anyone else? They were slow mutants, walking with the hunched
deliberation of corpses reanimated by some arcane magic.
The dust had muffled their feet like carpet. With the dog banished,
they might well have gotten within attacking distance if Topsy
hadn't done Roland the favour of dying at such an opportune
moment. No guns that Roland could see; they were armed with
clubs. These were chair-legs and table-legs, for the most part, but
Roland saw one that looked made rather than seized - it had a
bristle of rusty nails sticking out of it, and he suspected it had once
- been the property of a saloon bouncer, possibly
the one who kept school in The Bustling Pig.
Roland raised his pistol, aiming at the fellow in the centre of the
line. Now he could hear the shuffle of their feet, and the wet
snuffle of their breathing. As if they all had bad chest-colds.
Came out of the mines, most likely, Roland thought. There are
radium mines somewhere about. That would account for the skin. I
wonder that the sun doesn't kill them.
Then, as he watched, the one on the end - a creature with a face
like melted candle-wax - did die ... or collapsed, at any rate. He
(Roland was quite sure it was a male) went to his knees with a low,
gobbling cry, groping for the hand of the thing walking next to him
- something with a lumpy bald head and red sores sizzling on its
neck. This creature took no notice of its fallen companion, but kept
its dim eyes on Roland, lurching along in rough step with its
remaining companions.
'Stop where you are!' Roland said. 'Ware me, if you'd live to see
day's end! 'Ware me very well!'
He spoke mostly to the one in the centre, who wore ancient red
suspenders over rags of shirt, and a filthy bowler hat. This gent had
only one good eye, and it peered at the gunslinger with a greed as
horrible as it was unmistakable. The one beside Bowler Hat
(Roland believed this one might be a woman, with the dangling
vestiges of breasts beneath the vest it wore) threw the chair-leg it
held. The arc was true, but the missile fell ten yards short.
Roland thumbed back the trigger of his revolver and fired again.
This time the dirt displaced by the slug kicked up on the tattered
remains of Bowler Hat's shoe instead of on a lame dog's paw.
The green folk didn't run as the dog had, but they stopped, staring
at him with their dull greed. Had the missing folk of Eluria
finished up in these creatures' stomachs? Roland couldn't believe it
. . . although he knew perfectly well that such as these held no
scruple against cannibalism. (And perhaps it wasn't cannibalism,
not really; how could such things as these be considered human,
whatever they might once have been?) They were too slow, too
stupid. If they had dared come back into town after the Sheriff had
run them out, they would have been burned or stoned to death.
Without thinking about what he was doing, wanting only to free
his other hand to draw his second gun if the apparitions didn't see
reason, Roland stuffed the medallion which he had taken from the
