Gunslinger

by Stephen King

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  “With pleasure, gunslinger.”

  They left by the east end of the hedge-bordered corridor; Thomas and Jamie were returning with the nurses already. They looked like ghosts in their white and gauzy summer robes, crossed at the breast with red.

  “Shall I help you with the hawk?” Cuthbert asked.

  “Yes,” the gunslinger said. “That would be lovely, Bert.”

  And later, when darkness had come and the rushing thundershowers with it; while huge, phantom caissons rolled across the sky and lightning washed the crooked streets of the lower town in blue fire; while horses stood at hitching rails with their heads down and their tails drooping, the gunslinger took a woman and lay with her.

  It was quick and good. When it was over and they lay side by side without speaking, it began to hail with a brief, rattling ferocity. Downstairs and far away, someone was playing “Hey Jude” ragtime. The gunslinger’s mind turned reflectively inward. It was in that hail-splattered silence, just before sleep overtook him, that he first thought that he might also be the last.

  IX

  The gunslinger didn’t tell the boy all of this, but perhaps most of it came through anyway. He had already realized that this was an extremely perceptive boy, not so different from Alain, who was strong in that half-empathy, half-telepathy they called the touch.

  “You asleep?” the gunslinger asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you understand what I told you?”

  “Understand it?” the boy asked with surprising scorn. “Understand it? Are you kidding?”

  “No.” But the gunslinger felt defensive. He had never told anyone about his coming of age before, because he felt ambivalent about it. Of course, the hawk had been a perfectly acceptable weapon, yet it had been a trick, too. And a betrayal. The first of many. And tell me—am I really preparing to throw this boy at the man in black?

  “I understood it, all right,” the boy said. “It was a game, wasn’t it? Do grown men always have to play games? Does everything have to be an excuse for another kind of game? Do any men grow up or do they only come of age?”

  “You don’t know everything,” the gunslinger said, trying to hold his slow anger. “You’re just a boy.”

  “Sure. But I know what I am to you.”

  “And what is that?” the gunslinger asked, tightly.

  “A poker chip.”

  The gunslinger felt an urge to find a rock and brain the boy. Instead, he spoke calmly.

  “Go to sleep. Boys need their sleep.”

  And in his mind he heard Marten’s echo: Go and find your hand.

  He sat stiffly in the darkness, stunned with horror and terrified (for the first time in his existence) of the self-loathing that might come afterward.

  X

  During the next period of waking, the railway angled closer to the underground river, and they came upon the Slow Mutants.

  Jake saw the first one and screamed aloud.

  The gunslinger’s head, which had been fixed straight forward as he pumped the handcar, jerked to the right. There was a rotten jack-o’-lantern greenness below them, pulsating faintly. For the first time he became aware of odor—faint, unpleasant, wet.

  The greenness was a face—what might be called a face by one of charitable bent. Above the flattened nose was an insectile node of eyes, peering at them expressionlessly. The gunslinger felt an atavistic crawl in his intestines and privates. He stepped up the rhythm of arms and handcar handle slightly.

  The glowing face faded.

  “What the hell was that?” the boy asked, crawling to him. “What—” The words stopped dumb in his throat as they came upon and then passed a group of three faintly glowing forms, standing between the rails and the invisible river, watching them, motionless.

  “They’re Slow Mutants,” the gunslinger said. “I don’t think they’ll bother us. They’re probably just as frightened of us as we are of—”

  One of the forms broke free and shambled toward them. The face was that of a starving idiot. The faint naked body had been transformed into a knotted mess of tentacular limbs and suckers.

  The boy screamed again and crowded against the gunslinger’s leg like a frightened dog.

  One of the thing’s tentacle arms pawed across the flat platform of the handcar. It reeked of the wet and the dark. The gunslinger let loose of the handle and drew. He put a bullet through the forehead of the starving idiot face. It fell away, its faint swamp-fire glow fading, an eclipsed moon. The gunflash lay bright and branded on their dark retinas, fading only reluctantly. The smell of expended powder was hot and savage and alien in this buried place.

  There were others, more of them. None moved against them overtly, but they were closing in on the tracks, a silent, hideous party of rubberneckers.

  “You may have to pump for me,” the gunslinger said. “Can you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then be ready.”

  The boy stood close to him, his body poised. His eyes took in the Slow Mutants only as they passed, not traversing, not seeing more than they had to. The boy assumed a psychic bulge of terror, as if his very id had somehow sprung out through his pores to form a shield. If he had the touch, the gunslinger reasoned, that was not impossible.

  The gunslinger pumped steadily but did not increase his speed. The Slow Mutants could smell their terror, he knew that, but he doubted if terror alone would be enough to motivate them. He and the boy were, after all, creatures of the light, and whole. How they must hate us, he thought, and wondered if they had hated the man in black in the same way. He thought not, or perhaps he had passed among them only like the shadow of a dark wing in this greater darkness.

  The boy made a noise in his throat and the gunslinger turned his head almost casually. Four of them were charging the handcar in a stumbling way—one of them in the process of finding a handgrip.

  The gunslinger let go of the handle and drew again, with the same sleepy casual motion. He shot the lead mutant in the head. The mutant made a sighing, sobbing noise and began to grin. Its hands were limp and fish-like, dead; the fingers clove to one another like the fingers of a glove long immersed in drying mud. One of these corpse-hands found the boy’s foot and began to pull.

  The boy shrieked aloud in the granite womb.

  The gunslinger shot the mutant in the chest. It began to slobber through the grin. Jake was going off the side. The gunslinger caught one of his arms and was almost pulled off balance himself. The thing was surprisingly strong. The gunslinger put another bullet in the mutant’s head. One eye went out like a candle. Still it pulled. They engaged in a silent tug of war for Jake’s jerking, wriggling body. The Slow Mutants yanked on him like a wishbone. The wish would undoubtedly be to dine.

  The handcar was slowing down. The others began to close in—the lame, the halt, the blind. Perhaps they only looked for a Jesus to heal them, to raise them Lazarus-like from the darkness.

  It’s the end for the boy, the gunslinger thought with perfect coldness. This is the end he meant. Let go and pump or hold on and be buried. The end for the boy.

  He gave a tremendous yank on the boy’s arm and shot the mutant in the belly. For one frozen moment its grip grew even tighter and Jake began to slide off the edge again. Then the dead mud-mitts loosened, and the Slow Mutie fell on its face behind the slowing handcar, still grinning.

  “I thought you’d leave me,” the boy was sobbing. “I thought . . . I thought . . .”

  “Hold on to my belt,” the gunslinger said. “Hold on just as tight as you can.”

  The hand worked into his belt and clutched there; the boy was breathing in great convulsive, silent gasps.

  The gunslinger began to pump steadily again, and the handcar picked up speed. The Slow Mutants fell back a step and watched them go with faces hardly human (or pathetically so), faces that generated the weak phosphorescence common to those weird deep-sea fishes that live under incredible black pressure, face
s that held no anger or hate but only what seemed to be a semiconscious, idiot regret.

  “They’re thinning,” the gunslinger said. The drawn-up muscles of his lower belly and privates relaxed the smallest bit. “They’re—”

  The Slow Mutants had put rocks across the track. The way was blocked. It had been a quick, poor job, perhaps the work of only a minute to clear, but they were stopped. And someone would have to get down and move them. The boy moaned and shuddered closer to the gunslinger. The gunslinger let go of the handle and the handcar coasted noiselessly to the rocks, where it thumped to rest.

  The Slow Mutants began to close in again, almost casually, almost as if they had been passing by, lost in a dream of darkness, and had found someone of whom to ask directions. A street-corner congregation of the damned beneath the ancient rock.

  “Are they going to get us?” the boy asked calmly.

  “Never in life. Be quiet a second.”

  He looked at the rocks. The mutants were weak, of course, and had not been able to drag any of the boulders to block their way. Only small rocks. Only enough to stop them, to make someone—

  “Get down,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll have to move them. I’ll cover you.”

  “No,” the boy whispered. “Please.”

  “I can’t give you a gun and I can’t move the rocks and shoot, too. You have to get down.”

  Jake’s eyes rolled terribly; for a moment his body shuddered in tune with the turnings of his mind, and then he wriggled over the side and began to throw rocks to the right and the left, working with mad speed, not looking up.

  The gunslinger drew and waited.

  Two of them, lurching rather than walking, went for the boy with arms like dough. The guns did their work, stitching the darkness with red-white lances of light that pushed needles of pain into the gunslinger’s eyes. The boy screamed and continued to throw away rocks to either side. Witch-glow leaped and danced. Hard to see now, that was the worst. Everything had gone to shadows and afterimages.

  One of them, glowing hardly at all, suddenly reached for the boy with rubber boogeyman arms. Eyes that ate up half the mutie’s head rolled wetly.

  Jake screamed again and turned to struggle.

  The gunslinger fired without allowing himself to think before his spotty vision could betray his hands into a terrible quiver; the two heads were only inches apart. It was the mutie who fell.

  Jake threw rocks wildly. The mutants milled just outside the invisible line of trespass, closing a little at a time, now very close. Others had caught up, swelling their number.

  “All right,” the gunslinger said. “Get on. Quick.”

  When the boy moved, the mutants came at them. Jake was over the side and scrambling to his feet; the gunslinger was already pumping again, all out. Both guns were holstered now. They must run. It was their only chance.

  Strange hands slapped the metal plane of the car’s surface. The boy was holding his belt with both hands now, his face pressed tightly into the small of the gunslinger’s back.

  A group of them ran onto the tracks, their faces full of that mindless, casual anticipation. The gunslinger was full of adrenaline; the car was flying along the tracks into the darkness. They struck the four or five pitiful hulks full force. They flew like rotten bananas struck from the stem.

  On and on, into the soundless, flying, banshee darkness.

  After an age, the boy raised his face into the made wind, dreading and yet needing to know. The ghost of gunflashes still lingered on his retinas. There was nothing to see but the darkness and nothing to hear but the rumble of the river.

  “They’re gone,” the boy said, suddenly fearing an end to the tracks in the darkness, and the wounding crash as they jumped the rails and plunged to twisted ruin. He had ridden in cars; once his humorless father had driven at ninety on the New Jersey Turnpike and had been stopped by a cop who ignored the twenty Elmer Chambers offered with his license and gave him a ticket anyway. But he had never ridden like this, with the wind and the blindness and the terrors behind and ahead, with the sound of the river like a chuckling voice—the voice of the man in black. The gunslinger’s arms were pistons in a lunatic human factory.

  “They’re gone,” the boy said timidly, the words ripped from his mouth by the wind. “You can slow down now. We left them behind.”

  But the gunslinger did not hear. They careened onward into the strange dark.

  XI

  They went on for three “days” without incident.

  XII

  During the fourth period of waking (halfway through? three-quarters? they didn’t know—knew only that they weren’t tired enough yet to stop) there was a sharp thump beneath them; the handcar swayed, and their bodies immediately leaned to the right against gravity as the rails took a gradual turn to the left.

  There was a light ahead—a glow so faint and alien that it seemed at first to be a totally new element, not earth, air, fire, nor water. It had no color and could only be discerned by the fact that they had regained their hands and faces in a dimension beyond that of touch. Their eyes had become so light-sensitive that they noticed the glow more than five miles before they approached its source.

  “The end,” the boy said tightly. “It’s the end.”

  “No.” The gunslinger spoke with odd assurance. “It isn’t.”

  And it was not. They reached light but not day.

  As they approached the source of the glow, they saw for the first time that the rock wall to the left had fallen away and their tracks had been joined by others which crossed in a complex spiderweb. The light laid them in burnished vectors. On some of them there were dark boxcars, passenger coaches, a stage that had been adapted to rails. They made the gunslinger nervous, like ghost galleons trapped in an underground Sargasso.

  The light grew stronger, hurting their eyes a little, but growing slowly enough to allow them to adapt. They came from dark to light like divers coming up from deep fathoms in slow stages.

  Ahead, drawing nearer, was a huge hangar stretching up into the dark. Cut into it, showing yellow squares of light, were a series of perhaps twenty-four entranceways, growing from the size of toy windows to a height of twenty feet as they drew closer. They passed inside through one of the middle ways. Written above were a series of characters, in various languages, the gunslinger presumed. He was astounded to find that he could read the last one; it was an ancient root of the High Speech itself and said:

  TRACK 10 TO SURFACE AND POINTS WEST

  The light inside was brighter; the tracks met and merged through a series of switchings. Here some of the traffic lanterns still worked, flashing eternal reds and greens and ambers.

  They rolled between the rising stone piers caked black with the passage of thousands of vehicles, and then they were in some kind of central terminal. The gunslinger let the handcar coast slowly to a stop, and they peered around.

  “It’s like a subway,” the boy said.

  “Subway?”

  “Never mind. You wouldn’t know what I was talking about. I don’t even know what I’m talking about, not anymore.”

  The boy climbed up onto the cracked cement. They looked at silent, deserted booths where newspapers and books had once been traded or sold; a bootery; a weapon shop (the gunslinger, suddenly feverish with excitement, saw revolvers and rifles; closer inspection showed that their barrels had been filled with lead; he did, however, pick out a bow, which he slung over his back, and a quiver of almost useless, badly weighted arrows); a women’s apparel shop. Somewhere a converter was turning the air over and over, as it had for thousands of years—but perhaps would not for much longer. It had a grating noise somewhere in its cycle which served to remind that perpetual motion, even under strictly controlled conditions, was still a fool’s dream. The air had a mechanized taste. The boy’s shoes and the gunslinger’s boots made flat echoes.

  The boy cried out: “Hey! Hey . . .”

  The gunslinger turned around and went to him.
The boy was standing, transfixed, at the book stall. Inside, sprawled in the far corner, was a mummy. It was wearing a blue uniform with gold piping—a trainman’s uniform, by the look. There was an ancient, perfectly preserved newspaper on the dead thing’s lap, and it crumbled to dust when the gunslinger touched it. The mummy’s face was like an old, shriveled apple. Cautiously, the gunslinger touched the cheek. There was a small puff of dust. When it cleared, they were able to look through the flesh and into the mummy’s mouth. A gold tooth twinkled there.

  “Gas,” the gunslinger murmured. “The old people made a gas that would do this. Or so Vannay told us.”

  “The one who taught from books.”

  “Yes. He.”

  “I bet these old people fought wars with it,” the boy said darkly. “Killed other old people with it.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  There were perhaps a dozen other mummies. All but two or three were wearing the blue and gold ornamental uniforms. The gunslinger supposed that the gas had been used when the place was empty of most incoming and outgoing traffic. Perhaps once in the dim ago, the station had been a military objective of some long-gone army and cause.

  The thought depressed him.

  “We better go on,” he said, and started toward Track 10 and the handcar again. But the boy stood rebelliously behind him.

  “Not going.”

  The gunslinger turned back, surprised.

  The boy’s face was twisted and trembling. “You won’t get what you want until I’m dead. I’ll take my chances by myself.”

  The gunslinger nodded noncommittally, hating himself for what he was going to do. “Okay, Jake,” he said mildly. “Long days, pleasant nights.” He turned around, walked across to the stone piers, leaped easily down onto the handcar.

  “You made a deal with someone!” the boy screamed after him. “I know you did!”

  The gunslinger, not replying, carefully put the bow in front of the T-post rising out of the handcar’s floor, out of harm’s way.

  The boy’s fists were clenched, his features drawn in agony.