The Regulators

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