The Regulators

The firing slackens, then ceases entirely. The people in the Carver house can hear the crackle of fire from the other side of the fence-the Market amp; Mercantile they still think of as Old Doc’s bungalow-but otherwise there is a deep quiet that lies like balm against their ringing ears. In it, the survivors cautiously raise their heads.

“Is it over, do you think?” Steve asks, in the tone of someone who doesn’t want to come right out and say it wasn’t as bad as he thought… but who is thinking it.

“We ought to-” Johnny begins.

“I hear it again!” Kim Geller cries from the living room. Her voice is high, shivering on the edge of hysteria, but the rest of them have no reason not to believe her; she is closest to the street, after all. “That awful humming! Make it stop!” She rushes through the door into the kitchen, her eyes bulging and crazed. “Make it stop!”

“Get down, Mom!” Susi calls, but she herself does not stir from beside Dave Reed, who is lying with one arm around her and his hand (the one his creepy mother can’t see from where she is) against her breast. Susi doesn’t mind his hand a bit; would mind, in fact, if he took it away. Her terror and her almost maternal concern for the surviving twin have combined to make her really horny for the first time in her life. All she really wants right now is to be with David in a place where they can take their pants off without being noticed.

Kim ignores her daughter. She goes to Audrey, grabs her by her hair, yanks her head back. “Make him stop it!” she shouts into Audrey’s pale face. “He’s your kin, you brought him here, NOW MAKE HIM STOP!”

Belinda Josephson moves fast; she’s up from where she’s been lying, she’s across the room, and she has Kim Geller’s free arm twisted up behind her back almost before Brad can blink.

“Ow!” Kim screams, immediately letting go of Audrey’s hair. “Ow, let go! Let go, you black bi-”

Belinda has taken all the tiresome racist shit she intends to for one day. She yanks Kirn’s arm up even further before she can finish. Susi’s mom, who supports the Girl Scouts and never sends the Cancer Society lady away empty-handed, shrieks like a factory whistle at quitting time. Then Belinda turns her, hips her, and sends her flying back into the living room. Kim crashes into a wall. All around her more Hummel figures tumble to their doom.

“There,” Belinda says in a businesslike voice. “She had that coming. I don’t have to put up with that kind of-”

“Never mind,” Johnny says. The humming is louder now, louder than it has ever been: a steady, cycling beat like the sound of a huge electric transformer. “Get down, Bee. Right now. Everybody. Steve, Cynthia? Cover those children!” Then he looks, almost apologetically, at Seth Garin’s aunt. “Can you make him stop, Aud?”

She shakes her head. “It’s not him. Not now. It’s Tak.” Before she puts her head back down, she sees Cammie Reed looking at her, and there is something in that dry glance that frightens her more than all of Kirn Geller’s shouting and hair-pulling. It’s a serious look. No hysteria, only flat murder.

Who would Cammie murder, though? Her? Seth? Both? Audrey doesn’t know. She only knows she cannot tell the others what she did before leaving, that simple thing that might solve so much- if. If the window of time she’s hoping for opens; if she does the right thing when it does. She can’t tell them there’s hope, because if Tak is able to reach out and catch hold of their thoughts, all hopes will fail.

The thrumming grows louder. On Main Street, the Power Wagons are rolling again. Dream Floater, Tracker Arrow, and Freedom are closer to the Carver house and reach it first. They park in line, the red Tracker Arrow with Snake Hunter behind the wheel in the middle, blocking the driveway where the lord of the manor is lying dead (and looking much the worse for wear by this time). The other three-Rooty-Toot, Justice, and Meatwagon-come up from the south end of the street and lengthen the line of vehicles.

The Carver house (it is, perhaps ironically, a ranch-style home) is now entirely blocked off by Power Wagons. From the firing pit of Dream Floater, Laura DeMott trains her shotgun on the smashed picture window; from the firing pit of Tracker Arrow, Hoss Cartwright and a very young Glint Eastwood-he is Rowdy Yates of Rawhide in this incarnation, as a matter of fact-have also got the house covered. Jeb Murdock stands in the Doom Turret of the Meatwagon with two shotguns, each sawed off four inches above the cocked triggers, the butts propped against the wishbones of his hips. He is grinning widely, his face that of Rory Calhoun in his prime.

Roof trapdoors bang open. Cowboys and aliens fill the remaining shooting-points.

“Gosh, Paw, looks like a damn turkey-shoot!” Mark McCain cries, and then utters a shrill laugh.

“Root-root-root!”

“SHUT UP, ROOTY!” they all chorus, and the laugh becomes general.

At the sound of that laughter, something inside of Kim Geller, something which has only been badly bent up to now, finally snaps. She gets to her feet in the living room and marches to the screen door beyond which Debbie Ross still lies. Kirn’s sneakers grit through the broken china shards of Pie Carver’s prized Hummels. The sound of the cycling motors out front-that weird beat-beat-beat, like some sort of electric heart-is driving her insane. Still, it’s easier to focus on that than it is to think about how that uppity nigger woman first almost broke her arm and then threw her into the other room as if she were a sack of laundry, or something.

The others are unaware she’s left until they hear her voice, querulous and shrill: “You get out of here! You just stop it and get out of here right now The police are already on their way, you know!”

At the sound of that voice, Susi forgets all about how nice it is to have Dave Reed touching her breast, and how she’d like to help him forget the death of his brother by taking him upstairs and balling him until his liver explodes. “Mummy!” she gasps, and starts to get up.

Dave hauls her back down, then clamps an arm around her waist to make completely sure she doesn’t get up again. He has lost his brother, and he feels like that’s enough for one day.

Come on, come on, come on, Audrey thinks… except she guesses it’s actually a prayer. Her eyes are squeezed so tightly shut she can see exploding red dots behind the lids, and her hands are clamped into fists, the ragged remains of her nails digging into her palms. Come on, go to work the way you’re supposed to, do your job, get started-

“Kick in,” she whispers, unaware she’s speaking out loud. Johnny, who has raised his head at the sound of Kirn’s voice, now looks at Audrey. “Kick in, can’t you? For Christ’s sake, kick in!”

What are you talking about?” he asks, but she doesn’t answer.

Outside, Kim moves down the walk toward the Power Wagons, which are parked at the curb. This is the only place along the former Poplar Street where there is any curb left.

“I’m giving you a chance,” she says, her eyes drifting from one weirdo to the next. Some are dressed in ridiculous outer-space masks, and the one behind the wheel of the lunch-wagon thingy is actually wearing a whole-body robot costume. It makes him look like an oversized version of R2D2 in the Star Wars movies. Others look like refugees from a class in Western line-dancing. A few even seem familiar… but this is no time to be distracted by such foolish ideas.

“I’m giving you a chance,” she repeats, coming to a stop just above the place where the Carvers” cement walk joins the remaining strip of Poplar Street sidewalk. “Go while you still can. Otherwise-”

The slide door of the Freedom van opens, and Sheriff Streeter steps out. His star gleams a dull moonlit silver on the left flap of his vest. He looks up at Jeb Murdock-old enemy, new ally-in the Doom Turret of the Meatwagon.

“Well, Streeter?” Murdock says. “What do you think?”

“I think you should take the yappy bitch,” Streeter says with a smile, and both of Murdock’s sawed-offs explode with noise and white fire. At one moment Kim Geller is standing at the end of the Carvers” walk; at the next she’s entirely gone. No; not quite gone. Her sneakers are still there, and her feet are still inside them.

A split-second later, something that could be a bucket of dark, silty water but isn’t hits the front of the Carver house. Then, with the sound of the twin shotgun blasts still rolling away, Streeter screams: “Shoot! Shoot, goddammit! Wipe them off the map!”

“Get down!” Johnny shouts again, knowing it will do no good; the house is going to disappear like a child’s sand-castle before a tidal wave, and they are going to disappear with it.

The regulators begin firing, and it’s like nothing Johnny ever heard in Vietnam. This, he thinks, is what it must have been like to be in the trenches at Ypres, or in Dresden thirty years or so later. The noise is incredible, a ground-zero concatenation of KA-POW and KA-BAM, and although he feels he should be immediately deafened (or perhaps killed outright by raw decibels alone), Johnny is still able to hear the sounds of the house being blown apart all around them: bursting boards, breaking windows, china figurines exploding like targets in a shooting gallery, the brittle spatter of thrown laths. Very faintly, he can also hear people screaming. The bitter tang of gunsmoke fills his nostrils. Something unseen but huge passes through the kitchen above them, screaming as it goes, and suddenly much of the kitchen’s rear wall is just rubble fanned across the backyard and floating on the surface of the Kmart pool.

Yes, Johnny thinks. This is it, this is the end. And maybe that is just as well.

But then a strange thing begins to happen. The shooting doesn’t stop, but it begins to diminish, as if someone is turning down the volume control. This isn’t just true of the gunshots themselves, but of the screaming sound the shells make as they pass overhead. And it happens fast. Less than ten seconds after he first notices the diminution-and it might be more like five-the sounds are gone entirely. So is the queer, humming beat of the Power Wagons” engines.

They raise their heads and look around at each other. In the pantry, Cynthia sees that she and Steve are both as white as ghosts. She raises her arm and blows. Powder puffs up from her skin.

“Flour,” she says.

Steve rakes through his long hair and holds an unsteady hand out to her. There’s a cluster of shiny black things in the palm. “Flour’s not so bad,” he says. “I got olives.”

She thinks she’ll begin to laugh, but before she can, an amazing and totally unexpected thing happens.

Seth’s Place/Seth’s Time

Of all the passages he has dug for himself during the reign of Tak-Tak the Thief, Tak the Cruel, Tak the Despot-this is the longest. He has, in a way, re-created his own version of Rattlesnake Number One. The shaft goes deep into some black earth which he supposes is himself, then rises again toward the surface like a hope. At the end of it is a door of iron bands. He doesn’t try to open it, but not for fear he will find it locked. Quite the opposite. This is a door he must not touch until he is completely ready; once through it, there will never be any coming back.

He prays it goes where he thinks it does.

Enough light comes through the cracks between the door’s iron lengths to illuminate the place where he stands. There are pictures on the strange, fleshy walls; one a group portrait of his family with him sitting between his brother and sister, one a photo of him standing between Aunt Audrey and Uncle Herb on the lawn of this house. They are smiling. Seth, as always, is solemn, distant, not quite there. There is also a photograph of Allen Symes, standing beside (and dwarfed by) one of Miss Mo’s treads. Mr Symes is wearing his Deep Earth hardhat and grinning. No such photograph as this exists, but that doesn’t matter. This is Seth’s place, Seth’s time, Seth’s mind, and he decorates it as he likes. Not so long ago, there would have been pictures of the MotoKops and the characters from The Regulators hung, not just here, but all along the length of the tunnel. No longer. They have lost their charm for him.

I outgrew them, he thinks, and that is the truth of it. Autistic or not, only eight or not, he has gotten too old for shoot-'em-up Westerns and Saturday-morning cartoons. He suddenly understands that this is almost certainly the bottom truth, and one Tak would never understand: he outgrew them. He has the Cassie Styles figure in his pocket (when he needs a pocket he just imagines one; it’s handy) because he still loves her a little, but otherwise? No. The only question is whether or not he can escape them, sweet fantasies which might have been laced with poison all along.

And the time has come to find that out.

Beside the photo of Allen Symes, a little shelf just out of the wall. Seth has seen and admired the shelves in the Carver hallway, each dedicated to its own Hummel figure, and this one was created with those in mind. Enough light seeps through the cracks in the door to see what’s on it-not a Hummel shepherd or milkmaid but a red PlaySkool telephone.

He picks it up and spins out two-four-eight on the plastic phone’s rotary dial. It’s the Carvers” house number. In his ear the toy phone rings… rings… rings. But is it ringing on the other end? Does she hear it? Do any of them hear it?

“Come on,” he whispers. He is entirely aware and alert; in this deep-inside place he’s no more autistic than Steve Ames or Belinda Josephson or Johnny Marinville… is, in fact,