Kansas’s first-term representative, a Republican, laughed and said: “Why should I? I’ve got a real fine case myself. I’ll be so much dust in the wind come this time next week.”
“Fires, most likely set, continue to ravage Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute.
“A gigantic explosion centered near Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium was apparently not nuclear in nature, as was first feared, but occurred as the result of a natural gas buildup caused by unsupervised…”
Jake let the paper drop from his hands. A gust of wind caught it and blew it the length of the platform, the few folded sheets separating as they went. Oy stretched his neck and snagged one of these as it went by. He trotted toward Jake with it in his mouth, as obedient as a dog with a stick.
“No, Oy, I don’t want it,” Jake said. He sounded ill and very young.
“At least we know where all the folks are,” Susannah said, bending and taking the paper from Oy. It was the last two pages. They were crammed with obituaries printed in the tiniest type she had ever seen. No pictures, no causes of death, no announcement of burial services. Just this one died, beloved of so-and-so, that one died, beloved of Jill-n-Joe, t'other one died, beloved of them-and- those. All in that tiny, not-quite-even type. It was the jaggedness of the type which convinced her it was all real.
But how hard they tried to honor their dead, even at the end, she thought, and a lump rose in her throat. How hard they tried.
She folded the quarto together and looked on the back-the last page of the Capital-Journal. It showed a picture of Jesus Christ, eyes sad, hands outstretched, forehead marked from his crown of thorns. Below it, three stark words in huge type:
She looked up at Eddie, eyes accusing. Then she handed him the newspaper, one brown finger tapping the date at the top. It was June 24, 1986. Eddie had been drawn into the gunslinger’s world a year later.
He held it for a long time, fingers slipping back and forth across the date, as if the passage of his finger would somehow cause it to change. Then he looked up at them and shook his head. “No. I can’t explain this town, this paper, or the dead people in that station, but I can set you straight about one thing-everything was fine in New York when I left. Wasn’t it, Roland?”
The gunslinger looked a trifle sour. “Nothing in your city seemed very fine to me, but the people who lived there did not seem to be survivors of such a plague as this, no.”
“There was something called Legionnaires’ disease,” Eddie said. “And AIDS, of course-”
“That’s the sex one, right?” Susannah asked. “Transmitted by fruits and drug addicts?”
“Yes, but calling gays fruits isn’t the done thing in my when,” Eddie said. He tried a smile, but it felt stiff and unnatural on his face and he put it away again.
“So this… this never happened,” Jake said, tentatively touching the face of Christ on the back page of the paper.
“But it did,” Roland said. “It happened in June-sowing of the year one thousand nine hundred and eighty-six. And here we are, in the aftermath of that plague. If Eddie’s right about the length of time that has gone by, the plague of this ’superflu' was this past June-sowing. We’re in Topeka, Kansas, in the Reap of eighty-six. That’s the when of it. As to the where, all we know is that it’s not Eddie’s. It might be yours, Susannah, or yours, Jake, because you left your world before this arrived.” He tapped the date on the paper, then looked at Jake. “You said something to me once. I doubt if you remember, but I do; it’s one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me: 'Go, then, there are other worlds than these.'”
“More riddles,” Eddie said, scowling.
“Is it not a fact that Jake Chambers died once and now stands before us, alive and well? Or do you doubt my story of his death under the mountains? That you have doubted my honesty from time to time is something I know. And I suppose you have your reasons.”
Eddie thought it over, then shook his head. “You lie when it suits your purpose, but I think that when you told us about Jake, you were too fucked up to manage anything but the truth.”
Roland was startled to find himself hurt by what Eddie had said-You lie when it suits your purpose-but he went on. After all, it was essentially true.
“We went back to time’s pool,” the gunslinger said, “and pulled him out before he could drown.”
“You pulled him out,” Eddie corrected.
“You helped, though,” Roland said, “if only by keeping me alive, you helped, but let that go for now. It’s beside the point. What’s more to it is that there are many possible worlds, and an infinity of doors leading into them. This is one of those worlds; the thinny we can hear is one of those doors… only one much bigger than the ones we found on the beach.”
“How big?” Eddie asked. “As big as a warehouse loading door, or as big as the warehouse?”
Roland shook his head and raised his hands palms to the sky-who knows?
“This thinny,” Susannah said. “We’re not just near it, are we? We came through it. That’s how we got here, to this version of Topeka.”
“We may have,” Roland admitted. “Did any of you feel something strange? A sensation of vertigo, or transient nausea?”
They shook their heads. Oy, who had been watching Jake closely, also shook his head this time.
“No,” Roland said, as if he had expected this. “But we were concentrating on the riddling-”
“Concentrating on not getting killed,” Eddie grunted.
“Yes. So perhaps we passed through without being aware. In any case, thinnies aren’t natural-they are sores on the skin of existence, able to exist because things are going wrong. Things in all worlds.”
“Because things are wrong at the Dark Tower,” Eddie said.
Roland nodded. “And even if this place-this when, this where-is not the ka of your world now, it might become that ka. This plague-or others even worse-could spread. Just as the thinnies will continue to spread, growing in size and number. I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen in my years of searching for the Tower, and heard maybe two dozen more. The first… the first one 1 ever saw was when I was still very young. Near a town called Hambry.” He rubbed his hand up his cheek again, and was not surprised to find sweat amid the bristles. Love me, Roland. If you love me, then love me.
“Whatever happened to us, it bumped us out of your world, Roland,” Jake said. “We’ve fallen off the Beam. Look.” He pointed at the sky. The clouds were moving slowly above them, but no longer in the direction Blame’s smashed snout was pointing. Southeast was still southeast, but the signs of the Beam which they had grown so used to following were gone.
“Does it matter?” Eddie asked. “I mean… the Beam may be gone, but the Tower exists in all worlds, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Roland said, “but it may not be accessible from all worlds.”
The year before beginning his wonderful and fulfilling career as a heroin addict, Eddie had done a brief and not-very-successful turn as a bicycle messenger. Now he remembered certain office- building elevators he’d been in while making deliveries, buildings with banks or investment firms in them, mostly. There were some floors where you couldn’t stop the car and get off unless you had a special card to swipe through the slot below the numbers. When the elevator came to those locked-off floors, the number in the window was replaced by an X.
“I think,” Roland said, “we need to find the Beam again.”
“I’m convinced,” Eddie said. “Come on, let’s get going.” He took a couple of steps, then turned back to Roland with one eyebrow raised. “Where?”
“The way we were going,” Roland said, as if that should have been obvious, and walked past Eddie in his dusty, broken boots, headed for the park across the way.
Chapter V
TURNPIKIN’
1
Roland walked to the end of the platform, kicking bits of pink metal out of his way as he went. At the stairs, he paused and looked back at them somberly. “Mare dead. Be ready.”
“They’re not… um… runny, are they?” Jake asked.
Roland frowned, then his face cleared as he understood what Jake meant. “No. Not runny. Dry.”
“That’s all right, then,” Jake said, but he held his hand out to Susannah, who was being carried by Eddie for the time being. She gave him a smile and folded her fingers around his.
At the foot of the stairs leading down to the commuter parking lot at the side of the station, half a dozen corpses lay together like a collapsed cornshock. Two were women, three were men. The sixth was a child in a stroller. A summer spent dead in the sun and rain and heat (not to mention at the mercy of any stray cats, coons, or woodchucks that might be passing) had given the toddler a look of ancient wisdom and mystery, like a child mummy discovered in an Incan pyramid. Jake supposed from the faded blue outfit it was wearing that it had been a boy, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Eyeless, lipless, its skin faded to dusky gray, it made a joke of gender-why did the dead baby cross the road? Because it was stapled to the superflu.
Even so, the toddler seemed to have voyaged through Topeka’s empty post-plague months better than the adults around it. They were little more than skeletons with hair. In a scrawny bunch of skin-wrapped bones that had once been fingers, one of the men clutched the handle of a suitcase that looked like the Samsonites Jake’s parents owned. As with the baby (as with all of them), his eyes were gone; huge dark sockets stared at Jake. Below them, a ring of discolored teeth jutted in a pugnacious grin. What took you so long, kid? the dead man who was still clutching his suitcase seemed to be asking. Been waiting for you, and it’s been a long hot summer!
Where were you guys hoping to go? Jake wondered. Just where in the crispy crap did you think might be safe enough? Des Moines? Sioux City? Fargo? The moon?
They went down the stairs, Roland first, the others behind him, Jake still holding Susannah’s hand with Oy at his heels. The long-bodied bumbler seemed to descend each step in two stages, like a double trailer taking speed-bumps.
“Slow down, Roland,” Eddie said. “I want to check the crip spaces before we go on. We might get lucky.”
“Crip spaces?” Susannah said. “What’re those?”
Jake shrugged. He didn’t know. Neither did Roland.
Susannah switched her attention to Eddie. “I only ask, sugarpie, because it sounds a little on-pleasant. You know, like calling Negroes ‘blacks’ or gay folks ‘fruits.’ I know I’m just a poor ignorant pickaninny from the dark ages of 1964, but-”
“There.” Eddie pointed at a rank of signs marking the parking-row closest to the station. There were actually two signs to a post, the top of each pair blue and white, the bottom red and white. When they drew a little closer, Jake saw the one on top was a wheelchair symbol. The one on the bottom was a warning: $200 fine for improper use of handicapped PARKING SPACE. STRICTLY ENFORCED BY TOPEKA P.D.
“See there!” Susannah said triumphantly. “They shoulda done that a long time ago! Why, back in my when, you’re lucky if you can get your damn wheelchair through the doors of anything smaller
