Lovely.
Roland and Jake took fresh plates from the dwindling supply and used them to cut through the three runs of fence.
The high-voltage one parted with a bitter, sizzling crack and a brief blink of blue fire. Then they were in. Moving quickly and without speaking, they ran past the now-unguarded towers with Oy trailing closely at Jake's heels. Here was an alley running between Henry Graham's Drug Store amp; Soda Fountain and the Pleasantville Book Store.
At the head of the alley, they looked out and saw that Main Street was currently empty, although a tangy electric smell (a subway-station smell, Eddie thought) from the last two fire engines still hung in the air, making the overall stench even worse. In the distance, fire-sirens whooped and smoke detectors brayed. Here in Pleasantville, Eddie couldn't help but think of the Main Street in Disneyland: no litter in the gutters, no rude graffiti on the walls, not even any dust on the plate-glass windows.
This was where homesick Breakers came when they needed a little whiff of America, he supposed, but didn't any of them want anything better, anything more realistic, than this plastic-fantastic still life? Maybe it looked more inviting with folks on the sidewalks and in the stores, but that was hard to believe. Hard for him to believe, at least. Maybe it was only a city boy's chauvinism.
Across from them were Pleasantville Shoes, Gay Paree Fashions, Hair Today, and the Gem Theater (COME IN IT'S KOOL INSIDE said the banner hanging from the bottom of the marquee). Roland raised a hand, motioning Eddie and Jake across to that side of the street. It was there, if all went as he hoped (it almost never did), that they would set their ambush.
They crossed in a crouch, Oy still scurrying at Jake's heel. So far everything seemed to be working like a charm, and that made the gunslinger nervous, indeed.
SIXTEEN
Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a smallscale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.
Never mind. We have reached that point, the one where the Battle of Algul Siento took on a life of its own, and all I can do now is point here and there and hope you can bring your own order out of the general chaos.
SEVENTEEN
Trampas, the eczema-plagued low man who inadvertently let Ted in on so much, rushed to the stream of Breakers who were fleeing from Damli House and grabbed one, a scrawny excarpenter with a receding hairline named Birdie McCann.
"Birdie, what is it?" Trampas shouted. He was currently wearing his thinking-cap, which meant he could not share in the telepathic pulse all around him. "What's happening, do you kn-"
"Shooting!" Birdie yelled, pulling free. "Shooting! They're out there!" He pointed vaguely behind him.
"Who? How m-"
"Watch out you idiots it's not slowing dozun!" yelled Gaskie O'Tego, from somewhere behind Trampas arid McCann.
Trampas looked up and was horrified to see the lead fire engine come roaring and swaying along the center of the Mall, red lights flashing, two stainless-steel robot firemen now clinging to the back. Pimli, Finli, and Jakli leaped aside. So did Tassa the houseboy. But Tammy Kelly lay facedown on the grass in a spreading soup of blood. She had been flattened by Fire-Response Team Bravo, which had not actually scrambled to fight a fire in over eight hundred years. Her complaining days were over.
And-
"STAND CLEAR!" blared the fire engine. Behind it, two more engines swerved gaudily around either side of Warden's House. Once again Tassa the houseboy barely leaped in time to save his skin. "THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!" Some sort of metallic node rose from the center of the engine, split open, and produced a steel whirligig that began to spray highpressure streams of water in eight different directions. "MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!"
And-
James Cagney-the taheen who was standing with Gaskie in the foyer of the Feveral Hall dormitory when the trouble started, remember him?-saw what was going to happen and began yelling at the guards who were staggering out of Damli's west wing, red-eyed and coughing, some with their pants on fire, a few-oh, praise Gan and Bessa and all the gods-with weapons.
Cag screamed at them to get out of the way and could hardly hear himself in the cacophony. He saw Joey Rastosovich pull two of them aside and watched the Earnshaw kid bump aside another. A few of the coughing, weeping escapees saw the oncoming fire engine and scattered on their own. Then Fire-
Response Team Bravo was plowing through the guards from the west wing, not slowing, roaring straight for Damli House, spraying water to every point of the compass.