The Regulators - Stephen King [24]
The stormy sky is coming apart, starting to release its cold reservoir. He sees spots darkening all over the sidewalk, feels drops hitting the back of his neck in an increasing tempo as Brad Josephson shouts 'What the Christ!'behind him.
The van is still on the Lumina's ass, bulldozing it, digging into its flimsy New Age back deck; there is a hideous metallic squall and then a thunk! as the trunk latch lets go and the lid flies up, disclosing a spare tire, some old newspapers, and an orange styrofoam cooler. The Lumina's front end bounces up over the curb. The car crosses the sidewalk and comes to rest with its bumper against the fence between Billingsley's house and the next one down the hill, Mary's own.
Lightning — it's close, very close — paints the street a momentary lurid violet, thunder follows like a mortar barrage, the wind begins to pick up, hissing in the trees, and the rain starts coming in sheets. Visibility is closing down fast, but there's enough for him to see the yellow van picking up speed, racing away into the rain, and to see the Lumina's driver's side door open. A leg sticks out and then Mary Jackson emerges, looking as if she has absolutely no idea of where she is.
Brad is gripping his arm now with a very large and very wet hand, he's asking if Johnny saw that, if he saw it, that yellow van deliberately rammed her, but Johnny barely hears him. Johnny can now see another van, this one with scooped sides and metal-flake blue paint. It comes looming out of the storm like the snout of a prehistoric beast, the rain running in rivers down a steep polarized windshield on which no wipers move. And suddenly he knows what is going to happen.
'Mary!' he screams at the dazed woman staggering away from her car on high heels, but another brazen cannonade of thunder drowns out his cry. She doesn't even look his way. Rain is running down her face like extravagant tears in a South American soap opera.
'MARY, GET DOWN!' screaming so loud this time he thinks his vocal cords may rupture. 'GET UNDER THE CAR!'
Then the windshield of the blue van goes down. Slides down. Yes. That steep windshield slides into the front of the van like the front of a glass elevator, and behind it is darkness, and in the darkness there are ghosts. Ghosts. Yes. Two of them. Surely them must be ghosts; they are beings as brightly gray as a fog-shrouded landscape just before the sun burns its way through. The one behind the wheel is wearing a Confederate States of America uniform — Johnny is almost sure of this — but it is not human. Beneath its pinned-back cavalry hat is a bulging forehead, weird almond-shaped eyes, and a mouth that pulses out from its face like a fleshy horn. Its companion, although also a bright and illusory gray, at least looks human. He wears a buckskin trapper's shirt with a bandolier belt across it. His face is stubbled with what might be a week's growth of beard; the bristles look very black against the unnatural silver of his skin. He is standing, this fellow, and in his hands is a heavy double-barrelled shotgun. Trapper John raises it as Johnny watches, leaning out into a teeming, streaming world full of colors he does not in the slightest share, and he is grinning, lips drawing back to reveal a mouthful of tangled teeth which have clearly never known a dentist's ministrations. This dreamlike creature looks like something from a horror movie about inbred cretins living far back in some swamp.
No he doesn't, Johnny thinks. He looks like something from a movie, all right, but not that one.
'MARY!' he screams, and beside him, Brad joins in: 'YO, MARY, LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!'
But she never sees. The guy in the buckskin shirt opens up, firing three times, pumping his weapon rapidly after each shot and then reshouldering it. The first round goes wild, as far as Johnny can see. The second erases the Lumina's radio aerial. The third blows off the left side of Mary Jackson's head. She staggers away from her car and toward Old Doc's house nevertheless, blood pouring down her neck and soaking the left side of