Song of Susannah (19 page)

Up on his knees, Roland opened fire, fanning the trigger of his revolver with the hard ridge of his right hand, aiming first at the boys with the speed-shooters. One of them dropped dead on the country road’s white centerline with blood boiling out of his throat. The second was flung backward all the way to the road’s dirt shoulder with a hole between his eyes.

Then Eddie was beside him, also on his knees, fanning the trigger of Roland’s other gun. He missed at least two of his targets, which wasn’t surprising, given his condition. Three others dropped to the road, two dead and one screaming
“I’m hit! Ah, Jack, help me, I’m hit in the guts!”

Someone grabbed Roland’s shoulder, unaware of what a dangerous thing that was to do to a gunslinger, especially one in a fire-fight. “Mister, what in the hell—”

Roland took a quick look, saw a fortyish man wearing both a tie and a butcher’s apron, had time to think,
Shopkeeper, probably the one who gave
Pere directions to the post office,
and then shoved the man violently backward. A split second later, blood dashed backward from the left side of the man’s head. Grooved, the gunslinger judged, but not seriously hurt, at least not yet. If Roland hadn’t pushed him, however—

Eddie was reloading. Roland did the same, taking a bit longer thanks to the missing fingers on his right hand. Meanwhile, two of the surviving harriers had taken cover behind one of the old cars on this side of the road. Too close. Not good. Roland could hear the rumble of an approaching motor. He looked back at the fellow who’d been quick-witted enough to drop when Roland told him to, thus avoiding the fate of the ladies.

“You!” Roland said. “Do you have a gun?”

The man in the flannel shirt shook his head. His eyes were a brilliant blue. Frightened, but not, Roland judged, panicky. In front of this customer, the shopkeeper was sitting up, spread-legged, looking with sickened amazement at the red droplets pattering down and spreading on his white apron.

“Shopkeeper, do you keep a gun?” Roland asked.

Before the shopkeeper could answer—if he was capable of answering—Eddie grabbed Roland’s shoulder. “Charge of the Light Brigade,” he said. The words came out mushy—
sharr uvva lie brig-gay
—but Roland wouldn’t have understood the reference in any case. The important thing was that Eddie had seen another six men dashing across the road. This time they were spread out and zigzagging from side to side.

“Vai, vai, vai!”
Andolini bawled from behind them, sweeping both hands in the air.

“Christ, Roland, that’s Tricks Postino,” Eddie said. Tricks was once more toting an extremely large weapon, although Eddie couldn’t be sure it was the oversized M-16 he’d called The Wonderful Rambo Machine. In any case, he was no luckier here than he’d been in the shootout at the Leaning Tower: Eddie fired and Tricks went down on top of one of the guys already lying in the road, still firing his assault weapon at them as he did so. This was probably nothing more heroic than a finger-spasm, final signals sent from a dying brain, but Roland and Eddie had to throw themselves flat again, and the other five outlaws reached cover behind the old cars on this side of the road. Worse still. Backed by covering fire from the vehicles across the street—the vehicles these boys had come in, Roland was quite sure—they would soon be able to turn this little store into a shooting gallery without too much danger to themselves.

All of this was too close to what had happened at Jericho Hill.

It was time to beat a retreat.

The sound of the approaching vehicle continued to swell—a big engine, laboring under a heavy load, from the sound. What topped the rise to the left of the store was a gigantic truck filled with enormous cut trees. Roland saw the driver’s eyes widen and his mouth drop open, and why not? Here in front of this small-town mercantile where he had doubtless stopped many times for a bottle of beer or ale at the end of a long, hot day in the
woods, lay half a dozen bleeding bodies scattered in the road like soldiers killed in a battle. Which was, Roland knew, exactly what they were.

The big truck’s front brakes shrieked. From the rear came the angry-dragon chuff of the airbrakes. There was an accompanying scream of huge rubber tires first locking and then smoking black tracks on the metaled surface of the road. The truck’s multi-ton load began to slew sideways. Roland saw splinters flying from the trees and into the blue sky as the outlaws on the far side of the road continued to fire heedlessly. There was something almost hypnotic about all this, like watching one of the Lost Beasts of Eld come tumbling out of the sky with its wings on fire.

The truck’s horseless front end ran over the first of the bodies. Guts flew in red ropes and splashed the dirt of the shoulder. Legs and arms were torn off. A wheel squashed Tricks Postino’s head, the sound of his imploding skull like a chestnut bursting in a hot fire. The truck’s load broached sideways and began to totter. Wheels fully as high as Roland’s shoulders dug in and tossed up clouds of bloody dirt. The truck slid by the store with a majestic lack of speed. The driver was no longer visible in the cab. For a moment the store and the people inside it were blocked from the superior firepower on the other side of the road. The shopkeeper—Chip—and the surviving customer—Mr. Flannel Shirt—were staring at the broaching truck with identical expressions of helpless amazement. The shopkeeper absently wiped blood from the side of his head and flicked it
onto the floor like water. His wound was worse than Eddie’s, Roland judged, yet he seemed unaware of it. Maybe that was good.

“Out back,” the gunslinger said to Eddie. “Now.”

“Good call.”

Roland grabbed the man in the flannel shirt by the arm. The man’s eyes immediately left the truck and went to the gunslinger. Roland nodded toward the back, and the elderly gent nodded back. His unquestioning quickness was an unexpected gift.

Outside, the truck’s load finally overturned, mashing one of the parked cars (and the harriers hiding behind it, Roland dearly hoped), spilling logs first off the top and then simply spilling them all. There was a gruesome, endless sound of scraping metal that made the gunfire seem puny by comparison.

Eddie grabbed the storekeeper just as Roland had grabbed the other man, but Chip showed none of his customer’s awareness or instinct for survival. He merely went on staring through the jagged hole where his windows had been, eyes wide with shock and awe as the pulp-truck out there entered the final phase of its self-destructive ballet, the cab twisting free of the overloaded carrier and bouncing down the hill beyond the store and into the woods. The load itself went sliding up the right side of the road, creating a huge bow-wave of dirt and leaving behind a deep groove, a flattened Chevrolet, and two more flattened harriers.

There were plenty more where those came from, though. Or so it seemed. The gunfire continued.

“Come on, Chip, time to split,” Eddie said, and this time when he tugged the shopkeeper toward the back of the store Chip came, still looking back over his shoulder and wiping blood from the side of his face.

At the rear of the market, on the left, was an added-on lunchroom with a counter, a few patched stools, three or four tables, and an old lobster-pot over a newsstand which seemed to contain mostly out-of-date girlie magazines. As they reached this part of the building, the gunfire from outside intensified. Then it was dwarfed again, this time by an explosion. The pulper’s fuel-tank, Eddie assumed. He felt the droning passage of a bullet and saw a round black hole appear in the picture of a lighthouse mounted on the wall.

“Who
are
those guys?” Chip asked in a perfectly conversational voice. “Who are you? Am I hit? My son was in Viet Nam, you know. Did you see that truck?”

Eddie answered none of his questions, just smiled and nodded and hustled Chip along in Roland’s wake. He had absolutely no idea where they were going or how they were going to get out of this fuckaree. The only thing he was completely sure of was that Calvin Tower wasn’t here. Which was probably good. Tower might or might not have brought down this particular batch of hellfire and brimstone, but the hellfire and brimstone was
about
old Cal, of that Eddie had no doubt. If old Cal had only—

A darning-needle of heat suddenly tore through his arm and Eddie shouted in surprise and pain. A moment later another punched him in the calf. His lower right leg exploded into
serious
pain, and he cried out again.

“Eddie!” Roland chanced a look back. “Are you—”

“Yeah, fine, go, go!”

Ahead of them now was a cheap fiberboard back wall with three doors in it. One was marked
BUOYS
, one
GULLS
, one
EMPLOYEES ONLY
.

“E
MPLOYEES ONLY
!” Eddie shouted. He looked down and saw a blood-ringed hole in his bluejeans about three inches below his right knee. The bullet hadn’t exploded the knee itself, which was to the good, but oh Mama, it hurt like the veriest motherfucker of creation.

Over his head, a light-globe exploded. Glass showered down on Eddie’s head and shoulders.

“I’m insured, but God knows if it covers somethin like
this,
” Chip said in his perfectly conversational voice. He wiped more blood from his face, then slatted it off his fingertips and onto the floor, where it made a Rorschach inkblot. Bullets buzzed around them. Eddie saw one flip up Chip’s collar. Some-where behind them, Jack Andolini—old Double-Ugly—was hollering in Italian. Eddie somehow didn’t think he was calling retreat.

Roland and the customer in the flannel shirt went through the
EMPLOYEES ONLY
door. Eddie followed, pumped up on the wine of adrenaline and still dragging Chip. This was a storeroom, and of quite a good size. Eddie could smell different kinds
of grain, some sort of minty tang, and, most of all, coffee.

Now Mr. Flannel Shirt had taken the lead. Roland followed him quickly down the storeroom’s center aisle and between pallets stacked high with canned goods. Eddie limped gamely along after, still hauling the shopkeeper. Old Chip had lost a lot of blood from the wound on the side of his head and Eddie kept expecting him to pass out, but Chip actually seemed . . . well, chipper. He was currently asking Eddie what had happened to Ruth Beemer and her sister. If he meant the two women who’d been in the store (Eddie was pretty sure he did), Eddie hoped that Chip wouldn’t suddenly regain his memory.

There was another door at the back. Mr. Flannel Shirt opened it and started out. Roland hauled him back by the shirt, then went out himself, low. Eddie stood Chip beside Mr. Flannel Shirt and himself just in front of them. Behind them, bullets smacked through the
EMPLOYEES ONLY
door, creating startled white eyes of daylight.

“Eddie!” Roland grunted. “To me!”

Eddie limped out. There was a loading dock here, and beyond it about an acre of unlovely, churned-up ground. Trash barrels had been stacked haphazardly to the right of the dock and there were two Dumpsters to the left, but it didn’t look to Eddie Dean as if anyone had worried too much about putting litter in its place. There were also several piles of beercans almost big enough to qualify as archaeological middens.
Nothing like relaxing on the back porch after a hard day at the store,
Eddie thought.

Roland was pointing his gun at another oil-pump, this one rustier and older than the ones out front. On it was a single word. “Diesel,” Roland said. “Does that mean fuel? It does, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “Chip, does the diesel pump work?”

“Sure, sure,” Chip said in a disinterested tone of voice. “Lotsa guys fill up back here.”

“I can run it, mister,” said Flannel Shirt. “You better let me, too—it’s tetchy. Can you and your buddy cover me?”

“Yes,” Roland said. “Pour it in there.” And jerked a thumb at the storeroom.

“Hey, no!” Chip said, startled.

How long did all these things take? Eddie could not have said, not for sure. All he was aware of was a clarity he had known only once before: while riddling Blaine the Mono. It overwhelmed everything with its brilliance, even the pain in his lower leg, where the tibia might or might not have been chipped by a bullet. He was aware of how funky it smelled back here—rotted meat and moldy produce, the yeasty scent of a thousand departed brewskis, the odors of don’t-care laziness—and the divinely sweet fir-perfume of the woods just beyond the perimeter of this dirty little roadside store. He could hear the drone of a plane in some distant quadrant of the sky. He knew he loved Mr. Flannel Shirt because Mr. Flannel Shirt was
here,
was
with
them, linked to Roland and Eddie by the strongest of bonds for these few minutes. But time? No, he had no true sense of that. But it couldn’t have been much more than ninety seconds since
Roland had begun their retreat, or surely they would have been overwhelmed, crashed truck or no crashed truck.

Roland pointed left, then turned right himself. He and Eddie stood back to back on the loading dock with about six feet between them, guns raised to their cheeks like men about to commence a duel. Mr. Flannel Shirt hopped off the end of the dock, spry as a cricket, and seized the chrome crank on the side of the old diesel pump. He began to spin it rapidly. The numbers in their little windows spun backward, but instead of returning to all zeros, they froze at
0 0 1 9.
Mr. Flannel Shirt tried the crank again. When it refused to turn, he shrugged and yanked the nozzle out of its rusty cradle.

“John, no!” Chip cried. He was still standing in the doorway of his storeroom and holding up his hands, one clean and the other bloody all the way up the forearm.

“Get out of the way, Chip, or you’re gonna—”

Two men dashed around Eddie’s side of the East Stoneham General Store. Both were dressed in jeans and flannel shirts, but unlike Chip’s shirt, these looked brand-new, with the creases still in the sleeves. Purchased especially for the occasion, Eddie had no doubt. And one of the goons Eddie recognized quite well; had last seen him in The Manhattan Restaurant of the Mind, Calvin Tower’s bookshop. Eddie had also killed this fellow once before. Ten years in the future, if you could believe it. In The Leaning Tower, Balazar’s joint, and with the same gun he now held in his hand. A snatch of an old Bob Dylan lyric occurred to him,
something about the price you had to pay to keep from going through everything twice.