“Get out of here, Kim,” Johnny said. He could still see himself driving his fist into her mouth, but the madness was passing and his voice was almost steady. “You’re not yourself.”

“Susi? You get over here. We’re going away from these hateful people.”

Susi turned her back on her mother, trembling all over. Johnny supposed this did not change his opinion of the girl as a shallow, flighty creature… but she seemed a link or two up the food-chain from her mother, at least.

Slowly, like a rusty robot, Dave Reed raised his arms and put them around her. Cammie seemed about to object to this, then subsided.

“All right,” Kim said. Her voice was clear and composed again, the voice of someone giving a speech in a dream. “When you want me, I’ll be in the living room.” Her eyes switched to Johnny, whom she seemed to have identified as the source of all her misery. “And you-”

“Stop it,” Audrey said harshly. Startled, they all turned to look at her, except for Kim, who slipped off into the darkness of the living room. We have no time for this shit. We might have a chance to get out of this-a small one-but if you fools stand around squabbling, all we’re going to do is die.”

“Who’re you, ma’am?” Steve asked.

“Audrey Wyler.” She was tall, her legs long and coltish and not unsexy below her blue shorts, but her face was pale and haggard. That face made Johnny think of the way the Carver kids looked as they lay sleeping in each other’s arms, and suddenly he found himself trying to remember when he’d last seen Audrey, passed the time of day with her. He couldn’t. It was as if she had dropped out of the casual, back-and-forth life of the street entirely.

Little bitty baby Smitty, he thought suddenly, I seen you bite your mommy’s titty. Then he thought of the vans that had been on the floor of the Wyler den the afternoon he’d spent some time watching Bonanza with Seth. And once he had that, a kind of landslide started in his head. Outlaws that looked like movie stars. Major Pike, a good nailien gone bad. The Western scenery. That most of all. He loves the old Westerns, Audrey had said that day. She’d picked up a few of his toys as she spoke, doing it the way people do stuff when they’re nervous. Bonanza and The Rifleman are his favorites, but anything they’ll bring back on the cable, he’ll watch. If it has horses in it, that is.

“It’s your nephew, Audrey. Isn’t it? It’s Seth doing this.” “No.” She raised a hand and wiped her eyes with it. “Not Seth.

What’s inside Seth.”

I’ll tell you what I can, but there’s not much time. The Power Wagons will be back before long.”

“Who’s inside them?” Old Doc asked. “Do you know, Aud?”

“Regulators. Outlaws. Sci-fi policemen. And this place where we are is partly the Old West as it exists on TV and partly a place called the Force Corridor, which only exists in a TV-cartoon version of the twenty-third century.” She took a deep breath and ran her hands through her hair. “I don’t know everything, but-”

“Take us through as much as you can,” Johnny said.

She looked at her watch and made a sour face. “Stopped.”

“Mine, too,” Steve said. “Everybody’s, I imagine.”

“I think there’s time,” Audrey said. Which is to say, I think it’s too early for any… any movement just yet.” She laughed suddenly, startling Johnny. Startling all of them, from the look. It wasn’t the hysterical undertone so much as the genuine merriness on top. She saw their stares and brought herself under control. “Sorry-it’s a kind of pun. No reason you should understand. Yet, anyway. We have to wait. If he brings the regulators back in the meantime, we’ll have to just… endure them, I suppose.”

“Are they getting stronger?” Cammie asked suddenly. “These regulators, are they getting more powerful?”

“Yes,” Audrey said. “And if the thing doing this caught the energy from the people who died out there in the woods, the next run will be the worst yet. I pray that didn’t happen, but I think it probably did.”

She looked around at them, drew in a deep breath, and began.

“The thing inside Seth is named Tak.”

“Is it a demon, Aud?” Old Doc asked. “Some kind of demon?”

“No. It has no… no religion, I suppose you’d say. Unless TV counts. It’s more like a tumor, I think. One that’s conscious and enjoys cruelty and violence. It’s been inside him for almost two years now. I heard a story once about a Vermont woman who found a black widow spider in her sink. It apparently came into the house in an empty box her husband brought home from the supermarket where he worked. The box had been full of bananas from South America. The spider had gotten in with them when they were packed. That’s pretty much how Tak got to Poplar Street, I think. Except we’re talking about a black widow with a voice. It called Seth when he and his family were crossing the desert. Crossing Nevada. It sensed him, someone it could use, passing close by, and called him.”

She looked down at her hands, which were knotted tightly together in her lap. Kim Geller was standing in the living-room doorway now, drawn back by Audrey’s story. Audrey looked up again. She spoke to them all, but it was Johnny her eyes kept returning to.

“I think it was weak at first, but not too weak to understand that Seth’s family posed a threat to it. I don’t know how much they knew or suspected, but I do know that my last phone conversation with my brother was very strange. I think Bill could have told me a lot… if Tak had let him.”

“It can do that?” Steve asked. “Impose control over people like that?”

She gestured at her swollen mouth. “My hand did this,” she said, “but I wasn’t running it.”

“Christ,” Cynthia said. She looked nervously at the knives hanging on their magnetized steel runners over the kitchen counter. “That’s bad. Very.”

“It could be worse, though,” Audrey said. “Tak can only physically control at short range.”

“How short?” Cammie asked.

“Usually no more than twenty or thirty feet. Beyond that, its physical influence runs out in a hurry. Usually. Now, all bets are off. Because it’s never been so loaded with energy.”

“Let her tell her story,” Johnny said. He could feel time almost as a tangible thing, slipping away from them. He didn’t know if he was getting that from Audrey or if it was coming from inside himself, and he didn’t care. Time was short. He had never felt an intuition so strongly in his whole life. Time was short.

“There’s a boy still in there,” she said, speaking slowly and with great emphasis. “A sweet, special child named Seth Garin. And the most despicable thing is that Tak has used what the child loves to do its killing. In the case of my brother and his family, it was Tracker Arrow, one of the MotoKops” Power Wagons. They were in California, at the end of the trip that took them through Nevada, when it happened. I don’t know where Tak got enough energy to summon Tracker Arrow out of Seth’s thoughts and dreams at that stage of its development. Seth is its basic power-supply, but Seth isn’t enough. It needs more in order to really crank up.”

“It’s a vampire, isn’t it?” Johnny said. “Only what it draws off is psychic energy instead of blood.”

She nodded. “And the energy it uses is most abundantly available when someone is in pain. In the case of Bill and the rest of his family, maybe someone in the neighborhood died or was hurt. Or-”

“Or maybe there was someone it could hurt itself,” Steve said. “A handy bum, for instance. Just some old wino pushing a shopping cart. Whoever it was, I bet he died with a smile on his face.”

Audrey looked at him, her face sad and sickened. “You know.”

“Not much, but what I know fits what you’re saying,” Steve told her. “There’s a guy like that back there.” He hooked a thumb in the general direction of the greenbelt. “Entragian recognized him. Said he’d been on the street two or three times before since the start of the summer. He got in your nephew’s hooking range, didn’t he? How?”