2004 The Dark Tower VII The Dark Tower

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 the 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 that they had been set upon by a hundred or more seasoned fighters, land-pirates from God only knew where. The majority of Algul Siento’s Breakers were in the grassy

area between the rear of Main Street and the 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 the 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 the 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 agroup 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. Oy jumped 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 job 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’t find 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.

“Say it, then, chum. But I’d keep it short if you want to get it all out.”

“Thee and thine are a pack of yellowback dogs,” Finli managed. He probablywas shot in

the heart—so it felt, anyway—but he would say this; it needed to be said, and he willed his damaged heart to beat until it was out. Then he’d die and welcome the dark. “Piss-stinking yellowback dogs, killing men from ambush. That’s what I’d say.”

Eddie smiled humorlessly. “And what about yellowback dogs who’d use children to kill

the whole world from ambush, my friend? The wholeuniverse ?”

The Weasel blinked at that, as if he’d expected no such reply. Perhaps any reply at all. “I had…my orders.”

“I have no doubt of that,” Eddie said. “And followed them to the end. Enjoy hell or Na’ar or whatever you call it.” He put the barrel of his gun against Finli’s temple and pulled the

trigger. The Wease jerked a single time and was still. Grimacing, Eddie got to his feet.

He caught movement from the corner of his eye as he did so and saw another one—the

boss of the show—had struggled up onto one elbow. His gun, the Peacemaker .40 that had once executed a rapist, was leveled. Eddie’s reflexes were quick, but there was no time to

use them. The Peacemaker roared a single time, fire licking from the end of its barrel, and blood flew from Eddie Dean’s brow. A lock of hair flipped on the back of his head as the

slug exited. He slapped his hand to the hole that had appeared over his right eye, like a man who has remembered something of vital importance just a little too late.

Roland whirled on the rundown heels of his boots, pulling his own gun in a dip too quick to see. Jake and Susannah also turned. Susannah saw her husband standing in the street with the heel of his hand pressed to his brow.

“Eddie?Sugar? ”

Pimli was struggling to cock the Peacemaker again, his upper lip curled back from his teeth in a doglike snarl of effort. Roland shot him in the throat and Algul Siento’s Master

snap-rolled to his left, the still-uncocked pistol flying out of his hand and clattering to a stop beside the body of his friend the Weasel. It finished almost at Eddie’s feet.

“Eddie!” Susannah screamed, and began a loping crawl toward him, thrusting herself on her hands.He’s not hurt bad, she told herself,not hurt bad, dear God don’t let my man be

hurt bad —

Then she saw the blood running from beneath his pressing hand, pattering down into the street, and knew itwas bad.

“Suze?” he asked. His voice was perfectly clear. “Suzie, where are you? I can’t see.”

He took one step, a second, a third…and then fell facedown in the street, just as Gran-pere Jaffords had known he would, aye, from the first moment he’d laid eyes on him. For the

boy was a gunslinger, say true, and it was the only end that one such as he could expect.

Chapter XII:

The Tet Breaks

One

That night found Jake Chambers sitting disconsolately outside the Clover Tavern at the east end of Main Street in Pleasantville. The bodies of the guards had been carted away by

a robot maintenance crew, and that was at least something of a relief. Oy had been in the boy’s lap for an hour or more. Ordinarily he would never have stayed so close for so long,

but he seemed to understand that Jake needed him. On several occasions, Jake wept into the bumbler’s fur.

For most of that endless day Jake found himself thinking in two different voices. This had happened to him before, but not for years; not since the time when, as a very young child, he suspected he might have suffered some sort of weird, below-the-parental-radar breakdown.

Eddie’s dying,said the first voice (the one that used to assure him there were monsters in his closet, and soon they would emerge to eat him alive).He’s in a room in Corbett Hall and Susannah’s with him and he won’t shut up, but he’s dying.

No,denied the second voice (the one that used to assure him—feebly—that there were no such things as monsters).No, that can’t be. Eddie’s… Eddie!And besides, he’s ka-tet. He

might die when we reach the Dark Tower, we might alldie when we get there, but not now, not here, that’s crazy.

Eddie’s dying,replied the first voice. It was implacable.He’s got a hole in his head almost big enough to stick your fist in, and he’s dying.

To this the second voice could offer only more denials, each weaker than the last.

Not even the knowledge that they had likely saved the Beam (Sheemie certainly seemed to think they had; he’d crisscrossed the weirdly silent campus of the Devar-Toi, shouting the

news—BEAM SAYS ALL MAY BE WELL! BEAM SAYS THANKYA!—at the top of his lungs) could make Jake feel better. The loss of Eddie was too great a price to pay even for such an outcome. And the breaking of the tet was an even greater price. Every time Jake

thought of it, he felt sick to his stomach and sent up inarticulate prayers to God, to Gan, to the Man Jesus, to any or all of them to do a miracle and save Eddie’s life.

He even prayed to the writer.

Save my friend’s life and we’ll save yours,he prayed to Stephen King, a man he had never seen.Save Eddie and we won’t let that van hit you. I swear it .

Then again he’d think of Susannah screaming Eddie’s name, of trying to turn him over, and Roland wrapping his arms around her and sayingYou mustn’t do that, Susannah, you mustn’t disturb him, and how she’d fought him, her face crazy, her facechanging as

different personalities seemed to inhabit it for a moment or two and then flee.I have to help him! she’d sob in the Susannah-voice Jake knew, and then in another, harsher voice she’d

shoutLet me go, mahfah! Let me do mah voodoo on him, make mah houngun, he goan git up an walk, you see! Sho! And Roland holding her through all of it, holding her and

rocking her while Eddie lay in the street, but not dead, it would have been better, almost, if he’d been dead (even if being dead meant the end of talking about miracles, the end of

hope), but Jake could see his dusty fingers twitching and could hear him muttering incoherently, like a man who talks in his sleep.

Then Ted had come, and Dinky just behind him, and two or three of the other Breakers trailing along hesitantly behind them. Ted had gotten on his knees beside the struggling, screaming woman and motioned for Dinky to get kneebound on the other side of her. Ted

had taken one of her hands, then nodded for Dink to take the other. And something had flowed out of them—something deep and soothing. It wasn’t meant for Jake, no, not at all,

but he caught some of it, anyway, and felt his wildly galloping heart slow. He looked into

Ted Brautigan’s face and saw that Ted’s eyes were doing their trick, the pupils swelling and shrinking, swelling and shrinking.

Susannah’s cries faltered, subsiding to little hurt groans. She looked down at Eddie, and when she bent her head her eyes had spilled tears onto the back of Eddie’s shirt, making

dark places, like raindrops. That was when Sheemie appeared from one of the alleys, shouting glad hosannahs to all who would hear him—“BEAM SAYS NOT TOO LATE!

BEAM SAYS JUST IN TIME, BEAM SAYS THANKYA AND WE MUST LET HIM HEAL!”—and limping badly on one foot (none of them thought anything of it then or even

noticed it). Dinky murmured to the growing crowd of Breakers looking at the mortally wounded gunslinger, and several went to Sheemie and got him to quiet down. From the main part of the Devar-Toi the alarms continued, but the follow-up fire engines were

actually getting the three worst fires (those in Damli House, Warden’s House, and Feveral

Hall) under control.

What Jake remembered next was Ted’s fingers—unbelievably gentle fingers—spreading the hair on the back of Eddie’s head and exposing a large hole filled with a dark jelly of

blood. There were little white flecks in it. Jake had wanted to believe those flecks were bits of bone. Better than thinking they might be flecks of Eddie’s brain.

At the sight of this terrible head-wound Susannah leaped to her feet and began to scream again. Began to struggle. Ted and Dinky (who was paler than paste) exchanged a glance, tightened their grip on her hands, and once more sent the

(peace ease quiet wait calm slow peace)

soothing message that was as much colors—cool blue shading to quiet ashes of gray—as it was words. Roland, meanwhile, held her shoulders.

“Can anything be done for him?” Roland asked Ted. “Anything at all?”

“He can be made comfortable,” Ted said. “We can do that much, at least.” Then he pointed toward the Devar. “Don’t you still have work there to finish, Roland?”

For a moment Roland didn’t quite seem to understand that. Then he looked at the bodies of the downed guards, and did. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I do. Jake, can you help me? If the ones left were to find a new leader and regroup…that wouldn’t do at all.”

“What about Susannah?” Jake had asked.

“Susannah’s going to help us see her man to a place where he can be at his ease, and die as peacefully as possible,” said Ted Brautigan. “Aren’t you, dear heart?”

She’d looked at him with an expression that was not quite vacant; the understanding (and the pleading) in that gaze went into Jake’s heart like the tip of an icicle.“Must he die?” she

had asked him.

Ted had lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it. “Yes,” he said. “He must die and you must bear it.”

“Then you have to do something for me,” she said, and touched Ted’s cheek with her fingers. To Jake those fingers looked cold. Cold.

“What, love? Anything I can.” He took hold of her fingers and wrapped them

(peace ease quiet wait calm slow peace)

in his own.

“Stop what you’re doing, unless I tell you different,” said she.

He looked at her, surprised. Then he glanced at Dinky, who only shrugged. Then he looked back at Susannah.

“You mustn’t use your good-mind to steal my grief,” Susannah told him, “for I’d open my mouth and drink it to the dregs. Every drop.”

For a moment Ted only stood with his head lowered and a frown creasing his brow. Then he looked up and gave her the sweetest smile Jake had ever seen.

“Aye, lady,” Ted replied. “We’ll do as you ask. But if you need us…whenyou need us…”

“I’ll call,” Susannah said, and once more slipped to her knees beside the muttering man who lay in the street.

Two

As Roland and Jake approached the alley which would take them back to the center of the Devar-Toi, where they would put off mourning their fallen friend by taking care of any

who might still stand against them, Sheemie reached out and plucked the sleeve of

Roland’s shirt.

“Beam says thankya, Will Dearborn that was.” He had blown out his voice with shouting and spoke in a hoarse croak. “Beam says all may yet be well. Good as new.Better .”

“That’s fine,” Roland said, and Jake supposed it was. There had been no real joy then, however, as there was no real joy now. Jake kept thinking of the hole Ted Brautigan’s

gentle fingers had exposed. That hole filled with red jelly.

Roland put an arm around Sheemie’s shoulders, squeezed him, gave him a kiss. Sheemie smiled, delighted. “I’ll come with you, Roland. Will’ee have me, dear?”

“Not this time,” Roland said.

“Why are you crying?” Sheemie asked. Jake had seen the happiness draining from Sheemie’s face, being replaced with worry. Meanwhile, more Breakers were returning to

Main Street, milling around in little groups. Jake had seen consternation in the expressions they directed toward the gunslinger…and a certain dazed curiosity…and, in some cases,

clear dislike. Hate, almost. He had seen no gratitude, not so much as a speck of gratitude, and for that he’d hatedthem .

“My friend is hurt,” Roland had said. “I cry for him, Sheemie. And for his wife, who is my

friend. Will you go to Ted and sai Dinky, and try to soothe her, should she ask to be soothed?”

“If you want, aye! Anything for you!”

“Thankee-sai, son of Stanley. And help if they move my friend.”

“Your friend Eddie! Him who lays hurt!”

“Aye, his name is Eddie, you say true. Will you help Eddie?”

“Aye!”

“And there’s something else—”

“Aye?” Sheemie asked, then seemed to remember something. “Aye! Help you go away, travel far, you and your friends! Ted told me. ‘Make a hole,’ he said, ‘like you did for me.’ Only they brought him back. The bad ’uns. They’d not bring you back, for the bad ’uns are gone! Beam’s at peace!” And Sheemie laughed, a jarring sound to Jake’s grieving ear.

To Roland’s too, maybe, because his smile was strained. “In time, Sheemie…although I think Susannah may stay here, and wait for us to return.”

If wedoreturn, Jake thought.

“But I have another chore you may be able to do. Not helping someone travel to that other world, butlike that, a little. I’ve told Ted and Dinky, and they’d tell you, once Eddie’s been put at his ease. Will you listen?”

“Aye! And help, if I can!”

Roland clapped him on the shoulder. “Good!” Then Jake and the gunslinger had gone in a direction that might have been north, headed back to finish what they had begun.

Three

They flushed out another fourteen guards in the next three hours, most of them humes. Roland surprised Jake—a little—by only killing the two who shot at them from behind the fire engine that had crashed with one wheel stuck in the cellar bulkhead. The rest he disarmed and then gave parole, telling them that any Devar-Toi guards still in the compound when the late-afternoon change-of-shifts horn blew would be shot out of hand.

“But where will we go?” asked a taheen with a snowy-white rooster’s head below a great floppy-red coxcomb (he reminded Jake a little of Foghorn Leghorn, the cartoon character).

Roland shook his head. “I care not where you fetch,” he said, “as long as you’re not here when the next horn blows, kennit. You’ve done hell’s work here, but hell’s shut, and I mean to see it will never open this particular set of doors again.”

“What do you mean?” asked the rooster-taheen, almost timidly, but Roland wouldn’t say, had only told the creature to pass on the message to any others he might run across.

Most of the remaining taheen and can-toi left Algul Siento in pairs and triplets, going

without argument and nervously looking back over their shoulders every few moments.

Jake thought they were right to be afraid, because his dinh’s face that day had been abstract with thought and terrible with grief. Eddie Dean lay on his deathbed, and Roland of Gilead would not bear crossing.

“What are you going to do to the place?” Jake asked after the afternoon horn had blown.

They were making their way past the smoking husk of Damli House (where the robot firemen had posted signs every twenty feet readingOFF-LIMITS PENDING FIRE DEPT. INVESTIGATION ), on their way to see Eddie.

Roland only shook his head, not answering the question.

On the Mall, Jake spied six Breakers standing in a circle, holding hands. They looked like folks having a séance. Sheemie was there, and Ted, and Dani Rostov; there also was a young woman, an older one, and a stout, bankerly-looking man. Beyond, lying with their feet sticking out under blankets, was a line of the nearly fifty guards who had died during the brief action.

“Do you know what they’re doing?” Jake asked, meaning the séance-folken—the ones behind them were just being dead, a job that would occupy them from now on.

Roland glanced toward the circle of Breakers briefly. “Yes.”

“What?”

“Not now,” said the gunslinger. “Now we’re going to pay our respects to Eddie. You’re going to need all the serenity you can manage, and that means emptying your mind.”

Four

Now, sitting with Oy outside the empty Clover Tavern with its neon beer-signs and silent jukebox, Jake reflected on how right Roland had been, and how grateful Jake himself had been when, after forty-five minutes or so, the gunslinger had looked at him, seen his terrible distress, and excused him from the room where Eddie lingered, giving up his

vitality an inch at a time, leaving the imprint of his remarkable will on every last inch of his life’s tapestry.

The litter-bearing party Ted Brautigan had organized had borne the young gunslinger to Corbett Hall, where he was laid in the spacious bedroom of the first-floor proctor’s suite.

The litter-bearers lingered in the dormitory’s courtyard, and as the afternoon wore on, the rest of the Breakers joined them. When Roland and Jake arrived, a pudgy red-haired

woman stepped into Roland’s way.

Lady, I wouldn’t do that,Jake had thought.Not this afternoon.

In spite of the day’s alarums and excursions, this woman—who’d looked to Jake like the Lifetime President of his mother’s garden club—had found time to put on a fairly heavy

coat of makeup: powder, rouge, and lipstick as red as the side of a Devar fire engine. She introduced herself as Grace Rumbelow (formerly of Aldershot, Hampshire, England) and demanded to know what was going to happen next—where they would go, what they would do, who would take care of them. The same questions the rooster-headed taheen had asked, in other words.

“For we havebeen taken care of,” said Grace Rumbelow in ringing tones (Jake had been fascinated with how she said “been,” so it rhymed with “seen”), “and are in no position, at least for the time being, to care for ourselves.”

There were calls of agreement at this.

Roland looked her up and down, and something in his face had robbed the lady of her measured indignation. “Get out of my road,” said the gunslinger, “or I’ll push you down.”

She grew pale beneath her powder and did as he said without uttering another word. A birdlike clatter of disapproval followed Jake and Roland into Corbett Hall, but it didn’t

start until the gunslinger was out of their view and they no longer had to fear falling

beneath the unsettling gaze of his blue eyes. The Breakers reminded Jake of some kids with whom he’d gone to school at Piper, classroom nitwits willing to shout out stuff likethis test sucks orbite my bag …but only when the teacher was out of the room.

The first-floor hallway of Corbett was bright with fluorescent lights and smelled strongly

of smoke from Damli House and Feveral Hall. Dinky Earnshaw was seated in a folding chair to the right of the door markedPROCTOR’S SUITE , smoking a cigarette. He looked

up as Roland and Jake approached, Oy trotting along in his usual position just behind

Jake’s heel.

“How is he?” Roland asked.

“Dying, man,” Dinky said, and shrugged.

“And Susannah?”

“Strong. Once he’s gone—” Dinky shrugged again, as if to say it could go either way, any way.

Roland knocked quietly on the door.

“Who is it?” Susannah’s voice, muffled.