Wolves of the Calla (94 page)

“All right,” Overholser said. “I ken some of it, do ya. The Wolves’ll see the cast-offs and be even surer the kids are up there. But why send the rest of em north at all, gunslinger? Why not just march em down to the rice right now?”

“Because we have to assume the Wolves can smell the track of prey as well as real Wolves,” Roland said. He raised his voice again.
“Children, up the path! Oldest first! Hold the hand of your partner and don’t let go! Come back at my whistle!”

The children started off, helped into the ditch by Callahan, Sarey Adams, the Javiers, and Ben Slightman. All the adults looked anxious; only Benny’s Da’ looked mistrustful, as well.

“The Wolves will start in because they’ve reason to believe the children are up there,” Roland said, “but they’re not fools, Wayne. They’ll look for sign and we’ll give it to em. If they smell—and I’d bet this town’s last rice crop that they do—they’ll have scent as well as dropped shoes and ribbons to look at. After the smell of the main group stops, that of the four I sent first will carry on yet awhile farther. It may suck em in deeper, or it may not. By then it shouldn’t matter.”

“But—”

Roland ignored him. He turned toward his little band of fighters. They would be seven in all.
It’s a good number,
he told himself.
A number of power
. He looked beyond them at the dust-cloud. It rose higher than any of the remaining seminon dust-devils, and was moving with horrible speed. Yet for the time being, Roland thought they were all right.

“Listen and hear.” It was Zalia, Margaret, and Rosa to whom he was speaking. The members of his own ka-tet already knew this part, had since old Jamie whispered his long-held secret into Eddie’s ear on the Jaffordses’ porch. “The Wolves are neither men nor monsters; they’re robots.”

“Robots!”
Overholser shouted, but with surprise rather than disbelief.

“Aye, and of a kind my ka-tet has seen before,” Roland said. He was thinking of a certain clearing where the great bear’s final surviving retainers had chased each other in an endless worry-circle. “They wear hoods to conceal tiny twirling things on top of their heads. They’re probably this wide and this long.” Roland showed them a height of about two inches and a length of about five. “It’s what Molly Doolin hit and snapped off with her dish, once upon a time. She hit by accident. We’ll hit a-purpose.”

“Thinking-caps,” Eddie said. “Their connection to the outside world. Without em, they’re as dead as dogshit.”

“Aim here.” Roland held his right hand an inch above the crown of his head.

“But the chests . . . the gills in the chests . . . ” Margaret began, sounding utterly bewildered.

“Bullshit now and ever was,” Roland said. “Aim at the tops of the hoods.”

“Someday,” Tian said, “I’m going to know why there had to be so much buggering bullshit.”

“I hope there
is
a someday,” Roland said. The last of the children—the youngest ones—were just starting up the path, obediently holding hands. The eldest would be perhaps an eighth of a mile up, Jake’s quartet at least an eighth of a mile beyond that. It would have to be enough. Roland turned his attention to the child-minders.

“Now they come back,” he said. “Take them across the ditch and through the corn in two side-by-side rows.” He cocked a thumb over his shoulder without looking. “Do I have to tell you how important it is that the corn-plants not be disturbed, especially close to the road, where the Wolves can see?”

They shook their heads.

“At the edge of the rice,” Roland continued, “take them into one of the streams. Lead them almost to the river, then have them lie down where it’s tall and still green.” He moved his hands apart, his blue eyes blazing. “Spread em out. You grown-ups get on the river side of em. If there’s trouble—more Wolves, something else we don’t expect—that’s the side it’ll come from.”

Without giving them a chance to ask questions, Roland buried his fingers in the corners of his mouth again and whistled. Vaughn Eisenhart, Krella Anselm, and Wayne Overholser joined the others in the ditch and began bellowing for the little ’uns to turn around and start back toward the road. Eddie, meanwhile, took another look over his shoulder and was stunned to see how far toward the river the dust-cloud had progressed. Such rapid
movement made perfect sense once you knew the secret; those gray horses weren’t horses at all, but mechanical conveyances disguised to
look
like horses, no more than that.
Like a fleet of government Chevys,
he thought.

“Roland, they’re coming fast! Like hell!”

Roland looked. “We’re all right,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Rosa asked.

“Yes.”

The youngest children were now hurrying back across the road, hand-in-hand, bug-eyed with fear and excitement. Cantab of the Manni and Ara, his wife, were leading them. She told them to walk straight down the middle of the rows and try not to even brush any of the skeletal plants.

“Why, sai?” asked one tyke, surely no older than four. There was a suspicious dark patch on the front of his overalls. “Corn all picked, see.”

“It’s a game,” Cantab said. “A don’t-touch-the-corn game.” He began to sing. Some of the children joined in, but most were too bewildered and frightened.

As the pairs crossed the road, growing taller and older as they came, Roland cast another glance to the east. He estimated the Wolves were still ten minutes from the other side of the Whye, and ten minutes should be enough, but gods, they were
fast
! It had already crossed his mind that he might have to keep Slightman the Younger and the Tavery twins up here, with them. It wasn’t in the plan, but by the time things got this far, the plan almost always started to change.
Had
to change.

Now the last of the kids were crossing, and only
Overholser, Callahan, Slightman the Elder, and Sarey Adams were still on the road.

“Go,” Roland told them.

“I want to wait for my boy!” Slightman objected.

“Go!”

Slightman looked disposed to argue the point, but Sarey Adams touched one elbow and Overholser actually took hold of the other.

“Come’ee,” Overholser said. “The man’ll take care of yours same as he’ll take care of his.”

Slightman gave Roland a final doubtful look, then stepped over the ditch and began herding the tail end of the line downhill, along with Overholser and Sarey.

“Susannah, show them the hide,” Roland said.

They’d been careful to make sure the kids crossed the ditch on the road’s river side well down from where they had done their digging the day before. Now, using one of her capped and shortened legs, Susannah kicked aside a tangle of leaves, branches, and dead corn-plants—the sort of thing one would expect to see left behind in a roadside runoff ditch—and exposed a dark hole.

“It’s just a trench,” she said, almost apologetically. “There’s boards over the top. Light ones, easy to push back. That’s where we’ll be. Roland’s made a . . . oh, I don’t know what you call it, we call it a periscope where I come from, a thing with mirrors inside it you can see through . . . and when the time comes, we just stand up. The boards’ll fall away around us when we do.”

“Where’s Jake and those other three?” Eddie asked. “They should be back by now.”

“It’s too soon,” Roland said. “Calm down, Eddie.”

“I won’t calm down and it’s
not
too soon. We should at least be able to see them. I’m going over there—”

“No, you’re not,” Roland said. “We have to get as many as we can before they figure out what’s going on. That means keeping our firepower over here, at their backs.”

“Roland, something’s not right.”

Roland ignored him. “Lady-sais, slide in there, do ya please. The extra boxes of plates will be on your end; we’ll just kick some leaves over them.”

He looked across the road as Zalia, Rosa, and Margaret began to worm into the hole Susannah had disclosed. The path to the arroyo was now completely empty. There was still no sign of Jake, Benny, and the Tavery twins. He was beginning to think that Eddie was right; that something had gone amiss.

Jake and his companions reached the place where the trail split quickly and without incident. Jake had held back two items, and when they reached the fork, he threw a broken rattle toward the Gloria and a little girl’s woven string bracelet toward the Redbird.
Choose,
he thought,
and be damned to you either way.

When he turned, he saw the Tavery twins had already started back. Benny was waiting for him, his face pale and his eyes shining. Jake nodded to him and made himself return Benny’s smile. “Let’s go,” he said.

Then they heard Roland’s whistle and the twins broke into a run, despite the scree and fallen rock which littered the path. They were still holding hands, weaving their way around what they couldn’t simply scramble over.

“Hey, don’t run!” Jake shouted. “He said not to run and mind your f—”

That was when Frank Tavery stepped into the hole. Jake heard the grinding, snapping sound his ankle made when it broke, knew from the horrified wince on Benny’s face that he had, too. Then Frank let out a low, screaming moan and pitched sideways. Francine grabbed for him and got a hand on his upper arm, but the boy was too heavy. He fell through her grip like a sashweight. The thud of his skull colliding with the granite outcrop beside him was far louder than the sound his ankle had made. The blood which immediately began to flow from the wound in his scalp was brilliant in the early morning light.

Trouble,
Jake thought.
And in our road.

Benny was gaping, his cheeks the color of cottage cheese. Francine was already kneeling beside her brother, who lay at a twisted, ugly angle with his foot still caught in the hole. She was making high, breathless keening sounds. Then, all at once, the keening stopped. Her eyes rolled up in their sockets and she pitched forward over her unconscious twin brother in a dead faint.

“Come on,” Jake said, and when Benny only stood there, gawping, Jake punched him in the shoulder. “For your father’s sake!”

That got Benny moving.

Jake saw everything with a gunslinger’s cold, clear vision. The blood splashed on the rock. The clump of hair stuck in it. The foot in the hole. The spittle on Frank Tavery’s lips. The swell of his sister’s new breast as she lay awkwardly across him. The Wolves were coming now. It wasn’t Roland’s whistle that told him this, but the touch.
Eddie,
he thought.
Eddie wants to come over here.

Jake had never tried using the touch to send, but he did now:
Stay where you are! If we can’t get back in time we’ll try to hide while they go past BUT DON’T YOU COME DOWN HERE! DON’T YOU SPOIL THINGS!

He had no idea if the message got through, but he
did
know it was all he had time for. Meanwhile, Benny was . . . what? What was
le mot juste
? Ms. Avery back at Piper had been very big on
le mot juste
. And it came to him. Gibbering. Benny was gibbering.

“What are we gonna do, Jake? Man Jesus,
both
of them! They were fine! Just running, and then . . . what if the Wolves come? What if they come while we’re still here? We better leave em, don’t you think?”

“We’re not leaving them,” Jake said. He leaned down and grabbed Francine Tavery by the shoulders. He yanked her into a sitting position, mostly to get her off her brother so Frank could breathe. Her head lolled back, her hair streaming like dark silk. Her eyelids fluttered, showing glabrous white beneath. Without thinking, Jake slapped her. And hard.

“Ow!
Ow!”
Her eyes flew open, blue and beautiful and shocked.

“Get up!” Jake shouted. “Get off him!”

How much time had passed? How still everything was, now that the children had gone back to the road! Not a single bird cried out, not even a rustie. He waited for Roland to whistle again, but Roland didn’t. And really, why would he? They were on their own now.

Francine rolled aside, then staggered to her feet. “Help him . . . please, sai, I beg . . . ”

“Benny. We have to get his foot out of the hole.” Benny dropped to one knee on the other side of the awkwardly sprawled boy. His face was still pale, but his lips were pressed together in a tight straight line that Jake found encouraging. “Take his shoulder.”

Benny grasped Frank Tavery’s right shoulder. Jake took the left. Their eyes met across the unconscious boy’s body. Jake nodded.

“Now.”

They pulled together. Frank Tavery’s eyes flew open—they were as blue and as beautiful as his sister’s—and he uttered a scream so high it was soundless. But his foot did not come free.

It was stuck deep.

Now a gray-green shape was resolving itself out of the dust-cloud and they could hear the drumming of many hooves on hardpan. The three Calla women were in the hide. Only Roland, Eddie, and Susannah still remained in the ditch, the men standing,
Susannah kneeling with her strong thighs spread. They stared across the road and up the arroyo path. The path was still empty.

“I heard something,” Susannah said. “I think one of em’s hurt.”

“Fuck it, Roland, I’m going after them,” Eddie said.

“Is that what Jake wants or what
you
want?” Roland asked.

Eddie flushed. He had heard Jake in his head—not the exact words, but the gist—and he supposed Roland had, too.

“There’s a hundred kids down there and only four over there,” Roland said. “Get under cover, Eddie. You too, Susannah.”

“What about you?” Eddie asked.

Roland pulled in a deep breath, let it out. “I’ll help if I can.”

“You’re not going after him, are you?” Eddie looked at Roland with mounting disbelief. “You’re really not.”

Roland glanced toward the dust-cloud and the gray-green cluster beneath it, which would resolve itself into individual horses and riders in less than a minute. Riders with snarling wolf faces framed in green hoods. They weren’t riding toward the river so much as they were swooping down on it.