by Stephen King
“We didn’t imagine it and things haven’t gone back to normal,” Steve said. “At least, not all the way. Check that one.”
Collie followed Steve’s pointing finger and stared at the Reed house. The modern aluminized siding had returned, replacing the logs, and the roof was once more neat asphalt shingles instead of whatever it had been before (sod, he thought); the mid-sized satellite dish was back on top of the carport. But the house’s foundation was rough wood planking instead of brick, and all the windows were tightly shuttered. There were loopholes in those shutters, too, as if the inhabitants of the house expected their day-to-day problems to include marauding Indians as well as Seventh-day Adventists and wandering insurance salesmen.
Collie couldn’t say for sure, but he didn’t think the Reed house had even had shutters before this afternoon, let alone ones with rifleport loopholes.
“Sa-aaay.” Billingsley sounded like a man who is finally getting the idea that all of this is a Candid Camera stunt. “Are those hitching rails in front of Audrey’s? They are, aren’t they? What is all this?”
“Never mind that,” Cynthia said. She reached up, took the old man’s face between her hands, and turned it like a camera on a tripod so he was looking at the corpse of Peter Jackson’s wife.
“Oh my God,” Collie said.
There was a large bird perched on the woman’s bare thigh, its yellow talons buried in her skin. It had already snacked off most of her remaining face, and was now burrowing into the flesh under her chin. Collie had a brief, unwelcome memory of going after Kellie Eberhart in exactly the same place one night at the West Columbus Drive-in, her saying that if he gave her a hickey, her dad would probably shoot them both.
He didn’t realize he had lifted the.30-.06 into firing position until Steve pushed the barrel back down with the palm of his hand. “No, man. I wouldn’t. Better to keep quiet, maybe.”
He was right, but… God. It wasn’t just what it was doing, but what it was.
“Losser goddam arm!” Gary announced from the kitchen, as if afraid they might forget this if he allowed them to. Old Doc ignored him. He had crossed the living room looking like a man who expects to be shot dead in his tracks at any moment, but now he seemed to have forgotten all about killers, weird vans, and transforming houses.
“My good gosh, look at that!” he exclaimed in a tone that sounded very much like awe. “I ought to photograph it. Yes! Excuse me… I’ll just get my camera…”
He began to turn away. Cynthia grabbed him by the shoulder. “The camera can wait, Mr Billingsley.”
He seemed to come back a little to their situation at that. “Yes… I suppose, but…”
The bird turned, as if hearing them, and seemed to stare at the vet’s bungalow with its red-rimmed eyes. Its pink skull appeared black with stubble. Its beak was a simple yellow hook.
“Is that a buzzard?” Cynthia asked. “Or maybe a vulture?”
“Buzzard? Vulture?” Old Doc looked startled. “Good gosh, no. I’ve never seen a bird like that in my life.”
“In Ohio, you mean,” Collie said, knowing that wasn’t what Billingsley meant, but wanting to hear it for himself.
“I mean anywhere.”
The hippie looked from the bird to Billingsley and then back to the bird again. “What is it, then? A new species?”
“New species my fanny! Excuse my French, young lady, but that’s a fucking mutant!” Billingsley stared, rapt, as the bird opened its wings, flapping them in order to help it move a little farther up Mary’s leg. “Look how big its body is, and how short its wings are in relation to it-damned thing makes an ostrich look like a miracle of aerodynamics! I don’t think the wings are even the same length!”
“No,” Collie said. “I don’t think they are, either.”
“How can it fly ?” Doc demanded. “How can it possibly fly ?”
“I don’t know, but it does.” Cynthia pointed down toward the thick billows which had now blotted out all vestiges of the world below Hyacinth Street. “It flew out of the smoke. I saw it.”
“I’m sure you did, I didn’t think someone pulled up in a… a Birdmobile and dropped it off, but how it can possibly fly is beyond all-” He broke off, peering at the thing. “Although I can understand how you might have thought it was a buzzard before the inevitable second thoughts set in.” Collie thought Old Doc was mostly talking to himself by this point, but he listened intently just the same. “It does look a little like a buzzard. As a child might draw it, anyway.”
“Huh?” Cynthia said.
“As a child might draw it,” Billingsley repeated. “Perhaps one who got it all mixed up in his mind with a bald eagle.”
The sight of Ralphie Carver hurt Johnny’s heart. Put aside by Jim Reed, whose solicitude had been superseded by his excitement at the impending mission, Ralphie stood between the stove and the refrigerator with his thumb in his mouth and a big wet spot spreading on the front of his shorts. All his bratty bluster had departed. His eyes were huge and still and shiny. He looked to Johnny like drug addicts he had known.
Johnny stopped inside the kitchen door and put Ellie down. She didn’t want to go, but at last he managed to pry her hands gently off his neck. Her eyes were also shocked, but held none of the merciful glaze Johnny could see in her brother’s. He looked past her and saw Kim and Susi Geller sitting on the floor with their arms around each other. Probably suits Mom just fine, Johnny thought, remembering how the woman had seemed to struggle with young
David Reed for possession of the girl. He had won then, but now David had bigger fish to fry; he was bound for Anderson Avenue and parts unknown. That didn’t change the fact that there were two little kids here who had become orphans since lunch, however.
“Kim?” he asked. “Could you maybe help a little with-”
“No,” she said. No more, no less. And calm. No defiance in her gaze, no hysteria in her tone… but no fellow feeling, either. She had an arm around her daughter, her daughter had an arm around her, cozy as can be, just a coupla white girls sittin around and waitin for the clouds to roll by. Understandable, maybe, but Johnny was furious with her, nevertheless; she was suddenly everyone he had ever known who looked bored when the conversation came around to AIDS, or homeless children, or the defoliation of the rain forests; she was everyone who had ever stepped over a homeless man or woman sleeping on the sidewalk without so much as a single glance down. As he had on occasion done himself. Johnny could picture himself grabbing her by the arms, hauling her to her feet, whirling her around, and planting a swift kick square in the middle of her narrow midwestern ass. Maybe that would wake her up. Even if it didn’t, it would certainly make him feel a little better.
“No,” he repeated, feeling his temples throb with stupid rage.
“No,” she agreed, and gave him a wan little at-last-you-under-stand smile. Then she turned her head toward Susi and began to stroke the girl’s hair.
“Come on, dear heart,” Belinda said to Ellen, leaning down and opening her arms. “Come over here and spend some time with Bee.” The girl came, silent, her face twisting in an awful cramp of grief that made the silence somehow even worse, and Belinda enfolded her.
The Reed twins watched this, but really didn’t see. They were standing by the back door, looking bright-eyed and excited. Cammie approached them, stood in front of them, appraised them with an expression Johnny at first mistook for dourness. A moment more and he realized what it really was: terror so large it could only be partially concealed.
“All right,” she said at last. Her voice was dry and businesslike. “Which one carries it?”
The boys looked at each other, and Johnny had a sense of communication between them-brief but complex, perhaps the sort of thing in which only twins could engage. Or perhaps, he thought, it’s just that your brains have boiled, John. That was not actually so farfetched. They certainly felt boiled.
Jim held out his hand. For just a moment his mother’s upper lip trembled. Then it f
irmed and she passed him David Carver’s pistol. Dave took the shells and opened the box while his brother rolled the.45’s cylinder and held the gun up to the light, checking to make sure the chambers were empty just as Johnny had done. We’re careful because we understand the potential a gun has to maim and kill, Johnny thought, but it’s more than that. On some level we know they’re evil. Devilish. Even their biggest fans and partisans sense it.
Dave was holding out a palmful of shells to his brother. Jim took them one at a time, loading the gun.
“You act like your father was with you every minute,” Cammie said as he did it. “If you think of doing something he wouldn’t let you do if he was here, don’t . Is that understood?”
“Yes, Mom.” Jim snapped the pistol’s cylinder closed and then held it at the end of his arm with his finger outside the trigger-guard and the muzzle pointing at the floor. He looked both embarrassed by his mother’s orders-she sounded like the CO in an old Leon Uris novel, laying down the law for a couple of green privates-and wildly excited at the prospect of what lay ahead.
She turned her attention to the other twin. “David?”
“Yes, Mom?”
“If you see people-strangers-in the woods, come right back. That’s the most important thing. Don’t ask questions, don’t respond to anything they might say, don’t even approach them.”
Jim began, “Mom, if they don’t have guns-”
“Don’t ask questions, don’t approach them,” she repeated. She didn’t speak much louder, but there was something in her voice they both flinched back from a little. Something that finished the discussion.
“Suppose they see cops, Mrs Reed?” Brad asked. “The police may have decided the greenbelt is their best approach to the street.”
“Safest to stay away,” Johnny said. “Any cops we run into are apt to be… well, nervous. Nervous cops have been known to hurt innocent people. They never mean to, but it’s better to be safe. Avoid accidents.”
“Are you coming with us, Mr Marinville?” Jim asked.
“Yes.”
Neither twin said anything, but Johnny liked the relief he saw in their eyes.
Cammie gave Johnny a forbidding look-Are you done? May I get back to business? it said-and then resumed her instructions. “Go to Anderson Avenue. If everything looks all right there… “she faltered a moment, as if realizing how unlikely that was, and then pushed on “… ask to use someone’s phone and call the police. But if Anderson Avenue’s like it is here, or if things seem even the slightest bit… well…”
“Hinky,” Johnny said. In Vietnam they’d had as many words for the feeling she was talking about as Indians had for variations in the weather, and it was funny how they all came back, turning on like neon signs in a dark room. Hinky. Weirded-out. Bent. Snafu’d. Dinky-dau. Yeah, doc, it’s all coming back to me now. Pretty soon I’ll be whipping a bandanna into a rope and tying it around my forehead to keep back the sweat, maybe leading the congregation in the Fish Cheer.
Cammie was still looking at her boys. Johnny hoped she’d hurry up. They were still looking back at her with respect (and a little fear), but most of what she had to say from this point on would go in one ear and out the other just the same.
“If you don’t like what you see on Anderson Avenue, use that pipe you know about. Get over to Columbus Broad. Call the police. Tell them what’s happened here. And don’t you even think of coming back to Poplar Street!”
“But Mom-” Jim began.
She reached up and seized his lips, pinching them shut. Not painfully, but firmly. Johnny could easily imagine her doing the same thing when the twins were ten years younger, only bending down to do it.
“You save “but Mom” for another time,” she said. “This time you just mind Mom. Get to a safe place, call the police, then stay put until this craziness is over. Got it?”
They nodded. Cammie nodded back and let go of Jim’s lips. Jim was smiling an embarrassed smile-ohboy, that’s my ma-and blushing to the tips of his ears. He knew better than to remonstrate, however.
“And be careful,” she finished. Something came into her eyes-an urge to kiss them, Johnny thought, or maybe just an urge to call the whole thing off while she still could. Then it was gone.
“Ready, Mr Marinville?” Dave asked. He was looking enviously at the gun dangling at the end of his brother’s arm. Johnny suspected they would not be too far down the path through the greenbelt before he asked to carry it a while.
“Just a second,” he said, and knelt down in front of Ralphie. Ralphie backed away until his little butt was flush against the wall, then looked at Johnny over his thumb. Down here at Ralphie’s level, the smell of urine and fear was so strong it was jungly.
From his pocket Johnny took the figure he’d found in the upstairs hall-the alien with the big eyes, the horn of a mouth, and the stiff strip of yellow hair running up the center of his otherwise bald head. He held it in front of Ralphie’s eyes. “Ralphie, what’s this?”
For a moment he didn’t think the boy was going to answer. Then, slowly, he reached out with the hand that wasn’t anchored in his mouth and took it. For the first time since the shooting had begun, a spark of life showed in his face. “That’s Major Pike,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Yes. He’s a Canopalean.” He pronounced this word carefully, proudly. “That means he’s a nailien. But a good nailien. Not like No Face.” A pause. “Sometimes he drives Bounty’s Power Wagon. Major Pike wasn’t with them, was he?” Tears overspilled Ralphie’s eyes, and Johnny suddenly remembered the story every kid used to know about the Black Sox baseball scandal in 1919. A weeping little boy had supposedly approached Shoeless Joe Jackson, begging the ballplayer to tell him that the fix hadn’t been in-to say it wasn’t so. And although Johnny had seen this freak-or someone wearing a mask to make him look like this freak-he immediately shook his head and gave Ralphie a comforting pat on the shoulder.
“Is Major Pike from a movie or a TV show?” Johnny asked, but he knew the answer already. It was coming together now, maybe should have come together a lot earlier. In the last few years he had taught a lot of classes in schools where grownups had to lean over seriously in order to drink from the water fountains, did a lot of readings in library rooms where the chairs were mostly three feet high. He listened to the run of their talk, but he didn’t watch their shows or go to their movies. He knew instinctively that that sort of research would hinder his work rather than help it. So he didn’t know everything, and still had plenty of questions, but he thought he was beginning to believe that this craziness could be understood.
“Ralphie?”
“From a TV show,” Ralphie said around his thumb. He was still holding Major Pike up in front of his eyes, much as Johnny had done. “He’s a MotoKop.”
“And Dream Floater. What’s that, Ralphie?”
“Mr Marinville,” Dave began, “we really ought to-”
“Give him a second, son,” Brad said.
Johnny never took his eyes off Ralphie. “Dream Floater?”
“Cassie’s Power Wagon,” Ralphie said. “Cassie Styles. I think she’s Colonel Henry’s girlfriend. My friend Jason says she isn’t because MotoKops don’t have girlfriends, but I think she is. Why are the Power Wagons on Poplar Street, Mr Marinville?”
“I don’t know, Ralphie.” Except he almost did.
“Why are they so big ? And if they’re good guys, why did they shoot my daddy and mommy?”
Ralphie dropped the Major Pike figure on the floor and kicked it all the way across the room. Then he put his hands over his face and began to sob. Cammie Reed started forward, but before she could get there, Ellen had wriggled free of Belinda. She went to Ralphie and put her arms around him. “Never mind,” she said. “Never mind, Ralphie, I’ll take care of you.”
Won’t that be a treat.” Ralphie said through his sobs, and Johnny clapped a hand over his mouth almost hard enough to make his lips bleed. It was the only way he could k
eep from bursting into mad, yodeling laughter.
If they’re good guys, why did they shoot my daddy and mommy?
“Come on, boys,” he said, standing up and turning to the Reed twins. “Let’s go exploring.”
On Poplar Street, the sun was starting to go down. It was too early for it to be going down, but it was, just the same. It glared above the horizon in the west like a baleful red eye, turning the puddles in the street and the driveways and on the stoops to fire. It turned the broken glass which littered the block into embers. It turned the eyes of the faux-buzzard into red pits as it lifted off from the body of Mary Jackson on its improbable wings and flew across the street to the Carver lawn. Here it alit, looking from David Carver’s body to that of Susi Geller’s friend. It seemed unsure upon which to start. So much to eat, so little time. At last it chose Ellen and Ralphie’s father, approaching the dead man in a series of clumsy hops. One of its yellow claw-feet sported five talons, the other only two.
Across the street, in the Wyler house-in the smell of dirt, old hamburger, and tomato soup-the TV blared on. It was the first saloon scene of The Regulators.
“You’re a right purty lady,” Rory Calhoun was saying. That knowing leer in his voice, the one that said Babydoll, I’m going to eat you like ice cream before this shitty little oat-opera is over, and both of us know it. “Why don’t you sit down “n have a drink? Bring me some luck?”
“I don’t drink with trash,” Karen Steele responded coldly, and all of Rory Calhoun’s men-the ones not currently hiding outside of town, that was-guffawed.
“Well, ain’t you a little spitfire?” Rory Calhoun said, relaxed, and his men guffawed some more.
“Want some Doritos, Pete?” Tak said. Now it spoke in the voice of Lucas McCain, who rode the cable-TV range in The Rifleman.
