“Come on, boss!” Finli o’ Tego almost pleaded. “We have to make sure the Breakers are
okay—”
“Smoke!” Jakli cried, fluttering his dark (and utterly useless) wings. “Smoke from Damli
House, smoke from Feveral, too!”
Pimli ignored him. He pulled the Peacemaker from the docker’s clutch, wondering briefly
what premonition had caused him to put it on. He had no idea, but he was glad for the
weight of the gun in his hand. Behind him, Tassa was yelling—Tammy was, too—but
Pimli ignored the pair of them. His heart was beating furiously, but he was calm again.
Finli was right. The Breakers were the important thing right now. Making sure they didn’t
lose a third of their trained psychics in some sort of electrical fire or half-assed act of
sabotage. He nodded at his Security Chief and they began to run toward Damli House with
Jakli squawking and flapping along behind them like a refugee from a Warner Bros.
cartoon. Somewhere up there, Gaskie was hollering. And then Pimli o’ New Jersey heard a
sound that chilled him to the bone, a rapidchow-chow-chow sound. Gunfire! If some clown
was shooting at his Breakers, that clown’s head would finish the day on a high pole, by the
gods. That the guards rather than the Breakers might be under attack had at that point still
not crossed his mind, nor that of the slightly wilier Finli, either. Too much was happening
too fast.
Eleven
At the south end of the Devar compound, the syncopated honking sound was almost loud
enough to split eardrums. “Christ!” Eddie said, and couldn’t hear himself.
In the south watchtowers, the guards were turned away from them, looking north. Eddie
couldn’t see any smoke yet. Perhaps the guards could from their higher vantage-points.
Roland grabbed Jake’s shoulder, then pointed at theSOO LINE boxcar. Jake nodded and
scrambled beneath it with Oy at his heels. Roland held both hands out to Eddie—Stay
where youare!—and then followed. On the other side of the boxcar the boy and the
gunslinger stood up, side by side. They would have been clearly visible to the sentries, had
the attention of those worthies not been distracted by the smoke detectors and fire alarms
inside the compound.
Suddenly the entire front of the Pleasantville Hardware Company descended into a slot in
the ground. A robot fire engine, all bright red paint and gleaming chrome, came bolting out
of the hitherto concealed garage. A line of red lights pulsed down the center of its
elongated body, and an amplified voice bellowed,“STAND CLEAR! THIS IS
FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO! STAND CLEAR! MAKE WAY FOR
FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO! ”
There must be no gunfire from this part of the Devar, not yet. The south end of the
compound must seem safe to the increasingly frightened inmates of Algul Siento: don’t
worry, folks, here’s your port in today’s unexpected shitstorm.
The gunslinger dipped a ’Riza from Jake’s dwindling supply and nodded for the boy to
take another. Roland pointed to the guard in the righthand tower, then once more at Jake.
The boy nodded, cocked his arm across his chest, and waited for Roland to give him the go.
Twelve
Once you hear the horn that signals the change of shifts,Roland had told Susannah,take it
to them. Do as much damage as you can, but don’t let them see they’re only facing a single
person, for your father’s sake!
As if he needed to tell her that.
She could have taken the three watchtower guards while the horn was still blaring, but
something made her wait. A few seconds later, she was glad she had. The rear door of the
Queen Anne burst open so violently it tore off its upper hinge. Breakers piled out, clawing
at those ahead of them in their panic (these are the would-be destroyers of the universe,she
thought,these sheep ), and among them she saw half a dozen of the freakboys with animal
heads and at least four of those creepy humanoids with the masks on.
Susannah took the guard in the west tower first, and had shifted her aim to the pair in the
east tower before the first casualty in the Battle of Algul Siento had fallen over the railing and tumbled to the ground with his brains dribbling out of his hair and down his cheeks.
The Coyote machine-pistol, switched to the middle setting, fired in low-pitched bursts of
three:Chow! Chow! Chow!
The taheen and the low man in the east tower spun widdershins to each other, like figures
in a dance. The taheen crumpled on the catwalk that skirted the top of the watchtower; the
low man was driven into the rail, flipped over it with his bootheels in the sky, then
plummeted head-first to the ground. She heard the crack his neck made when it broke.
A couple of the milling Breakers spotted this unfortunate fellow’s descent and screamed.
“Put up your hands!” That was Dinky, she recognized his voice. “Put up your hands if
you’re a Breaker!”
No one questioned the idea; in these circumstances, anyone who sounded like he knew
what was going on was in unquestioned charge. Some of the Breakers—but not all, not
yet—put their hands up. It made no difference to Susannah. She didn’t need raised hands to
tell the difference between the sheep and the goats. A kind of haunted clarity had fallen
over her vision.
She flicked the fire-control switch fromBURST toSINGLE SHOT and began to pick off the guards who’d come up from The Study with the Breakers.Taheen…can-toi, get him…a
hume but don’t shoot her, she’s a Breaker even though she doesn’t have her hands
up…don’t ask me how I know but I do…
Susannah squeezed the Coyote’s trigger and the head of the hume next to the woman in the
bright red slacks exploded in a mist of blood and bone. The Breakers screamed like
children, staring around with their eyes bulging and their hands up. And now Susannah
heard Dinky again, only this time not his physical voice. It was his mental voice she heard,
and it was much louder:
(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HURT)
Which was her cue to break cover and start moving. She’d gotten eight of the Crimson
King’s bad boys, counting the three in the towers—not that it was much of an
accomplishment, given their panic—and she saw no more, at least for the time being.
Susannah twisted the hand-throttle and scooted the SCT toward one of the other
abandoned sheds. The gadget’s pickup was so lively that she almost tumbled off the
bicycle-style seat. Trying not to laugh (and laughing anyway), she shouted at the top of her
lungs, in her best Detta Walker vulture-screech:
“Git outta here, muthafuckahs! Git south! Hands up so we know you fum the bad boys!
Everyone doan have their hands up goan get a bullet in the haid! Y’all trus’ me on it!”
In through the door of the next shed, scraping a balloon tire of the SCT on the jamb, but
not quite hard enough to tip it over. Praise God, for she never would have had enough
strength to right it on her own. In here, one of the “lazers” was set on a snap-down tripod.
She pushed the toggle-switch markedON and was wondering if she needed to do
something else with theINTERVAL switch when the weapon’s muzzle emitted a blinding
stream of reddish-purple light that arrowed into the compound above the triple run of fence
and made a hole in the top story of Damli House. To Susannah it looked as big as a hole
made by a point-blank artillery shell.
This is good,she thought.I gotta get the other ones going.
But she wondered if there would be time. Already other Breakers were picking up on
Dinky’s suggestion, rebroadcasting it and boosting it in the process:
(GO SOUTH! HANDS UP! WON’T BE HURT!)
She flicked the Coyote’s fire-switch toFULL AUTO and raked 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