EIGHTEEN
First to appear were three Breakers, running full out with their arms raised. They crossed Main Street that way, never seeing Eddie, who was in the box-office of the Gem (he’d knocked out the glass on all three sides with the sandalwood grip of the gun which had once been Roland’s), or Jake (sitting inside an engineless Ford sedan parked in front of the Pleasantville Bake Shoppe), or Roland himself (behind a mannequin in the window of Gay Paree Fashions).
They reached the other sidewalk and looked around, bewildered.
Go, Roland thought at them. Go on and get out of here, take the alley, get away while you can.
“Come on!” one of them shouted, and they ran down the alley between the drug store and the bookshop. Another appeared, then two more, then the first of the guards, a hume with a pistol raised to the side of his frightened, wide-eyed face. Roland sighted him… and then held his fire.
More of the Devar personnel began to appear, running into Main Street from between the buildings. They spread themselves wide apart. As Roland had hoped and expected, they were trying to flank their charges and channel them. Trying to keep the retreat from turning into a rout.
“Form two lines!” a taheen with a raven’s head was shouting in a buzzing, out-of-breath voice. “Form two lines and keep em between, for your fathers’ sakes!”
One of the others, a redheaded taheen with his shirttail out, yelled: “What about the fence, Jakli? What if they run on the fence?”
“Can’t do nothing about that, Cag, just-”
A shrieking Breaker tried to run past the raven before he could finish, and the raven-Jakli-gave him such a mighty push that the poor fellow went sprawling in the middle of the street. “Stay together, you maggots!” he snarled. “Run if ee will, but keep some fucking order about it!” As if there could be any order in this, Roland thought (and not without satisfaction)
Then, to the redhead, the one called Jakli shouted: “Let one or two of em fry-the rest’ll see and stop!”
It would complicate things if either Eddie or Jake started shooting at this point, but neither did. The three gunslingers watched from their places of concealment as a species of order rose from the chaos. More guards appeared. Jakli and the redhead directed them into the two lines, which was now a corridor running from one side of the street to the other. A few Breakers got past them before the corridor was fully formed, but only a few.
A new taheen appeared, this one with the head of a weasel, and took over for the one called Jakli. He pounded a couple of running Breakers on the back, actually hurrying them up.
From south of Main Street came a bewildered shout: “Fence is cut!” And then another: “I think the guards are dead!” This latter cry was followed by a howl of horror, and Roland knew as surely as if he had seen it that some unlucky Breaker had just come upon a severed watchman’s head in the grass.
The terrified babble on the heels of this hadn’t run itself out.
when Dinky Earnshaw and Ted Brautigan appeared from between the bakery and the shoe store, so close to Jake’s hiding place that he could have reached out the window of his car and touched them. Ted had been winged. His right shirtsleeve had turned red from the elbow down, but he was moving-with a little help from Dinky, who had an arm around him. Ted turned as the two of them ran through the gauntlet of guards and looked directly at Roland’s hiding place for a moment. Then he and Earnshaw entered the alley and were gone.
That made them safe, at least for the time being, and that was good. But where was the big bug? Where was Prentiss, the man in charge of this hateful place? Roland wanted him and yon Weasel-head taheen sai both-cut off the snake’s head and the snake dies. But they couldn’t afford to wait much longer.
The stream of fleeing Breakers was drying up. The gunslinger didn’t think sai Weasel would wait for the last stragglers; he’d want to keep his precious charges from escaping through the cut fence. He’d know they wouldn’t go far, given the sterile and gloomy countryside all around, but he’d also know that if there were attackers at the north end of the compound, there might be rescuers standing by at the-
And there he was, thank the gods and Gan-sai Pimli Prentiss, staggering and winded and clearly in a state of shock, with a loaded docker’s clutch swinging back and forth under his meaty arm. Blood was coming from one nostril and the corner of one eye, as if all this excitement had caused something to rupture inside of his head. He went to the Weasel, weaving slightly from side to side-it was this drunken weave that Roland would later blame in his bitter heart for the final outcome of that morning’s work-probably meaning to take command of the operation. Their short but fervent embrace, both giving comfort and taking it, told Roland all he needed to know about the closeness of their relationship.
He leveled his gun on the back of Prentiss’s head, pulled the trigger, and watched as blood and hair flew. Master Prentiss’s hands shot out, the fingers spread against the dark sky, and he collapsed almost at the stunned Weasel’s feet.
As if in response to this, the atomic sun came on, flooding the world with light.
“Hile, you gunslingers, kill them all!” Roland cried, fanning the trigger of his revolver, that ancient murder-machine, with the flat of his right hand. Four had fallen to his fire before the guards, lined up like so many clay ducks in a shooting gallery, had registered the sound of the gunshots, let alone had time to react. “For Gilead, for New York, for the Beam, for your fathers! Hear me, hear me! Leave not one of them standing! KILL THEM ALL!”
And so they did: the gunslinger out of Gilead, the former drug addict out of Brooklyn, the lonely child who had once been known to Mrs. Greta Shaw as ’Bama. Coming south from behind them, rolling through thickening banners of smoke on the SCT (diverting from a straight course only once, to swerve around the flattened body of another housekeeper, this one named Tammy), was a fourth: she who had once been instructed in the ways of nonviolent protest by young and earnest men from the N-double A-C-P and who had now embraced, fully and with no regrets, the way of the gun. Susannah picked off three laggard humie guards and one fleeing taheen. The taheen had a rifle slung over one shoulder but never tried for it. Instead he raised his sleek, fur-covered arms-his head was vaguely bearish-and cried for quarter and parole.
Mindful of all that had gone on here, not in the least how the pureed brains of children had been fed to the Beam-killers in order to keep them operating at top efficiency, Susannah gave him neither, although neither did she give him cause to suffer or time to fear his fate.
By the time she rolled down the alley between the movie theater and die hair salon, the shooting had stopped. Finli and Jakli were dying; James Cagney was dead with his hume mask torn half-off his repulsive rat’s head; lying with these were another three dozen, just as dead. The formerly immaculate gutters of Pleasantville ran with their blood.
There were undoubtedly other guards about the compound, but by now they’d be in hiding, positive diat they had been set upon by a hundred or more seasoned fighters, landpirates from God only knew where. The majority of Algul Siento’s Breakers were in the grassy area between the rear of Main Street and die south watchtowers, huddled like the sheep they were. Ted, unmindful of his bleeding arm, had already begun taking attendance.
Then the entire northern contingent of the harrier army appeared at the head of the alley next to the movieshow: one shor’leg black lady mounted on an ATV. She was steering with one hand and holding the Coyote machine-pistol steady on the handlebars with die other. She saw the bodies heaped in the street and nodded with joyless satisfaction.
Eddie came out of the box-office and embraced her.
“Hey, sugarman, hey,” she murmured, fluttering kisses along the side of his neck in a way that made him shiver. Then Jake was there-pale from the killing, but composed-and she slung an arm around his shoulders and pulled him close. Her eyes happened on Roland, standing on die sidewalk behind the three he had drawn to Mid-World. His gun dangled beside his left thigh, and could he feel the expression of longing on his face? Did he even know it was there? She doubted it, and her heart went out to him.
“Come here, Gilead,” she said. “This is a group hug, and you’re part of the group.”
For a moment she didn’t think he understood the invitation, or was pretending not to understand. Then he came, pausing to re-holster his gun and to pick up Oy. He moved in between Jake and Eddie. Oyjumped into Susannah’s lap as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Then the gunslinger put one arm around Eddie’s waist and the other around Jake’s. Susannah reached up (the bumbler scrabbling comically for purchase on her suddenly tilting lap), put her arms around Roland’s neck, and put a hearty smack on his sunburned forehead. Jake and Eddie laughed. Roland joined them, smiling as we do when we have been surprised by happiness.
I’d have you see them like this; I’d have you see them very well. Will you? They are clustered around Suzie’s Cruisin Trike, embracing in the aftermath of their victory. I’d have you see them this way not because they have won a great battle-they know better than that, every one of them-but because now they are ka-tet for the last time. The story of their fellowship ends here, on this make-believe street and beneath this artificial sun; the rest of the tale will be short and brutal compared to all that’s gone before. Because when ka-tet breaks, the end always comes quickly.
Say sorry…
NINETEEN
Pimli Prentiss watched through blood-crusted, dying eyes as the younger of the two men broke from the group embrace and approached Finli O’Tego. The young man saw that Finli was still stirring and dropped to one knee beside him. The woman, now dismounted from her motorized tricycle, and the boy began to check the rest of their victims and dispatch the few who still lived. Even as he lay dying with a bullet in his own head, Pimli understood this as mercy rather than cruelty. And when the j ob was done, Pimli supposed they’d meet with the rest of their cowardly, sneaking friends and search those buildings of the Algul that were not yet on fire, looking for the remaining guards, and no doubt shooting out of hand those they discovered. You won’tfind many, my yellowback friends, he thought. You ve wiped out two-thirds of my men right here. And how many of the attackers had Master Pimli, Security Chief Finli, and their men taken in return? So far as Pimli knew, not a single one.
But perhaps he could do something about that. His right hand began its slow and painful journey up toward the docker’s clutch, and the Peacemaker holstered there.
Eddie, meanwhile, had put the barrel of the Gilead revolver with the sandalwood grips against the side of Weasel-boy’s head. His finger was tightening on the trigger when he saw that Weasel-boy, although shot in the chest, bleeding heavily, and clearly dying fast, was looking at him with complete awareness.
And something else, something Eddie did not much care for. He thought it was contempt. He looked up, saw Susannah and Jake checking bodies at the eastern end of the killzone, saw Roland on the far sidewalk, speaking with Dinky and Ted as he knotted a makeshift bandage around the latter’s arm. The two former Breakers were listening carefully, and although both of them looked dubious, they were nodding their heads.
Eddie returned his attention to the dying taheen. ’You’re at the end of the path, my friend,” he said. “Plugged in the pump, it looks like to me. Do you have something you want to say before you step into the clearing?”
Finli nodded.
