Oy limped to where Jake lay and began licking his pale, still face.
Copperhead and Hoots had seen enough. They ran side by side for the small door through
which Tilly had gone to get the dipper of water. It was the wrong time for chivalry; Roland
shot them both in the back. He would have to move fast now, very fast indeed, and he
would not risk being waylaid by these two if they should chance to rediscover their guts.
A cluster of bright orange lights came on at the top of the capsule-shaped enclosure, and an
alarm began to go off: in broad, hoarse blats that bartered the walls. After a moment or two,
the emergency lights began to pulse in sync with the alarm.
35
EDDIE WAS RETURNING TO Susannah when the alarm began to wail. He yelled in
surprise and raised the Ruger, pointing it at nothing. “What’s happening?”
Susannah shook her head—she had no idea. The alarm was scary, but that was only part of
the problem; it was also loud enough to be physically painful. Those amplified jags of
sound made Eddie think of a tractor-trailer horn raised to the tenth power.
At that moment, the orange arc-sodiums began to pulse. When he reached Susannah’s
chair, Eddie saw that the COMMAND and ENTER buttons were also pulsing in bright red
beats. They looked like winking eyes.
“Blaine, what’s happening?” he shouted. He looked around but saw only wildly jumping
shadows. “Are you doing this?”
Blaine’s only response was laughter—terrible mechanical laughter that made Eddie think
of the clockwork clown that had stood outside the House of Horrors at Coney Island when
he was a little kid.
“Blaine, stop it!” Susannah shrieked. “How can we think of an answer to your riddle with that air-raid siren going off?”
The laughter stopped us suddenly as it began, but Blaine made no reply. Or perhaps he did;
from beyond the bars that separated them from the platform, huge engines powered by
frictionless slo-trans turbines awoke at the command of the dipolar computers the
Tick-Tock Man had so lusted after. For the first time in a decade, Blaine the Mono was
awake and cycling up toward running speed.
36
THE ALARM, WHICH HAD indeed been built to warn Lud’s long-dead residents of an
impending air attack (and which had not even been tested in almost a thousand years),
blanketed the city with sound. All the lights which still operated came on and began to
pulse in sync. Pubes above the streets and Grays below them were alike convinced that the
end they had always feared was finally upon them. The Grays suspected some cataclysmic
mechanical breakdown was occurring. The Pubes, who had always believed that the ghosts
lurking in the machines below the city would some day rise up to take their long-delayed
vengeance on the still living, were probably closer to the actual truth of what was
happening.
Certainly there had been an intelligence left in the ancient comput- ers below the city, a
single living organism which had long ago ceased to exist sanely under conditions that, within its merciless dipolar circuits, could only be absolute reality. It had held its
increasingly alien logic within its banks of memory for eight hundred years and might have
held them so for eight hundred more, if not for the arrival of Roland and his friends; yet this
mens non corpus had brooded and grown ever more insane with each passing year; even in
its increasing periods of sleep it could be said to dream, and these dreams grew steadily
more abnormal as the world moved on. Now, although the unthinkable machinery which
maintained the Beams had weakened, this insane and inhuman intelli- gence had awakened
in the rooms of ruin and had begun once more, although as bodiless as any ghost, to
stumble through the halls of the dead.
In other words, Blaine the Mono was preparing to get out of Dodge.
37
ROLAND HEARD A FOOTSTEP behind him as he knelt by Jake and turned, raising his
gun. Tilly, her dough-colored face a mask of confusion and superstitious fear, raised her
hands and shrieked: “Don’t kill me, sai! Please! Don’t kill me!”
“Run, then,” Roland said curtly, and as Tilly began to move, he struck her calf with the barrel of his revolver. “Not that way—through the door I came in. And if you ever see me
again, I’ll be the last thing you ever see. Now go!”
She disappeared into the leaping, circling shadows.
Roland dropped his head to Jake’s chest, slamming his palm against his other ear to deaden
the pulse of the alarm. He heard the boy’s heartbeat, slow but strong. He slipped his arms
around the boy, and as he did, Jakes’s eyes fluttered open. “You didn’t let me fall this time.”
His voice was no more than a hoarse whisper.
“No. Not this time, and not ever again. Don’t try your voice.”
“Where’s Oy?”
“Oy!” the bumbler barked. “Oy!”
Brandon had slashed Oy several times, but none of the wounds seemed mortal or even
serious. It was clear that he was in some pain, but it was equally clear he was transported
with joy. He regarded Jake with sparkling eyes, his pink tongue lolling out. “Ake, Ake,
Ake!”
Jake burst into tears and reached for him; Oy limped into the circle of his arms and allowed
himself to be hugged for a moment.
Roland got up and looked around. His gaze fixed on the door on the far side of the room.
The two men he’d backshot had been heading in that direction, and the woman had also
wanted to go that way. The gunslinger went toward the door with Jake in his arms and Oy
at his heel. He kicked one of the dead Grays aside, and ducked through. The room beyond
was a kitchen. It managed to look like a hog-wallow in spite of the built-in appliances and
the stainless steel walls; the Grays were apparently not much interested in housekeeping.
“Drink,” Jake whispered. “Please … so thirsty.”
Roland felt a queer doubling, as if time had folded backward on itself. He remembered
lurching out of the desert, crazy with the heat and the emptiness. He remembered passing
out in the stable of the way station, half-dead from thirst, and waking at the taste of cool
water trick- ling down his throat. The boy had taken off his shirt, soaked it under the flow
from the pump, and given him to drink. Now it was his turn to do for Jake what Jake had
already done for him.
Roland glanced around and saw a sink. He went over to it and turned on the faucet. Cold,
clear water rushed out. Over them, around them, under them, the alarm roared on and on.
“Can you stand?”
Jake nodded. “I think so.”
Roland set the boy on his feet, ready to catch him if he looked too wobbly, but Jake hung
onto the sink, then ducked his head beneath the flowing water. Roland picked Oy up and
looked at his wounds. They were already clotting. You got off very lucky, my furry friend,
Roland thought, then reached past Jake to cup a palmful of water for the animal. Oy drank
it eagerly.
Jake drew back from the faucet with his hair plastered to the sides of his face. His skin was
still too pale and the signs that he had been badly beaten were clearly visible, but he looked
better than he had when Roland had first bent over him. For one terrible moment, the
gunslinger had been positive Jake was dead.
He found himself wishing he could go back and kill Gasher again, and that led him to
another thought.
“What about the one Gasher called the Tick-Tock Man? Did you see him, Jake?”
“Yes. Oy ambushed him. Tore up his face. Then I shot him.”
“Dead?”
Jake’s lips began to tremble. He pressed them firmly together. “Yes. In his . . .” He tapped
his forehead high above his right eyebrow. “I was l-l- … I was lucky.”
Roland looked at him appraisingly, then slowly shook his head. “You know, I doubt that.
But never mind now. Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Jake’s voice was still little more than a husky murmur, and he kept looking past Roland’s shoulder toward the room where he had almost died.
Roland pointed across the kitchen. Beyond another hatchway, the corridor continued.
“That’ll do for a start.”
“GUNSLINGER,” a voice boomed from everywhere.
Roland wheeled around, one arm cradling Oy and the other around Jake’s shoulders, but
there was no one to see.
“Who speaks to me?” he shouted.
“NAME YOURSELF, GUNSLINGER.”
“Roland of Gilead, son of Steven. Who speaks to me?”
“GILEAD IS NO MORE,” the voice mused, ignoring the question.
Roland looked up and saw patterns of concentric rings in the ceiling. The voice was
coming from those.
“NO GUNSLINGER HAS WALKED IN-WORLD OR MID-WORLD FOR ALMOST