The Regulators - Stephen King [138]
'Make it stop!' Susi screams. 'Oh please someone MAKE IT STOP!'
The top half of Two Sisters seems to lift off in a storm of boards and shingles and glass and nails. Again there is that flicker, almost as quick as a hummingbird's wing, and in it Entragian's house may be glimpsed, even Gary Ripton's bike and plastic-covered body may be glimpsed, shimmering like the mirages they have now become. Then the house is gone and it's the Two Sisters (where in The Regulators we first see Laura DeMott, saloon lass with a heart of gold, surreptitiously buying cloth for a church dress) again, with half its roof gone and all its windows blown in.
From the badlands (sagebrush and huge tumbled boulders of cartoon roundness) north of Poplar Street, where Bear Street now isn't, the silver Rooty-Toot Power Wagon appears. Rooty is behind the wheel, his eyes flashing on and off like traffic lights; Little Joe Cartwright is in the seat next to him, devil-may-care grin on his face, a shotgun chrome-plated with futuristic swoops and doodads in his hands. Directly behind Rooty-Toot comes the Justice Wagon, and behind Justice there appears a humming electric nightmare. In the bonelight of the moon, the Meatwagon looks wrapped in black silk. No Face is in the steering-pit. Countess Lili is in the nav-pit, her sexy eyes gleaming in her ashy vampire-maiden's face. Jeb Murdock is above them, in the Doom Turret. In the prime shooting-station.
Because he is the meanest.
And so the final Power Wagon assault begins, with three vans swinging into the Force Corridor from the north and three more from the south. Hideously amplified shotgun blasts shake the air; the whistling passage of the shells thrown from the muzzles of those guns sounds like a flock of banshees. The Cattlemen's Hotel (formerly the Soderson house) is shivered backward on its foundations; the left side first slumps, then actually crumples, spitting off dry boards and wooden shingles. The house north of it — a wattle-and-daub construction Brad Josephson would never have recognized as his own lovingly maintained split-level — seems to explode outward in all directions, shooting jagged chunks of wood and slabs of dried mud into the air.
On the other side of the street, the false front of Worrell's Market Mercantile (once Tom Billingsley's house; the corpses of the Sodersons lie in an aisle of big round bags, all labelled disintegrates under a series of rifle shots from the Justice Wagon — each arriving round as loud as a mortar shell. Colonel Henry is driving; poked out of the firing trap and doing the shooting is Chuck Connors, also known as The Rifleman. His son is right next to him, grinning from ear to ear. 'Good shootin, Paw!' he exclaims as smoking boards from the false front ignite the decade's worth of trash and dust that has been hiding behind it. Soon the entire building will be on fire.
'Thanks, son,' Lucas McCain says, and turns his missile-firing Winchester on to Lushan's Chinese Laundry. Lushan's, once the home of Peter and Mary Jackson, has been pretty well bashed about already by Rooty-Toot, but that doesn't deter The Rifleman. His son joins in, firing a pistol. It's a small one, but every round from it sounds like a bazooka shell, just the same.
At the end of the run, a haze of gunsmoke hangs over Main Street. Several of the houses on the west side of the street — the adobe hacienda where the Gellers once lived, the log cabin where the Reeds hung their assorted hats, the wattle-and-daub Brad and Belinda once called home — have been almost totally destroyed. The Cattlemen's is still standing — more or less — and so is the Two Sisters on the east side, but the Mercantile will soon join the Owl (formerly the Hobart place) as so much ash in the wind.
Only one house on the east side of the street remains as it was before the regulators came: the Carver place. There are bullet-holes in the siding and broken windows from the previous assault, but on this run it has been completely untouched.
Dream