The Regulators - Stephen King [110]
'That's Marielle under that coverlet?' Audrey asked.
Tom nodded.
'We have to get with the others, Tom. Before it starts again. Before they come back.'
'Do you know what's happening here, Aud?'
'I don't think anyone knows exactly what's happening here, but I know some stuff, yes.' She pressed the heels of her palms against her forehead and closed her eyes. To Tom she looked like a math student wrestling with some massive equation. Then she dropped her hands and looked at him again. 'We better go next door. We should all be together.'
He lifted his chin toward the snoring Gary. 'What about him?'
'We couldn't carry him, couldn't lift him over David Carver's back fence even if we could. You'll be doing well to get over it yourself.'
'I'll manage,' he said, stung a little. 'Don't you worry about me, Aud, I'll manage fine.'
From the greenbelt there came a cry, another gunshot, and then an animal howling in agony. What seemed like a thousand coyotes howled in response.
'They shouldn't have gone out there,' Audrey said. 'I know why they did, but it was a bad idea.'
Old Doc nodded. 'I think they know that now,' he said.
8
Peter reached the fork in the path and looked into the desert, bone-white in the glare of a rising moon, beyond it. Then he looked down and saw the man in the patched khaki pants pinned to the cactus.
'Hello . . . friend,' he said. He moved the bum's shopping cart so he could sit down beside him. As he settled against the cactus spines, feeling them slide into his back, he heard a cry and a gunshot and an agonized howl. All from far away. Not important. He put his hand on the dead bum's shoulder. Their grins were identical. 'Hello . . . friend,' the erstwhile James Dickey scholar said again.
He looked south. His remaining sight was almost gone, but there was enough left for him to see the perfectly round moon rising between the fangs of the black Crayola mountains. It was as silver as the back of an old-time pocket watch, and upon it was the smiling, one-eye-winked face of Mr Moon from a child's book of Mother Goose rhymes.
Only this version of Mr Moon appeared to be wearing a cowboy hat.
'Hello . . . friend,' Peter said to it, and settled back further against the cactus. He did not feel the exaggerated spines that punctured his lungs, or the first trickles of blood that seeped out of his grinning mouth. He was with his friend. He was with his friend and now everything was all right, they were looking at Mr Cowpoke Moon and everything was all right.
9
The light dropped out of the day with a speed that reminded Johnny of the tropics, and soon the spiny landscape around them was only a black blur. The path was clear, at least for the time being — a gray streak about two feet wide winding through the shadows — but if the moon hadn't come up, they would probably be in even deeper shit than they already were. He had watched the weather forecast that morning and knew the moon was new, not full, but that little contradiction didn't seem very important under the current circumstances.
They went up the path two by two, like animals mounting the gangplank to Noah's Ark: Cammie and her surviving son, then he and Brad (with the corpse of Jim Reed swinging between them), then Cynthia and the hippie, whose name was Steve. The girl had picked up the .30-.06, and when the coyote — a nightmare even more misbegotten than the mountain lion had been — came out of a cactus grove to the east of the path, it was the girl who settled its account.
The moon was bringing out fantastic tangles of shadow everywhere, and for a moment Johnny thought the coyote was one of them. Then Brad yelled 'Hey, look OUT!' and the girl fired almost at once. The recoil would have knocked her over like a bowling pin if the hippie hadn't grabbed her by the back of her pants.
The coyote yowled and flipped over backward, its mismatched legs spasming. There was enough moonlight for Johnny to see that its paws ended in appendages that looked horribly like human