The Regulators - Stephen King [141]
A split-second later, something that could be a bucket of dark, silty water but isn't hits the front of the Carver house. Then, with the sound of the twin shotgun blasts still rolling away, Streeter screams: 'Shoot! Shoot, goddammit! Wipe them off the map!'
'Get down!' Johnny shouts again, knowing it will do no good; the house is going to disappear like a child's sand-castle before a tidal wave, and they are going to disappear with it.
The regulators begin firing, and it's like nothing Johnny ever heard in Vietnam. This, he thinks, is what it must have been like to be in the trenches at Ypres, or in Dresden thirty years or so later. The noise is incredible, a ground-zero concatenation of KA-POW and KA-BAM, and although he feels he should be immediately deafened (or perhaps killed outright by raw decibels alone), Johnny is still able to hear the sounds of the house being blown apart all around them: bursting boards, breaking windows, china figurines exploding like targets in a shooting gallery, the brittle spatter of thrown laths. Very faintly, he can also hear people screaming. The bitter tang of gunsmoke fills his nostrils. Something unseen but huge passes through the kitchen above them, screaming as it goes, and suddenly much of the kitchen's rear wall is just rubble fanned across the backyard and floating on the surface of the Kmart pool.
Yes, Johnny thinks. This is it, this is the end. And maybe that is just as well.
But then a strange thing begins to happen. The shooting doesn't stop, but it begins to diminish, as if someone is turning down the volume control. This isn't just true of the gunshots themselves, but of the screaming sound the shells make as they pass overhead. And it happens fast. Less than ten seconds after he first notices the diminution — and it might be more like five — the sounds are gone entirely. So is the queer, humming beat of the Power Wagons' engines.
They raise their heads and look around at each other. In the pantry, Cynthia sees that she and Steve are both as white as ghosts. She raises her arm and blows. Powder puffs up from her skin.
'Flour,' she says.
Steve rakes through his long hair and holds an unsteady hand out to her. There's a cluster of shiny black things in the palm. 'Flour's not so bad,' he says. 'I got olives.'
She thinks she'll begin to laugh, but before she can, an amazing and totally unexpected thing happens.
Seth's Place/Seth's Time
Of all the passages he has dug for himself during the reign of Tak — Tak the Thief, Tak the Cruel, Tak the Despot — this is the longest. He has, in a way, re-created his own version of Rattlesnake Number One. The shaft goes deep into some black earth which he supposes is himself, then rises again toward the surface like a hope. At the end of it is a door of iron bands. He doesn't try to open it, but not for fear he will find it locked. Quite the opposite. This is a door he must not touch until he is completely ready; once through it, there will never be any coming back.
He prays it goes where he thinks it does.
Enough light comes through the cracks between the door's iron lengths to illuminate the place where he stands. There are pictures on the strange, fleshy walls; one a group portrait of his family with him sitting between his brother and sister, one a photo of him standing between Aunt Audrey and Uncle Herb on the lawn of this house. They are smiling. Seth, as always, is solemn, distant, not quite there. There is also a photograph of Allen Symes, standing beside (and dwarfed by) one of Miss Mo's treads. Mr Symes is wearing his Deep Earth hardhat and grinning. No such photograph as this exists, but that doesn't matter. This is Seth's place, Seth's time, Seth's mind, and he decorates it as he likes. Not so long ago, there would have been pictures