by Stephen King
Alain unslung Lengyll’s machine-gun, looked at it doubtfully, then yanked back the slide-cock. “I don’t know about this, Roland. It’s loaded, and I think I see how to use it, but—”
“Then use it,” Roland said. The three of them were picking up speed now, the hooves of their horses drumming against the hardpan. The wind gusted, belling the fronts of their serapes. “This is the sort of work it was meant for. If it jams, drop it and use your revolver. Are you ready?”
“Yes, Roland.”
“Bert?”
“Aye,” Cuthbert said in a wildly exaggerated Hambry accent, “so I am, so I am.”
Ahead of them, dust puffed as groups of riders passed before and behind the tankers, readying the column for departure. Men on foot looked around at the oncomers curiously but with a fatal lack of alarm.
Roland drew both revolvers. “Gilead!” he cried. “Hile! Gilead!”
He spurred Rusher to a gallop. The other two boys did the same. Cuthbert was in the middle again, sitting on his reins, slingshot in hand, lucifer matches radiating out of his tightly pressed lips.
The gunslingers rode down on Hanging Rock like furies.
13
Twenty minutes after sending Sheemie back south, Susan and Olive came around a sharp bend and found themselves face to face with three mounted men in the road. In the late-slanting sun, she saw that the one in the middle had a blue coffin tattooed on his hand. It was Reynolds. Susan’s heart sank.
The one on Reynolds’s left—he wore a stained white drover’s hat and had a lazily cocked eye—she didn’t know, but the one on the right, who looked like a stony-hearted preacher, was Laslo Rimer. It was Rimer that Reynolds glanced at, after smiling at Susan.
“Why, Las and I couldn’t even get us a drink to send his late brother, the Chancellor of Whatever You Want and the Minister of Thank You Very Much, on with a word,” Reynolds said. “We hadn’t hardly hit town before we got persuaded out here. I wasn’t going to go, but . . . damn! That old lady’s something. Could talk a corpse into giving a blowjob, if you’ll pardon the crudity. I think your aunt may have lost a wheel or two off her cart, though, sai Delgado. She—”
“Your friends are dead,” Susan told him.
Reynolds paused, shrugged. “Wellnow. Maybe si and maybe no. Me, I think I’ve decided to travel on without em even if they ain’t. But I might hang around here one more night. This Reaping business . . . I’ve heard so much about the way folks do it in the Outers. ’Specially the bonfire part.”
The man with the cocked eye laughed phlegmily.
“Let us pass,” Olive said. “This girl has done nothing, and neither have I.”
“She helped Dearborn escape,” Rimer said, “him who murdered your own husband and my brother. I wouldn’t call that nothing.”
“The gods may restore Kimba Rimer in the clearing,” Olive said, “but the truth is he looted half of this town’s treasury, and what he didn’t give over to John Farson, he kept for himself.”
Rimer recoiled as if slapped.
“Ye didn’t know I knew? Laslo, I’d be angry at how little any of ye thought of me . . . except why would I want to be thought of by the likes of you, anyway? I knew enough to make me sick, leave it at that. I know that the man you’re sitting beside—”
“Shut up,” Rimer muttered.
“—was likely the one who cut yer brother’s black heart open; sai Reynolds was seen that early morning in that wing, so I’ve been told—”
“Shut up, you cunt!”
“—and so I believe.”
“Better do as he says, sai, and hold your tongue,” Reynolds said. Some of the lazy good humor had left his face. Susan thought: He doesn’t like people knowing what he did. Not even when he’s the one on top and what they know can’t hurt him. And he’s less without Jonas. A lot less. He knows it, too.
“Let us pass,” Olive said.
“No, sai, I can’t do that.”
“I’ll help ye, then, shall I?”
Her hand had crept beneath the outrageously large serape during the palaver, and now she brought out a huge and ancient pistola, its handles of yellowed ivory, its filigreed barrel of old tarnished silver. On top was a brass powder-and-spark.
Olive had no business even drawing the thing—it caught on her serape, and she had to fight it free. She had no business cocking it, either, a process that took both thumbs and two tries. But the three men were utterly flummoxed by the sight of the elderly blunderbuss in her hands, Reynolds as much as the other two; he sat his horse with his jaw hanging slack. Jonas would have wept.
“Get her!” a cracked old voice shrieked from behind the men blocking the road. “What’s wrong with ye, ye stupid culls? GET HER!”
Reynolds started at that and went for his gun. He was fast, but he had given Olive too much of a headstart and was beaten, beaten cold. Even as he cleared leather with the barrel of his revolver, the Mayor’s widow held the old gun out in both hands, and, squinching her eyes shut like a little girl who is forced to eat something nasty, pulled the trigger.
The spark flashed, but the damp powder only made a weary floop sound and disappeared in a puff of blue smoke. The ball—big enough to have taken Clay Reynolds’s head off from the nose on up, had it fired—stayed in the barrel.
In the next instant his own gun roared in his fist. Olive’s horse reared, whinnying. Olive went off the gelding head over boots, with a black hole in the orange stripe of her serape—the stripe which lay above her heart.
Susan heard herself screaming. The sound seemed to come from very far away. She might have gone on for some time, but then she heard the clop of approaching pony-hooves from behind the men in the road . . . and knew. Even before the man with the lazy eye moved aside to show her, she knew, and her screams stopped.
The galloped-out pony that had brought the witch back to Hambry had been replaced by a fresh one, but it was the same black cart, the same golden cabalistic symbols, the same driver. Rhea sat with the reins in her claws, her head ticking from side to side like the head of a rusty old robot, grinning at Susan without humor. Grinning as a corpse grins.
“Hello, my little sweeting,” she said, calling her as she had all those months ago, on the night Susan had come to her hut to be proved honest. On the night Susan had come running most of the way, out of simple high spirits. Beneath the light of the Kissing Moon she had come, her blood high from the exercise, her skin flushed; she had been singing “Careless Love.”
“Yer pallies and screw-buddies have taken my ball, ye ken,” Rhea said, clucking the pony to a stop a few paces ahead of the riders. Even Reynolds looked down on her with uneasiness. “Took my lovely glam, that’s what those bad boys did. Those bad, bad boys. But it showed me much while yet I had it, aye. It sees far, and in more ways than one. Much of it I’ve forgot . . . but not which way ye’d come, my sweeting. Not which way that precious old dead bitch laying yonder on the road would bring ye. And now ye must go to town.” Her grin widened, became something unspeakable. “It’s time for the fair, ye ken.”
“Let me go,” Susan said. “Let me go, if ye’d not answer to Roland of Gilead.”
Rhea ignored her and spoke to Reynolds. “Bind her hands before her and stand her in the back of the cart. There’s people that’ll want to see her. A good look is what they’ll want, and a good look is just what they’ll have. If her aunt’s done a proper job, there’ll be a lot of them in town. Get her up, now, and be smart about it.”
14
Alain had time for one clear thought: We could have gone around them—if what Roland said is true, then only the wizard’s glass matters, and we have that. We could have gone around them.
Except, of course, that was impossible. A hundred generations of gunslinger blood argued against it. Tower or no Tower, the thieves must not be allowed to have their prize. Not if they could be stopped.
Alain leaned forward and spoke directly into his horse’s ear. “Jig or rear when I start shooting, and I�
��ll knock your fucking brains out.”
Roland led them in, outracing the other two on his stronger horse. The clot of men nearest by—five or six mounted, a dozen or more on foot and examining a pair of the oxen which had dragged the tankers out here—gazed at him stupidly until he began to fire, and then they scattered like quail. He got every one of the riders; their horses fled in a widening fan, trailing their reins (and, in one case, a dead soldier). Somewhere someone was shouting, “Harriers! Harriers! Mount up, you fools!”
“Alain!” Roland screamed as they bore down. In front of the tankers, a double handful of riders and armed men were coming together—milling together—in a clumsy defensive line. “Now! Now!”
Alain raised the machine-gun, seated its rusty wire stock in the hollow of his shoulder, and remembered what little he knew about rapid-fire weapons: aim low, swing fast and smooth.
He touched the trigger and the speed-shooter bellowed into the dusty air, recoiling against his shoulder in a series of rapid thuds, shooting bright fire from the end of its perforated barrel. Alain raked it from left to right, running the sight above the scattering, shouting defenders and across the high steel hides of the tankers.
The third tanker actually blew up on its own. The sound it made was like no explosion Alain had ever heard: a guttural, muscular ripping sound accompanied by a brilliant flash of orange-red fire. The steel shell rose in two halves. One of these spun thirty yards through the air and landed on the desert floor in a furiously burning hulk; the other rose straight up into a column of greasy black smoke. A burning wooden wheel spun across the sky like a plate and came back down trailing sparks and burning splinters.
Men fled, screaming—some on foot, others laid flat along the necks of their nags, their eyes wide and panicky.
When Alain reached the end of the line of tankers, he reversed the track of the muzzle. The machine-gun was hot in his hands now, but he kept his finger pressed to the trigger. In this world, you had to use what you could while it still worked. Beneath him, his horse ran on as if it had understood every word Alain had whispered in its ear.
Another! I want another!
But before he could blow another tanker, the gun ceased its chatter—perhaps jammed, probably empty. Alain threw it aside and drew his revolver. From beside him there came the thuppp of Cuthbert’s slingshot, audible even over the cries of the men, the hoofbeats of the horses, the whoosh of the burning tanker. Alain saw a sputtering big-bang arc into the sky and come down exactly where Cuthbert had aimed: in the oil puddling around the wooden wheels of a tanker marked SUNOCO. For a moment Alain could clearly see the line of nine or a dozen holes in the tanker’s bright side—holes he had put there with sai Lengyll’s speed-shooter—and then there was a crack and a flash as the big-bang exploded. A moment later, the holes running along the bright flank of the tanker began to shimmer. The oil beneath them was on fire.
“Get out!” a man in a faded campaign hat yelled. “She’s gointer blow! They’re all going to b—”
Alain shot him, exploding the side of his face and knocking him out of one old, sprung boot. A moment later the second tanker blew up. One burning steel panel shot out sidewards, landed in the growing puddle of crude oil beneath a third tanker, and then that one exploded, as well. Black smoke rose in the air like the fumes of a funeral pyre; it darkened the day and drew an oily veil across the sun.
15
All six of Farson’s chief lieutenants had been carefully described to Roland—to all fourteen gunslingers in training—and he recognized the man running for the remuda at once: George Latigo. Roland could have shot him as he ran, but that, ironically, would have made possible a getaway that was cleaner than he wanted.
Instead, he shot the man who ran to meet him.
Latigo wheeled on the heels of his boots and stared at Roland with blazing, hate-filled eyes. Then he ran again, hiling another man, shouting for the riders who were huddled together beyond the burning zone.
Two more tankers exploded, whamming at Roland’s eardrums with dull iron fists, seeming to suck the air back from his lungs like a riptide. The plan had been for Alain to perforate the tankers and for Cuthbert to then shoot in a steady, arcing stream of big-bangers, lighting the spilling oil. The one big-banger he actually shot seemed to confirm that the plan had been feasible, but it was the last slingshot-work Cuthbert did that day. The ease with which the gunslingers had gotten inside the enemy’s perimeter and the confusion which greeted their original charge could have been chalked up to inexperience and exhaustion, but the placing of the tankers had been Latigo’s mistake, and his alone. He had drawn them tight without even thinking about it, and now they blew tight, one after another. Once the conflagration began, there was no chance of stopping it. Even before Roland raised his left arm and circled it in the air, signalling for Alain and Cuthbert to break off, the work was done. Latigo’s encampment was an oily inferno, and John Farson’s plans for a motorized assault were so much black smoke being tattered apart by the fin de año wind.
“Ride!” Roland screamed. “Ride, ride, ride!”
They spurred west, toward Eyebolt Canyon. As they went, Roland felt a single bullet drone past his left ear. It was, so far as he knew, the only shot fired at any of them during the assault on the tankers.
16
Latigo was in an ecstasy of fury, a perfect brain-bursting rage, and that was probably merciful—it kept him from thinking of what the Good Man would do when he learned of this fiasco. For the time being, all Latigo cared about was catching the men who had ambushed him . . . if an ambush in desert country was even possible.
Men? No.
The boys who had done this.
Latigo knew who they were, all right; he didn’t know how they had gotten out here, but he knew who they were, and their run would stop right here, east of the woods and rising hills.
“Hendricks!” he bawled. Hendricks had at least managed to hold his men—half a dozen of them, all mounted—near the remuda. “Hendricks, to me!”
As Hendricks rode toward him, Latigo spun the other way and saw a huddle of men standing and watching the burning tankers. Their gaping mouths and stupid young sheep faces made him feel like screaming and dancing up and down, but he refused to give in to that. He held a narrow beam of concentration, one aimed directly at the raiders, who must not under any circumstances be allowed to escape.
“You!” he shouted at the men. One of them turned; the others did not. Latigo strode to them, drawing his pistol as he went. He slapped it into the hand of the man who had turned toward the sound of his voice, and pointed at random to one of those who had not. “Shoot that fool.”
Dazed, his face that of a man who believes he is dreaming, the soldier raised the pistol and shot the man to whom Latigo had pointed. That unlucky fellow went down in a heap of knees and elbows and twitching hands. The others turned.
“Good,” Latigo said, taking his gun back.
“Sir!” Hendricks cried. “I see them, sir! I have the enemy in clear view!”
Two more tankers exploded. A few whickering shards of steel flew in their direction. Some of the men ducked; Latigo did not so much as twitch. Nor did Hendricks. A good man. Thank God for at least one such in this nightmare.
“Shall I hie after them, sir?”
“I’ll take your men and hie after them myself, Hendricks. Mount these hoss-guts before us.” He swept an arm at the standing men, whose doltish attention had been diverted from the burning tankers to their dead comrade. “Pull in as many others as you can. Do you have a bugler?”
“Yes, sir, Raines, sir!” Hendricks looked around, beckoned, and a pimply, scared-looking boy rode forward. A dented bugle on a frayed strap hung askew on the front of his shirt.
“Raines,” Latigo said, “you’re with Hendricks.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Get as many men as you can, Hendricks, but don’t linger over the job. They’re headed for that canyon, and I believe someone told me it’s a box.
If so, we’re going to turn it into a shooting gallery.”
Hendricks’s lips spread in a twisted grin. “Yes, sir.”
Behind them, the tankers continued to explode.
17
Roland glanced back and was astonished by the size of the black, smoky column rising into the air. Ahead he could clearly see the brush blocking most of the canyon’s mouth. And although the wind was blowing the wrong way, he could now hear the maddening mosquito-whine of the thinny.
He patted the air with his outstretched hands, signalling for Cuthbert and Alain to slow down. While they were both still looking at him, he took off his bandanna, whipped it into a rope, and tied it so it would cover his ears. They copied him. It was better than nothing.
The gunslingers continued west, their shadows now running out behind them as long as gantries on the desert floor. Looking back, Roland could see two groups of riders streaming in pursuit. Latigo was at the head of the first, Roland thought, and he was deliberately holding his riders back a little, so that the two groups could merge and attack together.
Good, he thought.
The three of them rode toward Eyebolt in a tight line, continuing to hold their own horses in, allowing their pursuers to close the distance. Every now and then another thud smote the air and shivered through the ground as one of the remaining tankers blew up. Roland was amazed at how easy it had been—even after the battle with Jonas and Lengyll, which should have put the men out here on their mettle, it had been easy. It made him think of a Reaptide long ago, he and Cuthbert surely no more than seven years old, running along a line of stuffy-guys with sticks, knocking them over one after the other, bang-bang-bangety-bang.
The sound of the thinny was warbling its way into his brain in spite of the bandanna over his ears, making his eyes water. Behind him, he could hear the whoops and shouts of the pursuing men. It delighted him. Latigo’s men had counted the odds—two dozen against three, with many more of their own force riding hard to join the battle—and their peckers were up once more.
