The Regulators

“What-two?-how-Christ!”

“Mr Entragian… Collie…” He tries to sound reasonable, tries not to grimace. “You’re breaking my shoulder.”

“Oh. Sorry, man. But-” His eyes go back and forth from the shotgu

Your shirt,” Joh

“I was shaving,” Collie replies, and runs his hands through his short, dripping hair. The gesture expresses-as probably nothing else could-a mind that has progressed beyond confusion to a state of almost total distraction. Joh

Joh

Then Peter arrives, sees his wife lying in front of Billingsley’s ceramic German Shepherd, and howls. The sound brings out fresh goosebumps on Joh

Peter grabs her and Joh

Or maybe it’s no big deal, maybe she always goes around that way.

“MARY!” Peter cries. He doesn’t turn her (thank God for small favors) but lifts her upper body, getting her into a sitting position. He screams again-no word this time, no vocal shape at all, just a streamer of amazed grief-as he sees the state of her head, half the face gone, half the hair burned off.

“Peter-” Old Doc begins, and the n the sky is split by a long lance of electricity flowing down the rain. Joh

“Ho-lee shit,” Jim Reed says. He’s standing in the Carver doorway with Ralphie still in his arms. Ralphie, Joh

“Dream Floater,” the boy says.

And then, as if the words were some sort of magical incantation, his waxy, u

Joh

Behind this vehicle, which may or may not be called Dream Floater, comes a long black vehicle with a bulging, dark-tinted windshield and a toadstool-shaped housing, also black, on the roof. This ebony nightmare is chased with zigzag bolts of chrome that look like barely disguised Nazi SS insignia.

The vehicles begin to pick up speed, their engines purring with a humming, cyclic bent.

A large porthole irises open in the left side of the pink vehicle. And on top of the black van, which looks like a hearse trying to transform itself into a locomotive, the side of the toadstool slides back, revealing two figures with shotguns. One is a bearded human being. He, like the alien driving the blue van, appears to be wearing the tags and tatters of a Civil War uniform. The thing beside him is wearing another sort of uniform altogether: black, high-collared, dressed with silver buttons. As with the black-and-chrome van, there’s something Nazi-ish about the uniform, but this isn’t what catches Joh

Above the high collar, there seems to be only darkness. He has no face, Joh

It occurs to Joh

Letter from Audrey Wyler (Wentworth, Ohio) to Janice Conroy (Plainview, New York), dated August 18, 1994:

Dear Janice, Thanks so much for your call. The note of condolence, too, of course, but you’ll never know how good it was to have your voice in my ear last night-like a drink of cool water on a hot day. Or maybe I mean like a sane voice when you’re stuck in the booby hatch!

Did any of what I said on the phone make sense to you? I can’t remember for sure. I’m off the tranks-“Fuck that shit,” as we used to say back in college-but that’s only been for the last couple of days, and even with Herb pitching in and helping like mad, a lot of the world has been so much scrambled eggs. Things started being that way when Bill’s friend, Joe Calabrese, called and said my brother and his wife and the two older kids had been killed, shotgu

Herb and I flew out to San Jose to collect Seth, then flew back to Toledo on the same plane as the bodies. They store them in the cargo hold, did you know that? Me neither. Nor wanted to.

The funeral was one of the most horrible experiences of my life-probably the most horrible. Those four coffins-my brother, my sister-in-law, my niece and my nephew-lined up in a row, first in the church and then at the cemetery, where they sat over the holes on those awful chrome rails. Wa