Wizard and Glass

Eddie unshouldered the pack he wore and pulled out the half-full box of.44s that went with Jake’s Ruger. The gunslinger shook his head and held out his hand. There were still four bullets in it, two for Eddie and two for Jake.

“What’s wrong with these?” Eddie shook a couple of shells from the box that had come from behind the hanging files in Elmer Chambers’s desk drawer.

“They’re from your world and they won’t block out the sound. Don’t ask me how I know that; I just do. Try them if you want, but they won’t work.”

Eddie pointed at the bullets Roland was offering. “Those are from our world, too. The gun-shop on Seventh and Forty-ninth. Clements', wasn’t that the name?”

“These didn’t come from there. These are mine, Eddie, reloaded often but originally brought from the green land. From Gilead.”

“You mean the wets?” Eddie asked incredulously. “The last of the wet shells from the beach? The ones that really got soaked?”

Roland nodded.

“You said those would never fire again! No matter how dry they got! That the powder had been… what did you say? ‘Flattened.’”

Roland nodded again.

“So why’d you save them? Why bring a bunch of useless bullets all this way?”

“What did I teach you to say after a kill, Eddie? In order to focus your mind?”

“Father, guide my hands and heart so that no part of the animal will be wasted.”

Roland nodded a third time. Jake took two shells and put them in his ears. Eddie took the last two, but first he tried the ones he’d shaken from the box. They muffled the sound of the thi

“Is there anything you don’t know?” he asked Roland.

“Yes,” Roland said. “Quite a lot.”

“What about Oy?” Jake asked.

“Oy will be fine, I think,” Roland said. “Come on, let’s make some miles before dark.”

7

Oy didn’t seem bothered by the warble of the thi

Somebody’s been at work with a wrecker, that’s my guess, Susa

There were corpses in some of the cars, but they, like the ones at the foot of the station steps, were dry, not ru

Susa

At one time Susa

“You boys all right?” Susa

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Feels like I got a bubble in my throat, though.” He was staring uneasily at the thi

“Feels to me like I got a bubble in my mind,” Eddie said. “Man, look at that shit shimmer.”

“Can you still hear it?” Susa

“Yeah. But faint. I can live with it. Can you?”

“Uh-huh. Let’s go.”

It was like riding in an open-cockpit plane through broken clouds, Susa

Then, all at once, they would run into the clear. The humming would fall away to a faint drone; you could even unplug your ears and not be too bothered, at least until you got near the other side of the break. Once again there were vistas…

Well, no, that was too grand, Kansas didn’t exactly have vistas, but there were open fields and the occasional copse of autumn-bright trees marking a spring or cow-pond. No Grand Canyon or surf crashing on Portland Headlight, hut at least you could see a by-God horizon off in the distance, and lose some of that unpleasant feeling of entombment. Then, back into the goop you went. Jake came closest to describing it, she thought, when he said that being in the thi

Whatever it was and however you described it, being inside it was claustrophobic, purgatorial, all the world gone except for the twin barrels of the turnpike and the hulks of the cars, like derelict ships abandoned on a frozen ocean.

Please help us get out of this, Susa

They ran into the biggest clear space they had yet come to near a roadsign which read big springs 2 mi. Behind them, in the west, the setting sun shone through a brief rift in the clouds, skipping scarlet splinters across the top of the thi