The Regulators - Stephen King [41]
But she's not a woman, Audrey thought. She felt cold all over, as if her skin had been briskly rubbed with ice. That's just a girl, probably no more than seventeen. The one who was visiting over at the Reeds' this afternoon. Before I went away to 1982 for a little while. That was Susi Geller's friend.
Audrey glanced down the block, suddenly sure she was imagining the whole thing, and that reality would snap back into place like a released elastic as soon as she saw the Hobart place standing intact. But the Hobart place was still burning, still sending huge white clouds of cedar-fumed smoke into the air, and when she looked back up the street, she still saw bodies. The corpses of her neighbors.
'It's started,' she whispered, and from the den behind her, like a horribly prescient curse, Rory Calhoun screamed: 'We're gonna wipe this town off the map!'
Escape! Jan screamed back, a voice inside her head instead of from the TV, but just as urgent. You're not just about out of time, not anymore, you are out of it! Escape, Audi Escape! Run! Escape!
Okay. She'd let go of her concern for Seth and run. That might come back to haunt her later — if there was a later — but for now . . .
She started for the front door and was reaching for the knob when a voice spoke up from behind her. It sounded like the voice of a child, but only because it was coming to her through a child's vocal cords. Otherwise it was toneless, loveless, hideous.
Worst of all, it was not entirely without a sense of humor.
'Hold on, there, ma'am,' Tak said, the voice of Seth Garin imitating the voice of John Payne. Why don't we just stand down, think this thing over?'
She tried to turn the doorknob, meaning to chance it anyway — she had gone too far to turn back now. She would hurl herself out into the pelting rain and just run. Where? Anywhere.
But instead of turning the knob, her hand fell back to her side, swinging like a nearly exhausted pendulum. Then she was turning around, resisting with all her will but turning anyway, to face the thing in the archway leading into the den . . . and she thought, considering what spent most of its time in there, den was exactly the right word for what the room had become.
She was back from her safe place.
God help her, she was back from her safe place, and the demon hiding inside her dead brother's autistic little boy had caught her trying to escape.
She felt Tak crawling inside her head, taking control, and although she saw it all and felt it all, she couldn't even scream.
3
Johnny lunged past the sprawled, face-down body of Susi Geller's redheaded friend, his head ringing from a slug which had screamed past his left ear . . . and it really had seemed to scream. His heart was running like a rabbit in his chest. He had moved far enough in the direction of the Carvers' house to be caught in a kind of no-man's-land when the two vans opened fire, and knew he was extremely lucky to still be alive. For a moment there he had almost frozen, like an animal caught in a pair of oncoming headlights. Then the slug — something that had felt the size of a cemetery headstone — had gone past his ear and he had streaked for the open door of the Carver house, head down and arms pumping. Life had simplified itself amazingly. He had forgotten about Soderson and his goaty expression of half-drunk complicity, had forgotten his concern that Jackson not realize his freshly expired wife was apparently coming home from the sort of interlude about which country-western songs were written, had forgotten Entragian, Billingsley, all of them. His only thought had been that he was going to die in the no-man's-land between the two houses, killed by psychotics who wore masks and weird outfits and shone like ghosts.
Now he was in a dark hall, just happy to realize he hadn't wet his pants, or worse. People were screaming somewhere behind him. Mounted on the wall was a jury of Hummel figures. They had been placed on little platforms . . . and the Carvers had seemed so normal in other respects, he thought. He started to giggle and shoved the