Wolves of the Calla (96 page)

He had told them the formation to expect when they burst out of the hide: about a quarter of the Wolves on one side of the path, looking toward the river, a quarter of their number turned toward the town of Calla Bryn Sturgis. Or perhaps a few more in that direction, since if there was trouble, the town was where the Wolves—or the Wolves’ programmers—would reasonably expect it to come from. And the rest? Thirty or more? Already up the path. Hemmed in, do ya.

Roland began counting to twenty, but when he got to nineteen decided he’d counted enough. He gathered his legs beneath him—there was no dry twist now, not so much as a twinge—and then pistoned upward with his father’s gun held high in his hand.

“For Gilead and the Calla!”
he roared.
“Now, gunslingers! Now, you Sisters of Oriza! Now, now! Kill them! No quarter! Kill them all!”

They burst up and out of the earth like dragon’s teeth. Boards flew away to either side of them, along with dry flurries of weeds and leaves. Roland and Eddie each had one of the big revolvers with the sandalwood grips. Jake had his father’s Ruger. Margaret, Rosa, and Zalia each held a Riza. Susannah had two, her arms crossed over her breasts as though she were cold.

The Wolves were deployed exactly as Roland had seen them with the cool killer’s eye of his imagination, and he felt a moment of triumph before all lesser thought and emotion was swept away beneath the red curtain. As always, he was never so happy to be alive as when he was preparing to deal death.
Five minutes’ worth of blood and stupidity,
he’d told them, and here those five minutes were. He’d also told them he always felt sick afterward, and while that was true enough, he never felt so fine as he did at this moment of beginning; never felt so completely and truly himself. Here were the tag ends of glory’s old cloud. It didn’t matter that they were robots; gods, no! What mattered was that they had been preying on the helpless for generations, and this time they had been caught utterly and completely by surprise.

“Top of the hoods!”
Eddie screamed, as in his right hand Roland’s pistol began to thunder and spit fire. The harnessed horses and mules reared in the traces; a couple screamed in surprise.
“Top of the hoods, get the thinking-caps!”

And, as if to demonstrate his point, the green hoods of three riders to the right of the path
twitched as if plucked by invisible fingers. Each of the three beneath pitched bonelessly out of their saddles and struck the ground. In Gran-pere’s story of the Wolf Molly Doolin had brought down, there had been a good deal of twitching afterward, but these three lay under the feet of their prancing horses as still as stones. Molly might not have hit the hidden “thinking-cap” cleanly, but Eddie knew what he was shooting for, and had.

Roland also began to fire, shooting from the hip, shooting almost casually, but each bullet found its mark. He was after the ones on the path, wanting to pile up bodies there, to make a barricade if he could.

“Riza flies true!”
Rosalita Munoz shrieked. The plate she was holding left her hand and bolted across the East Road with an unremitting rising shriek. It clipped through the hood of a rider at the head of the arroyo path who was trying desperately to rein his horse around. The thing fell backward, feet up to heaven, and landed upside down with its boots in the road.

“Riza!”
That was Margaret Eisenhart.

“For my brother!”
Zalia cried.

“Lady Riza come for your asses, you bastards!”
Susannah uncrossed her arms and threw both plates outward. They flew, screaming, crisscrossed in midair, and both found their mark. Scraps of green hooding fluttered down; the Wolves to whom the hoods had belonged fell faster and harder.

Bright rods of fire now glowed in the morning light as the jostling, struggling riders on either side of the path unsheathed their energy weapons. Jake
shot the thinking-cap of the first one to unsheath and it fell on its own bitterly sizzling sword, catching its cloak afire. Its horse shied sideways, into the descending light-stick of the rider to the direct left. Its head came off, disclosing a nest of sparks and wires. Now the sirens began to blat steadily, burglar alarms in hell.

Roland had thought the Wolves closest to town might try to break off and flee toward the Calla. Instead the nine on that side still left—Eddie had taken six with his first six shots—spurred past the buckas and directly toward them. Two or three hurled humming silvery balls.

“Eddie! Jake! Sneetches! Your right!”

They swung in that direction immediately, leaving the women, who were hurling plates as fast as they could pull them from their silk-lined bags. Jake was standing with his legs spread and the Ruger held out in his right hand, his left bracing his right wrist. His hair was blowing back from his brow. He was wide-eyed and handsome, smiling. He squeezed off three quick shots, each one a whipcrack in the morning air. He had a vague, distant memory of the day in the woods when he had shot pottery out of the sky. Now he was shooting at something far more dangerous, and he was glad.
Glad
. The first three of the flying balls exploded in brilliant flashes of bluish light. A fourth jinked, then zipped straight at him. Jake ducked and heard it pass just above his head, humming like some sort of pissed-off toaster oven. It would turn, he knew, and come back.

Before it could, Susannah swiveled and fired a
plate at it. The plate flew straight to the mark, howling. When it struck, both it and the sneetch exploded. Sharpnel rained down in the corn-plants, setting some of them alight.

Roland reloaded, the smoking barrel of his revolver momentarily pointed down between his feet. Beyond Jake, Eddie was doing the same.

A Wolf jumped the tangled heap of bodies at the head of the arroyo path, its green cloak floating out behind it, and one of Rosa’s plates tore back its hood, for a moment revealing the radar dish beneath. The thinking caps of the bear’s retinue had been moving slowly and jerkily; this one was spinning so fast its shape was only a metallic blur. Then it was gone and the Wolf went tumbling to the side and onto the team which had drawn Overholser’s lead waggon. The horses flinched backward, shoving the bucka into the one behind, mashing four whinnying, rearing animals between. These tried to bolt but had nowhere to go. Overholser’s bucka teetered, then overturned. The downed Wolf’s horse gained the road, stumbled over the body of another Wolf lying there, and went sprawling in the dust, one of its legs jutting off crookedly to the side.

Roland’s mind was gone; his eye saw everything. He was reloaded. The Wolves who had gone up the path were pinned behind a tangled heap of bodies, just as he had hoped. The group of fifteen on the town side had been decimated, only two left. Those on the right were trying to flank the end of the ditch, where the three Sisters of Oriza and Susannah anchored their line. Roland left the remaining two Wolves on his side to Eddie and Jake, sprinted
down the trench to stand behind Susannah, and began firing at the ten remaining Wolves bearing down on them. One raised a sneetch to throw, then dropped it as Roland’s bullet snapped off its thinking-cap. Rosa took another one, Margaret Eisenhart a third.

Margaret dipped to get another plate. When she stood up again, a light-stick swept off her head, setting her hair on fire as it tumbled into the ditch. And Benny’s reaction was understandable; she had been almost a second mother to him. When the burning head landed beside him, he batted it aside and scrambled out of the ditch, blind with panic, howling in terror.

“Benny, no, get back!”
Jake cried.

Two of the remaining Wolves threw their silver deathballs at the crawling, screaming boy. Jake shot one out of the air. He never had a chance at the other. It struck Benny Slightman in the chest and the boy simply exploded outward, one arm tearing free of his body and landing palm-up in the road.

Susannah cut the thinking-cap off the Wolf which had killed Margaret with one plate, then did for the one who had killed Jake’s friend with another. She pulled two fresh Rizas from her sacks and turned back to the oncoming Wolves just as the first one leaped into the ditch, its horse’s chest knocking Roland asprawl. It brandished its sword over the gunslinger. To Susannah it looked like a brilliant red-orange tube of neon.

“No you don’t, muhfuh!”
she screamed, and slung the plate in her right hand. It sheared through the gleaming saber and the weapon simply exploded
at the hilt, tearing off the Wolf’s arm. The next moment one of Rosa’s plates amputated its thinking-cap and it tumbled sideways and crashed to the ground, its gleaming mask grinning at the paralyzed, terrified Tavery twins, who lay clinging to each other. A moment later it began to smoke and melt.

Shrieking Benny’s name, Jake walked across the East Road, reloading the Ruger as he went, tracking through his dead friend’s blood without realizing it. To his left, Roland, Susannah, and Rosa were putting paid to the five remaining Wolves in what had been the raiding party’s north wing. The raiders whirled their horses in jerky, useless circles, seeming unsure what to do in circumstances such as these.

“Want some company, kid?” Eddie asked him. On their right, the group of Wolves who had been stationed on the town side of the arroyo path all lay dead. Only one of them had actually made it as far as the ditch; that one lay with its hooded head plowed into the freshly turned earth of the hide and its booted feet in the road. The rest of its body was wrapped in its green cloak. It looked like a bug that has died in its cocoon.

“Sure,” Jake said. Was he talking or only thinking? He didn’t know. The sirens blasted the air. “Whatever you want. They killed Benny.”

“I know. That sucks.”

“It should have been his fucking
father,
” Jake said. Was he crying? He didn’t know.

“Agreed. Have a present.” Into Jake’s hand Eddie dropped a couple of balls about three inches in diameter. The surfaces looked like steel, but
when Jake squeezed, he felt some give—it was like squeezing a child’s toy made out of hard, hard rubber. A small plate on the side read

To the left of the plate was a button. A distant part of Jake’s mind wondered who Harry Potter was. The sneetch’s inventor, more than likely.

They reached the heap of dead Wolves at the head of the arroyo path. Perhaps machines couldn’t really be dead, but Jake was unable to think of them as anything else, tumbled and tangled as they were. Dead, yes. And he was savagely glad. From behind them came an explosion, followed by a shriek of either extreme pain or extreme pleasure. For the moment Jake didn’t care which. All his attention was focused on the remaining Wolves trapped on the arroyo path. There were somewhere between eighteen and two dozen of them.

There was one Wolf out in front, its sizzling fire-stick raised. It was half-turned to its mates, and now it waved its light-stick at the road.
Except that’s no light-stick,
Eddie thought.
That’s a light
-saber,
just like the ones in the
Star Wars
movies. Only these light-sabers aren’t special effects
—
they really kill. What the hell’s going on here?
Well, the guy out front
was trying to rally his troops, that much seemed clear. Eddie decided to cut the sermon short. He thumbed the button in one of the three sneetches he had kept for himself. The thing began to hum and vibrate in his hand. It was sort of like holding a joy-buzzer.

“Hey, Sunshine!” he called.

The head Wolf didn’t look around and so Eddie simply lobbed the sneetch at it. Thrown as easily as it was, it should have struck the ground twenty or thirty yards from the cluster of remaining Wolves and rolled to a stop. It picked up speed instead, rose, and struck the head Wolf dead center in its frozen snarl of a mouth. The thing exploded from the neck up, thinking-cap and all.

“Go on,” Eddie said. “Try it. Using their own shit against em has its own special pl—”

Ignoring him, Jake dropped the sneetches Eddie had given him, stumbled over the heap of bodies, and started up the path.

“Jake? Jake, I don’t think that’s such a good idea—”

A hand gripped Eddie’s upper arm. He whirled, raising his gun, then lowering it again when he saw Roland. “He can’t hear you,” the gunslinger said. “Come on. We’ll stand with him.”

“Wait, Roland, wait.” It was Rosa. She was smeared with blood, and Eddie assumed it was poor sai Eisenhart’s. He could see no wound on Rosa herself. “I want some of this,” she said.

They reached Jake just as the remaining Wolves made their last charge. A few threw sneetches. These Roland and Eddie picked out of the air easily. Jake fired the Ruger in nine steady, spaced shots, right wrist clasped in left hand, and each time he fired, one of the Wolves either flipped backward out of its saddle or went sliding over the side to be trampled by the horses coming behind. When the Ruger was empty, Rosa took a tenth, screaming Lady Oriza’s name. Zalia Jaffords had also joined them, and the eleventh fell to her.

While Jake reloaded the Ruger, Roland and Eddie, standing side by side, went to work. They almost certainly could have taken the remaining eight between them (it didn’t much surprise Eddie that there had been nineteen in this last cluster), but they left the last two for Jake. As they approached, swinging their light-swords over their heads in a way that would have been undoubtedly terrifying to a bunch of farmers, the boy shot the thinking-cap off the one on the left. Then he stood aside, dodging as the last surviving Wolf took a halfhearted swing at him.

Its horse leaped the pile of bodies at the end of the path. Susannah was on the far side of the road, sitting on her haunches amid a litter of fallen green-cloaked machinery and melting, rotting masks. She was also covered in Margaret Eisenhart’s blood.

Roland understood that Jake had left the final one for Susannah, who would have found it extremely
difficult to join them on the arroyo path because of her missing lower legs. The gunslinger nodded. The boy had seen a terrible thing this morning, suffered a terrible shock, but Roland thought he would be all right. Oy—waiting for them back at the Pere’s rectory-house—would no doubt help him through the worst of his grief.