“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.
Chapter Twelve
MAIN STREET, DESPERATION/REGULATOR TIME
As on their previous run, the vans appear like phantoms, only this time it’s not mist from which they appear but blowing desert dust that shines like lame in the glow of Old Mr Cowpoke Moon.
Cassie’s pink Dream Floater comes first, with Candy behind the wheel in his pinned-back cavalry hat and Cassie herself sitting beside him. On the roof, the Valentine-heart radar dish is turning briskly. Like a sign on a whorehouse roof, Johnny Marinville might have said had he seen it, but he does not; he is lying on the floor of the Carvers” kitchen next to Old Doc with his hands laced together over the top of his head and his eyes squeezed tightly shut; on his face is the expression of a man who expects Armageddon, and soon.
Dream Floater does not swing on to Desperation’s dusty Main Street from Hyacinth; Hyacinth is gone. Where it once ran there is now nothing but hardpan desert, almost featureless… as the sky overhead in this direction is almost completely starless. It’s as if, when His eye turned south to the wastes beyond this tiny huddle of buildings, the Creator had lost most of His divine inspiration.
Dream Floater’s stubby wings are extended, its wheels partially retracted; it cuts through the air about three feet above the wheel-ruts of the street. Its engine pulses steadily. As it passes The Lady Day on the corner, its firing port irises open. Laura DeMott from The Regulators leans out. In her delicate white hands is not her Derringer but a shotgun. Just a double-barrelled shotgun, but when she fires it, the report is as loud as a detonating backpack missile. The report is followed by a short, high-pitched wail, and then the front of the saloon explodes. The batwing doors fly up, for a moment fluttering madly and looking like real wings. There’s an instant of flicker across what remains of the saloon’s front, almost like a heatwave, and for that one instant, anyone who had been looking would have seen the E-Z Stop behind the burning Lady Day like a ghost-building or a double exposure, the convenience store also half-demolished and also burning.
Behind Dream Floater comes Tracker Arrow, and behind Tracker Arrow comes Freedom. Freedom’s polarized windshield slides down again. Major Pike, a good Canopalean gone bad, is currently behind the wheel of Bounty’s van, but the Confederate uniform and pinned-back hat are gone (Candy has the hat on now; the regulators are always trading accessories and bits of uniform back and forth, it’s part of the fun). The Major is wearing his iridescent MotoKops uniform again, and without a hat, his blond Mohawk “do shows to good advantage. Sitting beside him in the nav-pit is the grizzled trapper type Johnny spotted earlier: Sergeant Mathis, Jeb Murdock’s chief aide after the beating and capture of Captain Candell.
Collie Entragian’s house has been replaced by the Two Sisters Millinery, where can be found The Finest in Ladies” Fashions. Serge leans out, draws a bead on the storefront with his shotgun, and yanks the triggers. There is another shattering double crash, and again that long, wailing shriek, as of a bomb falling dead-center-true down the gravity-well toward its target.
“Make it stop!” Susi screams. “Oh please someone MAKE IT STOP!”
The top half of Two Sisters seems to lift off in a storm of boards and shingles and glass and nails. Again there is that flicker, almost as quick as a hummingbird’s wing, and in it Entragian’s house may be glimpsed, even Gary Ripton’s bike and plastic-covered body may be glimpsed, shimmering like the mirages they have now become. Then the house is gone and it’s the Two Sisters (where in The Regulators we first see Laura DeMott, saloon lass with a heart of gold, surreptitiously buying cloth for a church dress) again, with half its roof gone and all its windows blown in.
From the badlands (sagebrush and huge tumbled boulders of cartoon roundness) north of Poplar Street, where Bear Street now isn’t, the silver Rooty-Toot Power Wagon appears. Rooty is behind the wheel, his eyes flashing on and off like traffic lights; Little Joe Cartwright is in the seat next to him, devil-may-care grin on his face, a shotgun chrome-plated with futuristic swoops and doodads in his hands. Directly behind Rooty-Toot comes the Justice Wagon, and behind Justice there appears a humming electric nightmare. In the bonelight of the moon, the Meatwagon looks wrapped in black silk. No Face is in the steering-pit. Countess Lili is in the nav-pit, her sexy eyes gleaming in her ashy vampire-maiden’s face. Jeb Murdock is above them, in the Doom Turret. In the prime shooting-station.
Because he is the meanest.
And so the final Power Wagon assault begins, with three vans swinging into the Force Corridor from the north and three more from the south. Hideously amplified shotgun blasts shake the air; the whistling passage of the shells thrown from the muzzles of those guns sounds like a flock of banshees. The Cattlemen’s Hotel (formerly the Soderson house) is shivered backward on its foundations; the left side first slumps, then actually crumples, spitting off dry boards and wooden shingles. The house north of it-a wattle-and-daub construction Brad Josephson would never have recognized as his own lovingly maintained split-level-seems to explode outward in all directions, shooting jagged chunks of wood and slabs of dried mud into the air.
On the other side of the street, the false front of Worrell’s Market amp; Mercantile (once Tom Billingsley’s house; the corpses of the Sodersons lie in an aisle of big round bags, all labelled disintegrates under a series of rifle shots from the Justice Wagon-each arriving round as loud as a mortar shell. Colonel Henry is driving; poked out of the firing trap and doing the shooting is Chuck Connors, also known as The Rifleman. His son is right next to him, grinning from ear to ear. “Good shootin, Paw!” he exclaims as smoking boards from the false front ignite the decade’s worth of trash and dust that has been hiding behind it. Soon the entire building will be on fire.