"I suppose you'd call me his foreman," Roland said. He pointed at the gun in Eddie's hand, then pointed into the storeroom, then pointed at himself:Wait for my signal. Eddie nodded.
"Why don't you send him out,mi amigo? This doesn't have to be your concern. I'll take him and let you go. Slick's the one I want to talk to. Getting the answers I need from him will be a pleasure. "
"You could never take us," Roland said pleasantly. "You've forgotten the face of your father. You're a bag of shit with legs. Your own ka-daddy is a man named Balazar, and you lick his dirty ass. The others know and they laugh at you. 'Look at Jack,' they say, 'all that ass-licking only makes him uglier. ' "
There was a brief pause. Then: "You got a mean mouth on you, mister. " Andolini's voice was level, but all the bogus good humor had gone out of it. All the laughter. "But you know what they say about sticks and stones. "
In the distance, at last, a siren rose. Roland nodded first to John (who was watching him alertly) and then at Eddie. Soon, that nod said.
"Balazar will be building his towers of cards long after you're nothing but bones in an unmarked grave, Jack. Some dreams are destiny, but not yours. Yours are only dreams. "
"Shut up!"
"Hear the sirens? Your time's almost u - "
"Vai!"Jack Andolini shouted. "Vai!Get em! I want that old fucker's head, do you hear me? I want his head! "
A round black object arced lazily through the hole where the EMPLOYEES ONLY door had been. Another grenado. Roland had been expecting it. He fired once, from the hip, and the grenado exploded in midair, turning the flimsy wall between the storeroom and the lunchroom into a storm of destructive, splintery blowback. There were screams of surprise and agony.
"Now, Eddie!"Roland shouted, and began to fire into the diesel. Eddie joined in. At first Roland didn't think anything was going to happen, but then a sluggish ripple of blue flame appeared in the center aisle and went snaking toward where the rear wall had been. Not enough! Gods, how he wished it had been the kind they called gasoline!
Roland tipped out the cylinder of his gun, dropped the spent casings around his boots, and reloaded.
"On your right, mister," John said, almost conversationally, and Roland dropped flat. One bullet passed through the place where he'd been. The second flipped at the ends of his long hair. He'd only had time to reload three of his revolver's six chambers, but that was one more bullet than he needed. The two harriers flew backward with identical holes in the center of their brows, just below the hairline.
Another hoodlum dashed around the corner of the store on Eddie's side and saw Eddie waiting for him with a grin on his bloody face. The fellow dropped his gun immediately and began to raise his hands. Eddie put a bullet through his chest before they got as high as his shoulders. He's learning, Roland thought. Gods help him, but he is.
"That fire's a little slow for my taste, boys," said John, and leaped up onto the loading dock. The store was barely visible through the rolling smoke of th
e deflected grenado, but bullets came flying through it. John seemed not to notice them, and Roland thanked ka for putting such a good man in their path. Such a hard man.
John took a square silver object from his pants pocket, flipped up the lid, and produced a good flame with the flick of his thumb on a small wheel. He tossed the little flaming tinderbox underhand into the storeroom. Flames burst up all around it with awhoomp sound.
"What's the matter with you?"Andolini screamed. "Get them!"
"Come and do it yourself!" Roland called. At the same time he pulled on John's pants leg. John jumped off the loading dock backward and stumbled. Roland caught him. Chip the storekeeper chose this moment to faint, pitching forward to the trash-littered earth with a groan so soft it was almost a sigh.
"Yeah, come on!" Eddie goaded. "Come onSlick, what-samattaSlick, don't send a boy to do a man's work, you ever hear that one? How many guys did you have over there, two dozen? And we're still standing! So come on! Come on and do it yourself! Or do you want to lick Enrico Balazar's ass for the rest of your life?"
More bullets came through the smoke and flame, but the harriers in the store showed no interest in trying to charge through the growing fire. No more came around the sides of the store, either.
Roland pointed at Eddie's lower right leg, where the hole was. Eddie gave him a thumbs-up, but the leg of his jeans now seemed too full below the knee - swollen - and when he moved, his shor'boot squelched. The pain had settled to a steady hard ache that seemed to cycle with the beat of his heart. Yet he was coming to believe it might have missed the bone. Maybe, he admitted to himself,because I want to believe it.
The first siren had been joined by two or three others, and they were closing in.
"Go!"Jack screamed. He now sounded on the verge of hysterics. "Go, you chickenshit motherfuckers, go get them!"
Roland thought that the remaining badmen might have attacked a couple of minutes ago - maybe even thirty seconds ago - if Andolini had led their charge personally. But now the frontal-assault option had been closed off, and Andolini must surely know that if he led men around either side of the store, Roland and Eddie would pick them off like clay birds in a Fair-Day shooting contest. The only workable strategies left to him were siege or a long flanking movement through the woods, and Jack Andolini had no time for either. Standing their ground back here, however, would present its own problems. Dealing with the local constabulary, for instance, or the fire brigade if that showed up first.
Roland pulled John to him so he could speak quietly. "We need to get out of here right now. Can you help us?"
"Oh, ayuh, I think so. " The wind shifted. A draft blew through the mercantile's broken front windows, through the place where the back wall had been, and out the back door. The diesel smoke was black and oily. John coughed and waved it away. "Follow me. Let's step lively. "
John hurried across the ugly acre of waste ground behind the store, stepping over a broken crate and weaving his way between a rusty incinerator and a pile of even rustier machine parts. There was a name on the biggest of these that Roland had seen before in his wanderings: JOHN DEERE.
Roland and Eddie walked backward, protecting John's back, taking little glances over their own shoulders to keep from tripping. Roland hadn't entirely given up hope that Andolini would make a final charge and he could kill him, as he had done once before. On the beach of the Western Sea, that had been, and here he was again, not only back but ten yearsyounger.
While I,Roland thought,feel at least a thousand years older.
Yet that was not really true. Yes, he was now suffering - finally - the ills an old man could reasonably expect. But he had a ka-tet to protect again, and not just any ka-tet but one ofgunslingers, and they had refreshed his life in a way he never would have expected. It all meant something to him again, not just the Dark Tower butall of it. So he wanted Andolini to come. And if he killed Andolini in this world, he had an idea Andolini would stay dead. Because this world wasdifferent. It had a resonance all the others, even his own, lacked. He felt it in every bone and every nerve. Roland looked up and saw exactly what he expected: clouds in a line. At the rear of the barren acre, a path slipped into the woods, its head marked by a pair of good-sized granite rocks. And here the gunslinger saw herringbone patterns of shadows, overlapping but all pointing the same way. You had to look to see it, but once seen it was unmistakable. As in the version of New York where they had found the empty bag in the vacant lot and Susannah had seen the vagrant dead, this was the true world, the one where time always ran in a single direction. They might be able to hop into the future if they could find a door, as he was sure Jake and Callahan had done (for Roland also remembered the poem on the fence, and now understood at least part of it), but they could never return to the past. This was the true world, the one where no roll of the dice could ever be taken back, the one closest to the Dark Tower. And they were still on the Path of the Beam.
John led them onto the way into the woods and quickly down it, away from the rising pillars of thick dark smoke and the approaching whine of the sirens.
Four
They hadn't gone even a quarter of a mile before Eddie began seeing blue glints through the trees. The path was slippery with pine needles, and when they came to the final slope - the one leading down to a long and narrow lake of surpassing loveliness - Eddie saw that someone had built a birch railing. Beyond it was a stub of dock jutting out into the water. Tied to the dock was a motorboat.
"That's mine," John said. "I come over for m'groceries and a bite of lunch. Didn't expect no excitement. "
"Well, you got it," Eddie said.
"Ayuh, that's a true thing. Mind this last bit, if you don't want to go on your keister. " John went nimbly down the final slope, holding the rail for balance and sliding rather than walking. On his feet was a pair of old scuffed workboots that would have looked perfectly at home in Mid-World, Eddie thought.
He went next himself, favoring his bad leg. Roland brought up the rear. From behind them came a sudden explosion, as sharp and limber as that first high-powered rifleshot but far louder.
"That'd be Chip's propane," John said.
"Cry pardon?" Roland asked.
"Gas," Eddie said quietly. "He means gas. "
"Ayuh, stove-gas," John agreed. He stepped into his boat, grabbed the Evinrude's starter-cord, gave it a yank. The engine, a sturdy little twenty-horse sewing machine of a thing, started on the first pull. "Get in here, boys, and let's us vacate t' area," he grunted.
Eddie got in. Roland paused for a moment to tap his throat three times. Eddie had seen him perform this ritual before when about to cross open water, and reminded himself to ask about it. He never got the chance; before the question occurred to him again, death had slipped between them.
Five
The skiff moved as quietly and as gracefully over the water as any motor-powered thing can, skating on its own reflection beneath a sky of summer's most pellucid blue. Behind them the plume of dark smoke sullied that blue, rising higher and higher, spreading as it went. Dozens of folk, most of them in shorts or bathing costumes, stood upon the banks of this little lake, turned in the smoke's direction, hands raised to shade against the sun. Few if any marked the steady (and completely unshowy) passage of the motorboat.
"This is Keywadin Pond, just in case you were wonderin," John said. He pointed ahead of them, where another gray tongue of dock stuck out. Beside this one was a neat little boathouse, white with green trim, its overhead door open. As they neared it, Roland and Eddie could see both a canoe and a kayak bobbing inside, at tether.
"Boathouse is mine," the man in the flannel shirt added. Theboat inboathouse came out in a way impossible to reproduce with mere letters - bwutwould probably come closest - but which both men recognized. It was the way the word was spoken in the Calla.
"Looks well-kept," Eddie said. Mostly to be sayingsomething.
"Oh, ayuh," John sa
id. "I do caretakin, camp-checkin, some rough carpenterin. Wouldn't look good f'business if I had a fallin-down boathouse, would it?"
Eddie smiled. "Suppose not. "
"My place is about half a mile back from the water. Name's John Cullum. " He held out his right hand to Roland, continuing to steer a straight course away from the rising pillar of smoke and toward the boathouse with the other.