Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6)

Song of Susannah (The Dark Tower #6) Page 7

One

Roland Deschain was the last of Gilead's last great band of warriors, for good reason; with his queerly romantic nature, his lack of imagination, and his deadly hands, he had ever been the best of them. Now he had been invaded by arthritis, but there was no dry twist in his ears or eyes. He heard the thud of Eddie's head against the side of the Unfound Door as they were sucked through (and, ducking down at the last split second, only just avoided having his own skull broken in by the Door's top jamb). He heard the sound of birds, at first strange and distant, like birds singing in a dream, then immediate and prosaic and completely there. Sunlight struck his face and should have dazzled him blind, coming as he was from the dimness of the cave. But Roland had turned his eyes into slits the moment he'd seen that bright light, had done it without thinking. Had he not, he surely would have missed the circular flash from two o'clock as they landed on hard-packed, oil-darkened earth. Eddie would have died for sure. Maybe both of them would have died. In Roland's experience, only two things glared with that perfect brilliant circularity: eyeglasses and the long sight of a weapon.

The gunslinger grabbed Eddie beneath the arm as unthinkingly as he'd slitted his eyes against the glare of onrushing sunlight. He'd felt the tension in the younger man's muscles as their feet left the rock-and bone-littered floor of the Doorway Cave, and he felt them go slack when Eddie's head connected with the side of the Unfound Door. But Eddie was groaning, still trying to talk, so he was at least partly aware.

"Eddie, to me!"Roland bellowed, scrambling to his feet. Bitter agony exploded in his right hip and raced almost all the way down to his knee, but he gave no sign. Barely registered it, in fact. He hauled Eddie with him toward a building, some building, and past what even Roland recognized as oil or gasoline pumps. These were marked MOBIL instead of CITGO or SUNOCO, two other names with which the gunslinger was familiar.

Eddie was semiconscious at best. His left cheek was drenched with blood from a laceration in his scalp. Nevertheless, he put his legs to work as best he could and stumbled up three wooden steps to what Roland now recognized as a general store. It was quite a bit smaller than Took's, but otherwise not much d -

A limber whipcrack of sound came from behind and slightly to the right. The shooter was close enough for Roland to feel confident that if he had heard the sound of the shot, the man with the rifle had already missed.

Something passed within an inch of his ear, making its own perfectly clear sound:Mizzzzzz! The glass in the little mercantile's front door shattered inward. The sign which had been hanging there ( WE'RE OPEN, SO COME IN 'N VISIT ) jumped and twisted.

"Rolan..." Eddie's voice, weak and distant, sounded as if it were coming through a mouthful of mush. "Rolan wha...who...OWF!" This last a grunt of surprise as Roland threw him flat inside the door and landed on top of him.

Now came another of those limber whipcracks; there was a gunner with an extremely high-powered rifle out there. Roland heard someone shout "Aw, fuck 'at, Jack!" and a moment later a speed-shooter - what Eddie and Jake called a machine-gun - opened up. The dirty display windows on both sides of the door came crashing down in bright shards. The paperwork which had been posted inside the glass - town notices, Roland had no doubt - went flying.

Two women and a gent of going-on-elderly years were the only customers in the store's aisles. All three were turned toward the front - toward Roland and Eddie - and on their faces was the eternal uncomprehending look of the gunless civilian. Roland sometimes thought it a grass-eating look, as though such folk - those in Calla Bryn Sturgis mostly no different - were sheep instead of people.

"Down!"Roland bellowed from where he lay on his semiconscious (and now breathless) companion. "For the love of your godsget DOWN! "

The going-on-elderly gent, who was wearing a checked flannel shirt in spite of the store's warmth, let go of the can he'd been holding (there was a picture of a tomato on it) and dropped. The two women did not, and the speed-shooter's second burst killed them both, caving in the chest of one and blowing off the top of the other's head. The chest-shot woman went down like a sack of grain. The one who'd been head-shot took two blind, blundering steps toward Roland, blood spewing from where her hair had been like lava from an erupting volcano. Outside the store a second and third speed-shooter began, filling the day with noise, filling the air above them with a deadly crisscross of slugs. The woman who'd lost the top of her head spun around twice in a final dance-step, arms flailing, and then collapsed. Roland went for his gun and was relieved to find it still in its holster: the reassuring sandalwood grip. So that much was well. The gamble had paid off. And he and Eddie certainly weren't todash. The gunners had seen them, seen them very well.

More. Had beenwaiting for them.

"Move in!" someone was screaming. "Move in, move in, don't give em a chance to find their peckers, move in, youcatzarros !"

"Eddie!" Roland roared. "Eddie, you have to help me now!"

"Hizz...?" Faint. Bemused. Eddie looking at him with only one eye, the right. The left was temporarily drowned in blood from his scalp-wound.

Roland reached out and slapped him hard enough to make blood fly from his hair. "Harriers!Coming to kill us! Kill all here!"

Eddie's visible eye cleared. It happened fast. Roland saw the effort that took - not to regain his wits but to regain them at such speed, and despite a head that must be pounding monstrously - and took a moment to be proud of Eddie. He was Cuthbert Allgood all over again, Cuthbert to the life.

"What the hell's this?" someone called in a cracked, excited voice. "Justwhat in the bluehell isthis? "

"Down," Roland said, without looking around. "If you want to live, get on the floor."

"Do what he says, Chip," someone else replied - probably, Roland thought, the man who'd been holding the can with the tomato on it.

Roland crawled through litters of broken glass from the door, feeling pricks and prinks of pain as some cut his knees and knuckles, not caring. A bullet buzzed past his temple. Roland ignored that, too. Outside was a brilliant summer day. In the foreground were the two oil-pumps with MOBIL printed on them. To one side was an old car, probably belonging to either the women shoppers (who'd never need it again) or to Mr. Flannel Shirt. Beyond the pumps and the oiled dirt of the parking area was a paved country road, and on the other side of that a little cluster of buildings painted a uniform gray. One was marked TOWN OFFICE, one STONEHAM FIRE AND RESCUE. The third and largest was the TOWN GARAGE. The parking area in front of these buildings was also paved (metaledwas Roland's word for it), and a number of vehicles had been parked there, one the size of a large bucka-waggon. From behind them came more than half a dozen men at full charge. One hung back and Roland recognized him: Enrico Balazar's ugly lieutenant, Jack Andolini. The gunslinger had seen this man die, gunshot and then eaten alive by the carnivorous lobstrosities which lived in the shallow waters of the Western Sea, but here he was again. Because infinite worlds spun on the axle which was the Dark Tower, and here was another of them. Yet only one world was true; only one where, when things were finished, theystayed finished. It might be this one; it might not be. In either case, this was no time to worry about it.

Up on his knees, Roland opened fire, fanning the trigger of his revolver with the hard ridge of his right hand, aiming first at the boys with the speed-shooters. One of them dropped dead on the country road's white centerline with blood boiling out of his throat. The second was flung backward all the way to the road's dirt shoulder with a hole between his eyes.

Then Eddie was beside him, also on his knees, fanning the trigger of Roland's other gun. He missed at least two of his targets, which wasn't surprising, given his condition. Three others dropped to the road, two dead and one screaming"I'm hit! Ah, Jack, help me, I'm hit in the guts!"

Someone grabbed Roland's shoulder, unaware of what a dangerous thing that was to do to a gunslinger, especially one in a fire-fight. "Mister, what in the hell - "

Roland took a quick look, saw a fortyish man wearing both a tie and a butcher's apron, had time to think,Shopkeeper, probably the one who gave Pere directions to the post office, and then shoved the man violently backward. A split second later, blood dashed backward from the left side of the man's head. Grooved, the gunslinger judged, but not seriously hurt, at least not yet. If Roland hadn't pushed him, however -

Eddie was reloading. Roland did the same, taking a bit longer thanks to the missing fingers on his right hand. Meanwhile, two of the surviving harriers had taken cover behind one of the old cars on this side of the road. Too close. Not good. Roland could hear the rumble of an approaching motor. He looked back at the fellow who'd been quick-witted enough to drop when Roland told him to, thus avoiding the fate of the ladies.

"You!" Roland said. "Do you have a gun?"

The man in the flannel shirt shook his head. His eyes were a brilliant blue. Frightened, but not, Roland judged, panicky. In front of this customer, the shopkeeper was sitting up, spread-legged, looking with sickened amazement at the red droplets pattering down and spreading on his white apron.

"Shopkeeper, do you keep a gun?" Roland asked.

Before the shopkeeper could answer - if he was capable of answering - Eddie grabbed Roland's shoulder. "Charge of the Light Brigade," he said. The words came out mushy - sharr uvva lie briggay - but Roland wouldn't have understood the reference in any case. The important thing was that Eddie had seen another six men dashing across the road. This time they were spread out and zig-zagging from side to side.

"Vai, vai, vai!"Andolini bawled from behind them, sweeping both hands in the air.

"Christ, Roland, that's Tricks Postino," Eddie said. Tricks was once more toting an extremely large weapon, although Eddie couldn't be sure it was the oversized M-16 he'd called The Wonderful Rambo Machine. In any case, he was no luckier here than he'd been in the shootout at the Leaning Tower: Eddie fired and Tricks went down on top of one of the guys already lying in the road, still firing his assault weapon at them as he did so. This was probably nothing more heroic than a finger-spasm, final signals sent from a dying brain, but Roland and Eddie had to throw themselves flat again, and the other five outlaws reached cover behind the old cars on this side of the road. Worse still. Backed by covering fire from the vehicles across the street - the vehicles these boys had come in, Roland was quite sure - they would soon be able to turn this little store into a shooting gallery without too much danger to themselves.

All of this was too close to what had happened at Jericho Hill.

It was time to beat a retreat.

The sound of the approaching vehicle continued to swell - a big engine, laboring under a heavy load, from the sound. What topped the rise to the left of the store was a gigantic truck filled with enormous cut trees. Roland saw the driver's eyes widen and his mouth drop open, and why not? Here in front of this small-town mercantile where he had doubtless stopped many times for a bottle of beer or ale at the end of a long, hot day in the woods, lay half a dozen bleeding bodies scattered in the road like soldiers killed in a battle. Which was, Roland knew, exactly what they were.

The big truck's front brakes shrieked. From the rear came the angry-dragon chuff of the airbrakes. There was an accompanying scream of huge rubber tires first locking and then smoking black tracks on the metaled surface of the road. The truck's multi-ton load began to slew sideways. Roland saw splinters flying from the trees and into the blue sky as the outlaws on the far side of the road continued to fire heedlessly. There was something almost hypnotic about all this, like watching one of the Lost Beasts of Eld come tumbling out of the sky with its wings on fire.

The truck's horseless front end ran over the first of the bodies. Guts flew in red ropes and splashed the dirt of the shoulder. Legs and arms were torn off. A wheel squashed Tricks Postino's head, the sound of his imploding skull like a chestnut bursting in a hot fire. The truck's load broached sideways and began to totter. Wheels fully as high as Roland's shoulders dug in and tossed up clouds of bloody dirt. The truck slid by the store with a majestic lack of speed. The driver was no longer visible in the cab. For a moment the store and the people inside it were blocked from the superior firepower on the other side of the road. The shopkeeper - Chip - and the surviving customer - Mr. Flannel Shirt - were staring at the broaching truck with identical expressions of helpless amazement. The shopkeeper absently wiped blood from the side of his head and flicked it onto the floor like water. His wound was worse than Eddie's, Roland judged, yet he seemed unaware of it. Maybe that was good.

"Out back," the gunslinger said to Eddie. "Now."

"Good call."

Roland grabbed the man in the flannel shirt by the arm. The man's eyes immediately left the truck and went to the gunslinger. Roland nodded toward the back, and the elderly gent nodded back. His unquestioning quickness was an unexpected gift.

Outside, the truck's load finally overturned, mashing one of the parked cars (and the harriers hiding behind it, Roland dearly hoped), spilling logs first off the top and then simply spilling them all. There was a gruesome, endless sound of scraping metal that made the gunfire seem puny by comparison.

Two

Eddie grabbed the storekeeper just as Roland had grabbed the other man, but Chip showed none of his customer's awareness or instinct for survival. He merely went on staring through the jagged hole where his windows had been, eyes wide with shock and awe as the pulp-truck out there entered the final phase of its self-destructive ballet, the cab twisting free of the overloaded carrier and bouncing down the hill beyond the store and into the woods. The load itself went sliding up the right side of the road, creating a huge bow-wave of dirt and leaving behind a deep groove, a flattened Chevrolet, and two more flattened harriers.

There were plenty more where those came from, though. Or so it seemed. The gunfire continued.

"Come on, Chip, time to split," Eddie said, and this time when he tugged the shopkeeper toward the back of the store Chip came, still looking back over his shoulder and wiping blood from the side of his face.

At the rear of the market, on the left, was an added-on lunchroom with a counter, a few patched stools, three or four tables, and an old lobster-pot over a newsstand which seemed to contain mostly out-of-date girlie magazines. As they reached this part of the building, the gunfire from outside intensified. Then it was dwarfed again, this time by an explosion. The pulper's fuel-tank, Eddie assumed. He felt the droning passage of a bullet and saw a round black hole appear in the picture of a lighthouse mounted on the wall.

"Whoare those guys?" Chip asked in a perfectly conversational voice. "Who are you? Am I hit? My son was in Viet Nam, you know. Did you see that truck?"

Eddie answered none of his questions, just smiled and nodded and hustled Chip along in Roland's wake. He had absolutely no idea where they were going or how they were going to get out of this fuckaree. The only thing he was completely sure of was that Calvin Tower wasn't here. Which was probably good. Tower might or might not have brought down this particular batch of hellfire and brimstone, but the hellfire and brimstone wasabout old Cal, of that Eddie had no doubt. If old Cal had only -

A darning-needle of heat suddenly tore through his arm and Eddie shouted in surprise and pain. A moment later another punched him in the calf. His lower right leg exploded intoserious pain, and he cried out again.

"Eddie!" Roland chanced a look back. "Are you - "

"Yeah, fine, go, go!"

Ahead of them now was a cheap fiberboard back wall with three doors in it. One was marked BUOYS, one GULLS, one EMPLOYEES ONLY.

"E MPLOYEES ONLY! " Eddie shouted. He looked down and saw a blood-ringed hole in his bluejeans about three inches below his right knee. The bullet hadn't exploded the knee itself, which was to the good, but oh Mama, it hurt like the veriest motherfucker of creation.

Over his head, a light-globe exploded. Glass showered down on Eddie's head and shoulders.

"I'm insured, but God knows if it covers somethin likethis, " Chip said in his perfectly conversational voice. He wiped more blood from his face, then slatted it off his fingertips and onto the floor, where it made a Rorschach inkblot. Bullets buzzed around them. Eddie saw one flip up Chip's collar. Somewhere behind them, Jack Andolini - old Double-Ugly - was hollering in Italian. Eddie somehow didn't think he was calling retreat.

Roland and the customer in the flannel shirt went through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door. Eddie followed, pumped up on the wine of adrenaline and still dragging Chip. This was a storeroom, and of quite a good size. Eddie could smell different kinds of grain, some sort of minty tang, and, most of all, coffee.

Now Mr. Flannel Shirt had taken the lead. Roland followed him quickly down the storeroom's center aisle and between pallets stacked high with canned goods. Eddie limped gamely along after, still hauling the shopkeeper. Old Chip had lost a lot of blood from the wound on the side of his head and Eddie kept expecting him to pass out, but Chip actually seemed...well, chipper. He was currently asking Eddie what had happened to Ruth Beemer and her sister. If he meant the two women who'd been in the store (Eddie was pretty sure he did), Eddie hoped that Chip wouldn't suddenly regain his memory.

There was another door at the back. Mr. Flannel Shirt opened it and started out. Roland hauled him back by the shirt, then went out himself, low. Eddie stood Chip beside Mr. Flannel Shirt and himself just in front of them. Behind them, bullets smacked through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door, creating startled white eyes of daylight.

"Eddie!" Roland grunted. "To me!"

Eddie limped out. There was a loading dock here, and beyond it about an acre of unlovely, churned-up ground. Trash barrels had been stacked haphazardly to the right of the dock and there were two Dumpsters to the left, but it didn't look to Eddie Dean as if anyone had worried too much about putting litter in its place. There were also several piles of beercans almost big enough to qualify as archaeological middens.Nothing like relaxing on the back porch after a hard day at the store, Eddie thought.

Roland was pointing his gun at another oil-pump, this one rustier and older than the ones out front. On it was a single word. "Diesel," Roland said. "Does that mean fuel? It does, doesn't it?"

"Yeah," Eddie said. "Chip, does the diesel pump work?"

"Sure, sure," Chip said in a disinterested tone of voice. "Lotsa guys fill up back here."

"I can run it, mister," said Flannel Shirt. "You better let me, too - it's tetchy. Can you and your buddy cover me?"

"Yes," Roland said. "Pour it in there." And jerked a thumb at the storeroom.

"Hey, no!" Chip said, startled.

How long did all these things take? Eddie could not have said, not for sure. All he was aware of was a clarity he had known only once before: while riddling Blaine the Mono. It overwhelmed everything with its brilliance, even the pain in his lower leg, where the tibia might or might not have been chipped by a bullet. He was aware of how funky it smelled back here - rotted meat and moldy produce, the yeasty scent of a thousand departed brewskis, the odors of don't-care laziness - and the divinely sweet fir-perfume of the woods just beyond the perimeter of this dirty little roadside store. He could hear the drone of a plane in some distant quadrant of the sky. He knew he loved Mr. Flannel Shirt because Mr. Flannel Shirt washere, waswith them, linked to Roland and Eddie by the strongest of bonds for these few minutes. But time? No, he had no true sense of that. But it couldn't have been much more than ninety seconds since Roland had begun their retreat, or surely they would have been overwhelmed, crashed truck or no crashed truck.

Roland pointed left, then turned right himself. He and Eddie stood back to back on the loading dock with about six feet between them, guns raised to their cheeks like men about to commence a duel. Mr. Flannel Shirt hopped off the end of the dock, spry as a cricket, and seized the chrome crank on the side of the old diesel pump. He began to spin it rapidly. The numbers in their little windows spun backward, but instead of returning to all zeros, they froze at0019. Mr. Flannel Shirt tried the crank again. When it refused to turn, he shrugged and yanked the nozzle out of its rusty cradle.

"John, no!" Chip cried. He was still standing in the doorway of his storeroom and holding up his hands, one clean and the other bloody all the way up the forearm.

"Get out of the way, Chip, or you're gonna - "

Two men dashed around Eddie's side of the East Stoneham General Store. Both were dressed in jeans and flannel shirts, but unlike Chip's shirt, these looked brand-new, with the creases still in the sleeves. Purchased especially for the occasion, Eddie had no doubt. And one of the goons Eddie recognized quite well; had last seen him in The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, Calvin Tower's bookshop. Eddie had also killed this fellow once before. Ten years in the future, if you could believe it. In The Leaning Tower, Balazar's joint, and with the same gun he now held in his hand. A snatch of old Bob Dylan lyric occurred to him, something about the price you had to pay to keep from going through everything twice.

"Hey, Big Nose!" Eddie cried (as he seemed to each time he saw this particular piece of pond scum). "How you doing, pal?" In truth, George Biondi did not appear to be doing well at all. Not even his mother would have considered him much more than presentable, even on his best day (that humungous beak), and now his features were puffed and dis-colored by bruises that had only just begun to fade. The worst of them was right between the eyes.

I did that,Eddie thought.In the back of Tower's bookstore. It was true, but it also seemed like something that had happened a thousand years ago.

"You,"said George Biondi. He seemed too stunned to even raise his gun."You. Here."

"Me here," Eddie agreed. "As for you, you should have stayed in New York." With that said, he blew George Biondi's face off. His friend's face, too.

Flannel Shirt squeezed the pump handle's pistol grip and dark diesel sprayed from the nozzle. It doused Chip, who cawed indignantly and then staggered out onto the loading dock."Stings!" he shouted."Gorry, don't that sting! Quit it, John!"

John did not. Another three men came dashing around Roland's side of the store, took one look at the gunslinger's calm and awful face, tried to backtrack. They were dead before they could do more than get the heels of their new country walking shoes planted. Eddie thought of the half-dozen cars and the big Winnebago that had been parked across the street and had time to wonder just how many men Balazar had sent on this little expedition. Certainly not just his own guys. How had he paid for the imports?

He didn't have to,Eddie thought.Someone loaded him up with dough and told him to go buy the farm. As many out-of-town goons as he could get. And somehow convinced him the guys they were going after deserved that kind of coverage.

From inside the store there came a dull, percussive thud. Soot blew out of the chimney and was lost against the darker, oilier cloud rising from the crashed pulp truck. Eddie thought somebody had tossed a grenade. The door to the storeroom blew off its hinges, walked halfway down the aisle surrounded by a cloud of smoke, and fell flat. Soon the fellow who'd thrown the grenade would throw another, and with the floor of the storeroom now covered in an inch of diesel fuel -

"Slow him down if you can," Roland said. "It's not wet enough in there yet."

"Slow down Andolini?" Eddie asked. "How do I do that?"

"With your everlastingmouth! " Roland cried, and Eddie saw a wonderful, heartening thing: Roland was grinning. Almost laughing. At the same time he looked at Flannel Shirt - John - and made a spinning gesture with his right hand:keep pumping.

"Jack!" Eddie shouted. He had no idea where Andolini might be at this point, and so simply yelled as loud as he could. Having grown up ramming around Brooklyn's less savory streets, this was quite loud.

There was a pause. The gunfire slowed, then stopped.

"Hey," Jack Andolini called back. He sounded surprised, but in a good-humored way. Eddie doubted he was really surprised at all, and he had no doubt whatsoever that what Jack wanted was payback. He'd been hurt in the storage area behind Tower's bookshop, but that wasn't the worst of it. He'd also been humiliated. "Hey, Slick! Are you the guy who was gonna send my brains to Hoboken, then stuck a gun under my chin? Man, I got a mark there!"

Eddie could see him making this rueful little speech, all the time gesturing with his hands, moving his remaining men into position. How many was that? Eight? Maybe ten? They'd already taken out a bunch, God knew. And where would the remainder be? A couple on the left of the store. A couple more on the right. The rest with Monsieur Grenades R Us. And when Jack was ready, those guys would charge. Right into the new shallow lake of diesel fuel.

Or so Eddie hoped.

"I've got the same gun with me today!" he called to Jack. "This time I'll jam it up your ass, how'd that be?"

Jack laughed. It was an easy, relaxed sound. An act, but a good one. Inside, Jack would be redlining: heart-rate up over one-thirty, blood-pressure up over one-seventy. This was it, not just payback for some little punk daring to blind-side him but the biggest job of his stinking bad-guy career, the Super Bowl.

Balazar gave the orders, undoubtedly, but Jack Andolini was the one on the spot, the field marshal, and this time the job wasn't just beating up a dice-dopey bartender who wouldn't pay the vig on what he owed or convincing some Yid jewelry-store owner on Lenox Avenue that he needed protection; this was an actual war. Jack was smart - at least compared to most of the street-hoods Eddie had met while doped up and running with his brother Henry - but Jack was also stupid in some fundamental way that had nothing to do with IQ scores. The punk who was currently taunting him had already beaten him once, and quite handily, but Jack Andolini had contrived to forget that.

Diesel sloshed quietly over the loading dock and rippled along the old warped boards of the mercantile's storeroom. John, aka Sai Yankee Flannel Shirt, gave Roland a questioning look. Roland responded by first shaking his head and then twirling his right hand again: more.

"Where's the bookstore guy, Slick?" Andolini's voice just as pleasant as before, but closer now. He'd crossed the road, then. Eddie put him just outside the store. Too bad diesel fuel wasn't more explosive. "Where's Tower? Give him to us and we'll leave you and the other guy alone until next time."

Sure,Eddie thought, and remembered something Susannah sometimes said (in her best growling Detta Walker voice) to indicate utter disbelief:Also I won't come in yo' mouth or get any in yo' hair.

This ambush had been set up especially for visiting gunslingers, Eddie was almost sure of it. The bad boys might or might not know where Tower was (he trusted what came out of Jack Andolini's mouth not at all), but someone had known to exactly which where and when the Unfound Door was going to deliver Eddie and Roland, and had passed that knowledge on to Balazar.You want the boy who embarrassed yourboy, Mr. Balazar? The kid who peeled Jack Andolini and George Biondi off Tower before Tower had time to give in and give you what you wanted? Fine. Here's where he's going to show up. Him and one other. And by the way, here's enough dough to buy an army of mercenaries in tu-tone shoes. Might not be enough, the kid's hard and his buddy's worse, but you might get lucky. Even if you don't, even if the one named Roland gets away and leaves a bunch of dead guys behind...well, getting the kid's a start. And there are always more gunnies, aren't there? Sure. The world's full of them. The worlds.

And what about Jake and Callahan? Had there been a reception party waiting for them, too, and had it been twenty-two years up the line from this when? The little poem on the fence surrounding the vacant lot suggested that, if they'd followed his wife, it had been -  SUSANNAH-MIO, DIVIDED GIRL OF MINE, the poem had said. PARKED HER RIG IN THE DIXIE PIG IN THE YEAR OF '99. And if therehad been a reception party waiting, could they possibly still be alive?

Eddie clung to one idea: if any member of the ka-tet died - Susannah, Jake, Callahan, even Oy - he and Roland would know. If he was kidding himself about that, succumbing to some romantic fallacy, so be it.

Three

Roland caught the eye of the man in the flannel shirt and drew the side of his hand across his throat. John nodded and let go of the oil-pump's squeeze-handle at once. Chip, the store owner, was now standing beside the loading dock, and where his face wasn't lathered with blood, he was looking decidedly gray. Roland thought he would pass out soon. No loss there.

"Jack!" the gunslinger shouted. "Jack Andolini!" His pronunciation of the Italian name was a pretty thing to listen to, both precise and rippling.

"You Slick's big brother?" Andolini asked. He sounded amused. And he sounded closer. Roland put him in front of the store, perhaps on the very spot where he and Eddie had come through. He wouldn't wait long to make his next move; this was the countryside, but there were still people about. The rising black plume of smoke from the overturned wood-waggon would already have been noticed. Soon they would hear sirens.

"I suppose you'd call me his foreman," Roland said. He pointed at the gun in Eddie's hand, then pointed into the storeroom, then pointed at himself:Wait for my signal. Eddie nodded.

"Why don't you send him out,mi amigo? This doesn't have to be your concern. I'll take him and let you go. Slick's the one I want to talk to. Getting the answers I need from him will be a pleasure."

"You could never take us," Roland said pleasantly. "You've forgotten the face of your father. You're a bag of shit with legs. Your own ka-daddy is a man named Balazar, and you lick his dirty ass. The others know and they laugh at you. 'Look at Jack,' they say, 'all that ass-licking only makes him uglier.' "

There was a brief pause. Then: "You got a mean mouth on you, mister." Andolini's voice was level, but all the bogus good humor had gone out of it. All the laughter. "But you know what they say about sticks and stones."

In the distance, at last, a siren rose. Roland nodded first to John (who was watching him alertly) and then at Eddie.Soon, that nod said.

"Balazar will be building his towers of cards long after you're nothing but bones in an unmarked grave, Jack. Some dreams are destiny, but not yours. Yours are only dreams."

"Shut up!"

"Hear the sirens? Your time's almost u - "

"Vai!"Jack Andolini shouted. "Vai!Get em! I want that old fucker's head, do you hear me? I want his head! "

A round black object arced lazily through the hole where the EMPLOYEES ONLY door had been. Another grenado. Roland had been expecting it. He fired once, from the hip, and the grenado exploded in midair, turning the flimsy wall between the storeroom and the lunchroom into a storm of destructive, splintery blowback. There were screams of surprise and agony.

"Now, Eddie!"Roland shouted, and began to fire into the diesel. Eddie joined in. At first Roland didn't think anything was going to happen, but then a sluggish ripple of blue flame appeared in the center aisle and went snaking toward where the rear wall had been. Not enough! Gods, how he wished it had been the kind they called gasoline!

Roland tipped out the cylinder of his gun, dropped the spent casings around his boots, and reloaded.

"On your right, mister," John said, almost conversationally, and Roland dropped flat. One bullet passed through the place where he'd been. The second flipped at the ends of his long hair. He'd only had time to reload three of his revolver's six chambers, but that was one more bullet than he needed. The two harriers flew backward with identical holes in the center of their brows, just below the hairline.

Another hoodlum dashed around the corner of the store on Eddie's side and saw Eddie waiting for him with a grin on his bloody face. The fellow dropped his gun immediately and began to raise his hands. Eddie put a bullet through his chest before they got as high as his shoulders.He's learning, Roland thought.Gods help him, but he is.

"That fire's a little slow for my taste, boys," said John, and leaped up onto the loading dock. The store was barely visible through the rolling smoke of the deflected grenado, but bullets came flying through it. John seemed not to notice them, and Roland thanked ka for putting such a good man in their path. Such a hard man.

John took a square silver object from his pants pocket, flipped up the lid, and produced a good flame with the flick of his thumb on a small wheel. He tossed the little flaming tinderbox underhand into the storeroom. Flames burst up all around it with awhoomp sound.

"What's the matter with you?"Andolini screamed."Get them!"

"Come and do it yourself!" Roland called. At the same time he pulled on John's pants leg. John jumped off the loading dock backward and stumbled. Roland caught him. Chip the storekeeper chose this moment to faint, pitching forward to the trash-littered earth with a groan so soft it was almost a sigh.

"Yeah, come on!" Eddie goaded. "Come onSlick, what-samattaSlick, don't send a boy to do a man's work, you ever hear that one? How many guys did you have over there, two dozen? And we're still standing! So come on! Come on and do it yourself! Or do you want to lick Enrico Balazar's ass for the rest of your life?"

More bullets came through the smoke and flame, but the harriers in the store showed no interest in trying to charge through the growing fire. No more came around the sides of the store, either.

Roland pointed at Eddie's lower right leg, where the hole was. Eddie gave him a thumbs-up, but the leg of his jeans now seemed too full below the knee - swollen - and when he moved, his shor'boot squelched. The pain had settled to a steady hard ache that seemed to cycle with the beat of his heart. Yet he was coming to believe it might have missed the bone.Maybe, he admitted to himself,because I want to believe it.

The first siren had been joined by two or three others, and they were closing in.

"Go!"Jack screamed. He now sounded on the verge of hysterics."Go, you chickenshit motherfuckers, go get them!"

Roland thought that the remaining badmen might have attacked a couple of minutes ago - maybe even thirty seconds ago - if Andolini had led their charge personally. But now the frontal-assault option had been closed off, and Andolini must surely know that if he led men around either side of the store, Roland and Eddie would pick them off like clay birds in a Fair-Day shooting contest. The only workable strategies left to him were siege or a long flanking movement through the woods, and Jack Andolini had no time for either. Standing their ground back here, however, would present its own problems. Dealing with the local constabulary, for instance, or the fire brigade if that showed up first.

Roland pulled John to him so he could speak quietly. "We need to get out of here right now. Can you help us?"

"Oh, ayuh, I think so." The wind shifted. A draft blew through the mercantile's broken front windows, through the place where the back wall had been, and out the back door. The diesel smoke was black and oily. John coughed and waved it away. "Follow me. Let's step lively."

John hurried across the ugly acre of waste ground behind the store, stepping over a broken crate and weaving his way between a rusty incinerator and a pile of even rustier machine parts. There was a name on the biggest of these that Roland had seen before in his wanderings: JOHN DEERE.

Roland and Eddie walked backward, protecting John's back, taking little glances over their own shoulders to keep from tripping. Roland hadn't entirely given up hope that Andolini would make a final charge and he could kill him, as he had done once before. On the beach of the Western Sea, that had been, and here he was again, not only back but ten yearsyounger.

While I,Roland thought,feel at least a thousand years older.

Yet that was not really true. Yes, he was now suffering - finally - the ills an old man could reasonably expect. But he had a ka-tet to protect again, and not just any ka-tet but one ofgunslingers, and they had refreshed his life in a way he never would have expected. It all meant something to him again, not just the Dark Tower butall of it. So he wanted Andolini to come. And if he killed Andolini in this world, he had an idea Andolini would stay dead. Because this world wasdifferent. It had a resonance all the others, even his own, lacked. He felt it in every bone and every nerve. Roland looked up and saw exactly what he expected: clouds in a line. At the rear of the barren acre, a path slipped into the woods, its head marked by a pair of good-sized granite rocks. And here the gunslinger saw herringbone patterns of shadows, overlapping but all pointing the same way. You had to look to see it, but once seen it was unmistakable. As in the version of New York where they had found the empty bag in the vacant lot and Susannah had seen the vagrant dead, this was the true world, the one where time always ran in a single direction. They might be able to hop into the future if they could find a door, as he was sure Jake and Callahan had done (for Roland also remembered the poem on the fence, and now understood at least part of it), but they could never return to the past. This was the true world, the one where no roll of the dice could ever be taken back, the one closest to the Dark Tower. And they were still on the Path of the Beam.

John led them onto the way into the woods and quickly down it, away from the rising pillars of thick dark smoke and the approaching whine of the sirens.

Four

They hadn't gone even a quarter of a mile before Eddie began seeing blue glints through the trees. The path was slippery with pine needles, and when they came to the final slope - the one leading down to a long and narrow lake of surpassing loveliness - Eddie saw that someone had built a birch railing. Beyond it was a stub of dock jutting out into the water. Tied to the dock was a motorboat.

"That's mine," John said. "I come over for m'groceries and a bite of lunch. Didn't expect no excitement."

"Well, you got it," Eddie said.

"Ayuh, that's a true thing. Mind this last bit, if you don't want to go on your keister." John went nimbly down the final slope, holding the rail for balance and sliding rather than walking. On his feet was a pair of old scuffed workboots that would have looked perfectly at home in Mid-World, Eddie thought.

He went next himself, favoring his bad leg. Roland brought up the rear. From behind them came a sudden explosion, as sharp and limber as that first high-powered rifleshot but far louder.

"That'd be Chip's propane," John said.

"Cry pardon?" Roland asked.

"Gas," Eddie said quietly. "He means gas."

"Ayuh, stove-gas," John agreed. He stepped into his boat, grabbed the Evinrude's starter-cord, gave it a yank. The engine, a sturdy little twenty-horse sewing machine of a thing, started on the first pull. "Get in here, boys, and let's us vacate t' area," he grunted.

Eddie got in. Roland paused for a moment to tap his throat three times. Eddie had seen him perform this ritual before when about to cross open water, and reminded himself to ask about it. He never got the chance; before the question occurred to him again, death had slipped between them.

Five

The skiff moved as quietly and as gracefully over the water as any motor-powered thing can, skating on its own reflection beneath a sky of summer's most pellucid blue. Behind them the plume of dark smoke sullied that blue, rising higher and higher, spreading as it went. Dozens of folk, most of them in shorts or bathing costumes, stood upon the banks of this little lake, turned in the smoke's direction, hands raised to shade against the sun. Few if any marked the steady (and completely unshowy) passage of the motorboat.

"This is Keywadin Pond, just in case you were wonderin," John said. He pointed ahead of them, where another gray tongue of dock stuck out. Beside this one was a neat little boathouse, white with green trim, its overhead door open. As they neared it, Roland and Eddie could see both a canoe and a kayak bobbing inside, at tether.

"Boathouse is mine," the man in the flannel shirt added. Theboat inboathouse came out in a way impossible to reproduce with mere letters - bwutwould probably come closest - but which both men recognized. It was the way the word was spoken in the Calla.

"Looks well-kept," Eddie said. Mostly to be sayingsomething.

"Oh, ayuh," John said. "I do caretakin, camp-checkin, some rough carpenterin. Wouldn't look good f'business if I had a fallin-down boathouse, would it?"

Eddie smiled. "Suppose not."

"My place is about half a mile back from the water. Name's John Cullum." He held out his right hand to Roland, continuing to steer a straight course away from the rising pillar of smoke and toward the boathouse with the other.

Roland took the hand, which was pleasantly rough. "I'm Roland Deschain, of Gilead. Long days and pleasant nights, John."

Eddie put out his own hand in turn. "Eddie Dean, from Brooklyn. Nice to meet you."

John shook with him easily enough but his eyes studied Eddie closely. When their hands parted, he said: "Young fella, did somethin just happen? It did, didn't it?"

"I don't know," Eddie said. Not with complete honesty.

"You ain't been to Brooklyn for a long time, son, have you?"

"Ain't been to Morehouse or tono house," Eddie Dean said, and then quickly, before he could lose it: "Mia's locked Susannah away. Locked her away in the year of '99. Suze can get to the Dogan, but going there's no good. Mia's locked off the controls. There's nothing Suze can do. She's kidnapped. She...she..."

He stopped. For a moment everything had been soclear, like a dream upon the instant of waking. Then, as so often happens with dreams, it faded. He didn't even know if it had been a real message from Susannah, or pure imagination.

Young fella, did somethin just happen?

So Cullum had felt it, too. Not imagination, then. Some form of the touch seemed more likely.

John waited, and when there was no more from Eddie, turned to Roland. "Does your pal come over funny that way often?"

"Not often, no. Sai...Mister,I mean. Mister Cullum, I thank you for helping us when we needed help. I thank ya big-big. It would be monstrous impudent of us to ask for more, but - "

"But you're gonna. Ayuh, figgered." John made a minute course correction toward the little boathouse with its square open mouth. Roland estimated they'd be there in five minutes. That was fine by him. He had no objection to riding in this tight little motor-powered boat (even though it rode rather low in the water with the weight of three grown men inside), but Keywadin Pond was far too exposed for his taste. If Jack Andolini (or his successor, should Jack be replaced) asked enough of those shore-gawkers, he would eventually find a few who remembered the little skiff with the three men in it. And the boathouse with the neat green trim.John Cullum's bwut-huss, may it do ya fine, these witnesses would say. Best they should be farther along the Beam before that happened, with John Cullum packed off to somewhere safe. Roland judged "safe" in this case to be perhaps three looks to the horizon-line, or about a hundred wheels. He had no doubt that Cullum, a total stranger, had saved their lives by stepping in decisively at the right moment. The last thing he wanted was for the man to lose his own as a result.

"Well, I'll do what I can for ya, already made up m'mind to that, but I got to ask you somethin now, while I got the chance."

Eddie and Roland exchanged a brief look. Roland said, "We'll answer if we can. Which is to say, John of East Stoneham, if we judge that the answer won't cause you harm."

John nodded. He seemed to gather himself. "I know you're not ghosts, because we all saw you back at the store and I just now touched you to shake hands. I can see the shadders you cast." He pointed at where they lay across the side of the boat. "Real as real. So my question is this: are you walk-ins?"

"Walk-ins," Eddie said. He looked at Roland, but Roland's face was completely blank. Eddie looked back at John Cullum, sitting in the stern of the boat and steering them toward the boathouse. "I'm sorry, but I don't..."

"Been a lot of em around here, last few years," John said. "Waterford, Stoneham, East Stoneham, Lovell, Sweden...even over in Bridgton and Denmark." This last township name came outDenmaa-aaak.

He saw they were still puzzled.

"Walk-ins're people who justappear, " he said. "Sometimes they're dressed in old-fashioned clothes, as if they came from...ago,I guess you'd say. One was nekkid as a jay-bird, walkin right up the middle of Route 5. Junior Angstrom seen im. Last November this was. Sometimes they talk other languages. One came to Don Russert's house over in Waterford. Sat right there in the kitchen! Donnie's a retired history professor from Vanderbilt College and he taped the fella. Fella jabbered quite awhile, then went into the laundry room. Donnie figured he must'a taken it for the bathroom and went after him to turn him around, but the fella was already gone. No door for him to go out of, but gone he was.

"Donnie played that tape of his for just about everyone in the Vandy Languages Department (Depaaa-aatment), and wasn't none of em recognized it. One said it must be a completely made-up language, like Esperanto. Do you sabby Esperanto, boys?"

Roland shook his head. Eddie said (cautiously), "I've heard of it, but I don't really know what it i - "

"And sometimes," John said, his voice lowering as they glided into the shadows of the boathouse, "sometimes they're hurt. Or disfigured. Roont."

Roland started so suddenly and so hard that the boat rocked. For a moment they were actually in danger of being tipped out. "What? What do you say? Speak again, John, for I would hear it very well."

John apparently thought it was purely an issue of verbal comprehension, because this time he was at pains to pronounce the word more carefully. "Ruined.Like folks who'd been in a nuclear war, or a fallout zone, or something."

"Slow mutants," Roland said. "I think he might be talking about slow muties. Here in this town."

Eddie nodded, thinking about the Grays and Pubes in Lud. Also thinking about a misshapen beehive and the monstrous insects which had been crawling over it.

John killed the little Evinrude engine, but for a moment the three of them sat where they were, listening to water slap hollowly against the aluminum sides of the boat.

"Slow mutants," the old fellow said, almost seeming to taste the words. "Ayuh, I guess that'd be as good a name for em as any. But they ain't the only ones. There's been animals, too, and kinds of birds no one's ever seen in these parts. But mostly it's the walk-ins that've got people worried and talkin amongst themselves. Donnie Russert called someone he knew at Duke University, and that fella called someone in their Department of Psychic Studies - amazin they've got such a thing as that in a real college, but it appears they do - and the Psychic Studies woman said that's what such folks are called: walk-ins. And then, when they disappear again - which they always do, except for one fella over in East Conway Village, who died - they're called walk-outs.The lady said that some scientists who study such things - I guess you could call em scientists, although I know a lot of folks might argue - b'lieve that walk-ins are aliens from other planets, that spaceships drop em off and then pick em up again, but most of em think they're time-travelers, or from different Earths that lie in a line with ours."

"How long has this been going on?" Eddie asked. "How long have the walk-ins been showing up?"

"Oh, two or three years. And it's gettin worse ruther'n better. I seen a couple of such fellas myself, and once a woman with a bald head who looked like she had this bleedin eye in the middle of her forread. But they was all at a distance, and you fellas are up close."

John leaned toward them over his bony knees, his eyes (as blue as Roland's own) gleaming. Water slapped hollowly at the boat. Eddie felt a strong urge to take John Cullum's hand again, to see if something else would happen. There was another Dylan song called "Visions of Johanna." What Eddie wanted was not a vision of Johanna, but the name was at least close to that.

"Ayuh," John was saying, "you boys are right up close and personal. Now, I'll help you along your way if I can, because I don't sense nothing the least bit bad about either of you (although I'm going to tell you flat out that I ain'tnever seen such shooting), but I want to know: are you walk-ins or not?"

Once more Roland and Eddie exchanged looks, and then Roland answered. "Yes," he said. "I suppose we are."

"Gorry," John whispered. In his awe, not even his seamed face could keep him from looking like a child. "Walk-ins! And where is it you're from, can you tell me that?" He looked at Eddie, laughed the way people do when they are admitting you've put a good one over on them, and said: "NotBrooklyn. "

"But Iam from Brooklyn," Eddie said. The only thing was it hadn't beenthis world's Brooklyn, and he knew that now. In the world he came from, a children's book namedCharlie the Choo-Choo had been written by a woman named Beryl Evans; in this one it had been written by someone named Claudia y Inez Bachman. Beryl Evans sounded real and Claudia y Inez Bachman sounded phony as a three-dollar bill, yet Eddie was coming more and more to believe that Bachman was the true handle. And why? Because it came as part of this world.

"Iam from Brooklyn, though. Just not the...well...the same one."

John Cullum was still looking at them with that wide-eyed child's expression of wonder. "What about those other fellas? The ones who were waiting for you? Are they...?"

"No," Roland said. "Not they. No more time for this, John - not now." He got cautiously to his feet, grabbed an overhead beam, and stepped out of the boat with a little wince of pain. John followed and Eddie came last. The two other men had to help him. The steady throb in his right calf had receded a little bit, but the leg was stiff and numb, hard to control.

"Let's go to your place," Roland said. "There's a man we need to find. With the blessing, you may be able to help us do that."

He may be able to help us in more ways than that,Eddie thought, and followed them back into the sunlight, gimping along on his bad leg with his teeth gritted.

At that moment, Eddie thought he would have slain a saint in exchange for a dozen aspirin tablets.

STAVE: Commala-loaf-leaven!

They go to hell or up to heaven!

When the guns are shot and the fire's hot,

You got to poke em in the oven.

RESPONSE: Commala-come-seven!

Salt and yow' for leaven!

Heat em up and knock em down

And poke em in the oven.