The Regulators - Stephen King [137]
February 7, 1996
Have noticed something interesting, what may be a key way of deciding which of them is in charge, at any given time, of the body they share. They both care a great deal for the Cassandra Styles action figure, but Tak's caring is almost completely sexual. It strokes her plastic breasts rubs her plastic legs. Two days ago I saw it sitting on the stairs licking the crotch of her blue shorts sporting an erection (hard to miss, when all it wears most days are underpants). And, of course, the fact that it wants me to wear Cassie-type clothes and has gotten me to dye my hair Cassie Styles red (horrible shade, too) has not escaped me.
Seth, on the other hand . . . when it's Seth, sometimes he just hugs the figure of Cassie, or strokes its stiff red hair, or kisses its cheek. He is pretending it's his mother. I don't know how I know that, but I do.
Must stop now. Crying again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Main Street, Desperation/Regulator Time
As on their previous run, the vans appear like phantoms, only this time it's not mist from which they appear but blowing desert dust that shines like lame in the glow of Old Mr Cow-poke Moon.
Cassie's pink Dream Floater comes first, with Candy behind the wheel in his pinned-back cavalry hat and Cassie herself sitting beside him. On the roof, the Valentine-heart radar dish is turning briskly. Like a sign on a whorehouse roof, Johnny Marinville might have said had he seen it, but he does not; he is lying on the floor of the Carvers' kitchen next to Old Doc with his hands laced together over the top of his head and his eyes squeezed tightly shut; on his face is the expression of a man who expects Armageddon, and soon.
Dream Floater does not swing on to Desperation's dusty Main Street from Hyacinth; Hyacinth is gone. Where it once ran there is now nothing but hardpan desert, almost featureless . . . as the sky overhead in this direction is almost completely starless. It's as if, when His eye turned south to the wastes beyond this tiny huddle of buildings, the Creator had lost most of His divine inspiration.
Dream Floater's stubby wings are extended, its wheels partially retracted; it cuts through the air about three feet above the wheel-ruts of the street. Its engine pulses steadily. As it passes The Lady Day on the corner, its firing port irises open. Laura DeMott from The Regulators leans out. In her delicate white hands is not her Derringer but a shotgun. Just a double-barrelled shotgun, but when she fires it, the report is as loud as a detonating backpack missile. The report is followed by a short, high-pitched wail, and then the front of the saloon explodes. The batwing doors fly up, for a moment fluttering madly and looking like real wings. There's an instant of flicker across what remains of the saloon's front, almost like a heatwave, and for that one instant, anyone who had been looking would have seen the E-Z Stop behind the burning Lady Day like a ghost-building or a double exposure, the convenience store also half-demolished and also burning.
Behind Dream Floater comes Tracker Arrow, and behind Tracker Arrow comes Freedom. Freedom's polarized windshield slides down again. Major Pike, a good Canopalean gone bad, is currently behind the wheel of Bounty's van, but the Confederate uniform and pinned-back hat are gone (Candy has the hat on now; the regulators are always trading accessories and bits of uniform back and forth, it's part of the fun). The Major is wearing his iridescent MotoKops uniform again, and without a hat, his blond Mohawk 'do shows to good advantage. Sitting beside him in the nav-pit is the grizzled trapper type Johnny spotted earlier: Sergeant Mathis, Jeb Murdock's chief aide after the beating and capture of Captain Candell.
Collie Entragian's house has been replaced by the Two Sisters Millinery, where can be found The Finest in Ladies' Fashions. Serge leans out, draws a bead on the storefront with his shotgun, and yanks the triggers. There is another shattering double crash, and again that long, wailing shriek, as