The Regulators (40 page)

“Yes!” Kim said pleasantly. “I think that's a
good
idea. We'll just go in the house, won't we, Susi? Some cold water on our faces will make us feel better.”

There were footfalls. The snuffling began to diminish, which was good. Then the coyotes began to howl again, which was bad. Brad looked over his shoulder and saw chips of moving silver light in the tangled darkness of the greenbelt. Eyes.

“We've got to hurry,” Cynthia said.

“You don't know the half of it,” Audrey said.

Brad thought: That's what I'm afraid of. He turned and took hold of Jim Reed's shoulders. He could smell, very faintly, the shampoo and aftershave the kid had used that morning. Probably he'd been thinking about the girls as he applied them. Johnny took a nervous look behind them—at those moving chips of light, Brad assumed—then moved down Jim's body until he had one arm around the dead
boy's waist and the other supporting his butt. Audrey and Cynthia took his legs.

“Ready?” Johnny asked.

They nodded.

“On three, then. One . . . two . . .
three.
”

They raised the body like a quartet doing a team bench-lift. For one horrible moment Brad thought his back, having supported a shamefully large gut for the last ten years or so, was going to lock up on him. Then they had Jim's body up to the top of the fence. The dead boy's arms hung out to either side, the posture of a circus acrobat inviting applause at the climax of a fabulous stunt. His open palms were full of moonlight.

Beside Brad, Johnny sounded on the verge of cardiac arrest. Jim's head lolled limply backward on his neck. A drop of half-congealed blood fell and struck Brad's cheek. It made him think of mint jelly, for some mad reason, and his stomach clenched like a hand in a slick glove.

“Help us!” Cynthia gasped. “For Christ's sake,
someone—
”

Hands appeared, hovered above the blunt fence-stakes for a moment, then broke apart into fingers which grasped Jim's shirt and the waistband of his shorts. Just as Brad knew he couldn't hold the body another second (never until now had he really understood the concept of
dead weight
), it was pulled away from him. There was a meaty thud, and from a little distance away (the Carvers' back porch was Brad's guess), Susi Geller voiced another brief scream.

Johnny looked at him, and Brad was almost
convinced the man was smiling. “Sounds like they dropped him,” Johnny said in a low voice. He wiped an arm across his sweaty face, then lowered it. The smile—if it had been there in the first place—was gone.

“Whoops,” Brad said.

“Yeah. Whoops-a-fuckin-daisy.”

“Hey, Doc!” Cynthia cried in a low voice. “Catch! Don't worry, safety's on!” She lifted the .30–.06, stock first, standing on her toes in order to tip it over the fence.

“Got it,” Billingsley said. Then, in a lower voice: “That woman and her idiot daughter finally went in the house.”

Cynthia climbed the fence and swung easily over the top. Audrey needed a push and a hand on her hip for balance, and then she was over, as well. Steve went next, using Brad's and Johnny's interlaced hands as a stirrup and then sitting up top a moment, waiting for the pain in his clawed shoulders to subside a little. When it had, he swung over the fence to the Carvers' side and pushed off, jumping rather than trying to let himself down.

“I can't get over there,” Johnny said. “No way. If there was a ladder in the garage—”

Wh-wh-whooooo! . . . Wh-wh-whooooooo!

From almost directly behind them. The two men jumped into each other's arms as unselfconsciously as small children. Brad turned his head and saw shapes closing in. Each was hulked up behind a pair of those glinting semi-circular moonchips.

“Cynthia!” Johnny shouted. “Shoot the gun!”

When her voice came back it sounded scared and uncertain. “You mean come back over the—”

“No! No! Just shoot it into the sky!”

She triggered the .30–.06 twice, the blasts whipcracking the air. The bitter tang of gunsmoke seeped through the fence-stakes. The shapes coming toward them through the greenbelt paused. Didn't draw back, but at least paused.

“You still pooped, John?” Brad asked softly.

Johnny was looking back at the shapes in the shadows. There was a strange, shaky smile on his mouth. “Nah,” he said. “Got my second wind. I . . . what do you think you're doing?”

“What's it look like?” Brad asked. He was down on his hands and knees at the base of the fence. “Hurry up, Daddy-O.”

Johnny stepped onto his back. “Jesus,” he said, “I feel like the President of South Africa.”

Brad didn't seem to understand at first. When he did, he began giggling. His back hurt like hell. Johnny Marinville seemed to weigh at least five hundred pounds, the man's heels felt as if they were leaving divots in Brad's outraged spine, but the giggles poured out of him just the same; he couldn't help it. Here was a white American intellectual with a prep-school education of excruciating correctness—a writer who had once partied with the Panthers at Lenny Bernstein's pad—using a black man as a footstool. If it wasn't a liberal's idea of hell, Brad had never heard of one. He thought of moaning and crying, “Hurry up, massa, you killin dis po boy!” and his giggles became
outright laughter. He was terrified of losing a section of his tender upturned ass to one of the slinkers back there in the woods, but he laughed anyway. I'll give him a chorus of “Old Black Joe,” he thought, and howled like a coyote himself. Tears poured from his eyes. He pounded his fist on the ground.

“Brad, what's wrong?” Johnny whispered from above him.

“Never mind!” he said, still giggling. “Just get off my back! Holy shit, what you got on those shoes? Cleats?”

Then, blessedly, the weight was gone. There were grunting sounds as Johnny struggled to get his leg over the fence. Brad got up, rode through a scary moment when his back again seemed about to lock, then got one meaty shoulder planted under Johnny's ass. A moment later he could hear another grunt of effort and a muffled cry from Johnny as he came down.

Which left him, all alone and with no footstool.

Brad eyed the top of the fence and thought it looked about ninety feet high. Then he glanced behind him and saw the shapes on the move again, tightening around him in a collapsing crescent.

He seized two of the stakes, and as he did, something snarled behind him. Underbrush rattled. He looked back over his shoulder and saw a creature that looked more like a wild boar than a coyote . . . except what it really looked like was a badly made child's drawing, nothing more than a hurried scribble, really, that had somehow come to life. Its legs were all of different lengths and ended in blunt clubs unlike either
paws or fingers. Its tail seemed to jut up from the middle of its back. Its eyes were blank silver circles. Its nose was a pig-pug. Only its teeth seemed really real, huge croggled things which spouted from either side of the beast's mouth.

Adrenaline hit Brad's nervous system like something shot from one of Old Doc's horse syringes. He forgot all about his back and yanked himself upward, tucking his knees between his chest and the fence when he heard the thing charge. It hit just below his feet, hard enough to shake the whole fence. Then Johnny had one of his wrists and Dave Reed had the other and Brad scrabbled to the top of the fence, leaving generous amounts of skin behind. He tried to get his left leg over the top and thumped the ankle on one of the blunt stakes instead. Then he was falling, tearing his shirt all the way down one side in his useless struggle to hold onto the top of the fence with his right hand. He let go in time to keep from breaking his arm, but when he landed (partly on top of Johnny, mostly on top of his admirably padded wife), he could feel blood trickling down from his armpit.

“Want to think about getting off me, handsome?” the admirably padded lady herself asked, sounding breathless. “I mean, if it wouldn't discommode you any?”

Brad crawled off them both, collapsed in a heap, then rolled over on his back. He looked up at alien stars, swollen things that blinked on and off like the Christmas lights they strung over small-town Main Streets every year on the day after Thanksgiving. What he was looking at were no more real stars than
he was the King of Prussia . . . but they were up there, just the same. Yes they were, right over his head, and how bad was your situation when the sky itself was part of the damned conspiracy?

Brad closed his eyes so he wouldn't look at them anymore. In his mind's eye—the one that opened widest when the other two closed—he saw Cary Ripton tossing him his
Shopper.
Saw his own hand, the one not holding the hose, go up and catch it.
Good one, Mr. Josephson!
Cary called, honestly admiring. It came from far away, that voice, like something echoing down a canyon. Closer by, he heard howls from the greenbelt side of the fence (except now it was the desertbelt). These were followed by a series of hard thuds as the boar-coyotes threw themselves at it.

Christ.

“Brad,” Johnny said. Low voice. Leaning over him, from the sound.

“What.”

“You all right?”

“Fine as paint.” Still not opening his eyes.

“Brad.”

“What!”

“I had an idea. For a movie.”

“You're a maniac, John.” Eyes still shut. Things were better that way. “But I'll bite. What's it going to be called, this movie I can be in?”

“Black Men Can't Climb Fences,”
Johnny said, and began laughing wildly. It had an exhausted, half-crazy sound to it. “I'm gonna get Mario Fucking Van Peebles to direct. Larry Fishburne's gonna play you.”

“Sure,” Brad said, sitting up painfully. “I love Larry Fishburne. Very intense. Offer him a million up front. Who could resist?”

“Right, right,” Johnny agreed, now laughing so hard he could barely talk . . . only tears were streaming down his face, and Brad didn't think they were tears of laughter. Not ten minutes ago, Cammie Reed had come within a hair of blowing his head off, and Brad doubted if Johnny had forgotten that. Brad doubted if Johnny forgot much of anything, in fact. It was probably a talent he would have traded, if given the opportunity.

Brad got on his feet, took Bee's hand, and helped her up. There were more thuds at the fence, more howls, then gnawing sounds, as if the hungry abortions over there were trying to eat their way through the stakes.

“So what do you think?” Johnny asked, letting Brad help him up as well. He staggered, found his balance, wiped his streaming eyes.

“I think that when the chips were down, I climbed just fine,” Brad said. He slipped an arm around his wife, then looked at Johnny. “Come on, honky. You climbed to success over your first black man, you must be all tuckered out. Let's get in the house.”

The thing which hopped unsteadily through the gate at the rear of Tom Billingsley's backyard was a
child's version of the gila monster Jeb Murdock blows off a rock during his shooting contest with Candy about halfway through
The Regulators.
Its head, however, was that of an escapee from Jurassic Park.

It hopped up the back steps, slithered to the screen, and pushed at it with its snout. Nothing happened; the screen opened outward. The gila stretched its saurian head forward and began chomping at the bottom panel of the door with its teeth. Three bites was all it took, and then it was in Old Doc's kitchen.

Gary Soderson became distantly aware of a rotten breeze blowing into his face. He tried to wave it away, but it only grew stronger. He raised one hand, touched something that felt like an alligator shoe—a very large alligator shoe—and opened his eyes. What he saw leaning over him at kissing distance, staring at him with a curiosity which was almost human, was so grotesque that he could not even scream. The lizard-thing's eyes were bright orange.

Here it is, Gary thought, my first major attack of the dt's. Ahoy, mateys, A.A. dead ahead.

He closed his eyes. He tried to tell himself that he didn't smell swamp-breath or hear the toneless clickety-click of a tail dragging across kitchen linoleum. He held his dead wife's cold hand. He said, “Nothing there. Nothing there. Noth—”

Before he could finish the third repetition (and everyone knows the third time's the charm), the monster had plunged its teeth into his throat and torn it open.

Johnny saw small feet through the open pantry door and looked in. Ellie and Ralphie were lying in there on what looked like a futon, holding each other. They were fast asleep, gunshots from out back notwithstanding, but even in slumber they had not entirely escaped what was happening; their faces were white and strained, their breathing had a watery sound that made him think of stifled sobs, and Ralphie's feet twitched, as if he dreamed of running.

Johnny guessed that Ellen must have found the futon and brought it into the pantry for herself and her little brother to lie on; certainly Kim Geller hadn't done it. Kim and her daughter had resumed their former places by the wall, only now sitting in kitchen chairs instead of on the floor.

“Is Jim really dead?” Susi asked, looking at Johnny with wet, shiny eyes as Johnny came in behind Brad and Belinda. “I just can't believe it, we were playing Frisbee like we always do, and we were going out to the movies tonight—”

Johnny was completely out of patience with her. “Why don't you go out on the back porch and have a look for yourself?”

“Why are you being such a bastard?” Kim asked angrily. “My daughter may
never
get over serious trauma like this. She's had a
profound shock
!”

“She's not the only one,” Johnny said. “And while we're at it—”

“Quit it, man, we don't need to get fighting,” Steve Ames said.