The Regulators

Chapter Five

Standing bare-chested at the bathroom mirror that afternoon before the world dropped into hell like a bucket on a broken string, Collie Entragian had made three large resolutions. The first was to quit going around unshaven on weekdays. The second was to quit drinking, at least until he got his life back on an even keel-he was doing far too much boozing, enough to make him uneasy, and it had to stop. The third was to stop procrastinating about looking for a job. There were three good security firms in the Columbus area, people he knew worked for two of them, and it was time to get cracking. He hadn’t died, after all; it was time to quit yowling and get on with his life.

Now, as the Hobart house burned like merry hell down the street and the two bizarre vans approached, all he cared about was holding on to that life. Mostly it was the black vehicle creeping along behind the pink one that galvanized him, that engaged every instinct to immediately relocate, possibly to Outer Mongolia. He didn’t catch more than a rain-blurred glimpse of the figures in the black van’s turret, but the van itself was enough. It looked like a hearse in a science-fiction movie, he thought.

“Inside!” he heard himself screaming-some part of him apparently still wanted to be in charge. “Everybody inside now!”

At that point he lost track of the people clustered around the late postman and his keening, shrieking wife-Mrs Geller, Susi, Susi’s friend, the Josephsons, Mrs Reed. Marinville, the writer, was a little closer, but Collie lost track of him, too. His focus shrank to the ones in front of Old Doc’s bungalow: Peter Jackson, the Sodersons, the store-clerk, the longhair from the Ryder truck, and Old Doc himself, who had retired from veterinary practice the year before with absolutely no clue that something like this was waiting for him.

“Go!” Collie screamed into Gary’s wet, gaping, half-drunk face. In that moment he wanted to kill the man, just haul off and kill him, set him on fire or something. “Go in the fucking HOUSE!” Behind him he could hear Marinville screaming the same thing, although it was presumably the Carvers” house he had in mind.

“What-” Marielle began, stepping to her husband’s side, then she looked past Gary and her eyes widened. Her splay-fingered hands rose to the sides of her face, her mouth dropped open and for one mad moment Collie expected her to drop to her knees and start singing “Mammy” like Al Jolson. She screamed instead. And as if that had been all their attackers had been waiting for, the gunfire began-harsh, compact explosions that no one could have mistaken for thunder.

The hippie guy grabbed Peter Jackson by Peter’s right wrist and tried to haul him away from his dead wife. Peter didn’t want to let go of her. He was still howling, and seemed completely unaware of what was happening around him. There was a KA-POW, as deafening as dynamite, followed by the sound of shattering glass. A KA-BAM, even louder, followed by a shriek of either fear or pain. Collie’s dough was on fear… this time, at least. A third report, and Billingsley’s ceramic German Shepherd disappeared from the forelegs up. Old Doc’s inner front door stood open behind a screen with a scrolly, ornamental B in the middle of it. That dark rectangular hole-an opening which might lead to a cave of safety-looked a thousand miles away.

Collie ran for Peter first, with no thought of bravery so much as crossing his mind; it was just where he went first. Another deafening report, and he was tightening his back and buttocks against a potentially lethal hit even while his mind was informing him that one, at least, was thunder. The next one wasn’t. It was another whiplash KA-POW, and he felt something slap a groove in the air past his right ear.

First time shot at, he thought. Nine years as a cop before they stuck it to me and broke it off-four beat, four plainclothes, one IA-and never shot at until now.

Another report. One of Billingsley’s living-room windows blew in, billowing the white curtains like ghost-arms. Guns going off behind him like artillery now, just bam-bam-bam-bam, and he felt another hot load go hustling by, this one to the left of his head, and a black hole appeared in the siding below the broken window. To Collie the hole looked like a big startled eye. The next one hummed by his hip. He couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead, just couldn’t believe it. He could smell burning cedar shingles and had time to think about October afternoons spent in the backyard with his dad, burning leaves in smouldery aromatic piles.

He had been running for hours, he felt like a goddam ceramic duck in a goddam shooting gallery, and he hadn’t even reached Peter Jackson yet, what the fuck was going on here?

It’s been five seconds since the shooting started, the colder side of his mind informed him. Maybe only three.

The hippie guy was still yanking Peter’s wrist, and now the girl, Cynthia, muckled on above the hippie guy’s grip. But Peter was actively resisting them, Collie saw. Peter wanted to stay with his wife, who had chosen a divinely bad time to arrive back home.

Still picking up speed (and he could boogie pretty good when he really wanted to), Collie bent and hooked a hand under the kneeling man’s left armpit on the way by. Just call me the mail train, he thought. Peter thrashed backward, trying to stop the three of them from pulling him away from his wife. Collie’s hand began to slip. Oh fuck, he thought. Fuck us all. Sideways.

There was another shriek from behind him, at the Carvers”. In the corner of his eye he saw the pink van, now past them and speeding up, accelerating down the hill toward Hyacinth Street.

“Mary!” Peter screamed. “She’s hurt!”

“I got her, Pete, don’t worry, I got her!” Old Doc screamed cheerfully, and although he had no one-was, in fact, running past Mary’s sprawled body without so much as a glance down at it-Peter nodded, looking relieved. It was the tone, Collie thought. That crazily cheerful tone of voice.

The hippie guy was actually helping now instead of just trying to. He had Peter by the belt, for one thing, and that was working better. “Help out, fella,” the hippie guy told Peter. “Just a little.”

Peter ignored him. He stared at Collie with huge, glazed eyes. “He’s getting her, right? Old Doc. He’s helping her.”

“That’s right!” Collie shouted. He tried for Doc’s tone of good cheer-a kind of sprinting bedside manner-and heard only terror. The pink van was gone but the black one was still there, rolling slowly, almost stopped. There were figures-too bright, almost fluorescent-in the turret. “Billingsley-”

Marielle Soderson bashed past him on the left, almost knocking Collie flat in her sprint toward Old Doc’s front door. Gary blew by on the right, hitting the store-girl with his shoulder and knocking her to one knee. She cried out in pain, mouth pulling down in a bow-shape as something-probably her ankle-twisted. Gary did not so much as spare her a glance; his eyes were on the prize. The girl was up again in a flash. The pain-grimace was still on her face but she was holding gamely to Peter’s arm, still trying to help out. Collie was gaining an appreciation for her, schizo tu-tone hair or not.

Onward sprinted the Sodersons. It had taken them a moment or two to get the general idea, but it had certainly clicked for them now, Collie saw.

There was another report. The longhair shouted in surprise and pain, grabbing at his right leg. Collie saw blood, amazingly bright in the gray gloom of the storm, seeping through his fingers. The girl was staring at him, her mouth open, her eyes wide.

“I’m okay,” the hippie said, regaining his balance. “It’s just a graze. Go on, go on!”

Peter was finally finding his feet, both literally and metaphorically. “What in the fuck… is going on?” he asked Collie. He sounded drugged.

Before Collie could say anything, there was a final shot from the black van and a sound-he would have sworn it-like the whistle of an artillery shell. Marielle Soderson, who had reached the stoop (Gary had already disappeared inside, no gentleman he), screamed and staggered sideways against the door. Her left arm flew bonelessly upward. Blood splashed Doc’s aluminum siding; the rain began to wash it down the side of the house in membranes. Collie heard the store-girl scream, and felt a little like screaming himself. The slug had taken Marielle in the shoulder and torn her left arm almost entirely off her body. It flopped back down and dangled precariously from a glistening knot of flesh with a mole on it. It was the mole-a flaw Gary might have lovingly kissed in his younger, less pickled days-that made it somehow real. She stood in the doorway, shrieking, her left arm hanging beside her like a door which has been ripped off two of its three hinges. And behind her, the black van now also accelerated down the hill, the turret sliding closed as it went. It disappeared into the rain and the billowing smoke from the empty Hobart house, where the roof was now sharing its gift of fire with the walls.

She had a place to go.

Sometimes that seemed like a blessing, sometimes (because it extended things, kept the hellish game going) like a curse, but either way, it was the only reason she was still herself, at least some of the time; the only reason she hadn’t been eaten alive from the inside out. The way Herb had been. In the end, though, Herb had been able to find himself one more time. Had been able to hold on to himself long enough to go out to the garage and put a bullet in his brain.

Or so she wanted to believe.

Sometimes, however, she believed otherwise. Sometimes she would think of the endless evenings before the gunshot from the garage and she would see Seth in his chair, the one with the horse-and-rider de cals she and Herb had put on when they came to realize just how much the boy loved “Wessurns”. Seth just sitting there, ignoring whatever was on TV (unless it was an oat-opera or a space-show, that was), looking at Herb with his horrible mud-brown eyes, the eyes of a creature that has lived its whole life in a swamp. Sitting there in the chair which his aunt and uncle had decorated so lovingly back in the early days, before the nightmare had started. Before they’d known it had started, at least. Sitting there and looking at Herb, hardly ever at her, at least not then. Looking at him. Thinking at him. Sucking him dry, like a vampire in a horror film. And that was what the thing inside Seth really was, wasn’t it? A vampire. And their lives here together on Poplar Street, that was the film. Poplar Street, for God’s sake, where there was probably still at least one Carpenters album in every home. Nice neighbors, the kind of folks that drop everything when they hear on the radio that the Red Cross is getting low on O, and none of them knew that Audrey Wyler, the quiet widow who lived between the Sodersons and the Reeds, was now starring in her own Hammer film.

On good days she would think that Herb, whose sense of humor had served as both a shield and a goad to the thing inside of Seth, had held on long enough to escape. On bad ones she knew that was bullshit, that Seth had simply used all of Herb there was to use and had then sent him out to the garage with a self-destruct program flashing away in his head like a neon Schlitz sign in a taproom window.

It wasn’t Seth, though, not really; not the Seth who had sometimes (in the early days) hugged them and given them brief open-mouthed kisses that felt like bursting soap-bubbles. “I “owboy,” he would occasionally say while sitting in the special chair, words rising out of his usual unintelligible babble and making them feel, however fleetingly, that they were getting somewhere: I’m a cowboy. That Seth had been sweet; lovable not just in spite of his autism but partly because of it. That Seth had also been a medium, however, like contaminated blood which simultaneously nourishes a virus and transports it.

The virus-the vampire-was Tak. A little gift from the Great American Desert. According to Bill, the Garin family had never turned back to Desperation, had never stopped to investigate what was behind the bulwark of earth they had seen from the road, the bulwark that had excited Seth enough for him to briefly transcend his usual gabble and speak in clear English. We really couldn’t do that, Aud, Bill had said. I wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City by dark. But Bill had lied. She knew because of a letter she’d gotten from a man named Allen Symes.

Symes, a geologist-engineer for something called the Deep Earth Mining Corporation, had seen the Garin family on July 24th of 1994, the same day Audrey’s brother had sent her the exuberant postcard. Symes had assured her that nothing very interesting had happened, that he had simply taken the Garins to the edge of the open-pit mine (actually going in would have been against MSHA regulations, his letter said) and given them a little history lecture before sending them on their way again. It was a good story, both boring and plausible. Audrey wouldn’t have questioned a word of it under ordinary circumstances, but she knew something Mr Allen Symes of Desperation, Nevada, had not: that Bill had denied stopping at all. Bill said they had simply hurried on their merry way, because he wanted to be sure of getting to Carson City by dark. And if Bill had lied, wasn’t it possible-even likely-that Symes had also lied?

Lied about what? Lied about what?

Stop, Daddy, go back, Seth want to see mountain.

Why did you lie to me, Bill?

That was a question she thought she could answer: Bill had lied because Seth had made him

lie. She thought that Seth had probably been standing right there by the phone during her conversation with Bill, watching the creature it no longer regarded as its father with mud-brown eyes that belonged under a log in some swamp. Bill had been allowed to say only what Tak wanted him to say, like a person who speaks with a gun pointed at his head. He had told his clumsy lies and laughed the unnatural cocktail-party laugh, ha-ha-ha.

The thing in Seth had eventually eaten Herb alive and now it was trying to eat her, but she was apparently different from Herb in one crucial way: she had a place to go. She had discovered it perhaps by accident, perhaps with help from Seth-the real Seth-and she could only pray that Tak would never discover what she was doing or where she was going. That the monster would never follow her to her sanctuary.

In May of 1982, when she was twenty-one and still Audrey Garin, she and her roommate (who was also her best friend, then and ever), Janice Goodlin, had spent a wonderful weekend-very likely the most perfect weekend of Audrey’s life-at Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York. The trip was a present from Jan’s father, who had won some sort of cash award from his company for selling and had been promoted two or three rungs up the corporate ladder into the bargain. If his intention had been to share some of his happiness, he had succeeded splendidly with the two young women.

On the Saturday of that magic weekend they had taken a picnic lunch (packed by the kitchen in a wonderful old-fashioned wicker hamper) and walked for hours, hunting for the perfect spot in which to settle. Usually when you’re doing that you don’t find it, but they had gotten lucky. It was a beautiful and half-wild upland meadow, rife with buttercups and daisies and wild roses. It hummed with bees; white butterflies danced on the warm air like enchanted confetti which never fell to earth. At one end of this meadow was an eccentric little cupola-shaped thing-Janice said it was called a folly, and they were spotted all over the Mohonk grounds. It was roofed to provide shade and shelter, but open on every side to provide air and view.

The two women had eaten enormously, talked prodigiously, and at three different points laughed so hard that tears ran down their faces. Audrey didn’t think she had ever laughed with quite that same heartiness since. She never forgot the long, clear summer light of that afternoon, or the dancing white shreds of the butterflies.

This was the place she returned to when Tak was fully out and fully in command of Seth. This was where she hid, with a Janice who was still Goodlin instead of Conroy, a Janice who was still young. Sometimes she would tell Janice about Seth-how he had come to stay, and how neither she nor Herb had seen or suspected (at least at first) what was inside Seth, a thing that was being very still, watching them and husbanding its strength and waiting for the right time to come out. Sometimes on these occasions she would tell Jan how much she missed Herb and how terrified she was… how she felt caught, like a fly in a web or a coyote in a leghold trap.

But that kind of talk felt dangerous, and she tried to stay away from it. Mostly she just replayed the sweet inconsequentialities of that long-ago day when Reagan had still been in his first term and there had been real vinyl records in the record stores. Stuff like whether or not Ray Soames, Jan’s current boyfriend, would be a considerate lover (pig-selfish, Jan had reported matter-of-factly three weeks later, just before bidding adieu to Ray’s sultry good looks forever), and what sorts of jobs they would have, and how many kids they would have, and who, in their circle of friends, would be the most successful.

Running through it all, large but unspoken-perhaps they hadn’t dared to speak of it, for fear of ruining it-was their joy in the day, in the unremarkable good health of young women, and their love for one another. It was these things and not her current troubles that Audrey concentrated on when she felt Tak digging into her with its unseen but exquisitely painful teeth, trying to batten on her and feed from her. It was to that day’s love and brightness that she fled, and so far it had given her succor and shelter.

So far, she was alive.

More important, so far she was still she.

In the meadow, the confusion and darkness melted away and everything stood clear: the splintery gray poles which held up the folly’s roof, each casting its thin precise shadow; the table (equally splintered) at which they sat on opposing wooden benches, a table that was deeply carved with initials, mostly those of lovers; the picnic basket, now set aside on the board floor, still open but really finished for the day, the utensils and plastic food-containers neatly packed for the trip back to the hotel. She could see the golden highlights in Jan’s hair, and a loose thread on the left shoulder of her blouse. She heard every cry of every bird.

Only one thing was different from the way it had really been. On the table where the picnic hamper had rested until they had repacked it and set it aside, there was a red plastic telephone. Audrey had had one exactly like it at the age of five, using it to hold long and deliriously nonsensical chats with an invisible playmate named Melissa Sweetheart.

On some visits to the folly in the meadow, the word PLAYSKOOL was stamped on the phone’s handset. At other times (usually on days that had been particularly horrible, and there were a lot more of those lately), she would see a shorter and much more ominous word stamped there: the name of the vampire.

It was the Tak-phone, and it never rang. At least not yet. Audrey had an idea that if it ever did, it would be because Tak had found her safe and secret place. If it did, she was sure it would be the end of her. She might go on breathing and eating for a little while, as Herb had, but it would be the end of her, nevertheless.

She occasionally tried to make the Tak-phone disappear. It had occurred to her that if she could dispose of it, get rid of the damned thing, she could perhaps escape the creature on the Poplar Street end of her life for good. Yet she couldn’t alter the phone’s reality, no matter how hard she tried. It did disappear sometimes, but never while she was looking at it or thinking about it. She would be looking into Jan’s laughing face instead (Jan talking about how she sometimes wanted to leap into Ray Soames’s arms and suck his face off, and how sometimes-like when she caught him furtively picking his nose-she wished he would just crawl off into a corner and die), and then she would look back at the table and see that the surface was bare, the little red phone gone. That meant Tak was gone, at least for a while, that he was sleeping (dozing, at least) or had withdrawn. On many of these occasions she came back to find Seth perched on the toilet, looking at her with eyes that were dazed and strange but at least recognizably human. Tak apparently didn’t like to be around when its host moved his bowels. It was, in Audrey’s view, a strange and almost existential fastidiousness in such a relentlessly cruel creature.

She looked down now and saw the phone was gone.

She stood up, and Jan-that young Jan, still with both breasts intact-stopped her chatter at once and looked at Audrey with sad eyes. “So soon?”

“I’m sorry,” Audrey said, although she had no idea if it was soon or late. She’d know when she got back and looked at a clock, but while she was here, the whole concept of clocks seemed ridiculous. The meadow which lay upland of Mohonk in May of 1982 was a no-clock zone, blessedly tickless.

“Maybe someday you’ll be able to get rid of that damned phone for good and stay,” Jan said.

“Maybe. That would be nice.”

But would it? Would it really? She didn’t know. And in the meantime, she had a little boy to take care of. And something else: she wasn’t quite ready to give up yet, which was what coming to live permanently in May of 1982 would mean. And who knew how she would feel about the upland meadow if she could never leave it? Under those circumstances, her haven might become her hell.

Yet things were changing, and not for the better. For one thing Tak wasn’t weakening, as she had perhaps foolishly hoped it would with the passage of time; Tak was, if anything, getting stronger. The TV ran constantly, broadcasting the same tapes and recycled series programs (Bonanza, The Rifleman… and MotoKops 2200, of course) over and over. The people on the shows had all begun to sound like lunatic demagogues to her, cruel voices exhorting a restless mob to some unspeakable action. Something was going to happen, and soon. She was almost sure of it. Tak was planning something… if it could be said to plan, or even to think at all. Perhaps change was too mild a word. It felt like things were going to turn upside down and inside out, the way they did in an earthquake. And if they did, when they did-

“Escape,” Jan said, and her eyes flashed. “Stop thinking about it and do it, Aud. Open the front door while Seth’s sleeping or shitting and run like hell. Get out of the house. Get the fuck away from that thing.”

It was the first time Janice had ever presumed to give her advice, and it shocked her. She had no idea at all how to answer. “I’ll… think about it.” “Better not think long, kiddo-I’ve got a feeling you’re almost out of time.” “I ought to go.” She took another flustered glance down at the table to make sure the PlaySkool phone was still gone. It was. “Yes. All right. Bye, Aud.” Jan’s voice seemed to come from a great distance now, and she was fading like a ghost. As the colour went out of her, she began to look more like the woman who was waiting for her to catch up, a woman with one breast-Tak was an artist when it came to those-but there was a clear sexual aspect to the nipple-pinching. And there was the way she was dressed… or undressed. More and more Tak was making her take her clothes off when it was angry with her, or just bored. As if it (or Seth, or both of them) sometimes saw her as its own private gatefold version of the tough but unremittingly wholesome Cassie Styles. Hey, kids, check out the tits on your favorite MotoKop!

She had almost no insight into the relationship between the host and the parasite, and that made her situation even worse. She thought Seth was a lot more interested in buckaroos than in breasts; he was only eight, after all. But how old was the thing inside him? And what did it want? There were possibilities, things far beyond pinching, that she didn’t want to consider. Although, not long before Herb died-

No. She wouldn’t think about that.

She slipped the blouse on and did up the buttons, glancing at the clock on the mantel as she did so. Only 4.15; Jan had been right to say so soon. But the weather had certainly changed, Catskills or no Catskills. Thunder rolled, lightning flashed, and rain pelted so furiously against the living room’s picture window that it looked like smoke.

The TV was playing in the den. The movie, of course. The horrible, hateful movie. They were on their fourth copy of The Regulators. Herb had brought the first one home from The Video Clip at the mall about a month before his suicide. And that old film had been, in some way she still didn’t understand, the final piece in the puzzle, the final number in the combination. It had freed Tak in some way… or focused it, the way a magnifying lens can focus light and turn it into fire. But how could Herb have known that would happen? How could either of them have known? At that time they had barely suspected Tak’s existence. It had been working on Herb, yes, she knew that now, but it had been doing so almost as silently as a leech that battens on a person below the waterline.

“You want to try me, Sheriff?” Rory Calhoun was gritting.

Murmuring under her breath, unaware she was doing it, Audrey said, “Why don’t we just stand down? Think this thing over?”

“Why don’t we just stand down?” John Payne said from the TV. Audrey could see light from the screen nickering against the curved arch between the two rooms. “Think this thing over?”

She tiptoed to the arch, tucking the blouse into the waistband of her blue shorts (one of roughly a dozen pairs, all dark blue with white piping on the side-seams, there was certainly no shortage of blue shorts here at casa Wyler), and looked in. Seth was on the couch, naked except for a grimy pair of MotoKops Underoos. The walls, which Herb had panelled himself in first-quality finished pine, had been stippled with spikes Seth had found in Herb’s garage workshop. Many of the pine boards had split vertically. Poked on to these badly pounded nails were pictures which Seth had cut from various magazines. They were mostly of cowboys, spacemen, and-of course-MotoKops. Interspersed among them was a scattering of Seth’s own drawings, mostly landscapes done with black felt-tip pens. On the coffee table in front of him were glasses scummed with the residue of Hershey’s chocolate milk, which was all Seth/Tak would drink, and jostling plates with half-eaten meals on them. All the meals were Seth’s favor ites: Chef Boyardee spaghetti and hamburger, Chef Boyardee Noodle-O’s and hamburger, and tomato soup with big chunks of hamburger rising out of the gelling liquid like baked Pacific atolls where generations of atomic bombs had been tested.

Seth’s eyes were open but blank-both he and Tak were gone, all right, maybe recharging the batteries, maybe sleeping open-eyed like a lizard on a hot rock, maybe just digging the goddamned movie in some deep and elemental way Audrey would never be able to comprehend. Or want to. The simple truth was that she didn’t give a shit where he-it-was.

Maybe she could get a meal in peace; that was enough for her. The Regulators had about twenty minutes left to run in this, its nine billionth showing at casa Wyler, and Audrey thought she could count on at least that long. Time for a sandwich and maybe a few lines in the journal Tak might well kill her for keeping-if Tak ever found out about it, that was.

Escape. Stop thinking about it and do it, Aud.

She stopped halfway back across the living room, the salami and lettuce in the fridge temporarily forgotten. That voice was so clear that for a moment it didn’t seem to be coming from her mind at all. For one moment she was convinced that Janice had somehow followed her back from 1982, was actually in the room with her. But when she turned, wide-eyed, there was no one. Only the voices from the TV, Rory Calhoun telling John Payne that the time for talking was done, John Payne saying, “Well now, if that’s the way you want it.” Very soon Karen Steele would run between them, screaming at them to stop it, just stop it. She would be killed by a bullet from Rory Calhoun’s gun, one meant for John Payne, and then the final shootout would begin. KA-POW and KA-BAM all the way home.

No one here but her and her dead friends on the TV.

Open the front door and just run like hell.

How many times had she considered it? But there was Seth to think about; he was as much a hostage as she was, and maybe more. Autistic he might be, but he was still a human being. She didn’t like to think what Tak might do to him, if it was crossed. And Seth was still there, all of him-she knew that. Parasites feed on their hosts but don’t kill them… unless it’s on purpose. Because they’re pissed off, maybe.

She had herself to think about, too. Janice could talk about escape, just opening the door and running like hell, but what Janice perhaps didn’t understand was that if Tak caught her before she was able to get away, it would almost certainly kill her. And if she did get out of the house, how far would she have to go before she was safe? Across the street? To the bottom of the block? Terre Haute? New Hampshire? Micronesia? And even in Micronesia, she didn’t think she would be able to hide. Because there was a mental link between them. The little red PlaySkool phone-the Tak-phone-proved that.

Yes, she wanted to get away. Oh yes, so much. But sometimes the devil you knew was better than the devil you didn’t.

She started for the kitchen again, then stopped again, this time staring at the big window with its view of the street. She had thought the rain was pelting the glass hard enough to look like smoke, but actually the first fury of the storm was already passing. What she was seeing didn’t just look like smoke; it was smoke.

She hurried to the window, looked down the street, and saw that the Hobart place was burning in the rain, sending big white clouds up into the gray sky. She saw no vehicles or people around it (and the smoke itself obscured her view of the dead boy and dog), so she looked up toward Bear Street. Where were the police cars? The fire engines? She didn’t see them, but she saw enough to make her cry out softly through hands-she didn’t know how they had gotten there-that were cupped to her mouth.

A car, Mary Jackson’s, she was quite sure, was on the grass between the Jackson house and Old Doc’s place, its nose almost up against the stake fence between the two properties. The trunk-lid had popped open, and the rear end looked trashed. The car wasn’t what had made her cry out, though. Beyond it, sprawled on Doc’s lawn like a fallen piece of statuary, was a woman’s body. Audrey’s mind made a brief attempt to persuade her it was something else-a department store mannequin, perhaps, dumped for some reason on Billingsley’s lawn-then gave it up. It was a body, all right. It was Mary Jackson, and she was as dead as… well, as dead as Audrey’s own late husband.

Tak, she thought. Was it Tak? Has it been out?

You knew it’s been getting ready for something, she thought coldly. You knew that. You’ve felt it gathering its forces, always in the sandbox playing with those damned vans or in front of the TV, eating hamburger meals, drinking chocolate milk, and watching, watching, watching. You’ve felt it, like a thunderstorm building up on a hot afternoon-

Beyond the woman, at the Carvers” house, were two more bodies. David Carver, who had sometimes played poker with Herb and Herb’s friends on Thursday nights, lay on his front walk like a beached whale. There was an enormous hole in his stomach above the bathing suit he always wore when he washed the car. And, lying face-down on the Carver stoop, there was a woman in white shorts. Yards of red hair spilled out around her head in a frizzy corona. Rain glistened on her bare back.

But she’s not a woman, Audrey thought. She felt cold all over, as if her skin had been briskly rubbed with ice. That’s just a girl, probably no more than seventeen. The one who was visiting over at the Reeds” this afternoon. Before I went away to 1982 for a little while. That was Susi Geller’s friend.

Audrey glanced down the block, suddenly sure she was imagining the whole thing, and that reality would snap back into place like a released elastic as soon as she saw the Hobart place standing intact. But the Hobart place was still burning, still sending huge white clouds of cedar-fumed smoke into the air, and when she looked back up the street, she still saw bodies. The corpses of her neighbors.

“It’s started,” she whispered, and from the den behind her, like a horribly prescient curse, Rory Calhoun screamed: “We’re gonna wipe this town off the map!”

Escape! Jan screamed back, a voice inside her head instead of from the TV, but just as urgent. You’re not just about out of time, not anymore, you are out of it! Escape, Audi Escape! Run! Escape!

Okay. She’d let go of her concern for Seth and run. That might come back to haunt her later-if there was a later-but for now…

She started for the front door and was reaching for the knob when a voice spoke up from behind her. It sounded like the voice of a child, but only because it was coming to her through a child’s vocal cords. Otherwise it was toneless, loveless, hideous.

Worst of all, it was not entirely without a sense of humor.

“Hold on, there, ma’am,” Tak said, the voice of Seth Garin imitating the voice of John Payne. Why don’t we just stand down, think this thing over?”

She tried to turn the doorknob, meaning to chance it anyway-she had gone too far to turn back now. She would hurl herself out into the pelting rain and just run. Where? Anywhere.

But instead of turning the knob, her hand fell back to her side, swinging like a nearly exhausted pendulum. Then she was turning around, resisting with all her will but turning anyway, to face the thing in the archway leading into the den… and she thought, considering what spent most of its time in there, den was exactly the right word for what the room had become.

She was back from her safe place. God help her, she was back from her safe place, and the demon hiding inside her dead brother’s autistic little boy had caught her trying to escape. She felt Tak crawling inside her head, taking control, and although she saw it all and felt it all, she couldn’t even scream.

Johnny lunged past the sprawled, face-down body of Susi Geller’s redheaded friend, his head ringing from a slug which had screamed past his left ear… and it really had seemed to scream. His heart was running like a rabbit in his chest. He had moved far enough in the direction of the Carvers” house to be caught in a kind of no-man’s-land when the two vans opened fire, and knew he was extremely lucky to still be alive. For a moment there he had almost frozen, like an animal caught in a pair of oncoming headlights. Then the slug-something that had felt the size of a cemetery headstone-had gone past his ear and he had streaked for the open door of the Carver house, head down and arms pumping. Life had simplified itself amazingly. He had forgotten about Soderson and his goaty expression of half-drunk complicity, had forgotten his concern that Jackson not realize his freshly expired wife was apparently coming home from the sort of interlude about which country-western songs were written, had forgotten Entragian, Billingsley, all of them. His only thought had been that he was going to die in the no-man’s-land between the two houses, killed by psychotics who wore masks and weird outfits and shone like ghosts.

Now he was in a dark hall, just happy to realize he hadn’t wet his pants, or worse. People were screaming somewhere behind him. Mounted on the wall was a jury of Hummel figures. They had been placed on little platforms… and the Carvers had seemed so normal in other respects, he thought. He started to giggle and shoved the heel of one hand against his lips to stifle the sound. This was definitely not a giggling situation. There was a taste on his skin, just the taste of his own sweat, of course, but for a moment it seemed almost to be the taste of pussy, and he leaned forward, sure he was going to vomit. He realized he would almost certainly pass out if he did and that thought helped him to control the urge. He took his hand away from his mouth, and that helped more. He no longer felt much like laughing, either, and that was probably good.

“My daddy!” Ellen Carver was howling from behind him. Johnny tried to remember if he had ever-in Vietnam, for instance-heard such piercing, keening grief coming out of such a young throat and couldn’t. “My DADDY!”

“Hush, honey.” It was the new widow-Pie, David had always called her. Still sobbing herself but already trying to comfort. Johnny closed his eyes, trying to get away from it like that, and instead his hideous memory showed him what he had just stepped over-lunged over, really. Susi Geller’s friend. A little redheaded girl, just like in the Peanuts comic strip.

He couldn’t leave her out there. She had looked as dead as Mary and poor old Dave, but he had leaped over her like Jack over the candlestick, his ear screaming from the near miss and his balls drawn up and as hard as a couple of cherrystones, not a state in which a man could make a reasonable diagnosis.

He opened his eyes. A Hummel girl wearing a bonnet and holding a shepherd’s crook was giving him a dead china come-on. Hey, sailor, want to comb some wool with me? Johnny was leaning against the wall on his forearms. One of the other Hummel figures had fallen off its little platform and lay in shards at his feet. Johnny supposed he had knocked it off himself while he had been struggling not to puke and trying to get that awful punchline-I don’t know about the other two, but the guy in the middle looks like Willie Nelson-out of his head.

He looked slowly to his left, hearing the tendons in his neck creak, and saw the Carvers” front door still standing open. The screen was ajar; the redhead’s hand, white and still as a starfish cast up on a beach, was caught in it. Outside, the air was gray with rain. It came down with a steady hissing sound, like the world’s biggest steam iron. He could smell the grass, like some sweet wet perfume. It was spiced with a tang of cedar smoke. God bless the lightning, he thought. The burning house would bring the police and the fire engines. But for now…

The girl. A little redheaded girl, like the one Charlie Brown was so crazy for. Johnny had jumped right over her, gripped by the blind impulse to save his own ass. Understandable in the heat of the moment, but you couldn’t leave it that way. Not if you wanted to sleep at night.

He started for the door. Someone grabbed his arm. He turned and saw the intent, fearful face of Dave Reed, the dark-haired twin.

“Don’t,” Dave said in a conspirator’s hoarse whisper. His adam’s apple went up and down in his throat like something in a slot. “Don’t, Mr Marinville, they could still be out there. You could draw fire.”

Johnny looked at the hand on his arm, put his own hand over it, and gently but firmly removed it. Behind Dave he could see Brad Josephson watching him. Brad’s arm was around his wife’s considerable waist. Belinda appeared to be quivering all over, and there was a lot of her to quiver. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, leaving shiny mocha tracks.

“Brad,” Johnny said. “Get everybody who’s here into the kitchen. I’m pretty sure that’s the furthest room from the street. Sit them on the floor, okay?” He gave the Reed boy a gentle push in that direction. Dave went, but slowly, with no rhythm in his walk. To Johnny he looked like a windup toy with rust in the gears.

“Brad?”

“Okay. Don’t you go getting your head blown off, now. There’s been enough of that already.”

“I won’t. I’m attached to it.”

“Just make sure it stays attached to you.”

Johnny watched Brad, Belinda, and Dave Reed go down the hall toward the others-in the gloom they were just clustered shadows-and then turned back to the screen door. There was a fist-sized hole in the upper panel, he saw, with jags of torn screen curling in from the edges. Something bigger than he wanted to think about (something almost the size of a cemetery headstone, perhaps) had come through there, miraculously missing his clustered neighbors… or so he hoped. None of them was screaming with pain, anyhow. But Jesus, what in God’s name had the guys in the vans been shooting? What was that big?

He dropped to his knees and crawled toward the cool, wet air coming through the screen. Toward that good smell of rain and grass. When he was as close as he could get, with his nose almost on the mesh, he looked to the right and then to the left. To the right was good-he could see almost all the way up to the corner, although Bear Street itself was lost in a haze of rain. Nothing there-no vans, no aliens, no loonies dressed like refugees from Stonewall Jackson’s army. He saw his own house next door; remembered playing his guitar and indulging all his old folkie fantasies. Ramblin Jack Marinville, always headed over the next horizon-line in those thirsty Eric Andersen boots of his, lookin for them violets of the dawn. He thought of his guitar now with a longing as sharp as it was pointless.

The view to the left wasn’t as good; was lousy, in fact. The stake fence and Mary’s crashed Lumina blocked any significant sightline down the hill. Some one-a sniper in Confederate gray, say-could be crouched down there almost anywhere, waiting for the next good target. A slightly used writer with a lot of old coffeehouse fantasies still knocking around in his head would do. Probably no one there, of course-they’d know the cops and the FD would be here any minute and would have made themselves scarce-but probably just didn’t seem good enough under these circumstances. Because none of these circumstances made sense.

“Miss?” he said to the sprawled tangle of red hair on the other side of the screen door. “Hey, miss? Can you hear me?” He swallowed and heard a loud click in his throat. His ear was no longer screaming, but there was a steady hum deep inside it. Johnny had an idea he was going to be living with that for a while. “If you can’t talk, wiggle your fingers.”

There was no sound, and the girl’s fingers didn’t wiggle. She didn’t appear to be breathing. He could see rain trickling down her pale redhead’s skin between the strap of her halter and the waistband of her shorts, but nothing else seemed to be moving. Only her hair looked alive, lush and vibrant, about two tones darker than orange. Drops of water glistened in it like seed pearls.

Thunder rumbled, less threatening now, moving off. He was reaching for the screen door when there was a much sharper report. To Johnny it sounded like a small-caliber rifle, and he threw himself flat.

“That was just a shingle, I think,” a voice whispered from close behind him, and Johnny cried out in surprise. He turned and saw Brad Josephson behind him. Brad was also on his hands and knees. The whites of his eyes were very bright in his dark face.

“What the fuck’re you doing here?” Johnny asked.

“White Folks” Fun Patrol,” Brad said. “Somebody’s got to make sure you guys don’t have too much of it-it’s bad for your hearts.”

“Thought you were going to get the rest of them in the kitchen.”

“And there they be,” Brad said. “Sitting on the floor in a neat little line. Cammie Reed tried the phone. It’s dead, just like yours. Probably the storm.”

“Yeah, probably.”

Brad looked at the mass of red hair on the Carvers” stoop. “She’s dead, too, isn’t she?”

“I don’t know. I think so, but… I’m going to ease the screen door open, try to make sure. Any objections?”

He rather hoped Brad would say hell yes, he had objections, a whole damn book of them, but Brad only shook his head.

“You better stay low while I do it,” Johnny said. “We’re okay on the right, but on the left I can’t see past Mary’s car.”

“I’ll be lower than a garter-snake in a stamping press.”

“I hope you’re never in a writing seminar I teach,” Johnny said. “And watch out for that broken china widget-don’t cut your hand.”

“Go on,” Brad said. “If you’re going to do it, do it.”

Johnny pulled the screen door open. He hesitated, not sure how to proceed, then picked up the girl’s cold starfish hand and felt for a pulse. For a moment there was nothing, and then-

“I think she’s alive!” he whispered to Brad. His voice was harsh with excitement. “I think I feel a pulse!”

Forgetting that there might still be people with guns lurking out there in the rain, Johnny yanked the screen wide, grabbed a handful of the girl’s hair, and lifted her head. Brad was crowded into the doorway with him now; Johnny could hear his excited breathing, could smell mingled sweat and aftershave.

The girl’s face came up, except it didn’t, not really, because there was no face there. All he could see was a shattered mass of red and a black hole that had been her mouth. Below it was a litter of white that he at first thought was rice. Then he realized it was her teeth, what was left of them. The two men screamed together in perfect soprano harmony, Brad’s shooting directly into Johnny’s humming ear like a spike. The pain seemed to go all the way into the middle of him.

“What’s wrong?” Cammie Reed cried from behind the swinging door that led into the kitchen. “Oh God, what’s wrong now?”

“Nothing,” the two men said, also together, and then looked at each other. Brad Josephson’s face had gone a queer ashy color.

“Just stay back,” Johnny called. He wanted it to be louder, but couldn’t seem to get any real volume into his voice. “Stay in the kitchen!”

He realized he was still holding the dead girl’s hair. It was kinky, like an unravelled Brillo pad-

No, he thought coldly. Not like that. Like what holding a scalp would be like, a human scalp.

He grimaced at that and opened his fingers. The girl’s face dropped back on to the concrete stoop with a wet smack that he could have lived without. Beside him, Brad moaned and then pressed the inner part of his forearm against his mouth to stifle the sound.

Johnny pulled his hand back, and as the screen door swung closed, he thought he saw movement across the street, in the Wyler house. A figure moving in the living room, behind the picture window. He couldn’t worry about the people over there now, though. He was currently too freaked to worry about anybody, including himself. What he wanted-the only thing in the world he did want, it seemed-was to hear the warble of approaching police cars and fire trucks.

All he did hear was thunder, the crackle of the fire at the Hobarts”, and the hiss of falling rain.

“Leave-” Brad began, then stopped and made a sound caught somewhere between a retch and a swallow. The spasm passed and he tried again. “Leave her.”

Yes. What else, at least for now, was there?

They began to retreat down the hall on their hands and knees. Johnny went backward at first, then swung around, brushing the splinters of the fallen Hummel figure with his moccasins. Brad was already past the doorway to the Carver dining room and most of the way to the kitchen, where his wife, also on her knees, waited for him. Brad’s considerable rear end wagged back and forth in a way Johnny might have considered comical under other circumstances.

Something caught his eye and he stopped. There was a small decorative table by the entrance to the dining room where David Carver would never preside over another Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas goose. This table had been loaded down with, gee, what a surprise, a dozen or so Hummel figures. The table wasn’t standing flat but leaning back against the wall to the right of the door, like a drunk dozing against a lamppost. One of its legs had been sheared off. The Hummel shepherdesses and milkmaids and farmboys were now mostly on their backs or faces, and there were more china fragments under the table where one or more had fallen off and shattered. Among the painted pieces there was something else, something black. In the gloom, Johnny first took it for the corpse of some huge dead bug. Another crawling pace disabused him of that idea.

He looked back over his shoulder at the fist-sized hole in the upper panel of the screen door. If a slug had made that, one running the last part of a downward trajectory-

He traced the course such a hypothetical slug might have taken and saw that, yes, it could have sheared off the table-leg, knocking the table itself back into that posture of leaning drunken surprise. And then, its force spent, come to rest?

Johnny reached into the litter of china, hoping he wouldn’t cut himself (his hand was shaking badly, and concentration would not still it), and picked up the black object.

“What you got?” Brad asked, crawling toward Johnny.

“Brad, you get back here!” Belinda whispered fiercely.

“Hush, now,” Brad told her. “What you got there, John?”

“I don’t know,” he said, and held it up. He supposed he did know, actually, had known almost as soon as he had determined that it wasn’t the remains of some weird summer beetle. But it was like no fired slug he had ever seen in his life. It wasn’t the one that had taken the girl’s life, that much seemed certain; it would have been flattened and twisted out of shape. This thing didn’t seem to have so much as a scratch on it, although it had been fired, had gone through a panel of the screen door, and had sheared off the table-leg.

“Let me see,” Brad said. His wife had crawled up beside him and was looking over his shoulder.

Johnny dropped it into Brad’s pale palm, a black cone about seven inches long from its tip, which looked sharp enough to cut skin, to its circular base. He guessed it was about two inches in diameter at its widest point. It was solid black metal, and completely unmarked, so far as Johnny could see. There were no concentric rings stamped into the base, no sign of a firing point (no bright nick left by the firing pin of the gun which had thrown it, for that matter), no manufacturer’s name, no caliber stamp.

Brad looked up. “What in the hell?” he asked, sounding as bewildered as Johnny felt.

“Let me see,” Belinda said in a low voice. “My father used to take me shooting, and I was his good little helper when he did reloads. Give it over.”

Brad passed it to her. She rolled the metal cone between her fingers, then held it up to her eyes. Thunder banged outside, the sharpest peal in the last few minutes, and they all jumped.

“Where’d you find it?” she asked Johnny.

He pointed at the litter of china under the leaning table.

“Yeah?” She looked skeptical. “How come it didn’t go into the wall?”

Now that she posed the question, he realized what a good one it was. It had only gone through a screen and a flimsy table-leg; why hadn’t it gone into the wall, leaving just a hole behind?

“I’ve never seen anything like this puppy in my life,” Belinda said. “Of course, I haven’t seen everything, far from it, but I can tell you that this didn’t come from a pistol or a rifle or a shotgun.”

“Shotguns are what they were firing, though,” Johnny said. “Double-barrelled shotguns. You’re sure this couldn’t-”

“I don’t even know how it was launched,” she said. “There’s no firing nipple on the bottom, that’s for sure. And it’s so clunky. Like a kid’s idea of what a bullet looks like.”

The swing-door between the hall and the kitchen opened, banging against the wall and startling them even more badly than the thunder had done. It was Susi Geller. Her face was horribly white, and to Johnny she looked all of eleven years old. “There’s someone screaming next door, at Billingsley’s,” she said. “It sounds like a woman, but it’s hard to tell. It’s scaring the kids.”

“All right, honey,” Belinda said. She sounded perfectly calm, and Johnny admired her for that. “You go on back in the kitchen, now. We’ll be along in a second.”

“Where’s Debbie?” Susi asked. Her view down the hall to the stoop was mercifully blocked by the wide-bodied Josephsons. “Did she go next door? I thought she was right behind me.” She paused. “You don’t think that’s her screaming, do you?”

“No, I’m sure it’s not,” Johnny said, and was appalled to find himself once more on the edge of crazy laughter. “Go on, now, Suze.”

She went back into the kitchen, letting the door close behind her. The three of them looked at one another for a moment with sick conspirators” eyes. None of them said anything. Then Belinda handed the gawky-looking black cone back to Johnny, duck-walked past him to the kitchen door, and pushed it open. Brad followed on his hands and knees. Johnny looked at the slug a moment longer, thinking of what the woman had said, that it was like a kid’s idea of a bullet. She was right. He had visited his share of lower elementary school classrooms since beginning to chronicle the adventures of Pat the Kitty-Cat, and he had seen a lot of drawings, big grinning mommies and daddies standing under yellow Crayola suns, weird green landscapes festooned with bold brown trees, and this looked like something that had fallen out of one of those pictures, whole and intact, somehow made real.

Little bitty baby Smitty, a voice said way back in his mind, but when he tried to chase after that voice, wanting to ask if it really knew something or was just blowing off its bazoo, it was gone.

Johnny put the slug in his right front pants pocket with his car keys and then followed the Josephsons into the kitchen.

Steven Jay Ames, pretty much of a scratched entry in the great American steeplechase, had a motto, and this motto was:

He had gotten D’s in his first semester at MIT-this in spite of SAT scores somewhere in the ionosphere-but, hey,

He had transferred from electrical engineering to general engineering, and when his grades still hadn’t risen past that magical 2.0 point, he had packed his bags and gone down the road to Boston University, having decided to give up the sterile halls of science for the green fields of English Lit. Coleridge, Keats, Hardy, a little T. S. Eliot. I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floor of the universe, here we go round the prickly pear; twentieth-century angst, man. He had done okay at BU for a while, then had flunked out in his junior year, as much a victim of obsessive bridge-playing as of booze and Panama Red. But

He had drifted around Cambridge, hanging out, playing guitar and getting laid. He wasn’t much of a guitar-player and did better at getting laid, but

really. When Cambridge began to get a tad elderly, he had simply cased his guitar and ridden his thumb down to New York City.

In the years since, he had scuttled his ragged claws through salesman’s jobs, gone around the prickly pear as a disc jockey at a short-lived heavy metal station in Fishkill, New York, gone around again as a radio-station engineer, a rock-show promoter (six good shows followed by a nightmaris h exit from Providence in the middle of the night-he’d left owing some pretty hard guys about $60,000, but

as a palmistry guru on the boardwalk in Wildwood, New Jersey, and then as a guitar tech. That felt like home, somehow, and he became a gun for hire in upstate New York and eastern Pennsylvania. He liked tuning and repairing guitars-it was peaceful. Also, he was a lot better at repairing them than he was at playing them. During this period he had also quit smoking dope and playing bridge, which simplified things even further. Two years before, living in Albany, he had become friends with Deke Ableson, who owned Club Smile, a good roadhouse where you could get a bellyful of blues almost any night you wanted. Steve had first shown up at Smile in his capacity as a freelance guitar tech, then had stepped up when the guy running the board had a minor heart attack. At first that had been a problem, maybe the first real one of Steve’s adult life, but for some reason he had stuck with it in spite of his fear of fucking up and being lynched by drunk cycle-wolves. Part of it was Deke, who was unlike every club owner Steve had known up until then: he was not a thief, a lecher, or a fellow who could validate his own existence only by making others miserable and afraid. Also, he actually liked rock and roll, while most club owners Steve had known loathed it, preferring Yanni or Zanfir and his Pan Flute when they were alone in their cars. Deke was exactly the sort of guy that Steve, who had remembered to file a 1040 form exactly once in his life, really liked: a

kind of guy. His wife was also a good sort, easygoing and equipped with mild, sleepy eyes, a good sense of humor, beautiful breasts and not, so far as Steve could tell, an unfaithful bone in her body. Best of all, Sandy was also a recovering bridge addict. Steve had had many deep conversations with her about the almost uncontrollable urge to overbid, especially in a money game.

In May of this year, Deke had purchased a very large club-a House of Blues kind of deal-in San Francisco. He and Sandy had left the east coast three weeks ago. He had promised Steve a good job if Steve would pack up all their shit (albums, mostly, over two thousand of them, anachronisms like Hot Tuna and Quicksilver Messenger Service and Canned Heat) and drive it out in a rental truck. Steve’s response:

Hey, he hadn’t been out to the West Coast in almost seven years, and he reckoned the change would do him good. Recharge those old Duracells.

It had taken him a little longer than he had expected to settle his Albany shit, get the truck, load the truck, and get rolling. There had been several phone calls from Deke, the last one sort of testy, and when Steve had mentioned this, Deke had said, well, that was what three weeks of sleeping bags and making do with the same half a dozen tee-shirts did to a person-was he coming or not? I’m coming, I’m coming, Steve had replied. Cool it, big guy. And he had. Left three days ago, in fact. Everything groovy at first. Then, this afternoon, he had blown a hose or something, he had taken the Wentworth exit in search of the Great American Service Station, and then-whoa, dude-there had come a big bang from under the hood and all the dials on the dashboard started showing bad news. He hoped it was just a blown seal, but it had actually sounded more like a piston. In any case, the Ryder truck, which had been a beauty ever since he had left New York, had suddenly turned into a beast. Still,

NO PROBLEM;

just find Mr Goodwrench and let him do his thing.

Steve had taken a wrong turn, though, away from the turnpike business area and into a much more suburban neighborhood, not the sort of place where Mr Goodwrench was apt to hang out during working hours. He had really been babying the truck by then, steam coming out through the grille, oil-pressure dropping, temperature rising, an unpleasant fried smell coming in through the air vents… but really

Well… maybe a very small problem for the Ryder people, that was true, but Steve had an idea they’d be able to bear up under the burden. Then-hey, beautiful, baby-a little neighborhood store with a blue pay-phone sign hung over the door… and the number to call if you had engine trouble was right up there on the driver’s side sun-visor.

story of his life.

Only now there was a problem. One that made learning the sound-board at Club Smile look like a minor annoyance in comparison.

He was in a little house that smelled of pipe tobacco, he was in a living room with framed photos of animals-pretty special ones, according to the captions-on the walls, a living room where only the huge, shapeless chair in front of the TV looked really used, and he had just tied his bandanna around his leg where he had sustained a bullet-wound, shallow but a bona fide bullet-wound just the same, and people were yelling, scared and yelling, and the skinny woman in the sleeveless blouse was also wounded (nothing shallow about hers, either) and outside people were dead, and if all this wasn’t a problem, then Steve guessed that “problem” was a concept without meaning.

His arm was grabbed above the wrist, and painfully. He wasn’t just being grabbed, actually; he was being pinched. He looked down and saw the girl in the blue store duster, the one with the crazed hair. “Don’t you freak on me,” she said in a ragged voice. “That lady needs help or she’s going to die, so do not freak on me.”

“No problem, cookie,” he said, and just hearing the words-any words-coming out of his mouth made him feel a little stronger.

“Don’t call me cookie and I won’t call you cake,” she said in a prim little no-nonsense voice.

He burst out laughing. It sounded extremely weird in this room, but he didn’t care. She didn’t seem to, either. She was looking back at him with just the faintest touch of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “Okay,” he said. “I won’t call you cookie, you don’t call me cake, and neither of us’ll freak, fair enough?”

“Yeah. What about your leg?”

“It’s okay. Looks more like a floor-burn than a bullet-wound.”

“Lucky you.”

“Yeah. I might dump a little disinfectant on it if I get a chance, but compared to her-”

“Gary!” the object of comparison bawled. The arm, Steve saw, was now hardly attached to the rest of her body at all; it seemed to be hanging by a thin strap of flesh. Her husband, also skinny (but with a blooming suburban potbelly just beginning to take shape), did a kind of helpless, panicky dance around her. He reminded Steve of a native in an old jungle flick doing the Cool Jerk around a brooding stone idol.

“Gary!” she screamed again. Blood was running out of her mangled shoulder in a steady stream, turning the left side of her pink top to a muddy maroon. Her paper-white face was drenched with sweat; her hair clung to the curve of her skull in clumps. “Gary, quit acting like a dog looking for a place to piss and help me-”

She collapsed back against the wall between the living room and the kitchenette, panting for breath. Steve expected her knees to buckle, but they didn’t. Instead, she grasped her left wrist with her right hand and lifted her wounded arm carefully toward Steve and Cynthia. The blood-glistening twist of gristle that was still connecting it to the rest of her made a squelchy sound, like a wet dishrag when you wring it out, and Steve wanted to tell her not to do that, to stop fooling with herself before she tore the goddam thing off like a wing off a baked chicken.

Then Gary was doing the Cool Jerk in front of Steve, going up and down like a man on a pogo stick, patches of hectic red standing out on his pale face. Gimme a little bass with those eighty-eights, Steve thought.

“Help her!” Gary cried. “Help my wife! Bleeding to death!”

“I can’t-” Steve began.

Gary reached out and seized the front of Steve’s tee-shirt. When there’s no more room in hell, this artifact said, the dead will walk the earth. He thrust his thin and feverish face up toward Steve’s. His eyes glittered with gin and panic. “Are you with them? Are you one of them?”

“I don’t-”

“Are you with the shooters? Tell me the truth!”

Angrier than he would have believed possible (anger was not, ordinarily, his thing at all), Steve knocked the man’s hands away from his old and much-loved tee-shirt, then pushed him. Gary took a stagger-step backward, his eyes first widening, then narrowing again.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, yeah. You asked for it. You asked for it and now you’re gonna get it.” He started forward again.

Cynthia got between them, glancing at Steve for a moment-probably to assure herself that he wasn’t in attack-mode yet-and then glaring at Gary. “What the fuc k’s wrong with you?” she asked him.

Gary smiled tightly. “He’s not from around here, is he?”

“Christ, neither am I! I’m from Bakersfield, California-does that make me one of them?”

“Gary!” It sounded like the yap of a dog that has run a long way on a dusty road and pretty much barked itself out. “Stop fucking around and help me! My arm…” She continued to hold it out, and what Steve thought of now-he didn’t want to but couldn’t help it-was Mucci’s Fine Meats in Newton. Guy in a white shirt, white cap, and bloodstained apron, holding out a peeled joint of meat to his mother. Serve it medium-rare with a little mint jelly on the side, Mrs Antes, and your family will never ask for roast chicken again. I guarantee it.

“Gary!”

The skinny guy with the gin on his breath took a step toward her, then looked back at Steve and Cynthia. The tight, knowing smile was gone. Now he only looked sick. “I don’t know what to do for her,” he said.

“Gary, you diseased ratbrain,” Marielle said in a low, hopeless voice. “You total dumbwit.” Her face was growing ever whiter. She had gone, in fact, that fabled faded whiter shade of pale. There were brown patches beneath her eyes-they seemed to be unfurling like wings-and her left sneaker was now a solid red instead of white.

She’s going to die if she doesn’t get help right away, Steve thought. The idea made him feel both amazed and somehow stupid. Professional help was what he was thinking about, he supposed, ER guys in green suits who said things like “ten cc’s of epi, stat”. But there were no guys like that around, and apparently none coming. He could still hear no sirens, only the sound of thunder retreating slowly into the east.

On the wall to his left was a framed photograph of a small brown dog with eerily intelligent eyes. On the matting beneath the photo, carefully printed in block letters, was DAISY, PEMBROKE CORGI, AGE 9. COULD COUNT. SHOWED APPARENT ABILITY TO ADD SMALL NUMBERS. To the left of Daisy, its glass now splattered with the thin woman’s blood, was a Collie that seemed to be grinning for the camera. The printed legend beneath this one read: CHARLOTTE, BORDER COLLIE, AGE 6. COULD SORT PHOTOS AND CULL OUT THOSE OF HUMANS KNOWN TO HER.

To the left of Charlotte was a photograph of a parrot which appeared to be smoking a Camel.

“None of this is happening,” Steve said in a conversational-almost jovial-tone of voice. He didn’t know if he was talking to Cynthia or to himself. “I think I’m in a hospital somewhere. I had a head-on in the truck out on the thruway, that’s what I think. It’s like Alice in Wonderland, only the Nine Inch Nails version.”

Cynthia opened her mouth to reply and then the old guy-the one who had presumably observed Daisy the Pembroke Corgi adding six and two and coming up with eight,

came in carrying an old black bag. The cop (was his name actually Collie, Steve wondered, or was that just some weird fantasy engendered by the photographs on the walls of this room?) followed him, pulling his belt out of its loops. Last in line, drifting, looking dazed, came Peter What’s-His-Face, husband of the woman who was lying dead out there.

“Help her!” Gary yelled, forgetting Steve and his conspiracy theories, at least for the time being. “Help her, Doc, she’s bleedin like a stuck pig!”

“You know I’m not a real physician, don’t you, Gary? Just an old horse-doctor is all I-”

“Don’t you call me a pig,” Marielle interrupted him. Her voice was almost too low to be heard, but her eyes, fixed on her husband, glowed with baleful life. She tried to straighten up, couldn’t, and slipped lower against the wall instead. “Don’t you… call me that.”

The old horse-doctor turned to the cop, who was standing just inside the kitchen doorway, barechested with the belt now stretched between his fists. He looked like the bouncer in a leather-bar where Steve had once worked the board for a group called The Big Chrome Holes.

“I have to?” the barechested cop asked. He was pretty pale himself, but Steve thought he looked game, at least so far.

Billingsley nodded and put his bag down on the big easy-chair that sprawled in front of the television. He snapped it open and began rummaging through it. “And hurry. The more blood she loses, the worse her chances become.” He looked up, a spool of suture in one gnarled old hand, a pair of bent-nosed surgical scissors in the other. “This is no fun for me, either. The last time I saw a patient in anything like this situation, it was a pony that had been mistaken for a deer and shot in the foreleg. Get it as high on her shoulder as you can. Turn the buckle in toward the breast and pull it tight!

“Where’s Mary?” Peter asked. “Where’s Mary? Where’s Mary? Where’s Mary?” Each time he asked the question his voice grew more plaintive. The fourth repetition was little more than a falsetto squeak. Abruptly he clutched his face in his hands and turned away from all of them, leaning his forehead against the wall between BARON, a Labrador Retriever that could spell its name with blocks, and DIRTYFACE, a morose-looking goat that was apparently able to play a number of rudimentary tunes on the harmonica. It occurred to Steve that if he ever heard a goat playing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” on a Hohner, he would probably fucking kill himself.

Marielle Soderson, meanwhile, was staring at Billingsley with the intensity of a vampire looking at a man with a shaving cut. “Hurts,” she croaked. “Give me something for it.”

“Yes,” Billingsley said, “but first we tourniquet.”

He nodded impatiently at the cop. The cop started forward. He had the tongue of his belt threaded through the buckle now, making a loop. He reached out gingerly to the skinny woman, whose blond hair had gone two shades darker with sweat. She reached out with her good arm and pushed him with surprising strength. The cop wasn’t expecting it. He went back two steps, hit the arm of the old guy’s sprawled-out easy-chair, and fell into it. He looked like a comic who’s just taken a pratfall in a movie.

The skinny woman didn’t give him a second glance. Her attention was focused on the old guy, and the old guy’s black bag.

“Now!” she barked at him, and it really did sound as if she were barking. “Give me something for it now you quacky old fuck, it’s killing me!”

The cop struggled out of the chair and caught Steve’s eye. Steve got the message, nodded, and began edging toward the woman named Marielle, drifting in from the right, flanking her. Be careful, he told himself, she’s flipped out, apt to scratch or bite or any damn thing, so be careful.

Marielle thrust herself away from the wall, swayed, steadied, and advanced on the old guy. She was once more holding her arm out in front of her, as if it were Exhibit A in a trial. Billingsley backed up a step, looking nervously from the barechested cop to Steve.

“Give me some Demerol, you weasel!” she cried in her barking, exhausted voice. “You give it to me or I’ll choke you until you bark like a bloodhound! I’ll-”

The cop nodded to Steve again and sprang forward on the left. Steve moved with him and threw an arm around the woman’s neck. He didn’t want to choke her, but he was scared to go around her back, maybe grabbing her wounded arm by mistake and hurting it worse. “Hold still!” he shouted. He didn’t mean to shout, he meant to just say it, but that wasn’t how it came out. At the same moment the cop slipped the loop of his belt over her left hand and up her arm.

“Hold her, buddy!” the cop cried. “Hold her still!”

For a second or two Steve did, and then a drop of sweat, warm and stinging, ran into his eye, and he relaxed his choke-hold just as Collie Entragian ran the makeshift belt tourniquet tight. Marielle lurched to the right, her baleful falcon’s gaze still fixed on the old guy, and her arm came off in the barechested cop’s hands. Steve could see her wristwatch, an Indiglo with the second-hand stopped dead between the four and the five. The belt held on at her shoulder for a moment and then dropped to the floor, a loop with nothing in it. The counter-girl shrieked, her huge eyes fixed on the arm. The cop looked down at it with his mouth open.

“Get it on ice!” Gary bawled. “Get it on ice right away! Right aw-” Then, all at once, he seemed to really realize what had happened. What the cop was holding. He opened his mouth, twisted his head in a peculiar way, and unloaded on the photo of the cigarette-smoking parrot.

Marielle noticed none of it. She staggered toward the clearly terrified veterinarian, her remaining hand outstretched. “I want a shot and I want it now!” she croaked. “Do you hear me, you old woman? I want a fucking shuh-shuh-”

She collapsed on to her knees. Her head drooped, hung. Then, with an immense effort, she got her chin up again. For a moment her gimlet gaze met Steve’s. “Who the fuck’re you?” she asked in a clear, perfectly understandable voice, then slid forward on her face. The top of her head came to rest inches from the heels of Peter, the man who had lost his wife. Jackson, Steve thought suddenly. That’s his last name, Jackson. Peter Jackson was still turned to the wall with his face clutched in his hands. If he takes a step backward, Steve thought, he’ll trip over her.

“Fuck a duck,” the cop said in a low, amazed voice. Then he looked down and realized he was still holding the woman’s arm. He walked stiffly toward the kitchen with it held out in front of him. The sound of rain hissing down seemed very loud in Steve’s ears.

“Come on,” the old party said, rousing himself. “We’re not done yet. Get that belt on her, son. Buckle in toward the breast. You game?”

“I guess,” Steve said, but he was very relieved when Cynthia the counter-girl picked the belt up and then knelt beside the unconscious woman with it in her hands.

From “The Force Corridor”, Episode 55 ofMotoKops 2200, original teleplay by Allen Smithee

FADE IN ON:

INT. CRISIS CENTER, MOTOKOPS” HQ

The room is dominated, as always, by the huge Situscreen. Standing before it on a floatpad is COLONEL HENRY, looking grave. Sitting at the horseshoe-shaped Crisis Desk are the rest of the MotoKops squad: SNAKE HUNTER, BOUNTY, MAJOR PIKE, ROOTY, and CASSIE.

On the Situscreen we see a SPACE VIEW. In the distance is Earth, just a blue-green coin at this distance. It looks peaceful enough.

SNAKE HUNTER (with customary scorn) So what’s the big deal? I don’t see anything that looks very-What the-??!!

Suddenly the FORCE CORRIDOR appears on the Situscreen, almost filling it, blotting out the stars on either side. It’s like watching the arrival of Darth Vader’s dreadnought at the beginning of the first Star Wars movie; in a word, awesome!

The CORRIDOR consists of two long metal plates with big square protrusions sticking out at intervals. The CORRIDOR HUMS OMINOUSLY, and BLUE FIRE CRACKLES from side to side between the square protrusions.

CASSIE STYLES gasps, looks at the Situscreen with dismay. COLONEL HENRY pushes a button on his hand-control, and the screen goes into FREEZE MODE. We can still see Earth, but with the corridor on either side, it looks caught in a potentially lethal WEB OF ELECTRICITY!

COLONEL HENRY (to SNAKE HUNTER) That’s the big deal! The Force Corridor, artifact of a long-vanished alien race! Destructive… and headed directly toward Earth!

CASSIE (dismay)

Oh, gosh!

COLONEL HENRY Relax, Cassie-it’s still over 150,000 light-years away. This is a composite shot.

Yeah, but how fast is it moving?

COLONEL HENRY That’s the problem. Let’s just say that if we don’t resolve this crisis in the next seventy-two hours, I think you can cancel your weekend plans.

Root-root-root-root!

SNAKE HUNTER Shutup, Rooty. (to COLONEL HENRY) So what’s our plan?

COLONEL HENRY takes the floatpad further up, so he can use his highlighter to circle a couple of the protrusions on the inner sides of the corridor.

COLONEL HENRY Drone telemetry reports that the Force Corridor itself is over 200,000 miles long and 50,000 miles wide, a hallway of death in which nothing can live! But it may have a weakness! I think these square shapes are power-generators. If we could knock “em out-

BOUNTY Are we talkin” Power Wagon assault, boss?

We move in on COLONEL HENRY’s grim face.

It’s Earth’s only chance.

SNAKE HUNTER A deep space Power Wagon assault? Could be a quick trip to that Boot Hill in the sky!

Root-root-root-root!

Shut up, Rooty!

COLONEL HENRY and CASSIE STYLES are in the lead, the other MotoKops behind them. ROOTY, as usual, is bumbling along in the rear.

You’re worried, little one.

CASSIE Of course I’m worried! Snake Hunter is right! The Power Wagons were never designed for the stresses of a deep space assault!

COLONEL HENRY But that’s not all that’s on your mind.

CASSIE Sometimes I hate your telepathy, Hank.

Come on… give.

CASSIE Something bothers me about those shapes inside the Force Corridor. What if they aren’t power-generators?

What else could they be?

They have reached the slide-door to the Power Wagon Corral. COLONEL HENRY slaps his hand into the palm-lock and the door slides up.

CASSIE I don’t know, but…

INT. THE POWER WAGON CORRAL, FEATURING THE MOTOKOPS

CASSIE gasps with shock, eyes widening! COLONEL HENRY, looking grim, puts his arm. around her. The other squad-members gather round

Root-root-root-root!

SNAKE HUNTER Yeah, Rooty, I couldn’t agree more!

He stares bitterly at:

INT. THE POWER WAGON CORRAL, MOTOKOPS” POV

Floating in the middle of the parked Power Wagons, between SNAKE HUNTER’s Tracker Arrow and the silver-sided Rooty-Toot, is a grim visitor: the Meatwagon,HUMMING SOFTLY.

MotoKops, prepare for battle!

SNAKE HUNTER (his stun-pistol already out) Way ahead of you, boss.

The others draw.

The Doom Turret SLIDES BACK, revealing NO FACE, sinister as always in his black uniform. Sitting behind him at the controls, with her customary look of sexy hauteur, is COUNTESS LILI. The Hypno-Jewel around her neck FLICKERS WILDLY through the color spectrum.

Floatpad, Countess. Now!

Yes, Excellent One.

The COUNTESS pulls a lever. A floatpad appears. NO FACE steps on to it and is wafted down to the floor of the Corral. He is unarmed, and asCOLONEL HENRY steps forward, he holsters his own stunner.

Aren’t you a little far from home, No Face?

Home is where the heart is, my dear Hank.

This is no time for games.

NO FACE As it happens, I couldn’t agree more. The Force Corridor approaches. You, Colonel Henry, are planning a Power Wagon assault-

How do you know that?

NO FACE (icy)

Because it’s what I’d do, you idiot!

(to COLONEL HENRY) A Power Wagon assault is incredibly risky, but it may also be Earth’s only chance. You’ll need all the help you can get, and you have no vehicle at your command as powerful as the Meatwagon.

SNAKE HUNTER That’s a matter of opinion, you mutt. My Tracker Arrow-

Stow the gab!

(to NO FACE)

What are you offering?

NO FACE A partnership until the crisis is past. Old quarrels put aside, at least temporarily. A joint attack on the Force Corridor.

He offers his black-gloved hand. COLONEL HENRY starts to reciprocate, and then MAJOR PIKE steps forward. His almond-shaped eyes are wide, and his mouth-horn quivers with alarm.

MAJOR PIKE Don’t do it, Hank! You can’t trust him! It’s a trick!

NO FACE I understand how you feel, Major… we both do, do we not, Countess?

Yes, Excellent One.

NO FACE But this time there are no tricks, no hidden cards.

COLONEL HENRY (to MAJOR PIKE) And we have no choice.

NO FACE Indeed we don’t. Time is running out.

COLONEL HENRY reaches out and takes NO FACE’shand.

Partners?

For now.

Root-root-root-root!

We FADE TO BLACK. Ends ACT 2.