Song of Susannah (18 page)

Mia was strong, but unprepared for this new attack. It was especially ferocious because Detta had joined her own murderous energy to Susannah’s understanding. For a moment the interloper was pushed backward, eyes wide. In the hotel room, the telephone dropped from Mia’s hand. She staggered drunkenly across the carpet, almost tripped over one of the beds, then whirled about like a tipsy dancer. Susannah slapped at her and red marks appeared on her cheek like exclamation points.

Slapping myself, that’s all I’m doing,
Susannah
thought.
Beating up the equipment, how stupid is that?
But she couldn’t help it. The enormity of what Mia had done, the betraying
enormity—

Inside, in some battle-ring which was not quite physical (but not entirely mental, either), Mia was finally able to clutch Susannah/Detta by the throat and drive her back. Mia’s eyes were still wide with shock at the ferocity of the assault. And perhaps with shame, as well. Susannah hoped she was able to feel shame, that she hadn’t gone beyond that.

I did what I had to do,
Mia repeated as she forced Susannah back into the brig.
It’s my chap, every hand is against me, I did what I had to do.

You traded Eddie and Roland for your monster, that’s what you did!
Susannah screamed.
Based on what you overheard and then passed on, Sayre was sure they’d use the Door to go after Tower, wasn’t he? And how many has he set against them?

The only answer was that iron clang. Only this time it was followed by a second. And a third. Mia had had the hands of her hostess clamped around her throat and was consequently taking no chances. This time the brig’s door had been triple-locked. Brig? Hell, might as well call it the Black Hole of Calcutta.

When I get out of here, I’ll go back to the Dogan and disable all the switches!
she cried.
I can’t believe I tried to help you! Well, fuck that! Have it on the street, for all of me!

You
can’t
get out,
Mia replied, almost apologetically.
Later, if I can, I’ll leave you in peace—

What kind of peace will there be for me with Eddie dead? No wonder you wanted to take his
ring off! How could you bear to have it lie against your skin, knowing what you’d done?

Mia picked up the telephone and listened, but Richard P. Sayre was no longer there. Probably had places to go and diseases to spread, Susannah thought.

Mia replaced the telephone in its cradle, looked around at the empty, sterile room the way people do when they won’t be coming back to a place and want to make sure they’ve taken everything that matters. She patted one pocket of her jeans and felt the little wad of cash. Touched the other and felt the lump that was the turtle, the
sköldpadda.

I’m sorry,
Mia said.
I have to take care of my chap. Every hand is against me now.

That’s not true,
Susannah said from the locked room where Mia had thrown her. And where was it, really? In the deepest, darkest dungeons of the Castle on the Abyss? Probably. Did it matter?
I was on your side. I helped you. I stopped your damn labor when you needed it stopped. And look what you did. How could you ever be so cowardly and low?

Mia paused with her hand on the room’s doorknob, her cheeks flushing a dull red. Yes, she was ashamed, all right. But shame wouldn’t stop her.
Nothing
would stop her. Until, that was, she found herself betrayed in turn by Sayre and his friends.

Thinking of that inevitability gave Susannah no satisfaction at all.

You’re damned,
she said.
You know that, don’t you?

“I don’t care,” Mia said. “An eternity in hell’s a
fair price to pay for one look in my chap’s face. Hear me well, I beg.”

And then, carrying Susannah and Detta with her, Mia opened the hotel room door, re-entered the corridor, and took her first steps on her course toward the Dixie Pig, where terrible surgeons waited to deliver her of her equally terrible chap.

STAVE:
Commala-mox-nix!

You’re in a nasty fix!

To take the hand in a traitor’s glove

Is to grasp a sheaf of sticks!

RESPONSE:
Commala-come-six!

Nothing there but thorns and sticks!

When you find your hand in a traitor’s glove

You’re in a nasty fix.

Roland Deschain was the last of Gilead’s last great band of warriors, for good reason; with his queerly romantic nature, his lack of imagination, and his deadly hands, he had ever been the best of them. Now he had been invaded by arthritis, but there was no dry twist in his ears or eyes. He heard the thud of Eddie’s head against the side of the Unfound Door as they were sucked through (and, ducking down at the last split second, only just avoided having his own skull broken in by the Door’s top jamb). He heard the sound of birds, at first strange and distant, like birds singing in a dream, then immediate and prosaic and completely there. Sunlight struck his face and should have dazzled him blind, coming as he was from the dimness of the cave. But Roland had turned his eyes into slits the moment he’d seen that bright light, had done it without thinking. Had he not, he surely would have missed the circular flash from two o’clock as they landed on hard-packed, oildarkened earth. Eddie would have died for sure. Maybe both of them would have died. In Roland’s
experience, only two things glared with that perfect brilliant circularity: eyeglasses and the long sight of a weapon.

The gunslinger grabbed Eddie beneath the arm as unthinkingly as he’d slitted his eyes against the glare of onrushing sunlight. He’d felt the tension in the younger man’s muscles as their feet left the rock-and bone-littered floor of the Doorway Cave, and he felt them go slack when Eddie’s head connected with the side of the Unfound Door. But Eddie was groaning, still trying to talk, so he was at least partly aware.

“Eddie, to me!”
Roland bellowed, scrambling to his feet. Bitter agony exploded in his right hip and raced almost all the way down to his knee, but he gave no sign. Barely registered it, in fact. He hauled Eddie with him toward a building, some building, and past what even Roland recognized as oil or gasoline pumps. These were marked
MOBIL
instead of
CITGO
or
SUNOCO
, two other names with which the gunslinger was familiar.

Eddie was semiconscious at best. His left cheek was drenched with blood from a laceration in his scalp. Nevertheless, he put his legs to work as best he could and stumbled up three wooden steps to what Roland now recognized as a general store. It was quite a bit smaller than Took’s, but otherwise not much d—

A limber whipcrack of sound came from behind and slightly to the right. The shooter was close enough for Roland to feel confident that if he had heard the sound of the shot, the man with the rifle had already missed.

Something passed within an inch of his ear, making its own perfectly clear sound:
Mizzzzzz!
The glass in the little mercantile’s front door shattered inward. The sign which had been hanging there (
WE’RE OPEN, SO COME IN ’N VISIT
) jumped and twisted.

“Rolan . . .” Eddie’s voice, weak and distant, sounded as if it were coming through a mouthful of mush. “Rolan wha . . . who . . .
OWF!
” This last a grunt of surprise as Roland threw him flat inside the door and landed on top of him.

Now came another of those limber whipcracks; there was a gunner with an extremely high-powered rifle out there. Roland heard someone shout “Aw, fuck ’at, Jack!” and a moment later a speed-shooter—what Eddie and Jake called a machine-gun—opened up. The dirty display windows on both sides of the door came crashing down in bright shards. The paperwork which had been posted inside the glass—town notices, Roland had no doubt—went flying.

Two women and a gent of going-on-elderly years were the only customers in the store’s aisles. All three were turned toward the front—toward Roland and Eddie—and on their faces was the eternal uncomprehending look of the gunless civilian. Roland sometimes thought it a grass-eating look, as though such folk—those in Calla Bryn Sturgis mostly no different—were sheep instead of people.

“Down!”
Roland bellowed from where he lay on his semiconscious (and now breathless) companion. “For the love of your gods
get DOWN!
”

The going-on-elderly gent, who was wearing a
checked flannel shirt in spite of the store’s warmth, let go of the can he’d been holding (there was a picture of a tomato on it) and dropped. The two women did not, and the speed-shooter’s second burst killed them both, caving in the chest of one and blowing off the top of the other’s head. The chest-shot woman went down like a sack of grain. The one who’d been head-shot took two blind, blundering steps toward Roland, blood spewing from where her hair had been like lava from an erupting volcano. Outside the store a second and third speed-shooter began, filling the day with noise, filling the air above them with a deadly crisscross of slugs. The woman who’d lost the top of her head spun around twice in a final dance-step, arms flailing, and then collapsed. Roland went for his gun and was relieved to find it still in its holster: the reassuring sandalwood grip. So that much was well. The gamble had paid off. And he and Eddie certainly weren’t todash. The gunners had seen them, seen them very well.

More. Had been
waiting
for them.

“Move in!” someone was screaming. “Move in, move in, don’t give em a chance to find their peckers, move in, you
catzarros!”

“Eddie!” Roland roared. “Eddie, you have to help me now!”

“Hizz . . .?” Faint. Bemused. Eddie looking at him with only one eye, the right. The left was temporarily drowned in blood from his scalp-wound.

Roland reached out and slapped him hard enough to make blood fly from his hair. “
Harriers!
Coming to kill us! Kill all here!”

Eddie’s visible eye cleared. It happened fast. Roland saw the effort that took—not to regain his wits but to regain them at such speed, and despite a head that must be pounding monstrously—and took a moment to be proud of Eddie. He was Cuthbert Allgood all over again, Cuthbert to the life.

“What the hell’s this?” someone called in a cracked, excited voice. “Just
what
in the blue
hell
is
this?
”

“Down,” Roland said, without looking around. “If you want to live, get on the floor.”

“Do what he says, Chip,” someone else replied—probably, Roland thought, the man who’d been holding the can with the tomato on it.

Roland crawled through litters of broken glass from the door, feeling pricks and prinks of pain as some cut his knees and knuckles, not caring. A bullet buzzed past his temple. Roland ignored that, too. Outside was a brilliant summer day. In the foreground were the two oil-pumps with
MOBIL
printed on them. To one side was an old car, probably belonging to either the women shoppers (who’d never need it again) or to Mr. Flannel Shirt. Beyond the pumps and the oiled dirt of the parking area was a paved country road, and on the other side of that a little cluster of buildings painted a uniform gray. One was marked
TOWN OFFICE
, one
STONE-HAM FIRE AND RESCUE
. The third and largest was the
TOWN GARAGE
. The parking area in front of these buildings was also paved (
metaled
was Roland’s word for it), and a number of vehicles had been parked there, one the size of a large bucka-waggon. From behind them came more than half a dozen
men at full charge. One hung back and Roland recognized him: Enrico Balazar’s ugly lieutenant, Jack Andolini. The gunslinger had seen this man die, gunshot and then eaten alive by the carnivorous lobstrosities which lived in the shallow waters of the Western Sea, but here he was again. Because infinite worlds spun on the axle which was the Dark Tower, and here was another of them. Yet only one world was true; only one where, when things were finished, they
stayed
finished. It might be this one; it might not be. In either case, this was no time to worry about it.