“Is Major Pike from a movie or a TV show?” Johnny asked, but he knew the answer already. It was coming together now, maybe should have come together a lot earlier. In the last few years he had taught a lot of classes in schools where grownups had to lean over seriously in order to drink from the water fountains, did a lot of readings in library rooms where the chairs were mostly three feet high. He listened to the run of their talk, but he didn’t watch their shows or go to their movies. He knew instinctively that that sort of research would hinder his work rather than help it. So he didn’t know everything, and still had plenty of questions, but he thought he was beginning to believe that this craziness could be understood.
“Ralphie?”
“From a TV show,” Ralphie said around his thumb. He was still holding Major Pike up in front of his eyes, much as Johnny had done. “He’s a MotoKop.”
“And Dream Floater. What’s that, Ralphie?”
“Mr Marinville,” Dave began, “we really ought to-”
“Give him a second, son,” Brad said.
Johnny never took his eyes off Ralphie. “Dream Floater?”
“Cassie’s Power Wagon,” Ralphie said. “Cassie Styles. I think she’s Colonel Henry’s girlfriend. My friend Jason says she isn’t because MotoKops don’t have girlfriends, but I think she is. Why are the Power Wagons on Poplar Street, Mr Marinville?”
“I don’t know, Ralphie.” Except he almost did.
“Why are they so big ? And if they’re good guys, why did they shoot my daddy and mommy?”
Ralphie dropped the Major Pike figure on the floor and kicked it all the way across the room. Then he put his hands over his face and began to sob. Cammie Reed started forward, but before she could get there, Ellen had wriggled free of Belinda. She went to Ralphie and put her arms around him. “Never mind,” she said. “Never mind, Ralphie, I’ll take care of you.”
Won’t that be a treat.” Ralphie said through his sobs, and Johnny clapped a hand over his mouth almost hard enough to make his lips bleed. It was the only way he could keep from bursting into mad, yodeling laughter.
If they’re good guys, why did they shoot my daddy and mommy?
“Come on, boys,” he said, standing up and turning to the Reed twins. “Let’s go exploring.”
On Poplar Street, the sun was starting to go down. It was too early for it to be going down, but it was, just the same. It glared above the horizon in the west like a baleful red eye, turning the puddles in the street and the driveways and on the stoops to fire. It turned the broken glass which littered the block into embers. It turned the eyes of the faux-buzzard into red pits as it lifted off from the body of Mary Jackson on its improbable wings and flew across the street to the Carver lawn. Here it alit, looking from David Carver’s body to that of Susi Geller’s friend. It seemed unsure upon which to start. So much to eat, so little time. At last it chose Ellen and Ralphie’s father, approaching the dead man in a series of clumsy hops. One of its yellow claw-feet sported five talons, the other only two.
Across the street, in the Wyler house-in the smell of dirt, old hamburger, and tomato soup-the TV blared on. It was the first saloon scene of The Regulators.
“You’re a right purty lady,” Rory Calhoun was saying. That knowing leer in his voice, the one that said Babydoll, I’m going to eat you like ice cream before this shitty little oat-opera is over, and both of us know it. “Why don’t you sit down “n have a drink? Bring me some luck?”
“I don’t drink with trash,” Karen Steele responded coldly, and all of Rory Calhoun’s men-the ones not currently hiding outside of town, that was-guffawed.
“Well, ain’t you a little spitfire?” Rory Calhoun said, relaxed, and his men guffawed some more.
“Want some Doritos, Pete?” Tak said. Now it spoke in the voice of Lucas McCain, who rode the cable-TV range in The Rifleman.
Peter Jackson, seated in the La-Z-Boy in front of the TV, didn’t reply. He was grinning broadly. Moving shadows played across his face, occasionally making the grin look like a silent scream, but it was a grin, all right.
“He should have some, all right, Paw,” Tak said, now in the almost-adolescent voice of Johnny Crawford, who had played Lucas’s son. “They’re the good ones. Cool Ranch. Come on, Mr Jackson, over the teeth and over the gums, look out guts, “cause here they come.”
The boy held chips out in one grimy hand and waved them up and down in front of Peter Jackson’s face. Peter took no notice. He stared at the TV, through the TV, with eyes that bulged out of his head like those of some exotic deep-dwelling fish that has undergone explosive decompression. And he grinned.
“Don’t appear he’s hongry, Paw.”
“I think he is, son. Hongry as hell. You’re hongry, ain’t you, Pete? Just need a little help, that’s all. So take the damn chips!”
There was a kind of humming in the room. A line of static appeared briefly on the TV, where Rory Calhoun was now trying to kiss Karen Steele. She slapped his face and knocked off his hat. That wiped away his leering, teasing grin. Folks-even womenfolks-didn’t knock off Jeb Murdock’s hat with impunity.
Peter slowly raised the chips. He bypassed his relentlessly grinning mouth and began poking them against his nose instead, crumbling them, catching some of the smaller pieces in his nostrils. His unnaturally bulging eyes never left the TV.
“Little too high, Mr Jackson.” Now it was the earnest voice of Hoss Cartwright. Hoss had been one of Seth’s favorites before Tak came to stay inside him, and so now he was one of Tak’s favorites, too. They rolled that way, like a wheel. “Let’s try again, what do you say?”
The hand went down slowly and jerkily, like a freight elevator. This time the chips went into Peter’s mouth, and he began to chew mechanically. Tak smiled at him with Seth’s mouth. It hoped-in its strange way it did have emotions, although none of them was precisely human-that Peter was enjoying the Doritos, because they were going to be his last meal. It had sucked a great deal of life-force out of Peter, first replenishing the gaudy amounts of energy it had expended this afternoon, then taking in more. Getting ready for the next step.
Getting ready for the night.
Peter chewed and chewed, Dorito fragments spilling out of his grin and tumbling down the front of his tee-shirt, the one with happy old Mr Smiley-Smile on the front. His eyeballs, bulging so far out of their sockets that they seemed to be lying on his cheeks, quivered with the motion of his jaw. The left one had split like a squeezed grape when Tak invaded his mind and stole most of it-the useful part-but he could still see a little out of the right one. Enough so he’d be able to do the next part mostly on his own. Once, that was, his motor was running again.
“Peter? I say, Peter, can you hear me, old boy?” Tak now spoke in the clipped British tones of Andrew Case, Peter’s department head. Like all of Tak’s imitations, it was quite good. Not as good as its Western movie and TV show imitations (at which it had had much more practice), but still not bad.
And the voice of authority did wonders, it had found, even for the terminally brain-damaged. A vague flicker of life came into Peter’s face. He turned and saw Andrew Case in a spiffy houndstooth jacket instead of Seth Garin in a pair of MotoKops Underoos decorated with reddish-orange blobs of Chef Boyardee sauce.
“I’ll want you to go across the street now, old boy. Into the woods, eh? But you needn’t toddle all the way to grandmother’s house. Just to the path. Do you know the path in the woods?”
Peter shook his head. His protruding eyeballs trembled above the stretched clown rictus of his lips.
“No matter, you’ll find it. Hard to miss, old top. When you get to the fork, you can sit down with your… friend.”
“My friend,” Peter said. Not quite a question.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Peter had never actually met the man he would be joining at the fork in the path and never actually would, not really, but there was no sense in telling Peter these things. He didn’t have mind enough left to understand them, for one thing. He was shortly going to be dead, for another. As dead as Herb Wyler. As dead as the man with the shopping-cart, the one Peter would shortly be meeting in the woods.
“My friend,” Peter said a second time. A little surer now.