The Regulators - Stephen King [88]
'Christ!' Collie said, and Steve thought he meant those howls — coyotes howling somewhere to the east of them, where there were supposed to be houses and stores and five different kinds of McBurger restaurants — but the big cop wasn't looking that way. He was looking down. Steve followed his gaze and saw a man sitting beside the beached shopping cart. He was propped against a cactus, stuck to its spines like a grotesque human memo which had been left here for them to find.
Wh-Wh-Whoooo . . .
He reached out, not thinking about it, and found the cop's hand. Collie felt his touch and grabbed back. It was a hard grip, but Steve didn't mind.
'Oh, shit, I've seen this guy,' Collie said.
'How in Christ's name can you tell?' Steve asked.
'His clothes. His cart. He's been on the street two or three times since the start of the summer. If I saw him again, I was going to warn him off. Probably harmless, but — '
'But what?' Steve, who had been on the bum a time or two in his life, didn't know whether to be pissed or amused. 'What'd you think he was going to do? Steal someone's favorite velvet Elvis painting? Try to hit that guy Soderson up for a drink?'
Collie shrugged.
The man pinned to the cactus was dressed in patched khaki pants and a tee-shirt even older, dirtier, and more ragged than the one Billingsley had found for Collie. His elderly sneakers were bound together with electrical tape. They were the clothes of a bum, and the possessions which had spilled out of the cart when it overturned suggested the same: an old pair of airtip dress shoes, a length of frayed rope, a Barbie doll, a blue jacket with BUCKEYE LANES printed on the back in gold thread, a bottle of wine, half-full, stoppered with what looked like the finger of a lady's evening glove, and a boombox radio which had to be at least ten years old. Its plastic case had been mended with airplane glue. There were also at least a dozen plastic bags, each carefully rolled up and secured with twine.
A dead bum in the woods. But how in God's name had he died? His eyes had popped out of their sockets and hung on his cheeks from dried optic nerves. Both looked deflated, as if the force that had pushed them out had also split them. His nose had bled copiously over his lips and the salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin. The blood didn't obscure his mouth, though — Steve only wished it had. It was distended in a huge, loopy grin that seemed to have dragged the corners of the bum's mouth halfway to his grimy ears. Something — some force — had swatted him into the cactus-grove and killed him hard enough to shove his eyeballs clear out on to his face. Yet the same force had left him grinning.
Collie's hand was gripping harder than ever. Crushing his fingers.
'Can you let up?' Steve asked. 'You're breaking my — '
He looked up the east-tending fork of the path, the one that was supposed to lead them out on to Anderson Avenue and help. It ran on for about ten yards and then opened like the mouth of a funnel into a nightmare desert world. That it bore no resemblance to Ohio made no impression on Steven Ames, for the simple reason that it bore no resemblance to any landscape he had ever seen in his life. Or glimpsed in his dreams.
Beyond the last few sane, green trees was a broad expanse of whitish hardpan running toward a troubled horizon of saw-toothed mountain peaks. They had no shading or texture, no folds or outcrops or valleys. They were the dead black Crayola mountains of a child.
The path didn't disappear but widened