The Regulators (richard bachman)

by Stephen King

  “Get it on ice!” Gary bawled. “Get it on ice right away! Right aw-” Then, all at once, he seemed to really realize what had happened. What the cop was holding. He opened his mouth, twisted his head in a peculiar way, and unloaded on the photo of the cigarette-smoking parrot.

  Marielle noticed none of it. She staggered toward the clearly terrified veterinarian, her remaining hand outstretched. “I want a shot and I want it now!” she croaked. “Do you hear me, you old woman? I want a fucking shuh-shuh-”

  She collapsed on to her knees. Her head drooped, hung. Then, with an immense effort, she got her chin up again. For a moment her gimlet gaze met Steve’s. “Who the fuck’re you?” she asked in a clear, perfectly understandable voice, then slid forward on her face. The top of her head came to rest inches from the heels of Peter, the man who had lost his wife. Jackson, Steve thought suddenly. That’s his last name, Jackson. Peter Jackson was still turned to the wall with his face clutched in his hands. If he takes a step backward, Steve thought, he’ll trip over her.

  “Fuck a duck,” the cop said in a low, amazed voice. Then he looked down and realized he was still holding the woman’s arm. He walked stiffly toward the kitchen with it held out in front of him. The sound of rain hissing down seemed very loud in Steve’s ears.

  “Come on,” the old party said, rousing himself. “We’re not done yet. Get that belt on her, son. Buckle in toward the breast. You game?”

  “I guess,” Steve said, but he was very relieved when Cynthia the counter-girl picked the belt up and then knelt beside the unconscious woman with it in her hands.

  From “The Force Corridor”, Episode 55 ofMotoKops 2200, original teleplay by Allen Smithee

  ACT 2

  FADE IN ON:

  INT. CRISIS CENTER, MOTOKOPS” HQ

  The room is dominated, as always, by the huge Situscreen. Standing before it on a floatpad is COLONEL HENRY, looking grave. Sitting at the horseshoe-shaped Crisis Desk are the rest of the MotoKops squad: SNAKE HUNTER, BOUNTY, MAJOR PIKE, ROOTY, and CASSIE.

  On the Situscreen we see a SPACE VIEW. In the distance is Earth, just a blue-green coin at this distance. It looks peaceful enough.

  SNAKE HUNTER (with customary scorn) So what’s the big deal? I don’t see anything that looks very-What the-??!!

  Suddenly the FORCE CORRIDOR appears on the Situscreen, almost filling it, blotting out the stars on either side. It’s like watching the arrival of Darth Vader’s dreadnought at the beginning of the first Star Wars movie; in a word, awesome!

  The CORRIDOR consists of two long metal plates with big square protrusions sticking out at intervals. The CORRIDOR HUMS OMINOUSLY, and BLUE FIRE CRACKLES from side to side between the square protrusions.

  CASSIE STYLES gasps, looks at the Situscreen with dismay. COLONEL HENRY pushes a button on his hand-control, and the screen goes into FREEZE MODE. We can still see Earth, but with the corridor on either side, it looks caught in a potentially lethal WEB OF ELECTRICITY!

  COLONEL HENRY (to SNAKE HUNTER) That’s the big deal! The Force Corridor, artifact of a long-vanished alien race! Destructive… and headed directly toward Earth!

  CASSIE (dismay)

  Oh, gosh!

  COLONEL HENRY Relax, Cassie-it’s still over 150,000 light-years away. This is a composite shot.

  MAJOR PIKE

  Yeah, but how fast is it moving?

  COLONEL HENRY That’s the problem. Let’s just say that if we don’t resolve this crisis in the next seventy-two hours, I think you can cancel your weekend plans.

  ROOTY

  Root-root-root-root!

  SNAKE HUNTER Shutup, Rooty. (to COLONEL HENRY) So what’s our plan?

  COLONEL HENRY takes the floatpad further up, so he can use his highlighter to circle a couple of the protrusions on the inner sides of the corridor.

  COLONEL HENRY Drone telemetry reports that the Force Corridor itself is over 200,000 miles long and 50,000 miles wide, a hallway of death in which nothing can live! But it may have a weakness! I think these square shapes are power-generators. If we could knock “em out-

  BOUNTY Are we talkin” Power Wagon assault, boss?

  We move in on COLONEL HENRY’s grim face.

  COLONEL HENRY

  It’s Earth’s only chance.

  INT. CRISIS DESK, WITH THE MOTOKOPS

  SNAKE HUNTER A deep space Power Wagon assault? Could be a quick trip to that Boot Hill in the sky!

  ROOTY

  Root-root-root-root!

  ALL

  Shut up, Rooty!

  INT. A HALLWAY IN THE CRISIS CENTER

  COLONEL HENRY and CASSIE STYLES are in the lead, the other MotoKops behind them. ROOTY, as usual, is bumbling along in the rear.

  COLONEL HENRY

  You’re worried, little one.

  CASSIE Of course I’m worried! Snake Hunter is right! The Power Wagons were never designed for the stresses of a deep space assault!

  COLONEL HENRY But that’s not all that’s on your mind.

  CASSIE Sometimes I hate your telepathy, Hank.

  COLONEL HENRY

  Come on… give.

  CASSIE Something bothers me about those shapes inside the Force Corridor. What if they aren’t power-generators?

  COLONEL HENRY

  What else could they be?

  They have reached the slide-door to the Power Wagon Corral. COLONEL HENRY slaps his hand into the palm-lock and the door slides up.

  CASSIE I don’t know, but…

  INT. THE POWER WAGON CORRAL, FEATURING THE MOTOKOPS

  CASSIE gasps with shock, eyes widening! COLONEL HENRY, looking grim, puts his arm. around her. The other squad-members gather round

  ROOTY

  Root-root-root-root!

  SNAKE HUNTER Yeah, Rooty, I couldn’t agree more!

  He stares bitterly at:

  INT. THE POWER WAGON CORRAL, MOTOKOPS” POV

  Floating in the middle of the parked Power Wagons, between SNAKE HUNTER’s Tracker Arrow and the silver-sided Rooty-Toot, is a grim visitor: the Meatwagon,HUMMING SOFTLY.

  INT. RESUME MOTOKOPS SQUAD

  COLONEL HENRY

  MotoKops, prepare for battle!

  SNAKE HUNTER (his stun-pistol already out) Way ahead of you, boss.

  The others draw.

  INT. RESUME MEATWAGON

  The Doom Turret SLIDES BACK, revealing NO FACE, sinister as always in his black uniform. Sitting behind him at the controls, with her customary look of sexy hauteur, is COUNTESS LILI. The Hypno-Jewel around her neck FLICKERS WILDLY through the color spectrum.

  NO FACE

  Floatpad, Countess. Now!

  COUNTESS LILI

  Yes, Excellent One.

  The COUNTESS pulls a lever. A floatpad appears. NO FACE steps on to it and is wafted down to the floor of the Corral. He is unarmed, and asCOLONEL HENRY steps forward, he holsters his own stunner.

  COLONEL HENRY

  Aren’t you a little far from home, No Face?

  NO FACE

  Home is where the heart is, my dear Hank.

  BOUNTY

  This is no time for games.

  NO FACE As it happens, I couldn’t agree more. The Force Corridor approaches. You, Colonel Henry, are planning a Power Wagon assault-

  MAJOR PIKE

  How do you know that?

  NO FACE (icy)

  Because it’s what I’d do, you idiot!

  (to COLONEL HENRY) A Power Wagon assault is incredibly risky, but it may also be Earth’s only chance. You’ll need all the help you can get, and you have no vehicle at your command as powerful as the Meatwagon.

  SNAKE HUNTER That’s a matter of opinion, you mutt. My Tracker Arrow-

  COLONEL HENRY

  Stow the gab!

  (to NO FACE)

  What are you offering?

  NO FACE A partnership until the crisis is past. Old quarrels put aside, at least temporarily. A joint attack on the Force Corridor.

  He offers his black-gloved hand. COLONEL HEN
RY starts to reciprocate, and then MAJOR PIKE steps forward. His almond-shaped eyes are wide, and his mouth-horn quivers with alarm.

  MAJOR PIKE Don’t do it, Hank! You can’t trust him! It’s a trick!

  NO FACE I understand how you feel, Major… we both do, do we not, Countess?

  COUNTESS LILI

  Yes, Excellent One.

  NO FACE But this time there are no tricks, no hidden cards.

  COLONEL HENRY (to MAJOR PIKE) And we have no choice.

  NO FACE Indeed we don’t. Time is running out.

  COLONEL HENRY reaches out and takes NO FACE’shand.

  NO FACE

  Partners?

  COLONEL HENRY

  For now.

  ROOTY

  Root-root-root-root!

  We FADE TO BLACK. Ends ACT 2.

  Chapter Six

  Now speaking in the voice of Ben Cartwright, patriarch of the Ponderosa, Tak said: “Ma’am, it looks to me like you were planning on skedaddling.”

  “No…”

  It was her voice, but weak and distant, like a radio transmission coming in from the West Coast on a rainy night. “No, I was just going to the store. Because we’re out of…” Out of what? What could they possibly be out of that this monster would care about, believe in? And, blessedly, something came to her. “Chocolate syrup! Hershey’s!”

  It came toward her from the den doorway, Seth Garin in MotoKops Underoos, only now she saw an amazing, horrid thing: the child’s bare toes were dragging across the living-room carpet, but otherwise it was floating along like a boy-shaped balloon. It was Seth’s body, poignantly grimy at the wrists and ankles, but there was no Seth in the eyes. None at all. Now it was just the thing that looked like it belonged in a swamp.

  “Says she was just going to take a mosey down to the general store,” said the voice of Ben Cartwright. Whatever else Tak might be, it was a hellishly good mimic. You had to give it that. “What do you think, Adam?”

  “Think she’s lying, Paw,” said the voice of Pernell Roberts, the actor who had played Adam Cartwright. Roberts had lost his hair over the years, but he had gotten the best of the deal, anyway; the actors who had played his father and his brothers had all died in the years since Bonanza had galloped off into the sunset of reruns and cable TV.

  Back to the voice of Ben as the thing drifted closer, close enough for her to be able to smell sour sweat and a sweet lingering ghost of No More Tears shampoo. “What do you think, Hoss? Speak up, boy.”

  “Lyin, Paw,” Dan Blocker’s voice said… and for a moment the almost-floating child actually looked like Blocker.

  “Little Joe?”

  “Lyin, Paw.”

  “Root-root-root-root!”

  “Shut up, Rooty,” said Snake Hunter’s voice. It was as if some invisible ensemble of talented lunatics were putting on a show for her. When the thing in front of her spoke again, Snake Hunter was gone and Ben Cartwright was back, that stern Moses of the Sierra Nevada. We don’t much abide liars on the Ponderosa, ma’am. Skedaddlers, either. Now what do you reckon we should do with you?”

  Don’t hurt me, she tried to say, but no words came out, not even a whisper of words. She tried to switch over to some internal circuit, visualizing the little red telephone, only with SETH stamped into the plastic of the handset now. It scared her to try and reach Seth directly, but she had never been in a jam like this. If it decided it wanted her dead…

  She saw the phone in her mind, saw herself speaking into it, and what she had to say was painfully simple: Don’t let it hurt me, Seth. You had power over it at the start, I know you did.

  Maybe not much, but a little. If you have any left-any power, any influence-please don’t let it hurt me, please don’t let it kill me. I’m miserable, but not miserable enough to want to die. Not yet.

  She looked for a flicker of humanity in the floating thing’s eyes, the slightest sign of Seth, and saw nothing.

  Suddenly her left hand shot up and then slapped down, whacking her left cheek with a sound like a breaking stick of kindling. Heat flooded her skin; it was as if someone had turned a sunlamp on that side of her face. Her left eye began to water.

  Now her right hand rose up in front of her eyes, like a Hindu swami’s snake rising out of its basket. It hung in front of her for a moment, and then slowly folded itself into a fist.

  No, she tried to say, please no, please, Seth, don’t let it, but nothing came out this time, either, and the fist plummeted down, knuckles very white in the dim room, and then her nose seemed to explode upward in clouds of white dots like butterflies. They danced frantically in front of her eyes even as blood, warm and loose, began to run down over her lips and chin. She staggered backward.

  “This woman is an affront to justice in the twenty-third century!” Colonel Henry said in his stern voice-a voice she found more hateful and self-righteous each time an episode of the fucking cartoon came on. “She must be shown the error of her ways.”

  Hoss: “That’s right, Colonel! We got to show this bitch who’s top hand!”

  “Root-root-root-root!”

  Cassie Styles: “I agree with Rooty! And a little sweetening up is just the way to start!”

  She was walking again-being walked, rather. The living room flowed past her eyes like scenery running backward past the windows of a train. Her cheek throbbed. Her nose throbbed. She could taste blood on her teeth. Now she pictured a MotoKops-style phone, the kind where you could actually see the person you were talking to, pictured talking face-to-face with Seth on this phone. Please, Seth, it’s your Aunt Audrey, do you recognize me even though my hair’s a different color now? Tak made me dye it so it would look like Cassie’s, and when I go out I have to wear a blue headband like Cassie does, but it’s still me, still Aunt Audrey, the one who took you in, the one who’s been watching out for you, trying to, anyway, and now you have to watch out for me. Don’t let it hurt me too badly, Seth, please don’t let it.

  The lights were off in the kitchen and it was a bowl of gloomy, swarming shadows. As she was propelled across the yellow linoleum (cheery when it was clean, but now dingy and jaundiced-looking), a thought occurred to her, one that was terrible with logic: Why should Seth help her? Even if he was receiving her message and even if he still could help, why should he? To escape Tak meant to abandon Seth to his fate, and that was just what she had been trying to do. If the boy was still there, he must know that as well as Tak.

  A sob, as faint and distant as an invalid’s breath, escaped her as the fingers of her bloodstained right hand felt for the light-switch by the stove, found it, and turned it.

  “Sweeten her up, Paw!” Little Joe Cartwright yelped. “Sweeten her up, by Jasper!” The voice suddenly slid up, becoming the high-pitched laughter of Rooty the Robot. Audrey found herself wishing for insanity. It would be better than this, wouldn’t it? It would have to be.

  Instead she watched, a helpless passenger inside her own body, as Tak turned her, walked her over to the spice rack, and used her hand to open the cabinet above it. The other hand yanked out a yellow Tupperware container that hit the floor and sprayed macaroni across the linoleum in every direction. The flour went next, landing beside her foot and puffing up to coat her legs. The hand darted into the hole it had created and seized the plastic honey bear. The other hand grabbed the top, unscrewed it, tossed it aside. A moment later the bear was hanging upside down over her open, waiting mouth.

  The hand wrapped around the bear’s chubby stomach began to squeeze rhythmically, much as she had once squeezed the rubber bulb of the horn that had been mounted on her childhood bicycle. Blood from her ruptured nose slid down her throat. Then honey filled her mouth, thick and gagging-sweet.

  “Swallow it!” Tak shouted, now in no one’s voice but its own. “Swallow it, you bitch!”

  She swallowed. One mouthful, then two, then three. On the third one her throat seemed to clench shut. She tried to breathe and couldn’t. Her windpipe was blocked by a nightmare of sweet glue.
She fell to her knees and began crawling across the kitchen floor, her dark-red hair hanging in her face, barking out great thick wads of blood-laced honey. It was up her nose as well, packing it and dripping from her nostrils.

  For another few moments she still couldn’t seem to breathe, and the white specks dancing in front of her eyes turned black. I’m going to drown, she thought. Drown in Sue Bee honey.

  Then her windpipe opened up again, a little, anyway, enough, and she was gasping air into her lungs, pulling it down her slick, coated throat, weeping with terror and pain.

  Tak dropped on to Seth Garin’s scabby knees in front of her and began screaming into her face. “Don’t you ever try to get away from me! Don’t you ever! Don’t you ever! Do you understand? Nod your head, you stupid cow, show me you understand!”

  Its hands-the ones she couldn’t see, the ones that were inside her head-seized her and all at once her head was swooping up and down, her forehead smacking the floor on each downstroke, and Tak was laughing. Laughing. She thought it would keep on pounding her head against the floor until she passed out and just sprawled here in the mess she had made.

  Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The hands were gone. The feel of its mind was gone, as well. She looked up cautiously, swiping at her nose with the side of her hand, still hitching for breath and letting it out in gasps that were half-retches. Her forehead throbbed. She could feel it swelling already.