The Regulators

much dignity… and probably without realizing they were leaving at all.

“Do?” Steve asked. He stared at Johnny, almost comically amazed, and ran a hand through his hair, smearing red in with the gray. More blood was spreading on the shoulders of his shirt where the cat’s claws had sunk in. “What do you mean, do?”

“Do we go on or do we go back?” Johnny asked. His voice was rough, urgent. “What’s up ahead? What did you see?”

“Nothing,” Steve said. “No, I take that back. It’s worse than nothing. It-” His eyes shifted past Johnny and widened.

Johnny turned, thinking the hippie must have seen the coyotes, they had finally arrived, but it wasn’t coyotes. “Jim, no!” he screamed. “Don’t!” Knowing it was already too late, seeing it on young Jim Reed’s pale face, where everything had been cancelled.

4

The boy stood there with the pistol pressed against the side of his head just long enough for Steve Ames to hope that maybe he wasn’t going to do it, that he’d had a change of heart at the penultimate moment, that last little vestibule of maybe not before the endless hallway of too late, and then Jim pulled the trigger. His face contorted as if he had been struck with a gas-pain of moderate intensity. His skin seemed to pop sideways on his skull, the left cheek puffing out. Then his head blew apart, his ambitions to write great essays (not to mention those of getting into Susi Geller’s pants) so much vapor in the strange sunset air, red goo that splattered across one of the insane cacti like spit. He staggered forward a step on buckling knees, the gun tumbling from his hand, then went down. Steve turned his thunderstruck face to Johnny’s, thinking: I didn’t see what I just saw. Rewind the tape, play it again, and you’ll see, too. I didn’t see what I just saw. Neither of us did. No, man. No.

Except he had. The kid, overcome with remorse and horror at what he had done to the guy from down the street, had just committed impulse suicide in front of him.

“You should have stopped him!” Dave Reed screamed, hurling himself at Johnny. “You should have stopped him, why didn’t you? Why didn’t you stop him?”

Steve tried to grab the kid on his way by, but the pain in his shoulders was excruciating. He could only watch helplessly as Dave Reed grabbed Johnny and bore him to the ground. They rolled over twice, from one side of the path to the other. Johnny wound up on top, at least for a moment. “David, listen to me-”

“No! No! You should have stopped him! You should have stopped him!”

The kid slapped Johnny first with his right hand, then his left. He was sobbing, tears streaming down his pale cheeks. Steve tried again to help and succeeded only in distracting Johnny, who had been trying to pin the boy’s arms with his knees. Dave rocked up hard on one hip, throwing Johnny off the path to the left. Johnny put out a hand to break his fall and got a palmful of cactus spines instead. He roared in pain and surprise.

Steve got hold of Dave Reed’s shoulder with his right hand-that arm was at least responding a little-but the boy shook him off easily, not even looking around, and then sprang on to Johnny Marinville’s broad back, got his hands around his throat, and began to choke him. And, all around them in the swiftly darkening day, the coyotes howled-perfect round howls, the kind Steve had never heard when he was growing up, although he had been born and raised in Texas. Howls like these you only heard in the movies.

Both men had wanted to come with her, but Cynthia wouldn’t have it-one was old, the other drunk. The gate at the bottom of the lawn was still open. A moment after going through it, she was fighting her way through the underbrush toward the path. She saw several cacti before she got there (there were more of them now, and they were driving out the normal greenbelt vegetation), but didn’t register them. She could hear the sounds of a struggle up ahead: harsh, strained breathing, a cry of pain, the thud of a landed blow. And coyotes. She didn’t see them, but they sounded as if they were everywhere.

As she reached the path, a trim little blonde in jeans blew past her without so much as a glance. Cynthia knew who she was-Cammie Reed, the twins” mother. Following her and panting heavily was Brad Josephson. Rivulets of sweat were running down his cheeks; the late light made him look as if he were crying tears of blood.

Sun’s going down, Cynthia thought as she turne d on to the path and ran after the others. If we don’t get out of here soon, we’re apt to get lost. And wouldn’t that be fun.

Then there was a scream from just ahead of her. No, not a scream but a shriek. Horror and grief mingled. The Reed woman. Cynthia heard Brad say, “Oh no, oh fuck,” just as she reached him.

For a moment Josephson’s broad back obscured what was going on, and then he bent beside Cammie and Cynthia saw two bodies lying sprawled on either side of the path. In the thickening shadows she couldn’t tell who they were-only that they had been male, and looked as if they had died unpleasantly-but she could see Steve standing to one side of the melee at the left of the path, and the sight of him made her feel glad. Almost at his feet was the carcass of a horribly misshapen animal with half its head blown away.

Cammie Reed was on her knees beside one of the corpses, not touching it but holding her shaking hands out over it, palms up, wailing. On her face was an expression of murderous agony. Cynthia saw the Eddie Bauer shorts and understood it was one of her sons.

But they had such perfect teeth, Cynthia thought stupidly. Must have cost her and her husband a fortune.

Brad worked at getting the other twin (Dave, Cynthia thought his name was, or maybe it was Doug) off Johnny Marinville. The big black man had gotten his arms under the teenager’s arms, and had locked his large hands together behind Dave’s neck, giving him full-nelson leverage. Still, the Reed boy did not come easily.

“Let me go!” he bawled. “Let me go, you son of a bitch! He killed my brother! He killed Jimmy!”

Mrs Reed’s keening stopped. She looked up and the still, questioning expression on her white face frightened Cynthia. “What?” she said, so low that she might have been speaking to herself. “What did you say?”

“He killed Jimmy!” Dave Reed bawled. His head was bent strenuously forward under the pressure Brad was exerting on his neck, but he still pointed unerringly at Johnny, who was getting to his feet. Blood trickled from one of the writer’s nostrils.

“No,” Johnny said heavily. The woman wasn’t listening to him, Cynthia saw that clearly in her white and frozen face, but Marinville didn’t. “I understand how you feel, David, but-”

The woman looked down. Cynthia looked down with her. They saw the.45 on the path at the same moment, and both of them went for it. Cynthia dropped to her knees and actually got her hand on it first, but it did her no good. Fingers as cold as marble and as strong as the talons of an eagle closed over her hand and plucked the pistol away.

“-it was all a terrible accident,” Johnny was mumbling. He seemed to be speaking mostly to Dave. He looked ill, on the verge of fainting. “That’s how you have to think of it. As-”

“Look out!” Steve cried, then: “Jesus Christ, lady, no! Don’t!”

“You killed Jimmy?” the woman asked in a deadly-cold voice. “Why? Why would you do that?”

But she wasn’t interested in the answer, it seemed. She lifted the.45, centering it on Johnny Marinville’s forehead. There was no question in Cynthia’s mind that she meant to kill him. Would have killed him, if not for the new arrival, who came between Cammie and her intended target just before she could squeeze the trigger.

Brad recognized the zombie in spite of its hitching, shambling walk and distorted face. He didn’t know what kind of force had been responsible for changing the amiable college English teacher from down the block into the thing he was looking at now, and didn’t want to know. Looking was bad enough. It was as if someone whose prodigious strength was only overmatched by his sadistic cruelty had gripped Peter Jackson’s head between his hands and squeezed. The man’s eyes bulged from their sockets; the left had actually burst and lay on his cheek. His grin was even worse, a grotesque ear-to-ear rictus that made Brad think of The Joker in the Batman comic books.

They all stopped moving; Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner with his glittering, enchanted gaze might have entered their company. Brad felt his fingers, laced together at the nape of Dave’s neck, loosen, but Dave made no immediate effort to pull away. The longhair in the bloodstained tee-shirt was partially blocking Peter’s way, and for a moment Brad thought there was going to be a collision. At the last second the hippie managed a single shaky backward step, making room. Peter turned his strangely distended head toward him. The fading light shone on his bulging eyeballs and grinning teeth.

“Find… my… frie nd,” Peter said to the hippie. His voice was faint and queasy, as if he had been gassed enough to fuck him up but not quite enough to put him down. “Sit… down… with… my friend.”

“Do it, man, knock yourself out,” the hippie said in an unsteady voice, then hunched his shoulder in, away from the grinning man. The hippie had been wounded somehow and it obviously hurt him to do that, but he did it anyway. Brad didn’t blame him. He wouldn’t have wanted to be touched by that thing, either, even in passing.

It went on up the path, kicking the leg of the outstretched animal, and Brad saw a weird thing: the animal-it had been some sort of cat-was decaying with the speed of time-lapse photography, its pelt turning black and beginning to send up tendrils of nasty-smelling steam or smoke.

They remained frozen-the hippie with his bloody shoulders hunched; the counter-girl on one knee; Cammie standing in front of the girl and pointing the gun; Johnny with his hands up, as if he intended to try catching the bullet; Brad and Dave Reed caught in their wrestling pose-as Peter drifted south along the path, his back now to them. The evening was utterly still, poised on a diminishing shaft of daylight. Even the coyotes had gone still, at least for the moment.

Then Dave sensed the lack of strength in the hands holding his neck and tore out of Brad’s grip. The boy showed no interest in Johnny, however. He charged at his mother instead.

“You too!” he screamed. “You killed him, too!”

She turned toward him, her face shocked and flabbergasted.

“Why did you send us out here, Ma? Why?”

He snatched the gun from her unresisting hand, held it up in front of his eyes for a moment, and then heaved it into the woods… except they weren’t woods, not anymore. The changes had continued all around them even while they had been striving one with the other, and they were now standing in a bristling, alien forest of cacti. Even the smell of the burning house had changed; it now smelled like burning mesquite, or maybe sagebrush.

“Dave… Davey, I…”

She fell silent, only staring at him. He stared back, just as white, just as drawn. It occurred to Brad that not long ago the boy had been standing on his lawn, laughing and throwing a Frisbee. Dave’s face began to contort. His mouth drew down and shuddered open. Gleaming strands of spit stretched between his lips. He began to wail. His mother put her arms around him and began to rock him. “No, it’s all right,” she said. Her own eyes were like smooth dark stones in a dry riverbed. “No, it’s all right. No, honey, it’s all right, Mom’s here and it’s all right.”

Johnny stepped back on to the path. He looked briefly at the dead animal, which was now shimmering like something seen through a furnace-haze and oozing runnels of thick pink liquid. Then he looked at Cammie and her remaining son.

“Cammie,” he said. “Mrs Reed. I did not shoot Jim. I swear I didn’t. What happened was-”

“Be still,” she said, not looking at him. Dave was half a foot taller than his mother and had to outweigh her by seventy pounds, but she rocked him as easily now as she must have done when he was eight months old and colicky. “I don’t want to hear what happened. I don’t care what happened. Let’s just go back. Do you want to go back, David?”

Weeping, not looking, he nodded against her shoulder.

She turned her terrible dry eyes toward Brad. “Bring my other boy. We’re not leaving him out here with that thing.” She looked briefly at the fuming, stinking carcass of the mountain lion, then back at Brad. “Bring him, do you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Brad said. “I absolutely do.”

Tom Billingsley was standing at the kitchen door, peering out into the growing gloom toward his open back gate and trying to make sense of the sounds and voices he heard coming from beyond it. When a set of fingers tapped him on the shoulder, he almost had a heart attack.

Once he would have spun gracefully and coldcocked the intruder with his fist or elbow before either of them knew what was happening, but the slim young man who had been capable of such