The Regulators - Stephen King [89]
it said. The signpost was topped with a cow-skull as misshapen as the cacti. Beyond the sign, the road ran straight to the horizon in an artificially diminishing perspective that made Steve think of movie posters for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There were already stars in the sky above the mountains, impossible stars that were much too big. They didn't seem to twinkle but to blink on and off like Christmas-tree lights. The howls rose again, this time not a trio or a quartet but a whole choir. Not from the foothills; there were no foothills. Just flat white desert, green blobs of cactus, the road, the ravine, and, in the distance, the sharktooth necklace of the mountains.
Collie whispered, 'What in God's name is this?'
Before Steve could reply — Some child's mind, he would have said, given the chance — a low growl came from the ravine. To Steve it sounded almost like the idle of a powerful boat engine. Then two green eyes opened in the shadows and he took a step back, his mouth drying. He lifted the Mossberg, but his hands felt like blocks of wood and the gun looked puny, useless. The eyes (they floated like comic-strip eyes in a dark room) looked the size of goddam footballs, and he didn't think he wanted to see how big the animal that went with them might be. 'Can we kill it?' he asked. 'If it comes at us, do you think — '
'Look around you!' Collie interrupted. 'Look what's happening!'
He did. The green world was retreating from them and the desert was advancing. The foliage under their feet first became pallid, as if something had sucked all the sap out of it, then disappeared as the dark, moist earth bleached and granulated. Beads. That was what he had been thinking a few moments ago, that the topsoil had been replaced by this weird round beadlike shit. To his right, one of the scrubby trees suddenly plumped out. This was accompanied by the sound you get when you stick your finger in your cheek and then pop it. The tree's whitish trunk turned green and grew spines. Its branches melted together, the color in the leaves seeming to spread and blur as they became cactus arms.
'You know, I think it might be time to beat a retreat here,' Collie said.
Steve didn't bother to reply; he talked with his feet instead. A moment later and they were both running back along the path toward the place where they had stepped on to it. At first Steve thought only about not getting poked in the eye by a branch, running into a drift of brambles, or going past the discarded double-A batteries, which was where they'd want to turn dead west and head for Billingsley's gate. Then he heard the coughing growl again and everything else faded into insignificance. It was close. The green-eyed creature from the ravine was following them. Hell, chasing them. And gaining.
2
There was a gunshot, and Peter Jackson slowly turned his head toward it. He realized (so far as he was still capable of realizing anything) that he had been standing on the edge of his backyard and looking at (so far as he was still capable of looking at anything) the table on the patio. There was a stack of books and magazines on the table, most bristling with pink marker-slips. He had been working on a scholarly article called 'James Dickey and the New Southern Reality', relishing the thought that it would stir a great deal of controversy in certain ivied bowers of academe. He might be invited to other colleges to be on panel discussions! Panel discussions to which he would travel with all expenses paid! (Within reason, of course.) How he had dreamed of that. Now it all seemed faraway and unimportant. Like the gunshot from the woods, and the scream that followed it, and the two shots which followed the scream. Even the snarling sounds — like a tiger that had escaped from the zoo and hidden in their green-belt — seemed faraway and unimportant. All that mattered