unmistakable glee in it. Roland saw a shadow grow from the
shadow of the overturned freight wagon, which he had now almost
reached, and had just time to understand that another of the green
folk had been hiding beneath it.
As he began to turn, a club crashed down on Roland's shoulder,
numbing his right arm all the way to the wrist. He held on to the
gun and fired once, but the bullet went into one of the wagon-
wheels, smashing a wooden spoke and turning the wheel on its hub
with a high screeching sound. Behind him, he heard the green folk
in the street uttering hoarse, yapping cries as they charged forward.
The thing which had been hiding beneath the overturned wagon
was a monster with two heads growing out of his neck, one with
the vestigial, slack face of a corpse. The other, although just as
green, was more lively. Broad lips spread in a cheerful grin as he
raised his club to strike again.
Roland drew with his left hand - the one that wasn't numbed and
distant. He had time to put one bullet through the bushwhacker's
grin, flinging him backwards in a spray of blood and teeth, the
bludgeon flying out of his relaxing fingers. Then the others were
on him, clubbing and drubbing.
The gunslinger was able to slip the first couple of blows, and there
was one moment when he thought he might be able to spin around
to the rear of the overturned wagon, spin and turn and go to work
with his guns. Surely he would be able to do that. Surely his quest
for the Dark Tower wasn't supposed to end on the sun-blasted
street of a little far-western town called Eluria, at the hands of half
a dozen green-skinned slow mutants. Surely ka could not be so
cruel.
But Bowler Hat caught him with a vicious sidehand blow, and
Roland crashed into the wagon's slowly spinning rear wheel
instead of skirting around it. As he went to his hands and knees,
still scrambling and trying to turn, trying to evade the blows which
rained down on him, he saw there were now many more than half a
dozen. Coming up the street towards the town square were at least
thirty green men and women. This wasn't a clan but a damned tribe
of them. And in broad, hot daylight! Slow mutants were, in his
experience, creatures that loved the dark, almost like toadstools
with brains, and he had never seen any such as these before. They -
The one in the red vest was female. Her bare breasts swinging
beneath the dirty red vest were the last things he saw clearly as
they gathered around and above him, bashing away with their
clubs. The one with the nails studded in it came down on his lower
right calf, sinking its stupid rusty fangs in deep. He tried again to
raise one of the big guns (his vision was fading, now, but that
wouldn't help them if he got to shooting; he had always been the
most hellishly talented of them; Jamie DeCurry had once
proclaimed that Roland could shoot blindfolded, because he had
eyes in his fingers), and it was kicked out of his hand and into the
