The Dark Tower (54 page)

That made them safe, at least for the time being, and that was good. But where was the big bug? Where was Prentiss, the man in charge of this hateful place? Roland wanted him and yon Weasel-head taheen sai both—cut off the snake’s head and the snake dies. But they couldn’t afford to wait
much longer. The stream of fleeing Breakers was drying up. The gunslinger didn’t think sai Weasel would wait for the last stragglers; he’d want to keep his precious charges from escaping through the cut fence. He’d know they wouldn’t go far, given the sterile and gloomy countryside all around, but he’d also know that if there were attackers at the north end of the compound, there might be rescuers standing by at the—

And there he was, thank the gods and Gan—sai Pimli Prentiss, staggering and winded and clearly in a state of shock, with a loaded docker’s clutch swinging back and forth under his meaty arm. Blood was coming from one nostril and the corner of one eye, as if all this excitement had caused something to rupture inside of his head. He went to the Weasel, weaving slightly from side to side—it was this drunken weave that Roland would later blame in his bitter heart for the final outcome of that morning’s work—probably meaning to take command of the operation. Their short but fervent embrace, both giving comfort and taking it, told Roland all he needed to know about the closeness of their relationship.

He leveled his gun on the back of Prentiss’s head, pulled the trigger, and watched as blood and hair flew. Master Prentiss’s hands shot out, the fingers spread against the dark sky, and he collapsed almost at the stunned Weasel’s feet.

As if in response to this, the atomic sun came on, flooding the world with light.

“Hile, you gunslingers, kill them all!
” Roland cried, fanning the trigger of his revolver, that ancient murder-machine, with the flat of his right hand. Four had fallen to his fire before the guards, lined
up like so many clay ducks in a shooting gallery, had registered the sound of the gunshots, let alone had time to react.
“For Gilead, for New York, for the Beam, for your fathers! Hear me, hear me! Leave not one of them standing! KILL THEM ALL!
”

And so they did: the gunslinger out of Gilead, the former drug addict out of Brooklyn, the lonely child who had once been known to Mrs. Greta Shaw as ’Bama. Coming south from behind them, rolling through thickening banners of smoke on the SCT (diverting from a straight course only once, to swerve around the flattened body of another housekeeper, this one named Tammy), was a fourth: she who had once been instructed in the ways of nonviolent protest by young and earnest men from the N-double A-C-P and who had now embraced, fully and with no regrets, the way of the gun. Susannah picked off three laggard humie guards and one fleeing taheen. The taheen had a rifle slung over one shoulder but never tried for it. Instead he raised his sleek, fur-covered arms—his head was vaguely bearish—and cried for quarter and parole. Mindful of all that had gone on here, not in the least how the pureed brains of children had been fed to the Beam-killers in order to keep them operating at top efficiency, Susannah gave him neither, although neither did she give him cause to suffer or time to fear his fate.

By the time she rolled down the alley between the movie theater and the hair salon, the shooting had stopped. Finli and Jakli were dying; James Cagney was dead with his hume mask torn half-off his repulsive rat’s head; lying with these were another three dozen, just as dead. The formerly immaculate
gutters of Pleasantville ran with their blood.

There were undoubtedly other guards about the compound, but by now they’d be in hiding, positive that they had been set upon by a hundred or more seasoned fighters, land-pirates from God only knew where. The majority of Algul Siento’s Breakers were in the grassy area between the rear of Main Street and the south watchtowers, huddled like the sheep they were. Ted, unmindful of his bleeding arm, had already begun taking attendance.

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 katet breaks, the end always comes quickly.

Say sorry.

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.

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.