taste nasty. She chewed slowly at first, then more rapidly. She swallowed. Took another
piece. Chewed, swallowed. Another. Now she was nearly wolfing it.
“Whoa, slow down!” Eddie said.
“It must be another kind! That’s it, of course it is!” She looked at Eddie shiningly. “We’ve moved further up the beach and the species has changed! I’m no longer allergic, it seems! It
doesn’t taste nasty, like it did before. . . and I did try to keep it down, didn’t I?” She looked at him nakedly. “I tried very hard.”
“Yeah.” To himself he sounded like a radio broadcasting a very distant signal. She thinks she’s been eating every day and then upchucking everything. She thinks that’s why she’s so
weak. Christ Almighty. “Yeah, you tried like hell.”
“It tastes—” These words were hard to pick up because her mouth was full. “It tastes so good!” She laughed. The sound was delicate and lovely. “It’s going to stay down! I’m going to take nourishment! I know it! I feel it!”
“Just don’t overdo it,” he cautioned, and gave her one of the water-skins. “You’re not used to it. All that—” He swal- lowed and there was an audible (audible to him, at least) click in his throat. “All that throwing up.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“I need to talk to Roland for a few minutes.”
“All right.”
But before he could go she grasped his hand again.
“Thank you, Eddie. Thank you for being so patient. And thank him.” She paused gravely.
“Thank him, and don’t tell him that he scares me.”
“I won’t,” Eddie had said, and went back to the gunslinger.
3
Even when she wasn’t pushing, Odetta was a help. She navigated with the prescience of a
woman who has spent a long time weaving a wheelchair through a world that would not
acknowledge handicapped people such as she for years to come.
“Left,” she’d call, and Eddie would gee to the left, gliding past a rock snarling out of the pasty grit like a decayed fang. On his own, he might have seen it… or maybe not.
“Right,” she called, and Eddie hawed right, barely miss- ing one of the increasingly rare sandtraps.
They finally stopped and Eddie lay down, breathing hard.
“Sleep,” Odetta said. “An hour. I’ll wake you.”
Eddie looked at her.
“I’m not lying. I observed your friend’s condition, Eddie-”
“He’s not exactly my friend, you kn—”
“—and I know how important time is. I won’t let you sleep longer than an hour out of a
misguided sense of mercy. I can tell the sun quite well. You won’t do that man any good by
wearing yourself out, will you?”
“No,” he said, thinking: But you don’t understand. If I sleep and Delta Walker comes back—
“Sleep, Eddie,” she said, and since Eddie was too weary (and too much in love) to do other than trust her, he did. He slept and she woke him when she said she would and she was still
Odetta, and they went on, and now she was pumping again, helping. They raced up the
diminishing beach toward the door Eddie kept frantically looking for and kept not seeing.
4
When he left Odetta eating her first meal in days and went back to the gunslinger, Roland
seemed a little better.
“Hunker down,” he said to Eddie.
Eddie hunkered.
“Leave me the skin that’s half full. All I need. Take her to the door.”
“What if I don’t—”
“Find it? You’ll find it. The first two were there; this one will be, too. If you get there
before sundown tonight, wait for dark and then kill double. You’ll need to leave her food
and make sure she’s sheltered as well as she can be. If you don’t reach it tonight, kill triple.
Here.”
He handed over one of his guns.
Eddie took it with respect, surprised as before by how heavy it was.
“I thought the shells were all losers.”
“Probably are. But I’ve loaded with the ones I believe were wetted least—three from the
buckle side of the left belt, three from the buckle side of the right. One may fire. Two, if
you’re lucky. Don’t try them on the crawlies.” His eyes considered Eddie briefly. “There may be other things out there.”
“You heard it too, didn’t you?”
“If you mean something yowling in the hills, yes. If you mean the Bugger-Man, as your
eyes say, no. I heard a wildcat in the brakes, that’s all, maybe with a voice four times the
size of its body. It may be nothing you can’t drive off with a stick. But there’s her to think
about. If her other comes back, you may have to—”
“I won’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking!”
“You may have to wing her. You understand?”
Eddie gave a reluctant nod. Goddam shells probably wouldn’t fire anyway, so there was no
sense getting his panties in a bunch about it.
“When you get to the door, leave her. Shelter her as well as you can, and come back to me
with the chair.”
“And the gun?”
The gunslinger’s eyes blazed so brightly that Eddie snapped his head back, as if Roland
had thrust a flaming torch in his face. “Gods, yes! Leave her with a loaded gun, when
her other might come back at any time? Are you insane?”
“The shells—”
“Fuckthe shells!” the gunslinger cried, and a freak drop in the wind allowed the words to carry. Odetta turned her head, looked at them for a long moment, then looked back toward
the sea. “Leave it with her not!”
Eddie kept his voice low in case the wind should drop again. “What if something comes
down from the brakes while I’m on my way back here? Some kind of cat four times bigger
than its voice, instead of the other way around? Something you can’t drive off with a stick?”
“Give her a pile of stones,” the gunslinger said.
“Stones!Jesus wept! Man, you are such a fucking shit!”
“I am thinking,” the gunslinger said. “Something you seem unable to do. I gave you the gun so you could protect her from the sort of danger you’re talking about for half of the trip you
must make. Would it please you if I took the gun back? Then perhaps you could die for her.
Would that please you? Very romantic. . . except then, instead of just her, all three of us would go down.”
“Very logical. You’re still a fucking shit, however.”
“Go or stay. Stop calling me names.”
“You forgot something,” Eddie said furiously.
“What was that?”
“You forgot to tell me to grow up. That’s what Henry always used to say. ‘Oh grow up,
kid.’ ”
The gunslinger had smiled, a weary, oddly beautiful smile. “I think you have grown up.
Will you go or stay?”
“I’ll go,” Eddie said. “What are you going to eat? She scarfed the left-overs.”
“The fucking shit will find a way. The fucking shit has been finding one for years.”
Eddie looked away. “I… I guess I’m sorry I called you that, Roland. It’s been—” He
laughed suddenly, shrilly. “It’s been a very trying day.”
Roland smiled again. “Yes,” he said. “It has.”
5
They made the best time of the entire trek that day, but there was still no door in sight
when the sun began to spill its gold track across the ocean. Although she told him she was
perfectly capable of going on for another half an hour, he called a halt and helped her out of
the chair. He carried her to an even patch of ground that looked fairly smooth, got the
cushions from the back of the chair and the seat, and eased them under her.
“Lord, it feels so good to stretch out,” she sighed. “But …” Her brow clouded. “I keep thinking of that man back there, Roland, all by himself, and I can’t really enjoy it. Eddie,
who is he? What is he?” And, almost as an afterthought: “And why does he shout so much?”
“Just his nature, I guess,” Eddie said, and abruptly went off to gather rocks. Roland hardly ever shouted. He guessed some of it was this morning— FUCK the shells!— but that the rest
of it was false memory: the time she thought she had been Odetta.
He killed triple, as the gunslinger had instructed, and was so intent on the last that he
skipped back from a fourth which had been closing in on his right with only an instant to
spare. He saw the way its claws clicked on the empty place which had been occupied by his
foot and leg a moment before, and thought of the gunslinger’s missing fingers.
He cooked over a dry wood fire—the encroaching hills and increasing vegetation made
the search for good fuel quicker and easier, that was one thing—while the last of the
daylight faded from the western sky.
“Look, Eddie!” she cried, pointing up.