The Regulators - Stephen King [94]
'Doc!' Cynthia cried, running to Marielle. 'Doc!'
Gary came first. He stumbled in the kitchen doorway and would have knee-dropped on to his wife's stomach if Cynthia hadn't pushed him backward. The smell of cooking sherry hung around him in a sweet cloud.
'Wass happen?' Gary asked. 'Wass wrong my wi?'
Marielle whipped her head from side to side. It thumped against the wall. The picture of Daisy, the Corgi who could count and add, fell off and landed on her chest. Mercifully, the glass in the frame didn't break. Cynthia grabbed it and tossed it aside. As she did, she saw the gauze over the stump of the woman's arm had turned red. The stitches — some of them, at least — had broken.
'Doc!' she screamed.
He came hurrying across from the door, where he had been standing and staring out, almost hypnotized by the changes which were still taking place. There were snarling sounds from the greenbelt out back, more screams, more gunshots. At least two. Gary looked in that direction, blinking owlishly. 'Wass happen?' he asked again.
Marielle stopped shivering. Her fingers moved, as if she was trying to snap them, and then that stopped, too. Her eyes stared up blankly at the ceiling. A single tear trickled from the corner of the left one. Doc took her wrist and felt for a pulse. He stared at Cynthia with a kind of desperate intensity as he did. 'I guess if you want to go on working downstreet, you'll have to turn in that cashier's duster for a dancehall dress,' he said. 'The E-Z Stop's a saloon now. The Lady Day.'
'Is she dead?' Cynthia asked.
'Yuh,' Old Doc said, lowering Marielle's hand. 'For whatever it's worth, I think she ran out of chances fifteen minutes ago. She needed a trauma unit, not an old veterinarian with shaky hands.'
More screams. Shouts. Someone was crying out there, crying and shouting you should have stopped him, you should have stopped him. A sudden surety came to Cynthia: Steve, a guy she'd already come to like, was dead. The shooters were out there, and they'd killed him.
'Wass happen?' Gary asked for the third time. Neither the old man nor the girl answered him. Although he had been right there, kneeling in the kitchen doorway beside her when Billingsley pronounced his wife dead, Gary didn't seem to realize what had happened until Old Doc pulled the brown corduroy cover off his couch and spread it over her. Then it got through to Gary, drunk or not. His face began to shiver. He groped under the couch cover, found his wife's hand, brought it out, kissed it. Then he held it against his cheek and began to cry.
6
When Jim Reed saw rapidly approaching shapes coming up the path toward him, his excitement vanished. Terror filled the space where it had been. For the first time it occurred to him that coming out here might not have been a very intelligent idea.
If you see strangers in the woods, come right back. That was what his mom had said. But he couldn't even move. He was frozen. Then there was a horrible growling sound in the undergrowth, the sound of an animal, and he panicked. He did not see Collie Entragian and Steve Ames when they burst into view; he saw killers who had left their vans to infiltrate the woods. He didn't hear Johnny's muffled yell, or see Johnny struggling to free himself from Dave's clutching hands.
'Shoot, Jimmy!' Dave shrieked. His voice was a trembling, freaked-out falsetto. 'Shoot, Jeezum Crow, it's them!'
Jim fired and the one on the left went down, clutching for the top of his head, which blew back in a red film of scalp and hair and bone. The rifle the man had been carrying tumbled to the side of the path. Blood poured through his fingers and sheeted down over his face.
'Get the other one!' Dave cried. 'Get him, Jimmy, get him before he gets us!'
'No, don't shoot!' the other guy said, holding out his hands. There was a rifle in one of them. 'Please, man, don't shoot me!'
He was going