The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (69 page)

As they stepped into the stable, which was lit by one dim gas lamp, a shadow moved out of one of the stalls. Roland, who had belted on both guns, now drew them. Sheemie looked at him with an uncertain smile, holding a stirrup in one hand. Then the smile broadened, his eyes flashed with happiness, and he ran toward them.

Roland holstered his guns and made ready to embrace the boy, but Sheemie ran past him and threw himself into Cuthbert’s arms.

“Whoa, whoa,” Cuthbert said, first staggering back comically and then lifting Sheemie off his feet. “You like to knock me over, boy!”

“She got ye out!” Sheemie cried. “Knew she would, so I did! Good old Susan!” Sheemie looked around at Susan, who stood beside Roland. She was still pale, but now seemed composed. Sheemie turned back to Cuthbert and planted a kiss directly in the center of Bert’s forehead.

“Whoa!” Bert said again. “What’s that for?”

“ ’Cause I love you, good old Arthur Heath! You saved my life!”

“Well, maybe I did,” Cuthbert said, laughing in an embarrassed way (his borrowed
sombrero,
too large to begin with, now sat comically askew on his head), “but if we don’t get a move on, I won’t have saved it for long.”

“Horses are all saddled,” Sheemie said. “Susan told me to do it and I did. I did it just right. I just have to put this stirrup
on Mr. Richard Stockworth’s horse, because the one on there’s ’bout worn through.”

“That’s a job for later,” Alain said, taking the stirrup. He put it aside, then turned to Roland. “Where do we go?”

Roland’s first thought was that they should return to the Thorin mausoleum.

Sheemie reacted with instant horror. “The boneyard? And with Demon Moon at the full?” He shook his head so violently that his
sombrera
came off and his hair flew from side to side. “They’re dead in there, sai Dearborn, but if ye tease em during the time of the Demon, they’s apt to get up and walk!”

“It’s no good, anyway,” Susan said. “The women of the town’ll be lining the way from Seafront with flowers, and filling the mausoleum, too. Olive will be in charge, if she’s able, but my aunt and Coral are apt to be in the company. Those aren’t ladies we want to meet.”

“All right,” Roland said. “Let’s mount up and ride. Think about it, Susan. You too, Sheemie. We want a place where we can hide up until dawn, at least, and it should be a place we can get to in less than an hour. Off the Great Road, and in any direction from Hambry but northwest.”

“Why not northwest?” Alain asked.

“Because that’s where we’re going now. We’ve got a job to do . . . and we’re going to let them know we’re doing it. Eldred Jonas most of all.” He offered a thin blade of smile. “I want him to know the game is over. No more Castles. The
real
gunslingers are here. Let’s see if he can deal with them.”

An hour later, with the moon well above the trees, Roland’s
ka-tet
arrived at the Citgo oilpatch. They rode out parallel to the Great Road for safety’s sake, but, as it happened, the caution was wasted: they saw not one rider on the road, going in either direction.
It’s as if Reaping’s been cancelled this year,
Susan thought . . . then she thought of the red-handed stuffies, and shivered. They would have painted Roland’s hands red tomorrow night, and still would, if they were caught.
Not just him, either. All of us. Sheemie, too.

They left the horses (and Caprichoso, who had trotted ill-temperedly but nimbly behind them on a tether) tied to some
long-dead pumping equipment in the southeastern corner of the patch, and then walked slowly toward the working derricks, which were clustered in the same area. They spoke in whispers when they spoke at all. Roland doubted if that was necessary, but whispers here seemed natural enough. To Roland, Citgo was far spookier than the graveyard, and while he doubted that the dead in that latter place awoke even when Old Demon was full, there were some
very
unquiet corpses here, squalling zombies that stood rusty-weird in the moonlight with their pistons going up and down like marching feet.

Roland led them into the active part of the patch, nevertheless, past a sign which read
HOW
’
S YOUR HARDHAT
? and another reading
WE PRODUCE OIL, WE REFINE SAFETY
. They stopped at the foot of a derrick grinding so loudly that Roland had to shout in order to be heard.

“Sheemie! Give me a couple of those big-bangers!”

Sheemie had taken a pocketful from Susan’s saddlebag and now handed a pair of them over. Roland took Bert by the arm and pulled him forward. There was a square of rusty fencing around the derrick, and when the boys tried to climb it, the horizontals snapped like old bones. They looked at each other in the running shadows combined of machinery and moonlight, nervous and amused.

Susan twitched Roland’s arm.
“Be careful!”
she shouted over the rhythmic
whumpa-whumpa-whumpa
of the derrick machinery. She didn’t look frightened, he saw, only excited and alert.

He grinned, pulled her forward, and kissed the lobe of her ear. “Be ready to run,” he whispered. “If we do this right, there’s going to be a new candle here at Citgo. A hellacious big one.”

He and Cuthbert ducked under the lowest strut of the rusty derrick tower and stood next to the equipment, wincing at the cacophony. Roland wondered that it hadn’t torn itself apart years ago. Most of the works were housed in rusty metal blocks, but he could see a gigantic turning shaft of some kind, gleaming with oil that must be supplied by automated jets. Up this close, there was a gassy smell that reminded him of the jet that flared rhythmically on the other side of the oilpatch.

“Giant-farts!”
Cuthbert shouted.

“What?”

“I said it smells like . . . aw, never mind! Let’s do it if we can . . . can we?”

Roland didn’t know. He walked toward the machinery crying out beneath metal cowls which were painted a faded, rusting green. Bert followed with some reluctance. The two of them slid into a short aisle, smelly and baking hot, that took them almost directly beneath the derrick. Ahead of them, the shaft at the end of the piston turned steadily, shedding oily teardrops down its smooth sides. Beside it was a curved pipe—almost surely an overflow pipe, Roland thought. An occasional drop of crude oil fell from its lip, and there was a black puddle on the ground beneath. He pointed at it, and Cuthbert nodded.

Shouting would do no good in here; the world was a roaring, squealing din. Roland curled one hand around his friend’s neck and pulled Cuthbert’s ear to his lips; he held a big-bang up in front of Bert’s eyes with the other.

“Light it and run,” he said. “I’ll hold it, give you as much time as I can. That’s for my benefit as much as for yours. I want a clear path back through that machinery, do you understand?”

Cuthbert nodded against Roland’s lips, then turned the gunslinger’s head so he could speak in the same fashion. “What if there’s enough gas here to burn the air when I make a spark?”

Roland stepped back. Raised his palms in a “How-do-I-know?” gesture. Cuthbert laughed and drew out a box of sulfur matches which he had scooped off Avery’s desk before leaving. He asked with his eyebrows if Roland was ready. Roland nodded.

The wind was blowing hard, but under the derrick the surrounding machinery cut it off and the flame from the sulfur rose straight. Roland held out the big-banger, and had a momentary, painful memory of his mother: how she had hated these things, how she had always been sure that he would lose an eye or a finger to one.

Cuthbert tapped his chest above his heart and kissed his palm in the universal gesture of good luck. Then he touched the flame to the fuse. It began to sputter. Bert turned, pretended to bang off a covered block of machinery—that was Bert, Roland thought; he would joke on the gallows—and then dashed back down the short corridor they’d used to get here.

Roland held the round firework as long as he dared, then lobbed it into the overflow pipe. He winced as he turned
away, half-expecting what Bert was afraid of: that the very air would explode. It didn’t. He ran down the short aisle, came into the clear, and saw Cuthbert standing just outside the broken bit of fencing. Roland flapped both hands at him—
Go, you idiot, go!
—and then the world blew up behind him.

The sound was a deep, belching thud that seemed to shove his eardrums inward and suck the breath out of his throat. The ground rolled under his feet like a wave under a boat, and a large, warm hand planted itself in the center of his back and shoved him forward. He thought he ran with it for a step—maybe even two or three steps—and then he was lifted off his feet and hurled at the fence, where Cuthbert was no longer standing; Cuthbert was sprawled on his back, staring up at something behind Roland. The boy’s eyes were wide and wondering; his mouth hung open. Roland could see all this very well, because Citgo was now as bright as in full daylight. They had lit their own Reaping bonfire, it seemed, a night early and much brighter than the one in town could ever hope to be.

He went skidding on his knees to where Cuthbert lay, and grabbed him under one arm. From behind them came a vast, ripping roar, and now chunks of metal began to fall around them. They got up and ran toward where Alain stood in front of Susan and Sheemie, trying to protect them.

Roland took a quick look back over his shoulder and saw that the remains of the derrick—about half of it still stood—were glowing blackish red, like a heated horseshoe, around a flaring yellow torch that ran perhaps a hundred and fifty feet into the sky. It was a start. He didn’t know how many other derricks they could fire before folk began arriving from town, but he was determined to do as many as possible, no matter what the risks might be. Blowing up the tankers at Hanging Rock was only half the job. Farson’s
source
had to be wiped out.

Further firecrackers dropped down further overflow pipes turned out not to be necessary. There was a network of inter-connected pipes under the oilpatch, most filled with natural gas that had leaked in through ancient, decaying seals. Roland and Cuthbert had no more than reached the others when there was a fresh explosion, and a fresh tower of flame erupted from a derrick to the right of the one they had set afire. A moment later, a third derrick—this one sixty full yards away
from the first two—exploded with a dragon’s roar. The ironwork tore free of its anchoring concrete pillars like a tooth pulled from a decayed gum. It rose on a cushion of blazing blue and yellow, attained a height of perhaps seventy feet, then heeled over and came crashing back down, spewing sparks in every direction.

Another. Another. And yet another.

The five young people stood in their corner, stunned, holding their hands up to shield their eyes from the glare. Now the oilpatch flared like a birthday cake, and the heat baking toward them was enormous.

“Gods be kind,” Alain whispered.

If they lingered here much longer, Roland realized, they would be popped like corn. There were the horses to consider, too; they were well away from the main focus of the explosions, but there was no guarantee that the focus would stay where it was; already he saw two derricks that hadn’t even been working engulfed in flames. The horses would be terrified.

Hell,
he
was terrified.

“Come on!” he shouted.

They ran for the horses through shifting yellow-orange brilliance.

At first Jonas thought it was going on in his own head—that the explosions were part of their lovemaking.

Lovemaking, yar. Lovemaking, horseshit. He and Coral made love no more than donkeys did sums. But it was
something.
Oh yes indeed it was.

He’d been with passionate women before, ones who took you into a kind of oven-place and then held you there, staring with greedy intensity as they pumped their hips, but until Coral he’d never been with a woman that sparked such a powerfully harmonic chord in himself. With sex, he had always been the kind of man who took it when it came and forgot it when it didn’t. But with Coral he only wanted to take it, take it, and take it some more. When they were together they made love like cats or ferrets, twisting and hissing and clawing; they bit at each other and cursed at each other, and so far none of it was even close to enough. When he was with her, Jonas sometimes felt as if he were being fried in sweet oil.

Tonight there had been a meeting with the Horsemen’s Association, which had pretty much become the Farson Association in these latter days. Jonas had brought them up to date, had answered their idiotic questions, and had made sure they understood what they’d be doing the next day. With that done, he had checked on Rhea, who had been installed in Kimba Rimer’s old suite. She hadn’t even noticed Jonas peering in at her. She sat in Rimer’s high-ceilinged, book-lined study—behind Rimer’s ironwood desk, in Rimer’s upholstered chair, looking as out of place as a whore’s bloomers on a church altar. On Rimer’s desk was the Wizard’s Rainbow. She was passing her hands back and forth above it and muttering rapidly under her breath, but the ball remained dark.

Jonas had locked her in and had gone to Coral. She had been waiting for him in the parlor where tomorrow’s Conversational would have been held. There were plenty of bedrooms in that wing, but it was to her dead brother’s that she had led him . . . and not by accident, either, Jonas was sure. There they made love in the canopied bed Hart Thorin would never share with his gilly.

It was fierce, as it had always been, and Jonas was approaching his orgasm when the first oil derrick blew.
Christ, she’s something,
he thought.
There’s never in the whole damned world been a woman like—

Then two more explosions, in rapid succession, and Coral froze for a moment beneath him before beginning to thrust her hips again. “Citgo,” she said in a hoarse, panting voice.

“Yar,” he growled, and began to thrust with her. He had lost all interest in making love, but they had reached the point where it was impossible to stop, even under threat of death or dismemberment.