The Dark Tower

I can’t? she sent back, leveling the automatic. Oh, sugar, you are just . . . so. . . WRONG!

But before she could pull the trigger, there was a gunshot from behind her. A slug burned across the side of her neck. Susannah reacted instantly, turning and throwing herself sideways into the aisle. One of the low men who’d run had had a change of heart and come back. Susannah put two bullets into his chest and made him mortally sorry.

She turned, eager for more—yes, this was what she wanted, what she had been made for, and she’d always revere Roland for showing her—but the others were either dead or fled. The spider raced down the side of its birthbed on its many legs, leaving the papier-mâché corpse of its mother behind. It turned its white infant’s head briefly toward her.

You’d do well to let me pass, Blackie, or—

She fired at it, but stumbled over the hawkman’s outstretched hand as she did. The bullet that would have killed the abomination went a little awry, clipping off one of its eight hairy legs instead. A yellowish-red fluid, more like pus than blood, poured from the place where the leg had joined the body. The thing screamed at her in pain and surprise. The audible portion of that scream was hard to hear over the endless cycling blat of the robot’s siren, but she heard it in her head loud and clear.

I’ll pay you back for that! My father and I, we’ll pay you back! Make you cry for death, so we will!

You ain’t gonna have a chance, sugar, Susannah sent back, trying to project all the confidence she possibly could, not wanting the thing to know what she believed: that Scowther’s automatic might have been shot dry. She aimed with a deliberation that was unnecessary, and the spider scuttled rapidly away from her, darting first behind the endlessly sirening robot and then through a dark doorway.

All right. Not great, not the best solution by any means, but she was still alive, and that much was grand.

And the fact that all of sai Sayre’s crew were dead or run off? That wasn’t bad, either.

Susannah tossed Scowther’s gun aside and selected another, this one a Walther PPK. She took it from the docker’s clutch Straw had been wearing, then rummaged in his pockets, where she found half a dozen extra clips. She briefly considered adding the vampire’s electric sword to her armory and decided to leave it where it was. Better the tools you knew than those you didn’t.

She tried to get in touch with Jake, couldn’t hear herself think, and turned to the robot. “Hey, big boy! Shut off that damn sireen, what do you say?”

She had no idea if it would work, but it did. The silence was immediate and wonderful, with the sensuous texture of moiré silk. Silence might be useful. If there was a counterattack, she’d hear them coming. And the dirty truth? She hoped for a counterattack, wanted them to come, and never mind whether that made sense or not. She had a gun and her blood was up. That was all that mattered.

(Jake! Jake, do you hear me, kiddo? If you hear, answer your big sis!)

Nothing. Not even that rattle of distant gunfire. He was out of t—

Then, a single word—was it a word?

(wimeweh)

More important, was it Jake?

She didn’t know for sure, but she thought yes. And the word seemed familiar to her, somehow.

Susannah gathered her concentration, meaning to call louder this time, and then a queer idea came to her, one too strong to be called intuition. Jake was trying to be quiet. He was . . . hiding? Maybe getting ready to spring an ambush? The idea sounded crazy, but maybe his blood was up, too. She didn’t know, but thought he’d either sent her that one odd word

(wimeweh)

on purpose, or it had slipped out. Either way, it might be better to let him roll his own oats for awhile.

“I say, I have been blinded by gunfire!” the robot insisted. Its voice was still loud, but had dropped to a range at least approaching normal. “I can’t see a bloody thing and I have this incubator—”

“Drop it,” Susannah said.

“But—”

“Drop it, Chumley.”

“I beg pawdon, madam, but my name is Nigel the Butler and I really can’t—”

Susannah had been hauling herself closer during this little exchange—you didn’t forget the old means of locomotion just because you’d been granted a brief vacation with legs, she was discovering—and read both the name and the serial number stamped on the robot’s chrome-steel midsection.

“Nigel DNK 45932, drop that fucking glass box, say thankya!”

The robot (DOMESTIC was stamped just below its serial number) dropped the incubator and then whimpered when it shattered at its steel feet.