The Regulators - Stephen King [48]
'No problem, cookie,' he said, and just hearing the words — any words — coming out of his mouth made him feel a little stronger.
'Don't call me cookie and I won't call you cake,' she said in a prim little no-nonsense voice.
He burst out laughing. It sounded extremely weird in this room, but he didn't care. She didn't seem to, either. She was looking back at him with just the faintest touch of a smile at the corners of her mouth. 'Okay,' he said. 'I won't call you cookie, you don't call me cake, and neither of us'll freak, fair enough?'
'Yeah. What about your leg?'
'It's okay. Looks more like a floor-burn than a bullet-wound.'
'Lucky you.'
'Yeah. I might dump a little disinfectant on it if I get a chance, but compared to her — '
'Gary!' the object of comparison bawled. The arm, Steve saw, was now hardly attached to the rest of her body at all; it seemed to be hanging by a thin strap of flesh. Her husband, also skinny (but with a blooming suburban potbelly just beginning to take shape), did a kind of helpless, panicky dance around her. He reminded Steve of a native in an old jungle flick doing the Cool Jerk around a brooding stone idol.
'Gary!' she screamed again. Blood was running out of her mangled shoulder in a steady stream, turning the left side of her pink top to a muddy maroon. Her paper-white face was drenched with sweat; her hair clung to the curve of her skull in clumps. 'Gary, quit acting like a dog looking for a place to piss and help me — '
She collapsed back against the wall between the living room and the kitchenette, panting for breath. Steve expected her knees to buckle, but they didn't. Instead, she grasped her left wrist with her right hand and lifted her wounded arm carefully toward Steve and Cynthia. The blood-glistening twist of gristle that was still connecting it to the rest of her made a squelchy sound, like a wet dishrag when you wring it out, and Steve wanted to tell her not to do that, to stop fooling with herself before she tore the goddam thing off like a wing off a baked chicken.
Then Gary was doing the Cool Jerk in front of Steve, going up and down like a man on a pogo stick, patches of hectic red standing out on his pale face. Gimme a little bass with those eighty-eights, Steve thought.
'Help her!' Gary cried. 'Help my wife! Bleeding to death!'
'I can't — ' Steve began.
Gary reached out and seized the front of Steve's tee-shirt. When there's no more room in hell, this artifact said, the dead will walk the earth. He thrust his thin and feverish face up toward Steve's. His eyes glittered with gin and panic. 'Are you with them? Are you one of them?'
'I don't — '
'Are you with the shooters? Tell me the truth!'
Angrier than he would have believed possible (anger was not, ordinarily, his thing at all), Steve knocked the man's hands away from his old and much-loved tee-shirt, then pushed him. Gary took a stagger-step backward, his eyes first widening, then narrowing again.
'Okay,' he said. 'Okay, yeah. You asked for it. You asked for it and now you're gonna get it.' He started forward again.
Cynthia got between them, glancing at Steve for a moment — probably to assure herself that he wasn't in attack-mode yet — and then glaring at Gary. 'What the fuck's wrong with you?' she asked him.
Gary smiled tightly. 'He's not from around here, is he?'
'Christ, neither am I! I'm from Bakersfield, California — does that make me one of them?'
'Gary!' It sounded like the yap of a dog that has run a long way on a dusty road and pretty much barked itself out. 'Stop fucking around and help me! My arm . . .' She continued to hold it out, and what Steve thought of now — he didn't want to but couldn't help it — was Mucci's Fine Meats in Newton. Guy in a white shirt, white cap, and bloodstained apron, holding out a peeled joint of meat to his mother.