The Dark Tower

There was a plastic-swaddled object sittingon a barrel marked DANGER! MUNITIONS! Eddie removed the protectiveplastic and revealed a machine with reels on it. One of the reels was loaded.Roland could make nothing of the single word on the front of the speakingmachine and asked Susa

“Wollensak,” she said. “A German company.When it comes to these things, they make the best.”

“Not no mo’, sugarbee,” Eddie said. “In mywhen we like to say ‘Sony! No baloney!’ They make a tape-player you canclip right to your belt. It’s called a Walkman. I bet this dinosaur weighstwenty pounds. More, with the batteries.”

Susa

“After the daylight goes, maybe,” Rolandsaid. “For now, let’s see what else we’ve got here.”

“Roland?” Jake asked.

The gunslinger turned toward him. There wassomething about the boy’s face that almost always softened Roland’s own.Looking at Jake did not make the gunslinger handsome, but seemed to give hisfeatures a quality they didn’t ordinarily have. Susa

“What is it, Jake?”

“I know we’re going to fight—”

“ ‘Join us next week for Return to theO.K. Corral, starring Van Heflin and Lee Van Cleef,’” Eddie murmured,walking toward the back of the cave. There a much larger object had beencovered with what looked like a quilted mover’s pad.

“—but when?” Jake continued. “Will itbe tomorrow?”

“Perhaps,” Roland replied. “I think the dayafter’s more likely.”

“I have a terrible feeling,” Jake said.“It’s not being afraid, exactly—”

“Do you think they’re going to beat us,hon?” Susa

“I don’t think so,” Jake said. “I don’tknow what it is. I’ve only felt something like it once, and that was justbefore…”

“Just before what?” Susa

“Holy shit! Come here, you guys! Yougotta see this!”

Eddie had pulled away the mover’s pad andrevealed a motorized vehicle that looked like a cross between an ATV and agigantic tricycle. The tires were wide balloon jobs with deep zigzag treads.The controls were all on the handlebars. And there was a playing card proppedon the rudimentary dashboard. Roland knew what it was even before Eddie pluckedit up between two fingers and turned it over. The card showed a woman with ashawl over her head at a spi

“Looks like our pal Ted left you a ride,sugarbee,” Eddie said.

Susa

He did, and when she was in the saddle,holding handlebars instead of reins, the vehicle looked made for her. Susa

Susa

None of them noticed the strickenexpression on Roland’s face. He bent over to pick up the card Eddie had droppedso no one would.

Yes, it was her, all right—the Ladyof the Shadows. Under her shawl she seemed to be smiling craftily and sobbing,both at the same time. On the last occasion he’d seen that card, it had been inthe hand of the man who sometimes went by the name of Walter, sometimes that ofFlagg.

You have no idea how close you stand tothe Tower now, he had said. Worlds turn about your head.

And now he recognized the feeling that hadcrept among them for what it almost certainly was: not worry or weariness butka-shume. There was no real translation for that rue-laden term, but it meantto sense an approaching break in one’s ka-tet.

Walter o’ Dim, his old nemesis, was dead.Roland had known it as soon as he saw the face of the Lady of Shadows. Soon oneof his own would die as well, probably in the coming battle to break the powerof the Devar-Toi. And once again the scales which had temporarily tilted intheir favor would balance.

It never once crossed Roland’s mind thatthe one to die might be him.

Two

There were three brand names on what Eddieimmediately dubbed “Suzie’s Cruisin Trike.” One was Honda; one was Takuro (asin that wildly popular pre-superflu import, the Takuro Spirit); the third wasNorth Central Positronics. And a fourth, as well: U.S. ARMY, as in PROPERTY OF.

Susa

Now their most basic abilities came out:the true thread, Cort might have called it. Those talents and intuitions thatcould have remained sleeping for most of their lives, only stirring long enoughto get them into occasional trouble, if Roland had not deliberately wakenedthem… cosseted them… and then filed their teeth to deadly points.

Hardly a word was spoken among them asRoland produced a wide prying tool from his purse and levered away the tops ofthe crates. Susa

There was a crate of AR-15 rifles, thebarrels packed in grease, the firing mechanisms fragrant with banana oil. Eddienoted the added selector switches, and looked in the crate next to the 15’s.Inside, covered with plastic and also packed in grease, were metal drums. Theylooked like the ones you saw on tommy-guns in gangster epics like WhiteHeat, only these were bigger. Eddie lifted one of the 15’s, turned it over,and found exactly what he expected: a conversion clip that would allow thesedrums to be attached to the guns, turning them into rapid-fire rice-cutters.How many shots per drum? A hundred? A hundred and twenty-five? Enough to mowdown a whole company of men, that was sure.

There was a box of what looked like rocketshells with the letters STS stenciled on each. In a rack beside them, proppedagainst the cave wall, were half a dozen handheld launchers. Roland pointed atthe atom-symbol on them and shook his head. He did not want them shooting offweapons that would release potentially lethal radiation no matter how powerfulthey might be. He was willing to kill the Breakers if that was what it took tostop their meddling with the Beam, but only as a last resort.

Flanking a metal tray filled with gas-masks(to Jake they looked gruesome, like the severed heads of strange bugs) were twocrates of handguns: snub-nosed machine-pistols with the word COYOTE embossed onthe butts and heavy automatics called Cobra Stars. Jake was attracted to bothweapons (in truth his heart was attracted to all the weapons), but hetook one of the Stars because it looked a little bit like the gun he had lost.The clip fed up the handle and held either fifteen or sixteen shots. This wasnot a matter of counting but only of looking and knowing.