THIRTEEN
Roland lay on his belly in the ditch, now watching the Wolves with one eye of imagination and one of intuition instead of with those in his head. The Wolves were between the bluff and the hill, riding full-out with their cloaks streaming behind them. They’d all disappear behind the hill for perhaps seven seconds. If, that was, they stayed bunched together and the leaders didn’t start to pull ahead. If he had calculated their speed correctly. If he was right, he’d have five seconds when he could motion Jake and the others to come. Or seven. If he was right, they’d have those same five seconds to cross the road. If he was wrong (or if the others were slow), the Wolves would either see the man in the ditch, the children in the road, or all of them. The distances would likely be too great to use their weapons, but that wouldn’t much matter, because the carefully crafted ambush would be blown. The smart thing would be to stay down, and leave the kids over there to their fate. Hell, four kids caught on the arroyo path would make the Wolves more sure than ever that the rest of them were stashed farther on, in one of the old mines.
Enough thinking, Cort said in his head. If you mean to move, maggot, this is your only chance.
Roland shot to his feet. Directly across from him, protected by the cluster of tumbled boulders which marked the East Road end of the arroyo path, stood Jake and Benny Slightman, with the Tavery boy supported between them. The kid was bloody both north and south; gods knew what had happened to him. His sister was looking over his shoulder. In that instant they looked not just like twins but Kaffin twins, joined at the body.
Roland jerked both hands extravagantly back over his head, as if clawing for a grip in the air: To me, come! Come! At the same time, he looked east. No sign of the Wolves; good. The hill had momentarily blocked them all.
Jake and Benny sprinted across the road, still dragging the boy between them. Frank Tavery’s shor’boots dug fresh grooves in the oggan. Roland could only hope the Wolves would attach no especial significance to the marks.
The girl came last, light as a sprite. “Down!” Roland snarled, grabbing her shoulder and throwing her flat. “Down, down, down!” He landed beside her and Jake landed on top of him. Roland could feel the boy’s madly beating heart between his shoulderblades, through both of their shirts, and had a moment to relish the sensation.
Now the hoofbeats were coming hard and strong, swelling every second. Had they been seen by the lead riders? It was impossible to know, but they would know, and soon. In the meantime they could only go on as planned. It would be tight quarters in the hide with three extra people in there, and if the Wolves had seen Jake and the other three crossing the road, they would all no doubt be cooked where they lay without a single shot fired or plate thrown, but there was no time to worry about that now. They had a minute left at most, Roland estimated, maybe only forty seconds, and that last little bit of time was melting away beneath them.
“Get off me and under cover,” he said to Jake. “Right now.”
The weight disappeared. Jake slipped into the hide.
“You’re next, Frank Tavery,” Roland said. “And be quiet. Two minutes from now you can scream all you want, but for now, keep your mouth shut. That goes for all of you.”
“I’ll be quiet,” the boy said huskily. Benny and Frank’s sister nodded.
“We’re going to stand up at some point and start shooting,” Roland said. “You three—Frank, Francine, Benny—stay down. Stay flat.” He paused. “For your lives, stay out of our way.”
FOURTEEN
Roland lay in the leaf-and dirt-smelling dark, listening to the harsh breathing of the children on his left. This sound was soon overwhelmed by that of approaching hooves. The eye of imagination and that of intuition opened once more, and wider than ever. In no more than thirty seconds—perhaps as few as fifteen—the red rage of battle would do away with all but the most primitive seeing, but for now he saw all, and all he saw was exactly as he wanted it to be. And why not? What good did visualizing plans gone astray ever do anyone?
He saw the twins of the Calla lying sprawled like corpses in the thickest, wettest part of the rice, with the muck oozing through their shirts and pants. He saw the adults beyond them, almost to the place where rice became riverbank. He saw Sarey Adams with her plates, and Ara of the Manni—Cantab’s wife—with a few of her own, for Ara also threw (although as one of the Manni-folk, she could never be at fellowship with the other women). He saw a couple of the men—Estrada, Anselm, Overholser—with their bahs hugged to their chests. Instead of a bah, Vaughn Eisenhart was hugging the rifle Roland had cleaned for him. In the road, approaching from the east, he saw rank upon rank of green-cloaked riders on gray horses. They were slowing now. The sun was finally up and gleaming on the metal of their masks. The joke of those masks, of course, was that there was more metal beneath them. Roland let the eye of his imagining rise, looking for other riders—a party coming into the undefended town from the south, for instance. He saw none. In his own mind, at least, the entire raiding party was here. And if they’d swallowed the line Roland and the Ka-Tet of the Ninety and Nine had paid out with such care, it should be here. He saw the bucka waggons lined up on the town side of the road and had time to wish they’d freed the teams from the traces, but of course this way it looked better, more hurried. He saw the path leading into the arroyos, to the mines both abandoned and working, to the honeycomb of caves beyond them. He saw the leading Wolves rein up here, dragging the mouths of their mounts into snarls with their gauntleted hands. He saw through their eyes, saw pictures not made of warm human sight but cold, like those in the Magda-seens. Saw the child’s hat Francine Tavery had let drop. His mind had a nose as well as an eye, and it smelled the bland yet fecund aroma of children. It smelled something rich and fatty—the stuff the Wolves would take from the children they abducted. His mind had an ear as well as a nose, and it heard—faintly—the same sort of clicks and clunks that had emanated from Andy, the same low whining of relays, servomotors, hydraulic pumps, gods knew what other machinery. His mind’s eye saw the Wolves first inspecting the confusion of tracks on the road (he hoped it looked like a confusion to them), then looking up the arroyo path. Because imagining them looking the other way, getting ready to broil the ten of them in their hide like chickens in a roasting pan, would do him no good. No, they were looking up the arroyo path. Must be looking up the arroyo path. They were smelling children—perhaps their fear as well as the powerful stuff buried deep in their brains—and seeing the few tumbled bits of trash and treasure their prey had left behind. Standing there on their mechanical horses. Looking.
Go in, Roland urged silently. He felt Jake stir a little beside him, hearing his thought. His prayer, almost. Go in. Go after them. Take what you will.
There was a loud clack! sound from one of the Wolves. This was followed by a brief blurt of siren. The siren was followed by the nasty warbling whistle Jake had heard out at the Dogan. After that, the horses began to move again. First there was the soft thud of their hooves on the oggan, then on the far stonier ground of the arroyo path. There was nothing else; these horses didn’t whinny nervously, like those still harnessed to the buckas. For Roland, it was enough. They had taken the bait. He slipped his revolver out of its holster. Beside him, Jake shifted again and Roland knew he was doing the same thing.
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!”
FIFTEEN
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
“SNEETCH”
HARRY POTTER MODEL
Serial # 465-11-AA HPJKR
CAUTION
EXPLOSIVE
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.
SIXTEEN
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.
“Lady Oh-RIZA!” Susannah screamed, and flung one final plate as the Wolf reined its horse around, turning it east, toward whatever it called home. The plate rose, screaming, and clipped off the top of the green hood. For a moment this last child thief sat in its saddle, shuddering and blaring out its alarm, calling for help that couldn’t come. Then it snapped violently backward, turning a complete somersault in midair, and thudded to the road. Its siren cut off in mid-whoop.
And so, Roland thought, our five minutes are over. He looked dully at the smoking barrel of his revolver, then dropped it back into its holster. One by one the alarms issuing from the downed robots were stopping.
Zalia was looking at him with a kind of dazed incomprehension. “Roland!” she said.
“Yes, Zalia.”
“Are they gone? Can they be gone? Really?”
“All gone,” Roland said. “I counted sixty-one, and they all lie here or on the road or in our ditch.”
For a moment Tian’s wife only stood there, processing this information. Then she did something that surprised a man who was not often surprised. She threw herself against him, pressing her body frankly to his, and covered his face with hungry, wet-lipped kisses. Roland bore this for a little bit, then held her away. The sickness was coming now. The feeling of uselessness. The sense that he would fight this battle or battles like it over and over for eternity, losing a finger to the lobstrosities here, perhaps an eye to a clever old witch there, and after each battle he would sense the Dark Tower a little farther away instead of a little closer. And all the time the dry twist would work its way in toward his heart.
Stop that, he told himself. It’s nonsense, and you know it.
“Will they send more, Roland?” Rosa asked.
“They may have no more to send,” Roland said. “If they do, there’ll almost certainly be fewer of them. And now you know the secret to killing them, don’t you?”
“Yes,” she said, and gave him a savage grin. Her eyes promised him more than kisses later on, if he’d have her.
“Go down through the corn,” he told her. “You and Zalia both. Tell them it’s safe to come up now. Lady Oriza has stood friend to the Calla this day. And to the line of Eld, as well.”
“Will ye not come yourself?” Zalia asked him. She had stepped away from him, and her cheeks were filled with fire. “Will ye not come and let em cheer ye?”
“Perhaps later on we may all hear them cheer us,” Roland said. “Now we need to speak an-tet. The boy’s had a bad shock, ye ken.”
“Yes,” Rosa said. “Yes, all right. Come on, Zee.” She reached out and took Zalia’s hand. “Help me be the bearer of glad tidings.”
SEVENTEEN
The two women crossed the road, making a wide berth around the tumbled, bloody remains of the poor Slightman lad. Zalia thought that most of what was left of him was only held together by his clothes, and shivered to think of the father’s grief.
The young man’s shor’leg lady-sai was at the far north end of the ditch, examining the bodies of the Wolves scattered there. She found one where the little revolving thing hadn’t been entirely shot off, and was still trying to turn. The Wolf’s green-gloved hands shivered uncontrollably in the dust, as if with palsy. While Rosa and Zalia watched, Susannah picked up a largish chunk of rock and, cool as a night in Wide Earth, brought it down on the remains of the thinking-cap. The Wolf stilled immediately. The low hum that had been coming from it stopped.
“We go to tell the others, Susannah,” Rosa said. “But first we want to tell thee well-done. How we do love thee, say true!”
Zalia nodded. “We say thankya, Susannah of New York. We say thankya more big-big than could ever be told.”
“Yar, say true,” Rosa agreed.
The lady-sai looked up at them and smiled sweetly. For a moment Rosalita looked a little doubtful, as if maybe she saw something in that dark-brown face that she shouldn’t. Saw that Susannah Dean was no longer here, for instance. Then the expression of doubt was gone. “We go with good news, Susannah,” said she.
“Wish you joy of it,” said Mia, daughter of none. “Bring them back as you will. Tell them the danger here’s over, and let those who don’t believe count the dead.”
“The legs of your pants are wet, do ya,” Zalia said.
Mia nodded gravely. Another contraction had turned her belly to a stone, but she gave no sign. “ ’Tis blood, I’m afraid.” She nodded toward the headless body of the big rancher’s wife. “Hers.”
The women started down through the corn, hand-in-hand. Mia watched Roland, Eddie, and Jake cross the road toward her. This would be the dangerous time, right here. Yet perhaps not too dangerous, after all; Susannah’s friends looked dazed in the aftermath of the battle. If she seemed a little off her feed, perhaps they would think the same of her.
She thought mostly it would be a matter of waiting for her opportunity. Waiting . . . and then slipping away. In the meantime, she rode the contraction of her belly like a boat riding a high wave.
They’ll know where you went, a voice whispered. It wasn’t a head-voice but a belly-voice. The voice of the chap. And that voice spoke true.
Take the ball with you, the voice told her. Take it with you when you go. Leave them no door to follow you through.
Aye.