The Regulators - Stephen King [29]
The vehicles begin to pick up speed, their engines purring with a humming, cyclic bent.
A large porthole irises open in the left side of the pink vehicle. And on top of the black van, which looks like a hearse trying to transform itself into a locomotive, the side of the toadstool slides back, revealing two figures with shotguns. One is a bearded human being. He, like the alien driving the blue van, appears to be wearing the tags and tatters of a Civil War uniform. The thing beside him is wearing another sort of uniform altogether: black, high-collared, dressed with silver buttons. As with the black-and-chrome van, there's something Nazi-ish about the uniform, but this isn't what catches Johnny's eyes and freezes his vocal cords so he is at first unable to cry a warning.
Above the high collar, there seems to be only darkness. He has no face, Johnny thinks in the second before the creatures in the pink van and the dead black one open fire. He has no face, that thing has no face at all.
It occurs to Johnny Marinville, who sees everything, that he may have died; that this may be hell.
Letter from Audrey Wyler (Wentworth, Ohio) to Janice Conroy (Plainview, New York), dated August 18, 1994:
Dear Janice,
Thanks so much for your call. The note of condolence, too, of course, but you'll never know how good it was to have your voice in my ear last night — like a drink of cool water on a hot day. Or maybe I mean like a sane voice when you're stuck in the booby hatch!
Did any of what I said on the phone make sense to you? I can't remember for sure. I'm off the tranks — 'Fuck that shit,' as we used to say back in college — but that's only been for the last couple of days, and even with Herb pitching in and helping like mad, a lot of the world has been so much scrambled eggs. Things started being that way when Bill's friend, Joe Calabrese, called and said my brother and his wife and the two older kids had been killed, shotgunned in a drive-by. The man, who I've never met in my life, was crying, hard to understand, and much too shaken to be diplomatic. He kept saying he was so ashamed, and I ended up trying to comfort him, and all the time I'm thinking, There's got to be a mistake here, Bill can't be dead, my brother was supposed to be around for as long as I needed him.' I still wake up in the night thinking, 'Not Bill, it's just a goof-up, it can't be Bill.' The only thing in my whole life I can remember that felt this crazy was when I was a kid and everybody came down with the flu at the same time.
Herb and I flew out to San Jose to collect Seth, then flew back to Toledo on the same plane as the bodies. They store them in the cargo hold, did you know that? Me neither. Nor wanted to.
The funeral was one of the most horrible experiences of my life — probably the most horrible. Those four coffins — my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and my nephew — lined up in a row, first in the church and then at the cemetery, where they sat over the holes on those awful chrome rails. Wanna hear something totally nuts? During the whole graveside service I kept thinking of my honeymoon in Jamaica. They have speed-bumps in the road that they call sleeping policemen. And for some reason that's how I started thinking of the coffins, as sleeping policemen. Well, I told you I've been crazy, didn't I? Ohio's Valium Queen of 1994, that's me.
The service at the church was packed — Bill and June had a lot of friends — and everyone was bawling. Except for poor little Seth, of course, who can't. Or doesn't. Or who knows? He just sat there between me and Herb with two of his toys on his lap — a pink van he calls 'Dweem Fwoatah' and the action figure that goes with it, a sexy little redhead named Cassandra Styles. The toys are from a show called MotoKops 2200, and the names of the damned MotoKops vans (excuse me, the MotoKops Power Wagons, lah-di-dah) are among the few things Seth says which are actually understandable