by Stephen King
“There was something called Legionnaires’ disease,” Eddie said. “And AIDS, of course-”
“That’s the sex one, right?” Susannah asked. “Transmitted by fruits and drug addicts?”
“Yes, but calling gays fruits isn’t the done thing in my when,” Eddie said. He tried a smile, but it felt stiff and unnatural on his face and he put it away again.
“So this… this never happened,” Jake said, tentatively touching the face of Christ on the back page of the paper.
“But it did,” Roland said. “It happened in June-sowing of the year one thousand nine hundred and eighty-six. And here we are, in the aftermath of that plague. If Eddie’s right about the length of time that has gone by, the plague of this ’superflu' was this past June-sowing. We’re in Topeka, Kansas, in the Reap of eighty-six. That’s the when of it. As to the where, all we know is that it’s not Eddie’s. It might be yours, Susannah, or yours, Jake, because you left your world before this arrived.” He tapped the date on the paper, then looked at Jake. “You said something to me once. I doubt if you remember, but I do; it’s one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me: 'Go, then, there are other worlds than these.'”
“More riddles,” Eddie said, scowling.
“Is it not a fact that Jake Chambers died once and now stands before us, alive and well? Or do you doubt my story of his death under the mountains? That you have doubted my honesty from time to time is something I know. And I suppose you have your reasons.”
Eddie thought it over, then shook his head. “You lie when it suits your purpose, but I think that when you told us about Jake, you were too fucked up to manage anything but the truth.”
Roland was startled to find himself hurt by what Eddie had said-You lie when it suits your purpose-but he went on. After all, it was essentially true.
“We went back to time’s pool,” the gunslinger said, “and pulled him out before he could drown.”
“You pulled him out,” Eddie corrected.
“You helped, though,” Roland said, “if only by keeping me alive, you helped, but let that go for now. It’s beside the point. What’s more to it is that there are many possible worlds, and an infinity of doors leading into them. This is one of those worlds; the thinny we can hear is one of those doors… only one much bigger than the ones we found on the beach.”
“How big?” Eddie asked. “As big as a warehouse loading door, or as big as the warehouse?”
Roland shook his head and raised his hands palms to the sky-who knows?
“This thinny,” Susannah said. “We’re not just near it, are we? We came through it. That’s how we got here, to this version of Topeka.”
“We may have,” Roland admitted. “Did any of you feel something strange? A sensation of vertigo, or transient nausea?”
They shook their heads. Oy, who had been watching Jake closely, also shook his head this time.
“No,” Roland said, as if he had expected this. “But we were concentrating on the riddling-”
“Concentrating on not getting killed,” Eddie grunted.
“Yes. So perhaps we passed through without being aware. In any case, thinnies aren’t natural-they are sores on the skin of existence, able to exist because things are going wrong. Things in all worlds.”
“Because things are wrong at the Dark Tower,” Eddie said.
Roland nodded. “And even if this place-this when, this where-is not the ka of your world now, it might become that ka. This plague-or others even worse-could spread. Just as the thinnies will continue to spread, growing in size and number. I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen in my years of searching for the Tower, and heard maybe two dozen more. The first… the first one 1 ever saw was when I was still very young. Near a town called Hambry.” He rubbed his hand up his cheek again, and was not surprised to find sweat amid the bristles. Love me, Roland. If you love me, then love me.
“Whatever happened to us, it bumped us out of your world, Roland,” Jake said. “We’ve fallen off the Beam. Look.” He pointed at the sky. The clouds were moving slowly above them, but no longer in the direction Blame’s smashed snout was pointing. Southeast was still southeast, but the signs of the Beam which they had grown so used to following were gone.
“Does it matter?” Eddie asked. “I mean… the Beam may be gone, but the Tower exists in all worlds, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Roland said, “but it may not be accessible from all worlds.”
The year before beginning his wonderful and fulfilling career as a heroin addict, Eddie had done a brief and not-very-successful turn as a bicycle messenger. Now he remembered certain office-building elevators he’d been in while making deliveries, buildings with banks or investment firms in them, mostly. There were some floors where you couldn’t stop the car and get off unless you had a special card to swipe through the slot below the numbers. When the elevator came to those locked-off floors, the number in the window was replaced by an X.
“I think,” Roland said, “we need to find the Beam again.”
“I’m convinced,” Eddie said. “Come on, let’s get going.” He took a couple of steps, then turned back to Roland with one eyebrow raised. “Where?”
“The way we were going,” Roland said, as if that should have been obvious, and walked past Eddie in his dusty, broken boots, headed for the park across the way.
Chapter V
TURNPIKIN’
1
Roland walked to the end of the platform, kicking bits of pink metal out of his way as he went. At the stairs, he paused and looked back at them somberly. “Mare dead. Be ready.”
“They’re not… um… runny, are they?” Jake asked.
Roland frowned, then his face cleared as he understood what Jake meant. “No. Not runny. Dry.”
“That’s all right, then,” Jake said, but he held his hand out to Susannah, who was being carried by Eddie for the time being. She gave him a smile and folded her fingers around his.
At the foot of the stairs leading down to the commuter parking lot at the side of the station, half a dozen corpses lay together like a collapsed cornshock. Two were women, three were men. The sixth was a child in a stroller. A summer spent dead in the sun and rain and heat (not to mention at the mercy of any stray cats, coons, or woodchucks that might be passing) had given the toddler a look of ancient wisdom and mystery, like a child mummy discovered in an Incan pyramid. Jake supposed from the faded blue outfit it was wearing that it had been a boy, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Eyeless, lipless, its skin faded to dusky gray, it made a joke of gender-why did the dead baby cross the road? Because it was stapled to the superflu.
Even so, the toddler seemed to have voyaged through Topeka’s empty post-plague months better than the adults around it. They were little more than skeletons with hair. In a scrawny bunch of skin-wrapped bones that had once been fingers, one of the men clutched the handle of a suitcase that looked like the Samsonites Jake’s parents owned. As with the baby (as with all of them), his eyes were gone; huge dark sockets stared at Jake. Below them, a ring of discolored teeth jutted in a pugnacious grin. What took you so long, kid? the dead man who was still clutching his suitcase seemed to be asking. Been waiting for you, and it’s been a long hot summer!
Where were you guys hoping to go? Jake wondered. Just where in the crispy crap did you think might be safe enough? Des Moines? Sioux City? Fargo? The moon?
They went down the stairs, Roland first, the others behind him, Jake still holding Susannah’s hand with Oy at his heels. The long-bodied bumbler seemed to descend each step in two stages, like a double trailer taking speed-bumps.
“Slow down, Roland,” Eddie said. “I want to check the crip spaces before we go on. We might get lucky.”
“Crip spaces?” Susannah said. “What’re those?”
Jake shrugged. He didn’t know. Neither did Roland.
Susannah switched her attention to Eddie. “I only ask, sugarpie, because it sounds a little on-pleasant. You kno
w, like calling Negroes ‘blacks’ or gay folks ‘fruits.’ I know I’m just a poor ignorant pickaninny from the dark ages of 1964, but-”
“There.” Eddie pointed at a rank of signs marking the parking-row closest to the station. There were actually two signs to a post, the top of each pair blue and white, the bottom red and white. When they drew a little closer, Jake saw the one on top was a wheelchair symbol. The one on the bottom was a warning: $200 fine for improper use of handicapped PARKING SPACE. STRICTLY ENFORCED BY TOPEKA P.D.
“See there!” Susannah said triumphantly. “They shoulda done that a long time ago! Why, back in my when, you’re lucky if you can get your damn wheelchair through the doors of anything smaller than the Shop ’ Save. Hell, lucky if you can get it up over the curbs! And special parking? Forget it, sugar!”
The lot was jammed almost to capacity, but even with the end of the world at hand, only two cars that didn’t have little wheelchair symbols on their license plates were parked in the row Eddie had called “the crip spaces.”
Jake guessed that respecting the “crip spaces” was just one of those things that got a mysterious lifelong hold on people, like putting zip-codes on letters, parting your hair, or brushing your teeth before breakfast.
“And there it is!” Eddie cried. “Hold your cards, folks, but I think we have a Bingo!”
Still carrying Susannah on his hip-a thing he would have been incapable of doing for any extended period of time even a month ago-Eddie hurried over to a boat of a Lincoln. Strapped on the roof was a complicated-looking racing bicycle; poking out of the half-open trunk was a wheelchair. Nor was this the only one; scanning the row of “crip spaces,” Jake saw at least four more wheelchairs, most strapped to roof-racks, some stuffed into the backs of vans or station wagons, one (it looked ancient and fearsomely bulky) thrown into the bed of a pickup truck.
Eddie set Susannah down and bent to examine the rig holding the chair in the trunk. There were a lot of crisscrossing elastic cords, plus some sort of locking bar. Eddie drew the Ruger Jake had taken from his father’s desk drawer. “Fire in the hole,” he said cheerfully, and before any of them could even think of covering their ears, he pulled the trigger and blew the lock off the security-bar. The sound went rolling into the silence, then echoed back. The warbling sound of the thinny returned with it, as if the gunshot had snapped it awake. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it? Jake thought, and grimaced with distaste. Half an hour ago, he wouldn’t have believed that a sound could be as physically upsetting, as… well, the smell of rotting meat, say, but he believed it now. He looked up at the turnpike signs. From this angle he could see only their tops, but that was enough to confirm that they were shimmering again. It throws some kind of field, Jake thought. The way mixers and vacuum cleaners make static on the radio or TV, or the way that cyclotron gadget made the hair on my arms stand up when Mr. Kingery brought it to class and then asked for volunteers to come up and stand next to it.
Eddie wrenched the locking bar aside, and used Roland’s knife to cut the elastic cords. Then he drew the wheelchair out of the trunk, examined it, unfolded it, and engaged the support which ran across the back at seat-level. “Voila!” he said.
Susannah had propped herself on one hand-Jake thought she looked a little like the woman in this Andrew Wyeth painting he liked, Christina ’s World-and was examining the chair with some wonder.
“God almighty, it looks so little ’ light!”
“Modem technology at its finest, darlin,” Eddie said. “It’s what we fought Vietnam for. Hop in.” He bent to help her. She didn’t resist him, but her face was set and frowning as he lowered her into the seat. Like she expected the chair to collapse under her, Jake thought. As she ran her hands over the arms of her new ride, her face gradually relaxed.
Jake wandered off a little, walking down another row of cars, running his fingers over their hoods, leaving trails of dust. Oy padded after him, pausing once to lift his leg and squirt a tire, as if he had been doing it all his life.
“Make you homesick, honey?” Susannah asked from behind Jake. “Probably thought you’d never see an honest-to-God American automobile again, am I right?”
Jake considered this and decided she was not right. It had never crossed his mind that he would remain in Roland’s world forever; that he might never see another car. He didn’t think that would bother him, actually, but he also didn’t think it was in the cards. Not yet, anyway. There was a certain vacant lot in the New York when he had come from. It was on the comer of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. Once there had been a deli there-Tom and Gerry’s, Party Platters Our Specialty-but now it was just rubble, and weeds, and broken glass, and…
… and a rose. Just a single wild rose growing in a vacant lot where a bunch of condos were scheduled to go up at some point, but Jake had an idea that there was nothing quite like it growing anywhere else on Earth. Maybe not on any of those other worlds Roland had mentioned, either. There were roses as one approached the Dark Tower; roses by the billion, according to Eddie, great bloody acres of them. He had seen them in a dream. Still, Jake suspected that his rose was different even from those… and that until its fate was decided, one way or the other, he was not done with the world of cars and TVs and policemen who wanted to know if you had any identification and what your parents’ names were.
And speaking of parents, I may not be done with them, either, Jake thought. The idea hurried his heartbeat with a mixture of hope and alarm.
They stopped halfway down the row of cars, Jake staring blankly across a wide street (Gage Boulevard, he assumed) as he considered these things. Now Roland and Eddie caught up to them.
“This baby’s gonna be great after a couple of months pushing the Iron Maiden,” Eddie said with a grin. “Bet you could damn near puff it along.” He blew a deep breath at the back of the wheelchair to demonstrate. Jake thought of telling Eddie that there were probably others back there in the “crip spaces” with motors in them, then realized what Eddie must have known right away: their batteries would be dead.
Susannah ignored him for the time being; it was Jake she was interested in. “You didn’t answer me, sug. All these cars get you homesick?”
“Nah. But I was curious about whether or not they were all cars I knew. I thought maybe… if this version of 1986 grew out of some other world than my 1977, there’d be a way to tell. But I can’t tell. Because things change so dam fast. Even in nine years…” He shrugged, then looked at Eddie. “You might be able to, though. I mean, you actually lived in 1986.”
Eddie grunted. “I lived through it, but I didn’t exactly observe it. I was fucked to the sky most of the time. Still… I suppose…”
Eddie started pushing Susannah along the smooth macadam of the parking lot again, pointing to cars as they passed them. “Ford Explorer… Chevrolet Caprice… and that one there’s an old Pontiac, you can tell because of the split grille-”
“Pontiac Bonneville,” Jake said. He was amused and a little touched by the wonder in Susannah’s eyes-most of these cars must look as futuristic to her as Buck Rogers scout-ships. That made him wonder how Roland felt about them, and Jake looked around.
The gunslinger showed no interest in the cars at all. He was gazing across the street, into the park, toward the turnpike… except Jake didn’t think he was actually looking at any of those things. Jake had an idea that Roland was simply looking into his own thoughts. If so, the expression on his face suggested that he wasn’t finding anything good there.
“That’s one of those little Chrysler K’s,” Eddie said, pointing, “and that’s a Subaru. Mercedes SEL 450, excellent, the car of champions… Mustang… Chrysler Imperial, good shape but must be older'n God-”
“Watch it, boy,” Susannah said, with a touch of what Jake thought was real asperity in her voice. “I recognize that one. Looks new to me.”
“Sorry, Suze. Really. This one’s a Cougar… another Chevy… and one more… Topeka loves General Motors, big fuckin surprise t
here… Honda Civic… VW Rabbit… a Dodge… a Ford… a-”
Eddie stopped, looking at a little car near the end of the row, white with red trim. “A Takuro,” he said, mostly to himself. He went around to look at the trunk. “A Takuro Spirit, to be exact. Ever hear of that make and model, Jake of New York?"
Jake shook his head.
“Me, neither,” he said. “Me fucking neither.”
Eddie began pushing Susannah toward Gage Boulevard (Roland with them but still mostly off in his own private world, walking when they walked, stopping where they stopped). Just shy of the lot’s automated entrance (stop TAKE TICKET), Eddie halted.
“At this rate, we’ll be old before we get to yonder park and dead before we raise the turnpike,” Susannah said.
This time Eddie didn’t apologize, didn’t seem even to hear her. He was looking at the bumper sticker on the front of a rusty old AMC Pacer. The sticker was blue and white, like the little wheelchair signs marking the “crip spaces.” Jake squatted for a better look, and when Oy dropped his head on Jake’s knee, the boy stroked him absently. With his other hand he reached out and touched the sticker, as if to verify its reality. kansas city monarchs, it said. The 0 in Monarchs was a baseball with speedlines drawn out behind it, as if it were leaving the park.
Eddie said: “Check me if I’m wrong on this, sport, because I know almost zilch about baseball west of Yankee Stadium, but shouldn’t that say Kansas City Royals? You know, George Brett and all that?”
Jake nodded. He knew the Royals, and he knew Brett, although he had been a young player in Jake’s when and must have been a fairly old one in Eddie’s.
“Kansas City Athletics, you mean,” Susannah said, sounding bewildered. Roland ignored it all; he was still cruising in his own personal ozone layer.
“Not by '86, darlin,” Eddie said kindly. “By '86 the Athletics were in Oakland.” He glanced from the bumper sticker to Jake. “Minor-league team, maybe?” he asked. “Triple A?”