Song of Susannah

More. Had beenwaiting for them.

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

“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. “Justwhat in the bluehell isthis? ”

“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. Fla

Up on his knees, Roland opened fire, fa

Then Eddie was beside him, also on his knees, fa

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 fla

“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 briggay—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 zig-zagging 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. Fla