The Dark Tower (51 page)

“Gods!” Jakli cried in his buzzing voice. “It
is
fire!”

Pimli stared with his mouth open. And suddenly yet
another
smoke-and-fire alarm went off, this one in a series of loud, hiccuping whoops. Good God, sweet Jesus, that was one of the
Damli House
alarms! Surely nothing could be wrong at—

Finli o’ Tego grabbed his arm. “Boss,” he said, calmly enough. “We’ve got real trouble.”

Before Pimli could reply, the horn went off, signaling the change of shifts. And suddenly he realized how vulnerable they would be for the next seven minutes or so. Vulnerable to all sorts of things.

He refused to admit the word
attack
into his consciousness. At least not yet.

Dinky Earnshaw had been sitting in the overstuffed easy chair for what seemed like forever, waiting impatiently for the party to begin. Usually being in The Study cheered him up—hell, cheered
everybody
up, it was the “good-mind” effect—but
today he only felt the wires of tension inside him winding tighter and tighter, pulling his guts into a ball. He was aware of taheen and can-toi looking down from the balconies every now and again, riding the good-mind wave, but didn’t have to worry about being progged by the likes of them; from that, at least, he was safe.

Was that a smoke alarm? From Feveral, perhaps?

Maybe. But maybe not, too. No one else was looking around.

Wait,
he told himself.
Ted told you this would be the hard part, didn’t he? And at least Sheemie’s out of the way. Sheemie’s safe in his room, and Corbett Hall’s safe from fire. So calm down. Relax.

That
was
the bray of a smoke alarm. Dinky was sure of it. Well . . .
almost
sure.

A book of crossword puzzles was open in his lap. For the last fifty minutes he’d been filling one of the grids with nonsense-letters, ignoring the definitions completely. Now, across the top, he printed this in large dark block letters:
GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HU

That was when one of the upstairs fire alarms, probably the one in the west wing, went off with a loud, warbling bray. Several of the Breakers, jerked rudely from a deep daze of concentration, cried out in surprised alarm. Dinky also cried out, but in relief. Relief and something more. Joy? Yeah, very likely it
was
joy. Because when the fire alarm began to bray, he’d felt the powerful hum of good-mind snap. The eerie combined force of the Breakers had winked out like an overloaded electrical circuit. For the moment, at least, the assault on the Beam had stopped.

Meanwhile, he had a job to do. No more waiting. He stood up, letting the crossword magazine tumble to the Turkish rug, and threw his mind at the Breakers in the room. It wasn’t hard; he’d been practicing almost daily for this moment, with Ted’s help. And if it worked? If the Breakers picked it up, rebroadcasting it and amping what Dinky could only suggest to the level of a command? Why then it would rise. It would become the dominant chord in a new good-mind gestalt.

At least that was the hope.

(IT’S A FIRE FOLKS THERE’S A FIRE IN THE BUILDING)

As if to underscore this, there was a soft bang-and-tinkle as something imploded and the first puff of smoke seeped from the ventilator panels. Breakers looked around with wide, dazed eyes, some getting to their feet.

And Dinky sent:

(DON’T WORRY DON’T PANIC ALL IS WELL WALK UP THE)

He sent a perfect, practiced image of the north stairway, then added Breakers. Breakers walking up the north stairway. Breakers walking through the kitchen. Crackle of fire, smell of smoke, but both coming from the guards’ sleeping area in the west wing. And would anyone question the truth of this mental broadcast? Would anyone wonder who was beaming it out, or why? Not now. Now they were only scared. Now they were
wanting
someone to tell them what to do, and Dinky Earnshaw was that someone.

(NORTH STAIRWAY WALK UP THE NORTH STAIRWAY WALK OUT ONTO THE BACK LAWN)

And it worked. They began to walk that way. Like sheep following a ram or horses following a stallion. Some were picking up the two basic ideas

(NO PANIC NO PANIC)

(NORTH STAIRWAY NORTH STAIRWAY)

and rebroadcasting them. And, even better, Dinky heard it from above, too. From the can-toi and the taheen who had been observing from the balconies.

No one ran and no one panicked, but the exodus up the north stairs had begun.

Susannah sat astride the SCT in the window of the shed where she’d been concealed, not worrying about being seen now. Smoke detectors—at least three of them—were yowling. A fire alarm was whooping even more loudly; that one was from Damli House, she was quite sure. As if in answer, a series of loud electronic goose-honks began from the Pleasantville end of the compound. This was joined by a multitude of clanging bells.

With all that happening to their south, it was no wonder that the woman north of the Devar-Toi saw only the backs of the three guards in the ivy-covered watchtowers. Three didn’t seem like many, but it was five per cent of the total. A start.

Susannah looked down the barrel of her gun at the one in her sights and prayed.
God grant me true aim . . . true aim . . .

Soon.

It would be soon.

Finli grabbed the Master’s arm. Pimli shook him off and started toward his house again, staring unbelievingly at the smoke that was now pouring out of all the windows on the left side.

“Boss!” Finli shouted, renewing his grip. “Boss, never mind that! It’s the Breakers we have to worry about! The
Breakers!
”

It didn’t get through, but the shocking warble of the Damli House fire alarm did. Pimli turned back in that direction, and for a moment he met Jakli’s beady little bird’s eyes. He saw nothing in them but panic, which had the perverse but welcome effect of steadying Pimli himself. Sirens and buzzers everywhere. One of them was a regular pulsing honk he’d never heard before. Coming from the direction of Pleasantville?

“Come on, boss!” Finli o’ Tego almost pleaded. “We have to make sure the Breakers are okay—”

“Smoke!” Jakli cried, fluttering his dark (and utterly useless) wings. “Smoke from Damli House, smoke from Feveral, too!”

Pimli ignored him. He pulled the Peacemaker from the docker’s clutch, wondering briefly what premonition had caused him to put it on. He had no idea, but he was glad for the weight of the gun in his hand. Behind him, Tassa was yelling—Tammy was, too—but Pimli ignored the pair of them. His heart was beating furiously, but he was calm again. Finli was right. The Breakers were the important thing right now. Making sure they didn’t lose a third of their trained psychics in some sort of electrical fire or half-assed act of sabotage. He nodded at his Security Chief and they began to
run toward Damli House with Jakli squawking and flapping along behind them like a refugee from a Warner Bros. cartoon. Somewhere up there, Gaskie was hollering. And then Pimli o’ New Jersey heard a sound that chilled him to the bone, a rapid
chow-chow-chow
sound. Gunfire! If some clown was shooting at his Breakers, that clown’s head would finish the day on a high pole, by the gods. That the guards rather than the Breakers might be under attack had at that point still not crossed his mind, nor that of the slightly wilier Finli, either. Too much was happening too fast.

At the south end of the Devar compound, the syncopated honking sound was almost loud enough to split eardrums. “Christ!” Eddie said, and couldn’t hear himself.

In the south watchtowers, the guards were turned away from them, looking north. Eddie couldn’t see any smoke yet. Perhaps the guards could from their higher vantage-points.

Roland grabbed Jake’s shoulder, then pointed at the
SOO LINE
boxcar. Jake nodded and scrambled beneath it with Oy at his heels. Roland held both hands out to Eddie—
Stay where you are!
—and then followed. On the other side of the boxcar the boy and the gunslinger stood up, side by side. They would have been clearly visible to the sentries, had the attention of those worthies not been distracted by the smoke detectors and fire alarms inside the compound.

Suddenly the entire front of the Pleasantville Hardware Company descended into a slot in the
ground. A robot fire engine, all bright red paint and gleaming chrome, came bolting out of the hitherto concealed garage. A line of red lights pulsed down the center of its elongated body, and an amplified voice bellowed,
“STAND CLEAR! THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO! STAND CLEAR! MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!
”

There must be no gunfire from this part of the Devar, not yet. The south end of the compound must seem safe to the increasingly frightened inmates of Algul Siento: don’t worry, folks, here’s your port in today’s unexpected shitstorm.

The gunslinger dipped a ’Riza from Jake’s dwindling supply and nodded for the boy to take another. Roland pointed to the guard in the righthand tower, then once more at Jake. The boy nodded, cocked his arm across his chest, and waited for Roland to give him the go.

Once you hear the horn that signals the change of shifts,
Roland had told Susannah,
take it to them. Do as much damage as you can, but don’t let them see they’re only facing a single person, for your father’s sake!

As if he needed to tell her that.

She could have taken the three watchtower guards while the horn was still blaring, but something made her wait. A few seconds later, she was glad she had. The rear door of the Queen Anne burst open so violently it tore off its upper hinge. Breakers piled out, clawing at those ahead of them in their panic (
these are the would-be destroyers of the universe,
she thought,
these sheep
), and among them
she saw half a dozen of the freakboys with animal heads and at least four of those creepy humanoids with the masks on.

Susannah took the guard in the west tower first, and had shifted her aim to the pair in the east tower before the first casualty in the Battle of Algul Siento had fallen over the railing and tumbled to the ground with his brains dribbling out of his hair and down his cheeks. The Coyote machine-pistol, switched to the middle setting, fired in low-pitched bursts of three:
Chow! Chow! Chow!

The taheen and the low man in the east tower spun widdershins to each other, like figures in a dance. The taheen crumpled on the catwalk that skirted the top of the watchtower; the low man was driven into the rail, flipped over it with his bootheels in the sky, then plummeted head-first to the ground. She heard the crack his neck made when it broke.

A couple of the milling Breakers spotted this unfortunate fellow’s descent and screamed.

“Put up your hands!” That was Dinky, she recognized his voice. “Put up your hands if you’re a Breaker!”

No one questioned the idea; in these circumstances, anyone who sounded like he knew what was going on was in unquestioned charge. Some of the Breakers—but not all, not yet—put their hands up. It made no difference to Susannah. She didn’t need raised hands to tell the difference between the sheep and the goats. A kind of haunted clarity had fallen over her vision.

She flicked the fire-control switch from
BURST
to
SINGLE SHOT
and began to pick off the guards who’d come up from The Study with the Breakers.
Taheen . . . can-toi, get him . . . a hume but don’t shoot her, she’s a Breaker even though she doesn’t have her hands up . . . don’t ask me how I know but I do . . .

Susannah squeezed the Coyote’s trigger and the head of the hume next to the woman in the bright red slacks exploded in a mist of blood and bone. The Breakers screamed like children, staring around with their eyes bulging and their hands up. And now Susannah heard Dinky again, only this time not his physical voice. It was his mental voice she heard, and it was much louder:

(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HURT)

Which was her cue to break cover and start moving. She’d gotten eight of the Crimson King’s bad boys, counting the three in the towers—not that it was much of an accomplishment, given their panic—and she saw no more, at least for the time being.

Susannah twisted the hand-throttle and scooted the SCT toward one of the other abandoned sheds. The gadget’s pickup was so lively that she almost tumbled off the bicycle-style seat. Trying not to laugh (and laughing anyway), she shouted at the top of her lungs, in her best Detta Walker vulture-screech:

“Git outta here, muthafuckahs! Git south! Hands up so we know you fum the bad boys! Everyone doan have their hands up goan get a bullet in the haid! Y’all trus’ me on it!
”

In through the door of the next shed, scraping a balloon tire of the SCT on the jamb, but not quite hard enough to tip it over. Praise God, for she never would have had enough strength to right it on her own. In here, one of the “lazers” was set on
a snap-down tripod. She pushed the toggle-switch marked
ON
and was wondering if she needed to do something else with the
INTERVAL
switch when the weapon’s muzzle emitted a blinding stream of reddish-purple light that arrowed into the compound above the triple run of fence and made a hole in the top story of Damli House. To Susannah it looked as big as a hole made by a point-blank artillery shell.

This is good,
she thought.
I gotta get the other ones going.

But she wondered if there would be time. Already other Breakers were picking up on Dinky’s suggestion, rebroadcasting it and boosting it in the process:

(GO SOUTH! HANDS UP! WON’T BE HURT!)