civilization and listening to a rock-and-roll drum-line . . . that was crazy, but was it any
crazier than a traffic-light that dinged and dropped a rusty green flag with the word GO
printed on it? Any crazier than discovering the wreck of a German plane from the 1930s?
Eddie sang the words to the Z.Z. Top song in a whisper:
“You need just enough of that sticky stuff
To hold the seam on your fine blue-jeans
I say yeah, yeah …”
They fit the beat perfectly. It was the disco-pulse percussion of “Velcro Fly.” Eddie was sure of it.
A short time later the sound ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and he could hear only the
wind, and, more faintly, the Send River, which had a bed but never slept.
5
THE NEXT FOUR DAYS were uneventful. They walked; they watched the bridge and
the city grow larger and define themselves more clearly; they camped; they ate; they
riddled; they kept watch turn and turn about (Jake had pestered Roland into letting him
keep a short watch in the two hours just before dawn); they slept. The only remarkable
incident had to do with the bees.
Around noon on the third day after the discovery of the downed plane, a buzzing sound
came to them, growing louder and louder until it dominated the day. At last Roland stopped.
“There,” he said, and pointed toward a grove of eucalyptus trees.
“It sounds like bees,” Susannah said.
Roland’s faded blue eyes gleamed. “Could be we’ll have a little dessert tonight.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this, Roland,” Eddie said, “but I have this aversion to being stung.”
“Don’t we all,” Roland agreed, “but the day is windless. I think we can smoke them to sleep and steal their comb right out from under them without setting half the world on fire.
Let’s have a look.”
He carried Susannah, who was as eager for the adventure as the gunslinger himself, toward
the grove. Eddie and Jake lagged behind, and Oy, apparently having decided that discretion
was the better part of valor, remained sitting at the edge of the Great Road, panting like a
dog and watching them carefully.
Roland paused at the edge of the trees. “Stay where you are,” he told Eddie and Jake,
speaking softly. “We’re going to have a look. I’ll give you a come-on if all’s well.” He carried Susannah into the dappled shadows of the grove while Eddie and Jake remained in
the sunshine, peering after them.
It was cooler in the shade. The buzzing of the bees was a steady, hypnotic drone. “There are too many,” Roland murmured. “This is late summer; they should be out working. I
don’t—”
He caught sight of the hive, bulging tumorously from the hollow of a tree in the center of
the clearing, and broke off.
“What’s the matter with them?” Susannah asked in a soft, horrified voice. “Roland, what’s the matter with them?”
A bee, as plump and slow-moving as a horsefly in October, droned past her head.
Susannah flinched away from it.
Roland motioned for the others to join them. They did, and stood looking at the hive
without speaking. The chambers weren’t neat hexa- gons but random holes of all shapes and
sizes; the beehive itself looked queerly melted, as if someone had turned a blowtorch on it.
The bees which crawled sluggishly over it were as white as snow.
“No honey tonight,” Roland said. “What we took from yonder comb might taste sweet, but it would poison us as surely as night follows day.”
One of the grotesque white bees lumbered heavily past Jake’s head. He ducked away with
an expression of loathing.
“What did it?” Eddie asked. “What did it to them, Roland?”
“The same thing that has emptied this whole land; the thing that’s still causing many of the buffalo to be born as sterile freaks. I’ve heard it called the Old War, the Great Fire, the
Cataclysm, and the Great Poisoning. Whatever it was, it was the start of all our troubles and
it happened long ago, a thousand years before the great-great-grandfathers of the River
Crossing folk were born. The physical effects—the two-headed buffalo and the white bees
and such—have grown less as time passes. I have seen this for myself. The other changes
are greater, if harder to see, and they are still going on.”
They watched the white bees crawl, dazed and almost completely helpless, about their
hive. Some were apparently trying to work; most simply wandered about, butting heads
and crawling over one another. Eddie found himself remembering a newsclip he’d seen
once. It had shown a crowd of survivors leaving the area where a gas-main had exploded,
flattening almost a whole city block in some California town. These bees reminded him of
those dazed, shellshocked survivors.
“You had a nuclear war, didn’t you?” he asked—almost accused. “These Great Old Ones you like to talk about . . . they blew their great old asses straight to hell. Didn’t they?”
“I don’t know what happened. No one knows. The records of those times are lost, and the
few stories are confused and conflicting.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Jake said in a trembling voice. “Looking at those things makes me sick.”
“I’m with you, sugar,” Susannah said.
So they left the bees to their aimless, shattered life in the grove of ancient trees, and there
was no honey that night.
6
“WHEN ARE YOU GOING to tell us what you do know?” Eddie asked the next morning.
The day was bright and blue, but there was a bite in the air; their first autumn in this world
was almost upon them.
Roland glanced at him. “What do you mean?”
“I’d like to hear your whole story, from beginning to end, starting with Gilead. How you
grew up there and what happened to end it all. I want to know how you found out about the
Dark Tower and why you started chasing after it in the first place. I want to know about
your first bunch of friends, too. And what happened to them.”
Roland removed his hat, armed sweat from his brow, then replaced it. “You have the right
to know all those things, I suppose, and I’ll tell them to you . . . but not now. It’s a very long story. I never expected to tell it to anyone, and I’ll only tell it once.”
“When?” Eddie persisted.
“When the time is right,” Roland said, and with that they had to be content.
7
ROLAND CAME AWAKE THE moment before Jake began to shake him. He sat up and
looked around, but Eddie and Susannah were still fast asleep and in the first faint light of
morning, he could see nothing amiss.
“What is it?” he asked Jake in a low voice.
“I don’t know. Fighting, maybe. Come and listen.”
Roland threw his blanket aside and followed Jake out to the road. He reckoned they were
now only three days’ walk from the place where the Send passed in front of the city, and the
bridge—built squarely along the path of the Beam—dominated the horizon. Its
pronounced tilt was more clearly visible than ever, and he could see at least a dozen gaps
where over-stressed cables had snapped like the strings of a lyre.
Tonight the wind blew directly into their faces as they looked toward the city, and the
sounds it carried to them were faint but clear.
“Is it fighting?” Jake asked.
Roland nodded and held a finger to his lips.
He heard faint shouts, a crash that sounded like some huge object falling, and—of
course—the drums. Now there was another crash, this one more musical: the sound of
breaking glass.
“Jeepers,” Jake whispered, and moved closer to the gunslinger.
Then came the sounds which Roland had hoped not to hear: a fast, sandy rattle of
small-arms fire followed by a loud hollow bang—clearly an explosion of some land. It
rolled across the flatlands toward them like an invisible bowling ball. After that, the shouts,
thuds, and sounds of breakage quickly sank below the level of the drums, and when the
drums quit a few minutes later with their usual unsettling suddenness, the city was silent
again. But now that silence had an unpleasant waiting quality.
Roland put an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Still not too late to detour around,” he said.
Jake glanced up at him. “We can’t.”
“Because of the train?”
Jake nodded and singsonged: “Blaine is a pain, but we have to take the train. And the city’s the only place where we can get on.”
Roland looked thoughtfully at Jake. “Why do you say we have to? Is it ka? Because, Jake,
you have to understand that you don’t know much about ka yet—it’s the sort of subject men
study all their lives.”
“I don’t know if it’s ka or not, but I do know that we can’t go into the waste lands unless we’re protected, and that means Blaine. Without him we’ll die, like those bees we saw are