Eddie tore his pants open, feeling like some cut-rate version of Superman, and finally managed to free the Ruger. He hit the safety with the heel of his left palm, placed his elbow on his leg just above the knee, and began to fire. There was no need to think—no need to even aim. Roland had told them that in battle a gunslinger’s hands worked on their own, and Eddie now discovered it was true. It would have been hard for a blind man to miss at this range, anyway. Susannah had cut the numbers of the charging Pubes to no more than fifteen; Eddie went through the remainder like a storm wind in a wheatfield, dropping four in less than two seconds.
Now the single face of the mob, that look of glazed and mindless eagerness, began to break apart. The man with the hammer abruptly tossed his weapon aside and ran for it, limping extravagantly on a pair of arthritis-twisted legs. He was followed by two others. The rest of them milled uncertainly in the street. “Come on, you deucies!” a relatively young man snarled. He wore his blue scarf around his throat like a rally-racer’s ascot. He was bald except for two fluffs of frizzy red hair, one on each side of his head. To Susannah, this fellow looked like Clarabell the Clown; to Eddie he looked like Ronald McDonald; to both of them he looked like trouble. He threw a home-made spear that might have started life as a steel tableleg. It clattered harmlessly into the street to Eddie and Susannah’s right. “Come on, I say! We can get em if we all stick togeth—“
“Sorry, guy,” Eddie murmured, and shot him in the chest. Clarabell/Ronald staggered backward, one hand going to his shirt. He stared at Eddie with huge eyes that told his tale with heartbreaking clarity: this wasn’t supposed to happen. The hand dropped heavily to the young man’s side. A single runlet of blood, incredibly bright in the gray day, slipped from the comer of his mouth. The few remaining Pubes stared at him mutely as he slipped to his knees, and one of them turned to run. “Not at all,” Eddie said. “Stay put, my retarded friend, or you’re going to get a good look at the clearing where your path ends.” He raised his voice. “Drop em, boys and girls! All of em! Now!”
“You …” the dying man whispered. “You . . . gunslinger?” “That’s right,” Eddie said. His eyes surveyed the remaining Pubes grimly. “Cry your . . . pardon,” the man with the frizzy red hair gasped, and then he fell forward onto his face.
“Gunslingers?” one of the others asked. His tone was one of dawning horror and realization.
“Well, you’re stupid, but you ain’t deaf,” Susannah said, “and that’s somethin, anyway.” She waggled the barrel of the gun, which Eddie was quite sure was empty. For that matter, how many rounds could be left in the Ruger? He realized he didn’t have any idea how many rounds the clip held, and cursed himself for a fool . . . but had he really believed it could come to something like this? He didn’t think so. “You heard him, folks. Drop em. Recess is over.” One by one, they complied. The woman who was wearing a pint or so of Mr. Sword-and-Kilt’s blood on her face said, “You shouldn’t've killed Winston, missus—’twas his birthday, so it was.”
“Well, I guess he should have stayed home and eaten some more birthday cake,” Eddie said. Given the overall quality of this experience, he didn’t find either the woman’s comment or his own response at all surreal. There was one other woman among the remaining Pubes, a scrawny thing whose long blonde hair was coming out in big patches, as if she had the mange. Eddie observed her sidling toward the dead dwarf—and the potential safety of the overgrown arches beyond him—and put a bullet into the cracked cement close by her foot. He had no idea what he wanted with her, but what he didn’t want was one of them giving the rest of them ideas. For one thing, he was afraid of what his hands might do if the sickly, sullen people before him tried to run. Whatever his head thought about this gunslinging business, his hands had discovered they liked it just fine.
“Stand where you are, beautiful. Officer Friendly says play it safe.” He glanced at Susannah and was disturbed by the grayish quality of her complexion. “Suze, you all right?” he asked in a lower voice. “Yes.”
“You’re not going to faint or anything, are you? Because—” “No.” She looked at him with eyes so dark they were like caves. “It’s just that I never shot anyone before . . . okay?”
Well, you better get used to it rose to his lips. He bit it back and returned his gaze to the five people who remained before them. They were looking at him and Susannah with a species of sullen fear which nevertheless stopped well short of terror.
Shit, most of them have forgotten what terror is, he thought. Joy, sadness, love . . . same thing. I don’t think they feel much of anything, anymore. They’ve been living in this purgatory too long.