Dark Tower VII, The (v. 7)

by Stephen King

  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 VIPs 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, dark-complected, heavily jowled 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 HURT)

  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 façade. 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 DevarToi), 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 & 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 small-scale engagement (as th
is 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 ex-carpenter 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 down!” yelled Gaskie o’ Tego, from somewhere behind Trampas and 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 high-pressure streams of water in eight different directions. “MAKE WAY FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!”

  And—

  James Cagney—the can-toi 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.

  And—

  “Dear Christ, no,” Pimli Prentiss moaned. He clapped his hands over his eyes. Finli, on the other hand, was helpless to look away. He saw a low man—Ben Alexander, he was quite sure—chewed beneath the firetruck’s huge wheels. He saw another struck by the grille and mashed against the side of Damli House as the engine crashed, spraying boards and glass, then breaking through a bulkhead which had been partially concealed by a bed of sickly flowers. One wheel dropped down into the cellar stairwell and a robot voice began to boom, “ACCIDENT! NOTIFY THE STATION! ACCIDENT!”

  No shit, Sherlock, Finli thought, looking at the blood on the grass with a kind of sick wonder. How many of his men and his valuable charges had the goddamned malfunctioning firetruck mowed down? Six? Eight? A motherfucking dozen?

  From behind Damli House came that terrifying chow-chow-chow sound once again, the sound of automatic weapons fire.

  A fat Breaker named Waverly jostled him. Finli snared him before Waverly could fly on by. “What happened? Who told you to go south?” For Finli, unlike Trampas, wasn’t wearing any sort of thinking-cap and the message

  (GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HURT)

  was slamming into his head so hard and loud it was nearly impossible to think of anything else.

  Beside him, Pimli—struggling to gather his wits—seized on the beating thought and managed one of his own: That’s almost got to be Brautigan, grabbing an idea and amplifying it that way. Who else could?

  And—

  Gaskie grabbed first Cag and then Jakli and shouted at them to gather up all the armed guards and put them to work flanking the Breakers who were hurrying south on the Mall and the streets that flanked the Mall. They looked at him with blank, starey eyes—panic-eyes—and he could have screamed with balked fury. And here came the next two engines with their sirens whooping. The larger of the pair struck two of the Breakers, bearing them to the ground and running them over. One of these new casualties was Joey Rastosovich. When the engine had passed, beating at the grass with its compressed-air vents, Tanya fell on her knees beside her dying husband, raising her hands to the sky. She was screaming at the top of her lungs but Gaskie could barely hear her. Tears of frustration and fear prickled the corners of his eyes. Dirty dogs, he thought. Dirty ambushing dogs!

  And—

  North of the Algul compound, Susannah broke cover, moving in on the triple run of fence. This wasn’t in the plan, but the need to keep shooting, to keep knocking them down, was stronger than ever. She simply couldn’t help herself, and Roland would have understood. Besides, the billowing smoke from Damli House had momentarily obscured everything at this end of the compound. Red beams from the “lazers” stabbed into it—on and off, on and off, like some sort of neon sign— and Susannah reminded herself not to get in the way of them, not unless she wanted a hole two inches across all the way through her.

  She used bullets from the Coyote to cut her end of the fence—outer run, middle run, inner run—and then vanished into the thickening smoke, reloading as she went.

  And—

  The Breaker named Waverly tried to pull free of Finli. Nar, nar, none of that, may it please ya, Finli thought. He yanked the man—who’d been a bookkeeper or some such thing in his preAlgul life—closer to him, then slapped him twice across the face, hard enough to make his hand hurt. Waverly screamed in pain and surprise.

  “Who the fuck is back there!” Finli roared. “WHO THE FUCK IS DOING THIS?” The follow-up fire engines had halted in front of Damli House and were pouring streams of water into the smoke. Finli didn’t know if it could help, but probably it couldn’t hurt. And at least the damned things hadn’t crashed into the building they were supposed to save, like the first one.

  “Sir, I don’t know!” Waverly sobbed. Blood was streaming from one of his nostrils and the corner of his mouth. “I don’t know, but there has to be fifty, maybe a hundred of the devils! Dinky got us out! God bless Dinky Earnshaw!”

  Gaskie o’ Tego, meanwhile, wrapped one good-sized hand around James Cagney’s neck and the other around Jakli’s. Gaskie had an idea son of a bitching crowhead Jakli had been on the verge of running, but there was no time to worry about that now. He needed them both.

  And—

  “Boss!” Finli shouted. “Boss, grab the Earnshaw kid! Something about this smells!”

  And—

  With Cag’s face pressing against one of his cheeks and Jakli’s against the other, the Wease (who thought as clearly as anyone that terrible morning) was finally able to make himself heard. Gaskie, meanwhile, repeated his command: divide up the armed guards and put them with the retreating Breakers. “Don’t try to stop them, but stay with them! And for Christ’s sake, keep em from getting electrocuted! Keep em off the fence if they go past Main Stree—”

  Before he could finish this admonishment, a figure came plummeting out of the thickening smoke. It was Gangli, the compound doctor, his white coat on fire, his roller skates still on his feet.

  And—

  Susannah Dean took up a position at the left rear corner of Damli House, co
ughing. She saw three of the sons of bitches— Gaskie, Jakli, and Cagney, had she but known it. Before she could draw a bead, eddying smoke blotted them out. When it cleared, Jakli and Cag were gone, rounding up armed guards to act as sheepdogs who would at least try to protect their panicked charges, even if they could not immediately stop them. Gaskie was still there, and Susannah took him with a single headshot.

  Pimli didn’t see it. It was becoming clear to him that all the confusion was on the surface. Quite likely deliberate. The Breakers’ decision to move away from the attackers north of the Algul had come a little too quickly and was a little too organized.

  Never mind Earnshaw, he thought, Brautigan’s the one I want to talk to.

  But before he could catch up to Ted, Tassa grabbed the Master in a frantic, terrified hug, babbling that Warden’s House was on fire, he was afraid, terribly afraid, that all of Master’s clothes, his books—

  Pimli Prentiss knocked him aside with a hammerblow to the side of his head. The pulse of the Breakers’ unified thought (bad-mind now instead of good-mind), yammered

  (WITH YOUR HANDS UP YOU WON’T BE)

  crazily in his head, threatening to drive out all thought. Fucking Brautigan had done this, he knew it, and the man was too far ahead … unless …

  Pimli looked at the Peacemaker in his hand, considered it, then jammed it back into the docker’s clutch under his left arm. He wanted fucking Brautigan alive. Fucking Brautigan had some explaining to do. Not to mention some more goddamned breaking.

  Chow-chow-chow. Bullets flicking all around him. Running hume guards, taheen, and can-toi all around him. And Christ, only a few of them were armed, mostly humes who’d been down for fence-patrol. Those who guarded the Breakers didn’t really need guns, by and large the Breakers were as tame as parakeets and the thought of an outside attack had seemed ludicrous until …

  Until it happened, he thought, and spied Trampas.

  “Trampas!” he bawled. “ Trampas! Hey, cowboy! Grab Earnshaw and bring him to me! Grab Earnshaw!”

  Here in the middle of the Mall it was a little less noisy and Trampas heard sai Prentiss quite clearly. He sprinted after Dinky and grabbed the young man by one arm.