The Regulators - Stephen King [154]
'You okay, Mr Marinville?'
'Yeah.' He tried to say more, but what came out instead of words was a hitching half-sob. He wiped snot off his nose with the back of his hand and then tried to smile. 'Cynthia, isn't it?'
'Cynthia, yep.'
'And I'm Johnny. Just Johnny.'
'Kay.' She was looking down at the entwined bodies. Audrey's head was thrown back, her eyes closed, her face as still and serene as a deathniask. And the boy still looked like an infant in his fragile nakedness. One that had died in childbirth.
'Look at them,' Cynthia said softly. 'His arms around her neck like that. He must have loved her such a lot.'
'He killed her,' Johnny said flatly.
'That can't be!'
He sympathized with the shock on her face, but it didn't change what he knew. 'It is, though. He called Cammie in on her.'
'Called her in? What do you mean, called her in?'
He nodded as if she had offered agreement. 'He did it the same way COs in the bush used to call in artillery fire on enemy Villes in Vietnam. He called her in on both of them, in fact. I heard him do it.' He tapped his temple.
'You're saying Seth told Cammie to kill them?'
He nodded.
'The other one, maybe. You might have heard him . . . it — '
Johnny shook his head. 'Nope. It was Seth, not Tak. I recognized his voice.' He paused, looking down at the dead child, then looked back up at Cynthia. 'Even in my head, he was a mouth-breather.'
2
The houses had returned to what they really were, Steve saw, but that didn't mean they had returned to normal. They had clearly taken one hell of a pasting. The Hobart place was no longer burning, there was that much; the downpour had tamped the fire to a kind of sullen fume, like a volcano after the main eruption. The old veterinarian's bungalow was more fully involved, with flames leaping from the windows and black, charry patches spreading along the eaves and bubbling the paint. Between them, the house of Peter and Mary Jackson was a tumbled, shot-up ruin.
There were two fire engines on the street and more coming. Already hoses lay tangled on the lawns over there, looking like fat beige pythons. There were police cars, too. Three were parked in front of Entragian's place, where the newsboy's body (and that of Hannibal, couldn't forget him) lay under plastic which was now puddled with water from the downpour. The cruisers' red lights swung and flashed. Two more cruisers were parked at the top of the street, blocking the Bear Street end off entirely.
That won't do any good if they come back, Steve thought. If the regulators come back, boys, they'll blow your little roadblock right over the nearest ice cap.
Except they wouldn't be back. That was what the sunlight meant, what the retreating thunder meant. It had all really happened — Steve only had to look at the burning houses and those that were all shot up to know that — but it had happened in some weird fistula of time that these cops would never know about, or want to know about. He looked down at his watch and wasn't surprised to see it was running again. 5:18, it said, and he guessed that was as close to the real time as his Timex was ever going to get.
He looked back down the street at the cops. Some of them had their guns out; some did not. Not one of them looked clear on how he or she was supposed to be behaving. Steve could understand that. They were looking at a shooting gallery, after all, and probably no one on the surrounding blocks had even heard any shots. Thunder, maybe, but shotguns that sounded like mortar shells? Nope.
They saw him on the lawn, and one of them beckoned. At the same time, two others were gesturing for him to go back into the Wyler house. They looked like a pretty mindfucked posse, all in all, and Steve didn't blame them. Something had gone on here, they could see that, but what?
You'll be a while figuring it out, Steve thought, but you'll get something you can live with in the end. You guys always do. Whether it's a crashed flying saucer in Rosewell, New Mexico, an empty ship in