The Regulators - Stephen King [63]
Seth! she tries, concentrating as hard as she can. Seth, come with me!
I can't! Go, Aunt Audrey! Go now!
The agony in that voice is more than she can endure. She turns toward the arch again, the one which leads into the den, but sees a meadow slanting down to a rock wall instead. There are wild roses; she smells them and feels the sexy, delicate heat of spring now tending toward summer. And then Janice is beside her and Janice is asking her what her all-time favorite Simon and Garfunkel song is and soon they are deep in a discussion of 'Homeward Bound' and 'I Am a Rock', the one that goes 'If I'd never loved, I never would have cried.'
In the Carver kitchen, the refugees lie on the floor with their hands laced over the backs of their heads and their faces pressed to the floor; around them the world seems to be tearing itself apart. Glass shatters, furniture falls, something explodes. There are horrible punching sounds as bullets pound through the walls.
Suddenly Pie Carver can stand Ellie's clinging to her no more. She loves Ellen, of course she does, but it's Ralphie she wants now, and Ralphie she must have; smart, sassy Ralphie, who looks so much like his father. She pushes Ellen roughly away, ignoring the girl's cry of startled dismay, and bolts for the niche between the stove and the fridge, where Jim is hunched over the frantic, screaming Ralphie, holding one hand over the back of Ralphie's head like a cap.
'Mommmmeeee!'Ellen wails, and attempts to run after her. Cammie Reed pushes away from the pantry door, grabs the little girl around the waist, and drops her back to the floor just as something that sounds like a monster locust drones across the kitchen, strikes the kitchen faucet, and backflips it like a majorette's baton. Most of the spinning faucet tears through the screen and the spider's web on the other side. Water spouts up from what's left, at first almost all the way to the ceiling.
'Give him to me!' Pie screams. 'Give me my son! Give me my s — '
Another approaching drone, this one followed by a loud, unmusical clang as one of the copper pots hanging by the stove is hammered into a hulk of twisted fragments and flying shrapnel. And Pie is suddenly just screaming, no words now, just screaming. Her hands are clapped to her face. Blood pours through her fingers and down her neck. Threads of copper litter the front of her misbuttoned blouse. More copper is in her hair, and a large chunk quivers in the center of her forehead like the blade of a thrown knife.
'I can't see!' she shrieks, and drops her hands. Of course she can't; her eyes are gone. So is most of her face. Quills of copper bristle from her cheeks, her lips, her chin. 'Help me, I can't see! Help me, David! Where are you?'
Johnny, lying face-down beside Brad in Ellen's room upstairs can hear her screaming and understands that something terrible has happened. Bullets hemstitch the air above them. On the far wall is a picture of Eddie Vedder; as Johnny starts to wriggle toward the doorway to the hall, a huge bullet-hole appears in Eddie's chest. Another one hits the child-sized vanity mirror over Ellen's dresser and hammers it to sparkling fragments. Somewhere on the block, blending hellishly with the sounds of Pie Carver's screams from downstairs, comes the bray of a car alarm. And still the gunfire goes on.
As he crawls out into the toy-littered hall, he hears Brad beside him, panting harshly. This has been a hell of an aerobic day for a fellow with such a big stomach, Johnny thinks . . . but then that thought, the sound of the woman screaming downstairs, and the roar of the gunfire are all driven from his mind. For a moment he feels as if