The Dark Tower

Cag screamed at them to get out of the wayand could hardly hear himself in the cacophony. He saw Joey Rastosovich pulltwo of them aside and watched the Earnshaw kid bump aside another. A few of thecoughing, weeping escapees saw the oncoming fire engine and scattered on theirown. Then Fire-Response Team Bravo was plowing through the guards from the westwing, not slowing, roaring straight for Damli House, spraying water to everypoint of the compass.

And—

“Dear Christ, no,” Pimli Prentiss moaned.He clapped his hands over his eyes. Finli, on the other hand, was helpless tolook away. He saw a low man—Ben Alexander, he was quite sure—chewedbeneath the firetruck’s huge wheels. He saw another struck by the grille andmashed against the side of Damli House as the engine crashed, spraying boardsand glass, then breaking through a bulkhead which had been partially concealedby a bed of sickly flowers. One wheel dropped down into the cellar stairwelland a robot voice began to boom, “ACCIDENT! NOTIFY THE STATION! ACCIDENT!”

No shit, Sherlock, Finli thought,looking at the blood on the grass with a kind of sick wonder. How many of hismen and his valuable charges had the goddamned malfunctioning firetruck moweddown? Six? Eight? A motherfucking dozen?

From behind Damli House came thatterrifying chow-chow-chow sound once again, the sound of automaticweapons fire.

A fat Breaker named Waverly jostled him.Finli snared him before Waverly could fly on by. “What happened? Who told youto go south?” For Finli, unlike Trampas, wasn’t wearing any sort ofthinking-cap and the message

(GO SOUTH WITH YOUR HANDS UP, YOUWON’T BE HURT)

was slamming into his head so hard and loudit was nearly impossible to think of anything else.

Beside him, Pimli—struggling togather his wits—seized on the beating thought and managed one of his own:That’s almost got to be Brautigan, grabbing an idea and amplifying it thatway. Who else could?

And—

Gaskie grabbed first Cag and then Jakli andshouted at them to gather up all the armed guards and put them to work flankingthe Breakers who were hurrying south on the Mall and the streets that flankedthe Mall. They looked at him with blank, starey eyes—panic-eyes—andhe could have screamed with balked fury. And here came the next two engineswith their sirens whooping. The larger of the pair struck two of the Breakers,bearing them to the ground and ru

And—

North of the Algul compound, Susa

She used bullets from the Coyote to cut herend of the fence—outer run, middle run, i

And—

The Breaker named Waverly tried to pullfree of Finli. Nar, nar, none of that, may it please ya, Finli thought.He yanked the man—who’d been a bookkeeper or some such thing in hispre-Algul life—closer to him, then slapped him twice across the face,hard enough to make his hand hurt. Waverly screamed in pain and surprise.

“Who the fuck is back there!” Finliroared. “WHO THE FUCK IS DOING THIS?” The follow-up fire engines hadhalted in front of Damli House and were pouring streams of water into thesmoke. Finli didn’t know if it could help, but probably it couldn’t hurt. Andat least the damned things hadn’t crashed into the building they were supposedto save, like the first one.

“Sir, I don’t know!” Waverly sobbed.Blood was streaming from one of his nostrils and the corner of his mouth. “Idon’t know, but there has to be fifty, maybe a hundred of the devils!Dinky got us out! God bless Dinky Earnshaw!”

Gaskie o’ Tego, meanwhile, wrapped onegood-sized hand around James Cagney’s neck and the other around Jakli’s. Gaskiehad an idea son of a bitching crowhead Jakli had been on the verge of ru

And—

“Boss!” Finli shouted. “Boss, grab theEarnshaw kid! Something about this smells!”

And—

With Cag’s face pressing against one of hischeeks and Jakli’s against the other, the Wease (who thought as clearly asanyone that terrible morning) was finally able to make himself heard. Gaskie,meanwhile, repeated his command: divide up the armed guards and put them withthe retreating Breakers. “Don’t try to stop them, but stay with them! Andfor Christ’s sake, keep em from getting electrocuted! Keep em off the fence ifthey go past Main Stree—”

Before he could finish this admonishment, afigure came plummeting out of the thickening smoke. It was Gangli, the compounddoctor, his white coat on fire, his roller skates still on his feet.

And—

Susa

Pimli didn’t see it. It was becoming clearto him that all the confusion was on the surface. Quite likely deliberate. TheBreakers’ decision to move away from the attackers north of the Algul had comea little too quickly and was a little too organized.

Never mind Earnshaw, he thought,Brautigan’s the one I want to talk to.

But before he could catch up to Ted, Tassagrabbed the Master in a frantic, terrified hug, babbling that Warden’s Housewas on fire, he was afraid, terribly afraid, that all of Master’s clothes, hisbooks—

Pimli Prentiss knocked him aside with ahammer-blow to the side of his head. The pulse of the Breakers’ unified thought(bad-mind now instead of good-mind), yammered

(WITH YOUR HANDS UP YOU WON’T BE)

crazily in his head, threatening to driveout all thought. Fucking Brautigan had done this, he knew it, and theman was too far ahead… unless…

Pimli looked at the Peacemaker in his hand,considered it, then jammed it back into the docker’s clutch under his left arm.He wanted fucking Brautigan alive. Fucking Brautigan had some explaining to do.Not to mention some more goddamned breaking.

Chow-chow-chow. Bullets flicking allaround him. Ru

Until it happened, he thought, andspied Trampas.

“Trampas!” he bawled. “Trampas! Hey,cowboy! Grab Earnshaw and bring him to me! Grab Earnshaw!”

Here in the middle of the Mall it was alittle less noisy and Trampas heard sai Prentiss quite clearly. He sprintedafter Dinky and grabbed the young man by one arm.