The Regulators

Maybe she could get a meal in peace; that was enough for her. The Regulators had about twenty minutes left to run in this, its nine billionth showing at casa Wyler, and Audrey thought she could count on at least that long. Time for a sandwich and maybe a few lines in the journal Tak might well kill her for keeping-if Tak ever found out about it, that was.

Escape. Stop thinking about it and do it, Aud.

She stopped halfway back across the living room, the salami and lettuce in the fridge temporarily forgotten. That voice was so clear that for a moment it didn’t seem to be coming from her mind at all. For one moment she was convinced that Janice had somehow followed her back from 1982, was actually in the room with her. But when she turned, wide-eyed, there was no one. Only the voices from the TV, Rory Calhoun telling John Payne that the time for talking was done, John Payne saying, “Well now, if that’s the way you want it.” Very soon Karen Steele would run between them, screaming at them to stop it, just stop it. She would be killed by a bullet from Rory Calhoun’s gun, one meant for John Payne, and then the final shootout would begin. KA-POW and KA-BAM all the way home.

No one here but her and her dead friends on the TV.

Open the front door and just run like hell.

How many times had she considered it? But there was Seth to think about; he was as much a hostage as she was, and maybe more. Autistic he might be, but he was still a human being. She didn’t like to think what Tak might do to him, if it was crossed. And Seth was still there, all of him-she knew that. Parasites feed on their hosts but don’t kill them… unless it’s on purpose. Because they’re pissed off, maybe.

She had herself to think about, too. Janice could talk about escape, just opening the door and ru

Yes, she wanted to get away. Oh yes, so much. But sometimes the devil you knew was better than the devil you didn’t.

She started for the kitchen again, then stopped again, this time staring at the big window with its view of the street. She had thought the rain was pelting the glass hard enough to look like smoke, but actually the first fury of the storm was already passing. What she was seeing didn’t just look like smoke; it was smoke.

She hurried to the window, looked down the street, and saw that the Hobart place was burning in the rain, sending big white clouds up into the gray sky. She saw no vehicles or people around it (and the smoke itself obscured her view of the dead boy and dog), so she looked up toward Bear Street. Where were the police cars? The fire engines? She didn’t see them, but she saw enough to make her cry out softly through hands-she didn’t know how they had gotten there-that were cupped to her mouth.

A car, Mary Jackson’s, she was quite sure, was on the grass between the Jackson house and Old Doc’s place, its nose almost up against the stake fence between the two properties. The trunk-lid had popped open, and the rear end looked trashed. The car wasn’t what had made her cry out, though. Beyond it, sprawled on Doc’s lawn like a fallen piece of statuary, was a woman’s body. Audrey’s mind made a brief attempt to persuade her it was something else-a department store ma

Tak, she thought. Was it Tak? Has it been out?

You knew it’s been getting ready for something, she thought coldly. You knew that. You’ve felt it gathering its forces, always in the sandbox playing with those damned vans or in front of the TV, eating hamburger meals, drinking chocolate milk, and watching, watching, watching. You’ve felt it, like a thunderstorm building up on a hot afternoon-

Beyond the woman, at the Carvers” house, were two more bodies. David Carver, who had sometimes played poker with Herb and Herb’s friends on Thursday nights, lay on his front walk like a beached whale. There was an enormous hole in his stomach above the bathing suit he always wore when he washed the car. And, lying face-down on the Carver stoop, there was a woman in white shorts. Yards of red hair spilled out around her head in a frizzy corona. Rain glistened on her bare back.

But she’s not a woman, Audrey thought. She felt cold all over, as if her skin had been briskly rubbed with ice. That’s just a girl, probably no more than seventeen. The one who was visiting over at the Reeds” this afternoon. Before I went away to 1982 for a little while. That was Susi Geller’s friend.

Audrey glanced down the block, suddenly sure she was imagining the whole thing, and that reality would snap back into place like a released elastic as soon as she saw the Hobart place standing intact. But the Hobart place was still burning, still sending huge white clouds of cedar-fumed smoke into the air, and when she looked back up the street, she still saw bodies. The corpses of her neighbors.

“It’s started,” she whispered, and from the den behind her, like a horribly prescient curse, Rory Calhoun screamed: “We’re go