quarter of the way up the slope.
She punched the clutch, downshifted to Second like a NASCAR driver with the checkered
flag in view, then turned hard left, hauling on the wheel with both hands. Chip McAvoy’s
pickup truck teetered but did not roll. She saw the twinkle of sun on metal as a vehicle
coming the other way reached the top of the hill King was climbing. She heard the man
sitting by the door shout, “Pull in behind him!”
She did as he told her, even though she could now see that the oncoming vehicle was off
the road and thus apt to broadside them. Not to mention crushing Stephen King in a metal
sandwich between them.
The door popped open and the one named Roland half-rolled, half-jumped out of the truck.
After that, things happened very, very fast.
Chapter II:
Ves’-Ka Gan
One
What happened was lethally simple: Roland’s bad hip betrayed him. He went to his knees
with a cry of mingled rage, pain, and dismay. Then the sunlight was blotted out as Jake
leaped over him without so much as breaking stride. Oy was barking crazily from the cab
of the truck:“Ake-Ake! Ake-Ake!”
“Jake, no!”Roland shouted. He saw it all with a terrible clarity. The boy seized the writer
around the waist as the blue vehicle—neither a truck nor a car but seemingly a cross
between the two—bore down upon them in a roar of dissonant music. Jake turned King to
the left, shielding him with his body, and so it was Jake the vehicle struck. Behind the
gunslinger, who was now on his knees with his bleeding hands buried in the dirt, the
woman from the store screamed.
“JAKE, NO!”Roland bellowed again, but it was too late. The boy he thought of as his son
disappeared beneath the blue vehicle. The gunslinger saw one small upraised hand—would
never forget it—and then that was gone, too. King, struck first by Jake and then by the
weight of the van behind Jake, was thrown to the edge of the little grove of trees, ten feet
from the point of impact. He landed on his right side, hitting his head on a stone hard
enough to send the cap flying from his head. Then he rolled over, perhaps intending to try
for his feet. Or perhaps intending nothing at all; his eyes were shocked zeroes.
The driver hauled on his vehicle’s steering wheel and it slipped past on Roland’s left,
missing him by inches, merely throwing dust into his face instead of running him down. By then it was slowing, the driver perhaps applying the machine’s brake now that it was too
late. The side squalled across the hood of the pickup truck, slowing the van further, but it
was not done doing damage even so. Before coming to a complete stop it struck King again,
this time as he lay on the ground. Roland heard the snap of a breaking bone. It was followed
by the writer’s cry of pain. And now Roland knew for sure about the pain in his own hip,
didn’t he? It had never been dry twist at all.
He scrambled to his feet, only peripherally aware that his pain was entirely gone. He
looked at Stephen King’s unnaturally twisted body beneath the left front wheel of the blue
vehicle and thoughtGood! with unthinking savagery.Good! If someone has to die here, let
it be you! To hell with Gan’s navel, to hell with the stories that come out of it, to hell with the Tower, let it be you and not my boy!
The bumbler raced past Roland to where Jake lay on his back at the rear of the van with
blue exhaust blowing into his open eyes. Oy did not hesitate; he seized the Oriza pouch that
was still slung over Jake’s shoulder and used it to pull the boy away from the van, doing it
inch by inch, his short strong legs digging up puffs of dust. Blood was pouring from Jake’s
ears and the corners of his mouth. The heels of his shor’boots left a double line of tracks in the dirt and crisp brown pine needles.
Roland staggered to Jake and fell on his knees beside him. His first thought was that Jake
was all right after all. The boy’s limbs were straight, thank all the gods, and the mark
running across the bridge of his nose and down one beardless cheek was oil flecked with
rust, not blood as Roland had first assumed. Therewas blood coming out of his ears, yes,
and his mouth, too, but the latter stream might only be flowing from a cut in the lining of
his cheek, or—
“Go and see to the writer,” Jake said. His voice was calm, not at all constricted by pain.
They might have been sitting around a little cookfire after a day on the trail, waiting for
what Eddie liked to call vittles…or, if he happened to be feeling particularly humorous (as
he often was), “wittles.”
“The writer can wait,” Roland said curtly, thinking:I’ve been given a miracle. One made
by the combination of a boy’s yielding, not-quite-finished body, and the soft earth that
gave beneath him when that bastard’s truckomobile ran over him.
“No,” Jake said. “He can’t.” And when he moved, trying to sit up, his shirt pulled a little
tighter against the top half of his body and Roland saw the dreadful concavity of the boy’s
chest. More blood poured from Jake’s mouth, and when he tried to speak again he began to
cough, instead. Roland’s heart seemed to twist like a rag inside his chest, and there was a
moment to wonder how it could possibly go on beating in the face of this.
Oy voiced a moaning cry, Jake’s name expressed in a half-howl that made Roland’s arms
burst out in gooseflesh.
“Don’t try to talk,” Roland said. “Something may be sprung inside of you. A rib, mayhap two.”
Jake turned his head to the side. He spat out a mouthful of blood—some of it ran down his
cheek like chewing tobacco—and took a hold on Roland’s wrist. His grip was strong; so
was his voice, each word clear.
“Everything’ssprung. This is dying—I know because I’ve done it before.” What he said
next was what Roland had been thinking just before they started out from Cara Laughs: “If
ka will say so, let it be so.See to the man we came to save! ”
It was impossible to deny the imperative in the boy’s eyes and voice. It was done, now, the
Ka of Nineteen played out to the end. Except, perhaps, for King. The man they had come to
save. How much of their fate had danced from the tips of his flying, tobacco-stained fingers?
All? Some? This?
Whatever the answer, Roland could have killed him with his bare hands as he lay pinned
beneath the machine that had struck him, and never mind that King hadn’t been driving the
van; if he had been doing what ka had meant him to be doing, he never would have been
here when the fool came calling, and Jake’s chest wouldn’t have that terrible sunken look.
It was too much, coming so soon after Eddie had been bushwhacked.
And yet—
“Don’t move,” he said, getting up. “Oy, don’tlet him move.”
“I won’t move.” Every word still clear, still sure. But now Roland could see blood also
darkening the bottom of Jake’s shirt and the crotch of his jeans, blooming there like roses.
Once before he died and had come back. But not from this world. In this one, death was
always for keeps.
Roland turned to where the writer lay.
Two
When Bryan Smith tried to get out from behind the wheel of his van, Irene Tassenbaum
pushed him rudely back in. His dogs, perhaps smelling blood or Oy or both, were barking
and capering wildly behind him. Now the radio was pounding out some new and utterly
hellish heavy metal tune. She thought her head would split, not from the shock of what had
just happened but from pure racket. She saw the man’s revolver lying on the ground and
picked it up. The small part of her mind still capable of coherent thought was amazed by
the weight of the thing. Nevertheless, she pointed it at the man, then reached past him and
punched the power button on the radio. With the blaring fuzz-tone guitars gone, she could
hear birds as well as two barking dogs and one howling…well, one howling
whatever-it-was.
“Back your van off the guy you hit,” she said. “Slowly. And if you run over the kid again when you do it, I swear I’ll blow your jackass head off.”
Bryan Smith stared at her with bloodshot, bewildered eyes. “What kid?” he asked.
Three
When the van’s front wheel rolled slowly off the writer, Roland saw that his lower body
was twisted unnaturally to the right and a lump pushed out the leg of his jeans on that side.