The Regulators - Stephen King [129]
'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 on to 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