The Regulators - Stephen King [67]
'Mommy! Mommy!' Ralphie screams, and Jim Reed is losing his battle to keep the twisting, struggling boy from running to the woman dying in the kitchen doorway.
Johnny and Brad are coming down the stairs on their fannies — a riser at a time, like kids playing a game — but when Johnny gets to the bottom and understands what has happened, what is still happening, he gets to his feet and runs, first kicking aside the battered-in screen door, then crunching through the remains of Kirsten's beloved Hummels.
'No, get down!' Brad yells at him, but Johnny pays no attention. He's thinking only one thing, and that is to separate the dying woman from her kids as fast as he can. They don't need to see the rest of her suffering.
'Mommeeeee!'Ellen howls, trying to wriggle out from under Cammie. The girl's nose is bleeding. Her eyes are wild but hellishly aware. 'Mommmeeeeeee!'
Unhearing, her days of caring about her children and her husband and her secret ambition to someday create beautiful Hummel figures of her own (most, she has thought, will probably look like her gorgeous son) all behind her, Kirsten Carver jitters mindlessly in the doorway, feet kicking, hands rising and falling, drumming briefly in her lap and then flying up again like startled birds. She growls and sings, growls and sings, sounds which are almost words.
'Get her out!' Cammie yells at Johnny. She stares at Pie with terror and pity. 'Get her away from the kids, for Christ's sake!'
He bends, lifts, and then Belinda is there to help him. They carry Kirsten into her living room and set her on a couch that she agonized over for weeks and which is now bleeding stuffing from a gaping hole. Brad backs up before them to give them room, throwing nervous glances over his shoulder at the street, which appears once again to be deserted.
'Don't ask me to sew it,' Pie says in an arch tone of voice, and then gives a horrible choked laugh.
'Kirsten,' Belinda says, bending over her and taking one of her hands. 'You're going to be all right. You're going to be fine.'
'Don't ask me to sew it,' the woman on the couch repeats. This time she sounds as if she is lecturing. The cushion under her head is growing dark, the bloodstain spreading visibly as the three of them stand looking down at her. To Johnny it looks like the kind of nimbus that Renaissance painters sometimes put around their Madonnas. And then the convulsions resume.
Belinda bends and seizes Kirsten's twisting shoulders. 'Help me with her!' she chokes furiously at Johnny and her husband. She is weeping again. 'Oh, you stupids, I can't do it alone, help me with her!'
In the house next door, Tom Billingsley has gone on trying to save Marielle's life even at the height of the attack, working with the aplomb of a battlefield surgeon. Now she is sewn up, and the bleeding is down to a muddy seep through a triple fold of gauze, but when he looks up at Collie, Old Doc shakes his head. He is actually more upset by the cries from next door than by the operation he has just performed. He doesn't have much feeling about Marielle Soderson one way or the other, but he's almost positive the woman crying out over there is Kirstie Carver, and Kirstie he likes very much. 'Boy oh boy,' he says out loud. T mean boy-howdy.'
Collie looks toward Gary, wanting to make sure he's out of earshot, and spots him poking around in Doc's kitchenette, oblivious to the screaming and the weeping children next door, unaware that the operation on his wife is finished; he's opening and closing cupboards with the thoroughness of a dedicated alcoholic hunting for booze. His look into the fridge for beer or maybe some chilled vodka was an understandably short one; his wife's arm is there, on the second shelf. Collie put it in himself, sliding stuff around — salad dressing, pickles, the mayonnaise, some left-over sliced pork in Saran Wrap — until there