The Regulators

Coming downhill from Bear Street, Dream Floater and the Justice Wagon pour fire into 251 and 249-the Josephson house and the Soderson house. The windows blow in. The doors blow open. A round that sounds like something thrown from a small anti-aircraft gun hits the back of Gary’s old Saab. The back end crumples in, shards of red taillight glass fly, and there’s a whoomp! as the gas-tank explodes, engulfing the little car in a ball of smoky orange flame. The bumper-stickers-I MAY BE SLOW BUT I’M AHEAD OF YOU on the right, MAFIA STAFF CAR on the left-shimmer in the heat like mirages. The south-moving trio of vans and the trio moving north meet, cross, and stop in front of the stake fences separating the Billingsley place from the Carver house above it and the Jackson house below it.

Audrey Wyler, who was eating a sandwich and drinking a can of lite beer in the kitchen when the shooting started, stands in the living room, staring out at the street with wide eyes, unaware that she’s still holding half of a salami and lettuce on rye in one hand. The firing has merged into one continuous, ear-splitting World War III roar, but she is in no danger; all of it is currently being directed at the two houses across from her.

She sees Ralphie Carver’s red wagon-Buster-rise into the air with one side blown into a twisted metal flower. It cartwheels over David Carver’s soggy corpse, lands with its wheels up and spinning, and then another hit bends it almost double and sends it into the flowers to the left of the driveway. Another round blows the Carver screen door off its hinges and hammers it down the hall; two more from Bounty’s Freedom van vaporize most of Pie’s prized Hummel figures.

Holes open in the crushed back deck of Mary Jackson’s Lumina, and then it too explodes, flames belching up and swallowing the car back to front. Bullets tear off two of Old Doc’s shutters. A hole the size of a baseball appears in the mailbox mounted beside his door; the box drops to the welcome mat, smoking. Inside it, a Kmart circular and a letter from the Ohio Veterinary Society are blazing. Another KA-BAM and the bungalow’s door-knocker-a silver St Bernard’s head-disappears as conclusively as a coin in a magician’s hand. Seeming oblivious of all this, Peter Jackson struggles to his feet with his dead wife in his arms. His round rimless glasses, the lenses spotted with water, glint in the strengthening light. His pale face is more than distracted; it is the face of a man whose entire bank of fuses has burned out. But he’s standing there, Audrey sees, miraculously whole, miraculously-

Aunt Audrey!

Seth. Very faint, but definitely Seth.

Aunt Audrey, can you hear me?

Yes! Seth, what’s happening?

Never mind! The voice sounds on the edge of panic. You have the place you go, don’t you?

The safe place?

Mohonk? Did he mean Mohonk? He must, she decided.

Yes, I-

Go there! the faint voice cries. Go there NOW! Because-

The voice doesn’t finish, and doesn’t have to. She has turned away from the furious shooting-gallery in the street, turned toward the den, where the movie-The Movie-is playing again. The volume has been cranked, somehow, far beyond what their Zenith should be able to produce. Seth’s shadow bounces ecstatically up and down on the wall, elongated and somehow horrible; it reminds her of what scared her most as a child, the horned demon from the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of Fantasia. It’s as if Tak is twisting inside the child’s body, warping it, stretching it, driving it ruthlessly beyond its ordinary limits and boundaries.

Nor is that all that’s happening. She turns back to the window, stares out. At first she thinks it’s her eyes, something wrong with her eyes-perhaps Tak has melted them somehow, or warped the lenses-but she holds her hands up in front of her and they look all right. No, it’s Poplar Street that’s wrong. It seems to be twisting out of perspective in some way she can’t quite define, angles changing, corners bulging, colors blurring. It’s as if reality is on the verge of liquefying, and she thinks she knows why: Tak’s long period of preparation and quiet growth is over. The time of action has come. Tak is making, Tak is building. Seth told her to get out, at least for a while, but where can Seth go?

Seth! she tries, concentrating as hard as she can. Seth, come with me!

I can’t! Go, Aunt Audrey! Go now!

The agony in that voice is more than she can endure. She turns toward the arch again, the one which leads into the den, but sees a meadow slanting down to a rock wall instead. There are wild roses; she smells them and feels the sexy, delicate heat of spring now tending toward summer. And then Janice is beside her and Janice is asking her what her all-time favorite Simon and Garfunkel song is and soon they are deep in a discussion of “Homeward Bound” and “I Am a Rock”, the one that goes “If I’d never loved, I never would have cried.”

In the Carver kitchen, the refugees lie on the floor with their hands laced over the backs of their heads and their faces pressed to the floor; around them the world seems to be tearing itself apart. Glass shatters, furniture falls, something explodes. There are horrible punching sounds as bullets pound through the walls.

Suddenly Pie Carver can stand Ellie’s clinging to her no more. She loves Ellen, of course she does, but it’s Ralphie she wants now, and Ralphie she must have; smart, sassy Ralphie, who looks so much like his father. She pushes Ellen roughly away, ignoring the girl’s cry of startled dismay, and bolts for the niche between the stove and the fridge, where Jim is hunched over the frantic, screaming Ralphie, holding one hand over the back of Ralphie’s head like a cap.

“Mommmmeeee!” Ellen wails, and attempts to run after her. Cammie Reed pushes away from the pantry door, grabs the little girl around the waist, and drops her back to the floor just as something that sounds like a monster locust drones across the kitchen, strikes the kitchen faucet, and backflips it like a majorette’s baton. Most of the spinning faucet tears through the screen and the spider’s web on the other side. Water spouts up from what’s left, at first almost all the way to the ceiling.

“Give him to me!” Pie screams. “Give me my son! Give me my s-”

Another approaching drone, this one followed by a loud, unmusical clang as one of the copper pots hanging by the stove is hammered into a hulk of twisted fragments and flying shrapnel. And Pie is suddenly just screaming, no words now, just screaming. Her hands are clapped to her face. Blood pours through her fingers and down her neck. Threads of copper litter the front of her misbuttoned blouse. More copper is in her hair, and a large chunk quivers in the center of her forehead like the blade of a thrown knife.

“I can’t see!” she shrieks, and drops her hands. Of course she can’t; her eyes are gone. So is most of her face. Quills of copper bristle from her cheeks, her lips, her chin. “Help me, I can’t see! Help me, David! Where are you?”

Johnny, lying face-down beside Brad in Ellen’s room upstairs can hear her screaming and understands that something terrible has happened. Bullets hemstitch the air above them. On the far wall is a picture of Eddie Vedder; as Johnny starts to wriggle toward the doorway to the hall, a huge bullet-hole appears in Eddie’s chest. Anothe r one hits the child-sized vanity mirror over Ellen’s dresser and hammers it to sparkling fragments. Somewhere on the block, blending hellishly with the sounds of Pie Carver’s screams from downstairs, comes the bray of a car alarm. And still the gunfire goes on.

As he crawls out into the toy-littered hall, he hears Brad beside him, panting harshly. This has been a hell of an aerobic day for a fellow with such a big stomach, Johnny thinks… but then that thought, the sound of the woman screaming downstairs, and the roar of the gunfire are all driven from his mind. For a moment he feels as if he has walked into a Mike Tyson right hand.

“It’s the same guy,” he whispers. “Oh Jesus-God, it’s the same fucking one.”

“Get down, fool!” Brad grabs his arm and yanks. Johnny collapses forward like a car slipping off a badly placed jack, not realizing he’s been up on his hands and knees until he comes crashing back down again. Unseen bullets hunt the air over his head. The glass on a framed wedding picture at the head of the stairs shatters; the picture itself falls face-down on the carpet with a thump. A second later, the wooden ball atop the banister’s newel-post disintegrates, spewing a deadly bouquet of splinters. Brad ducks down, covering his face, but Johnny only stares at something on the hallway floor, oblivious of everything else.

“What’s wrong with you?” Brad asks him. “You want to die?”

“It’s him, Brad,” Johnny repeats. He curls his fingers into his hair and gives a brief hard tug, as if to assure himself that all this is really happening. “The-” There’s a vicious buzz, almost like a plucked guitar-string, over their heads, and the hall light-fixture explodes, showering glass down on them. “The guy that was driving the blue van,” he finishes. “The other one shot her-the human-but this is the guy who was driving.”

He reaches out and picks up one of Ralphie Carver’s action figures from the hall floor, which is now littered with glass and splinters as well as toys. It’s an alien with a bulging forehead, almond- shaped eyes that are dark and huge, and a mouth that isn’t a mouth at all but a kind of fleshy horn. It’s dressed in a greenish iridescent uniform. The head is bald except for a stiff blond strip of hair. To Johnny it looks like the comb on a Roman Centurion’s helmet. Where’s your hat? he thinks at the little figure as the bullets whine through the air above him, punching through the wallpaper, shattering the laths beneath. The figure looks a little like Spielberg’s ET. Where’s your pinned-back cavalry hat, bub?

“What are you talking about?” Brad asks. He’s lying full-length on his stomach. Now he takes the figure, which is perhaps seven inches tall, from Johnny and looks at it. There is a cut on one of Brad’s plump cheeks. Falling glass from the light-fixture, Johnny assumes. Downstairs, the screaming woman falls silent. Brad looks at the alien, then stares at Johnny with eyes that are almost comically round. “You’re full of shit,” he says.

“No,” Johnny says. Tm not. With God as my witness I’m not. I never forget a face.”

What are you saying? That the people doing this are wearing masks so the survivors can’t identify them later?”

The idea hasn’t occurred to Johnny until this moment, but it’s a pretty good one. “I suppose that must be it. But-”

“But what?”

“It didn’t look like a mask. That’s all. It didn’t look like a mask.”

Brad stares at him a moment longer, then tosses the figure aside and begins wriggling toward the stairwell. Johnny picks it up, looks at it for a moment, then winces as another slug comes through the window at the end of the hall-the one facing the street-and drones directly over his head. He tucks the action figure into the pants pocket not holding the oversized slug and begins to wriggle after Brad.

On the lawn of Old Doc’s house, Peter Jackson stands with his wife in his arms, woundless at the center of the firestorm. He sees the vans with their dark glass and futuristic contours, he sees the shotgun barrels, their muzzles belching fire, and between the silvery one and the red one he can see Gary Soderson’s old shitbox Saab burning in the Soderson driveway. None of it makes much of an impression on him. He is thinking about how he just got home from work. That seems like a very big deal to him, for some reason. He thinks he will begin every account of this terrible afternoon (it has not occurred to him that he may not survive the terrible afternoon, at least not yet) by saying I just got home from work . This phrase already has become a kind of magical structure inside his head; a bridge back to the sane and orderly world which he assumed, only an hour ago, was his by right and would be for years and decades to come: I just got home from work .

He is also thinking of Mary’s father, a professor at the Meermont College of Dentistry in Brooklyn. He has always been rather terrified of Henry Kaepner, of Henry Kaepner’s somehow daunting integrity; in his heart Peter has always known that Henry Kaepner considers him unworthy of his daughter (and in his heart this is an opinion with which Peter Jackson has always concurred). And now Peter is standing in the firestorm with his feet in the wet grass, wondering how he’ll ever be able to tell Mr Kaepner that his father-in-law’s worst unspoken fear has become reality: his unworthy son- in-law has gotten his only child killed.

It’s not my fault, though, Peter thinks. Perhaps I can make him see that if I start by saying I just got home from w-

“Jackson.”

The voice wipes out his worries, makes him sway on his feet, makes him feel like screaming. It is as if an alien mouth has opened inside his mind, tearing a hole in it. Mary slips in his arms, trying to slither out of his grip, and Peter hugs her tight against him again, ignoring the ache in his arms. At the same time he comes back to some vague appreciation of reality. Most of the vans are on the move again, but very slowly, still firing. The pink one and the yellow one are now pouring fire into the Reed and Geller residences, shattering birdbaths, blasting away faucet bibs, breaking basement windows, shredding flowers and bushes, slicing through raingutters that drop, slanting, to the lawns below.

One of them, however, is not moving. The black one. It is parked on the other side of the street, blocking most of the Wyler house from view. The turret has slid back, and now a shining figure, all