“They’re from your world and they won’t block out the sound. Don’t ask me how I know that; I just do. Try them if you want, but they won’t work.”
Eddie pointed at the bullets Roland was offering. “Those are from our world, too.
The gun-shop on Seventh and Forty-ninth. Clements’, wasn’t that the name?”
“These didn’t come from there. These are mine, Eddie, reloaded often but originally brought from the green land. From Gilead.”
“You mean the wets?” Eddie asked incredulously. “The last of the wet shells from the beach? The ones that really got soaked?”
Roland nodded.
“You said those would never fire again! No matter how dry they got! That the powder had been .. . what did you say? ‘Flattened.’ ”
Roland nodded again.
“So why’d you save them? Why bring a bunch of useless bullets all this way?”
“What did I teach you to say after a kill, Eddie? In order to focus your mind?”
” ‘Father, guide my hands and heart so that no part of the animal will be wasted.’ ”
Roland nodded a third time. Jake took two shells and put them in his ears. Eddie took the last two, but first he tried the ones he’d shaken from the box. They muffled the sound of the thinny, but it was still there, vibrating in the center of his forehead, making his eyes water the way they did when he had a cold, making the bridge of his nose feel like it was going to explode. He picked them out, and put the bigger slugs—the ones from Roland’s ancient revolvers—in their place.
Putting bullets in my ears, he thought. Ma would shit. But that didn’t matter. The sound of the thinny was gone—or at least down to a distant drone—and that was what did. When he turned and spoke to Roland, he expected his own voice to sound muffled, the way it did when you were wearing earplugs, but he found he could hear himself pretty well.
“Is there anything you don’t know?” he asked Roland.
“Yes,” Roland said. “Quite a lot.”
“What about Oy?” Jake asked.
“Oy will be fine, I think,” Roland said. “Come on, let’s make some miles before dark.”
7
Oy didn’t seem bothered by the warble of the thinny, but he stuck close to Jake Chambers all that afternoon, looking mistrustfully at the stalled cars which clogged the eastbound lanes of 1-70. And yet, Susannah saw, those cars did not clog the highway completely. The congestion eased as the travellers left downtown behind them, but even where the traffic had been heavy, some of the dead vehicles had been pulled to one side or the other; a number had been pushed right off the highway and onto the median strip, which was a concrete divider in the metro area and grass outside of town.
Somebody’s been at work with a wrecker, that’s my guess, Susannah thought. The idea made her happy. No one would have bothered clearing a path down the center of the highway while the plague was still raging, and if someone had done it after—if someone had been around to do it after—that meant the plague hadn’t gotten everyone; those crammed-together obituaries weren’t the whole story.
There were corpses in some of the cars, but they, like the ones at the foot of the station steps, were dry, not runny—mummies wearing seat-belts, for the most part.
The majority of the cars were empty. A lot of the drivers and passengers caught in the traffic jams had probably tried to walk out of the plague-zone, she supposed, but she guessed that wasn’t the only reason they had taken to their feet.
Susannah knew that she herself would have to be chained to the steering wheel to keep her inside a car once she felt the symptoms of some fatal disease setting in; if she was going to die, she would want to do it in God’s open air. A hill would be
best, someplace with a little elevation, but even a wheatfield would do, came it to that. Anything but coughing your last while smelling the air-freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.
At one time Susannah guessed they would have been able to see many of the corpses of the fleeing dead, but not now. Because of the thinny. They approached it steadily, and she knew exactly when they entered it. A kind of tingling shudder ran through her body, making her draw her shortened legs up, and the wheelchair stopped for a moment. When she turned around she saw Roland, Eddie, and Jake holding their stomachs and grimacing. They looked as if they had all been stricken with the bellyache at the same time. Then Eddie and Roland straightened up. Jake bent to stroke Oy, who had been staring at him anxiously.
“You boys all right?” Susannah asked. The question came out in the half-querulous, half-humorous voice of Detta Walker. Using that voice was nothing she planned; sometimes it just came out.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Feels like I got a bubble in my throat, though.” He was staring uneasily at the thinny. Its silvery blankness was all around them now, as if the whole world had turned into a flat Norfolk fen at dawn. Nearby, trees poked out of its silver surface, casting distorted reflections that never stayed quite still or quite in focus. A little farther away, Susannah could see a grain-storage tower, seeming to float. The words gaddish feeds were written on the side in pink letters which might have been red under normal conditions.
“Feels to me like I got a bubble in my mind,” Eddie said. “Man, look at that shit shimmer.”
“Can you still hear it?” Susannah asked.
“Yeah. But faint. I can live with it. Can you?”
“Uh-huh. Let’s go.”
It was like riding in an open-cockpit plane through broken clouds, Susannah decided. They’d go for what felt like miles through that humming brightness that was not quite fog and not quite water, sometimes seeing shapes (a bam, a tractor, a Stuckey’s billboard) loom out of it, then losing everything but the road, which ran consistently above the thinny’s bright but somehow indistinct surface.
Then, all at once, they would run into the clear. The humming would fall away to a faint drone; you could even unplug your ears and not be too bothered, at least until you got near the other side of the break. Once again there were vistas …
Well, no, that was too grand, Kansas didn’t exactly have vistas, but there were open fields and the occasional copse of autumn-bright trees marking a spring or cow-pond. No Grand Canyon or surf crashing on Portland Headlight, hut at least you could see a by-God horizon off in the distance, and lose some of that unpleasant feeling of entombment. Then, back into the goop you went. Jake came closest to describing it, she thought, when he said that being in the thinny was like finally reaching the shining water-mirage you could often see far up the highway on hot days.
Whatever it was and however you described it, being inside it was claustrophobic, purgatorial, all the world gone except for the twin barrels of the turnpike and the hulks of the cars, like derelict ships abandoned on a frozen ocean.
Please help us get out of this, Susannah prayed to a God in whom she no longer precisely believed—she still believed in something, but since awakening to Roland’s world on the beach of the Western Sea, her concept of the invisible world had changed considerably. Please help us find the Beam again. Please help us escape this world of silence and death.
They ran into the biggest clear space they had yet come to near a roadsign which read big springs 2 mi. Behind them, in the west, the setting sun shone through a brief rift in the clouds, skipping scarlet splinters across the top of the thinny and lighting the windows and taillights of the stalled cars in tones of fire. On either side of them empty fields stretched away. Full Earth come and gone, Susannah thought. Reaping come and gone, too. This is what Roland calls closing the year.
The thought made her shiver.
“We’ll camp here for the night,” Roland said soon after they had passed the Big Springs exit ramp. Up ahead they could see the thinny encroaching on the highway again, but that was miles farther on—you could see a damn long way in eastern Kansas, Susannah was discovering. “We can get firewood without going too near the thinny, and the sound won’t be too bad. We may even be able to sleep without bullets stuffed into our ears.”
Eddie and Jake climbed over the guardrails, descended the bank, and foraged for wood along a dry creekbed, staying together as Roland admonished them to do.
When they came back, the clouds had gulped the sun again, and an ashy, uninteresting twilight had begun to creep over the world.