Stephen King – The Dark Tower

flattened by Fire-Response Team Bravo, which had not actually scrambled to fight a fire in

over eight hundred years. Her complaining days were over.

And—

“STAND CLEAR!”blared the fire engine. Behind it, two more engines swerved gaudily

around either side of Warden’s House. Once again Tassa the houseboy barely leaped in

time to save his skin.“THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!” Some sort of metallic

node rose from the center of the engine, split open, and produced a steel whirligig that began to spray high-pressure streams of water in eight different directions.“MAKE WAY

FOR FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!”

And—

James Cagney—the taheen who was standing with Gaskie in the foyer of the Feveral Hall

dormitory when the trouble started, remember him?—saw what was going to happen and

began yelling at the guards who were staggering out of Damli’s west wing, red-eyed and

coughing, some with their pants on fire, a few—oh, praise Gan and Bessa and all the

gods—with weapons.

Cag screamed at them to get out of the way and could hardly hear himself in the

cacophony. He saw Joey Rastosovich pull two of them aside and watched the Earnshaw kid

bump aside another. A few of the coughing, weeping escapees saw the oncoming fire

engine and scattered on their own. Then Fire-Response Team Bravo was plowing through

the guards from the west wing, not slowing, roaring straight for Damli House, spraying

water to every point of the compass.

And—

“Dear Christ, no,” Pimli Prentiss moaned. He clapped his hands over his eyes. Finli, on the

other hand, was helpless to look away. He saw a low man—Ben Alexander, he was quite

sure—chewed beneath the firetruck’s huge wheels. He saw another struck by the grille and

mashed against the side of Damli House as the engine crashed, spraying boards and glass,

then breaking through a bulkhead which had been partially concealed by a bed of sickly

flowers. One wheel dropped down into the cellar stairwell and a robot voice began to

boom,“ACCIDENT! NOTIFY THE STATION! ACCIDENT!”

No shit, Sherlock,Finli thought, looking at the blood on the grass with a kind of sick

wonder. How many of his men and his valuable charges had the goddamned

malfunctioning firetruck mowed down? Six? Eight? A motherfucking dozen?

From behind Damli House came that terrifyingchow-chow-chow sound once again, the

sound of automatic weapons fire.

A fat Breaker named Waverly jostled him. Finli snared him before Waverly could fly on

by. “What happened? Who told you to go south?” For Finli, unlike Trampas, wasn’t

wearing any sort of thinking-cap and the message

(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HURT)

was slamming into his head so hard and loud it was nearly impossible to think of anything

else.

Beside him, Pimli—struggling to gather his wits—seized on the beating thought and

managed one of his own:That’s almost got to be Brautigan, grabbing an idea and amplifying it that way. Who else could?

And—

Gaskie grabbed first Cag and then Jakli and shouted at them to gather up all the armed

guards and put them to work flanking the Breakers who were hurrying south on the Mall

and the streets that flanked the Mall. They looked at him with blank, starey

eyes—panic-eyes—and he could have screamed with balked fury. And here came the next

two engines with their sirens whooping. The larger of the pair struck two of the Breakers,

bearing them to the ground and running them over. One of these new casualties was Joey

Rastosovich. When the engine had passed, beating at the grass with its compressed-air

vents, Tanya fell on her knees beside her dying husband, raising her hands to the sky. She

was screaming at the top of her lungs but Gaskie could barely hear her. Tears of frustration

and fear prickled the corners of his eyes.Dirty dogs, he thought.Dirty ambushing dogs!

And—

North of the Algul compound, Susannah broke cover, moving in on the triple run of fence.

This wasn’t in the plan, but the need to keep shooting, to keep knocking them down, was

stronger than ever. She simply couldn’t help herself, and Roland would have understood.

Besides, the billowing smoke from Damli House had momentarily obscured everything at

this end of the compound. Red beams from the “lazers” stabbed into it—on and off, on and

off, like some sort of neon sign—and Susannah reminded herself not to get in the way of

them, not unless she wanted a hole two inches across all the way through her.

She used bullets from the Coyote to cut her end of the fence—outer run, middle run, inner

run—and then vanished into the thickening smoke, reloading as she went.

And—

The Breaker named Waverly tried to pull free of Finli.Nar, nar, none of that, may it please

ya, Finli thought. He yanked the man—who’d been a bookkeeper or some such thing in his

pre-Algul life—closer to him, then slapped him twice across the face, hard enough to make

his hand hurt. Waverly screamed in pain and surprise.

“Who the fuck is back there!”Finli roared.“WHO THE FUCK IS DOING THIS?” The

follow-up fire engines had halted in front of Damli House and were pouring streams of

water into the smoke. Finli didn’t know if it could help, but probably it couldn’t hurt. And

at least the damned things hadn’t crashed into the building they were supposed to save, like

the first one.

“Sir, I don’t know!”Waverly sobbed. Blood was streaming from one of his nostrils and the

corner of his mouth.“I don’tknow, but there has to be fifty, maybe a hundred of the devils!

Dinky got us out! God bless Dinky Earnshaw!”

Gaskie o’ Tego, meanwhile, wrapped one good-sized hand around James Cagney’s neck and the other around Jakli’s. Gaskie had an idea son of a bitching crowhead Jakli had been

on the verge of running, but there was no time to worry about that now. He needed them

both.

And—

“Boss!” Finli shouted. “Boss, grab the Earnshaw kid! Something about this smells!”

And—

With Cag’s face pressing against one of his cheeks and Jakli’s against the other, the Wease

(who thought as clearly as anyone that terrible morning) was finally able to make himself

heard. Gaskie, meanwhile, repeated his command: divide up the armed guards and put

them with the retreating Breakers. “Don’t try to stop them, but stay with them! And for

Christ’s sake, keep em from getting electrocuted! Keep em off the fence if they go past

Main Stree—”

Before he could finish this admonishment, a figure came plummeting out of the thickening

smoke. It was Gangli, the compound doctor, his white coat on fire, his roller skates still on his feet.

And—

Susannah Dean took up a position at the left rear corner of Damli House, coughing. She

saw three of the sons of bitches—Gaskie, Jakli, and Cagney, had she but known it. Before

she could draw a bead, eddying smoke blotted them out. When it cleared, Jakli and Cag

were gone, rounding up armed guards to act as sheepdogs who would at least try to protect

their panicked charges, even if they could not immediately stop them. Gaskie was still

there, and Susannah took him with a single headshot.

Pimli didn’t see it. It was becoming clear to him that all the confusion was on the surface.

Quite likely deliberate. The Breakers’ decision to move away from the attackers north of

the Algul had come a little too quickly and was a little too organized.

Never mind Earnshaw,he thought, Brautigan’sthe one I want to talk to .

But before he could catch up to Ted, Tassa grabbed the Master in a frantic, terrified hug,

babbling that Warden’s House was on fire, he was afraid, terribly afraid, that all of

Master’s clothes, his books—

Pimli Prentiss knocked him aside with a hammer-blow to the side of his head. The pulse of

the Breakers’ unified thought (bad-mind now instead of good-mind), yammered

(WITH YOUR HANDS UP YOU WON’T BE)

crazily in his head, threatening to drive out all thought. Fucking Brautigan had done this, heknew it, and the man was too far ahead…unless…

Pimli looked at the Peacemaker in his hand, considered it, then jammed it back into the

docker’s clutch under his left arm. He wanted fucking Brautigan alive. Fucking Brautigan

had some explaining to do. Not to mention some more goddamned breaking.

Chow-chow-chow.Bullets flicking all around him. Running hume guards, taheen, and

can-toi all around him. And Christ, only a few of them were armed, mostly humes who’d

been down for fence-patrol. Those who guarded the Breakers didn’t reallyneed guns, by

and large the Breakers were as tame as parakeets and the thought of an outside attack had

seemed ludicrous until…

Until it happened,he thought, and spied Trampas.

“Trampas!” he bawled. “Trampas!Hey, cowboy! Grab Earnshaw and bring him to

me!Grab Earnshaw! ”

Here in the middle of the Mall it was a little less noisy and Trampas heard sai Prentiss

quite clearly. He sprinted after Dinky and grabbed the young man by one arm.