2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

Tammy said, “Do you smell—”

“—smoke!” he finished, and they looked at each other with alarm, their argument forgotten perhaps only five seconds before it would have come to blows. Tammy’s eyes

fixed on the sampler hung beside the stove. There were similar ones all over Algul Siento, because most of the buildings which made up the compound were wood.Old wood.WE ALL MUST WORK TOGETHER TO CREATE A FIRE-FREE ENVIRONMENT , it said.

Somewhere close by—in the back hallway—one of the still-working smoke detectors went off with a loud and frightening bray. Tammy hurried into the pantry to grab the fire-extinguisher in there.

“Get the one in the library!” she shouted, and Tassa ran to do it without a word of protest. Fire was the one thing they all feared.

Five

Gaskie o’ Tego, the Deputy Security Chief, was standing in the foyer of Feveral Hall, the dormitory directly behind Damli House, talking with James Cagney. Cagney was a redhaired can-toi who favored Western-style shirts and boots that added three inches to his

actual five-foot-five. Both had clipboards and were discussing certain necessary changes in the following week’s Damli security. Six of the guards who’d been assigned to the second

shift had come down with what Gangli, the compound doctor, said was a hume disease called “momps.” Sickness was common enough in Thunderclap—it was the air, as

everyone knew, and the poisoned leavings of the old people—but it was ever inconvenient. Gangli said they were lucky there had never been an actual plague, like the Black Death or the Hot Shivers.

Beyond them, on the paved court behind Damli House, an early-morning basketball game was going on, several taheen and can-toi guards (who would be officially on duty as soon as the horn blew) against a ragtag team of Breakers. Gaskie watched Joey Rastosovich take

a shot from way downtown—swish. Trampas snared the ball and took it out of bounds, briefly lifting his cap to scratch beneath it. Gaskie didn’t care much for Trampas, who had

an entirely inappropriate liking for the talented animals who were his charges. Closer by, sitting on the dorm’s steps and also watching the game, was Ted Brautigan. As always, he

was sipping at a can of Nozz-A-La.

“Well fuggit,” James Cagney said, speaking in the tones of a man who wants to be finished with a boring discussion. “If you don’t mind taking a couple of humies off the fence-walk

for a day or two—”

“What’s Brautigan doing up so early?” Gaskie interrupted. “He almost never rolls out until noon. That kid he pals around with is the same way. What’s his name?”

“Earnshaw?” Brautigan also palled around with that half-bright Ruiz, but Ruiz was no kid.

a loud braying sound from behind them. They had no more begun to turn toward it when another bray began from the other end of the compound—the dormitory end.

“What the devil—” Pimli began.

—is thatwas how he meant to finish, but before he could, Tammy Kelly came rushing out through the front door of Warden’s House, with Tassa, his houseboy, scampering along

right behind her. Both of them were waving their arms over their heads.

“Fire!”Tammy shouted. “Fire!”

Fire? But that’s impossible,Pimli thought.For if that’s the smoke detector I’m hearing in my house and alsothe smoke detector I’m hearing from one of the dorms, then surely —

“It must be a false alarm,” he told Finli. “Those smoke detectors do that when their batteries are—”

Before he could finish this hopeful assessment, a side window of Warden’s House exploded outward. The glass was followed by an exhalation of orange flame.

“Gods!” Jakli cried in his buzzing voice. “Itis fire!”

Pimli stared with his mouth open. And suddenly yetanother smoke-and-fire alarm went off, this one in a series of loud, hiccuping whoops. Good God, sweet Jesus, that was one of theDamli House alarms! Surely nothing could be wrong at—

Finli o’ Tego grabbed his arm. “Boss,” he said, calmly enough. “We’ve got real trouble.”

Before Pimli could reply, the horn went off, signaling the change of shifts. And suddenly he realized how vulnerable they would be for the next seven minutes or so. Vulnerable to all sorts of things.

He refused to admit the wordattack into his consciousness. At least not yet.

Eight

Dinky Earnshaw had been sitting in the overstuffed easy chair for what seemed like

forever, waiting impatiently for the party to begin. Usually being in The Study cheered him up—hell, cheeredeverybody up, it was the “good-mind” effect—but today he only felt the

wires of tension inside him winding tighter and tighter, pulling his guts into a ball. He was

aware of taheen and can-toi looking down from the balconies every now and again, riding the good-mind wave, but didn’t have to worry about being progged by the likes of them;

from that, at least, he was safe.

Was that a smoke alarm? From Feveral, perhaps?

Maybe. But maybe not, too. No one else was looking around.

Wait,he told himself.Ted told you this would be the hard part, didn’t he? And at least Sheemie’s out of the way. Sheemie’s safe in his room, and Corbett Hall’s safe from fire. So

calm down. Relax.

Thatwas the bray of a smoke alarm. Dinky was sure of it. Well…almostsure.

A book of crossword puzzles was open in his lap. For the last fifty minutes he’d been filling one of the grids with nonsense-letters, ignoring the definitions completely. Now,

across the top, he printed this in large dark block letters:GO SOUTH WITH YOUR

HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HU

That was when one of the upstairs fire alarms, probably the one in the west wing, went off with a loud, warbling bray. Several of the Breakers, jerked rudely from a deep daze of concentration, cried out in surprised alarm. Dinky also cried out, but in relief. Relief and

something more. Joy? Yeah, very likely itwas joy. Because when the fire alarm began to bray, he’d felt the powerful hum of good-mind snap. The eerie combined force of the

Breakers had winked out like an overloaded electrical circuit. For the moment, at least, the assault on the Beam had stopped.

Meanwhile, he had a job to do. No more waiting. He stood up, letting the crossword

magazine tumble to the Turkish rug, and threw his mind at the Breakers in the room. It wasn’t hard; he’d been practicing almost daily for this moment, with Ted’s help. And if it

worked? If the Breakers picked it up, rebroadcasting it and amping what Dinky could only suggest to the level of a command? Why then it would rise. It would become the dominant chord in a new good-mind gestalt.

At least that was the hope.

(IT’S A FIRE FOLKS THERE’S A FIRE IN THE BUILDING)

As if to underscore this, there was a soft bang-and-tinkle as something imploded and the first puff of smoke seeped from the ventilator panels. Breakers looked around with wide, dazed eyes, some getting to their feet.

And Dinky sent:

(DON’T WORRY DON’T PANIC ALL IS WELL WALK UP THE)

He sent a perfect, practiced image of the north stairway, then added Breakers. Breakers

walking up the north stairway. Breakers walking through the kitchen. Crackle of fire, smell of smoke, but both coming from the guards’ sleeping area in the west wing. And would

anyone question the truth of this mental broadcast? Would anyone wonder who was beaming it out, or why? Not now. Now they were only scared. Now they werewanting someone to tell them what to do, and Dinky Earnshaw was that someone.

(NORTH STAIRWAY WALK UP THE NORTH STAIRWAY WALK OUT ONTO THE BACK LAWN)

And it worked. They began to walk that way. Like sheep following a ram or horses following a stallion. Some were picking up the two basic ideas

(NO PANIC NO PANIC)

(NORTH STAIRWAY NORTH STAIRWAY)

and rebroadcasting them. And, even better, Dinky heard it from above, too. From the can-toi and the taheen who had been observing from the balconies.

No one ran and no one panicked, but the exodus up the north stairs had begun.

Nine

Susannah sat astride the SCT in the window of the shed where she’d been concealed, not worrying about being seen now. Smoke detectors—at least three of them—were yowling. A fire alarm was whooping even more loudly; that one was from Damli House, she was quite sure. As if in answer, a series of loud electronic goose-honks began from the Pleasantville end of the compound. This was joined by a multitude of clanging bells.

With all that happening to their south, it was no wonder that the woman north of the

Devar-Toi saw only the backs of the three guards in the ivy-covered watchtowers. Three didn’t seem like many, but it was five per cent of the total. A start.

Susannah looked down the barrel of her gun at the one in her sights and prayed.God grant me true aim…true aim…

Soon.

It would be soon.

Ten

Finli grabbed the Master’s arm. Pimli shook him off and started toward his house again, staring unbelievingly at the smoke that was now pouring out of all the windows on the left side.

“Boss!” Finli shouted, renewing his grip. “Boss, never mind that! It’s the Breakers we have to worry about! TheBreakers! ”

It didn’t get through, but the shocking warble of the Damli House fire alarm did. Pimli

turned back in that direction, and for a moment he met Jakli’s beady little bird’s eyes. He saw nothing in them but panic, which had the perverse but welcome effect of steadying

Pimli himself. Sirens and buzzers everywhere. One of them was a regular pulsing honk he’d never heard before. Coming from the direction of Pleasantville?

“Come on, boss!” Finli o’ Tego almost pleaded. “We have to make sure the Breakers are okay—”

“Smoke!” Jakli cried, fluttering his dark (and utterly useless) wings. “Smoke from Damli House, smoke from Feveral, too!”

Pimli ignored him. He pulled the Peacemaker from the docker’s clutch, wondering briefly what premonition had caused him to put it on. He had no idea, but he was glad for the weight of the gun in his hand. Behind him, Tassa was yelling—Tammy was, too—but

Pimli ignored the pair of them. His heart was beating furiously, but he was calm again.

Finli was right. The Breakers were the important thing right now. Making sure they didn’t lose a third of their trained psychics in some sort of electrical fire or half-assed act of sabotage. He nodded at his Security Chief and they began to run toward Damli House with

Jakli squawking and flapping along behind them like a refugee from a Warner Bros. cartoon. Somewhere up there, Gaskie was hollering. And then Pimli o’ New Jersey heard a

sound that chilled him to the bone, a rapidchow-chow-chow sound. Gunfire! If some clown was shooting at his Breakers, that clown’s head would finish the day on a high pole, by the

gods. That the guards rather than the Breakers might be under attack had at that point still not crossed his mind, nor that of the slightly wilier Finli, either. Too much was happening too fast.

Eleven

At the south end of the Devar compound, the syncopated honking sound was almost loud enough to split eardrums. “Christ!” Eddie said, and couldn’t hear himself.

In the south watchtowers, the guards were turned away from them, looking north. Eddie couldn’t see any smoke yet. Perhaps the guards could from their higher vantage-points.

Roland grabbed Jake’s shoulder, then pointed at theSOO LINE boxcar. Jake nodded and scrambled beneath it with Oy at his heels. Roland held both hands out to Eddie—Stay where youare!—and then followed. On the other side of the boxcar the boy and the gunslinger stood up, side by side. They would have been clearly visible to the sentries, had the attention of those worthies not been distracted by the smoke detectors and fire alarms inside the compound.

Suddenly the entire front of the Pleasantville Hardware Company descended into a slot in the ground. A robot fire engine, all bright red paint and gleaming chrome, came bolting out

of the hitherto concealed garage. A line of red lights pulsed down the center of its elongated body, and an amplified voice bellowed,“STAND CLEAR! THIS IS

FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO! STAND CLEAR! MAKE WAY FOR

FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO! ”

There must be no gunfire from this part of the Devar, not yet. The south end of the compound must seem safe to the increasingly frightened inmates of Algul Siento: don’t worry, folks, here’s your port in today’s unexpected shitstorm.

The gunslinger dipped a ’Riza from Jake’s dwindling supply and nodded for the boy to take another. Roland pointed to the guard in the righthand tower, then once more at Jake. The boy nodded, cocked his arm across his chest, and waited for Roland to give him the go.

Twelve

Once you hear the horn that signals the change of shifts,Roland had told Susannah,take it to them. Do as much damage as you can, but don’t let them see they’re only facing a single person, for your father’s sake!

As if he needed to tell her that.

She could have taken the three watchtower guards while the horn was still blaring, but something made her wait. A few seconds later, she was glad she had. The rear door of the Queen Anne burst open so violently it tore off its upper hinge. Breakers piled out, clawing at those ahead of them in their panic (these are the would-be destroyers of the universe,she thought,these sheep ), and among them she saw half a dozen of the freakboys with animal heads and at least four of those creepy humanoids with the masks on.

Susannah took the guard in the west tower first, and had shifted her aim to the pair in the east tower before the first casualty in the Battle of Algul Siento had fallen over the railing and tumbled to the ground with his brains dribbling out of his hair and down his cheeks.

The Coyote machine-pistol, switched to the middle setting, fired in low-pitched bursts of three:Chow! Chow! Chow!

The taheen and the low man in the east tower spun widdershins to each other, like figures in a dance. The taheen crumpled on the catwalk that skirted the top of the watchtower; the low man was driven into the rail, flipped over it with his bootheels in the sky, then plummeted head-first to the ground. She heard the crack his neck made when it broke.

A couple of the milling Breakers spotted this unfortunate fellow’s descent and screamed.

“Put up your hands!” That was Dinky, she recognized his voice. “Put up your hands if you’re a Breaker!”

No one questioned the idea; in these circumstances, anyone who sounded like he knew

what was going on was in unquestioned charge. Some of the Breakers—but not all, not yet—put their hands up. It made no difference to Susannah. She didn’t need raised hands to

tell the difference between the sheep and the goats. A kind of haunted clarity had fallen over her vision.

She flicked the fire-control switch fromBURST toSINGLE SHOT and began to pick off the guards who’d come up from The Study with the Breakers.Taheen…can-toi, get him…a hume but don’t shoot her, she’s a Breaker even though she doesn’t have her hands up…don’t ask me how I know but I do…

Susannah squeezed the Coyote’s trigger and the head of the hume next to the woman in the bright red slacks exploded in a mist of blood and bone. The Breakers screamed like children, staring around with their eyes bulging and their hands up. And now Susannah heard Dinky again, only this time not his physical voice. It was his mental voice she heard, and it was much louder:

(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOU WON’T BE HURT)

Which was her cue to break cover and start moving. She’d gotten eight of the Crimson King’s bad boys, counting the three in the towers—not that it was much of an

accomplishment, given their panic—and she saw no more, at least for the time being.

Susannah twisted the hand-throttle and scooted the SCT toward one of the other abandoned sheds. The gadget’s pickup was so lively that she almost tumbled off the

bicycle-style seat. Trying not to laugh (and laughing anyway), she shouted at the top of her lungs, in her best Detta Walker vulture-screech:

“Git outta here, muthafuckahs! Git south! Hands up so we know you fum the bad boys! Everyone doan have their hands up goan get a bullet in the haid! Y’all trus’ me on it!”

In through the door of the next shed, scraping a balloon tire of the SCT on the jamb, but

not quite hard enough to tip it over. Praise God, for she never would have had enough strength to right it on her own. In here, one of the “lazers” was set on a snap-down tripod.

She pushed the toggle-switch markedON and was wondering if she needed to do something else with theINTERVAL switch when the weapon’s muzzle emitted a blinding

stream of reddish-purple light that arrowed into the compound above the triple run of fence and made a hole in the top story of Damli House. To Susannah it looked as big as a hole made by a point-blank artillery shell.

This is good,she thought.I gotta get the other ones going.

But she wondered if there would be time. Already other Breakers were picking up on

Dinky’s suggestion, rebroadcasting it and boosting it in the process:

(GO SOUTH! HANDS UP! WON’T BE HURT!)

She flicked the Coyote’s fire-switch toFULL AUTO and raked it across the upper level of the nearest dorm to emphasize the point. Bullets whined and ricocheted. Glass broke. Breakers screamed and began to stampede around the side of Damli House with their hands up. Susannah saw Ted come around the same side. He was hard to miss, because he was

going against the current. He and Dinky embraced briefly, then raised their hands and joined the southward flow of Breakers, who would soon lose their status as VIPs and become just one more bunch of refugees struggling to survive in a dark and poisoned land.

She’d gotten eight, but it wasn’t enough. The hunger was upon her, that dry hunger. Her eyes saw everything. They pulsed and ached in her head, and they saw everything. She hoped that other taheen, low men, or hume guards would come around the side of Damli House.

She wanted more.

Thirteen

Sheemie Ruiz lived in Corbett Hall, which happened to be the dormitory Susannah, all unknowing, had raked with at least a hundred bullets. Had he been on his bed, he almost

certainly would have been killed. Instead he was on his knees, at the foot of it, praying for the safety of his friends. He didn’t even look up when the window blew in but simply redoubled his supplications. He could hear Dinky’s thoughts

(GO SOUTH)

pounding in his head, then heard other thought-streams join it,

(WITH YOUR HANDS UP)

making a river. And thenTed’s voice was there, not just joining the others but amping them up, turning what had been a river

(YOU WON’T BE HURT)

into an ocean. Without realizing it, Sheemie changed his prayer.Our Father andP’teck my pals becamego south with your hands up, you won’t be hurt . He didn’t even stop this when

the propane tanks behind the Damli House cafeteria blew up with a shattering roar.

Fourteen

Gangli Tristum (that’sDoctor Gangli to you, say thankya) was in many ways the most feared man in Damli House. He was a can-toi who had—perversely—taken a taheen name instead of a human one, and he ran the infirmary on the third floor of the west wing with an iron fist. And on roller skates.

Things on the ward were fairly relaxed when Gangli was in his office doing paperwork, or off on his rounds (which usually meant visiting Breakers with the sniffles in their dorms), but when he came out, the whole place—nurses and orderlies as well as patients—fell respectfully (and nervously) silent. A newcomer might laugh the first time he saw the squat,

dark-complected, heavily jowled man-thing gliding slowly down the center aisle between

the beds, arms folded over the stethoscope which lay on his chest, the tails of his white coat wafting out behind him (one Breaker had once commented, “He looks like John Irving after a bad facelift”). Such a one who wascaught laughing would never laugh again,

however. Dr. Gangli had a sharp tongue, indeed, and no one made fun of his roller skates with impunity.

Now, instead of gliding on them, he went flying up and down the aisles, the steel wheels

(for his skating gear far predated rollerblades) rumbling on the hardwood. “All the papers!” he shouted. “Do you hear me?…If I lose one file in this fucking mess,one gods-damned file, I’ll have someone’s eyes with my afternoon tea!”

The patients were already gone, of course; he’d had them out of their beds and down the stairs at the first bray of the smoke detector, at the first whiff of smoke. A number of orderlies—gutless wonders, and he knew who each of them was, oh yes, and a complete report would be made when the time came—had fled with the sickfolk, but five had stayed, including his personal assistant, Jack London. Gangli was proud of them, although one could not have told it from his hectoring voice as he skated up and down, up and down, in the thickening smoke.

“Get the papers, d’ye hear? You better, by all the gods that ever walked or crawled!You better! ”

A red glare shot in through the window. Some sort of weapon, for it blew in the glass wall that separated his office from the ward and set his favorite easy-chair a-smolder.

Gangli ducked and skated under the laser beam, never slowing.

“Gan-a-damn!” cried one of the orderlies. He was a hume, extraordinarily ugly, his eyes bulging from his pale face. “What in the hell was th—”

“Never mind!” Gangli bawled. “Never mind what it was, you pissface clown! Get the papers!Get my motherfucking papers! ”

From somewhere in front—the Mall?—came the hideous approaching clang-and-yowl of some rescue vehicle. “STAND CLEAR!” Gangli heard. “THIS IS FIRE-RESPONSE TEAM BRAVO!”

Gangli had never heard of such a thing as Fire-Response Team Bravo, but there was so much they didn’t know about this place. Why, he could barely use a third of the equipment

in his own surgical suite! Never mind, the thing that mattered right now—

Before he could finish his thought, the gas-pods behind the kitchen blew up. There was a tremendous roar—seemingly from directly beneath them—and Gangli Tristum was thrown into the air, the metal wheels on his roller skates spinning. The others were thrown as well, and suddenly the smoky air was full of flying papers. Looking at them, knowing