The Regulators - Stephen King [151]
She turns to Johnny, the bloody child still in her arms, and Johnny sees an astonishing thing: she looks happy. Cammie screams as Audrey goes down, perhaps in triumph, perhaps in horror at what she has done.
Audrey somehow keeps her grip on Seth even as she dies. And as she falls, the uneasy red thing rises from the remains of Seth's face like a caul. It swirls in the air above the filthy linoleum, bright scarlet bits orbiting each other like electrons.
Johnny and Cammie Reed face each other through this redness for he doesn't know how long — they are frozen, it seems — until someone screams: 'Oh shit! Oh shit, why'd you do that, you numb bitch?'
Johnny sees Steve and Cynthia come forward through the darkened living room until they're standing just behind Cammie. Cynthia springs forward, grabs Cammie by the arm, and shakes her. 'Bitch! Stupid murdering cunt, what did you think, this would bring your kid back? Didn't you ever go to fucking SCHOOL?'
Cammie seems not to hear. She is looking at the spinning red thing with wide, unblinking eyes, as if hypnotized . . . and it is looking back at her. Johnny doesn't know how he can know this, but he does. And suddenly it launches itself at her like a comet . . . or Snake Hunter's red Tracker Arrow on a Power Wagon assault.
He had asked Audrey if Tak could jump to someone else. She had said no, she was sure it coudn't, but what if she had been wrong? What if Tak had fooled her? If it had —
'Look out!'he shouts at Cynthia. 'Get back from her!'
Little Miss Tu-Tone Hair only stares at him, uncomprehending, from over Cammie's shoulder. Steve doesn't look as if he understands, either, but he reacts to the unmistakable panic in Johnny's voice and yanks Cynthia back.
The swirling red specks divide in two. For a moment Tak's exterior form looks to Johnny like the sort of fork they used to toast marshmallows on back when they were teenagers, sitting around driftwood beach fires at Savin Rock. Only the tines of this fork plunge themselves directly into Cammie Reed's bulging eyes.
They glow a brilliant red, swell even further outward, then explode from their sockets. The grin on Cammie's face stretches so wide that her lips split open and begin to stream blood down her chin. The eyeless thing staggers forward, dropping the empty rifle and holding its hands out. They clutch blindly at the air. Johnny thinks he has never seen anything in his life so simultaneously weak and predatory.
'Tak,' it proclaims in a guttural voice which is nothing like Cammie's. 'Tak ah wan! Tak ah lah! Mi him en tow!' There is a pause. Then, in a grinding, inhuman voice Johnny knows he will hear in nightmares until the end of his life, the eyeless thing says: 'I know you all. I'll find you all. I'll hunt you down. Tak! Mi him, en tow!'
Its skull begins to swell outward then; what remains of Cammie's head begins to look like a monster mushroom cap. Johnny hears a tearing sound like ripping paper and realizes it is the scant flesh over her skull pulling apart. The clotted sockets of her eyes stretch out long, turning into slits; the swelling skull pulls her nose up into a snout with long, lozenge-shaped nostrils.
So, Johnny thinks, Audrey was right. Only Seth was able to contain it. Seth or someone like Seth. Someone very special. Because —
As if to finish this thought in the most spectacular fashion imaginable, Cammie Reed's head explodes. Hot fragments, some still pulsing with life, pelt Johnny's face.
Screaming, revolted to the point of madness, Johnny wipes at the stuff, using his thumbs to try and clear his eyes. Faintly, the way you hear things when someone at the other end of the line temporarily puts the phone down, he can hear Steve and Cynthia, also screaming. Then blinding light fills up the room, as sudden and shocking as an unexpected slap. Johnny thinks at first it's an explosion of some sort — the end for all of them. But as his eyes (still burning and salty and full of Cammie's blood)