by Stephen King
Gaskie was hollering. And then Pimli o’ New Jersey heard a sound that chilled him to the bone, a rapid chow-chow-chow sound. Gunfire! If some clown was shooting at his Breakers, that clown’s head would finish the day on a high pole, by the gods.
That the guards rather than the Breakers might be under attack had at that point still not crossed his mind, nor that of the slighdy wilier Finli, either. Too much was happening too fast.
ELEVEN
At the south end of the Devar compound, the syncopated honking sound was almost loud enough to split eardrums.
“Christ!” Eddie said, and couldn’t hear himself.
In the south watchtowers, the guards were turned away from them, looking north. Eddie couldn’t see any smoke yet.
Perhaps the guards could from their higher vantage-points.
Roland grabbed Jake’s shoulder, then pointed at the soo LINE boxcar. Jake nodded and scrambled beneath it with Oy at his heels. Roland held both hands out to Eddie-Stay where you are!-and then followed. On the other side of the boxcar the boy and the gunslinger stood up, side by side. They would have been clearly visible to the sentries, had the attention of those worthies not been distracted by the smoke detectors and fire alarms inside the compound.
Suddenly the entire front of the Pleasantville Hardware Company descended into a slot in the ground. A robot fire engine, all bright red paint and gleaming chrome, came bolting out of the hitherto concealed garage. A line of red lights pulsed down the center of its elongated body, and an amplified voice bellowed, “STAND CLEAR! THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO! STAND CLEAR! MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE
TEAMBRAVOr There must be no gunfire from this part of the Devar, not yet. The south end of the compound must seem safe to the increasingly frightened inmates of Algul Siento: don’t worry, folks, here’s your port in today’s unexpected shitstorm.
The gunslinger dipped a ’Riza from Jake’s dwindling supply and nodded for the boy to take another. Roland pointed to the guard in the righthand tower, then once more at Jake. The boy nodded, cocked his arm across his chest, and waited for Roland to give him the go.
TWELVE
Once you hear the horn that signals the change of shifts, Roland had told Susannah, take it to them. Do as much damage as you can, but don’t let them see they’re only facing a single person, for your father’s sake!
As if he needed to tell her that.
She could have taken the three watchtower guards while the horn was still blaring, but something made her wait. A few seconds later, she was glad she had. The rear door of the Queen Anne burst open so violently it tore off its upper hinge. Breakers piled out, clawing at those ahead of them in their panic (these are the would-be destroyers of the universe, she thought, these sheep), and among them she saw half a dozen of the freakboys with animal heads and at least four of those creepy humanoids with the masks on.
Susannah took the guard in the west tower first, and had shifted her aim to the pair in the east tower before the first casualty in the Batde of Algul Siento had fallen over the railing and tumbled to the ground with his brains dribbling out of his hair and down his cheeks. The Coyote machine-pistol, switched to the middle setting, fired in low-pitched bursts of three:
Chow! Chow! Chow!
The taheen and the low man in the east tower spun widdershins to each other, like figures in a dance. The taheen crumpled on the catwalk that skirted the top of the watchtower; the low man was driven into the rail, flipped over it with his bootheels in the sky, then plummeted head-first to the ground. She heard the crack his neck made when it broke.
A couple of the milling Breakers spotted this unfortunate fellow’s descent and screamed.
“Put up your hands!” That was Dinky, she recognized his voice. “Put up your hands if you’re a Breaker!”
No one questioned the idea; in these circumstances, anyone who sounded like he knew what was going on was in unquestioned charge. Some of the Breakers-but not all, not yet-put their hands up. It made no difference to Susannah.
She didn’t need raised hands to tell the difference between the sheep and the goats. A kind of haunted clarity had fallen over her vision.
She flicked the fire-control switch from BURST to SINGLE SHOT and began to pick off the guards who’d come up from The Study with the Breakers. Taheen… can-toi, get him… a hume but don’t shoot her, she’s a Breaker even though she doesn’t have her hands up… don’t ask me how I know but I do…
Susannah squeezed the Coyote’s trigger and the head of the hume next to the woman in the bright red slacks exploded in a mist of blood and bone. The Breakers screamed like children, staring around with their eyes bulging and their hands up. And now Susannah heard Dinky again, only this time not his physical voice. It was his mental voice she heard, and it was much louder:
(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP. YOU WON’T BE HURT)
Which was her cue to break cover and start moving. She’d gotten eight of the Crimson King’s bad boys, counting the three in the towers-not that it was mvich of an accomplishment, given their panic-and she saw no more, at least for the time being.
Susannah twisted the hand-throttle and scooted the SCT toward one of the other abandoned sheds. The gadget’s pickup was so lively that she almost tumbled off the bicycle-style seat.
Trying not to laugh (and laughing anyway), she shouted at the top of her lungs, in her best Detta Walker vulture-screech:
“Git outta here, muthafuckahs! Git south! Hands up so we knoiu youfum the bad boys! Everyone doan have their hands up goan get a bullet in the haid! Y’all trus’ me on it!n In through the door of the next shed, scraping a balloon tire of the SCT on the jamb, but not quite hard enough to tip it over. Praise God, for she never would have had enough strength to right it on her own. In here, one of the “lazers” was set on a snap-down tripod. She pushed the toggle-switch marked ON and was wondering if she needed to do something else with the INTERVAL switch when the weapon’s muzzle emitted a blinding stream of reddish-purple light that arrowed into the compound above the triple run offence and made a hole in the top story of Damli House. To Susannah it looked as big as a hole made by a point-blank artillery shell.
This is good, she thought. I gotta get the other ones going.
But she wondered if there would be time. Already other Breakers were picking up on Dinky’s suggestion, rebroadcasting it and boosting it in the process:
(GO SOUTH! HANDS UP! WON’T BE HURT!)
She flicked the Coyote’s fire-switch to FULL AUTO and raked it across the upper level of the nearest dorm to emphasize the point. Bullets whined and ricocheted. Glass broke. Breakers screamed and began to stampede around the side of Damli House with their hands up. Susannah saw Ted come around the same side. He was hard to miss, because he was going against the current. He and Dinky embraced briefly, then raised their hands and joined the southward flow of Breakers, who would soon lose their status as VTPs and become just one more bunch of refugees struggling to survive in a dark and poisoned land.
She’d gotten eight, but it wasn’t enough. The hunger was upon her, that dry hunger. Her eyes saw everything. They pulsed and ached in her head, and they saw everything. She hoped that other taheen, low men, or hume guards would come around the side of Damli House.
She wanted more.
THIRTEEN
Sheemie Ruiz lived in Corbett Hall, which happened to be the dormitory Susannah, all unknowing, had raked with at least a hundred bullets. Had he been on his bed, he almost certainly would have been killed. Instead he was on his knees, at the foot of it, praying for the safety of his friends. He didn’t even look up when the window blew in but simply redoubled his supplications.
He could hear Dinky’s thoughts
(GO SOUTH)
pounding in his head, then heard other thought-streams join it,
(WITH YOUR HANDS UP)
making a river. And then Ted’s voice was there, not just joining the others but amping them up, turning what had been a river
(YOU WON’T BE HURT)
into an ocean. Without realizing it, Sheemie changed his prayer. Our Father and P’teck my pals became go south with your hands up, you won’t be hurt. He didn’t even stop this when the propane tanks behind the Damli House cafeteria blew up with a shattering roar.”
FOURTEEN
Gangli Tristum (that’s Doctor Gangli to you, say thankya) was in many ways the most feared man in Damli House. He was a cantoi who had-perversely-taken a taheen name instead of a human one, and he ran the infirmary on the third floor of the west wing with an iron fist. And on roller skates.
Things on the ward were fairly relaxed when Gangli was in his office doing paperwork, or off on his rounds (which usually meant visiting Breakers with the sniffles in their dorms), but when he came out, the whole place-nurses and orderlies as well as patients-fell respectfully (and nervously) silent. A newcomer might laugh the first time he saw the squat, darkcomplected, heavilyjowled man-thing gliding slowly down the center aisle between the beds, arms folded over the stethoscope which lay on his chest, the tails of his white coat wafting out behind him (one Breaker had once commented, “He looks like John Irving after a bad facelift”). Such a one who was caught laughing would never laugh again, however. Dr. Gangli had a sharp tongue, indeed, and no one made fun of his roller skates with impunity.
Now, instead of gliding on them, he went flying up and down the aisles, the steel wheels (for his skating gear far predated rollerblades) rumbling on the hardwood. “All the papers!” he shouted. “Do you hear me?… If I lose one file in this fucking mess, one gods-damned file, I’ll have someone’s eyes with my afternoon tea!”
The patients were already gone, of course; he’d had them out of their beds and down the stairs at the first bray of the smoke detector, at the first whiff of smoke. A number of orderlies-gutless wonders, and he knew who each of them was, oh yes, and a complete report would be made when the time came-had fled with the sickfolk, but five had stayed, including his personal assistant, Jack London. Gangli was proud of them, although one could not have told it from his hectoring voice as he skated up and down, up and down, in the thickening smoke.
“Get the papers, d’ye hear? You better, by all the gods that ever walked or crawled! You better!”
A red glare shot in through the window. Some sort of weapon, for it blew in the glass wall that separated his office from the ward and set his favorite easy-chair a-smolder.
Gangli ducked and skated under the laser beam, never slowing.
“Gan-a-damn!” cried one of the orderlies. He was a hume, extraordinarily ugly, his eyes bulging from his pale face. “What in the hell was th-”
“Never mind!” Gangli bawled. “Never mind what it was, you pissface clown! Get the papers! Get my motherfucking papers!”
From somewhere in front-the Mall?-came the hideous approaching clang-and-yowl of some rescue vehicle. “STAND CLEAR!” Gangli heard. “THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!”
Gangli had never heard of such a thing as Fire-Response Team Bravo, but there was so much they didn’t know about this place. Why, he could barely use a third of the equipment in his own surgical suite! Never mind, the thing that mattered right now-
Before he could finish his thought, the gas-pods behind the kitchen blew up. There was a tremendous roar-seemingly from directly beneath them-and Gangli Tristum was thrown into the air, the metal wheels on his roller skates spinning.
The others were thrown as well, and suddenly the smoky air was full of flying papers. Looking at them, knowing that the papers would burn and he would be lucky not to burn with them, a clear thought came to Dr. Gangli: the end had come early.
FIFTEEN
Roland heard the telepathic command
(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP. YOU WON’T BE
begin to beat in his mind. It was time. He nodded at Jake and the Orizas flew. Their eerie whistling wasn’t loud in the general cacophony, yet one of the guards must have heard something coming, because he was beginning to pivot when the plate’s sharpened edge took his head off and tumbled it backward into the compound, the eyelashes fluttering in bewildered surprise. The headless body took two steps and then collapsed with its arms over the rail, blood pouring from the neck in a gaudy stream. The other guard was already down.
Eddie rolled effortlessly beneath the soo LINE boxcar and bounced to his feet on the compound side. Two more automated fire engines had come bolting out of the station hitherto hidden by the hardware store facade. They were wheelless, seeming to run on cushions of compressed air. Somewhere toward the north end of the campus (for so Eddie’s mind persisted in identifying the Devar-Toi), something exploded. Good.
Lovely.
Roland and Jake took fresh plates from the dwindling supply and used them to cut through the three runs of fence.
The high-voltage one parted with a bitter, sizzling crack and a brief blink of blue fire. Then they were in. Moving quickly and without speaking, they ran past the now-unguarded towers with Oy trailing closely at Jake’s heels. Here was an alley running between Henry Graham’s Drug Store amp; Soda Fountain and the Pleasantville Book Store.
At the head of the alley, they looked out and saw that Main Street was currently empty, although a tangy electric smell (a subway-station smell, Eddie thought) from the last two fire engines still hung in the air, making the overall stench even worse. In the distance, fire-sirens whooped and smoke detectors brayed. Here in Pleasantville, Eddie couldn’t help but think of the Main Street in Disneyland: no litter in the gutters, no rude graffiti on the walls, not even any dust on the plate-glass windows.
This was where homesick Breakers came when they needed a little whiff of America, he supposed, but didn’t any of them want anything better, anything more realistic, than this plastic-fantastic still life? Maybe it looked more inviting with folks on the sidewalks and in the stores, but that was hard to believe. Hard for him to believe, at least. Maybe it was only a city boy’s chauvinism.
Across from them were Pleasantville Shoes, Gay Paree Fashions, Hair Today, and the Gem Theater (COME IN IT’S KOOL INSIDE said the banner hanging from the bottom of the marquee). Roland raised a hand, motioning Eddie and Jake across to that side of the street. It was there, if all went as he hoped (it almost never did), that they would set their ambush.
They crossed in a crouch, Oy still scurrying at Jake’s heel. So far everything seemed to be working like a charm, and that made the gunslinger nervous, indeed.
SIXTEEN
Any battle-seasoned general will tell you that, even in a smallscale engagement (as this one was), there always comes a point where coherence breaks down, and narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place.
Never mind. We have reached that point, the one where the Battle of Algul Siento took on a life of its own, and all I can do now is point here and there and hope you can bring your own order out of the general chaos.
SEVENTEEN
Trampas, the eczema-plagued low man who inadvertently let Ted in on so much, rushed to the stream of Breakers who were fleeing from Damli House and grabbed one, a scrawny excarpenter with a receding hairline named Birdie McCann.
“Birdie, what is it?” Trampas shouted. He was currently wearing his thinking-cap, which meant he could not share in the telepathic pulse all around him. “What’s happening, do you kn-”
“Shooting!” Birdie yelled, pulling free. “Shooting! They’re out there!” He pointed vaguely behind him.
“Who? How m-”
“Watch out you idiots it’s not slowing dozun!” yelled Gaskie O’Tego, from somewhere behind Trampas arid McCann.
Trampas looked up and was horrified to see the lead fire engine come roaring and swaying along the center of the Mall, red lights flashing, two stainless-steel robot firemen now clinging to the back. Pimli, Finli, and Jakli leaped aside. So did Tassa
the houseboy. But Tammy Kelly lay facedown on the grass in a spreading soup of blood. She had been flattened by Fire-Response Team Bravo, which had not actually scrambled to fight a fire in over eight hundred years. Her complaining days were over.
And-
“STAND CLEAR!” blared the fire engine. Behind it, two more engines swerved gaudily around either side of Warden’s House. Once again Tassa the houseboy barely leaped in time to save his skin. “THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!” Some sort of metallic node rose from the center of the engine, split open, and produced a steel whirligig that began to spray highpressure streams of water in eight different directions. “MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!”
And-
James Cagney-the taheen who was standing with Gaskie in the foyer of the Feveral Hall dormitory when the trouble started, remember him?-saw what was going to happen and began yelling at the guards who were staggering out of Damli’s west wing, red-eyed and coughing, some with their pants on fire, a few-oh, praise Gan and Bessa and all the gods-with weapons.
Cag screamed at them to get out of the way and could hardly hear himself in the cacophony. He saw Joey Rastosovich pull two of them aside and watched the Earnshaw kid bump aside another. A few of the coughing, weeping escapees saw the oncoming fire engine and scattered on their own. Then Fire-
Response Team Bravo was plowing through the guards from the west wing, not slowing, roaring straight for Damli House, spraying water to every point of the compass.
