The Regulators - Stephen King [150]
He glances toward the PlaySkool phone — what Aunt Audrey calls the Tak-phone — longingly for a moment, but of course he doesn't need a telephone, not really; it was always just a symbol, something concrete to help the telepathy flow more easily between them, as the switches and telltales are simply tools to help him concentrate his will. And telepathy isn't Seth's concern here, anyway. If telepathy were all the two of them could share, this would be futile.
Under his hand, the switches move stubbornly upward, driven by Tak's primitive force, Tak's primitive will. For a moment the red telltales beneath them flicker out and the green ones above them flicker on. Seth feels a terrible machine-like buzzing in his head, trying to overwhelm his thoughts; for a moment his inner vision is blurred by swirling crimson light in which embers flick and stutter.
Seth pushes the switches down with all his strength. The green lights go off. The red ones come back on. For the moment, anyway.
The time is now, there is only one down-card left in the game, and now Seth Garin turns it up.
The Wyler House/Johnny's Time
In a way it is like being caught in another barrage from the regulators, only this time what Johnny feels cutting past him are thoughts instead of bullets. But weren't they always thoughts, really?
The first one goes to Cammie Reed, standing in the kitchen doorway with the gun in her hands:
— Now! Do it now!
The second goes to Audrey Wyler, who recoils as if slapped and suddenly stops clawing at the spectral red miasma around Seth's head:
— Now, Aunt Audrey! The time is now!
And the last one, a terrible inhuman roar that fills Johnny's head and wipes out everything else:
— NO, YOU LITTLE BASTARD! NO, YOU CAN'T!
No, Johnny thinks, he can't. He never could. Then he raises his eyes to Cammie Reed's face. Her eyes bulge from their sockets; her lips are stretched in a dry and terrible smile.
But she can.
Tak's Place/Tak's Time
It has perhaps three seconds, while the woman with the gun calls out, to realize it has been outplayed. How it has been outplayed. A few seconds of incredulity in which to wonder how that could happen after all the millennia it has spent trapped in the dark, thinking and planning. Then, even as it begins to realize that Seth isn't really inside the body it has been trying to re-enter, the woman in the doorway opens fire.
The Wyler House/Johnny's Time
Cammie is no longer sure that she is acting of her own free will, but it doesn't matter; if her will was free, this is still what she would do. The Wyler woman is holding the monstrous brat curled naked in her arms like an oversized baby, its shanks painted with shit instead of blood and afterbirth. Holding it like a shield. Cammie could almost laugh at the idea.
'Put it down!' Cammie screams, but instead of putting Seth down, Audrey lifts him higher against her breast, as if in defiance. Still smiling her dry, vicious smile, her eyes appearing to start out of their sockets (Johnny will tell himself later that was an optical illusion, surely it was), Cammie centers the rifle on the child.
'No Cammie don't!' Johnny cries, and then she fires. The first shot takes eight-year-old Seth Garin, who is still shivering helplessly with bowel cramps, in the temple and blows the top of his head off, spattering his aunt's weirdly serene face with blood, hair, and bits of scalp. The slug drives all the way through his brain and exits the far side of his skull, where it enters Audrey's left breast. By then, however, it is too spent to do any further serious damage. It's the second shot that does that, catching her in the throat as she staggers back under the force of