The Regulators - Stephen King [113]
The energy released by Jim Reed's suicide had lit Tak up like a flare and shot its borrowed nerves all the way into the red zone. Fresh energy — young energy — flooded in, replacing the enormous amounts it had expended thus far. And now it hung in the doorway, humming, totally loaded, ready to finish what it had started.
Food first. It was ravenous. Tak floated halfway across the living room, then stopped.
'Aunt Audrey?' it called in Seth's voice. A sweet voice, perhaps because it was so little used. 'Aunt Audrey, are you here?'
No. It sensed she wasn't. Aunt Audrey was able — with Seth's help — to block off her mind sometimes, but never the steady pulse of that mind's existence; its thereness. That was gone, now, but only from the house. She could be with the others, probably was, but she had gone no farther. Because Poplar Street was surrounded by Nevada desert, now . . . except it wasn't exactly the real Nevada, more a Nevada of the mind, the one Tak had imagined into being. With Seth's help, of course. It couldn't have done any of this without Seth.
Tak moved toward the kitchen again. Aunt Audrey's leaving was probably for the best. It would make Seth easier to control, make it less likely that he'd become a distraction at a crucial moment. Not that the little feller could present much of a problem under any circumstances; he was powerful but in many crucial ways helpless. At first it had been an arm-wrestle between equally matched opponents . . . except they weren't equally matched, not really. In the long run, raw strength is never a match for craft, and Tak had had long millennia in which to hone its hooks and wiles. Now, little by little, it was gaining the upper hand, using Seth Garin's own extraordinary powers against him like a clever karate master matched against a strong but stupid opponent.
Seth? it asked as it drifted toward the refrigerator. Seth, where are you, pard?
For a moment it actually thought Seth might be gone . . . except that couldn't be. They were completely entwined now, partners in a relationship as saprophytic as that of Siamese twins fused at the spine. If Seth left this body, all the para-sympathetic systems — heart, lungs, elimination, tissue-building, cerebral wave-function — would cease. Tak could no more maintain them than an astronaut could maintain the thousands of complicated systems which first thrust him into space and then kept him there in a stable environment. Seth was the computer, and without him the computer operator would die. Yet suicide was not an option for Seth Garin. Tak could keep him from the act just as it had driven Jim Reed to it. And, it sensed, Seth did not want to commit suicide. Part of Seth, in fact, did not even want to be free of Tak, not really. Because Tak had changed everything. Tak had given him Power Wagons that weren't just toys; Tak had given him movies that were real; Tak had come out of the China Pit with a pair of seven-league cowboy boots just the right size for a lonely little buckaroo. Who would want such a magical friend to leave? Especially if you would once again be locked in the gulag of your own skull when your trusty trailmate was gone?
Seth? Tak asked again. Where are you, y'old cayuse, you?
And, far back in the network of caves and tunnels and boltholes the boy had constructed (the part of him that did not want Tak, the part that was horrified of the stranger now living in his head), Tak caught a glimmer, a faint pulse, that it recognized.
Thereness!
It was Seth, all right. Hiding. Confident that Tak couldn't see, hear,