The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (11 page)

“Read, kid!” Eddie told him. Susannah said nothing; she was already reading the story—the only one on the front page—over his shoulder. Jake cleared his throat as if it were suddenly dry, and began.

“The byline says John Corcoran, plus staff and AP reports. That means a lot of different people worked on it, Roland. Okay. Here goes. ‘America’s greatest crisis—and the world’s, perhaps—deepened overnight as the so-called superflu, known as Tube-Neck in the Midwest and Captain Trips in California, continues to spread.

“ ‘Although the death-toll can only be estimated, medical experts say the total at this point is horrible beyond comprehension: twenty to thirty million dead in the continental U.S. alone is the estimate given by Dr. Morris Hackford of Topeka’s St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center. Bodies are being burned from Los Angeles, California, to Boston, Massachusetts, in crematoria, factory furnaces, and at landfill sites.

“ ‘Here in Topeka, the bereaved who are still well enough and strong enough to do so are urged to take their dead to one of three sites: the disposal plant north of Oakland Billard Park; the pit area at Heartland Park Race Track; the landfill on Southeast Sixty-first Street, east of Forbes Field. Landfill users should approach by Berryton Road; California has been blocked by car wrecks and at least one downed Air Force transport plane, sources tell us.’ ”

Jake glanced up at his friends with frightened eyes, looked behind him at the silent railway station, then looked back down at the newspaper.

“ ‘Dr. April Montoya of the Stormont-Vail Regional Medical Center points out that the death-toll, horrifying as it is, constitutes only part of this terrible story. “For every person who has died so far as a result of this new flu-strain,” Montoya said, “there are another six who are lying ill in their homes, perhaps as many as a dozen. And, so far as we have been able to determine, the recovery rate is zero.” Coughing, she then told this reporter: “Speaking personally, I’m not making any plans for the weekend.”

“ ‘In other local developments:

“ ‘All commercial flights out of Forbes and Phillip Billard have been cancelled.

“ ‘All Amtrak rail travel has been suspended, not just in Topeka but across all of Kansas. The Gage Boulevard Amtrak station has been closed until further notice.

“ ‘All Topeka schools have also been closed until further notice. This includes Districts 437, 345, 450 (Shawnee Heights), 372, and 501 (metro Topeka). Topeka Lutheran and Topeka Technical College are also closed, as is KU at Lawrence.

“ ‘Topekans must expect brownouts and perhaps blackouts in the days and weeks ahead. Kansas Power and Light has announced a “slow shutdown” of the Kaw River Nuclear Plant in Wamego. Although no one in KawNuke’s Office of Public
Relations answered this newspaper’s calls, a recorded announcement cautions that there is no plant emergency, that this is a safety measure only. KawNuke will return to on-line status, the announcement concludes, “when the current crisis is past.” Any comfort afforded by this statement is in large part negated by the recorded statement’s final words, which are not “Goodbye” or “Thank you for calling” but “God will help us through our time of trial.” ’ ”

Jake paused, following the story to the next page, where there were more pictures: a burned-out panel truck overturned on the steps of the Kansas Museum of Natural History; traffic on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge stalled bumper to bumper; piles of corpses in Times Square. One body, Susannah saw, had been hung from a lamppost, and that brought back nightmarish memories of the run for the Cradle of Lud she and Eddie had made after parting from the gunslinger; memories of Luster and Winston and Jeeves and Maud.
When the god-drums started up this time, it was Spanker’s stone what came out of the hat,
Maud had said.
We set him to dance
. Except, of course, what she’d meant was that they had set him to
hang
. As they had hung some folks, it seemed, back home in little old New York. When things got weird enough, someone always found a lynchrope, it seemed.

Echoes. Everything echoed now. They bounced back and forth from one world to the other, not fading as ordinary echoes did but growing and becoming more terrible.
Like the god-drums,
Susannah thought, and shuddered.

“ ‘In national developments,’ ” Jake read, “ ‘conviction continues to grow that, after denying the superflu’s existence during its early days, when quarantine measures might still have had some effect, national leaders have fled to underground retreats which were created as brain-trust shelters in case of nuclear war. Vice-President Bush and key members of the Reagan cabinet have not been seen during the last forty-eight hours. Reagan himself has not been seen since Sunday morning, when he attended prayer services at Green Valley Methodist Church in San Simeon.

“ ‘ “They have gone to the bunkers like Hitler and the rest of the Nazi sewer-rats at the end of World War II,” said Rep. Steve Sloan. When asked if he had any objection to being quoted by name, Kansas’s first-term representative, a Republican, laughed and said: “Why should I? I’ve got a real fine
case myself. I’ll be so much dust in the wind come this time next week.”

“ ‘Fires, most likely set, continue to ravage Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute.

“ ‘A gigantic explosion centered near Cincinnati’s River-front Stadium was apparently not nuclear in nature, as was first feared, but occurred as the result of a natural gas buildup caused by unsupervised . . .’ ”

Jake let the paper drop from his hands. A gust of wind caught it and blew it the length of the platform, the few folded sheets separating as they went. Oy stretched his neck and snagged one of these as it went by. He trotted toward Jake with it in his mouth, as obedient as a dog with a stick.

“No, Oy, I don’t want it,” Jake said. He sounded ill and very young.

“At least we know where all the folks are,” Susannah said, bending and taking the paper from Oy. It was the last two pages. They were crammed with obituaries printed in the tiniest type she had ever seen. No pictures, no causes of death, no announcement of burial services. Just this one died, beloved of so-and-so, that one died, beloved of Jill-n-Joe, t’other one died, beloved of them-and-those. All in that tiny, not-quite-even type. It was the jaggedness of the type which convinced her it was all real.

But how hard they tried to honor their dead, even at the end,
she thought, and a lump rose in her throat.
How hard they tried.

She folded the quarto together and looked on the back—the last page of the
Capital-Journal
. It showed a picture of Jesus Christ, eyes sad, hands outstretched, forehead marked from his crown of thorns. Below it, three stark words in huge type:

She looked up at Eddie, eyes accusing. Then she handed him the newspaper, one brown finger tapping the date at the top. It was June 24, 1986. Eddie had been drawn into the gunslinger’s world a year later.

He held it for a long time, fingers slipping back and forth across the date, as if the passage of his finger would somehow cause it to change. Then he looked up at them and shook his
head. “No. I can’t explain this town, this paper, or the dead people in that station, but I can set you straight about one thing—everything was fine in New York when I left. Wasn’t it, Roland?”

The gunslinger looked a trifle sour. “Nothing in your city seemed very fine to me, but the people who lived there did not seem to be survivors of such a plague as this, no.”

“There was something called Legionnaires’ disease,” Eddie said. “And AIDS, of course—”

“That’s the sex one, right?” Susannah asked. “Transmitted by fruits and drug addicts?”

“Yes, but calling gays fruits isn’t the done thing in my when,” Eddie said. He tried a smile, but it felt stiff and unnatural on his face and he put it away again.

“So this . . . this never happened,” Jake said, tentatively touching the face of Christ on the back page of the paper.

“But it did,” Roland said. “It happened in June-sowing of the year one thousand nine hundred and eighty-six. And here we are, in the aftermath of that plague. If Eddie’s right about the length of time that has gone by, the plague of this ‘superflu’ was this
past
June-sowing. We’re in Topeka, Kansas, in the Reap of eighty-six. That’s the
when
of it. As to the
where,
all we know is that it’s not Eddie’s. It might be yours, Susannah, or yours, Jake, because you left your world before this arrived.” He tapped the date on the paper, then looked at Jake. “You said something to me once. I doubt if you remember, but I do; it’s one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me: ‘Go, then, there are other worlds than these.’ ”

“More riddles,” Eddie said, scowling.

“Is it not a fact that Jake Chambers died once and now stands before us, alive and well? Or do you doubt my story of his death under the mountains? That you have doubted my honesty from time to time is something I know. And I suppose you have your reasons.”

Eddie thought it over, then shook his head. “You lie when it suits your purpose, but I think that when you told us about Jake, you were too fucked up to manage anything but the truth.”

Roland was startled to find himself hurt by what Eddie had said—
You lie when it suits your purpose
—but he went on. After all, it was essentially true.

“We went back to time’s pool,” the gunslinger said, “and pulled him out before he could drown.”

“
You
pulled him out,” Eddie corrected.

“You helped, though,” Roland said, “if only by keeping me alive, you helped, but let that go for now. It’s beside the point. What’s more to it is that there are many possible worlds, and an infinity of doors leading into them. This is one of those worlds; the thinny we can hear is one of those doors . . . only one much bigger than the ones we found on the beach.”

“
How
big?” Eddie asked. “As big as a warehouse loading door, or as big as the warehouse?”

Roland shook his head and raised his hands palms to the sky—
who knows?

“This thinny,” Susannah said. “We’re not just
near
it, are we? We came
through
it. That’s how we got here, to this version of Topeka.”

“We may have,” Roland admitted. “Did any of you feel something strange? A sensation of vertigo, or transient nausea?”

They shook their heads. Oy, who had been watching Jake closely, also shook his head this time.

“No,” Roland said, as if he had expected this. “But we were concentrating on the riddling—”

“Concentrating on not getting killed,” Eddie grunted.

“Yes. So perhaps we passed through without being aware. In any case, thinnies aren’t natural—they are sores on the skin of existence, able to exist because things are going wrong. Things in
all
worlds.”

“Because things are wrong at the Dark Tower,” Eddie said.

Roland nodded. “And even if this place—this
when,
this
where
—is not the
ka
of your world now, it might become that
ka
. This plague—or others even worse—could spread. Just as the thinnies will continue to spread, growing in size and number. I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen in my years of searching for the Tower, and heard maybe two dozen more. The first . . . the first one I ever saw was when I was still very young. Near a town called Hambry.” He rubbed his hand up his cheek again, and was not surprised to find sweat amid the bristles.

Love me, Roland. If you love me, then love me.

“Whatever happened to us, it bumped us out of your world, Roland,” Jake said. “We’ve fallen off the Beam. Look.” He pointed at the sky. The clouds were moving slowly above them, but no longer in the direction Blaine’s smashed snout
was pointing. Southeast was still southeast, but the signs of the Beam which they had grown so used to following were gone.

“Does it matter?” Eddie asked. “I mean . . . the
Beam
may be gone, but the
Tower
exists in all worlds, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Roland said, “but it may not be
accessible
from all worlds.”

The year before beginning his wonderful and fulfilling career as a heroin addict, Eddie had done a brief and not-very-successful turn as a bicycle messenger. Now he remembered certain office-building elevators he’d been in while making deliveries, buildings with banks or investment firms in them, mostly. There were some floors where you couldn’t stop the car and get off unless you had a special card to swipe through the slot below the numbers. When the elevator came to those locked-off floors, the number in the window was replaced by an X.

“I think,” Roland said, “we need to find the Beam again.”

“I’m convinced,” Eddie said. “Come on, let’s get going.” He took a couple of steps, then turned back to Roland with one eyebrow raised. “Where?”

“The way we were going,” Roland said, as if that should have been obvious, and walked past Eddie in his dusty, broken boots, headed for the park across the way.

Roland walked to the end of the platform, kicking bits of pink metal out of his way as he went. At the stairs, he paused and looked back at them somberly. “More dead. Be ready.”

“They’re not . . . um . . . runny, are they?” Jake asked.

Roland frowned, then his face cleared as he understood what Jake meant. “No. Not runny. Dry.”

“That’s all right, then,” Jake said, but he held his hand out to Susannah, who was being carried by Eddie for the time being. She gave him a smile and folded her fingers around his.

At the foot of the stairs leading down to the commuter parking lot at the side of the station, half a dozen corpses lay together like a collapsed cornshock. Two were women, three were men. The sixth was a child in a stroller. A summer spent dead in the sun and rain and heat (not to mention at the mercy of any stray cats, coons, or woodchucks that might be passing) had given the toddler a look of ancient wisdom and mystery, like a child mummy discovered in an Incan pyramid. Jake supposed from the faded blue outfit it was wearing that it had been a boy, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Eyeless, lipless, its skin faded to dusky gray, it made a joke of gender—why did the dead baby cross the road? Because it was stapled to the superflu.

Even so, the toddler seemed to have voyaged through Topeka’s empty post-plague months better than the adults around it. They were little more than skeletons with hair. In a scrawny bunch of skin-wrapped bones that had once been fingers, one of the men clutched the handle of a suitcase that
looked like the Samsonites Jake’s parents owned. As with the baby (as with
all
of them), his eyes were gone; huge dark sockets stared at Jake. Below them, a ring of discolored teeth jutted in a pugnacious grin.
What took you so long, kid?
the dead man who was still clutching his suitcase seemed to be asking.
Been waiting for you, and it’s been a long hot summer!

Where were you guys hoping to go?
Jake wondered.
Just where in the crispy crap did you think might be safe enough? Des Moines? Sioux City? Fargo? The moon?

They went down the stairs, Roland first, the others behind him, Jake still holding Susannah’s hand with Oy at his heels. The long-bodied bumbler seemed to descend each step in two stages, like a double trailer taking speed-bumps.

“Slow down, Roland,” Eddie said. “I want to check the crip spaces before we go on. We might get lucky.”

“Crip spaces?” Susannah said. “What’re those?”

Jake shrugged. He didn’t know. Neither did Roland.

Susannah switched her attention to Eddie. “I only ask, sugarpie, because it sounds a little
on
-pleasant. You know, like calling Negroes ‘blacks’ or gay folks ‘fruits.’ I know I’m just a poor ignorant pickaninny from the dark ages of 1964, but—”

“There.” Eddie pointed at a rank of signs marking the parking-row closest to the station. There were actually two signs to a post, the top of each pair blue and white, the bottom red and white. When they drew a little closer, Jake saw the one on top was a wheelchair symbol. The one on the bottom was a warning: $200
FINE FOR IMPROPER USE OF HANDICAPPED PARKING SPACE. STRICTLY ENFORCED BY TOPEKA P.D.

“See there!” Susannah said triumphantly. “They shoulda done that a long time ago! Why, back in my when, you’re lucky if you can get your damn wheelchair through the doors of anything smaller than the Shop ’n Save. Hell, lucky if you can get it up over the curbs! And special parking? Forget it, sugar!”

The lot was jammed almost to capacity, but even with the end of the world at hand, only two cars that didn’t have little wheelchair symbols on their license plates were parked in the row Eddie had called “the crip spaces.”

Jake guessed that respecting the “crip spaces” was just one of those things that got a mysterious lifelong hold on people,
like putting zip-codes on letters, parting your hair, or brushing your teeth before breakfast.

“And there it is!” Eddie cried. “Hold your cards, folks, but I think we have a Bingo!”

Still carrying Susannah on his hip—a thing he would have been incapable of doing for any extended period of time even a month ago—Eddie hurried over to a boat of a Lincoln. Strapped on the roof was a complicated-looking racing bicycle; poking out of the half-open trunk was a wheelchair. Nor was this the only one; scanning the row of “crip spaces,” Jake saw at least four more wheelchairs, most strapped to roof-racks, some stuffed into the backs of vans or station wagons, one (it looked ancient and fearsomely bulky) thrown into the bed of a pickup truck.

Eddie set Susannah down and bent to examine the rig holding the chair in the trunk. There were a lot of crisscrossing elastic cords, plus some sort of locking bar. Eddie drew the Ruger Jake had taken from his father’s desk drawer. “Fire in the hole,” he said cheerfully, and before any of them could even think of covering their ears, he pulled the trigger and blew the lock off the security-bar. The sound went rolling into the silence, then echoed back. The warbling sound of the thinny returned with it, as if the gunshot had snapped it awake.
Sounds Hawaiian, doesn’t it?
Jake thought, and grimaced with distaste. Half an hour ago, he wouldn’t have believed that a sound could be as physically upsetting, as . . . well, the smell of rotting meat, say, but he believed it now. He looked up at the turnpike signs. From this angle he could see only their tops, but that was enough to confirm that they were shimmering again.
It throws some kind of field,
Jake thought.
The way mixers and vacuum cleaners make static on the radio or TV, or the way that cyclotron gadget made the hair on my arms stand up when Mr. Kingery brought it to class and then asked for volunteers to come up and stand next to it.

Eddie wrenched the locking bar aside, and used Roland’s knife to cut the elastic cords. Then he drew the wheelchair out of the trunk, examined it, unfolded it, and engaged the support which ran across the back at seat-level.
“Voila!”
he said.

Susannah had propped herself on one hand—Jake thought she looked a little like the woman in this Andrew Wyeth painting he liked,
Christina’s World
—and was examining the chair with some wonder.

“God almighty, it looks so little ’n light!”

“Modern technology at its finest, darlin,” Eddie said. “It’s what we fought Vietnam for. Hop in.” He bent to help her. She didn’t resist him, but her face was set and frowning as he lowered her into the seat. Like she expected the chair to collapse under her, Jake thought. As she ran her hands over the arms of her new ride, her face gradually relaxed.

Jake wandered off a little, walking down another row of cars, running his fingers over their hoods, leaving trails of dust. Oy padded after him, pausing once to lift his leg and squirt a tire, as if he had been doing it all his life.

“Make you homesick, honey?” Susannah asked from behind Jake. “Probably thought you’d never see an honest-to-God American automobile again, am I right?”

Jake considered this and decided she was
not
right. It had never crossed his mind that he would remain in Roland’s world forever; that he might never see another car. He didn’t think that would bother him, actually, but he also didn’t think it was in the cards. Not yet, anyway. There was a certain vacant lot in the New York when he had come from. It was on the corner of Second Avenue and Forty-sixth Street. Once there had been a deli there—Tom and Gerry’s, Party Platters Our Specialty—but now it was just rubble, and weeds, and broken glass, and . . .

. . . and a rose. Just a single wild rose growing in a vacant lot where a bunch of condos were scheduled to go up at some point, but Jake had an idea that there was nothing quite like it growing anywhere else on Earth. Maybe not on any of those other worlds Roland had mentioned, either. There were roses as one approached the Dark Tower; roses by the billion, according to Eddie, great bloody acres of them. He had seen them in a dream. Still, Jake suspected that his rose was different even from those . . . and that until its fate was decided, one way or the other, he was not done with the world of cars and TVs and policemen who wanted to know if you had any identification and what your parents’ names were.

And speaking of parents, I may not be done with them, either,
Jake thought. The idea hurried his heartbeat with a mixture of hope and alarm.

They stopped halfway down the row of cars, Jake staring blankly across a wide street (Gage Boulevard, he assumed) as
he considered these things. Now Roland and Eddie caught up to them.

“This baby’s gonna be great after a couple of months pushing the Iron Maiden,” Eddie said with a grin. “Bet you could damn near
puff
it along.” He blew a deep breath at the back of the wheelchair to demonstrate. Jake thought of telling Eddie that there were probably others back there in the “crip spaces” with motors in them, then realized what Eddie must have known right away: their batteries would be dead.

Susannah ignored him for the time being; it was Jake she was interested in. “You didn’t answer me, sug. All these cars get you homesick?”

“Nah. But I was curious about whether or not they were all cars I knew. I thought maybe . . . if this version of 1986 grew out of some other world than my 1977, there’d be a way to tell. But I
can’t
tell. Because things change so darn fast. Even in nine years . . .” He shrugged, then looked at Eddie. “
You
might be able to, though. I mean, you actually
lived
in 1986.”

Eddie grunted. “I lived through it, but I didn’t exactly
observe
it. I was fucked to the sky most of the time. Still . . . I suppose . . .”

Eddie started pushing Susannah along the smooth macadam of the parking lot again, pointing to cars as they passed them. “Ford Explorer . . . Chevrolet Caprice . . . and that one there’s an old Pontiac, you can tell because of the split grille—”

“Pontiac Bonneville,” Jake said. He was amused and a little touched by the wonder in Susannah’s eyes—most of these cars must look as futuristic to her as Buck Rogers scout-ships. That made him wonder how Roland felt about them, and Jake looked around.

The gunslinger showed no interest in the cars at all. He was gazing across the street, into the park, toward the turnpike . . . except Jake didn’t think he was actually looking at any of those things. Jake had an idea that Roland was simply looking into his own thoughts. If so, the expression on his face suggested that he wasn’t finding anything good there.

“That’s one of those little Chrysler K’s,” Eddie said, pointing, “and that’s a Subaru. Mercedes SEL 450, excellent, the car of champions . . . Mustang . . . Chrysler Imperial, good shape but must be older’n God—”

“Watch it, boy,” Susannah said, with a touch of what Jake
thought was real asperity in her voice. “I recognize that one. Looks new to me.”

“Sorry, Suze. Really. This one’s a Cougar . . . another Chevy . . . and one more . . . Topeka loves General Motors, big fuckin surprise there . . . Honda Civic . . . VW Rabbit . . . a Dodge . . . a Ford . . . a—”

Eddie stopped, looking at a little car near the end of the row, white with red trim. “A Takuro,” he said, mostly to himself. He went around to look at the trunk. “A Takuro
Spirit,
to be exact. Ever hear of that make and model, Jake of New York?”

Jake shook his head.

“Me, neither,” he said. “Me fucking neither.”

Eddie began pushing Susannah toward Gage Boulevard (Roland with them but still mostly off in his own private world, walking when they walked, stopping where they stopped). Just shy of the lot’s automated entrance (
STOP TAKE TICKET
), Eddie halted.

“At this rate, we’ll be old before we get to yonder park and dead before we raise the turnpike,” Susannah said.

This time Eddie didn’t apologize, didn’t seem even to hear her. He was looking at the bumper sticker on the front of a rusty old AMC Pacer. The sticker was blue and white, like the little wheelchair signs marking the “crip spaces.” Jake squatted for a better look, and when Oy dropped his head on Jake’s knee, the boy stroked him absently. With his other hand he reached out and touched the sticker, as if to verify its reality.
KANSAS CITY MONARCHS
, it said. The O in Monarchs was a baseball with speedlines drawn out behind it, as if it were leaving the park.

Eddie said: “Check me if I’m wrong on this, sport, because I know almost zilch about baseball west of Yankee Stadium, but shouldn’t that say Kansas City
Royals
? You know, George Brett and all that?”

Jake nodded. He knew the Royals, and he knew Brett, although he had been a young player in Jake’s when and must have been a fairly old one in Eddie’s.

“Kansas City
Athletics,
you mean,” Susannah said, sounding bewildered. Roland ignored it all; he was still cruising in his own personal ozone layer.

“Not by ’86, darlin,” Eddie said kindly. “By ’86 the
Athletics were in Oakland.” He glanced from the bumper sticker to Jake. “Minor-league team, maybe?” he asked. “Triple A?”

“The Triple A Royals are still the Royals,” Jake said. “They play in Omaha. Come on, let’s go.”

And although he didn’t know about the others, Jake himself went on with a lighter heart. Maybe it was stupid, but he was relieved. He didn’t believe that this terrible plague was waiting up ahead for his world, because there were no Kansas City Monarchs in his world. Maybe that wasn’t enough information upon which to base a conclusion, but it felt true. And it was an enormous relief to be able to believe that his mother and father weren’t slated to die of a germ people called Captain Trips and be burned in a . . . a landfill, or something.

Except that wasn’t quite a sure thing, even if this wasn’t the 1986 version of his 1977 world. Because even if this awful plague had happened in a world where there were cars called Takuro Spirits and George Brett played for the K.C. Monarchs, Roland said the trouble was spreading . . . that things like the superflu were eating through the fabric of existence like battery acid eating its way into a piece of cloth.