The driver hauled on his vehicle's steering wheel and it slipped past on Roland's left, missing him by inches, merely throwing dust into his face instead of running him down. By then it was slowing, the driver perhaps applying the machine's brake now that it was too late. The side squalled across the hood of the pickup truck, slowing the van further, but it was not done doing damage even so. Before coming to a complete stop it struck King again, this time as he lay on the ground.
Roland heard the snap of a breaking bone. It was followed by the writer's cry of pain. And now Roland knew for sure about the pain in his own hip, didn't he? It had never been dry twist at all.
He scrambled to his feet, only peripherally aware that his pain was entirely gone. He looked at Stephen King's unnaturally twisted body beneath the left front wheel of the blue vehicle and thought Good! with unthinking savagery. Good! If someone has to die here, let it be you! To hell with Gan 's navel, to hell with the stories that come out of it, to hell with the Tower, let it be you and not my boy!
The bumbler raced past Roland to where Jake lay on his back at the rear of the van with blue exhaust blowing into his open eyes. Oy did not hesitate; he seized the Oriza pouch that was still slung over Jake's shoulder and used it to pull the boy away from the van, doing it inch by inch, his short strong legs digging up puffs of dust. Blood was pouring from Jake's ears and the corners of his mouth. The heels of his shor'boots left a double line of tracks in the dirt and crisp brown pine needles.
Roland staggered to Jake and fell on his knees beside him.
His first thought was that Jake was all right after all. The boy's limbs were straight, thank all the gods, and the mark running across the bridge of his nose and down one beardless cheek was oil flecked with rust, not blood as Roland had first assumed.
There was blood coming out of his ears, yes, and his mouth, too, but die latter stream might only be flowing from a cut in the lining of his cheek, or-
"Go and see to the writer," Jake said. His voice was calm, not at all constricted by pain. They might have been sitting around a little cookfire after a day on the trail, waiting for what Eddie liked to call vittles... or, if he happened to be feeling particularly humorous (as he often was), "wittles."
"The writer can wait," Roland said curdy, thinking: I've been given a miracle. One made by the combination of a boy's yielding, not-quite-finished body, and the soft earth that gave beneath him when that bastard's truckomobile ran over him.
"No," Jake said. "He can't." And when he moved, trying to sit up, his shirt pulled a little tighter against the top half of his body and Roland saw the dreadful concavity of the boy's chest. More blood poured from Jake's mouth, and when he tried to speak again he began to cough, instead. Roland's heart seemed to twist like a rag inside his chest, and there was a moment to wonder how it could possibly go on beating in the face of this.
Oy voiced a moaning cry, Jake's name expressed in a halfhowl that made Roland's arms burst out in gooseflesh.
"Don't try to talk," Roland said. "Something may be sprung inside of you. A rib, mayhap two."
Jake turned his head to the side. He spat out a mouthful of blood-some of it ran down his cheek like chewing tobacco-and took a hold on Roland's wrist. His grip was strong; so was his voice, each word clear.
"Everything's sprung. This is dying-I know because I've done it before." What he said next was what Roland had been thinking just before they started out from Cara Laughs: "If ka will say so, let it be so. See to the man we came to save!"
It was impossible to deny the imperative in the boy's eyes and voice. It was done, now, the Ka of Nineteen played out to the end. Except, perhaps, for King. The man they had come to save. How much of their fate had danced from the tips of his flying, tobacco-stained fingers? All? Some? This?
Whatever the answer, Roland could have killed him with his bare hands as he lay pinned beneath the machine that had struck him, and never mind that King hadn't been driving the van; if he had been doing what ka had meant him to be doing, he never would have been here when the fool came calling, and Jake's chest wouldn't have that terrible sunken look. It was too much, coming so soon after Eddie had been bushwhacked.
And yet-
"Don't move," he said, getting up. "Oy, don't lethim move."
"I won't move." Every word still clear, still sure. But now Roland could see blood also darkening the bottom of Jake's shirt and the crotch of his jeans, blooming there like roses.
Once before he died and had come back. But not from this world. In this one, death was always for keeps.
Roland turned to where the writer lay.
TWO