by Stephen King
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 re-holster 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 toward 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.
He caught movement from the corner of his eye as he did so and saw another one—the boss of the show—had struggled up onto one elbow. His gun, the Peacemaker .40 that had once executed a rapist, was leveled. Eddie’s reflexes were quick, but there was no time to use them. The Peacemaker roared a single time, fire licking from the end of its barrel, and blood flew from Eddie Dean’s brow. A lock of hair flipped on the back of his head as the slug exited. He slapped his hand to the hole that had appeared over his right eye, like a man who has remembered something of vital importance just a little too late.
Roland whirled on the rundown heels of his boots, pulling his own gun in a dip too quick to see. Jake and Susannah also turned. Susannah saw her husband standing in the street with the heel of his hand pressed to his brow.
“Eddie? Sugar?”
Pimli was struggling to cock the Peacemaker again, his upper lip curled back from his teeth in a doglike snarl of effort. Roland shot him in the throat and Algul Siento’s Master snap-rolled to his left, the still-uncocked pistol flying out of his hand and clattering to a stop beside the body of his friend the Weasel. It finished almost at Eddie’s feet.
“Eddie!” Susannah screamed, and began a loping crawl toward him, thrusting herself on her hands. He’s not hurt bad, she told herself, not hurt bad, dear God don’t let my man be hurt bad—
Then she saw the blood running from beneath his pressing hand, pattering down into the street, and knew it was bad.
“Suze?” he asked. His voice was perfectly clear. “Suzie, where are you? I can’t see.”
He took one step, a second, a third…and then fell facedown in the street, just as Gran-pere Jaffords had known he would, aye, from the first moment he’d laid eyes on him. For the boy was a gunslinger, say true, and it was the only end that one such as he could expect.
Chapter XII:
The Tet Breaks
One
That night found Jake Chambers sitting disconsolately outside the Clover Tavern at the east end of Main Street in Pleasantville. The bodies of the guards had been carted away by a robot maintenance crew, and that was at least something of a relief. Oy had been in the boy’s lap for an hour or more. Ordinarily he would never have stayed so close for so long, but he seemed to understand that Jake needed him. On several occasions, Jake wept into the bumbler’s fur.
For most of that endless day Jake found himself thinking in two different voices. This had happened to him before, but not for years; not since the time when, as a very young child, he suspected he might have suffered some sort of weird, below-the-parental-radar breakdown.
Eddie’s dying, said the first voice (the one that used to assure him there were monsters in his closet, and soon they would emerge to eat him alive). He’s in a room in Corbett Hall and Susannah’s with him and he won’t shut up, but he’s dying.
No, denied the second voice (the one that used
to assure him—feebly—that there were no such things as monsters). No, that can’t be. Eddie’s… Eddie! And besides, he’s ka-tet. He might die when we reach the Dark Tower, we might all die when we get there, but not now, not here, that’s crazy.
Eddie’s dying, replied the first voice. It was implacable. He’s got a hole in his head almost big enough to stick your fist in, and he’s dying.
To this the second voice could offer only more denials, each weaker than the last.
Not even the knowledge that they had likely saved the Beam (Sheemie certainly seemed to think they had; he’d crisscrossed the weirdly silent campus of the Devar-Toi, shouting the news—BEAM SAYS ALL MAY BE WELL! BEAM SAYS THANKYA!—at the top of his lungs) could make Jake feel better. The loss of Eddie was too great a price to pay even for such an outcome. And the breaking of the tet was an even greater price. Every time Jake thought of it, he felt sick to his stomach and sent up inarticulate prayers to God, to Gan, to the Man Jesus, to any or all of them to do a miracle and save Eddie’s life.
He even prayed to the writer.
Save my friend’s life and we’ll save yours, he prayed to Stephen King, a man he had never seen. Save Eddie and we won’t let that van hit you. I swear it.
Then again he’d think of Susannah screaming Eddie’s name, of trying to turn him over, and Roland wrapping his arms around her and saying You mustn’t do that, Susannah, you mustn’t disturb him, and how she’d fought him, her face crazy, her face changing as different personalities seemed to inhabit it for a moment or two and then flee. I have to help him! she’d sob in the Susannah-voice Jake knew, and then in another, harsher voice she’d shout Let me go, mahfah! Let me do mah voodoo on him, make mah houngun, he goan git up an walk, you see! Sho! And Roland holding her through all of it, holding her and rocking her while Eddie lay in the street, but not dead, it would have been better, almost, if he’d been dead (even if being dead meant the end of talking about miracles, the end of hope), but Jake could see his dusty fingers twitching and could hear him muttering incoherently, like a man who talks in his sleep.
Then Ted had come, and Dinky just behind him, and two or three of the other Breakers trailing along hesitantly behind them. Ted had gotten on his knees beside the struggling, screaming woman and motioned for Dinky to get kneebound on the other side of her. Ted had taken one of her hands, then nodded for Dink to take the other. And something had flowed out of them—something deep and soothing. It wasn’t meant for Jake, no, not at all, but he caught some of it, anyway, and felt his wildly galloping heart slow. He looked into Ted Brautigan’s face and saw that Ted’s eyes were doing their trick, the pupils swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking.
Susannah’s cries faltered, subsiding to little hurt groans. She looked down at Eddie, and when she bent her head her eyes had spilled tears onto the back of Eddie’s shirt, making dark places, like raindrops. That was when Sheemie appeared from one of the alleys, shouting glad hosannahs to all who would hear him—“BEAM SAYS NOT TOO LATE! BEAM SAYS JUST IN TIME, BEAM SAYS THANKYA AND WE MUST LET HIM HEAL!”—and limping badly on one foot (none of them thought anything of it then or even noticed it). Dinky murmured to the growing crowd of Breakers looking at the mortally wounded gunslinger, and several went to Sheemie and got him to quiet down. From the main part of the Devar-Toi the alarms continued, but the follow-up fire engines were actually getting the three worst fires (those in Damli House, Warden’s House, and Feveral Hall) under control.
What Jake remembered next was Ted’s fingers—unbelievably gentle fingers—spreading the hair on the back of Eddie’s head and exposing a large hole filled with a dark jelly of blood. There were little white flecks in it. Jake had wanted to believe those flecks were bits of bone. Better than thinking they might be flecks of Eddie’s brain.
At the sight of this terrible head-wound Susannah leaped to her feet and began to scream again. Began to struggle. Ted and Dinky (who was paler than paste) exchanged a glance, tightened their grip on her hands, and once more sent the
(peace ease quiet wait calm slow peace)
soothing message that was as much colors—cool blue shading to quiet ashes of gray—as it was words. Roland, meanwhile, held her shoulders.
“Can anything be done for him?” Roland asked Ted. “Anything at all?”
“He can be made comfortable,” Ted said. “We can do that much, at least.” Then he pointed toward the Devar. “Don’t you still have work there to finish, Roland?”
For a moment Roland didn’t quite seem to understand that. Then he looked at the bodies of the downed guards, and did. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I do. Jake, can you help me? If the ones left were to find a new leader and regroup…that wouldn’t do at all.”
“What about Susannah?” Jake had asked.
“Susannah’s going to help us see her man to a place where he can be at his ease, and die as peacefully as possible,” said Ted Brautigan. “Aren’t you, dear heart?”
She’d looked at him with an expression that was not quite vacant; the understanding (and the pleading) in that gaze went into Jake’s heart like the tip of an icicle. “Must he die?” she had asked him.
Ted had lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Yes,” he said. “He must die and you must bear it.”
“Then you have to do something for me,” she said, and touched Ted’s cheek with her fingers. To Jake those fingers looked cold. Cold.
“What, love? Anything I can.” He took hold of her fingers and wrapped them
(peace ease quiet wait calm slow peace)
in his own.
“Stop what you’re doing, unless I tell you different,” said she.
He looked at her, surprised. Then he glanced at Dinky, who only shrugged. Then he looked back at Susannah.
“You mustn’t use your good-mind to steal my grief,” Susannah told him, “for I’d open my mouth and drink it to the dregs. Every drop.”
For a moment Ted only stood with his head lowered and a frown creasing his brow. Then he looked up and gave her the sweetest smile Jake had ever seen.
“Aye, lady,” Ted replied. “We’ll do as you ask. But if you need us…when you need us…”
“I’ll call,” Susannah said, and once more slipped to her knees beside the muttering man who lay in the street.
Two
As Roland and Jake approached the alley which would take them back to the center of the Devar-Toi, where they would put off mourning their fallen friend by taking care of any who might still stand against them, Sheemie reached out and plucked the sleeve of Roland’s shirt.
“Beam says thankya, Will Dearborn that was.” He had blown out his voice with shouting and spoke in a hoarse croak. “Beam says all may yet be well. Good as new. Better.”
“That’s fine,” Roland said, and Jake supposed it was. There had been no real joy then, however, as there was no real joy now. Jake kept thinking of the hole Ted Brautigan’s gentle fingers had exposed. That hole filled with red jelly.
Roland put an arm around Sheemie’s shoulders, squeezed him, gave him a kiss. Sheemie smiled, delighted. “I’ll come with you, Roland. Will’ee have me, dear?”
“Not this time,” Roland said.
“Why are you crying?” Sheemie asked. Jake had seen the happiness draining from Sheemie’s face, being replaced with worry. Meanwhile, more Breakers were returning to Main Street, milling around in little groups. Jake had seen consternation in the expressions they directed toward the gunslinger…and a certain dazed curiosity…and, in some cases, clear dislike. Hate, almost. He had seen no gratitude, not so much as a speck of gratitude, and for that he’d hated them.
“My friend is hurt,” Roland had said. “I cry for him, Sheemie. And for his wife, who is my friend. Will you go to Ted and sai Dinky, and try to soothe her, should she ask to be soothed?”
“If you want, aye! Anything for you!”
“Thankee-sai, son of Stanley. And help if they move my friend.”
“Your friend Eddie
! Him who lays hurt!”
“Aye, his name is Eddie, you say true. Will you help Eddie?”
“Aye!”
“And there’s something else—”
“Aye?” Sheemie asked, then seemed to remember something. “Aye! Help you go away, travel far, you and your friends! Ted told me. ‘Make a hole,’ he said, ‘like you did for me.’ Only they brought him back. The bad ’uns. They’d not bring you back, for the bad ’uns are gone! Beam’s at peace!” And Sheemie laughed, a jarring sound to Jake’s grieving ear.
To Roland’s too, maybe, because his smile was strained. “In time, Sheemie…although I think Susannah may stay here, and wait for us to return.”
If we do return, Jake thought.
“But I have another chore you may be able to do. Not helping someone travel to that other world, but like that, a little. I’ve told Ted and Dinky, and they’d tell you, once Eddie’s been put at his ease. Will you listen?”
“Aye! And help, if I can!”
Roland clapped him on the shoulder. “Good!” Then Jake and the gunslinger had gone in a direction that might have been north, headed back to finish what they had begun.
Three
They flushed out another fourteen guards in the next three hours, most of them humes. Roland surprised Jake—a little—by only killing the two who shot at them from behind the fire engine that had crashed with one wheel stuck in the cellar bulkhead. The rest he disarmed and then gave parole, telling them that any Devar-Toi guards still in the compound when the late-afternoon change-of-shifts horn blew would be shot out of hand.
“But where will we go?” asked a taheen with a snowy-white rooster’s head below a great floppy-red coxcomb (he reminded Jake a little of Foghorn Leghorn, the cartoon character).
Roland shook his head. “I care not where you fetch,” he said, “as long as you’re not here when the next horn blows, kennit. You’ve done hell’s work here, but hell’s shut, and I mean to see it will never open this particular set of doors again.”