The Regulators - Stephen King [77]
Cynthia had put a pillow under Marielle's head, but she was still lying on the living-room floor (under the picture of Daisy, the mathematically inclined Corgi, actually). They hadn't dared move her; Billingsley was afraid his stitches might tear open again. She was still alive, which was good, and still unconscious, which might also be good, considering what had happened to her. But she was breathing in great, irregular gasps that did not sound good to Collie at all. It sounded like the kind of breathing that might stop any time.
Her husband, the charming Gary, was sitting in a kitchen chair which he had turned around so he could at least look at his wife while he drank. Collie saw that the bottle he had found contained Mother DeLucca's Best Cooking Sherry, and felt his stomach turn over.
Gary saw him looking (or perhaps felt it), and looked over at Collie. His eyes were red and puffy. Sore-looking. Miserable. Collie hunted in his heart and found some sympathy for the man. Not much, though. 'Losser damn arm,' he told Collie in a furry, confiding voice. 'Gaw hepper.' Collie thought this over and translated it as Drunkish for either Got to help her or God help her.
'Yes,' he said. 'We're going to get her some help.'
'Aw be here awreddy. Losser mahfuhn arm. Zin the mahfuhn fritch!'
'I know.'
Cynthia joined them. 'You used to be a vet, didn't you, Mr Billingsley?'
Billingsley nodded.
'I thought so. Could you come here? Take a look at something out the front door?'
'Do you think that's safe?'
'For the time being, I think so. The thing that's out there . . . well, I'd rather you looked for yourself.' She glanced at the other two men. 'Selves.'
She led Billingsley across the living room to the door looking out on Poplar Street. Collie glanced at Steve, who shrugged. Collie's assumption was that the girl wanted to show Billingsley how the houses across the street had changed, although what that had to do with Billingsley's being a vet he didn't know.
'Holy shit,' he said to Steve as they reached the door. 'They've gone back to normal! Or did we just imagine they'd changed in the first place?' It was the Geller house he kept staring at. Ten minutes ago, when he and the hippie and the counter-girl had been looking out this same door, he could have sworn that the Geller place had turned into an adobe — the sort of thing you saw in pictures of New Mexico and Arizona back when they were territories. Now it was clad in plain old Ohio aluminum siding again.
'We didn't imagine it and things haven't gone back to normal,' Steve said. 'At least, not all the way. Check that one.'
Collie followed Steve's pointing finger and stared at the Reed house. The modern aluminized siding had returned, replacing the logs, and the roof was once more neat asphalt shingles instead of whatever it had been before (sod, he thought); the mid-sized satellite dish was back on top of the carport. But the house's foundation was rough wood planking instead of brick, and all the windows were tightly shuttered. There were loopholes in those shutters, too, as if the inhabitants of the house expected their day-to-day problems to include marauding Indians as well as Seventh-day Adventists and wandering insurance salesmen. Collie couldn't say for sure, but he didn't think the Reed house had even had shutters before this afternoon, let alone ones with rifleport loopholes.
'Sa-aaay.' Billingsley sounded like a man who is finally getting the idea that all of this is a Candid Camera stunt. 'Are those hitching rails in front of Audrey's? They are, aren't they? What is all this?'
'Never mind that,' Cynthia said. She reached up, took the old man's face between her hands, and turned it like a camera on a tripod so he was looking at the corpse of Peter Jackson's wife.
'Oh my God,' Collie said.
There was a large bird perched on the woman's bare thigh, its yellow talons buried in her skin. It had already snacked off most of her