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 pi - "
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?"