The Regulators - Stephen King [64]
'It's the same guy,' he whispers. 'Oh Jesus-God, it's the same fucking one.'
'Get down, fool!' Brad grabs his arm and yanks. Johnny collapses forward like a car slipping off a badly placed jack, not realizing he's been up on his hands and knees until he comes crashing back down again. Unseen bullets hunt the air over his head. The glass on a framed wedding picture at the head of the stairs shatters; the picture itself falls face-down on the carpet with a thump. A second later, the wooden ball atop the banister's newel-post disintegrates, spewing a deadly bouquet of splinters. Brad ducks down, covering his face, but Johnny only stares at something on the hallway floor, oblivious of everything else.
'What's wrong with you?' Brad asks him. 'You want to die?'
'It's him, Brad,' Johnny repeats. He curls his fingers into his hair and gives a brief hard tug, as if to assure himself that all this is really happening. 'The — ' There's a vicious buzz, almost like a plucked guitar-string, over their heads, and the hall light-fixture explodes, showering glass down on them. 'The guy that was driving the blue van,' he finishes. 'The other one shot her — the human — but this is the guy who was driving.'
He reaches out and picks up one of Ralphie Carver's action figures from the hall floor, which is now littered with glass and splinters as well as toys. It's an alien with a bulging forehead, almond-shaped eyes that are dark and huge, and a mouth that isn't a mouth at all but a kind of fleshy horn. It's dressed in a greenish iridescent uniform. The head is bald except for a stiff blond strip of hair. To Johnny it looks like the comb on a Roman Centurion's helmet. Where's your hat? he thinks at the little figure as the bullets whine through the air above him, punching through the wallpaper, shattering the laths beneath. The figure looks a little like Spielberg's ET. Where's your pinned-back cavalry hat, bub?
'What are you talking about?' Brad asks. He's lying full-length on his stomach. Now he takes the figure, which is perhaps seven inches tall, from Johnny and looks at it. There is a cut on one of Brad's plump cheeks. Falling glass from the light-fixture, Johnny assumes. Downstairs, the screaming woman falls silent. Brad looks at the alien, then stares at Johnny with eyes that are almost comically round. 'You're full of shit,' he says.
'No,' Johnny says. Tm not. With God as my witness I'm not. I never forget a face.'
What are you saying? That the people doing this are wearing masks so the survivors can't identify them later?'
The idea hasn't occurred to Johnny until this moment, but it's a pretty good one. 'I suppose that must be it. But — '
'But what?'
'It didn't look like a mask. That's all. It didn't look like a mask.'
Brad stares at him a moment longer, then tosses the figure aside and begins wriggling toward the stairwell. Johnny picks it up, looks at it for a moment, then winces as another slug comes through the window at the end of the hall — the one facing the street — and drones directly over his head. He tucks the action figure into the pants pocket not holding the oversized slug and begins to wriggle after Brad.
On the lawn of Old Doc's house, Peter Jackson stands with his wife in his arms, woundless at the center of the firestorm. He sees the vans with their dark glass and futuristic contours, he sees the shotgun barrels, their muzzles belching fire, and between the silvery one and the red one he can see Gary Soderson's old shitbox Saab burning in the Soderson driveway. None of it makes much of an impression on him. He is thinking about how he just got home from work. That seems like a very big deal to him, for some reason. He thinks he will begin every account of this terrible afternoon (it has not occurred to him that he may not survive the terrible afternoon, at least not yet) by saying I just got home from work. This phrase already has become a kind of magical structure inside his head; a bridge back to the sane and orderly world which he assumed, only an hour ago,