” Benny, no, get back!”Jake cried.
Two of the remaining Wolves threw their silver deathballs at the crawling, screaming boy. Jake shot one out of the air. He never had a chance at the other. It struck Benny Slightman in the chest and the boy simply exploded outward, one arm tearing free of his body and landing palm-up in the road.
Susannah cut the thinking-cap off the Wolf which had killed Margaret with one plate, then did for the one who had killed Jake’s friend with another. She pulled two fresh Rizas from her sacks and turned back to the oncoming Wolves just as the first one leaped into the ditch, its horse’s chest knocking Roland asprawl. It brandished its sword over the gunslinger. To Susannah it looked like a brilliant red-orange tube of neon.
” No you don’t muhfuh! ” she screamed, and slung the plate in her right hand. It sheared through the gleaming saber and the weapon simply exploded at the hilt, tearing off the Wolf’s arm. The next moment one of Rosa’s plates amputated its thinking-cap and it tumbled sideways and crashed to the ground, its gleaming mask grinning at the paralyzed, terrified Tavery twins, who lay clinging to each other. A moment later it began to smoke and melt.
Shrieking Benny’s name, Jake walked across the East Road, reloading the Ruger as he went, tracking through his dead friend’s blood without realizing it. To his left, Roland, Susannah, and Rosa were putting paid to the five remaining Wolves in what had been the raiding party’s north wing. The raiders whirled their horses in jerky, useless circles, seeming unsure what to do in circumstances such as these.
“Want some company, kid?” Eddie asked him. On their right, the group of Wolves who had been stationed on the town side of the arroyo path all lay dead. Only one of them had actually made it as far as the ditch; that one lay with its hooded head plowed into the freshly turned earth of the hide and its booted feet in the road.
The rest of its body was wrapped in its green cloak. It looked like a bug that has died in its cocoon.
“Sure,” Jake said. Was he talking or only thinking? He didn’t know. The sirens blasted the air. “Whatever you want. They killed Benny.”
“I know. That sucks.”
“It should have been his fucking father” Jake said. Was he crying? He didn’t know.
“Agreed. Have a present.” Into Jake’s hand Eddie dropped a couple of balls about three inches in diameter.
The surfaces looked like steel, but when Jake squeezed, he felt some give— it was like squeezing a child’s toy made out of hard, hard rubber. A small plate on the side read
“SNEETCH” HARRY POTTER MODEL
Serial # 465-11-AA HPJKR
CAUTION EXPLOSIVE
To the left of the plate was a button. A distant part of Jake’s mind wondered who Harry Potter was. The sneetch’s inventor, more than likely.
They reached the heap of dead Wolves at the head of the arroyo path. Perhaps machines couldn’t really be dead, but Jake was unable to think of them as anything else, tumbled and tangled as they were. Dead, yes.
And he was savagely glad. From behind them came an explosion, followed by a shriek of either extreme pain or extreme pleasure. For the moment Jake didn’t care which. All his attention was focused on the remaining Wolves trapped on the arroyo path. There were somewhere between eighteen and two dozen of them.
There was one Wolf out in front, its sizzling fire-stick raised. It was half-turned to its mates, and now it waved its light-stick at the road. Except that’s no light-stick, Eddie thought. That’s a light-saber, just like the ones in the Star Wars movies. Only these light-sabers aren’t special effects— they really kill. What the hell’s going on here” ? Well, the guy out front was trying to rally his troops, that much seemed clear. Eddie decided to cut the sermon short. He thumbed the button in one of the three sneetches he had kept for himself. The thing began to hum and vibrate in his hand. It was sort of like holding a joy-buzzer.
“Hey, Sunshine!” he called.
The head Wolf didn’t look around and so Eddie simply lobbed the sneetch at it. Thrown as easily as it was, it should have struck the ground twenty or thirty yards from the cluster of remaining Wolves and rolled to a stop. It picked up speed instead, rose, and struck the head Wolf dead center in its frozen snarl of a mouth. The thing exploded from the neck up, thinking-cap and all.
“Go on,” Eddie said. “Try it. Using their own shit against em has its own special pi—”
Ignoring him, Jake dropped the sneetches Eddie had given him, stumbled over the heap of bodies, and started up the path.
“Jake? Jake, I don’t think that’s such a good idea—”
A hand gripped Eddie’s upper arm. He whirled, raising his gun, then lowering it again when he saw Roland.
“He can’t hear you,” the gunslinger said. “Come on. We’ll stand with him.”
“Wait, Roland, wait.” It was Rosa. She was smeared with blood, and Eddie assumed it was poor sai Eisenhart’s. He could see no wound on Rosa herself. “I want some of this,” she said.
SIXTEEN
They reached Jake just as the remaining Wolves made their last charge. A few threw sneetches. These Roland and Eddie picked out of the air easily. Jake fired the Ruger in nine steady, spaced shots, right wrist clasped in left hand, and each time he fired, one of the Wolves either flipped backward out of its saddle or went sliding over the side to be trampled by the horses coming behind. When the Ruger was empty, Rosa took a tenth, screaming Lady Oriza’s name. Zalia Jaffords had also joined them, and the eleventh fell to her.
While Jake reloaded the Ruger, Roland and Eddie, standing side by side, went to work. They almost certainly could have taken the remaining eight between them (it didn’t much surprise Eddie that there had been
nineteen in this last cluster), but they left the last two for Jake. As they approached, swinging their light-swords over their heads in a way that would have been undoubtedly terrifying to a bunch of farmers, the boy shot the thinking-cap off the one on the left. Then he stood aside, dodging as the last surviving Wolf took a halfhearted swing at him.
Its horse leaped the pile of bodies at the end of the path. Susannah was on the far side of the road, sitting on her haunches amid a litter of fallen green-cloaked machinery and melting, rotting masks. She was also covered in Margaret Eisenhart’s blood.
Roland understood that Jake had left the final one for Susannah, who would have found it extremely difficult to join them on the arroyo path because of her missing lower legs. The gunslinger nodded. The boy had seen a terrible thing this morning, suffered a terrible shock, but Roland thought he would be all right. Oy—waiting for them back at the Pere’s rectory-house— would no doubt help him through the worst of his grief.
” Lady Oh-RIZA!” Susannah screamed, and flung one final plate as the Wolf reined its horse around, turning it east, toward whatever it called home. The plate rose, screaming, and clipped off the top of the green hood.
For a moment this last child thief sat in its saddle, shuddering and blaring out its alarm, calling for help that couldn’t come. Then it snapped violently backward, turning a complete somersault in midair, and thudded to the road. Its siren cut off in mid-whoop.
And so, Roland thought, our five minutes are over. He looked dully at the smoking barrel of his revolver, then dropped it back into its holster. One by one the alarms issuing from the downed robots were stopping.
Zalia was looking at him with a kind of dazed incomprehension. “Roland!” she said.
“Yes, Zalia.”
“Are they gone? Can they be gone? Really?”
“All gone,” Roland said. “I counted sixty-one, and they all lie here or on the road or in our ditch.”
For a moment Tian’s wife only stood there, processing this information. Then she did something that surprised a man who was not often surprised. She threw herself against him, pressing her body frankly to his, and covered his face with hungry, wet-lipped kisses. Roland bore this for a little bit, then held her away. The sickness was coming now. The feeling of uselessness. The sense that he would fight this battle or battles like it over and over for eternity, losing a finger to the lobstrosities here, perhaps an eye to a clever old witch there, and after each battle he would sense the Dark Tower a little farther away instead of a little closer. And all the time the dry twist would work its way in toward his heart.