung himself smoothly over to the other side. He did it, so far as Brad could see, with no expression save that look of faint unease on his face. Cammie went next, Audrey and Cynthia boosting. As she gained the top, Dave’s hands rose to meet her. Cammie slipped into them, making no effort to keep hold of the fence for safety’s sake. Brad had an idea that at this point she might have actually welcomed a fall. Maybe even a broken neck. Why did you send us out here, Ma? the kid had shouted, perhaps intuiting that his own eagerness to go-and Jim’s-would never serve as a mitigating circumstance in her mind. Cammie would always blame herself, and he would probably always be willing to let her.

“Brad?” That was a voice he was glad to hear, although he rarely heard it sound so soft and worried. “You there, hon?”

“I’m here, Bee.”

“You okay?”

“Fine. Listen, Bee, and don’t lose your cool. Jim Reed is dead. So’s Entragian from down the street.”

There was a gasp, and then Susi Geller was screaming Jim’s name over and over again. To Brad, who was emotionally as well as physically exhausted, those screams roused annoyance rather than pity… and the fear that they might draw something even less pleasant than the big cat or the coyote with the human fingers.

“Susi?” The alarmed voice of Kim Geller from the house. Then she was screaming, too, the sound seeming to cut the moonlit air like a sharp whirling blade: “Soooooo-zeeeeee! Sooooozeeeeee!”

“Shut up!” Johnny yelled. “Jesus, Kim, SHUT UP!”

For a wonder she did, but the girl went on and on, shrieking like a misbegotten fifth-act Juliet.

“Dear God,” Audrey muttered. She put her palms over her ears and ran her fingers into her hair.

“Bee,” Brad said through the fence, “shut that Chicken Little up. I don’t care how.”

“JIM!” Susi screamed. “OHHHH GAWWWD, JIM! OH GAWWWD NO! OH-”

There was a slap. The screams were cut off almost at once. Then:

“You can’t hit my daughter! You can’t hit my daughter, you bitch, I don’t care what ideas you’ve gotten from… from affirmative action! You fat black bitch!”

“Oh, fuck me til I cry,” Cynthia said. She clutched her own double-dyed hair and squeezed her eyes shut like a kid who doesn’t want to watch the final few minutes of a scary movie.

Brad kept his open and held his breath, waiting for Bee to go nuclear. Instead, Bee ignored the woman, calling softly through the fence: “Are you sending his body over, Bradley?” She sounded completely composed, for which Brad was completely thankful.

“Yeah. You and his mother and his brother catch hold of him when we do.”

“We will.” Still cool as a cucumber fresh out of the crock.

“Kim?” Brad called through the stakes of the fence. “Mrs Geller? Why don’t you go on in the house, ma’am?”

“Yes!” Kim said pleasantly. “I think that’s a good idea. We’ll just go in the house, won’t we, Susi? Some cold water on our faces will make us feel better.”

There were footfalls. The snuffling began to diminish, which was good. Then the coyotes began to howl again, which was bad. Brad looked over his shoulder and saw chips of moving silver light in the tangled darkness of the greenbelt. Eyes.

“We’ve got to hurry,” Cynthia said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Audrey said.

Brad thought: That’s what I’m afraid of. He turned and took hold of Jim Reed’s shoulders. He could smell, very faintly, the shampoo and aftershave the kid had used that morning. Probably he’d been thinking about the girls as he applied them. Johnny took a nervous look behind them-at those moving chips of light, Brad assumed-then moved down Jim’s body until he had one arm around the dead boy’s waist and the other supporting his butt. Audrey and Cynthia took his legs.

“Ready?” Johnny asked.

They nodded.

“On three, then. One… two… three.”

They raised the body like a quartet doing a team bench-lift. For one horrible moment Brad thought his back, having supported a shamefully large gut for the last ten years or so, was going to lock up on him. Then they had Jim’s body up to the top of the fence. The dead boy’s arms hung out to either side, the posture of a circus acrobat inviting applause at the climax of a fabulous stunt. His open palms were full of moonlight.

Beside Brad, Johnny sounded on the verge of cardiac arrest. Jim’s head lolled limply backward on his neck. A drop of half-congealed blood fell and struck Brad’s cheek. It made him think of mint jelly, for some mad reason, and his stomach clenched like a hand in a slick glove.

“Help us!” Cynthia gasped. “For Christ’s sake, someone-

Hands appeared, hovered above the blunt fence-stakes for a moment, then broke apart into fingers which grasped Jim’s shirt and the waistband of his shorts. Just as Brad knew he couldn’t hold the body another second (never until now had he really understood the concept of dead weight), it was pulled away from him. There was a meaty thud, and from a little distance away (the Carvers” back porch was Brad’s guess), Susi Geller voiced another brief scream.

Johnny looked at him, and Brad was almost convinced the man was smiling. “Sounds like they dropped him,” Johnny said in a low voice. He wiped an arm across his sweaty face, then lowered it. The smile-if it had been there in the first place-was gone.

“Whoops,” Brad said.

“Yeah. Whoops-a-fuckin-daisy.”

“Hey, Doc!” Cynthia cried in a low voice. “Catch! Don’t worry, safety’s on!” She lifted the.30-.06, stock first, standing on her toes in order to tip it over the fence.

“Got it,” Billingsley said. Then, in a lower voice: “That woman and her idiot daughter finally went in the house.”

Cynthia climbed the fence and swung easily over the top. Audrey needed a push and a hand on her hip for balance, and then she was over, as well. Steve went next, using Brad’s and Johnny’s interlaced hands as a stirrup and then sitting up top a moment, waiting for the pain in his clawed shoulders to subside a little. When it had, he swung over the fence to the Carvers” side and pushed off, jumping rather than trying to let himself down.

“I can’t get over there,” Johnny said. “No way. If there was a ladder in the garage-”

Wh-wh-WHOOOOO!…Wh-wh-WHOOOOOOO!

From almost directly behind them. The two men jumped into each other’s arms as unselfconsciously as small children. Brad turned his head and saw shapes closing in. Each was hulked up behind a pair of those glinting semi-circular moonchips.

“Cynthia!” Johnny shouted. “Shoot the gun!”

When her voice came back it sounded scared and uncertain. “You mean come back over the-” “No! No! Just shoot it into the sky!” She triggered the.30-.06 twice, the blasts whipcracking the air. The bitter tang of gunsmoke seeped through the fence-stakes. The shapes coming toward them through the greenbelt paused. Didn’t draw back, but at least paused.

“You still pooped, John?” Brad asked softly.

Johnny was looking back at the shapes in the shadows. There was a strange, shaky smile on his mouth. “Nah,” he said. “Got my second wind. I… what do you think you’re doing?”

What’s it look like?” Brad asked. He was down on his hands and knees at the base of the fence. “Hurry up, Daddy-O.”

Johnny stepped on to his back. “Jesus,” he said, “I feel like the President of South Africa.”

Brad didn’t seem to understand at first. When he did, he began giggling. His back hurt like hell, Johnny Marinville seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds, the man’s heels felt as if they were leaving divots in Brad’s outraged spine, but the giggles poured out of him just the same; he couldn’t help it. Here was a white American intellectual with a prep school education of excruciating correctness-a writer who had once partied with the Panthers at

Lenny Bernstein’s pad-using a black man as a footstool. If it wasn’t a liberal’s idea of hell, Brad had never heard of one. He thought of moaning and crying, “Hurry up, massa, you killin dis po boy!” and his giggles became outright laughter. He was terrified of losing a section of his tender upturned ass to one of the slinkers back there in the woods, but he laughed anyway. I’ll give him a chorus of “Old Black Joe”, he thought, and howled like a coyote himself. Tears poured from his eyes. He pounded his fist on the ground.

“Brad, what’s wrong?” Johnny whispered from above him.

“Never mind!” he said, still giggling. “Just get off my back! Holy shit, what you got on those shoes? Cleats?”

Then, blessedly, the weight was gone. There were grunting sounds as Johnny struggled to get his leg over the fence. Brad got up, rode through a scary moment when his back again seemed about to lock, then got one meaty shoulder planted under Johnny’s ass. A moment later he could hear another grunt of effort and a muffled cry from Johnny as he came down.

Which left him, all alone and with no footstool.

Brad eyed the top of the fence and thought it looked about ninety feet high. Then he glanced behind him and saw the shapes on the move again, tightening around him in a collapsing crescent.

He seized two of the stakes, and as he did, something snarled behind him. Underbrush rattled. He looked back over his shoulder and saw a creature that looked more like a wild boar than a coyote… except what it really looked like was a badly made child’s drawing, nothing more than a hurried scribble, really, that had somehow come to life. Its legs were all of different lengths and ended in blunt clubs unlike either paws or fingers. Its tail seemed to jut up from the middle of its back. Its eyes were blank silver circles. Its nose was a pig-pug. Only its teeth seemed really real, huge croggled things which spouted from either side of the beast’s mouth.

Adrenaline hit Brad’s nervous system like something shot from one of Old Doc’s horse syringes. He forgot all about his back and yanked himself upward, tucking his knees between his chest and the fence when he heard the thing charge. It hit just below his feet, hard enough to shake the whole fence. Then Johnny had one of his wrists and Dave Reed had the other and Brad scrabbled to the top of the fence, leaving generous amounts of skin behind. He tried to get his left leg over the top and thumped the ankle on one of the blunt stakes instead. Then he was falling, tearing his shirt all the way down one side in his useless struggle to hold on to the top of the fence with his right hand. He let go in time to keep from breaking his arm, but when he landed (partly on top of Johnny, mostly on top of his admirably padded wife), he could feel blood trickling down from his armpit.

“Want to think about getting off me, handsome?” the admirably padded lady herself asked, sounding breathless. “I mean, if it wouldn’t discommode you any?”

Brad crawled off them both, collapsed in a heap, then rolled over on his back. He looked up at alien stars, swollen things that blinked on and off like the Christmas lights they strung over small-town Main Streets every year on the day after Thanksgiving. What he was looking at were no more real stars than he was the King of Prussia… but they were up there, just the same. Yes they were, right over his head, and how bad was your situation when the sky itself was part of the damned conspiracy?

Brad closed his eyes so he wouldn’t look at them anymore. In his mind’s eye-the one that opened widest when the other two closed-he saw Gary Ripton tossing him his Shopper. Saw his own hand, the one not holding the hose, go up and catch it. Good one, Mr Josephson! Gary called, honestly admiring. It came from far away, that voice, like something echoing down a canyon. Closer by, he heard howls from the greenbelt side of the fence (except now it was the desertbelt). These were followed by a series of hard thuds as the boar-coyotes threw themselves at it.

Christ.

“Brad,” Johnny said. Low voice, leaning over him, from the sound.

“What.”

“You all right?”

“Fine as paint.” Still not opening his eyes.

“Brad.”

“What!”

“I had an idea. For a movie.”

“You’re a maniac, John.” Eyes still shut. Things were better that way. “But I’ll bite. What’s it going to be called, this movie I can be in?”

“Black Men Can’t Climb Fences,” Johnny said, and began laughing wildly. It had an exhausted, half-crazy sound to it. I’m gonna get Mario Fucking Van Peebles to direct. Larry Fishburne’s gonna play you.”

“Sure,” Brad said, sitting up painfully. “I love Larry Fishburne. Very intense. Offer him a million up front. Who could resist?”

“Right, right,” Johnny agreed, now laughing so hard he could barely talk… only tears were streaming down his face, and Brad didn’t think they were tears of laughter. Not ten minutes ago, Cammie Reed had come within a hair of blowing his head off, and Brad doubted if Johnny had forgotten that. Brad doubted if Johnny forgot much of anything, in fact. It was probably a talent he would have traded, if given the opportunity.

Brad got on his feet, took Bee’s hand, and helped her up. There were more thuds at the fence, more howls, then gnawing sounds, as if the hungry abortions over there were trying to eat their way through the stakes.

“So what do you think?” Johnny asked, letting Brad help him up as well. He staggered, found his balance, wiped his streaming eyes.

“I think that when the chips were down, I climbed just fine,” Brad said. He slipped an arm around his wife, then looked at Johnny. “Come on, honky. You climbed to success over your first black man, you must be all tuckered out. Let’s get in the house.”

The thing which hopped unsteadily through the gate at the rear of Tom Billingsley’s backyard was a child’s version of the gila monster Jeb Murdock blows off a rock during his shooting contest with Candy about halfway through The Regulators. Its head, however, was that of an escapee from Jurassic Park.

It hopped up the back steps, slithered to the screen, and pushed at it with its snout. Nothing happened; the screen opened outward. The gila stretched its saurian head forward and began chomping at the bottom panel of the door with its teeth. Three bites was all it took, and then it was in Old Doc’s kitchen.

Gary Soderson became distantly aware of a rotten breeze blowing into his face. He tried to wave it away, but it only grew stronger. He raised one hand, touched something that felt like an alligator shoe-a very large alligator shoe-and opened his eyes. What he saw leaning over him at kissing distance, staring at him with a curiosity which was almost human, was so grotesque that he could not even scream. The lizard-thing’s eyes were bright orange.

Here it is, Gary thought, my first major attack of the dt’s. Ahoy, mateys, A.A. dead ahead.

He closed his eyes. He tried to tell himself that he didn’t smell swamp-breath or hear the toneless clickety-click of a tail dragging across kitchen linoleum. He held his dead wife’s cold hand. He said, “Nothing there. Nothing there. Noth-”

Before he could finish the third repetition (and everyone knows the third time’s the charm), the monster had plunged its teeth into his throat and torn it open.

Johnny saw small feet through the open pantry door and looked in. Ellie and Ralphie were lying in there on what looked like a futon, holding each other. They were fast asleep, gunshots from out back notwithstanding, but even in slumber they had not entirely escaped what was happening; their faces were white and strained, their breathing had a watery sound that made him think of stifled sobs, and Ralphie’s feet twitched, as if he dreamed of running.

Johnny guessed that Ellen must have found the futon and brought it into the pantry for herself and her little brother to lie on; certainly Kim Geller hadn’t done it. Kim and her daughter had resumed their former places by the wall, only now sitting in kitchen chairs instead of on the floor.

“Is Jim really dead?” Susi asked, looking at Johnny with wet, shiny eyes as Johnny came in behind Brad and Belinda. “I just can’t believe it, we were playing Frisbee like we always do, and we were going out to the movies tonight-”

Johnny was completely out of patience with her. “Why don’t you go out on the back porch and have a look for yourself?”

“Why are you being such a bastard?” Kim asked angrily. “My daughter may never get over serious trauma like this. She’s had a profound shock!”

“She’s not the only one,” Johnny said. “And while we’re at it-”

“Quit it, man, we don’t need to get fighting,” Steve Ames said.

Undoubtedly true, but Johnny no longer cared. He pointed a finger at Kim, who stared back at him along its length with hot, resentful eyes. “And while we’re at it, the next time you call Belinda Josephson a black bitch, I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.”

“Oh, gosh, don’t you think your shit comes out smoking,” Kim said, and rolled her eyes theatrically.

“Stop it, John,” Belinda said, and took his arm. “Right now. We’ve got more important things to-”

“Fat black bitch,” Kim Geller said. She didn’t look at Belinda as she said it but at Johnny. Her eyes were still burning, but now she was smiling. He thought it was the most poisonous smile he had ever seen in his life. “Fat black nigger bitch.” That said, she pointed her own finger at her mouth and visible teeth, like a woman trying to get suicide across in a game of charades. Her daughter was looking at her with a stunned expression. “Okay? Did you hear it? So come on. Knock my teeth down my throat. Let’s see you try.”

Johnny started forward, meaning to do just that. Brad grabbed one of his arms. Steve grabbed the other one.

“Get out of here, you idiot,” Old Doc said. His voice was harsh and dry. It got through to Kim, somehow, and she gave him a startled, considering look. “Get out of here right now.”

Kim rose from her chair, pulling Susi out of hers. For a moment it seemed they would go into the living room together, but then Susi pulled away. Kim reached for her, but Susi continued to back off.

What do you think you’re doing?” Kim asked. “We’re going into the living room! We’re going to get away from these-”

“Not me,” Susi said, shaking her head quickly. Tou, maybe. Not me. Uh-uh.”

Kim stared at her, then looked back at Johnny. Her face was sick with a kind of hateful confusion.

“Get out of here, Kim,” Johnny said. He could still see himself driving his fist into her mouth, but the madness was passing and his voice was almost steady. “You’re not yourself.”

“Susi? You get over here. We’re going away from these hateful people.”

Susi turned her back on her mother, trembling all over. Johnny supposed this did not change his opinion of the girl as a shallow, flighty creature… but she seemed a link or two up the food-chain from her mother, at least.

Slowly, like a rusty robot, Dave Reed raised his arms and put them around her. Cammie seemed about to object to this, then subsided.

“All right,” Kim said. Her voice was clear and composed again, the voice of someone giving a speech in a dream. “When you want me, I’ll be in the living room.” Her eyes switched to Johnny, whom she seemed to have identified as the source of all her misery. “And you-”

“Stop it,” Audrey said harshly. Startled, they all turned to look at her, except for Kim, who slipped off into the darkness of the living room. We have no time for this shit. We might have a chance to get out of this-a small one-but if you fools stand around squabbling, all we’re going to do is die.”

“Who’re you, ma’am?” Steve asked.

“Audrey Wyler.” She was tall, her legs long and coltish and not unsexy below her blue shorts, but her face was pale and haggard. That face made Johnny think of the way the Carver kids looked as they lay sleeping in each other’s arms, and suddenly he found himself trying to remember when he’d last seen Audrey, passed the time of day with her. He couldn’t. It was as if she had dropped out of the casual, back-and-forth life of the street entirely.

Little bitty baby Smitty, he thought suddenly, I seen you bite your mommy’s titty. Then he thought of the vans that had been on the floor of the Wyler den the afternoon he’d spent some time watching Bonanza with Seth. And once he had that, a kind of landslide started in his head. Outlaws that looked like movie stars. Major Pike, a good nailien gone bad. The Western scenery. That most of all. He loves the old Westerns, Audrey had said that day. She’d picked up a few of his toys as she spoke, doing it the way people do stuff when they’re nervous. Bonanza and The Rifleman are his favorites, but anything they’ll bring back on the cable, he’ll watch. If it has horses in it, that is.

“It’s your nephew, Audrey. Isn’t it? It’s Seth doing this.” “No.” She raised a hand and wiped her eyes with it. “Not Seth.

What’s inside Seth.”

I’ll tell you what I can, but there’s not much time. The Power Wagons will be back before long.”

“Who’s inside them?” Old Doc asked. “Do you know, Aud?”

“Regulators. Outlaws. Sci-fi policemen. And this place where we are is partly the Old West as it exists on TV and partly a place called the Force Corridor, which only exists in a TV-cartoon version of the twenty-third century.” She took a deep breath and ran her hands through her hair. “I don’t know everything, but-”

“Take us through as much as you can,” Johnny said.

She looked at her watch and made a sour face. “Stopped.”

“Mine, too,” Steve said. “Everybody’s, I imagine.”

“I think there’s time,” Audrey said. Which is to say, I think it’s too early for any… any movement just yet.” She laughed suddenly, startling Johnny. Startling all of them, from the look. It wasn’t the hysterical undertone so much as the genuine merriness on top. She saw their stares and brought herself under control. “Sorry-it’s a kind of pun. No reason you should understand. Yet, anyway. We have to wait. If he brings the regulators back in the meantime, we’ll have to just… endure them, I suppose.”

“Are they getting stronger?” Cammie asked suddenly. “These regulators, are they getting more powerful?”

“Yes,” Audrey said. “And if the thing doing this caught the energy from the people who died out there in the woods, the next run will be the worst yet. I pray that didn’t happen, but I think it probably did.”

She looked around at them, drew in a deep breath, and began.

“The thing inside Seth is named Tak.”

“Is it a demon, Aud?” Old Doc asked. “Some kind of demon?”

“No. It has no… no religion, I suppose you’d say. Unless TV counts. It’s more like a tumor, I think. One that’s conscious and enjoys cruelty and violence. It’s been inside him for almost two years now. I heard a story once about a Vermont woman who found a black widow spider in her sink. It apparently came into the house in an empty box her husband brought home from the supermarket where he worked. The box had been full of bananas from South America. The spider had gotten in with them when they were packed. That’s pretty much how Tak got to Poplar Street, I think. Except we’re talking about a black widow with a voice. It called Seth when he and his family were crossing the desert. Crossing Nevada. It sensed him, someone it could use, passing close by, and called him.”

She looked down at her hands, which were knotted tightly together in her lap. Kim Geller was standing in the living-room doorway now, drawn back by Audrey’s story. Audrey looked up again. She spoke to them all, but it was Johnny her eyes kept returning to.

“I think it was weak at first, but not too weak to understand that Seth’s family posed a threat to it. I don’t know how much they knew or suspected, but I do know that my last phone conversation with my brother was very strange. I think Bill could have told me a lot… if Tak had let him.”

“It can do that?” Steve asked. “Impose control over people like that?”

She gestured at her swollen mouth. “My hand did this,” she said, “but I wasn’t running it.”

“Christ,” Cynthia said. She looked nervously at the knives hanging on their magnetized steel runners over the kitchen counter. “That’s bad. Very.”

“It could be worse, though,” Audrey said. “Tak can only physically control at short range.”

“How short?” Cammie asked.

“Usually no more than twenty or thirty feet. Beyond that, its physical influence runs out in a hurry. Usually. Now, all bets are off. Because it’s never been so loaded with energy.”

“Let her tell her story,” Johnny said. He could feel time almost as a tangible thing, slipping away from them. He didn’t know if he was getting that from Audrey or if it was coming from inside himself, and he didn’t care. Time was short. He had never felt an intuition so strongly in his whole life. Time was short.

“There’s a boy still in there,” she said, speaking slowly and with great emphasis. “A sweet, special child named Seth Garin. And the most despicable thing is that Tak has used what the child loves to do its killing. In the case of my brother and his family, it was Tracker Arrow, one of the MotoKops” Power Wagons. They were in California, at the end of the trip that took them through Nevada, when it happened. I don’t know where Tak got enough energy to summon Tracker Arrow out of Seth’s thoughts and dreams at that stage of its development. Seth is its basic power-supply, but Seth isn’t enough. It needs more in order to really crank up.”

“It’s a vampire, isn’t it?” Johnny said. “Only what it draws off is psychic energy instead of blood.”

She nodded. “And the energy it uses is most abundantly available when someone is in pain. In the case of Bill and the rest of his family, maybe someone in the neighborhood died or was hurt. Or-”

“Or maybe there was someone it could hurt itself,” Steve said. “A handy bum, for instance. Just some old wino pushing a shopping cart. Whoever it was, I bet he died with a smile on his face.”

Audrey looked at him, her face sad and sickened. “You know.”

“Not much, but what I know fits what you’re saying,” Steve told her. “There’s a guy like that back there.” He hooked a thumb in the general direction of the greenbelt. “Entragian recognized him. Said he’d been on the street two or three times before since the start of the summer. He got in your nephew’s hooking range, didn’t he? How?”

“I don’t know,” she said dully. “I must have been away.”

“Where?” Cynthia asked. She’d had the idea that Mrs Wyler was sort of a recluse.

“Never mind,” Audrey said. “Just a place I go. You wouldn’t understand. The point is, Tak killed my brother Bill and the rest of his family. And it used one of the Power Wagons to do it.”

“Maybe he could only manage one lonely trombone then, but he’s got the whole band playing now, doesn’t he?” Johnny asked.

Audrey was looking away from them now, nibbling at lips that looked dry and sore. “Herb and I took him in, and in some ways-in many ways, actually-I was never sorry. We could never have children ourselves. He was a loving boy, a sweetheart of a boy-”

“Somebody probably loved Typhoid Mary, too,” Cammie Reed said in a dry, rasping voice.

Audrey looked at her, still biting at her lips, then looked back at Johnny, appealing with her eyes for understanding. He didn’t want to understand, not after all that had happened, especially not after seeing the terrible distortion in Jim Reed’s face as the bullet slammed into his brain, but he thought maybe he did a little, anyway. Like it or not.

“The first six months or so were the best. Although even then we knew something was wrong, of course.”

“Did you take him to the doctor?” Johnny asked.

“It wouldn’t have done any good. Tak would have hidden. The tests would have shown nothing, I’m almost sure of it. And then… later… when we got home…”

Johnny studied her swollen mouth and said, Tt would have punished you.”

“Yes. Me and-” Her voice thickened, broke, resumed as little more than a whisper. “Me and Herb.”

“Herb didn’t kill himself, did he?” Tom asked. “This Tak-thing murdered him.”

She nodded again. “Herb wanted us to get away from it. Tak sensed that. And it found it couldn’t use Herb for… for something it wanted to do. To have sex… experience sex… with me. Herb wouldn’t let it. That made Tak angry.”

“My God,” Brad said.

“It killed Herb and replenished itself. After that, Seth was its only hostage… but Seth was all it needed to keep me in line.”

“Because you love him,” Johnny said.

“Yes, that’s right, because I love him.” It wasn’t defiance Johnny heard in her voice but a weird and awful shame. Cynthia handed her a paper towel, but Audrey only held it in her hand, as if she had no idea what to use it for. “So in a way, I suppose my love’s responsible for all that’s happened. It’s terrible, but it’s probably true.” She turned her streaming eyes toward

Cammie Reed, who sat on the floor with her arm around her remaining son. “I never believed it would come to this. You have to believe that. Even after it drove the Hobarts away and killed Herb, I had no idea of its powers. What its powers could be.”

Cammie looked at her, saying nothing and giving nothing out of her stone of a face.

“Since Herb died, Seth and I have lived a quiet life,” Audrey said. Johnny thought this was the first outright lie she had told them, although she had perhaps skirted the truth a time or two on her way to it. “Seth’s eight, but school’s not a problem. I fulfil certain home-education requirements and send in a form once a month to the Ohio Board of Education. It’s a joke, really. Seth watches his movies and his TV shows over and over. That’s his real education.

He plays in the sandbox. He eats-hamburgers and Franco-American spaghetti, mostly-and drinks all the chocolate milk I’ll make him. Mostly it was Seth.” She looked at them pleadingly. “Mostly it was. Except… all that time… Tak was inside. Growing. Pushing its roots deeper and deeper. Invading him.”

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

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

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

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

“Or your neck,” Belinda said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audrey was nodding, too. “Yes, that sounds right. Like how the characters from The

Regulators, both good and bad, have always gotten along with the MotoKops in Seth’s sandbox play-fantasies. In his fantasies, even Sheriff Streeter and Jeb Murdock get along, although they’re deadly enemies in the movie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence in the room.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The humming swelled.

“Pray,” Belinda said suddenly. “Everybody pray.”

Johnny was too frightened to pray.

From Audrey Wyler’s journal February 7, 1996

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

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

Must stop now. Crying again.