The Regulators

FLIP MORAN, the hostler, lets go with a round. A couple of others follow suit, but only a couple, luckily.

RESUME MAIN STREET IN FRONT OF THE SALOON

A BULLET WHINES off one of the batwing doors, knocking a splinter out.

STREETER

Don’t shoot, he’s gone!

RESUME ROOFTOPS SCENE CONTINUES

The men lower their guns. FLIP MORAN looks confused and ashamed of himself.

EXT. STREETER AND LAURA, CLOSE

The SHERIFF’s hard shell is temporarily gone-smashed. He looks down at the DYING DANCEHALL GIRL and realizes he loves her!

STREETER

Laura!

LAURA (coughing) Gun misfired… you always said… never trust a… a hideout gun…

She breaks down coughing. STREETER Don’t talk. I’ll send Joe Prudum for the doc-LAURA (coughing) Too… too late. Just hold me! STREETER does. She looks up at him CURIOUSLY. LAURA Why, Sheriff!… are you crying? EXT. REAR OF THE LADY DAY MURDOCK comes bursting out. SERGEANT MATHIS is still there, holding the horses.

SARGE

What happened? I heard shootin'!

MURDOCK (swings up on his horse) Never mind. It’s time to get the boys.

SARGE

You mean-?!

Suddenly MURDOCK’s insanity breaks free. His eyes BLAZE. SCENE CONTINUES His lips pull back in a snarl that looks almost like a GRIN. It is the grin of a cornered ANIMAL! MURDOCK We’re gonna wipe this town off the map!

They wheel their horses away to join the rest of the regulators.

Chapter Nine

1

There was no need for Steve and Collie to hop the fence at the far end of Doc’s yard; there was a gate, although they had to tear out a fair amount of well-entrenched ivy befor e they could use it. They exchanged words only twice before reaching the path. The first time it was Steve who spoke. He looked around at the trees-scrubby, weedy-looking things, for the most part, now mysterious with the rustle of rainwater dripping off the leaves-and then asked: “Are these poplars?”

Collie, who had been working his way around a particularly vicious clump of thornbushes, looked back at him. “Say what?”

“I asked if these trees are poplars. Since Poplar Street is where we came from, I just wondered.”

“Oh.” Collie looked around doubtfully, swapping the.30-.06 from one hand to the other and then running an arm across his forehead. It was very hot in the greenbelt. “I don’t know if they’re poplars or pines or goddam eucalyptuses, to tell you the truth. Botany was never my thing. That one over there is a skinny-ass birch, and that’s about all I know on the subject.” With that, he started off again.

Five minutes later (Steve wondering by now if there really was a path back here, or only wishful thinking), Collie stopped. He looked back past Steve, his eyes so intense that Steve turned himself to see what he was looking at. He saw nothing but the tangled greenery through which they had already made their way. No sign of Old Doc’s house; the Jacksons”, either. He could see a tiny wedge of red that he thought might be the chimney atop the Carver house, but that was all. They almost could have been a hundred miles from the nearest human habitation. Thinking that-and realizing it was a true thought-gave Steve a chill.

“What?” he asked, thinking the cop would ask him why they couldn’t hear any cars, not even some kid’s glasspack-equipped low-rider, or a single bass-powered sound-system, or a motorcycle, or a horn, or a shout, or anything.

Instead, Collie said: “We’re losing the light.”

“We can’t be. It’s only-” Steve looked at his watch, but it had stopped. The battery had given out, probably; he’d never replaced it since his sister had given it to him for Christmas a couple of years ago. It was odd, though, that it should have stopped just past four o’clock, which had to be not long after the time he had first wheeled into this marvellous little neighborhood.

“Only what?”

“I can’t say exactly, my watch has stopped, but just think about it. It can’t be much more than five-thirty, five forty-five. Maybe even earlier. Don’t they say you overestimate elapsed time when you’re in a crisis situation?”

“I don’t even know who “they” are, never have,” Collie said. “But look at the light. The quality of the light.”

Steve did, and yes, the cop had a point. Steve didn’t like to admit it, but he did. The light slanted through the tangle (and that was the proper word for it, not greenbelt) in hot red shafts. Red sun at night, sailor’s delight, he thought, and suddenly, as if that was a trigger, it all tried to crash in on him, all the things that were wrong, and he couldn’t stand it. He raised his hands and clapped them over his eyes, whacking himself a damned good one on the side of the head with the butt of the.22 he was carrying, feeling his bladder go loose, knowing he was close to watering his underwear and not caring. He staggered backward and-from a distance, it seemed-heard Collie Entragian asking if he was okay. With what felt like the greatest effort of his life, Steve said that he was and forced himself to lower his hands, to look into that delirious red light again.

“Let me ask you a very personal question,” Steve said. He thought his voice did not sound even remotely like his own. “How scared are you?”

“Very.” The big guy armed more sweat off his forehead. It was very hot in here, but in spite of the dripping, rustling leaves, the heat felt strangely dry to Steve, not in the least greenhouse-ish. The smells were that way, too. Not unpleasant, but dry. Egyptian, almost. “Don’t lose hope, though. I see the path, I think.”

It was indeed the path, they stepped on to it less than a minute after getting moving again, and Steve saw signs-comforting ones, under the circumstances-of the animals which had used this particular game-trail: a potato-chip bag, the wrapper from a pack of baseball cards, a couple of double-A batteries which had maybe been pried out of some kid’s Walkman after they went dead, initials carved on a tree.

He saw something far less comforting on the other side of the track: a misshapen growth, prickly and virulent green, among the sumach and scrub trees. Two more stood behind it, their lumpy arms sticking stiffly up like the arms of alien traffic cops.

“Holy shit, do you see those?” Steve asked.

Collie nodded. “They look like cactuses. Or cacti. Or whatever you say for more than one.”

Yes, Steve thought, but only in the way that women painted by Picasso during his Cubist phase looked like real women. The simplicity of the cactuses and their lack of symmetry-like the bird with the mismatched wings-gave them a surreal aspect that hurt his head. It was like looking at something that wouldn’t quite come into focus.

It does look a little like a buzzard, Old Doc had said. As a child might draw it.

Things were starting to group together in his mind. Not fit together, at least not yet, but forming themselves naturally into what they had been taught to call a set back in Algebra I. The vans, which looked like props from a kids” Saturday matinee. The bird. Now these violent green cactuses, like something you’d see in an energetic first grader’s picture.

Collie approached the one closest to the path and stuck out a tentative finger.

“Man, don’t do that, you’re nuts!” Steve said.

Collie ignored him. Reached the finger further. Closer. And closer yet, until-

“Ouch! You mother!”

Steve jumped. Collie yanked his hand back and peered at it like a kid with an interesting new scrape. Then he turned to Steve and held it out. A bead of blood, small and dark and perfect, was forming on the pad of his index finger. “They’re real enough to poke,” he said. “This one is, anyway.”

“Sure. And what if it poisons you? Like something from the Congo Basin, something like that?”

Collie shrugged as if to say too late now, pal, and started along the path. It was headed south at this point, toward Hyacinth. With the red-orange sunlight flooding through the trees from the right, it was at least impossible to become disoriented. They started down the hill. As they went, Steve saw more and more of the misshapen cacti in the woods to the east of the path. They were actually crowding out the trees in places. The underbrush was thinning, and for a very good reason: the topsoil was also thinning, being replaced by a grainy gray sandbed that looked like… like…

Sweat ran in Steve’s eyes, stinging. He wiped it away. So hot, and the light so strong and red. He felt sick to his stomach.

“Look.” Collie pointed. Twenty yards ahead, another clump of cacti guarded a fork in the path. Jutting out from them like the prow of a ship was an overturned shopping cart. In the dying light, the metal basket-rods looked as if they had been dipped in blood.