The Dark Tower IV Wizard and Glass (13 page)

“Do you know what any of that truck means, Roland?” Susannah asked.

Roland shook his head, but he looked troubled, and that introspective look never left his own eyes.

They went on.

At the place where the ramp merged with the turnpike, the two men, the boy, and the bumbler clustered around Susannah in her new wheelchair. All of them looked east.

Eddie didn’t know what the traffic situation would be like once they cleared Topeka, but here all the lanes, those headed west as well as the eastbound ones on their side, were crammed with cars and trucks. Most of the vehicles were piled high with possessions gone rusty with a season’s worth of rain.

But the traffic was the least of their concerns as they stood there, looking silently eastward. For half a mile or so on either side of them, the city continued—they could see church steeples, a strip of fast food places (Arby’s, Wendy’s, McD’s, Pizza Hut, and one Eddie had never heard of called Boing Boing Burgers), car dealerships, the roof of a bowling alley
called Heartland Lanes. They could see another turnpike exit ahead, the sign by the ramp reading Topeka State Hospital and S. W. 6th. Beyond the off-ramp there hulked a massive old red brick edifice with tiny windows peering like desperate eyes out of the climbing ivy. Eddie figured a place that looked so much like Attica
had
to be a hospital, probably the kind of welfare purgatory where poor folks sat in shitty plastic chairs for hours on end, all so some doctor could look at them like they were dogshit.

Beyond the hospital, the city abruptly ended and the thinny began.

To Eddie, it looked like flat water standing in a vast marshland. It crowded up to the raised barrel of I-70 on both sides, silvery and shimmering, making the signs and guardrails and stalled cars waver like mirages; it gave off that liquidy humming sound like a stench.

Susannah put her hands to her ears, her mouth drawn down. “I don’t know as I can stand it. Really. I don’t mean to be spleeny, but already I feel like vomiting, and I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”

Eddie felt the same way. Yet, sick as he felt he could hardly take his eyes away from the thinny. It was as if unreality had been given . . . what? A face? No. The vast and humming silver shimmer ahead of them had no face, was the very antithesis of a face, in fact, but it had a body . . . an aspect . . . a
presence
.

Yes; that last was best. It had a presence, as the demon which had come to the circle of stones while they were trying to draw Jake had had a presence.

Roland, meanwhile, was rummaging in the depths of his purse. He appeared to dig all the way to the bottom before finding what he wanted: a fistful of bullets. He plucked Susannah’s right hand off the arm of her chair, and put two of the bullets in her palm. Then he took two more and poked them, slug ends first, into his ears. Susannah looked first amazed, then amused, then doubtful. In the end, she followed his example. Almost at once an expression of blissful relief filled her face.

Eddie unshouldered the pack he wore and pulled out the half-full box of .44s that went with Jake’s Ruger. The gunslinger shook his head and held out his hand. There were still four bullets in it, two for Eddie and two for Jake.

“What’s wrong with these?” Eddie shook a couple of shells from the box that had come from behind the hanging files in Elmer Chambers’s desk drawer.

“They’re from your world and they won’t block out the sound. Don’t ask me how I know that; I just do. Try them if you want, but they won’t work.”

Eddie pointed at the bullets Roland was offering. “Those are from our world, too. The gun-shop on Seventh and Forty-ninth. Clements’, wasn’t that the name?”

“These didn’t come from there. These are mine, Eddie, reloaded often but originally brought from the green land. From Gilead.”

“You mean the
wets
?” Eddie asked incredulously. “The last of the wet shells from the beach? The ones that really got soaked?”

Roland nodded.

“You said those would never fire again! No matter how dry they got! That the powder had been . . . what did you say? ‘Flattened.’ ”

Roland nodded again.

“So why’d you save them? Why bring a bunch of useless bullets all this way?”

“What did I teach you to say after a kill, Eddie? In order to focus your mind?”

“ ‘Father, guide my hands and heart so that no part of the animal will be wasted.’ ”

Roland nodded a third time. Jake took two shells and put them in his ears. Eddie took the last two, but first he tried the ones he’d shaken from the box. They muffled the sound of the thinny, but it was still there, vibrating in the center of his forehead, making his eyes water the way they did when he had a cold, making the bridge of his nose feel like it was going to explode. He picked them out, and put the bigger slugs—the ones from Roland’s ancient revolvers—in their place.
Putting bullets in my ears,
he thought.
Ma would shit.
But that didn’t matter. The sound of the thinny was gone—or at least down to a distant drone—and that was what did. When he turned and spoke to Roland, he expected his own voice to sound muffled, the way it did when you were wearing earplugs, but he found he could hear himself pretty well.

“Is there anything you
don’t
know?” he asked Roland.

“Yes,” Roland said. “Quite a lot.”

“What about Oy?” Jake asked.

“Oy will be fine, I think,” Roland said. “Come on, let’s make some miles before dark.”

Oy didn’t seem bothered by the warble of the thinny, but he stuck close to Jake Chambers all that afternoon, looking mistrustfully at the stalled cars which clogged the eastbound lanes of I-70. And yet, Susannah saw, those cars did not clog the highway completely. The congestion eased as the travellers left downtown behind them, but even where the traffic had been heavy, some of the dead vehicles had been pulled to one side or the other; a number had been pushed right off the highway and onto the median strip, which was a concrete divider in the metro area and grass outside of town.

Somebody’s been at work with a wrecker, that’s my guess,
Susannah thought. The idea made her happy. No one would have bothered clearing a path down the center of the highway while the plague was still raging, and if someone had done it after—if someone had been
around
to do it after—that meant the plague hadn’t gotten everyone; those crammed-together obituaries weren’t the whole story.

There were corpses in some of the cars, but they, like the ones at the foot of the station steps, were dry, not runny—mummies wearing seatbelts, for the most part. The majority of the cars were empty. A lot of the drivers and passengers caught in the traffic jams had probably tried to walk out of the plague-zone, she supposed, but she guessed that wasn’t the only reason they had taken to their feet.

Susannah knew that she herself would have to be chained to the steering wheel to keep her inside a car once she felt the symptoms of some fatal disease setting in; if she was going to die, she would want to do it in God’s open air. A hill would be best, someplace with a little elevation, but even a wheatfield would do, came it to that. Anything but coughing your last while smelling the air-freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.

At one time Susannah guessed they would have been able to see many of the corpses of the fleeing dead, but not now. Because of the thinny. They approached it steadily, and she knew exactly when they entered it. A kind of tingling shudder
ran through her body, making her draw her shortened legs up, and the wheelchair stopped for a moment. When she turned around she saw Roland, Eddie, and Jake holding their stomachs and grimacing. They looked as if they had all been stricken with the bellyache at the same time. Then Eddie and Roland straightened up. Jake bent to stroke Oy, who had been staring at him anxiously.

“You boys all right?” Susannah asked. The question came out in the half-querulous, half-humorous voice of Detta Walker. Using that voice was nothing she planned; sometimes it just came out.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Feels like I got a bubble in my throat, though.” He was staring uneasily at the thinny. Its silvery blankness was all around them now, as if the whole world had turned into a flat Norfolk fen at dawn. Nearby, trees poked out of its silver surface, casting distorted reflections that never stayed quite still or quite in focus. A little farther away, Susannah could see a grain-storage tower, seeming to float. The words
GADDISH FEEDS
were written on the side in pink letters which might have been red under normal conditions.

“Feels to me like I got a bubble in my
mind,
” Eddie said. “Man, look at that shit shimmer.”

“Can you still hear it?” Susannah asked.

“Yeah. But faint. I can live with it. Can you?”

“Uh-huh. Let’s go.”

It was like riding in an open-cockpit plane through broken clouds, Susannah decided. They’d go for what felt like miles through that humming brightness that was not quite fog and not quite water, sometimes seeing shapes (a barn, a tractor, a Stuckey’s billboard) loom out of it, then losing everything but the road, which ran consistently above the thinny’s bright but somehow indistinct surface.

Then, all at once, they would run into the clear. The humming would fall away to a faint drone; you could even unplug your ears and not be too bothered, at least until you got near the other side of the break. Once again there were vistas . . .

Well, no, that was too grand, Kansas didn’t exactly
have
vistas, but there were open fields and the occasional copse of autumn-bright trees marking a spring or cow-pond. No Grand Canyon or surf crashing on Portland Headlight, but at least you could see a by-God
horizon
off in the distance, and lose some of that unpleasant feeling of entombment. Then, back
into the goop you went. Jake came closest to describing it, she thought, when he said that being in the thinny was like finally reaching the shining water-mirage you could often see far up the highway on hot days.

Whatever it was and however you described it, being inside it was claustrophobic, purgatorial, all the world gone except for the twin barrels of the turnpike and the hulks of the cars, like derelict ships abandoned on a frozen ocean.

Please help us get out of this,
Susannah prayed to a God in whom she no longer precisely believed—she still believed in
something,
but since awakening to Roland’s world on the beach of the Western Sea, her concept of the invisible world had changed considerably.
Please help us find the Beam again. Please help us escape this world of silence and death.

They ran into the biggest clear space they had yet come to near a roadsign which read
BIG SPRINGS
2 MI. Behind them, in the west, the setting sun shone through a brief rift in the clouds, skipping scarlet splinters across the top of the thinny and lighting the windows and taillights of the stalled cars in tones of fire. On either side of them empty fields stretched away.
Full Earth come and gone,
Susannah thought.
Reaping come and gone, too. This is what Roland calls closing the year.
The thought made her shiver.

“We’ll camp here for the night,” Roland said soon after they had passed the Big Springs exit ramp. Up ahead they could see the thinny encroaching on the highway again, but that was miles farther on—you could see a damn long way in eastern Kansas, Susannah was discovering. “We can get firewood without going too near the thinny, and the sound won’t be too bad. We may even be able to sleep without bullets stuffed into our ears.”

Eddie and Jake climbed over the guardrails, descended the bank, and foraged for wood along a dry creekbed, staying together as Roland admonished them to do. When they came back, the clouds had gulped the sun again, and an ashy, uninteresting twilight had begun to creep over the world.

The gunslinger stripped twigs for kindling, then laid his fuel around them in his usual fashion, building a kind of wooden chimney in the breakdown lane. As he did it, Eddie strolled across to the median strip and stood there, hands in pockets, looking east. After a few moments, Jake and Oy joined him.

Roland produced his flint and steel, scraped fire into the shaft of his chimney, and soon the little campfire was burning.

“Roland!” Eddie called. “Suze! Come over here! Look at this!”

Susannah started rolling her chair toward Eddie, then Roland—after a final check of his campfire—took hold of the handles and pushed her.

“Look at what?” Susannah asked.

Eddie pointed. At first Susannah saw nothing, although the turnpike was perfectly visible even beyond the point where the thinny closed in again, perhaps three miles ahead. Then . . . yes, she might see something. Maybe. A kind of shape, at the farthest edge of vision. If not for the fading daylight . . .

“Is it a building?” Jake asked. “Cripes, it looks like it’s built right across the highway!”

“What about it, Roland?” Eddie asked. “You’ve got the best eyes in the universe.”

For a time the gunslinger said nothing, only looked up the median strip with his thumbs hooked in his gunbelt. At last he said, “We’ll see it better when we get closer.”

“Oh, come on!” Eddie said. “I mean, holy shit! Do you know what it is or not?”

“We’ll see it better when we get closer,” the gunslinger repeated . . . which was, of course, no answer at all. He moseyed back across the eastbound lanes to check on his campfire, bootheels clicking on the pavement. Susannah looked at Jake and Eddie. She shrugged. They shrugged back . . . and then Jake burst into bright peals of laughter. Usually, Susannah thought, the kid acted more like an eighteen-year-old than a boy of eleven, but that laughter made him sound about nine-going-on-ten, and she didn’t mind a bit.

She looked down at Oy, who was looking at them earnestly and rolling his shoulders in an effort to shrug.

They ate the leaf-wrapped delicacies Eddie called gunslinger burritos, drawing closer to the fire and feeding it more wood as the dark drew down. Somewhere south a bird cried out—it was just about the loneliest sound he had ever heard in his life, Eddie reckoned. None of them talked much, and it occurred to him that, at this time of their day, hardly anyone
ever did. As if the time when the earth swapped day for dark was special, a time that somehow closed them off from the powerful fellowship Roland called
ka-tet
.