Song of Susannah

tracks on the metaled surface of the road. The truck’s multi-ton load began to slew sideways. Roland saw splinters flying from the trees and into the blue sky as the outlaws on the far side of the road continued to fire heedlessly. There was something almost hypnotic about all this, like watching one of the Lost Beasts of Eld come tumbling out of the sky with its wings on fire.

The truck’s horseless front end ran over the first of the bodies. Guts flew in red ropes and splashed the dirt of the shoulder. Legs and arms were torn off. A wheel squashed Tricks Postino’s head, the sound of his imploding skull like a chestnut bursting in a hot fire. The truck’s load broached sideways and began to totter. Wheels fully as high as Roland’s shoulders dug in and tossed up clouds of bloody dirt. The truck slid by the store with a majestic lack of speed. The driver was no longer visible in the cab. For a moment the store and the people inside it were blocked from the superior firepower on the other side of the road. The shopkeeper-Chip-and the surviving customer-Mr. Flannel Shirt-were staring at the broaching truck with identical expressions of helpless amazement. The shopkeeper absently wiped blood from the side of his head and flicked it onto the floor like water. His wound was worse than Eddie’s, Roland judged, yet he seemed unaware of it. Maybe that was good.

“Outback,” the gunslinger said to Eddie. “Now.”

“Good call.”

Roland grabbed the man in the flannel shirt by the arm. The man’s eyes immediately left the truck and went to the gunslinger. Roland nodded toward the back, and the elderly gent nodded back. His unquestioning quickness was an unexpected gift.

Outside, the truck’s load finally overturned, mashing one of the parked cars (and the harriers hiding behind it, Roland dearly hoped), spilling logs first off the top and then simply spilling them all. There was a gruesome, endless sound of scraping metal that made the gunfire seem puny by comparison.

TWO

Eddie grabbed the storekeeper just as Roland had grabbed the other man, but Chip showed none of his customer’s awareness or instinct for survival. He merely went on staring through the jagged hole where his windows had been, eyes wide with shock and awe as the pulp-truck out there entered the final phase of its self-destructive ballet, the cab twisting free of the overloaded carrier and bouncing down the hill beyond the store and into the woods. The load itself went sliding up the right side of the road, creating a huge bow-wave of dirt and leaving behind a deep groove, a flattened Chevrolet, and two more flattened harriers.

There were plenty more where those came from, though. Or so it seemed. The gunfire continued.

“Come on, Chip, time to split,” Eddie said, and this time when he tugged the shopkeeper toward the back of the store Chip came, still looking back over his shoulder and wiping blood from the side of his face.

At the rear of the market, on the left, was an added-on lunchroom with a counter, a few patched stools, three or four tables, and an old lobster-pot over a newsstand which seemed to contain mostly out-of-date girlie magazines. As they reached this part of the building, the gunfire from outside intensified. Then it was dwarfed again, this time by an explosion. The pulper’s fuel-tank, Eddie assumed. He felt the droning passage of a bullet and saw a round black hole appear in the picture of a lighthouse mounted on the wall.

“Who are those guys?” Chip asked in a perfectly conversational voice. “Who are you? Am I hit? My son was in Viet Nam, you know. Did you see that truck?”

Eddie answered none of his questions, just smiled and nodded and hustled Chip along in Roland’s wake. He had absolutely no idea where they were going or how they were going to get out of this fuckaree. The only thing he was completely sure of was that Calvin Tower wasn’t here. Which was probably good. Tower might or might not have brought down this particular batch of hellfire and brimstone, but the hellfire and brimstone was about old Cal, of that Eddie had no doubt. If old Cal had only-

A darning-needle of heat suddenly tore through his arm and Eddie shouted in surprise and pain. A moment later another punched him in the calf. His lower right leg exploded into serious pain, and he cried out again.

“Eddie!” Roland chanced a look back. “Are you-”

“Yeah, fine, go, go!”

Ahead of them now was a cheap fiberboard back wall with three doors in it. One was marked buoys, one gulls, one EMPLOYEES ONLY.

“Employees only!” Eddie shouted. He looked down and saw a blood-ringed hole in his bluejeans about three inches below his right knee. The bullet hadn’t exploded the knee itself, which was to the good, but oh Mama, it hurt like the veriest motherfucker of creation.

Over his head, a light-globe exploded. Glass showered down on Eddie’s head and shoulders.

“I’m insured, but God knows if it covers somethin like this,” Chip said in his perfectly conversational voice. He wiped more blood from his face, then slatted it off his fingertips and onto the floor, where it made a Rorschach inkblot. Bullets buzzed around them. Eddie saw one flip up Chip’s collar. Somewhere behind them, Jack Andolini-old Double-Ugly-was hollering in Italian. Eddie somehow didn’t think he was calling retreat.

Roland and the customer in the flannel shirt went through the employees only door. Eddie followed, pumped up on the wine of adrenaline and still dragging Chip. This was a storeroom, and of quite a good size. Eddie could smell different kinds of grain, some sort of minty tang, and, most of all, coffee.

Now Mr. Flannel Shirt had taken the lead. Roland followed him quickly down the storeroom’s center aisle and between pallets stacked high with canned goods. Eddie limped gamely along after, still hauling the shopkeeper. Old Chip had lost a lot of blood from the wound on the side of his head and Eddie kept expecting him to pass out, but Chip actually seemed… well, chipper. He was currently asking Eddie what had happened to Ruth Beemer and her sister. If he meant the two women who’d been in the store (Eddie was pretty sure he did), Eddie hoped that Chip wouldn’t suddenly regain his memory.

There was another door at the back. Mr. Flannel Shirt opened it and started out. Roland hauled him back by the shirt, then went out himself, low. Eddie stood Chip beside Mr. Flannel Shirt and himself just in front of them. Behind them, bullets smacked through the employees only door, creating startled white eyes of daylight.

“Eddie!” Roland grunted. “To me!”

Eddie limped out. There was a loading dock here, and beyond it about an acre of unlovely, churned-up ground. Trash barrels had been stacked haphazardly to the right of the dock and there were two Dumpsters to the left, but it didn’t look to Eddie Dean as if anyone had worried too much about putting litter in its place. There were also several piles of beercans almost big enough to qualify as archaeological middens. Nothing like relaxing on the back porch after a hard day at the store, Eddie thought.

Roland was pointing his gun at another oil-pump, this one rustier and older than the ones out front. On it was a single word. “Diesel,” Roland said. “Does that mean fuel? It does, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Chip, does the diesel pump work?”

“Sure, sure,” Chip said in a disinterested tone of voice. “Lotsa guys fill up back here.”

“I can run it, mister,” said Flannel Shirt. ’You better let me, too-it’s tetchy. Can you and your buddy cover me?”

“Yes,” Roland said. “Pour it in there.” And jerked a thumb at the storeroom.

“Hey, no!” Chip said, startled.

How long did all these things take? Eddie could not have said, not for sure. All he was aware of was a clarity he had known only once before: while riddling Blaine the Mono. It overwhelmed everything with its brilliance, even the pain in his lower leg, where the tibia might or might not have been chipped by a bullet. He was aware of how funky it smelled back here-rotted meat and moldy produce, the yeasty scent of a thousand departed brewskis, the odors of don’t-care laziness-and the divinely sweet fir-perfume of the woods just beyond the perimeter of this dirty little roadside store. He could hear the drone of a plane in some distant quadrant of the sky. He knew he loved Mr. Flannel Shirt because Mr. Flannel Shirt was here, was with them, linked to Roland and Eddie by the strongest of bonds for these few minutes. But time? No, he had no true sense of that. But it couldn’t have been much more than ninety seconds since Roland had begun their retreat, or surely they would have been overwhelmed, crashed truck or no crashed truck.

Roland pointed left, then turned right himself. He and Eddie stood back to back on the loading dock with about six feet between them, guns raised to their cheeks like men about to commence a duel. Mr. Flannel Shirt hopped off the end of the dock, spry as a cricket, and seized the chrome crank on the side of the old diesel pump. He began to spin it rapidly. The numbers in their little windows spun backward, but instead of returning to all zeros, they froze at 0 0 1 9. Mr. Flannel Shirt tried the crank again. When it refused to turn, he shrugged and yanked the nozzle out of its rusty cradle.

“John, no!” Chip cried. He was still standing in the doorway of his storeroom and holding up his hands, one clean and the other bloody all the way up the forearm.

“Get out of the way, Chip, or you’re gonna-”

Two men dashed around Eddie’s side of the East Stoneham General Store. Both were dressed in jeans and flannel shirts, but unlike Chip’s shirt, these looked brand-new, with the creases still in the sleeves. Purchased especially for the occasion, Eddie had no doubt. And one of the goons Eddie recognized quite well; had last seen him in The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, Calvin Tower’s bookshop. Eddie had also killed this fellow once before. Ten years in the future, if you could believe it. In The Leaning Tower, Balazar’s joint, and with the same gun he now held in his hand. A snatch of old Bob Dylan lyric occurred to him, something about the price you had to pay to keep from going through everything twice…

“Hey, Big Nose!” Eddie cried (as he seemed to each time he saw this particular piece of pond scum). “How you doing, pal?” In truth, George Biondi did not appear to be doing well at all. Not even his mother would have considered him, much more than presentable, even on his best day (that humungous beak), and now his features were puffed and discolored by bruises that had only just begun to fade. The worst of them was right between the eyes.

I did that, Eddie thought. In the back of Tower’s bookstore. It was true, but it also seemed like something that had happened a thousand years ago.

“You, “said George Biondi. He seemed too stunned to even raise his gun. “You. Here.”

“Me here,” Eddie agreed. “As for you, you should have stayed in New York.” With that said, he blew George Biondi’s face off. His friend’s face, too.

Flannel Shirt squeezed the pump handle’s pistol grip and dark diesel sprayed from the nozzle. It doused Chip, who cawed indignantly and then staggered out onto the loading; dock. “Stings!” he shouted. “Gorry, don’t that sting! Quit it, John!”

John did not. Another three men came dashing around Roland’s side of the store, took one look at the gunslinger’s calm and awful face, tried to backtrack. They were dead before they could do more than get the heels of their new country walking shoes planted. Eddie thought of the half-dozen cars and the big Winnebago that had been parked across the street and had time to wonder just how many men Balazar had sent on this little expedition. Certainly not just his own guys. How had he paid for the imports?

He didn’t have to, Eddie thought. Someone loaded him up with dough and told him to go buy the farm. As many out-of-town goons as he could get. And somehow convinced him the guys they were going after deserved that kind of coverage.

From inside the store there came a dull, percussive thud. Soot blew out of the chimney and was lost against the darker, oilier cloud rising from the crashed pulp truck. Eddie thought somebody had tossed a grenade. The door to the storeroom blew off its hinges, walked halfway down the aisle surrounded by a cloud of smoke, and fell flat. Soon the fellow who’d thrown the grenade would throw another, and with the floor of the storeroom now covered in an inch of diesel fuel-

“Slow him down if you can,” Roland said. “It’s not wet enough in there yet.”

“Slow down Andolini?” Eddie asked. “How do I do that?”

“With your everlasting mouth.” Roland cried, and Eddie saw a wonderful, heartening thing: Roland was grinning. Almost laughing. At the same