by Stephen King
And—
Eleven-year-old Daneeka Rostov came out of the rolling smoke that now entirely obscured the lower half of Damli House, pulling two red wagons behind her. Daneeka’s face was red and swollen; tears were streaming from her eyes; she was bent over almost double with the effort it was taking her to keep pulling Baj, who sat in one Radio Flyer wagon, and Sej, who sat in the other. Both had the huge heads and tiny, wise eyes of hydrocephalic savants, but Sej was equipped with waving stubs of arms while Baj had none. Both were now foaming at the mouth and making hoarse gagging sounds.
“Help me!” Dani managed, coughing harder than ever. “Help me, someone, before they choke!”
Dinky saw her and started in that direction. Trampas restrained him, although it was clear his heart wasn’t in it. “No, Dink,” he said. His tone was apologetic but firm. “Let someone else do it. Boss wants to talk to—”
Then Brautigan was there again, face pale, mouth a single stitched line in his lower face. “Let him go, Trampas. I like you, dog, but you don’t want to get in our business today.”
“Ted? What—”
Dink started toward Dani again. Trampas pulled him back again. Beyond them, Baj fainted and tumbled headfirst from his wagon. Although he landed on the soft grass, his head made a dreadful rotten splitting sound, and Dani Rostov shrieked.
Dinky lunged for her. Trampas yanked him back once more, and hard. At the same time he pulled the .38 Colt Woodsman he was wearing in his own docker’s clutch.
There was no more time to reason with him. Ted Brautigan hadn’t thrown the mind-spear since using it against the wallet-thief in Akron, back in 1935; hadn’t even used it when the low men took him prisoner again in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, of 1960, although he’d been sorely tempted. He had promised himself he’d never use it again, and he certainly didn’t want to throw it at
(smile when you say that )
Trampas, who had always treated him decently. But he had to get to the south end of the compound before order was restored, and he meant to have Dinky with him when he arrived.
Also, he was furious. Poor little Baj, who always had a smile for anyone and everyone!
He concentrated and felt a sick pain rip through his head. The mind-spear flew. Trampas let go of Dinky and gave Ted a look of unbelieving reproach that Ted would remember to the end of his life. Then Trampas grabbed the sides of his head like a man with the worst Excedrin Headache in the universe, and fell dead on the grass with his throat swollen and his tongue sticking out of his mouth.
“Come on!” Ted cried, and grabbed Dinky’s arm. Prentiss was looking away for the time being, thank God, distracted by another explosion.
“But Dani … and Sej!”
“She can get Sej!” Sending the rest of it mentally:
(now that she doesn’t have to pull Baj too )
Ted and Dinky fled while behind them Pimli Prentiss turned, looked unbelievingly at Trampas, and bawled for them to stop—to stop in the name of the Crimson King.
Finli o’ Tego unlimbered his own gun, but before he could fire, Daneeka Rostov was on him, biting and scratching. She weighed almost nothing, but for a moment he was so surprised to be attacked from this unexpected quarter that she almost bowled him over. He curled a strong, furry arm around her neck and threw her aside, but by then Ted and Dinky were almost out of range, cutting to the left side of Warden’s House and disappearing into the smoke.
Finli steadied his pistol in both hands, took in a breath, held it, and squeezed off a single shot. Blood flew from the old man’s arm; Finli heard him cry out and saw him swerve. Then the young pup grabbed the old cur and they cut around the corner of the house.
“I’m coming for you!” Finli bellowed after them. “Yar I am, and when I catch you, I’ll make you wish you were never born!” But the threat felt horribly empty, somehow.
Now the entire population of Algul Siento — Breakers, taheen, hume guards, can-toi with bloody red spots glaring on their foreheads like third eyes—was in tidal motion, flowing south. And Finli saw something he really did not like at all: the Breakers and only the Breakers were moving that way with their arms raised. If there were more harriers down there, they’d have no trouble at all telling which ones to shoot, would they?
And—
In his room on the third floor of Corbett Hall, still on his knees at the foot of his glass-covered bed, coughing on the smoke that was drifting in through his broken window, Sheemie Ruiz had his revelation … or was spoken to by his imagination, take your pick. In either case, he leaped to his feet. His eyes, normally friendly but always puzzled by a world he could not quite understand, were clear and full of joy.
“BEAM SAYS THANKYA!” he cried to the empty room.
He looked around, as happy as Ebenezer Scrooge discovering that the spirits have done it all in one night, and ran for the door with his slippers crunching on the broken glass. One sharp spear of glass pierced his foot—carrying his death on its tip, had he but known it, say sorry, say Discordia—but in his joy he didn’t even feel it. He dashed into the hall and then down the stairs.
On the second floor landing, Sheemie came upon an elderly female Breaker named Belle O’Rourke, grabbed her, shook her. “BEAM SAYS THANKYA!” he hollered into her dazed and uncomprehending face. “BEAM SAYS ALL MAY YET BE WELL! NOT TOO LATE! JUST IN TIME!”
He rushed on to spread the glad news (glad to him, anyway), and—
On Main Street, Roland looked first at Eddie Dean, then at Jake Chambers. “They’re coming, and this is where we have to take them. Wait for my command, then stand and be true.”
EIGHTEEN
First to appear were three Breakers, running full out with their arms raised. They crossed Main Street that way, never seeing Eddie, who was in the box-office of the Gem (he’d knocked out the glass on all three sides with the sandalwood grip of the gun which had once been Roland’s), or Jake (sitting inside an engineless Ford sedan parked in front of the Pleasantville Bake Shoppe), or Roland himself (behind a mannequin in the window of Gay Paree Fashions).
They reached the other sidewalk and looked around, bewildered.
Go, Roland thought at them. Go on and get out of here, take the alley, get away while you can.
“Come on!” one of them shouted, and they ran down the alley between the drug store and the bookshop. Another appeared, then two more, then the first of the guards, a hume with a pistol raised to the side of his frightened, wide-eyed face. Roland sighted him … and then held his fire.
More of the Devar personnel began to appear, running into Main Street from between the buildings. They spread themselves wide apart. As Roland had hoped and expected, they were trying to flank their charges and channel them. Trying to keep the retreat from turning into a rout.
“Form two lines!” a taheen with a raven’s head was shouting in a buzzing, out-of-breath voice. “Form two lines and keep em between, for your fathers’ sakes!”
One of the others, a redheaded taheen with his shirttail out, yelled: “What about the fence, Jakli? What if they run on the fence?”
“Can’t do nothing about that, Cag, just—”
A shrieking Breaker tried to run past the raven before he could finish, and the raven—Jakli—gave him such a mighty push that the poor fellow went sprawling in the middle of the street. “Stay together, you maggots!” he snarled. “Run if’ee will, but keep some fucking order about it!” As if there could be any order in this, Roland thought (and not without satisfaction). Then, to the redhead, the one called Jakli shouted: “Let one or two of em fry—the rest’ll see and stop!”
It would complicate things if either Eddie or Jake started shooting at this point, but neither did. The three gunslingers watched from their places of concealment as a species of order rose from the chaos. More guards appeared. Jakli and the redhead directed them into the two lines, which was now a corridor running from one side of the street to the other. A few Breakers got past them before the corridor was fully formed,
but only a few.
A new taheen appeared, this one with the head of a weasel, and took over for the one called Jakli. He pounded a couple of running Breakers on the back, actually hurrying them up.
From south of Main Street came a bewildered shout: “Fence is cut!” And then another: “I think the guards are dead!” This latter cry was followed by a howl of horror, and Roland knew as surely as if he had seen it that some unlucky Breaker had just come upon a severed watchman’s head in the grass.
The terrified babble on the heels of this hadn’t run itself out when Dinky Earnshaw and Ted Brautigan appeared from between the bakery and the shoe store, so close to Jake’s hiding place that he could have reached out the window of his car and touched them. Ted had been winged. His right shirtsleeve had turned red from the elbow down, but he was moving—with a little help from Dinky, who had an arm around him. Ted turned as the two of them ran through the gauntlet of guards and looked directly at Roland’s hiding place for a moment. Then he and Earnshaw entered the alley and were gone.
That made them safe, at least for the time being, and that was good. But where was the big bug? Where was Prentiss, the man in charge of this hateful place? Roland wanted him and yon Weasel-head taheen sai both—cut off the snake’s head and the snake dies. But they couldn’t afford to wait much longer. The stream of fleeing Breakers was drying up. The gunslinger didn’t think sai Weasel would wait for the last stragglers; he’d want to keep his precious charges from escaping through the cut fence. He’d know they wouldn’t go far, given the sterile and gloomy countryside all around, but he’d also know that if there were attackers at the north end of the compound, there might be rescuers standing by at the—
And there he was, thank the gods and Gan—sai Pimli Prentiss, staggering and winded and clearly in a state of shock, with a loaded docker’s clutch swinging back and forth under his meaty arm. Blood was coming from one nostril and the corner of one eye, as if all this excitement had caused something to rupture inside of his head. He went to the Weasel, weaving slightly from side to side — it was this drunken weave that Roland would later blame in his bitter heart for the final outcome of that morning’s work—probably meaning to take command of the operation. Their short but fervent embrace, both giving comfort and taking it, told Roland all he needed to know about the closeness of their relationship.
He leveled his gun on the back of Prentiss’s head, pulled the trigger, and watched as blood and hair flew. Master Prentiss’s hands shot out, the fingers spread against the dark sky, and he collapsed almost at the stunned Weasel’s feet.
As if in response to this, the atomic sun came on, flooding the world with light.
“Hile, you gunslingers, kill them all!” Roland cried, fanning the trigger of his revolver, that ancient murder-machine, with the flat of his right hand. Four had fallen to his fire before the guards, lined up like so many clay ducks in a shooting gallery, had registered the sound of the gunshots, let alone had time to react. “For Gilead, for New York, for the Beam, for your fathers! Hear me, hear me! Leave not one of them standing! KILL THEM ALL!”
And so they did: the gunslinger out of Gilead, the former drug addict out of Brooklyn, the lonely child who had once been known to Mrs. Greta Shaw as ‘Bama. Coming south from behind them, rolling through thickening banners of smoke on the SCT (diverting from a straight course only once, to swerve around the flattened body of another housekeeper, this one named Tammy), was a fourth: she who had once been instructed in the ways of nonviolent protest by young and earnest men from the Ndouble A-C-P and who had now embraced, fully and with no regrets, the way of the gun. Susannah picked off three laggard humie guards and one fleeing taheen. The taheen had a rifle slung over one shoulder but never tried for it. Instead he raised his sleek, fur-covered arms— his head was vaguely bearish—and cried for quarter and parole. Mindful of all that had gone on here, not in the least how the pureed brains of children had been fed to the Beam-killers in order to keep them operating at top efficiency, Susannah gave him neither, although neither did she give him cause to suffer or time to fear his fate.
By the time she rolled down the alley between the movie theater and the hair salon, the shooting had stopped. Finli and Jakli were dying; James Cagney was dead with his hume mask torn half-off his repulsive rat’s head; lying with these were another three dozen, just as dead. The formerly immaculate gutters of Pleasantville ran with their blood.
There were undoubtedly other guards about the compound, but by now they’d be in hiding, positive that they had been set upon by a hundred or more seasoned fighters, land-pirates from God only knew where. The majority of Algul Siento’s Breakers were in the grassy area between the rear of Main Street and the south watchtowers, huddled like the sheep they were. Ted, unmindful of his bleeding arm, had already begun taking attendance.
Then the entire northern contingent of the harrier army appeared at the head of the alley next to the movieshow: one shor’leg black lady mounted on an ATV. She was steering with one hand and holding the Coyote machine-pistol steady on the handlebars with the other. She saw the bodies heaped in the street and nodded with joyless satisfaction.
Eddie came out of the box-office and embraced her.
“Hey, sugarman, hey,” she murmured, fluttering kisses along the side of his neck in a way that made him shiver. Then Jake was there—pale from the killing, but composed—and she slung an arm around his shoulders and pulled him close. Her eyes happened on Roland, standing on the sidewalk behind the three he had drawn to Mid-World. His gun dangled beside his left thigh, and could he feel the expression of longing on his face? Did he even know it was there? She doubted it, and her heart went out to him.
“Come here, Gilead,” she said. “This is a group hug, and you’re part of the group.”
For a moment she didn’t think he understood the invitation, or was pretending not to understand. Then he came, pausing to reholster his gun and to pick up Oy. He moved in between Jake and Eddie. Oy jumped into Susannah’s lap as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Then the gunslinger put one arm around Eddie’s waist and the other around Jake’s. Susannah reached up (the bumbler scrabbling comically for purchase on her suddenly tilting lap), put her arms around Roland’s neck, and put a hearty smack on his sunburned forehead. Jake and Eddie laughed. Roland joined them, smiling as we do when we have been surprised by happiness.
I’d have you see them like this; I’d have you see them very well. Will you? They are clustered around Suzie’s Cruisin Trike, embracing in the aftermath of their victory. I’d have you see them this way not because they have won a great battle—they know better than that, every one of them—but because now they are ka-tet for the last time. The story of their fellowship ends here, on this make-believe street and beneath this artificial sun; the rest of the tale will be short and brutal compared to all that’s gone before. Because when ka-tet breaks, the end always comes quickly.
Say sorry.
NINETEEN
Pimli Prentiss watched through blood-crusted, dying eyes as the younger of the two men broke from the group embrace and approached Finli o’ Tego. The young man saw that Finli was still stirring and dropped to one knee beside him. The woman, now dismounted from her motorized tricycle, and the boy began to check the rest of their victims and dispatch the few who still lived. Even as he lay dying with a bullet in his own head, Pimli understood this as mercy rather than cruelty. And when the job was done, Pimli supposed they’d meet with the rest of their cowardly, sneaking friends and search those buildings of the Algul that were not yet on fire, looking for the remaining guards, and no doubt shooting out of hand those they discovered. You won’t find many, my yellowback friends, he thought. You’ve wiped out two-thirds of my men right here. And how many of the attackers had Master Pimli, Security Chief Finli, and their men taken in return? So far as Pimli knew, not a single one.
But perhaps he could do something about that. His right hand began its slow and painful journey up towar
d the docker’s clutch, and the Peacemaker holstered there.
Eddie, meanwhile, had put the barrel of the Gilead revolver with the sandalwood grips against the side of Weasel-boy’s head. His finger was tightening on the trigger when he saw that Weasel-boy, although shot in the chest, bleeding heavily, and clearly dying fast, was looking at him with complete awareness. And something else, something Eddie did not much care for. He thought it was contempt. He looked up, saw Susannah and Jake checking bodies at the eastern end of the killzone, saw Roland on the far sidewalk, speaking with Dinky and Ted as he knotted a makeshift bandage around the latter’s arm. The two former Breakers were listening carefully, and although both of them looked dubious, they were nodding their heads.
Eddie returned his attention to the dying taheen. “You’re at the end of the path, my friend,” he said. “Plugged in the pump, it looks like to me. Do you have something you want to say before you step into the clearing?”
Finli nodded.
“Say it, then, chum. But I’d keep it short if you want to get it all out.”
“Thee and thine are a pack of yellowback dogs,” Finli managed. He probably was shot in the heart—so it felt, anyway— but he would say this; it needed to be said, and he willed his damaged heart to beat until it was out. Then he’d die and welcome the dark. “Piss-stinking yellowback dogs, killing men from ambush. That’s what I’d say.”
Eddie smiled humorlessly. “And what about yellowback dogs who’d use children to kill the whole world from ambush, my friend? The whole universe ?”
The Weasel blinked at that, as if he’d expected no such reply. Perhaps any reply at all. “I had … my orders.”
“I have no doubt of that,” Eddie said. “And followed them to the end. Enjoy hell or Na’ar or whatever you call it.” He put the barrel of his gun against Finli’s temple and pulled the trigger. The Wease jerked a single time and was still. Grimacing, Eddie got to his feet.