Free The Regulators by Stephen King Page A

shirt with a bandolier belt across it. His face is stubbled with what might be a week’s growth of beard; the bristles look very black against the unnatural silver of his skin. He is standing, this fellow, and in his hands is a heavy double-barrelled shotgun. Trapper John raises it as Johnny watches, leaning out into a teeming, streaming world full of colors he does not in the slightestshare, and he is grinning, lips drawing back to reveal a mouthful of tangled teeth which have clearly never known a dentist’s ministrations. This dreamlike creature looks like something from a horror movie about inbred cretins living far back in some swamp.
    No he doesn’t, Johnny thinks. He looks like something from a movie, all right, but not that one.
    â€œMARY!” he screams, and beside him, Brad joins in: “ YO, MARY, LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU!”
    But she never sees. The guy in the buckskin shirt opens up, firing three times, pumping his weapon rapidly after each shot and then reshouldering it. The first round goes wild, as far as Johnny can see. The second erases the Lumina’s radio aerial. The third blows off the left side of Mary Jackson’s head. She staggers away from her car and toward Old Doc’s house nevertheless, blood pouring down her neck and soaking the left side of her blouse, her hair briefly burning in the rain (he sees this, he sees everything), and then for a moment she turns in Johnny’s direction and looks at him with her one remaining eye and the lightning flashes, filling that eye with fire; in the last second or two of her life she is empty of everything but electricity, it seems. Then she stumbles out of one of her high heels and falls backward, swandives into the sound of thunder, the brief low flames in her hair going out, her head still smoking like the tip of an indifferently butted cigarette. She sprawls near the ceramic German shepherd on Billingsley’s lawn, the one with his name and the number of his house on it,and as her legs relax apart Johnny sees something which is terrible and sad and inexplicable, all at the same time: a dark shadow that can only be one thing. Grotesquely, the punchline of an old joke goes on for a moment in his head like a neon sign: I don’t know about the other two, but the guy in the middle looks like Willie Nelson. He laughs out loud in the rain. Peter Jackson’s accountant wife has just been killed by a ghost, shot from a van piloted by another ghost (this one the ghost of an alien in a Sesech uniform), and the lady has died drawerless. None of this is funny, but he laughs just the same. Maybe to keep himself from screaming. He’s afraid that if he starts doing that, he won’t be able to stop.
    Now the shining creature behind the wheel of the blue van turns toward him and for just a moment Johnny sees it looking at him, marking him with its huge almond eyes, and he has a sense of having seen this thing before, insanity, of course, but the feeling is nevertheless very strong. It is only for a moment and then the van is past.
    But he saw me, all right, Johnny thinks. That thing in the mask (it must have been a mask) saw me, and it marked me, the way you might turn down the corner of a book-page for later reference.
    The shotgun goes off twice more, and at first Johnny can’t see what this is about, because the blue van is in the way—he thinks he can hear shattering glass over the roar of the storm, but that’s all. Then the van is retreating into the teeming, driving rain and he sees David Carver lying dead in his driveway in a litter ofglass from the blown-in picture window. There’s a huge red puddle in the center of Carver’s stomach, it is surrounded by gobbets of torn white flesh that looks like suet, and Johnny reckons that Carver’s days as a postal worker—not to mention his days as a suburban car-washer—are over.
    The blue van rolls rapidly up to the corner. By the time it gets there