footage.
“That’s one of em, cullies!” Lamla yelled in a voice that became unfortunately ovine when
it was raised.“Pour it on! Pour it on for the love of your fathers! ”
Half this crew probably never had such a thing,Flaherty thought morosely. Then came the
clearly audible shatter-sound of breaking glass and the dragon froze in place with billows
of flame issuing from its mouth and nostrils, as well as from the gills on the sides of its
armored throat.
Encouraged, the sharpshooters began firing faster, and a few moments later the clearing
and the frozen dragon both disappeared. Where they had been was only more tiled hallway,
with the tracks of those who had recently passed this way marking the dust. On either side
were the shattered projector portals.
“All right!” Flaherty yelled after giving Lamla an approving nod. “Now we’re going after
the kid, and we’re going to double-time it, and we’re going to catch him, and we’re going
to bring him back with his head on a stick! Are you with me?”
They roared savage agreement, none louder than Lamla, whose eyes glowed the same
baleful yellow-orange as the dragon’s breath.
“Good, then!” Flaherty set off, roaring a tune any Marine drill-corps would have
recognized:“We don’t care how far you run—”
“WE DON’T CARE HOW FAR YOU RUN!” they bawled back as they trotted four
abreast through the place where Jake’s jungle had been. Their feet crunched in the
shattered glass.
“We’ll bring you back before we’re done!”
“WE’LL BRING YOU BACK BEFORE WE’RE DONE!”
“You can run to Cain or Lud—”
“YOU CAN RUN TO CAIN OR LUD!”
“We’ll eat your balls and drink your blood!”
They called it in return, and Flaherty picked up the pace yet a little more.
Eleven
Jake heard them coming again, come-come-commala. Heard them promising to eat his
balls and drink his blood.
Brag, brag, brag,he thought, but tried to run faster, anyway. He was alarmed to find he
couldn’t. Doing the mindswap with Oy had tired him out quite a little b—
No.
Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence
to be denied. Jake had done his best to heed this advice, and as a result admitted that “being tired” no longer described his situation. The stitch in his side had grown fangs that had
sunk deep into his armpit. He knew he had gained on his pursuers; he also knew from the
shouted cadence-chant that they were making up the distance they’d lost. Soon they would
be shooting at him and Oy again, and while men didn’t shoot for shit while they were
running, someone could always get lucky.
Now he saw something up ahead, blocking the corridor. A door. As he approached it, Jake
allowed himself to wonder what he’d do if Susannah wasn’t on the other side. Or if she was
there but didn’t know how to help him.
Well, he and Oy would make a stand, that was all. No cover, no way to reenact
Thermopylae Pass this time, but he’d throw plates and take heads until they brought him
down.
If he needed to, that was.
Maybe he would not.
Jake pounded toward the door, his breath now hot in his throat—close to burning—and
thought,It’s just as well. I couldn’t have run much further, anyway .
Oy got there first. He put his front paws on the ghostwood and looked up as if reading the
words stamped into the door and the message flashing below them. Then he looked back at
Jake, who came panting up with one hand pressed against his armpit and the remaining
Orizas clanging loudly back and forth in their bag.
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
New York/Fedic
Maximum Security
VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED
#9 FINAL DEFAULT
He tried the doorknob, but that was only a formality. When the chilly metal refused to turn
in his grip, he didn’t bother trying again but hammered the heels of both hands against the
wood, instead. “Susannah!” he shouted. “If you’re there, let me in!”
Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chinhe heard his father say, and his mother, much more
gravely, as if she knew storytelling was serious business:I heard a fly buzz…when I died.
From behind the door there was nothing. From behind Jake, the chanting voices of the
Crimson King’s posse swept closer.
“Susannah!” he bawled, and when there was no answer this time he turned, put his back to
the door (hadn’t he always known it would end just this way, with his back to a locked
door?), and seized an Oriza in each hand. Oy stood between his feet, and now his fur was
bushed out, now the velvety-soft skin of his muzzle wrinkled back to show his teeth.
Jake crossed his arms, assuming “the load.”
“Come on then, you bastards,” he said. “For Gilead and the Eld. For Roland, son of Steven.
For me and Oy.”
At first he was too fiercely concentrated on dying well, of taking at least one of them with him (the fellow who’d told him theFaddah wasdinnah would be his personal preference)
and more if he could, to realize the voice he was hearing had come from the other side of
the door rather than from his own mind.
“Jake! Is it really you, sugarpie?”
His eyes widened. Oh please let it not be a trick. If it was, Jake reckoned that he would
never be played another.
“Susannah, they’re coming! Do you know how—”
“Yes!Should still bechassit, do you hear me? If Nigel’s right, the word should still becha
—”
Jake didn’t give her a chance to finish saying it again. Now he could see them sweeping
toward him, running full-out. Some waving guns and already shooting into the air.
“Chassit!” he yelled.“Chassit for the Tower!Open! Open, you son of a bitch! ”
Behind his pressing back the door between New York and Fedic clicked open. At the head
of the charging posse, Flaherty saw it happen, uttered the bitterest curse in his lexicon, and fired a single bullet. He was a good shot, and all the force of his not inconsiderable will
went with that particular slug, guiding it. No doubt it would have punched through Jake’s
forehead above the left eye, entering his brain and ending his life, had not a strong,
brown-fingered hand seized Jake by the collar at that very moment and yanked him
backward through the shrill elevator-shaft whistle that sounds endlessly between the levels
of the Dark Tower. The bullet buzzed by his head instead of entering it.
Oy came with him, barking his friend’s name shrilly—Ake-Ake, Ake-Ake!—and the door
slammed shut behind them. Flaherty reached it twenty seconds later and hammered on it
until his fists bled (when Lamla tried to restrain him, Flaherty thrust him back with such
ferocity that the taheen went a-sprawl), but there was nothing he could do. Hammering did
not work; cursing did not work; nothing worked.
At the very last minute, the boy and the bumbler had eluded them. For yet a little while
longer the core of Roland’s ka-tet remained unbroken.
Chapter VI:
On Turtleback Lane
One
See this, I do beg ya, and see it very well, for it’s one of the most beautiful places that still remain in America.
I’d show you a homely dirt lane running along a heavily wooded switchback ridge in
western Maine, its north and south ends spilling onto Route 7 about two miles apart. Just
west of this ridge, like a jeweler’s setting, is a deep green dimple in the landscape. At the bottom of it—the stone in the setting—is Kezar Lake. Like all mountain lakes, it may
change its aspect half a dozen times in the course of a single day, for here the weather is
beyond prankish; you could call it half-mad and be perfectly accurate. The locals will be
happy to tell you about ice-cream snow flurries that came to this part of the world once in
late August (that would be 1948) and once spang on the Glorious Fourth (1959). They’ll be
even more delighted to tell you about the tornado that came blasting across the lake’s
frozen surface in January of 1971, sucking up snow and creating a whirling mini-blizzard
that crackled with thunder in its middle. Hard to believe such crazy-jane weather, but you
could go and see Gary Barker, if you don’t believe me; he’s got the pictures to prove it.
Today the lake at the bottom of the dimple is blacker than homemade sin, not just reflecting the thunderheads massing overhead but amplifying their mood. Every now and
then a splinter of silver streaks across that obsidian looking-glass as lightning stabs out of the clouds overhead. The sound of thunder rolls through the congested sky west to east,
like the wheels of some great stone bucka rolling down an alley in the sky. The pines and
oaks and birches are still and all the world holds its breath. All shadows have disappeared.