by Stephen King
Christ, I’m going to get killed by some fuckhead with yellow teeth and I don’t even know his name, Eddie thought dimly. At least I put one in Balazar. At least I did that much. He wondered if Roland had another shot. He couldn’t remember.
“I got him!” Tricks Postino yelled cheerfully. “Gimme a clear field, Dario!” And before the man named Dario could give him a clear field or anything else, Tricks opened up with The Wonderful Rambo Machine. The heavy thunder of machine-gun fire filled Balazar’s office. The first result of this barrage was to save Eddie Dean’s life. Dario had drawn a bead on him with the sawed-off, but before he could pull its double triggers, Tricks cut him in half.
“Stop it, you idiot!” Balazar screamed.
But Tricks either didn’t hear, couldn’t stop, or wouldn’t stop. Lips pulled back from his teeth so that his spit-shining teeth were bared in a huge shark’s grin, he raked the room from one end to the other, blowing two of the wall panels to dust, turning framed photographs into clouds of flying glass fragments, hammering the bathroom door off its hinges. The frosted glass of Balazar’s shower stall exploded. The March of Dimes trophy Balazar had gotten the year before bonged like a bell as a slug drove through it.
In the movies, people actually kill other people with hand-held rapid-fire weapons. In real life, this rarely happens. If it does, it happens with the first four or five slugs fired (as the unfortunate Dario could have testified, if he had ever been capable of testifying to anything again). After the first four or five, two things happen to a man—even a powerful one—trying to control such a weapon. The muzzle begins to rise, and the shooter himself begins to turn either right or left, depending on which unfortunate shoulder he has decided to bludgeon with the weapon’s recoil. In short, only a moron or a movie star would attempt the use of such a gun; it was like trying to shoot someone with a pneumatic drill.
For a moment Eddie was incapable of any action more constructive than staring at this perfect marvel of idiocy. Then he saw other men crowding through the door behind Tricks, and raised Roland’s revolver.
“Got him!” Tricks was screaming with the joyous hysteria of a man who has seen too many movies to be able to distinguish between what the script in his head says should be happening and what really is. “Got him! I got him! I g—”
Eddie pulled the trigger and vaporized Tricks from the eyebrows up. Judging from the man’s behavior, that was not a great deal.
Jesus Christ, when these things do shoot, they really blow holes in things, he thought.
There was a loud KA-BLAM from Eddie’s left. Something tore a hot gouge in his underdeveloped left bicep. He saw Balazar pointing the Mag at him from behind the corner of his card-littered desk. His shoulder was a dripping red mass. Eddie ducked as the Magnum crashed again.
23
Roland managed to get into a crouch, aimed at the first of the new men coming in through the door, and squeezed the trigger. He had rolled the cylinder, dumped the used loads and the duds onto the carpet, and had loaded this one fresh shell. He had done it with his teeth. Balazar had pinned Eddie down. If this one’s a dud, I think we’re both gone.
It wasn’t. The gun roared, recoiled in his hand, and Jimmy Haspio spun aside, the .45 he had been holding falling from his dying fingers.
Roland saw the other man duck back and then he was crawling through the splinters of wood and glass that littered the floor. He dropped his revolver back into its holster. The idea of reloading again with two of his right fingers missing was a joke.
Eddie was doing well. The gunslinger measured just how well by the fact that he was fighting naked. That was hard for a man. Sometimes impossible.
The gunslinger grabbed one of the automatic pistols Claudio Andolini had dropped.
“What are the rest of you guys waiting for?” Balazar screamed. “Jesus! Eat these guys!”
Big George Biondi and the other man from the supply room charged in through the door. The man from the supply room was bawling something in Italian.
Roland crawled to the corner of the desk. Eddie rose, aiming toward the door and the charging men. He knows Balazar’s there, waiting, but he thinks he’s the only one of us with a gun now, Roland thought. Here is another one ready to die for you, Roland. What great wrong did you ever do that you should inspire such terrible loyalty in so many?
Balazar rose, not seeing the gunslinger was now on his flank. Balazar was thinking of only one thing: finally putting an end to the goddam junkie who had brought this ruin down on his head.
“No,” the gunslinger said, and Balazar looked around at him, surprise stamped on his features.
“Fuck y—” Balazar began, bringing the Magnum around. The gunslinger shot him four times with Claudio’s automatic. It was a cheap little thing, not much better than a toy, and touching it made his hand feel dirty, but it was perhaps fitting to kill a despicable man with a despicable weapon.
Enrico Balazar died with an expression of terminal surprise on what remained of his face.
“Hi, George!” Eddie said, and pulled the trigger of the gunslinger’s revolver. That satisfying crash came again. No duds in this baby, Eddie thought crazily. I guess I must have gotten the good one. George got off one shot before Eddie’s bullet drove him back into the screaming man, bowling him over like a ninepin, but it went wild. An irrational but utterly persuasive feeling had come over him: a feeling that Roland’s gun held some magical, talismanic power of protection. As long as he held it, he couldn’t be hurt.
Silence fell then, a silence in which Eddie could hear only the man under Big George moaning (when George landed on Rudy Vechhio, which was this unfortunate fellow’s name, he had fractured three of Vechhio’s ribs) and the high ringing in his own ears. He wondered if he would ever hear right again. The shooting spree which now seemed to be over made the loudest rock concert Eddie had ever been to sound like a radio playing two blocks over by comparison.
Balazar’s office was no longer recognizable as a room of any kind. Its previous function had ceased to matter. Eddie looked around with the wide, wondering eyes of a very young man seeing something like this for the first time, but Roland knew the look, and the look was always the same. Whether it was an open field of battle where thousands had died by cannon, rifle, sword, and halberd or a small room where five or six had shot each other, it was the same place, always the same place in the end: another deadhouse, stinking of gunpowder and raw meat.
The wall between the bathroom and the office was gone except for a few struts. Broken glass twinkled everywhere. Ceiling panels that had been shredded by Tricks Postino’s gaudy but useless M-16 fireworks display hung down like pieces of peeled skin.
Eddie coughed dryly. Now he could hear other sounds—a babble of excited conversation, shouted voices outside the bar, and, in the distance, the warble of sirens.
“How many?” the gunslinger asked Eddie. “Can we have gotten all of them?”
“Yes, I think—”
“I got something for you, Eddie,” Kevin Blake said from the hallway. “I thought you might want it, like for a souvenir, you know?” What Balazar had not been able to do to the younger Dean brother Kevin had done to the elder. He lobbed Henry Dean’s severed head through the doorway.
Eddie saw what it was and screamed. He ran toward the door, heedless of the splinters of glass and wood that punched into his bare feet, screaming, shooting, firing the last live shell in the big revolver as he went.
“No, Eddie!” Roland screamed, but Eddie didn’t hear. He was beyond hearing.
He hit a dud in the sixth chamber, but by then he was aware of nothing but the fact that Henry was dead, Henry, they had cut off his head, some miserable son of a bitch had cut off Henry’s head, and that son of a bitch was going to pay, oh yes, you could count on that.
So he ran toward the door, pulling the trigger again and again, unaware that nothing was happening, unaware that his feet were red with blood, and Kevin Blake stepped into the doorway to meet him, crouc
hed low, a Llama .38 automatic in his hand. Kevin’s red hair stood around his head in coils and springs, and Kevin was smiling.
24
He’ll be low, the gunslinger thought, knowing he would have to be lucky to hit his target with this untrustworthy little toy even if he had guessed right.
When he saw the ruse of Balazar’s soldier was going to draw Eddie out, Roland rose to his knees and steadied his left hand on his right fist, grimly ignoring the screech of pain making that fist caused. He would have one chance only. The pain didn’t matter.
Then the man with the red hair stepped into the doorway, smiling, and as always Roland’s brain was gone; his eye saw, his hand shot, and suddenly the red-head was lying against the wall of the corridor with his eyes open and a small blue hole in his forehead. Eddie was standing over him, screaming and sobbing, dry-firing the big revolver with the sandalwood grips again and again, as if the man with the red hair could never be dead enough.
The gunslinger waited for the deadly crossfire that would cut Eddie in half and when it didn’t come he knew it was truly over. If there had been other soldiers, they had taken to their heels.
He got wearily to his feet, reeled, and then walked slowly over to where Eddie Dean stood.
“Stop it,” he said.
Eddie ignored him and went on dry-firing Roland’s big gun at the dead man.
“Stop it, Eddie, he’s dead. They’re all dead. Your feet are bleeding.”
Eddie ignored him and went on pulling the revolver’s trigger. The babble of excited voices outside was closer. So were the sirens.
The gunslinger reached for the gun and pulled on it. Eddie turned on him, and before Roland was entirely sure what was happening, Eddie struck him on the side of the head with his own gun. Roland felt a warm gush of blood and collapsed against the wall. He struggled to stay on his feet—they had to get out of here, quick. But he could feel himself sliding down the wall in spite of his every effort, and then the world was gone for a little while in a drift of grayness.
25
He was out for no more than two minutes, and then he managed to get things back into focus and make it to his feet. Eddie was no longer in the hallway. Roland’s gun lay on the chest of the dead man with the red hair. The gunslinger bent, fighting off a wave of dizziness, picked it up, and dropped it into its holster with an awkward, cross-body movement.
I want my damned fingers back, he thought tiredly, and sighed.
He tried to walk back into the ruins of the office, but the best he could manage was an educated stagger. He stopped, bent, and picked up all of Eddie’s clothes that he could hold in the crook of his left arm. The howlers had almost arrived. Roland believed the men winding them were probably militia, a marshall’s posse, something of that sort . . . but there was always the possibility they might be more of Balazar’s men.
“Eddie,” he croaked. His throat was sore and throbbing again, worse even than the swollen place on the side of his head where Eddie had struck him with the revolver.
Eddie didn’t notice. Eddie was sitting on the floor with his brother’s head cradled against his belly. He was shuddering all over and crying. The gunslinger looked for the door, didn’t see it, and felt a nasty jolt that was nearly terror. Then he remembered. With both of them on this side, the only way to create the door was for him to make physical contact with Eddie.
He reached for him but Eddie shrank away, still weeping. “Don’t touch me,” he said.
“Eddie, it’s over. They’re all dead, and your brother’s dead, too.”
“Leave my brother out of this!” Eddie shrieked childishly, and another fit of shuddering went through him. He cradled the severed head to his chest and rocked it. He lifted his streaming eyes to the gunslinger’s face.
“All the times he took care of me, man,” he said, sobbing so hard the gunslinger could barely understand him. “All the times. Why couldn’t I have taken care of him, just this once, after all the times he took care of me?”
He took care of you, all right, Roland thought grimly. Look at you, sitting there and shaking like a man who’s eaten an apple from the fever-tree. He took care of you just fine.
“We have to go.”
“Go?” For the first time some vague understanding came into Eddie’s face, and it was followed immediately by alarm. “I ain’t going nowhere. Especially not back to that other place, where those big crabs or whatever they are ate Jack.”
Someone was hammering on the door, yelling to open up.
“Do you want to stay here and explain all these bodies?” the gunslinger asked.
“I don’t care,” Eddie said. “Without Henry, it doesn’t matter. Nothing does.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you,” Roland said, “but there are others involved, prisoner.”
“Don’t call me that!” Eddie shouted.
“I’ll call you that until you show me you can walk out of the cell you’re in!” Roland shouted back. It hurt his throat to yell, but he yelled just the same. “Throw that rotten piece of meat away and stop puling!”
Eddie looked at him, cheeks wet, eyes wide and frightened.
“THIS IS YOUR LAST CHANCE!” an amplified voice said from outside. To Eddie the voice sounded eerily like the voice of a game-show host. “THE S.W.A.T. SQUAD HAS ARRIVED—I REPEAT: THE S.W.A. T. SQUAD HAS ARRIVED!”
“What’s on the other side of that door for me?” Eddie asked the gunslinger quietly. “Go on and tell me. If you can tell me, maybe I’ll come. But if you lie, I’ll know.”
“Probably death,” the gunslinger said. “But before that happens, I don’t think you’ll be bored. I want you to join me on a quest. Of course, all will probably end in death—death for the four of us in a strange place. But if we should win through . . .” His eyes gleamed. “If we win through, Eddie, you’ll see something beyond all the beliefs of all your dreams.”
“What thing?”
“The Dark Tower.”
“Where is this Tower?”
“Far from the beach where you found me. How far I know not.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know that, either—except that it may be a kind of . . . of a bolt. A central linchpin that holds all of existence together. All existence, all time, and all size.”
“You said four. Who are the other two?”
“I know them not, for they have yet to be drawn.”
“As I was drawn. Or as you’d like to draw me.”
“Yes.”
From outside there was a coughing explosion like a mortar round. The glass of The Leaning Tower’s front window blew in. The barroom began to fill with choking clouds of tear-gas.
“Well?” Roland asked. He could grab Eddie, force the doorway into existence by their contact, and pummel them both through. But he had seen Eddie risk his life for him; he had seen this hag-ridden man behave with all the dignity of a born gunslinger in spite of his addiction and the fact that he had been forced to fight as naked as the day he was born, and he wanted Eddie to decide for himself.
“Quests, adventures, Towers, worlds to win,” Eddie said, and smiled wanly. Neither of them turned as fresh teargas rounds flew through the windows to explode, hissing, on the floor. The first acrid tendrils of the gas were now slipping into Balazar’s office. “Sounds better than one of those Edgar Rice Burroughs books about Mars Henry used to read me sometimes when we were kids. You only left out one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The beautiful bare-breasted girls.”
The gunslinger smiled. “On the way to the Dark Tower,” he said, “anything is possible.”
Another shudder wracked Eddie’s body. He raised Henry’s head, kissed one cool, ash-colored cheek, and laid the gore-streaked relic gently aside. He got to his feet.
“Okay,” he said. “I didn’t have anything else planned for tonight, anyway.”
“Take these,” Roland said, and shoved the clothes at him. “Put on your shoes if nothing el
se. You’ve cut your feet.”
On the sidewalk outside, two cops wearing plexiglass faceplates, flak-jackets, and Kelvar vests smashed in The Leaning Tower’s front door. In the bathroom, Eddie (dressed in his underpants, his Adidas sneakers, and nothing else) handed the sample packages of Keflex to Roland one by one, and Roland put them into the pockets of Eddie’s jeans. When they were all safely stowed, Roland slid his right arm around Eddie’s neck again and Eddie gripped Roland’s left hand again. The door was suddenly there, a rectangle of darkness. Eddie felt the wind from that other world blow his sweaty hair back from his forehead. He heard the waves rolling up that stony beach. He smelled the tang of sour sea-salt. And in spite of everything, all his pain and sorrow, he suddenly wanted to see this Tower of which Roland spoke. He wanted to see it very much. And with Henry dead, what was there in this world for him? Their parents were dead, and there hadn’t been a steady girl since he got heavily into the smack three years ago—just a steady parade of sluts, needlers, and nosers. None of them straight. Fuck that action.
They stepped through, Eddie actually leading a little.
On the other side he was suddenly wracked with fresh shudders and agonizing muscle-cramps—the first symptoms of serious heroin withdrawal. And with them he also had the first alarmed second thoughts.
“Wait!” he shouted. “I want to go back for a minute! His desk! His desk, or the other office! The scag! If they were keeping Henry doped, there’s gotta be junk! Heroin! I need it! I need it!”
He looked pleadingly at Roland, but the gunslinger’s face was stony.
“That part of your life is over, Eddie,” he said. He reached out with his left hand.
“No!” Eddie screamed, clawing at him. “No, you don’t get it, man, I need it! I NEED IT!”