Stephen King – The Dark Tower

“—but when?” Jake continued. “Will it be tomorrow?”

“Perhaps,” Roland replied. “I think the day after’s more likely.”

“I have a terrible feeling,” Jake said. “It’s not being afraid, exactly—”

“Do you think they’re going to beat us, hon?” Susannah asked. She put a hand on Jake’s

neck and looked into his face. She had come to respect his feelings. She sometimes

wondered how much of what he was now had to do with the creature he’d faced to get here:

the thing in the house on Dutch Hill. No robot there, no rusty old clockwork toy. The

doorkeeper had been a genuine leftover of thePrim . “You smell a whuppin in the wind?

That it?”

“I don’t think so,” Jake said. “I don’t know what it is. I’ve only felt something like it once, and that was just before…”

“Just before what?” Susannah asked, but before Jake had a chance to reply, Eddie broke in.

Roland was glad.Just before I fell. That was how Jake had meant to finish.Just before

Roland letme fall.

“Holyshit! Come here, you guys! You gotta see this!”

Eddie had pulled away the mover’s pad and revealed a motorized vehicle that looked like

a cross between an ATV and a gigantic tricycle. The tires were wide balloon jobs with deep

zigzag treads. The controls were all on the handlebars. And there was a playing card

propped on the rudimentary dashboard. Roland knew what it was even before Eddie

plucked it up between two fingers and turned it over. The card showed a woman with a

shawl over her head at a spinning wheel. It was the Lady of Shadows.

“Looks like our pal Ted left you a ride, sugarbee,” Eddie said.

Susannah had hurried over at her rapid crawl. Now she lifted her arms. “Boost me up!

Boost me, Eddie!”

He did, and when she was in the saddle, holding handlebars instead of reins, the vehicle looked made for her. Susannah thumbed a red button and the engine thrummed to life, so

low you could barely hear it. Electricity, not gasoline, Eddie was quite sure. Like a

golf-cart, but probably a lot faster.

Susannah turned toward them, smiling radiantly. She patted the three-wheeler’s dark

brown nacelle. “Call me Missus Centaur! I been lookin for this my whole life and never

even knew.”

None of them noticed the stricken expression on Roland’s face. He bent over to pick up the

card Eddie had dropped so no one would.

Yes, it was her, all right—the Lady of the Shadows. Under her shawl she seemed to be

smiling craftily and sobbing, both at the same time. On the last occasion he’d seen that card, it had been in the hand of the man who sometimes went by the name of Walter, sometimes

that of Flagg.

You have no idea how close you stand to the Tower now,he had said.Worlds turn about

your head .

And now he recognized the feeling that had crept among them for what it almost certainly

was: not worry or weariness but ka-shume. There was no real translation for that rue-laden

term, but it meant to sense an approaching break in one’s ka-tet.

Walter o’ Dim, his old nemesis, was dead. Roland had known it as soon as he saw the face

of the Lady of Shadows. Soon one of his own would die as well, probably in the coming

battle to break the power of the Devar-Toi. And once again the scales which had

temporarily tilted in their favor would balance.

It never once crossed Roland’s mind that the one to die might be him.

Two

There were three brand names on what Eddie immediately dubbed “Suzie’s Cruisin

Trike.” One was Honda; one was Takuro (as in that wildly popular pre-superflu import, the

Takuro Spirit); the third was North Central Positronics. And a fourth, as well:U.S. ARMY ,

as inPROPERTY OF .

Susannah was reluctant to get off it, but finally she did. God knew there was plenty more

to see; the cave was a treasure trove. Its narrowing throat was filled with food supplies

(mostly freeze-dried stuff that probably wouldn’t taste as good as Nigel’s chow but would

at least nourish them), bottled water, canned drinks (plenty of Coke and Nozz-A-La but

nothing alcoholic), and the promised propane stove. There were also crates of weaponry.

Some of the crates were markedU.S. ARMY , but by no means all.

Now their most basic abilities came out: the true thread, Cort might have called it. Those

talents and intuitions that could have remained sleeping for most of their lives, only stirring long enough to get them into occasional trouble, if Roland had not deliberately wakened

them…cosseted them…and then filed their teeth to deadly points.

Hardly a word was spoken among them as Roland produced a wide prying tool from his

purse and levered away the tops of the crates. Susannah had forgotten about the Cruisin

Trike she had been waiting for all her life; Eddie forgot to make jokes; Roland forgot about

his sense of foreboding. They became absorbed in the weaponry that had been left for them,

and there was no piece of it they did not understand either at once or after a bit of study.

There was a crate of AR-15 rifles, the barrels packed in grease, the firing mechanisms

fragrant with banana oil. Eddie noted the added selector switches, and looked in the crate

next to the 15’s. Inside, covered with plastic and also packed in grease, were metal drums.

They looked like the ones you saw on tommy-guns in gangster epics likeWhite Heat, only

these were bigger. Eddie lifted one of the 15’s, turned it over, and found exactly what he

expected: a conversion clip that would allow these drums to be attached to the guns,

turning them into rapid-fire rice-cutters. How many shots per drum? A hundred? A

hundred and twenty-five? Enough to mow down a whole company of men, that was sure.

There was a box of what looked like rocket shells with the lettersSTS stenciled on each. In

a rack beside them, propped against the cave wall, were half a dozen handheld launchers.

Roland pointed at the atom-symbol on them and shook his head. He did not want them

shooting off weapons that would release potentially lethal radiation no matter how

powerful they might be. He was willing to kill the Breakers if that was what it took to stop

their meddling with the Beam, but only as a last resort.

Flanking a metal tray filled with gas-masks (to Jake they looked gruesome, like the

severed heads of strange bugs) were two crates of handguns: snub-nosed machine-pistols

with the wordCOYOTE embossed on the butts and heavy automatics called Cobra Stars.

Jake was attracted to both weapons (in truth his heart was attracted toall the weapons), but

he took one of the Stars because it looked a little bit like the gun he had lost. The clip fed up the handle and held either fifteen or sixteen shots. This was not a matter of counting but

only oflooking andknowing .

“Hey,” Susannah said. She’d gone back toward the front of the cave. “Come look at this.

Sneetches.”

“Check out the crate-lid,” Jake said when they joined her. Susannah had set it aside; Jake

picked it up and was studying it with admiration. It showed the face of a smiling boy with a

lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. He was wearing round glasses and brandishing what

appeared to be a magician’s wand at a floating sneetch. The words stenciled beneath the

drawing read:

PROPERTY 449th SQUADRON

24 “SNEETCHES”

HARRY POTTER MODEL

SERIAL #465-17-CC NDJKR

“Don’t Mess with the 449!”

We’ll Kick the “Slytherin” Out of You!

There were two dozen sneetches in the crate, packed like eggs in little nests of plastic

excelsior. None of Roland’s band had had the opportunity to study live ones closely during

their battle with the Wolves, but now they had a good swatch of time during which they

could indulge their most natural interests and curiosities. Each took up a sneetch. They

were about the size of tennis balls, but a great deal heavier. Their surfaces had been gridded, making them resemble globes marked with lines of latitude and longitude. Although they

looked like steel, the surfaces had a faint giving quality, like very hard rubber.

There was an ID-plate on each sneetch and a button beside it. “That wakes it up,” Eddie

murmured, and Jake nodded. There was also a small depressed area in the curved surface,

just the right size for a finger. Jake pushed it without the slightest worry that the thing

would explode, or maybe extrude a mini-buzzsaw that would cut off his fingers. You used

the button at the bottom of the depression to access the programming. He didn’t know how

he knew that, but he most certainly did.

A curved section of the sneetch’s surface slid away with a faintAuowwm! sound.

Revealed were four tiny lights, three of them dark and one flashing slow amber pulses.