The Dark Tower

“Don’t try to talk,” Roland said. “Something may be sprung inside of you. A rib, mayhap two.”

Jake turned his head to the side. He spat out a mouthful of blood—some of it ran down his cheek like chewing tobacco—and took a hold on Roland’s wrist. His grip was strong; so was his voice, each word clear.

“Everything’s sprung. This is dying—I know because I’ve done it before.” What he said next was what Roland had been thinking just before they started out from Cara Laughs: “If ka will say so, let it be so. See to the man we came to save!”

It was impossible to deny the imperative in the boy’s eyes and voice. It was done, now, the Ka of Nineteen played out to the end. Except, perhaps, for King. The man they had come to save. How much of their fate had danced from the tips of his flying, tobacco-stained fingers? All? Some? This?

Whatever the answer, Roland could have killed him with his bare hands as he lay pinned beneath the machine that had struck him, and never mind that King hadn’t been driving the van; if he had been doing what ka had meant him to be doing, he never would have been here when the fool came calling, and Jake’s chest wouldn’t have that terrible sunken look. It was too much, coming so soon after Eddie had been bushwhacked.

And yet—

“Don’t move,” he said, getting up. “Oy, don’t let him move.”

“I won’t move.” Every word still clear, still sure. But now Roland could see blood also darkening the bottom of Jake’s shirt and the crotch of his jeans, blooming there like roses. Once before he died and had come back. But not from this world. In this one, death was always for keeps.

Roland turned to where the writer lay.

TWO

When Bryan Smith tried to get out from behind the wheel of his van, Irene Tassenbaum pushed him rudely back in. His dogs, perhaps smelling blood or Oy or both, were barking and capering wildly behind him. Now the radio was pounding out some new and utterly hellish heavy metal tune. She thought her head would split, not from the shock of what had just happened but from pure racket. She saw the man’s revolver lying on the ground and picked it up. The small part of her mind still capable of coherent thought was amazed by the weight of the thing. Nevertheless, she pointed it at the man, then reached past him and punched the power button on the radio. With the blaring fuzz-tone guitars gone, she could hear birds as well as two barking dogs and one howling . . . well, one howling whatever-it-was.

“Back your van off the guy you hit,” she said. “Slowly. And if you run over the kid again when you do it, I swear I’ll blow your jackass head off.”

Bryan Smith stared at her with bloodshot, bewildered eyes. “What kid?” he asked.

THREE

When the van’s front wheel rolled slowly off the writer, Roland saw that his lower body was twisted unnaturally to the right and a lump pushed out the leg of his jeans on that side. His thighbone, surely. In addition, his forehead had been split by the rock against which it had fetched up, and the right side of his face was drowned in blood. He looked worse than Jake, worse by far, but a single glance was enough to tell the gunslinger that if his heart was strong and the shock didn’t kill him, he’d probably live through this. Again he saw Jake seizing the man about the waist, shielding him, taking the impact with his own smaller body.

“You again,” King said in a low voice.

“You remember me.”

“Yes. Now.” King licked his lips. “Thirsty.”

Roland had nothing to drink, and wouldn’t have given more than enough to wet King’s lips even if he had. Liquid could induce vomiting in a wounded man, and vomiting could lead to choking. “Sorry,” he said.

“No. You’re not.” He licked his lips again. “Jake?”

“Over there, on the ground. You know him?”

King tried to smile. “Wrote him. Where’s the one that was with you before? Where’s Eddie?”

“Dead,” Roland said. “In the Devar-Toi.”

King frowned. “Devar . . . ? I don’t know that.”

“No. That’s why we’re here. Why we had to come here. One of my friends is dead, another may be dying, and the tet is broken. All because one lazy, fearful man stopped doing the job for which ka intended him.”

No traffic on the road. Except for the barking dogs, the howling bumbler, and the chirping birds, the world was silent. They might have been frozen in time. Perhaps we are, Roland thought. He had now seen enough to believe that might be possible. Anything might be possible.

“I lost the Beam,” King said from where he lay on the carpet of needles at the edge of the trees. The light of early summer streamed all around him, that haze of green and gold.