Wolves of the Calla

hour—perhaps longer—the Calla was filled with the thunderous hoofbeats of those gray horses and the screams of desolated parents. Green cloaks swirled. Wolf-masks that looked like metal and rotted in the sun like skin snarled. The children were taken. Sometimes a few pair were overlooked and left whole, suggesting that the Wolves' prescience wasn't perfect. Still, it must have been pretty goddam good, Eddie thought, because if the kids were moved (as they often were) or hidden at home (as they almost always were), the Wolves found them anyway, and in short order. Even at the bottom of sharproot piles or haystacks they were found. Those of the Calla who tried to stand against them were shot, fried by the light-sticks—lasers of some kind?—or cut to pieces by the flying drones. When trying to imagine these latter, he kept recalling a bloody little film Henry had dragged him to. Phantasm , it had been called. Down at the old Majestic. Corner of Brooklyn and Markey Avenue. Like too much of his old life, the Majestic had smelled of piss and popcorn and the kind of wine that came in brown bags. Sometimes there were needles in the aisles. Not good, maybe, and yet sometimes—usually at night, when sleep was long in coming—a deep part of him still cried for the old life of which the Majestic had been a part. Cried for it as a stolen child might cry for his mother.

The children were taken, the hoofbeats receded the way they had come, and that was the end of it.

'No, can't be,' Jake said. 'They must bring them back, don't they?'

'No,' Overholser said. 'The roont ones come back on the train, hear me, there's a great junkpile of em I could show'ee, and—What? What's wrong?' Jake's mouth had fallen open, and he'd lost most of his color.

'We had a bad experience on a train not so very long ago,' Susannah said. 'The trains that bring your children back, are they monos?'

They weren't. Overholser, the Jaffords, and the Slightmans had no idea what a mono was, in fact. (Callahan, who had been to Disneyland as a teenager, did.) The trains which brought the children back were hauled by plain old locomotives (hopefully none of them named Charlie , Eddie thought), driverless and attached to one or perhaps two open flatcars. The children were huddled on these. When they arrived they were usually crying with fear (from sunburns as well, if the weather west of Thunderclap was hot and clear), covered with food and their own drying shit, and dehydrated into the bargain. There was no station at the railhead, although Overholser opined there might have been, centuries before. Once the children had been offloaded, teams of horses were used to pull the short trains from the rusty railhead. It occurred to Eddie that they could figure out the number of times the Wolves had come by counting the number of junked engines, sort of like figuring out the age of a tree by counting the rings on the stump.

'How long a trip for them, would you guess?' Roland asked. 'Judging from their condition when they arrive?'

Overholser looked at Slightman, then at Tian and Zalia. 'Two days? Three?'

They shrugged and nodded.

'Two or three days,' Overholser said to Roland, speaking with more confidence than was perhaps warranted, judging from the looks of the others. 'Long enough for sunburns, and to eat most of the rations they're left—'

'Or paint themselves with em,' Slightman grunted.

'—but not long enough to die of exposure,' Overholser finished. 'If ye'd judge from that how far they were taken from the Calla, all I can say is I wish'eejoy of the riddle, for no one knows what speed the train draws when it's crossing the plains. It comes slow and stately enough to the far side of the river, but that means little.'

'No,' Roland agreed, 'it doesn't.' He considered. 'Twenty-seven days left?'

'Twenty-six now,' Callahan said quietly.

'One thing, Roland,' Overholser said. He spoke apologetically, but his jaw was jutting. Eddie thought he'd backslid to the kind of guy you could dislike on sight. If you had a problem with authority figures, that was, and Eddie always had.

Roland raised his eyebrows in silent question.

'We haven't said yes.' Overholser glanced at Slightman the Elder, as if for support, and Slightman nodded agreement.

'Ye must ken we have no way of knowing y'are who you say y'are,' Slightman said, rather apologetically. 'My family had no books growing up, and there's none out at the ranch—I'm foreman of Eisenhart's Rocking B— except for the stockline books, but growing up I heard as many tales of Gilead and gunslingers and Arthur Eld as any other boy… heard of Jericho Hill and such blood-and-thunder tales of pretend… but I never heard of a gunslinger missing two of his fingers, or a brown-skinned woman gunslinger, or one who won't be old enough to shave for years yet.'

His son looked shocked, and in an agony of embarrassment as well. Slightman looked rather embarrassed himself, but pushed on.

'I cry your pardon if what I say offends, indeed I do—'

'Hear him, hear him well,' Overholser rumbled. Eddie was starting to think that if the man's jaw jutted out much further, it would snap clean off.

'—but any decision we make will have long echoes. Ye must see it's so. If we make the wrong one, it could mean the death of our town, and all in it.'

'I can't believe what I'm hearing!' Tian Jaffords cried indignantly. 'Do you think 'ese're a fraud? Good gods, man, have'ee not looked at him? Do'ee not have—'

His wife grasped his arm hard enough to pinch white marks into his farmer's tan with the tips of her fingers. Tian looked at her and fell quiet, though his lips were pressed together tightly.

Somewhere in the distance, a crow called and a rustie answered in its slightly shriller voice. Then all was silent. One by one they turned to Roland of Gilead to see how he would reply.

FIVE

It was always the same, and it made him tired. They wanted help, but they also wanted references. A parade of witnesses, if they could get them. They wanted rescue without risk, just to close their eyes and be saved.

Roland rocked slowly back and forth with his arms wrapped around his knees. Then he nodded to himself and raised his head. 'Jake,' he said. 'Come to me.'

Jake glanced at Benny, his new friend, then got up and walked across to Roland. Oy walked at his heel, as always.

'Andy,' Roland said.

'Sai?'

'Bring me four of the plates we ate from.' As Andy did this,

Roland spoke to Overholser: 'You're going to lose some crockery. When gunslingers come to town, sai, things get broken. It's a simple fact of life.'

'Roland, I don't think we need—'

'Hush now,' Roland said, and although his voice was gentle, Overholser hushed at once. 'You've told your tale; now we tell ours.'

Andy's shadow fell over Roland. The gunslinger looked up and took the plates, which hadn't been rinsed and still gleamed with grease. Then he turned to Jake, where a remarkable change had taken place. Sitting with Benny the Kid, watching Oy do his small clever tricks and grinning with pride, Jake had looked like any other boy of twelve—carefree and full of the old Dick, likely as not Now the smile had fallen away and it was hard to tell just what his age might have been. His blue eyes looked into Roland's, which were of almost the same shade. Beneath his shoulder, the Ruger Jake had taken from his father's desk in another life hung in its docker's clutch. The trigger was secured with a rawhide loop which Jake now loosened without looking. It took only a single tug.

'Say your lesson, Jake, son of Elmer, and be true.'

Roland half-expected either Eddie or Susannah to interfere, but neither did. He looked at them. Their faces were as cold and grave as Jake's. Good.

Jake's voice was also without expression, but the words came out hard and sure.

'I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye. I do not shoot with my hand—'

'I don't see what this—' Overholser began.