Free The Regulators by Stephen King Page B

and turns right on Bear Street, it looks to Johnny like the mirage it should by all rights have been.
    â€œChrist, lookit him!” Brad screams, and runs into the street.
    â€œBradley, no!” His wife grabs for him, but she’s too late. Down the street, angling toward them, are the Reed twins.
    Johnny walks out into the street on numb, unsteady legs. He raises a hand, sees that the fingertips are already white and pruney (he sees it all, yes indeed, and how could a guy in a Close Encounters alien mask possibly look familiar ), and swops his soaked hair out of his eyes. Lightning jags across the sky like a bright crack in a dark mirror; thunder chases it. His feet are squelching in his sneakers, and he can smell damp gunsmoke. It’ll be gone in another ten or fifteen seconds, he knows, driven to earth and then washed away by the pounding rain, but for the time being it’s still there, as if to keep him from even trying to believe it was all just a hallucination . . . what his ex-wife Terry called “a brain-cramp.”
    And yes, he can see Mary Jackson’s pussy, that highly sought-after part of the female anatomy thatwas known, in those dim old junior high school days, as “the bearded clam.” He doesn’t want to be thinking this—doesn’t want to be seeing what he’s seeing, for that matter—but he’s not in charge. All the barriers in his mind have fallen, the way they used to when he was writing (it was one of the reasons he had quit writing novels, not the only one, but a biggie), time’s passage slowing as perception grows, widening until it’s like being in a Sergio Leone movie where people die the way people swim in underwater ballets.
    Little bitty baby Smitty, he thought, again hearing the voice from the telephone. I seen you bite your mommy’s titty. Why should that voice remind him of the man in the bizarre costume and even more bizarre almond-eyed alien mask?
    â€œWhat in the name of Jesus H. Sodapop Christ happened?” a voice asks from beside him. The others have converged on David Carver, but Gary Soderson has come over here, onto Old Doc’s lawn. With his pale face and scrawny body, he looks like a man suffering from mid-stage cholera. “Holy shit, Johnny! I see Paris, I see France, but I don’t see her—”
    â€œShut up, you drunken asshole,” Johnny says. He looks to his left and sees the Reed twins and their mother, Kim Geller and her daughter, plus a redhead he doesn’t know at all. They are gathered around David Carver’s body like ballplayers clustered around an injured teammate. Gary’s shrew of a wife is also there, but she’s spied Gary and is now drifting in the direction of chez Billingsley. Then she stops, fascinated, as the Carvers’ door smashes open and Kirstie comes flyingout into the pelting rain like the governess in an old gothic novel, shrieking her husband’s name as the lightning flashes and the thunder rolls.
    Slowly, like a stupid child who has been called upon to recite, Gary says: “What did you call me?” He isn’t looking at Johnny, though, or even at the crowd on the Carvers’ lawn; he is looking at what the dead woman’s hiked-up skirt has revealed, storing it up for later reference (and, perhaps, conversation). Johnny suddenly feels an almost irresistible urge to punch the man in the nose.
    â€œNever mind, just keep your mouth shut. I mean it.” He looks to his right, down the street, and sees Collie Entragian running this way. He appears to be wearing pink plastic shower-sandals. Behind him is a longhaired guy Johnny has never seen before, and the new girl from the market—Cynthia, her name is.
    And behind them, quickly outdistancing old Tom Billingsley and closing in on Cynthia, wild-eyed, comes the street’s resident expert on James Dickey and the New Southerns.
    â€œDaddy!” A piercing, desolate