The Regulators - Stephen King [44]
'Go on,' Brad said. 'If you're going to do it, do it.'
Johnny pulled the screen door open. He hesitated, not sure how to proceed, then picked up the girl's cold starfish hand and felt for a pulse. For a moment there was nothing, and then —
'I think she's alive!' he whispered to Brad. His voice was harsh with excitement. 'I think I feel a pulse!'
Forgetting that there might still be people with guns lurking out there in the rain, Johnny yanked the screen wide, grabbed a handful of the girl's hair, and lifted her head. Brad was crowded into the doorway with him now; Johnny could hear his excited breathing, could smell mingled sweat and aftershave.
The girl's face came up, except it didn't, not really, because there was no face there. All he could see was a shattered mass of red and a black hole that had been her mouth. Below it was a litter of white that he at first thought was rice. Then he realized it was her teeth, what was left of them. The two men screamed together in perfect soprano harmony, Brad's shooting directly into Johnny's humming ear like a spike. The pain seemed to go all the way into the middle of him.
'What's wrong?' Cammie Reed cried from behind the swinging door that led into the kitchen. 'Oh God, what's wrong now?'
'Nothing,' the two men said, also together, and then looked at each other. Brad Josephson's face had gone a queer ashy color.
'Just stay back,' Johnny called. He wanted it to be louder, but couldn't seem to get any real volume into his voice. 'Stay in the kitchen!'
He realized he was still holding the dead girl's hair. It was kinky, like an unravelled Brillo pad —
No, he thought coldly. Not like that. Like what holding a scalp would be like, a human scalp.
He grimaced at that and opened his fingers. The girl's face dropped back on to the concrete stoop with a wet smack that he could have lived without. Beside him, Brad moaned and then pressed the inner part of his forearm against his mouth to stifle the sound.
Johnny pulled his hand back, and as the screen door swung closed, he thought he saw movement across the street, in the Wyler house. A figure moving in the living room, behind the picture window. He couldn't worry about the people over there now, though. He was currently too freaked to worry about anybody, including himself. What he wanted — the only thing in the world he did want, it seemed — was to hear the warble of approaching police cars and fire trucks.
All he did hear was thunder, the crackle of the fire at the Hobarts', and the hiss of falling rain.
'Leave — ' Brad began, then stopped and made a sound caught somewhere between a retch and a swallow. The spasm passed and he tried again. 'Leave her.'
Yes. What else, at least for now, was there?
They began to retreat down the hall on their hands and knees. Johnny went backward at first, then swung around, brushing the splinters of the fallen Hummel figure with his moccasins. Brad was already past the doorway to the Carver dining room and most of the way to the kitchen, where his wife, also on her knees, waited for him. Brad's considerable rear end wagged back and forth in a way Johnny might have considered comical under other circumstances.
Something caught his eye and he stopped. There was a small decorative table by the entrance to the dining room where David Carver would never preside over another Thanksgiving turkey or Christmas goose. This table had been loaded down with, gee, what a surprise, a dozen or so Hummel figures. The table wasn't standing flat but leaning back against the wall to the right of the door, like a drunk dozing against a lamppost. One of its legs had been sheared off. The Hummel shepherdesses and milkmaids and farmboys were now mostly on their backs or faces, and there were more china fragments under the table where one or more had fallen off and shattered. Among the painted pieces there was something else, something black. In the gloom, Johnny first took it for the corpse of some huge