Free The Regulators by Stephen King

wasn’t too far to do that, probably wondering what he’s doing, and she isn’t seeing Johnny Marinville, isn’t seeing the weird yellow van with the polarized glass windows looming behind her, either.
    â€œMary look out!” he yells. Brad and Belinda, now mounting their front steps, wheel around. At the same moment, the van’s high, blunt front end crashes into the rear of the Lumina, splintering the taillights, snapping the bumper and crimping the trunk. He sees Mary’s head snap back and then forward, like the head of a flower on a long stalk pushed back and forth by a high wind. The Lumina’s tires scream, and there is a loud dry bang as the right front blows out. The car veers left, the flat tire flapping, the hubcap running off the rim and streaking down the street like the Reed kids’ Frisbee.
    Johnny sees everything, hears everything, feels everything; input floods him and his mind insists on lining up each crazy increment, as if something coherent were happening here, something which could actually be narrated.
    The stormy sky is coming apart, starting to release its cold reservoir. He sees spots darkening all over thesidewalk, feels drops hitting the back of his neck in an increasing tempo as Brad Josephson shouts “What the Christ !” behind him.
    The van is still on the Lumina’s ass, bulldozing it, digging into its flimsy New Age back deck; there is a hideous metallic squall and then a thunk! as the trunk latch lets go and the lid flies up, disclosing a spare tire, some old newspapers, and an orange styrofoam cooler. The Lumina’s front end bounces up over the curb. The car crosses the sidewalk and comes to rest with its bumper against the fence between Billingsley’s house and the next one down the hill, Mary’s own.
    Lightning—it’s close, very close—paints the street a momentary lurid violet, thunder follows like a mortar barrage, the wind begins to pick up, hissing in the trees, and the rain starts coming in sheets. Visibility is closing down fast, but there’s enough for him to see the yellow van picking up speed, racing away into the rain, and to see the Lumina’s driver’s-side door open. A leg sticks out and then Mary Jackson emerges, looking as if she has absolutely no idea of where she is.
    Brad is gripping his arm now with a very large and very wet hand, he’s asking if Johnny saw that, if he saw it, that yellow van deliberately rammed her, but Johnny barely hears him. Johnny can now see another van, this one with scooped sides and metal-flake blue paint. It comes looming out of the storm like the snout of a prehistoric beast, the rain running in rivers down a steep polarized windshield on which no wipers move. And suddenly he knows what is going to happen.
    â€œMary!” he screams at the dazed woman staggering away from her car on high heels, but another brazen cannonade of thunder drowns out his cry. She doesn’t even look his way. Rain is running down her face like extravagant tears in a South American soap opera.
    â€œMARY, GET DOWN!” screaming so loud this time he thinks his vocal cords may rupture, “GET UNDER THE CAR!”
    Then the windshield of the blue van goes down. Slides down. Yes. That steep windshield slides into the front of the van like the front of a glass elevator, and behind it is darkness, and in the darkness there are ghosts. Ghosts. Yes. Two of them. Surely they must be ghosts; they are beings as brightly gray as a fog-shrouded landscape just before the sun burns its way through. The one behind the wheel is wearing a Confederate States of America uniform—Johnny is almost sure of this—but it is not human. Beneath its pinned-back cavalry hat is a bulging forehead, weird almond-shaped eyes, and a mouth that pulses out from its face like a fleshy horn. Its companion, although also a bright and illusory gray, at least looks human. He wears a buckskin trapper’s