The Regulators by Stephen King Page A

were young again, with all the dirty cards life can deal you still buried well down in the deck. Remember how it was in college, when we thought we’dlive forever and only our stupid periods ever caught us by surprise?
    I’ve got to stop or I’ll be crying again.
    XXX (and tons more),

CHAPTER 5
1
    Standing bare-chested at the bathroom mirror that afternoon before the world dropped into hell like a bucket on a broken string, Collie Entragian had made three large resolutions. The first was to quit going around unshaven on weekdays. The second was to quit drinking, at least until he got his life back on an even keel—he was doing far too much boozing, enough to make him uneasy, and it had to stop. The third was to stop procrastinating about looking for a job. There were three security firms in the Columbus area, people he knew worked for two of them, and it was time to get cracking. He hadn’t died, after all; it was time to quit yowling and get on with his life.
    Now, as the Hobart house burned merry hell down the street and the two bizarre vans approached, all he cared about was holding on to that life. Mostly it wasthe black vehicle creeping along behind the pink one that galvanized him, that engaged every instinct to immediately relocate, possibly to Outer Mongolia. He didn’t catch more than a rain-blurred glimpse of the figures in the black van’s turret, but the van itself was enough. It looked like a hearse in a science-fiction movie, he thought.
    â€œInside!” he heard himself screaming—some part of him apparently still wanted to be in charge. “Everybody inside now !”
    At that point he lost track of the people clustered around the late postman and his keening, shrieking wife—Mrs. Geller, Susi, Susi’s friend, the Josephsons, Mrs. Reed. Marinville, the writer, was a little closer, but Collie lost track of him, too. His focus shrank to the ones in front of Old Doc’s bungalow: Peter Jackson, the Sodersons, the store clerk, the longhair from the Ryder truck, and Old Doc himself, who had retired from veterinary practice the year before with absolutely no clue that something like this was waiting for him.
    â€œGo!” Collie screamed into Gary’s wet, gaping, half-drunk face. In that moment he wanted to kill the man, just haul off and kill him, set him on fire or something. “Go in the fucking HOUSE !” Behind him he could hear Marinville screaming the same thing, although it was presumably the Carvers’ house he had in mind.
    â€œWhat—” Marielle began, stepping to her husband’s side; then she looked past Gary and her eyes widened. Her splay-fingered hands rose to the sides of her face, her mouth dropped open and for one mad momentCollie expected her to drop to her knees and start singing “Mammy” like Al Jolson. She screamed instead. And as if that had been all their attackers had been waiting for, the gunfire began—harsh, compact explosions that no one could have mistaken for thunder.
    The hippie guy grabbed Peter Jackson by Peter’s right wrist and tried to haul him away from his dead wife. Peter didn’t want to let go of her. He was still howling, and seemed completely unaware of what was happening around him. There was a KA-POW , as deafening as dynamite, followed by the sound of shattering glass. A KA-BAM , even louder, followed by a shriek of either fear or pain. Collie’s dough was on fear . . . this time, at least. A third report, and Billingsley’s ceramic German shepherd disappeared from the forelegs up. Old Doc’s inner front door stood open behind a screen with a scrolly, ornamental B in the middle of it. That dark rectangular hole—an opening which might lead to a cave of safety—looked a thousand miles away.
    Collie ran for Peter first, with no thought of bravery so much as crossing his mind; it was just where he went first. Another deafening report, and he was