The Regulators

bright gray and dead black, issues from it like a spook from the window of a haunted house. Except, Peter sees, the figure is standing on something. It looks like a floating pillow and seems to be humming.

Is it a man? He can’t exactly tell. It appears to be wearing a Nazi uniform, all black, glossy fabric and silver rigging, but there is no human face above the wings of its collar; there is no face of any kind, in fact.

Just blackness.

“Jackson! Get over here, partner.”

He tries to resist, to stand his ground, and when the voice comes again it isn’t like a mouth but a fishhook, yanking inside his head, tearing his thoughts open. Now he knows what a hooked trout feels like.

“Get a move-on, pard!”

Peter walks across the rain-washed remains of a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk (Ellen Carver and her friend Mindy from a block over made it that very morning), then steps into the gutter. Rushing water fills one shoe, but he doesn’t even feel it. In his mind he is now hearing a very strange thing, a kind of soundtrack. It’s being played by a twanging guitar, sort of like an old Duane Eddy instrumental. A tune he knows but can’t identify. It is the final maddening touch.

The bright figure on the floating pillow descends to street-level. As Peter draws closer, he expects to see the black cloth (perhaps nylon, perhaps silk) covering the man’s face, giving him that spooky look of absence, but he doesn’t see it, and as the plate-glass window of the EZ Stop explodes down the street, he realizes an awful thing: he doesn’t see it because it isn’t there. The man from the black wagon really has no face.

“Oh God,” he moans in a voice so low he can barely hear it himself. “Oh my God, please.”

Two other figures are looking down from the turret of the black van. One is a bearded guy wearing the ruins of what looks like a Civil War uniform. The other is a woman with lank black hair and cruel, beautiful features. She’s as pale as a comic-book vampire. Her uniform, like that of the faceless man, is black and silver, Gestapo-ish. Some sort of trumpery gem-it’s as big as a pigeon’s egg- hangs from a chain around her neck, flashing like a remnant of the psychedelic sixties.

She’s a cartoon, Peter thinks. Some pubescent boy’s first hesitant try at a sex-fantasy.

As he draws closer to the man with no face, he realizes an even more awful thing: he’s not really there at all. Neither are the other two, and neither is the black van. He remembers a Saturday matinee-he couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old-when he walked all the way down to the movie screen and stared up at it, realizing for the first time how cheesy the trick was. From twenty inches away the images were just gauze; the only reality was the bright reflective foundation of the screen, which was itself utterly blank, as featureless as a snowbank. It had to be, for the illusion to succeed. This is the same, and Peter feels the same sort of stupid surprise now that he felt then. I can see Herbie Wyler’s house, he thinks. I can see it right through the van.

“JACKSON!”

But that is real, that voice, just as the bullet which took Mary’s life was real. He screams through a grin of pain, jerking her body closer to his chest for a moment and then dropping her to the street in a tumble without even being aware of it. It is as if someone pressed the end of an electric bullhorn to one of his ears, turned the volume up all the way, and then bellowed his name into it. Blood bursts from his nose and begins to seep from the corners of his eyes.

“THATAWAY, PARD!” The black-and-silver figure, now insubstantial but still threatening, points at the Wyler house. The voice is the only reality, but it is all the reality Peter needs; it’s like the blade of a chainsaw. He jerks his head back so hard his glasses fall askew on his face. “WE GOT US SOME HOORAWIN TO DO! BEST GIT STARTED!”

He doesn’t walk toward Herbie and Audrey’s house; he is pulled towards it, reeled in. As he walks through the black, faceless figure, a crazy image fills his mind for just a moment: spaghetti, the unnaturally red kind that comes in a can, and hamburger. All mixed together in a white bowl with Warner Bros cartoon figures-Bugs, Elmer, Daffy-dancing around the rim. Just thinking about that kind of food usually nauseates him, but for the moment the image holds in his mind, he is desperately hungry; he lusts for those pallid strands of pasta and that unnatural red sauce. For that moment even the pain in his head ceases to exist.

He walks through the projected image of the black van just as it starts to roll again, and then he’s moving up the cement path to the house. His glasses finally give up their tenuous hold and fall off; he doesn’t notice. He can still hear a few isolated gunshots, but they are distant, in another world. The twangy guitar is still playing in his head, and as the door to the Wyler house opens all by itself, the guitar is joined by horns and he places the tune. It’s the theme to that old TV show, Bonanza.

I just got home from work, he thinks, stepping into a dark, fetid room that smells of sweat and old hamburger. I just got home from work, and the door slams shut behind him. I just got home from work, and he’s crossing the living room, headed for the arch and the sound of the TV. “What are you wearing that uniform for?” someone asks. “War’s been over near-bout three years, ain’t you heard?”

I just got home from work, Peter thinks, as if that explained everything-his dead wife, the shooting, the man with no face, the rancid air of this little room-and then the thing sitting in front of the TV turns around to face him and Peter thinks nothing at all.

Out on the street, the vans which have composed the fire-corridor accelerate, the black one quickly catching up with Dream Floater and the Justice Wagon. The bearded man in the turret throws one final round. It hits the blue US mailbox outside the E-Z Stop, putting a hole the size of a softball in it. Then the raiders turn left on Hyacinth and are gone. Rooty-Toot, Freedom, and Tracker Arrow leave on Bear Street, disappearing into the mist which first blurs them and then swallows them.

In the Carver house, Ralphie and Ellen are shrieking at the sight of their mother, who has collapsed in the doorway leading to the hall. She isn’t unconscious, however; her body snaps furiously from side to side as convulsions tear through her. It is as if her nervous system is being swept by hard squalls. Blood spatters from her shattered face in ropes, and she is making a complicated sound deep in her throat, a kind of singing growl.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Ralphie screams, and Jim Reed is losing his battle to keep the twisting, struggling boy from running to the woman dying in the kitchen doorway.

Johnny and Brad are coming down the stairs on their fannies-a riser at a time, like kids playing a game-but when Johnny gets to the bottom and understands what has happened, what is still happening, he gets to his feet and runs, first kicking aside the battered-in screen door, then crunching through the remains of Kirsten’s beloved Hummels.

“No, get down!” Brad yells at him, but Johnny pays no attention. He’s thinking only one thing, and that is to separate the dying woman from her kids as fast as he can. They don’t need to see the rest of her suffering.

“Mommeeeee!” Ellen howls, trying to wriggle out from under Cammie. The girl’s nose is bleeding. Her eyes are wild but hellishly aware. “Mommmeeeeeee!”

Unhearing, her days of caring about her children and her husband and her secret ambition to someday create beautiful Hummel figures of her own (most, she has thought, will probably look like her gorgeous son) all behind her, Kirsten Carver jitters mindlessly in the doorway, feet kicking, hands rising and falling, drumming briefly in her lap and then flying up again like startled birds. She growls and sings, growls and sings, sounds which are almost words.

“Get her out!” Cammie yells at Johnny. She stares at Pie with terror and pity. “Get her away from the kids, for Christ’s sake!”

He bends, lifts, and then Belinda is there to help him. They carry Kirsten into her living room and set her on a couch that she agonized over for weeks and which is now bleeding stuffing from a gaping hole. Brad backs up before them to give them room, throwing nervous glances over his shoulder at the street, which appears once again to be deserted.

“Don’t ask me to sew it,” Pie says in an arch tone of voice, and then gives a horrible choked laugh.

“Kirsten,” Belinda says, bending over her and taking one of her hands. “You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be fine.”

“Don’t ask me to sew it,” the woman on the couch repeats. This time she sounds as if she is lecturing. The cushion under her head is growing dark, the bloodstain spreading visibly as the three of them stand looking down at her. To Johnny it looks like the kind of nimbus that Renaissance painters sometimes put around their Madonnas. And then the convulsions resume.

Belinda bends and seizes Kirsten’s twisting shoulders. “Help me with her!” she chokes furiously at Johnny and her husband. She is weeping again. “Oh, you stupids, I can’t do it alone, help me with her!”

In the house next door, Tom Billingsley has gone on trying to save Marielle’s life even at the height of the attack, working with the aplomb of a battlefield surgeon. Now she is sewn up, and the bleeding is down to a muddy seep through a triple fold of gauze, but when he looks up at Collie, Old Doc shakes his head. He is actually more upset by the cries from next door than by the operation he has just performed. He doesn’t have much feeling about Marielle Soderson one way or the other, but he’s almost positive the woman crying out over there is Kirstie Carver, and Kirstie he likes very much. “Boy oh boy,” he says out loud. T mean boy-howdy.”

Collie looks toward Gary, wanting to make sure he’s out of earshot, and spots him poking around in Doc’s kitchenette, oblivious to the screaming and the weeping children next door, unaware that the operation on his wife is finished; he’s opening and closing cupboards with the thoroughness of a dedicated alcoholic hunting for booze. His look into the fridge for beer or maybe some chilled vodka was an understandably short one; his wife’s arm is there, on the second shelf. Collie put it in himself, sliding stuff around-salad dressing, pickles, the mayonnaise, some left-over sliced pork in Saran Wrap-until there was room for it. He doesn’t think it will ever be reattached, not even in this age of miracles and wonders can such a thing be done, but he still couldn’t bring himself to put it in Doc’s pantry. Too warm. It would draw flies.

“Is she going to die?” Collie asks.

“I don’t know,” Billingsley says. He pauses, takes his own look at Gary, sighs, runs his hands through his Albert Einstein tangle of white hair. “Probably. Certainly, if she doesn’t get to a hospital soon. She needs a lot of help. Most of all, a transfusion. And there’s someone hurt next door, by the sound. Kirsten, I think. And maybe she’s not the only one.”

Collie nods.

“Mr Entragian, what do you think is going on here?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea.”

Cynthia grabs a newspaper (it’s the Columbus Dispatch, not the Wentworth Shopper) that has fallen to the living-room floor during the rumpus, rolls it up, and crawls slowly to the front door. She uses the newspaper to sweep broken glass-there is a surprising amount of it-out of her way as she goes.

Steve thinks of objecting, asking her if she maybe has a deathwish, then stows it. Sometimes he gets ideas about things. Pretty strong ones, as a matter of fact. Once, while peaceably reading palms on the boardwalk in Wildwood, he had an idea so strong that he quit the job that very night. It was an idea about a laughing seventeen-year-old girl with ovarian cancer. Malignant, advanced, maybe a month beyond any possible human remedy. Not the sort of idea you wanted to have about a pretty green-eyed high-school kid if your life’s motto was

NO PROBLEM.

The idea he’s having now is every bit as strong as that one but quite a bit more optimistic: the shooters are gone, at least for the time being. There’s no way he can know that, but he feels certain of it, just the same.

Instead of calling Cynthia back, he joins her. The inside door has been blown open by several gunshots (it has also been so severely warped that Steve doubts it will ever close again), and the breeze coming through the shattered screen is heaven-sweet and cool on his sweaty face. The kids are still crying next door, but the screaming has stopped, at least for the time being, and that’s a relief.

“Where is he?” Cynthia asks, sounding stunned. “Look, there’s his wife-” she points to Mary’s body, which is now lying in the street, close enough to the far side so that tendrils of her hair are wavering in the water rushing down the west gutter-“but where’s he? Mr Jackson?”