It wasn't just light keeping it from attacking them, she reckoned, but fear of fire. The thing must have hung back while they were in the part of the passage where the glow-globes still worked, thinking (if it could think) that it would wait and take them once they were in the dark. She had an idea that if it had known they had access to fire, it might simply have closed some or all of its many eyes and pounced on them where a few of the globes were out and the light was dimmer. Now it was at least temporarily out of luck, because the bones made surprisingly good torches (the idea that they were being helped by the recovering Beam in this regard did not cross her mind). The only question was whether or not the Sterno would hold out.
She was able to conserve now because the bones burned on their own once they were going-except for a couple of damp ones that she had to cast aside after lighting her next torches from their guttering tips-but you did have to get diem going, and she was already deep into the third and last can. She bitterly regretted the one she'd tossed away when the thing had been closing in on them, but didn't know what else she could have done. She also wished Roland would go faster, although she guessed he now couldn't have maintained much speed even if she'd been faced around the right way and holding onto him.
Maybe a short burst, but surely no more. She covild feel his muscles trembling under his shirt. He was close to blown out.
Five minutes later, while getting a handful of canned heat to slather on a bony bulb of knee atop a shinbone, her fingers touched the bottom of the Sterno can. From the darkness behind them came another of those watery stomping sounds.
The tail of their friend, her mind insisted. It was keeping pace.
Waiting for them to run out of fuel and for the world to go dark again. Then it would pounce.
Then it would eat.
FOURTEEN
They were going to need a fallback position. She became sure of that almost as soon as the tips of her fingers touched the bottom of the can. Ten minutes and three torches later, Susannah prepared to tell the gunslinger to stop when-and if-they came to another especially large ossuary. They could make a bonfire of rags and bones, and once it was going hot and bright, they'd simply run like hell. When-and if-they heard the thing on their side of the fire-barrier again, Roland could lighten his load and speed his heels by leaving her behind. She saw this idea not as self-sacrificing but merely logical-there was no reason for the monstrous centipede to get both of them if they could avoid it. And she had no plans to let it take her, as far as that went. Certainly not alive. She had his gun, and she'd use it. Five shots for Sai Centipede; if it kept coming after that, the sixth for herself.
Before she could say any of these things, however, Roland got in three words that stopped all of hers. "Light," he panted.
"Up ahead."
She craned around and at first saw nothing, probably because of the torch she'd been holding out. Then she did: a faint white glow.
"More of those globes?" she asked. "A stretch of them that are still working?"
"Maybe. I don't think so."
Five minutes later she realized she could see the floor and walls in the light of her latest torch. The floor was covered with a fine scrim of dust and pebbles such as could only have been blown in from outside. Susannah threw her arms up over her head, one hand holding a blazing bone wrapped in a shirt, and gave a scream of triumph. The thing behind her answered with a roar of fury and frustration that did her heart good even as it pebbled her skin with goosebumps.
"Goodbye, honey!" she screamed. "Goodbye, you eyecovered muthafuck!"
It roared again and thrust itself forward. For one moment she saw it plain: a huge round lump that couldn't be called a face in spite of the lolling mouth; the segmented body, scratched and oozing from contact with the rough walls; a quartet of stubby armlike appendages, two on each side. These ended in snapping pincers. She shrieked and thrust the torch back at it, and the thing retreated with another deafening roar.
"Did your mother never teach you that it's wrong to tease the animals?" Roland asked her, and his tone was so dry she couldn't tell if he was kidding her or not.
Five minutes after that they were out.
Chapter II:ON BADLANDS AVENUE
ONE
They exited through a crumbling hillside arch beside a Quonset hut similar in shape but much smaller than the Arc 16 Experimental Station. The roof of this little building was covered with rust. There were piles of bones scattered around the front in a rough ring. The surrounding rocks had been blackened and splintered in places; one boulder the size of the Queen Anne house where the Breakers had been kept was split in two, revealing an interior filled with sparkling minerals.
The air was cold and they could hear the resdess whine of the wind, but the rocks blocked the worst of it and they turned their faces up to the sharp blue sky with wordless gratitude.
"There was some kind of battle here, wasn't there?" she asked.
"Yes, I'd say so. A big one, long ago." He sounded utterly whipped.