1
Roland walked to the end of the platform, kicking bits of pink metal out of his way as he went. At the stairs, he paused and looked back at them somberly. "Mare dead. Be ready."
"They're not. . . um ... runny, are they?" Jake asked.
Roland frowned, then his face cleared as he understood what Jake meant. "No. Not runny. Dry."
"That's all right, then," Jake said, but he held his hand out to Susannah, who was being carried by Eddie for the time being. She gave him a smile and folded her fingers around his.
At the foot of the stairs leading down to the commuter parking lot at the side of the station, half a dozen corpses lay together like a collapsed cornshock. Two were women, three were men. The sixth was a child in a stroller. A summer spent dead in the sun and rain and heat (not to mention at the mercy of any stray cats, coons, or woodchucks that might be passing) had given the toddler a look of ancient wisdom and mystery, like a child mummy discovered in an Incan pyramid. Jake supposed from the faded blue outfit it was wearing that it had been a boy, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Eyeless, lipless, its skin faded to dusky gray, it made a joke of gender - why did the dead baby cross the road? Because it was stapled to the superflu.
Even so, the toddler seemed to have voyaged through Topeka's empty post-plague months better than the adults around it. They were little more than skeletons with hair. In a scrawny bunch of skin-wrapped bones that had once been fingers, one of the men clutched the handle of a suitcase that looked like the Samsonites Jake's parents owned. As with the baby (as with all of them), his eyes were gone; huge dark sockets stared at Jake. Below them, a ring of discolored teeth jutted in a pugnacious grin. What took you so long, kid? the dead man who was still clutching his suitcase seemed to be asking. Been waiting for you, and it's been a long hot summer!
Where were you guys hoping to go? Jake wondered. Just where in the crispy crap did you think might be safe enough? Des Moines? Sioux City? Fargo? The moon?
They went down the stairs, Roland first, the others behind him, Jake still holding Susannah's hand with Oy at his heels. The long-bodied bumbler seemed to descend each step in two stages, like a double trailer taking speed-bumps.
"Slow down, Roland," Eddie said. "I want to check the crip spaces before we go on. We might get lucky."
"Crip spaces?" Susannah said. "What're those?"
Jake shrugged. He didn't know. Neither did Roland.
Susannah switched her attention to Eddie. "I only ask, sugarpie, because it sounds a little on-pleasant. You know, like calling Negroes 'blacks' or gay folks 'fruits.' I know I'm just a poor ignorant pickaninny from the dark ages of 1964, but - "
"There." Eddie pointed at a rank of signs marking the parking-row closest to the station. There were actually two signs to a post, the top of each pair blue and white, the bottom red and white. When they drew a little closer, Jake saw the one on top was a wheelchair symbol. The one on the bottom was a warning: $200 fine for improper use of handicapped PARKING SPACE. strictly enforced by topeka p.d.
"See there!" Susannah said triumphantly. "They shoulda done that a long time ago! Why, back in my when, you're lucky if you can get your damn wheelchair through the doors of anything smaller than the Shop 'n Save. Hell, lucky if you can get it up over the curbs! And special parking? Forget it, sugar!"
The lot was jammed almost to capacity, but even with the end of the world at hand, only two cars that didn't have little wheelchair symbols on their license plates were parked in the row Eddie had called "the crip spaces."
Jake guessed that respecting the "crip spaces" was just one of those things that got a mysterious lifelong hold on people, like putting zip-codes on letters, parting your hair, or brushing your teeth before breakfast.
"And there it is!" Eddie cried. "Hold your cards, folks, but I think we have a Bingo!"
Still carrying Susannah on his hip - a thing he wouldhave been incapable of doing for any extended period of time even a month ago - Eddie hurried over to a boat of a Lincoln. Strapped on the roof was a complicated-looking racing bicycle; poking out of the half-open trunk was a wheelchair. Nor was this the only one; scanning the row of "crip spaces," Jake saw at least four more wheelchairs, most strapped to roof-racks, some stuffed into the backs of vans or station wagons, one (it looked ancient and fearsomely bulky) thrown into the bed of a pickup truck.
Eddie set Susannah down and bent to examine the rig holding the chair in the trunk. There were a lot of crisscrossing elastic cords, plus some sort of locking bar. Eddie drew the Ruger Jake had taken from his father's desk drawer. "Fire in the hole," he said cheerfully, and before any of them could even think of covering their ears, he pulled the trigger and blew the lock off the security-bar. The sound went rolling into the silence, then echoed back. The warbling sound of the thinny returned with it, as if the gunshot had snapped it awake. Sounds Hawaiian, doesn't it? Jake thought, and grimaced with distaste. Half an hour ago, he wouldn't have believed that a sound could be as physically upsetting, as ... well, the smell of rotting meat, say, but he believed it now. He looked up at the turnpike signs. From this angle he could see only their tops, but that was enough to confirm that they were shimmering again. It throws some kind of field, Jake thought. The way mixers and vacuum cleaners make static on the radio or TV, or the way that cyclotron gadget made the hair on my arms stand up when Mr. Kingery brought it to class and then asked for volunteers to come up and stand next to it.
Eddie wrenched the locking bar aside, and used Roland's knife to cut the elastic cords. Then he drew the wheelchair out of the trunk, examined it, unfolded it, and engaged the support which ran across the back at seat-level. "Voila!" he said.
Susannah had propped herself on one hand - Jake thought she looked a little like the woman in this Andrew Wyeth painting he liked, Christina 's World - and was examining the chair with some wonder.
"God almighty, it looks so little 'n light!"
"Modem technology at its finest, darlin," Eddie said. "It's what we fought Vietnam for. Hop in." He bent to help her. She didn't resist him, but her face was set and frowning as he lowered her into the seat. Like she expected the chair to collapse under her, Jake thought. As she ran her hands over the arms of her new ride, her face gradually relaxed.
Jake wandered off a little, walking down another row of cars, running his fingers over their hoods, leaving trails of dust. Oy padded after him, pausing once to lift his leg and squirt a tire, as if he had been doing it all his life.
"Make you homesick, honey?" Susannah asked from behind Jake. "Probably thought you'd never see an honest-to-God American automobile again, am I right?"
Jake considered this and decided she was not right. It had never crossed his mind that he would remain in Roland's world forever; that he might never see another car. He didn't think that would bother him, actually, but he also didn't think it was in the cards. Not yet, anyway. There was a certain vacant lot in the New York when he had come from. It was on the comer of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. Once there had been a deli there - Tom and Gerry's, Party Platters Our Specialty - but now it was just rubble, and weeds, and broken glass, and ...
... and a rose. Just a single wild rose growing in a vacant lot where a bunch of condos were scheduled to go up at some point, but Jake had an idea that there was nothing quite like it growing anywhere else on Earth. Maybe not on any of those other worlds Roland had mentioned, either. There were roses as one approached the Dark Tower; roses by the billion, according to Eddie, great bloody acres of them. He had seen them in a dream. Still, Jake suspected that his rose was different even from those . . . and that until its fate was decided, one way or the other, he was not done with the world of cars and TVs and policemen who wanted to know if you had any identification and what your parents' names were.
And speaking of parents, I may not be done with them, either, Jake thought. The idea hurried his heartbeat with a mixture of hope and alarm.
They stopped halfway down the row of cars, Jake staring blankly across a wide street (Gage Boulevard, he assumed) as he considered these things. Now Roland and Eddie caught up to them.
"This baby's gonna be great after a couple of months pushing the Iron Maiden," Eddie said with a grin. "Bet you could damn near puff it along." He blew a deep breath at the back of the wheelchair to demonstrate. Jake thought of telling Eddie that there were probably others back there in the "crip spaces" with motors in them, then realized what Eddie must have known right away: their batteries would be dead.
Susannah ignored him for the time being; it was Jake she was interested in. "You didn't answer me, sug. All these cars get you homesick?"
"Nah. But I was curious about whether or not they were all cars I knew. I thought maybe . . . if this version of 1986 grew out of some other world than my 1977, there'd be a way to tell. But I can't tell. Because things change so dam fast. Even in nine years .. ." He shrugged, then looked at Eddie. "You might be able to, though. I mean, you actually lived in 1986."
Eddie grunted. "I lived through it, but I didn't exactly observe it. I was fucked to the sky most of the time. Still... I suppose . .."
Eddie started pushing Susannah along the smooth macadam of the parking lot again, pointing to cars as they passed them. "Ford Explorer ... Chevrolet Caprice . . . and that one there's an old Pontiac, you can tell because of the split grille - "
"Pontiac Bonneville," Jake said. He was amused and a little touched by the wonder in Susannah's eyes - most of these cars must look as futuristic to her as Buck Rogers scout-ships. That made him wonder how Roland felt about them, and Jake looked around.
The gunslinger showed no interest in the cars at all. He was gazing across the street, into the park, toward the turnpike . . . except Jake didn't think he was actually looking at any of those things. Jake had an idea that Roland was simply looking into his own thoughts. If so, the expression on his face suggested that he wasn't finding anything good there.
"That's one of those little Chrysler K's," Eddie said, pointing, "and that's a Subaru. Mercedes SEL 450, excellent, the car of champions . . . Mustang .. . Chrysler Imperial, good shape but must be older'n God - "
"Watch it, boy," Susannah said, with a touch of what Jake thought was real asperity in her voice. "I recognize that one. Looks new to me."
"Sorry, Suze. Really. This one's a Cougar . .. another Chevy .. . and one more ... Topeka loves General Motors, big fuckin surprise there . . . Honda Civic . . . VW Rabbit... a Dodge ... a Ford . . . a - "
Eddie stopped, looking at a little car near the end of the row, white with red trim. "A Takuro," he said, mostly to himself. He went around to look at the trunk. "A Takuro Spirit, to be exact. Ever hear of that make and model, Jake of New York?"
Jake shook his head.
"Me, neither," he said. "Me fucking neither."
Eddie began pushing Susannah toward Gage Boulevard (Roland with them but still mostly off in his own private world, walking when they walked, stopping where they stopped). Just shy of the lot's automated entrance (stop TAKE TICKET), Eddie halted.
"At this rate, we'll be old before we get to yonder park and dead before we raise the turnpike," Susannah said.
This time Eddie didn't apologize, didn't seem even to hear her. He was looking at the bumper sticker on the front of a rusty old AMC Pacer. The sticker was blue and white, like the little wheelchair signs marking the "crip spaces." Jake squatted for a better look, and when Oy dropped his head on Jake's knee, the boy stroked him absently. With his other hand he reached out and touched the sticker, as if to verify its reality. kansas city monarchs, it said. The 0 in Monarchs was a baseball with speedlines drawn out behind it, as if it were leaving the park.
Eddie said: "Check me if I'm wrong on this, sport, because I know almost zilch about baseball west of Yankee Stadium, but shouldn't that say Kansas City Royals? You know, George Brett and all that?"
Jake nodded. He knew the Royals, and he knew Brett, although he had been a young player in Jake's when and must have been a fairly old one in Eddie's.
"Kansas City Athletics, you mean," Susannah said, sounding bewildered. Roland ignored it all; he was still cruising in his own personal ozone layer.
"Not by '86, darlin," Eddie said kindly. "By '86 the Athletics were in Oakland." He glanced from the bumper sticker to Jake. "Minor-league team, maybe?" he asked. "Triple A?"
"The Triple A Royals are still the Royals," Jake said. "They play in Omaha. Come on, let's go."
And although he didn't know about the others, Jake himself went on with a lighter heart. Maybe it was stupid, but he was relieved. He didn't believe that this terrible plague was waiting up ahead for his world, because there were no Kansas City Monarchs in his world. Maybe that wasn't enough information upon which to base a conclusion, but it felt true. And it was an enormous relief to be able to believe that his mother and father weren't slated to die of a germ people called Captain Trips and be burned in a ... a landfill, or something.
Except that wasn't quite a sure thing, even if this wasn't the 1986 version of his 1977 world. Because even if this awful plague had happened in a world where there were cars called Takuro Spirits and George Brett played for the K.C. Monarchs, Roland said the trouble was spreading . . .that things like the superflu were eating through the fabric of existence like battery acid eating its way into a piece of cloth.
The gunslinger had spoken of time's pool, a phrase which had at first struck Jake as romantic and charming. But suppose the pool was growing stagnant and swampy? And suppose these Bermuda Triangle-type things Roland called thinnies, once great rarities, were becoming the rule rather than the exception? Suppose - oh, and here was a hideous thought, one guaranteed to keep you lying awake until way past three - all of reality was sagging as the structural weaknesses of the Dark Tower grew? Suppose there came a crash, one level falling down into the next... and the next... and the next... until -
When Eddie grasped his shoulder and squeezed, Jake had to bite his tongue to keep from screaming.
"You're giving yourself the hoodoos," Eddie said.
"What do you know about it?" Jake asked. That sounded rude, but he was mad. From being scared or being seen into? He didn't know. Didn't much care, either.
"When it comes to the hoodoos, I'm an old hand," Eddie said. "I don't know exactly what's on your mind, but whatever it is, this would be an excellent time to stop thinking about it."
That, Jake decided, was probably good advice. They walked across the street together. Toward Gage Park and one of the greatest shocks of Jake's life.
2
Passing under the wrought-iron arch with gage park written on it in old-fashioned, curlicued letters, they found themselves on a brick path leading through a garden that was half English Formal and half Ecuadorian Jungle. With no one to tend it through the hot Midwestern summer, it had run to riot; with no one to tend it this fall, it had run to seed. A sign just inside the arch proclaimed this to be the Reinisch Rose Garden, and there were roses, all right; roses everywhere. Most had gone over, but some of the wild ones still throve, making Jake think of the rose in the vacant lot at Forty-sixth and Second with a longing so deep it was an ache.
Off to one side as they entered the park was a beautiful old-time carousel, its prancing steeds and racing stallions now still on their posts. The carousel's very silence, its flashing lights and steamy calliope music stilled forever, gave Jake a chill. Hung over the neck of one horse, dangling from a rawhide strip, was some kid's baseball glove. Jake was barely able to look at it.
Beyond the carousel, the foliage grew even thicker, strangling the path until the travellers edged along single-file, like lost children in a fairy-tale wood. Thorns from overgrown and unpruned rosebushes tore at Jake's clothes. He had somehow gotten into the lead (probably because Roland was still deep inside his own thoughts), and that was why he saw Charlie the Choo-Choo first.
His only thought while approaching the narrow-gauge train-tracks which crossed the path - they were little more than toy tracks, really - was of the gunslinger saying that ka was like a wheel, always rolling around to the same place again. We 're haunted by roses and trains, he thought. Why? I don't know. I guess it's just another rid -
Then he looked to his left, and "OhgoodnesstoChrist" fell out of his mouth, all in one word. The strength ran out of his legs and he sat down. His voice sounded watery and distant to his own ears. He didn't quite faint, but the color drained out of the world until the running-to-riot foliage on the west side of the park looked almost as gray as the autumn sky overhead.
"Jake! Jake, what's wrong!" It was Eddie, and Jake could hear the genuine concern in his voice, but it seemed to be coming over a bad long-distance connection. From Beirut, say, or maybe Uranus. And he could feel Roland's steadying hand on his shoulder, but it was as distant as Eddie's voice.
"Jake!" Susannah. "What's wrong, honey? What - "
Then she saw, and stopped talking at him. Eddie saw, and also stopped talking at him. Roland's hand fell away. They all stood looking ... except for Jake, who sat looking. He supposed that strength and feeling would come back into his legs eventually and he would get up, but right now they felt like limp macaroni.
The train was parked fifty feet up, by a toy station that mimicked the one across the street. Hanging from its eaves was a sign which read topeka. The train was Charlie the Choo-Choo, cowcatcher and all; a 402 Big Boy Steam Locomotive. And, Jake knew, if he found enough strength to get up on his feet and go over there, he would find a family of mice nested in the seat where the engineer (whose name had undoubtedly been Bob Something-or-other) had once sat. There would he another family, this one of swallows, nested in the smokestack.
And the dark, oily tears, Jake thought, looking at the tiny train waiting in front of its tiny station with his skin crawling all over his body and his balls hard and his stomach in a knot. At night it cries those dark, oily tears, and they're rusting the hell out of his fine Stratham headlight. But in your time, Charlie-boy, you pulled your share of kids, right? Around and around Gage Park you went, and the kids laughed, except some of them weren't really laughing; some of them, the ones who were wise to you, were screaming. The way I'd scream now, if I had the strength.
But his strength was coming back, and when Eddie put a hand under one of his arms and Roland put one under the other, Jake was able to get up. He staggered once, then stood steady.
"Just for the record, I don't blame you," Eddie said. His voice was grim; so was his face. "I feel a little like falling over myself. That's the one in your book; that's it to the life."
"So now we know where Miss Beryl Evans got the idea for Charlie the Choo-Choo" Susannah said. "Either she lived here, or sometime before 1942, when the damned thing was published, she visited Topeka - "
" - and saw the kids' train that goes through Reinisch Rose Garden and around Gage Park," Jake said. He was getting over his scare now, and he - not just an only child but for most of his life a lonely child - felt a burst of love and gratitude for his friends. They had seen what he had seen, they had understood the source of his fright. Of course - they were ka-tet.
"It won't answer silly questions, it won't play silly games," Roland said musingly. "Can you go on, Jake?"
"Yes."
"You sure?" Eddie asked, and when Jake nodded, Eddie pushed Susannah across the tracks. Roland went next. Jake paused a moment, remembering a dream he'd had - he and Oy had been at a train-crossing, and the bumbler had suddenly leaped onto the tracks, barking wildly at the oncoming headlight.
Now Jake bent and scooped Oy up. He looked at the rusting train standing silently in its station, its dark headlamp like a dead eye. "I'm not afraid," he said in a low voice. "Not afraid of you."
The headlamp came to life and flashed at him once, brief but glare-bright, emphatic: I know different; I know different, my dear little squint.
Then it went out.
None of the others had seen. Jake glanced once more at the train, expecting the light to flash again - maybe expecting the cursed thing to actually start up and make a run at him - but nothing happened.
Heart thumping hard in his chest, Jake hurried after his companions.
3
The Topeka Zoo (the World Famous Topeka Zoo, according to the signs) was full of empty cages and dead animals. Some of the animals that had been freed were gone, but others had died near to hand. The big apes were still in the area marked Gorilla Habitat, and they appeared to have died hand-in-hand. That made Eddie feel like crying, somehow. Since the last of the heroin had washed out of his system, his emotions always seemed on the verge of blowing up into a cyclone. His old pals would have laughed.
Beyond Gorilla Habitat, a gray wolf lay dead on the path. Oy approached it carefully, sniffed, then stretched out his long neck and began to howl.
"Make him quit that, Jake, you hear me?" Eddie said gruffly. He suddenly realized he could smell decaying animals. The aroma was faint, mostly boiled off over the hot days of the summer just passed, but what was left made him feel like upchucking. Not that he could precisely remember the last time he'd eaten.
"Oy! To me!"
Oy howled one final time, then returned to Jake. He stood on the kid's feet, looking up at him with those spooky wedding-ring eyes of his. Jake picked him up, took him in a circle around the wolf, and then set him down again on the brick path.
The path led them to a steep set of steps (weeds had begun to push through the stonework already), and at the top Roland looked back over the zoo and the gardens. From here they could easily see the circuit the toy train-tracks made, allowing Charlie's riders to tour the entire perimeter of Gage Park. Beyond it, fallen leaves clattered down Gage Boulevard before a rush of cold wind.
"So fell Lord Perth," murmured Roland.
"And the countryside did shake with that thunder," Jake finished.
Roland looked down at him with surprise, like a man awakening from a deep sleep, then smiled and put an arm around Jake's shoulders. "I have played Lord Perth in my time," he said.
"Have you?"
"Yes. Very soon now you shall hear."
4
Beyond the steps was an aviary full of dead exotic birds; beyond the aviary was a snackbar advertising (perhaps heartlessly, given the location) topeka's best buffaloburger; beyond the snackbar was another wrought iron arch with a sign reading come back to gage park real soon! Beyond this was the curving upslope of a limited-access-highway entrance ramp. Above it, the green signs they had first spotted from across the way stood clear.
"Tumpikin' again," Eddie said in a voice almost too low to hear. "Goddam." Then he sighed.
"What's tumpikin', Eddie?"
Jake didn't think Eddie was going to answer; when Susannah craned around to look at him as he stood with his fingers wrapped around the handles of the new wheelchair, Eddie looked away. Then he looked back, first at Susannah, then at Jake. "It's not pretty. Not much about my life before Gary Cooper here yanked me across the Great Divide was."
"You don't have to - "
"It's also no big deal. A bunch of us would get together - me, my brother Henry, Bum O'Hara, usually, 'cause he had a car, Sandra Corbitt, and maybe this friend of Henry's we called Jimmie Polio - and we'd stick all our names in a hat. The one we drew out was the ... the trip-guide, Henry used to call him. He - she, if it was Sandi - had to stay straight. Relatively, anyway. Everyone else got seriously goobered. Then we'd all pile into Bum's Chrysler and go up 1-95 into Connecticut or maybe take the Taconic Parkway into upstate New York . . . only we called it the Catatonic Parkway. Listen to Creedence or Marvin Gaye or maybe even Elvis 's Greatest Hits on the tape-player.
"It was better at night, best when the moon was full. We'd cruise for hours sometimes with our heads stuck out the windows like dogs do when they're riding, looking up at the moon and watching for shooting stars. We called it tumpikin'." Eddie smiled. It looked like an effort. "A charming life, folks."
"It sounds sort of fun," Jake said. "Not the drug part, I mean, but riding around with your pals at night, looking at the moon and listening to the music . . . that sounds excellent."
"It was, actually," Eddie said. "Even stuffed so full of reds we were as apt to pee on our own shoes as in the bushes, it was excellent." He paused. "That's the horrible part, don't you get it?"
"Tumpikin'," the gunslinger said. "Let's do some."
They left Gage Park and crossed the road to the entrance ramp.
5
Someone had spray-painted over both signs marking the ramp's ascending curve. On the one reading st. louis 215, someone had slashed
in black. On the one marked next rest area 10 mi.,
had been written in fat red letters. That scarlet was still bright enough to scream even after an entire summer. Each had been decorated with a symbol -
"Do you know what any of that truck means, Roland?" Susannah asked. Roland shook his head, but he looked troubled, and that introspective look never left his own eyes. They went on.
6
At the place where the ramp merged with the turnpike, the two men, the boy, and the bumbler clustered around Susannah in her new wheelchair. All of them looked east.
Eddie didn't know what the traffic situation would be like once they cleared Topeka, but here all the lanes, those headed west as well as the eastbound ones on their side, were crammed with cars and trucks. Most of the vehicles were piled high with possessions gone rusty with a season's worth of rain.
But the traffic was the least of their concerns as they stood there, looking silently eastward. For half a mile or so on either side of them, the city continued - they could see church steeples, a strip of fast food places (Arby's, Wendy's, McD's, Pizza Hut, and one Eddie had never heard of called Boing Boing Burgers), car dealerships, the roof of a bowling alley called Heartland Lanes. They could see another turnpike exit ahead, the sign by the ramp reading Topeka State Hospital and S.W. 6th. Beyond the off-ramp there bulked a massive old red brick edifice with tiny windows peering like desperate eyes out of the climbing ivy. Eddie figured a place that looked so much like Attica had to be a hospital, probably the kind of welfare purgatory where poor folks sat in shitty plastic chairs for hours on end, all so some doctor could look at them like they were dogshit.
Beyond the hospital, the city abruptly ended and the thinny began.
To Eddie, it looked like flat water standing in a vast marshland. It crowded up to the raised barrel of 1-70 on both sides, silvery and shimmering, making the signs and guardrails and stalled cars waver like mirages; it gave off that liquidy humming sound like a stench.
Susannah put her hands to her ears, her mouth drawn down. "I don't know as I can stand it. Really. I don't mean to be spleeny, but already I feel like vomiting, and I haven't had anything to eat all day."
Eddie felt the same way. Yet, sick as he felt he could hardly take his eyes away from the thinny. It was as if unreality had been given . . . what? A face? No. The vast and humming silver shimmer ahead of them had no face, was the very antithesis of a face, in fact, but it had a body ... an aspect ... a presence.
Yes; that last was best. It had a presence, as the demon which had come to the circle of stones while they were trying to draw Jake had had a presence.
Roland, meanwhile, was rummaging in the depths of his purse. He appeared to dig all the way to the bottom before finding what he wanted: a fistful of bullets. He plucked Susannah's right hand off the arm of her chair, and put two of the bullets in her palm. Then he took two more and poked them, slug ends first, into his ears. Susannah looked first amazed, then amused, then doubtful. In the end, she followed his example. Almost at once an expression of blissful relief filled her face.
Eddie unshouldered the pack he wore and pulled out the half-full box of .44s that went with Jake's Ruger. The gunslinger shook his head and held out his hand. There were still four bullets in it, two for Eddie and two for Jake.
"What's wrong with these?" Eddie shook a couple of shells from the box that had come from behind the hanging files in Elmer Chambers's desk drawer.
"They're from your world and they won't block out the sound. Don't ask me how I know that; I just do. Try them if you want, but they won't work."
Eddie pointed at the bullets Roland was offering. "Those are from our world, too. The gun-shop on Seventh and Forty-ninth. Clements', wasn't that the name?"
"These didn't come from there. These are mine, Eddie, reloaded often but originally brought from the green land. From Gilead."
"You mean the wets?" Eddie asked incredulously. "The last of the wet shells from the beach? The ones that really got soaked?"
Roland nodded.
"You said those would never fire again! No matter how dry they got! That the powder had been .. . what did you say? 'Flattened.' "
Roland nodded again.
"So why'd you save them? Why bring a bunch of useless bullets all this way?"
"What did I teach you to say after a kill, Eddie? In order to focus your mind?"
" 'Father, guide my hands and heart so that no part of the animal will be wasted.' "
Roland nodded a third time. Jake took two shells and put them in his ears. Eddie took the last two, but first he tried the ones he'd shaken from the box. They muffled the sound of the thinny, but it was still there, vibrating in the center of his forehead, making his eyes water the way they did when he had a cold, making the bridge of his nose feel like it was going to explode. He picked them out, and put the bigger slugs - the ones from Roland's ancient revolvers - in their place. Putting bullets in my ears, he thought. Ma would shit. But that didn't matter. The sound of the thinny was gone - or at least down to a distant drone - and that was what did. When he turned and spoke to Roland, he expected his own voice to sound muffled, the way it did when you were wearing earplugs, but he found he could hear himself pretty well.
"Is there anything you don't know?" he asked Roland.
"Yes," Roland said. "Quite a lot."
"What about Oy?" Jake asked.
"Oy will be fine, I think," Roland said. "Come on, let's make some miles before dark."
7
Oy didn't seem bothered by the warble of the thinny, but he stuck close to Jake Chambers all that afternoon, looking mistrustfully at the stalled cars which clogged the eastbound lanes of 1-70. And yet, Susannah saw, those cars did not clog the highway completely. The congestion eased as the travellers left downtown behind them, but even where the traffic had been heavy, some of the dead vehicles had been pulled to one side or the other; a number had been pushed right off the highway and onto the median strip, which was a concrete divider in the metro area and grass outside of town.
Somebody's been at work with a wrecker, that's my guess, Susannah thought. The idea made her happy. No one would have bothered clearing a path down the center of the highway while the plague was still raging, and if someone had done it after - if someone had been around to do it after - that meant the plague hadn't gotten everyone; those crammed-together obituaries weren't the whole story.
There were corpses in some of the cars, but they, like the ones at the foot of the station steps, were dry, not runny - mummies wearing seat-belts, for the most part. The majority of the cars were empty. A lot of the drivers and passengers caught in the traffic jams had probably tried to walk out of the plague-zone, she supposed, but she guessed that wasn't the only reason they had taken to their feet.
Susannah knew that she herself would have to be chained to the steering wheel to keep her inside a car once she felt the symptoms of some fatal disease setting in; if she was going to die, she would want to do it in God's open air. A hill would be best, someplace with a little elevation, but even a wheatfield would do, came it to that. Anything but coughing your last while smelling the air-freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.
At one time Susannah guessed they would have been able to see many of the corpses of the fleeing dead, but not now. Because of the thinny. They approached it steadily, and she knew exactly when they entered it. A kind of tingling shudder ran through her body, making her draw her shortened legs up, and the wheelchair stopped for a moment. When she turned around she saw Roland, Eddie, and Jake holding their stomachs and grimacing. They looked as if they had all been stricken with the bellyache at the same time. Then Eddie and Roland straightened up. Jake bent to stroke Oy, who had been staring at him anxiously.
"You boys all right?" Susannah asked. The question came out in the half-querulous, half-humorous voice of Detta Walker. Using that voice was nothing she planned; sometimes it just came out.
"Yeah," Jake said. "Feels like I got a bubble in my throat, though." He was staring uneasily at the thinny. Its silvery blankness was all around them now, as if the whole world had turned into a flat Norfolk fen at dawn. Nearby, trees poked out of its silver surface, casting distorted reflections that never stayed quite still or quite in focus. A little farther away, Susannah could see a grain-storage tower, seeming to float. The words gaddish feeds were written on the side in pink letters which might have been red under normal conditions.
"Feels to me like I got a bubble in my mind," Eddie said. "Man, look at that shit shimmer."
"Can you still hear it?" Susannah asked.
"Yeah. But faint. I can live with it. Can you?"
"Uh-huh. Let's go."
It was like riding in an open-cockpit plane through broken clouds, Susannah decided. They'd go for what felt like miles through that humming brightness that was not quite fog and not quite water, sometimes seeing shapes (a bam, a tractor, a Stuckey's billboard) loom out of it, then losing everything but the road, which ran consistently above the thinny's bright but somehow indistinct surface.
Then, all at once, they would run into the clear. The humming would fall away to a faint drone; you could even unplug your ears and not be too bothered, at least until you got near the other side of the break. Once again there were vistas ...
Well, no, that was too grand, Kansas didn't exactly have vistas, but there were open fields and the occasional copse of autumn-bright trees marking a spring or cow-pond. No Grand Canyon or surf crashing on Portland Headlight, hut at least you could see a by-God horizon off in the distance, and lose some of that unpleasant feeling of entombment. Then, back into the goop you went. Jake came closest to describing it, she thought, when he said that being in the thinny was like finally reaching the shining water-mirage you could often see far up the highway on hot days.
Whatever it was and however you described it, being inside it was claustrophobic, purgatorial, all the world gone except for the twin barrels of the turnpike and the hulks of the cars, like derelict ships abandoned on a frozen ocean.
Please help us get out of this, Susannah prayed to a God in whom she no longer precisely believed - she still believed in something, but since awakening to Roland's world on the beach of the Western Sea, her concept of the invisible world had changed considerably. Please help us find the Beam again. Please help us escape this world of silence and death.
They ran into the biggest clear space they had yet come to near a roadsign which read big springs 2 mi. Behind them, in the west, the setting sun shone through a brief rift in the clouds, skipping scarlet splinters across the top of the thinny and lighting the windows and taillights of the stalled cars in tones of fire. On either side of them empty fields stretched away. Full Earth come and gone, Susannah thought. Reaping come and gone, too. This is what Roland calls closing the year. The thought made her shiver.
"We'll camp here for the night," Roland said soon after they had passed the Big Springs exit ramp. Up ahead they could see the thinny encroaching on the highway again, but that was miles farther on - you could see a damn long way in eastern Kansas, Susannah was discovering. "We can get firewood without going too near the thinny, and the sound won't be too bad. We may even be able to sleep without bullets stuffed into our ears."
Eddie and Jake climbed over the guardrails, descended the bank, and foraged for wood along a dry creekbed, staying together as Roland admonished them to do. When they came back, the clouds had gulped the sun again, and an ashy, uninteresting twilight had begun to creep over the world.
The gunslinger stripped twigs for kindling, then laid his fuel around them in his usual fashion, building a kind of wooden chimney in the breakdown lane. As he did it, Eddie strolled across to the median strip and stood there, hands in pockets, looking east. After a few moments, Jake and Oy joined him.
Roland produced his flint and steel, scraped fire into the shaft of his chimney, and soon the little campfire was burning.
"Roland!" Eddie called. "Suze! Come over here! Look at this!"
Susannah started rolling her chair toward Eddie, then Roland - after a final check of his campfire - took hold of the handles and pushed her.
"Look at what?" Susannah asked.
Eddie pointed. At first Susannah saw nothing, although the turnpike was perfectly visible even beyond the point where the thinny closed in again, perhaps three miles ahead. Then ... yes, she might see something. Maybe. A kind of shape, at the farthest edge of vision. If not for the fading daylight...
"Is it a building?" Jake asked. "Cripes, it looks like it's built right across the highway!"