The Regulators - Stephen King [139]
'Is it over, do you think?' Steve asks, in the tone of someone who doesn't want to come right out and say it wasn't as bad as he thought . . . but who is thinking it.
'We ought to — ' Johnny begins.
'I hear it again!' Kim Geller cries from the living room. Her voice is high, shivering on the edge of hysteria, but the rest of them have no reason not to believe her; she is closest to the street, after all. 'That awful humming! Make it stop!' She rushes through the door into the kitchen, her eyes bulging and crazed. 'Make it stop!'
'Get down, Mom!' Susi calls, but she herself does not stir from beside Dave Reed, who is lying with one arm around her and his hand (the one his creepy mother can't see from where she is) against her breast. Susi doesn't mind his hand a bit; would mind, in fact, if he took it away. Her terror and her almost maternal concern for the surviving twin have combined to make her really horny for the first time in her life. All she really wants right now is to be with David in a place where they can take their pants off without being noticed.
Kim ignores her daughter. She goes to Audrey, grabs her by her hair, yanks her head back. 'Make him stop it!' she shouts into Audrey's pale face. 'He's your kin, you brought him here, NOW MAKE HIM STOP!'
Belinda Josephson moves fast; she's up from where she's been lying, she's across the room, and she has Kim Geller's free arm twisted up behind her back almost before Brad can blink.
'Ow!' Kim screams, immediately letting go of Audrey's hair. 'Ow, let go! Let go, you black bi — '
Belinda has taken all the tiresome racist shit she intends to for one day. She yanks Kirn's arm up even further before she can finish. Susi's mom, who supports the Girl Scouts and never sends the Cancer Society lady away empty-handed, shrieks like a factory whistle at quitting time. Then Belinda turns her, hips her, and sends her flying back into the living room. Kim crashes into a wall. All around her more Hummel figures tumble to their doom.
'There,' Belinda says in a businesslike voice. 'She had that coming. I don't have to put up with that kind of — '
'Never mind,' Johnny says. The humming is louder now, louder than it has ever been: a steady, cycling beat like the sound of a huge electric transformer. 'Get down, Bee. Right now. Everybody. Steve, Cynthia? Cover those children!' Then he looks, almost apologetically, at Seth Garin's aunt. 'Can you make him stop, Aud?'
She shakes her head. 'It's not him. Not now. It's Tak.' Before she puts her head back down, she sees Cammie Reed looking at her, and there is something in that dry glance that frightens her more than all of Kirn Geller's shouting and hair-pulling. It's a serious look. No hysteria, only flat murder.
Who would Cammie murder, though? Her? Seth? Both? Audrey doesn't know. She only knows she cannot tell the others what she did before leaving, that simple thing that might solve so much — if. If the window of time she's hoping for opens; if she does the right thing when it does. She can't tell them there's hope, because if Tak is able to reach out and catch hold of their thoughts, all hopes will fail.
The thrumming grows louder. On Main Street, the Power Wagons are rolling again. Dream Floater, Tracker Arrow, and Freedom are closer to the Carver house and reach it first. They park in line, the red Tracker Arrow with Snake Hunter behind the wheel in the middle, blocking the driveway where the lord of the manor is lying dead (and looking much the worse for wear by this time). The other three — Rooty-Toot, Justice,