by Stephen King
“The others are beyond us,” Rhea said, “and the ball has slipped my grasp. But she—! Back to Mayor’s House she’s been ta’en, and mayhap we could see to her—we could do that much, aye.”
“You can’t see to anything,” Cordelia said distantly. “You’re dying.”
Rhea wheezed laughter and a trickle of yellowish drool. “Dying? Nay! Just done up and in need of a refreshment. Now listen to me, Cordelia daughter of Hiram and sister of Pat!”
She hooked a bony (and surprisingly strong) arm around Cordelia’s neck and drew her close. At the same time she raised her other hand, twirling the silver medallion in front of Cordelia’s wide eyes. The crone whispered, and after a bit Cordelia began to nod her understanding.
“Do it, then,” the old woman said, letting go. She slumped back in her chair, exhausted. “Now, for I can’t last much longer as I am. And I’ll need a bit o’ time after, mind ye. To revive, like.”
Cordelia moved across the room to the kitchen area. There, on the counter beside the hand-pump, was a wooden block in which were sheathed the two sharp knives of the house. She took one and came back. Her eyes were distant and far, as Susan’s had been when she and Rhea stood in the open doorway of Rhea’s hut in the light of the Kissing Moon.
“Would ye pay her back?” Rhea asked. “For that’s why I’ve come to ye.”
“Miss Oh So Young and Pretty,” Cordelia murmured in a barely audible voice. The hand not holding the knife floated up to her face and touched her ash-smeared cheek. “Yes. I’d be repaid of her, so I would.”
“To the death?”
“Aye. Hers or mine.”
“ ’Twill be hers,” Rhea said, “never fear it. Now refresh me, Cordelia. Give me what I need!”
Cordelia unbuttoned her dress down the front, pushing it open to reveal an ungenerous bosom and a middle which had begun to curve out in the last year or so, making a tidy little potbelly. Yet she still had the vestige of a waist, and it was here she used the knife, cutting through her shift and the top layers of flesh beneath. The white cotton began to bloom red at once along the slit.
“Aye,” Rhea whispered. “Like roses. I dream of them often enough, roses in bloom, and what stands black among em at the end of the world. Come closer!” She put her hand on the small of Cordelia’s back, urging her forward. She raised her eyes to Cordelia’s face, then grinned and licked her lips. “Good. Good enough.”
Cordelia looked blankly over the top of the old woman’s head as Rhea of the Cöos buried her face against the red cut in the shift and began to drink.
20
Roland was at first pleased as the muted jingle of harness and buckle drew closer to the place where the three of them were hunkered down in the high grass, but as the sounds drew closer still—close enough to hear murmuring voices as well as soft-thudding hooves—he began to be afraid. For the riders to pass close was one thing, but if they were, through foul luck, to come right upon them, the three boys would likely die like a nest of moles uncovered by the blade of a passing plow.
Ka surely hadn’t brought them all this way to end in such fashion, had it? In all these miles of Bad Grass, how could that party of oncoming riders possibly strike the one point where Roland and his friends had pulled up? But still they closed in, the sound of tack and buckle and men’s voices growing ever sharper.
Alain looked at Roland with dismayed eyes and pointed to the left. Roland shook his head and patted his hands toward the ground, indicating they would stay put. They had to stay put; it was too late to move without being heard.
Roland drew his guns.
Cuthbert and Alain did the same.
In the end, the plow missed the moles by sixty feet. The boys could actually see the horses and riders flashing through the thick grass; Roland easily made out that the party was led by Jonas, Depape, and Lengyll, riding three abreast. They were followed by at least three dozen others, glimpsed as roan flashes and the bright red and green of serapes through the grass. They were strung out pretty well, and Roland thought he and his friends could reasonably hope they’d string out even more once they reached open desert.
The boys waited for the party to pass, holding their horses’ heads in case one of them took it in mind to whicker a greeting to the nags so close by. When they were gone, Roland turned his pale and unsmiling face to his friends.
“Mount up,” he said. “Reaping’s come.”
21
They walked their horses to the edge of the Bad Grass, meeting the path of Jonas’s party where the grass gave way first to a zone of stunted bushes and then to the desert itself.
The wind howled high and lonesome, carrying big drifts of gritty dust under a cloudless dark blue sky. Demon Moon stared down from it like the filmed eye of a corpse. Two hundred yards ahead, the drogue riders backing Jonas’s party were spread out in a line of three, their sombreros jammed down tight on their heads, their shoulders hunched, their serapes blowing.
Roland moved so that Cuthbert rode in the middle of their trio. Bert had his slingshot in his hand. Now he handed Alain half a dozen steel balls, and Roland another half-dozen. Then he raised his eyebrows questioningly. Roland nodded and they began to ride.
Dust blew past them in rattling sheets, sometimes turning the drogue riders into ghosts, sometimes obscuring them completely, but the boys closed in steadily. Roland rode tense, waiting for one of the drogues to turn in his saddle and see them, but none did—none of them wanted to put his face into that cutting, grit-filled wind. Nor was there sound to warn them; there was sandy hardpack under the horses’ hooves now, and it didn’t give away much.
When they were just twenty yards behind the drogues, Cuthbert nodded—they were close enough for him to work. Alain handed him a ball. Bert, sitting ramrod straight in the saddle, dropped it into the cup of his slingshot, pulled, waited for the wind to drop, then released. The rider ahead on the left jerked as if stung, raised one hand a little, then toppled out of his saddle. Incredibly, neither of his two compañeros seemed to notice. Roland saw what he thought was the beginning of a reaction from the one on the right when Bert drew again, and the rider in the middle collapsed forward onto his horse’s neck. The horse, startled, reared up. The rider flopped bonelessly backward, his sombrero tumbling off, and fell. The wind dropped enough for Roland to hear his knee snap as his foot caught in one of his stirrups.
The third rider now began to turn. Roland caught a glimpse of a bearded face—a dangling cigarette, unlit because of the wind, one astonished eye—and then Cuthbert’s sling thupped again. The astonished eye was replaced by a red socket. The rider slid from his saddle, groping for the horn and missing it.
Three gone, Roland thought.
He kicked Rusher into a gallop. The others did the same, and the boys rode forward into the dust a stirrup’s width apart. The horses of the ambushed drogue riders veered off to the south in a group, and that was good. Riderless horses ordinarily didn’t raise eyebrows in Mejis, but when they were saddled—
More riders up ahead: a single, then two side by side, then another single.
Roland drew his knife, and rode up beside the fellow who was now drogue and didn’t know it.
“What news?” he asked conversationally, and when the man turned, Roland buried his knife in his chest. The vaq’s brown eyes widened above the bandanna he’d pulled up outlaw-style over his mouth and nose, and then he tumbled from his saddle.
Cuthbert and Alain spurred past him, and Bert, not slowing, took the two riding ahead with his slingshot. The fellow beyond them heard something in spite of the wind, and swivelled in his saddle. Alain had drawn his own knife and now held it by the tip of the blade. He threw hard, in the exaggerated full-arm motion they had been taught, and although the range was long for such work—twenty feet at least, and in windy air—his aim was true. The hilt came to rest protruding from the center of the man’s bandanna. The vaq groped for it, making choked gargling sounds around the knife in his throat, and then he too
dropped from the saddle.
Seven now.
Like the story of the shoemaker and the flies, Roland thought. His heart was beating slow and hard in his chest as he caught up with Alain and Cuthbert. The wind gusted a lonely whine. Dust flew, swirled, then dropped with the wind. Ahead of them were three more riders, and ahead of them the main party.
Roland pointed at the next three, then mimed the slingshot. Pointed beyond them and mimed firing a revolver. Cuthbert and Alain nodded. They rode forward, once again stirrup-to-stirrup, closing in.
22
Bert got two of the three ahead of them clean, but the third jerked at the wrong moment, and the steel ball meant for the back of his head only clipped his earlobe on the way by. Roland had drawn his gun by then, however, and put a bullet in the man’s temple as he turned. That made ten, a full quarter of Jonas’s company before the riders even realized trouble had begun. Roland had no idea if it would be enough of an advantage, but he knew that the first part of the job was done. No more stealth; now it was a matter of raw killing.
“Hile! Hile!” he screamed in a ringing, carrying voice. “To me, gunslingers! To me! Ride them down! No prisoners!”
They spurred toward the main party, riding into battle for the first time, closing like wolves on sheep, shooting before the men ahead of them had any slight idea of who had gotten in behind them or what was happening. The three boys had been trained as gunslingers, and what they lacked in experience they made up for with the keen eyes and reflexes of the young. Under their guns, the desert east of Hanging Rock became a killing-floor.
Screaming, not a single thought among them above the wrists of their deadly hands, they sliced into the unprepared Mejis party like a three-sided blade, shooting as they went. Not every shot killed, but not a one went entirely wild, either. Men flew out of their saddles and were dragged by boots caught in stirrups as their horses bolted; other men, some dead, some only wounded, were trampled beneath the feet of their panicky, rearing mounts.
Roland rode with both guns drawn and firing, Rusher’s reins gripped in his teeth so they wouldn’t fall overside and trip the horse up. Two men dropped beneath his fire on his left, two more on the right. Ahead of them, Brian Hookey turned in his saddle, his beard-stubbly face long with amazement. Around his neck, a reap-charm in the shape of a bell swung and tinkled as he grabbed for the shotgun which hung in a scabbard over one burly blacksmith’s shoulder. Before he could do more than get a hand on the gunstock, Roland blew the silver bell off his chest and exploded the heart which lay beneath it. Hookey pitched out of his saddle with a grunt.
Cuthbert caught up with Roland on the right side and shot two more men off their horses. He gave Roland a fierce and blazing grin. “Al was right!” he shouted. “These are hard calibers!”
Roland’s talented fingers did their work, rolling the cylinders of the guns he held and reloading at a full gallop—doing it with a ghastly, supernatural speed—and then beginning to fire again. Now they had come almost all the way through the group, riding hard, laying men low on both sides and straight ahead as well. Alain dropped back a little and turned his horse, covering Roland and Cuthbert from behind.
Roland saw Jonas, Depape, and Lengyll reining around to face their attackers. Lengyll was clawing at his machine-gun, but the strap had gotten tangled in the wide collar of the duster he wore, and every time he grabbed for the stock, it bobbed out of his reach. Beneath his heavy gray-blond mustache, Lengyll’s mouth was twisted with fury.
Now, riding between Roland and Cuthbert and these three, holding a huge blued-steel five-shot in one hand, came Hash Renfrew.
“Gods damn you!” Renfrew cried. “Oh, you rotten sister-fuckers!” He dropped his reins and laid the five-shot in the crook of one elbow to steady it. The wind gusted viciously, wrapping him in an envelope of swirling brown grit.
Roland had no thought of retreating, or perhaps jigging to one side or the other. He had, in fact, no thoughts at all. The fever had descended over his mind and he burned with it like a torch inside a glass sleeve. Screaming through the reins caught in his teeth, he galloped toward Hash Renfrew and the three men behind him.
23
Jonas had no clear idea of what was happening until he heard Will Dearborn screaming
(Hile! To me! No prisoners!)
a battle-cry he knew of old. Then it fell into place and the rattle of gunfire made sense. He reined around, aware of Roy doing the same beside him . . . but most aware of the ball in its bag, a thing both powerful and fragile, swinging back and forth against the neck of his horse.
“It’s those kids!” Roy exclaimed. His total surprise made him look more stupid than ever.
“Dearborn, you bastard!” Hash Renfrew spat, and the gun in his hand thundered a single time.
Jonas saw Dearborn’s sombrero rise from his head, its brim chewed away. Then the kid was firing, and he was good—better than anyone Jonas had ever seen in his life. Renfrew was hammered back out of his saddle with both legs kicking, still holding onto his monster gun, firing it twice at the dusty-blue sky before hitting the ground on his back and rolling, dead, on his side.
Lengyll’s hand dropped away from the elusive wire stock of his speed-shooter and he only stared, unable to believe the apparition bearing down on him out of the dust. “Get back!” he cried. “In the name of the Horsemen’s Association, I tell you—” Then a large black hole appeared in the center of his forehead, just above the place where his eyebrows tangled together. His hands flew up to his shoulders, palms out, as if he were declaring surrender. That was how he died.
“Son of a bitch, oh you little sister-fucking son of a bitch!” Depape howled. He tried to draw and his revolver got caught in his serape. He was still trying to pull it free when a bullet from Roland’s gun opened his mouth in a red scream almost all the way down to his adam’s apple.
This can’t be happening, Jonas thought stupidly. It can’t, there are too many of us.
But it was happening. The In-World boys had struck unerringly at the fracture-line; were performing what amounted to a textbook example of how gunslingers were supposed to attack when the odds were bad. And Jonas’s coalition of ranchers, cowboys, and town tough-boys had shattered. Those not dead were fleeing to every point of the compass, spurring their horses as if a hundred devils paroled from hell were in pursuit. They were far from a hundred, but they fought like a hundred. Bodies were scattered in the dust everywhere, and as Jonas watched, he saw the one serving as their back door—Stockworth—ride down another man, bump him out of his saddle, and put a bullet in his head as he fell. Gods of the earth, he thought, that was Croydon, him that owns the Piano Ranch!
Except he didn’t own it anymore.
And now Dearborn was bearing down on Jonas with his gun drawn.
Jonas snatched the drawstring looped around the horn of his saddle and unwound it with two fast, hard snaps of the wrist. He held the bag up in the windy air, his teeth bared and his long white hair streaming.
“Come any closer and I’ll smash it! I mean it, you damned puppy! Stay where you are!”
Roland never hesitated in his headlong gallop, never paused to think; his hands did his thinking for him now, and when he remembered all this later, it was distant and silent and queerly warped, like something seen in a flawed mirror . . . or a wizard’s glass.
Jonas thought: Gods, it’s him! It’s Arthur Eld himself come to take me!
And as the barrel of Roland’s gun opened in his eye like the entrance to a tunnel or a mineshaft, Jonas remembered what the brat had said to him in the dusty dooryard of that burned-out ranch: The soul of a man such as you can never leave the west.
I knew, Jonas thought. Even then I knew my ka had pretty well run out. But surely he won’t risk the ball . . . he can’t risk the ball, he’s the dinh of this ka-tet and he can’t risk it . . .
“To me!” Jonas screamed. “To me, boys! They’re only three, for gods’ sake! To me, you cowards!”
But h
e was alone—Lengyll killed with his idiotic machine-gun lying by his side, Roy a corpse glaring up at the bitter sky, Quint fled, Hookey dead, the ranchers who had ridden with them gone. Only Clay still lived, and he was miles from here.
“I’ll smash it!” he shrieked at the cold-eyed boy bearing down on him like death’s sleekest engine. “Before all the gods, I’ll—”
Roland thumbed back the hammer of his revolver and fired. The bullet struck the center of the tattooed hand holding the drawstring cord and vaporized the palm, leaving only fingers that twitched their random way out of a spongy red mass. For just a moment Roland saw the blue coffin, and then it was covered by downspilling blood.
The bag dropped. And, as Rusher collided with Jonas’s horse and slewed it to the side, Roland caught the bag deftly in the crook of one arm. Jonas, screaming in dismay as the prize left him, grabbed at Roland, caught his shoulder, and almost succeeded in turning the gunslinger out of his saddle. Jonas’s blood rained across Roland’s face in hot drops.
“Give it back, you brat!” Jonas clawed under his serape and brought out another gun. “Give it back, it’s mine!”
“Not anymore,” Roland said. And, as Rusher danced around, quick and delicate for such a large animal, Roland fired two point-blank rounds into Jonas’s face. Jonas’s horse bolted out from under him and the man with the white hair landed spreadeagled on his back with a thump. His arms and legs spasmed, jerked, trembled, then stilled.
Roland looped the bag’s drawstring over his shoulder and rode back toward Alain and Cuthbert, ready to give aid . . . but there was no need. They sat their horses side by side in the blowing dust, at the end of a scattered road of dead bodies, their eyes wide and dazed—eyes of boys who have passed through fire for the first time and can hardly believe they have not been burned. Only Alain had been wounded; a bullet had opened his left cheek, a wound that healed clean but left a scar he bore until his dying day. He could not remember who had shot him, he said later on, or at what point of the battle. He had been lost to himself during the shooting, and had only vague memories of what had happened after the charge began. Cuthbert said much the same.
