The Regulators - Stephen King [83]
'My friend,' Peter said. Not quite a question.
'Yes, that's right.'
Peter had never actually met the man he would be joining at the fork in the path and never actually would, not really, but there was no sense in telling Peter these things. He didn't have mind enough left to understand them, for one thing. He was shortly going to be dead, for another. As dead as Herb Wyler. As dead as the man with the shopping-cart, the one Peter would shortly be meeting in the woods.
'My friend,' Peter said a second time. A little surer now.
'Yep.' The British department head was gone; Tak returned to John Payne doing his Gary Cooper thing. 'Best be crawling, pard.'
'Down the path to the fork.'
'Reckon so.'
Peter rose to his feet like an old clockwork toy with rust in its gears. His eyeballs jiggled in the silver dreamlight from the TV.
'Best be crawling. And when I get to the fork, I can sit down with my friend.'
'Yessir, that's the deal.' Now it was the half-leering, half-laughing voice of Rory Calhoun. 'He's quite the boy, your friend. You could say he got this whole thing started. Lit the fuse, anyway. You git on, now, pard. Happy trails to you, until we meet again.'
Peter walked through the arch, not glancing with his one dying eye at Audrey, who was slumped over sideways in one of the living-room chairs with her eyes half-open. She appeared to be in a daze or perhaps even a state of coma. She was breathing slowly and regularly. Her legs, long and pretty (the first things about her to attract Herb back in the days when she had still been Audrey Garin), were stretched out before her, and Peter almost stumbled over them in his sleepwalk to the front door. When he opened the door and the red light of the declining day fell on his grin, it looked more like a scream than ever.
Halfway down the walk with that red light falling like strained blood through the rising pillar of smoke from the Hobart place, the Rory Calhoun voice filled his head, ripping at it like a razor blade: Close the door behind you, partner, was you born in a barn?
Peter made a drunken about-face, came back and did as he was told. The door was smooth and intact, the only one on the block not riddled with bullet-holes. He did another about-face (almost falling off the stoop in the process) and then set sail through the red light toward his own house, where he would walk up the driveway, past the breezeway, and into the backyard. From there he would climb over the low wire fence and enter the greenbelt. Find the path. Find the fork. Find his friend. Sit down with his friend.
He stepped over the sprawled body of his wife, then paused as a wild cry rose in the hot, smoky air: Wh-Wh-Whooo . . . As far gone as he was, that cry brought a scatter of gooseflesh to his arms. What was a coyote doing in Ohio? In a suburb of Colum —
Best be crawling, pard. Git along, little dogie.
Pain, even more excruciating than before. He moaned through the frozen curve of his grin. Fresh blood oozed from his ruptured eye and trickled down his cheek.
He started forward again, and when the cry returned — this time joined by a second, a third, and finally a fourth — he didn't react. He thought only of the path, the fork, the friend. Tak made one final check of the man's mind (it did not take long, as there was not much mind left in Peter to check) and then withdrew.
Now there was only it and the woman. It supposed it knew why it had let her live, like the bird that is reputed to live in the very jaws of the crocodile, the bird safe from the croc's teeth because it cleans among them, but Tak would not save her much longer. In many ways the boy had been an inspired host — perhaps the only host in which it could have lived and grown so much — but there was this one ironic drawback: what Tak could conceive and desire, the boy's body could not carry out. It could dress the woman and dye her hair, it could strip her naked, it could make her pinch her own nipples and do all sorts of other puerile things if it desired. It did not desire. What it desired was to couple with her, and that