The Dark Tower (36 page)

And now he recognized the feeling that had crept among them for what it almost certainly was: not worry or weariness but ka-shume. There was no real translation for that rue-laden term, but it meant to sense an approaching break in one’s ka-tet.

Walter o’ Dim, his old nemesis, was dead. Roland had known it as soon as he saw the face of the Lady of Shadows. Soon one of his own would die as well, probably in the coming battle to break the power of the Devar-Toi. And once again the scales which had temporarily tilted in their favor would balance.

It never once crossed Roland’s mind that the one to die might be him.

There were three brand names on what Eddie immediately dubbed “Suzie’s Cruisin Trike.” One was Honda; one was Takuro (as in that wildly popular pre-superflu import, the Takuro Spirit); the third was North Central Positronics. And a fourth, as well:
U.S. ARMY
, as in
PROPERTY OF
.

Susannah was reluctant to get off it, but finally she did. God knew there was plenty more to see; the cave was a treasure trove. Its narrowing throat was filled with food supplies (mostly freeze-dried stuff that probably wouldn’t taste as good as Nigel’s chow but would at least nourish them), bottled water, canned drinks (plenty of Coke and Nozz-A-La but nothing alcoholic), and the promised propane stove. There were also crates of weaponry. Some
of the crates were marked
U.S. ARMY
, but by no means all.

Now their most basic abilities came out: the true thread, Cort might have called it. Those talents and intuitions that could have remained sleeping for most of their lives, only stirring long enough to get them into occasional trouble, if Roland had not deliberately wakened them . . . cosseted them . . . and then filed their teeth to deadly points.

Hardly a word was spoken among them as Roland produced a wide prying tool from his purse and levered away the tops of the crates. Susannah had forgotten about the Cruisin Trike she had been waiting for all her life; Eddie forgot to make jokes; Roland forgot about his sense of foreboding. They became absorbed in the weaponry that had been left for them, and there was no piece of it they did not understand either at once or after a bit of study.

There was a crate of AR-15 rifles, the barrels packed in grease, the firing mechanisms fragrant with banana oil. Eddie noted the added selector switches, and looked in the crate next to the 15’s. Inside, covered with plastic and also packed in grease, were metal drums. They looked like the ones you saw on tommy-guns in gangster epics like
White Heat,
only these were bigger. Eddie lifted one of the 15’s, turned it over, and found exactly what he expected: a conversion clip that would allow these drums to be attached to the guns, turning them into rapid-fire rice-cutters. How many shots per drum? A hundred? A hundred and twenty-five? Enough to mow down a whole company of men, that was sure.

There was a box of what looked like rocket shells with the letters
STS
stenciled on each. In a
rack beside them, propped against the cave wall, were half a dozen handheld launchers. Roland pointed at the atom-symbol on them and shook his head. He did not want them shooting off weapons that would release potentially lethal radiation no matter how powerful they might be. He was willing to kill the Breakers if that was what it took to stop their meddling with the Beam, but only as a last resort.

Flanking a metal tray filled with gas-masks (to Jake they looked gruesome, like the severed heads of strange bugs) were two crates of handguns: snub-nosed machine-pistols with the word
COYOTE
embossed on the butts and heavy automatics called Cobra Stars. Jake was attracted to both weapons (in truth his heart was attracted to
all
the weapons), but he took one of the Stars because it looked a little bit like the gun he had lost. The clip fed up the handle and held either fifteen or sixteen shots. This was not a matter of counting but only of
looking
and
knowing
.

“Hey,” Susannah said. She’d gone back toward the front of the cave. “Come look at this. Sneetches.”

“Check out the crate-lid,” Jake said when they joined her. Susannah had set it aside; Jake picked it up and was studying it with admiration. It showed the face of a smiling boy with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. He was wearing round glasses and brandishing what appeared to be a magician’s wand at a floating sneetch. The words stenciled beneath the drawing read:

PROPERTY 449th SQUADRON
24 “SNEETCHES”

HARRY POTTER MODEL

SERIAL #465-17-CC NDJKR

“Don’t Mess with the 449!”
We’ll Kick the “Slytherin” Out of You!

There were two dozen sneetches in the crate, packed like eggs in little nests of plastic excelsior. None of Roland’s band had had the opportunity to study live ones closely during their battle with the Wolves, but now they had a good swatch of time during which they could indulge their most natural interests and curiosities. Each took up a sneetch. They were about the size of tennis balls, but a great deal heavier. Their surfaces had been gridded, making them resemble globes marked with lines of latitude and longitude. Although they looked like steel, the surfaces had a faint giving quality, like very hard rubber.

There was an ID-plate on each sneetch and a button beside it. “That wakes it up,” Eddie murmured, and Jake nodded. There was also a small depressed area in the curved surface, just the right size for a finger. Jake pushed it without the slightest worry that the thing would explode, or maybe extrude a mini-buzzsaw that would cut off his fingers. You used the button at the bottom of the depression to access the programming. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he most certainly did.

A curved section of the sneetch’s surface slid away with a faint
Auowwm!
sound. Revealed were four tiny lights, three of them dark and one flashing slow amber pulses. There were seven windows,
now showing
0 00 00 00
. Beneath each was a button so small that you’d need something like the end of a straightened paperclip to push it. “The size of a bug’s asshole,” as Eddie grumbled later on, while trying to program one. To the right of the windows were another two buttons, these marked
S
and
W
.

Jake showed it to Roland. “This one’s
SET
and the other one’s
WAIT
. Do you think so? I think so.”

Roland nodded. He’d never seen such a weapon before—not close up, at any rate—but, coupled with the windows, he thought the use of the buttons was obvious. And he thought the sneetches might be useful in a way the long-shooters with their atom-shells would not be.
SET
and
WAIT
.

SET
. . . and
WAIT
.

“Did Ted and his two pals leave all this stuff for us here?” Susannah asked.

Roland hardly thought it mattered who’d left it—it was here and that was enough—but he nodded.

“How? And where’d they get it?”

Roland didn’t know. What he did know was that the cave was a ma’sun—a war-chest. Below them, men were making war on the Tower which the line of Eld was sworn to protect. He and his tet would fall upon them by surprise, and with these tools they would smite and smite until their enemies lay with their boots pointed to the sky.

Or until theirs did.

“Maybe he explains on one of the tapes he left us,” Jake said. He had engaged the safety of his new Cobra automatic and tucked it away in the shoulder-bag with the remaining Orizas. Susannah had also helped herself to one of the Cobras, after twirling it around her finger a time or two, like Annie Oakley.

“Maybe he does,” she said, and gave Jake a smile. It had been a long time since Susannah had felt so physically well. So
not-preg
. Yet her mind was troubled. Or perhaps it was her spirit.

Eddie was holding up a piece of cloth that had been rolled into a tube and tied with three hanks of string. “That guy Ted said he was leaving us a map of the prison-camp. Bet this is it. Anyone ’sides me want a look?”

They all did. Jake helped Eddie to unroll the map. Brautigan had warned them it was rough, and it surely was: really no more than a series of circles and squares. Susannah saw the name of the little town—Pleasantville—and thought again of Ray Bradbury. Jake was tickled by the crude compass, where the map-maker had added a question mark beside the letter
N
.

While they were studying this hastily rendered example of cartography, a long and wavering cry rose in the murk outside. Eddie, Susannah, and Jake looked around nervously. Oy raised his head from his paws, gave a low, brief growl, then put his head back down again and appeared to go to sleep:
Hell wit’choo, bad boy, I’m wit’ my homies and I ain’t ascairt.

“What is it?” Eddie asked. “A coyote? A jackal?”

“Some kind of desert dog,” Roland agreed absently. He was squatted on his hunkers (which suggested his hip was better, at least temporarily) with his arms wrapped around his shins. He never took his eyes from the crude circles and squares drawn on the cloth. “Can-toi-tete.”

“Is that like
Dan
-Tete?” Jake asked.

Roland ignored him. He scooped up the map and left the cave with it, not looking back. The others shared a glance and then followed him, once more wrapping their blankets about them like shawls.

Roland returned to where Sheemie (with a little help from his friends) had brought them through. This time the gunslinger used the binoculars, looking down at Blue Heaven long and long. Somewhere behind them, the desert dog howled again, a lonely sound in the gloom.

And, Jake thought, the gloom was gloomier now. Your eyes adjusted as the day dialed itself down, but that brilliant spotlight of sun seemed brighter than ever by contrast. He was pretty sure the deal with the sun-machine was that you got your full-on, your full-off, and nothing in between. Maybe they even let it shine all night, but Jake doubted it. People’s nervous systems were set up for an orderly progression of dark and day, he’d learned that in science class. You could make do with long periods of low light—people did it every year in the Arctic countries—but it could really mess with your head. Jake didn’t think the guys in charge down there would want to goof up their Breakers if they could help it. Also, they’d want to save their “sun” for as long as they could; everything here was old and prone to breakdowns.

At last Roland gave the binoculars to Susannah. “Do look ya especially at the buildings on either end of the grassy rectangle.” He unrolled the map like a character about to read a scroll in a stageplay,
glanced at it briefly, and then said, “They’re numbered 2 and 3 on the map.”

Susannah studied them carefully. The one marked 2, the Warden’s House, was a small Cape Cod painted electric blue with white trim. It was what her mother might have called a fairy-tale house, because of the bright colors and the gingerbread scalloping around the eaves.

Damli House was much bigger, and as she looked, she saw several people going in and out. Some had the carefree look of civilians. Others seemed much more—oh, call it watchful. And she saw two or three slumping along under loads of stuff. She handed the glasses to Eddie and asked him if those were Children of Roderick.

“I think so,” he said, “but I can’t be completely—”

“Never mind the Rods,” Roland said, “not now. What do you think of those two buildings, Susannah?”

“Well,” she said, proceeding carefully (she did not, in fact, have the slightest idea what it was he wanted from her), “they’re both beautifully maintained, especially compared to some of the falling-down wrecks we’ve seen on our travels. The one they call Damli House is especially handsome. It’s a style we call Queen Anne, and—”

“Are they of wood, do you think, or just made to look that way? I’m particularly interested in the one called Damli.”

Susannah redirected the binoculars there, then handed them to Eddie. He looked, then handed them to Jake. While Jake was looking, there was an audible
CLICK!
sound that rolled to them across the miles . . . and the Cecil B. DeMille sunbeam
which had been shining down on the Devar-Toi like a spotlight went out, leaving them in a thick purple dusk which would soon be complete and utter dark.

In it, the desert-dog began to howl again, raising the skin on Jake’s arms into gooseflesh. The sound rose . . . rose . . . and suddenly cut off with one final choked syllable. It sounded like some final cry of surprise, and Jake had no doubt that the desert-dog was dead. Something had crept up behind it, and when the big overhead light went out—

There were still lights on down there, he saw: a double white row that might have been streetlights in “Pleasantville,” yellow circles that were probably arc-sodiums along the various paths of what Susannah was calling Breaker U . . . and spotlights running random patterns across the dark.

No,
Jake thought,
not spotlights. Searchlights. Like in a prison movie.
“Let’s go back,” he said. “There’s nothing to see anymore, and I don’t like it out here in the dark.”