The Regulators - Stephen King [79]
'Kim?' he asked. 'Could you maybe help a little with — '
'No,' she said. No more, no less. And calm. No defiance in her gaze, no hysteria in her tone . . . but no fellow feeling, either. She had an arm around her daughter, her daughter had an arm around her, cozy as can be, just a coupla white girls sittin around and waitin for the clouds to roll by. Understandable, maybe, but Johnny was furious with her, nevertheless; she was suddenly everyone he had ever known who looked bored when the conversation came around to AIDS, or homeless children, or the defoliation of the rain forests; she was everyone who had ever stepped over a homeless man or woman sleeping on the sidewalk without so much as a single glance down. As he had on occasion done himself. Johnny could picture himself grabbing her by the arms, hauling her to her feet, whirling her around, and planting a swift kick square in the middle of her narrow midwestern ass. Maybe that would wake her up. Even if it didn't, it would certainly make him feel a little better.
'No,' he repeated, feeling his temples throb with stupid rage.
'No,' she agreed, and gave him a wan little at-last-you-under-stand smile. Then she turned her head toward Susi and began to stroke the girl's hair.
'Come on, dear heart,' Belinda said to Ellen, leaning down and opening her arms. 'Come over here and spend some time with Bee.' The girl came, silent, her face twisting in an awful cramp of grief that made the silence somehow even worse, and Belinda enfolded her.
The Reed twins watched this, but really didn't see. They were standing by the back door, looking bright-eyed and excited. Cammie approached them, stood in front of them, appraised them with an expression Johnny at first mistook for dourness. A moment more and he realized what it really was: terror so large it could only be partially concealed.
'All right,' she said at last. Her voice was dry and businesslike. 'Which one carries it?'
The boys looked at each other, and Johnny had a sense of communication between them — brief but complex, perhaps the sort of thing in which only twins could engage. Or perhaps, he thought, it's just that your brains have boiled, John. That was not actually so farfetched. They certainly felt boiled.
Jim held out his hand. For just a moment his mother's upper lip trembled. Then it firmed and she passed him David Carver's pistol. Dave took the shells and opened the box while his brother rolled the .45's cylinder and held the gun up to the light, checking to make sure the chambers were empty just as Johnny had done. We're careful because we understand the potential a gun has to maim and kill, Johnny thought, but it's more than that. On some level we know they're evil. Devilish. Even their biggest fans and partisans sense it.
Dave was holding out a palmful of shells to his brother. Jim took them one at a time, loading the gun.
'You act like your father was with you every minute,' Cammie said as he did it. 'If you think of doing something he wouldn't let you do if he was here, don't. Is that understood?'
'Yes, Mom.' Jim snapped the pistol's cylinder closed and then held it at the end of his arm with his finger outside the trigger-guard and the muzzle pointing at the floor. He looked both embarrassed by his mother's orders — she sounded like the CO in an old Leon Uris novel, laying down the law for a couple of green privates — and wildly excited at the prospect of what lay ahead.
She turned her attention to the other twin. 'David?'
'Yes, Mom?'
'If you see people — strangers — in the woods, come right back. That's the most important thing. Don't ask questions, don't respond to anything they might say, don't even approach them.'
Jim began, 'Mom, if they don't have guns — '
'Don't ask questions, don't approach them,' she repeated. She didn't speak much louder, but there was something in her