Chapter 77
   Stu was sitting in a chair drawn up to Fran’s bed when George Richardson and Dan Lathrop came in. Fran immediately seized Stu’s hand and squeezed it tightly, almost painfully. Her face was set in rigid lines, and for a moment Stu saw what she would look like when she was old; for a moment she looked like Mother Abagail.
   “Stu,” George said. “I heard about your return. Miraculous. I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you. We all are.”
   George shook his hand and then introduced Dan Lathrop.
   Dan said, “We’ve heard there was an explosion in Las Vegas. You actually saw it?”
   “Yes.”
   “People around here seem to think it was a nuclear blast. Is that true?”
   “Yes.”
   George nodded at this, then seemed to dismiss it and turned to Fran.
   “How are you feeling?”
   “All right. Glad to have my man back. What about the baby?”
   “Actually,” Lathrop said, “that’s what we’re here about.”
   Fran nodded. “Dead?”
   George and Dan exchanged a glance. “Frannie, I want you to listen carefully and try not to misunderstand anything I say—”
   Lightly, with suppressed hysteria, Fran said: “If he’s dead, just tell me!”
   “Fran,” Stu said.
   “Peter seems to be recovering,” Dan Lathrop said mildly.
   There was a moment of utter shocked silence in the room. Fran, her face pale and oval below the dark chestnut mass of her hair on the pillow, looked up at Dan as if he had suddenly begun to spout some sort of lunatic doggerel. Someone—either Laurie Constable or Marcy Spruce—looked into the room and then passed on. It was a moment that Stu never forgot.
   “What?” Fran whispered at last.
   George said, “You mustn’t get your hopes up.”
   “You said… recovering,” Fran said. Her face was flatly stunned. Until this moment she hadn’t realized how much she had resigned herself to the baby’s death.
   George said, “Both Dan and I saw thousands of cases during the epidemic, Fran… you notice I don’t say ‘treated’ because I don’t think either of us ever changed the course of the disease by a jot or a tittle in any patient. Fair statement, Dan?”
   “Yes.”
   The I-want line that Stu had first noticed in New Hampshire hours after meeting her now appeared on Fran’s forehead. “Will you get to the point, for heaven’s sake?”
   “I’m trying, but I have to be careful and I’m going to be careful,” George said. “This is your son’s life we’re discussing, and I’m not going to let you press me. I want you to understand the drift of our thinking. Captain Trips was a shifting-antigen flu, we think now. Now, every kind of flu—the old flu—had a different antigen; that’s why it kept coming back every two or three years or so in spite of flu vaccinations. There would be an outbreak of A-type flu, Hong Kong flu that was, and you’d get a vaccination for it, and then two years later a B-type strain would come along and you’d get sick unless you got a different vaccination.”
   “But you’d get well again,” Dan broke in, “because eventually your body would produce its own antibodies. Your body changed to cope with the flu. With Captain Trips, the flu itself changed every time your body came to a defense posture. In that way it was more similar to the AIDS virus than to the common sorts of flu our bodies have become used to. And as with AIDS, it just went on shifting from form to form until the body was worn out. The result, inevitably, was death.”
   “Then why didn’t we get it?” Stu asked.
   George said: “We don’t know. I don’t think we’re ever going to know. The only thing we can be sure about is that the immunes didn’t get sick and then throw the sickness off; they never got sick at all. Which brings us to Peter again. Dan?”
   “Yes. The key to Captain Trips is that people seemed to get almost better, but never completely better. Now this baby, Peter, got sick forty-eight hours after he was born. There was no doubt at all that it was Captain Trips—the symptoms were classic. But those discolorations under the line of the jaw, which both George and I had come to associate with the fourth and terminal stage of superflu—they never came. On the other hand, his periods of remission have been getting longer and longer.”
   “I don’t understand,” Fran said, bewildered. “What—”
   “Every time the flu shifts, Peter is shifting right back at it,” George said. “There’s still the technical possibility that he might relapse, but he has never entered the final, critical phase. He seems to be wearing it out.”
   There was a moment of total silence.
   Dan said, “You’ve passed on half an immunity to your child, Fran. He got it, but we think now he’s got the ability to lick it. We theorize that Mrs. Wentworth’s twins had the same chance, but with the odds stacked much more radically against them—and I still think that they may not have died of the superflu, but of complications arising from the superflu. That’s a very small distinction, I know, but it may be crucial.”
   “And the other women who got pregnant by men who weren’t immune?” Stu asked.
   “We think they’ll have to watch their babies go through the same painful struggle,” George said, “and some of the children may die—it was touch and go with Peter for a while, and may be again from all we know now. But very shortly we’re going to reach the point where all the fetuses, in the Free Zone—in the world —are the product of two immune parents. And while it wouldn’t be fair to pre-guess, I’d be willing to lay money that when that happens, it’s going to be our ballgame. In the meantime, we’re going to be watching Peter very closely.”
   “And we won’t be watching him alone, if that’s any added consolation,” Dan added. “In a very real sense, Peter belongs to the entire Free Zone right now.”
   Fran whispered, “I only want him to live because he’s mine and I love him.” She, looked at Stu. “And he’s my link with the old world. He looks more like Jess than me, and I’m glad. That seems right. Do you understand, love?”
   Stu nodded, and a strange thought occurred to him—how much he would like to sit down with Hap and Norm Bruett and Vic Palfrey and have a beer with them and watch Vic make one of his shitty-smelling home-rolled cigarettes, and tell them how all of this had come out. They had always called him Silent Stu; ole Stu, they said, wouldn’t say “shit” if he had a mouthful. But he would talk their ears off their heads. He would talk all night and all day. He grasped Fran’s hand blindly, feeling the sting of tears.
   “We’ve got rounds to make,” George said, getting up, “but we’ll be monitoring Peter closely, Fran. You’ll know for sure when we know for sure.”
   “When could I nurse him? If… If he doesn’t… ?”
   “A week,” Dan said.
   “But that’s so long!”
   “It’s going to be long for all of us. We’ve got sixty-one pregnant women in the Zone, and nine of them conceived before the superflu. It’s going to be especially long for them. Stu? It was good meeting you.” Dan held out his hand and Stu shook it. He left quickly, a man with a necessary job to do and anxious to do it.
   George shook Stu’s hand and said, “I’ll see you by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, hum? Just tell Laurie when would be the most convenient time for you.”
   “What for?”
   “The leg,” George said. “It’s bad, isn’t it?”
   “Not too bad.”
   “Stu?” Frannie said, sitting up. “What’s wrong with your leg?”
   “Broken, badly set, overtaxed,” George said. “Nasty. But it can be fixed.”
   “Well…” Stu said.
   “Well, nothing! Let me see it, Stuart!” The I-want line was back.
   “Later,” Stu said.
   George got up. “See Laurie, all right?”
   “He will,” Frannie said.
   Stu grinned. “I will. Boss lady says so.”
   “It’s very good to have you back,” George said. A thousand questions seemed to stop just behind his lips. He shook his head slightly and then left, closing the door firmly behind him.
   “Let me see you walk,” Frannie said. The I-want line still creased her brow.
   “Hey, Frannie—”
   “Come on, let me see you walk.”
   He walked for her. It was a little like watching a sailor make his way across a pitching foredeck. When he turned back to her, she was crying.
   “Oh, Frannie, don’t do that, honey.”
   “I have to,” she said, and put her hands over her face.
   He sat beside her and took her hands away. “No. No, you don’t.”
   She looked at him nakedly, her tears still flowing. “So many people dead… Harold, Nick, Susan… and what about Larry? What about Glen and Ralph?”
   “I don’t know.”
   “And what’s Lucy going to say? She’ll be here in an hour. She comes every day, and she’s four months pregnant herself. Stu, when she asks you…”
   “They died over there,” Stu said, speaking more to himself than to her. “That’s what I think. What I know, in my heart.”
   “Don’t say it that way,” Fran begged. “Not when Lucy gets here. It will break her heart if you do.”
   “I think they were the sacrifice. God always asks for a sacrifice. His hands are bloody with it. Why? I can’t say. I’m not a very smart man. P’raps we brought it on ourselves. All I know for sure is that the bomb went off over there instead of over here and we’re safe for a while. For a little while.”
   “Is Flagg gone? Really gone?”
   “I don’t know. I think… we’ll have to stand a watch for him. And in time, someone will have to find the place where they made the germs like Captain Trips and fill that place up with dirt and seed the ground with salt and then pray over it. Pray for all of us.”
   Much later that evening, not long before midnight, Stu pushed her down the silent hospital corridor in a wheelchair. Laurie Constable walked with them, and Fran had seen to it that Stu had made his appointment.
   “You look like you’re the one that should be in that wheelchair, Stu Redman,” Laurie said.
   “Right now it doesn’t bother me at all,” Stu said.
   They came to a large glass window that looked in on a room done in blues and pinks. A large mobile hung from the ceiling. Only one crib was occupied, in the front row.
   Stu stared in, fascinated.
   GOLDSMITH-REDMAN, PETER, the card at the front of the crib read. BOY. B.W. 6 LB 9 OZ. M. FRANCES GOLDSMITH, RM. 209 F. JESSE RIDER (D.)
   Peter was crying.
   His small hands were balled into fists. His face was red. There was an amazing swatch of dark black hair on his head. His eyes were blue and they seemed to look directly into Stu’s eyes, as if accusing him of being the author of all his misery.
   His forehead was creased with a deep vertical slash… an I-want line.
   Frannie was crying again.
   “Frannie, what’s wrong?”
   “All those empty cribs,” she said, and her voice became a sob. “That’s what’s wrong. He’s all alone in there. No wonder he’s crying, Stu, he’s all alone. All those empty cribs, my God—”
   “He won’t be alone for very long,” Stu said, and put an arm around her shoulders. “And he looks to me as if he’s going to bear up just fine. Don’t you think so, Laurie?”
   But Laurie had left the two of them alone in front of the nursery window.
   Wincing at the pain in his leg, Stu knelt beside Frannie and hugged her clumsily, and they looked in at Peter in mutual wonder, as if the child were the first that had ever been gotten upon the earth. After a bit Peter fell asleep, small hands clenched together on his chest, and still they watched him… and wondered that he should be there at all.

Chapter 78

   Mayday


   They had finally put the winter behind them.

   It had been long, and to Stu, with his East Texas background, it had seemed fantastically hard. Two days after his return to Boulder, his right leg had been rebroken and reset and this time encased in a heavy plaster cast that had not come off until early April. By then the cast had begun to look like some incredibly complex roadmap; it seemed that everyone in the Zone had autographed it, although that was a patent impossibility. The pilgrims had begun to trickle in again by the first of March, and by the day that had been the cut-off for income tax returns in the old world, the Free Zone was nearly eleven thousand strong, according to Sandy DuChiens, who now headed a Census Bureau of a dozen persons, a bureau that had its own computer terminal at the First Bank of Boulder.
   Now he and Fran stood with Lucy Swann in the picnic area halfway up Flagstaff Mountain and watched the Mayday Chase. All the Zone’s children appeared to be involved (and not a few of the adults). The original maybasket, bedecked with crepe ribbons and filled with fruit and toys, had been hung on Tom Cullen. It had been Fran’s idea.
   Tom had caught Bill Gehringer (despite Billy’s self-conscious disclaimer that he was too old for such kid games, he had joined with a will), and together they had caught the Upshaw boy—or was it Upson? Stu had trouble keeping them all straight—and the three of them had tracked down Leo Rockway hiding behind Brentner Rock. Tom himself had put the tag on Leo.
   The chase ranged back and forth over West Boulder, gangs of kids and adolescents surging up and down the streets that were still mostly empty, Tom bellowing and carrying his basket. And at last it led back up here, where the sun was hot and the wind blew warm. The band of tagged children was some two hundred strong, and they were still in the process of tracking down the last, half dozen or so that were still “out.” In the process they were scaring up dozens of deer that wanted no part of the game.
   Two miles farther up, at Sunrise Amphitheater, a huge picnic lunch had been spread where Harold Lauder had once waited for just the right moment to speak into his walkie-talkie. At noon, two or three thousand people would sit down together and look east toward Denver and eat venison and deviled eggs and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, and fresh pie for dessert. It might be the last mass gathering the Zone would ever have, unless they all went down to Denver and got together in the stadium where the Broncos had once played football. Now, on Mayday, the trickle of early spring had swelled to a flood of immigrants. Since April 15 another eight thousand had come in, and they were now nineteen thousand or so—temporarily at least, Sandy’s Census Bureau could not keep up. A day when only five hundred came in was a rare day.
   In the playpen which Stu had brought up and covered with a blanket, Peter began to cry lustily. Fran moved toward him, but Lucy, mountainous and eight months pregnant, was there first.
   “I warn you,” Fran said, “it’s his diapers. I can tell just by the way he sounds.”
   “Looking at a little poo isn’t going to cross my eyes.” Lucy lifted an indignantly crying Peter from the playpen and shook him gently back and forth in the sunlight. “Hi, baby. What you doing? Not too much?”
   Peter blatted.
   Lucy set him down on another blanket they had brought up for a changing table. Peter began to crawl away, still blatting. Lucy turned him over and began to unsnap his blue corduroy pants. Peter’s legs waved in the air.
   “Why don’t you two go for a walk?” Lucy said. She smiled at Fran, but Stu thought the smile was sad.
   “Why don’t we do just that?” Fran agreed, and took Stu’s arm.
   Stu allowed himself to be walked away. They crossed the road and entered a mild green pasture that climbed upward at a steep angle under the moving white clouds and bright blue sky.
   “What was that about?” Stu asked.
   “Pardon me?” But Fran looked just a trifle too innocent.
   “That look.”
   “What look?”
   “I know a look when I see one,” Stu said. “I may not know what it means, but I know it when I see it.”
   “Sit down with me, Stu.”
   “Like that, is it?”
   They sat down and looked east where the land fell away in a series of swoops to flatlands that faded into a blue haze. Nebraska was out there in that haze somewhere.
   “It’s serious. And I don’t know how to talk to you about it, Stuart.”
   “Well, you just go on the best you can,” he said, and took her hand.
   Instead of speaking, Fran’s face began to work. A tear spilled down her cheek and her mouth drew down, trembling.
   “Fran—”
   “No, I won’t cry!” she said angrily, and then there were more tears, and she cried hard in spite of herself. Bewildered, Stu put an arm around her and waited.
   When the worst seemed to be over, he said: “Now tell me. What’s this about?”
   “I’m homesick, Stu. I want to go back to Maine.”
   Behind them, the children whooped and yelled. Stu looked at her, utterly flabbergasted. Then he grinned a little uncertainly. “That’s it? I thought you must have decided to divorce me, at the very least. Not that we’ve ever actually had the benefit of the clergy, as they say.”
   “I won’t go anyplace without you,” she said. She had taken a Kleenex from her breast pocket and was wiping her eyes with it. “Don’t you know that?”
   “I guess I do.”
   “But I want to go back to Maine. I dream about it. Don’t you ever dream about East Texas, Stu? Arnette?”
   “No,” he said truthfully. “I could live just as long and die just as happy if I never saw Arnette again. Did you want to go to Ogunquit, Frannie?”
   “Eventually, maybe. But not right away. I’d want to go to western Maine, what they called the Lakes Region. You were almost there when Harold and I met you in New Hampshire. There are some beautiful places, Stu. Bridgton… Sweden… Castle Rock. The lakes would be jumping with fish, I’d imagine. In time, we might settle on the coast, I suppose. But I couldn’t face that the first year. Too many memories. It would be too big at first. The sea would be too big.” She looked down at her nervously plucking hands. “If you want to stay here… help them get it going… I’ll understand. The mountains are beautiful, too, but… it just doesn’t seem like home.”
   He looked east and discovered he could at last name something he had felt stirring around in himself since the snow had begun to melt: an urge to move on. There were too many people here; they weren’t exactly stepping all over each other, at least not yet, but they were beginning to make him feel nervous. There were Zoners (and so they had begun to call themselves) who could cope with that sort of thing, who actually seemed to relish it. Jack Jackson, who headed the new Free Zone Committee (now expanded to nine members), was one. Brad Kitchner was another—Brad had a hundred projects going, and all the warm bodies he could use to help with each of them. It had been his idea to get one of the Denver TV stations going. It showed old movies every night from 6 to 1 A.M., with a ten-minute news broadcast at nine o’clock.
   And the man who had taken over the marshaling chore in Stu’s absence, Hugh Petrella, was not the sort of man Stu much cottoned to. The very fact that Petrella had campaigned for the job made Stu feel uneasy. He was a hard, puritanical fellow with a face that looked as if it had been carved by licks of a hatchet. He had seventeen deputies and was pushing for more at each Free Zone Committee meeting—if Glen had been here, Stu thought he would have said that the endless American struggle between the law and freedom of the individual had begun again. Petrella was not a bad man, but he was a hard man… and Stu supposed that with Hugh’s sure belief that the law was the final answer to every problem, he made a better marshal than Stu himself ever would have been.
   “I know you’ve been offered a spot on the committee,” Fran was saying hesitantly.
   “I got the feeling that was an honorary thing, didn’t you?”
   Fran looked relieved. “Well…”
   “I got the idea they’d be just as happy if I turned it down. I’m the last holdover from the old committee. And we were a crisis committee. Now there’s no crisis. What about Peter, Frannie?”
   “I think he’ll be old enough to travel by June,” she said. “And I’d like to wait until Lucy has her baby.”
   There had been eighteen births in the Zone since Peter had come into the world on January 4. Four had died; the rest were just fine. The babies born of the plague-immune parents would begin to arrive very soon, and it was entirely possible that Lucy’s would be the first. She was due on June 14.
   “What would you think about leaving on July first?” he asked.
   Fran’s face lit up. “You will! You want to?”
   “Sure.”
   “You’re not just saying that to please me?”
   “No,” he said. “Other people will be leaving too. Not many, not for a while. But some.”
   She flung her arms around his neck and hugged him. “Maybe it will just be a vacation,” she said. “Or maybe… maybe we’ll really like it.” She looked at him timidly. “Maybe we’ll want to stay.”
   He nodded. “Maybe so.” But he wondered if either of them would be content to stay in one place for any run of years.
   He looked over at Lucy and Peter. Lucy was sitting on the blanket and bouncing Peter up and down. He was giggling and trying to catch Lucy’s nose.
   “Have you thought that he might get sick? And you. What if you catch pregnant again?”
   She smiled. “There are books. We can both read them. We can’t live our lives afraid, can we?”
   “No, I suppose not.”
   “Books and good drugs. We can learn to use them, and as for the drugs that have gone over… we can learn to make them again. When it comes to getting sick and dying…” She looked back toward the large meadow where the last of the children were walking toward the picnic area, sweaty and winded. “That’s going to happen here, too. Remember Rich Moffat?” He nodded. “And Shirley Hammett?”
   “Yes.” Shirley had died of a stroke in February.
   Frannie took his hands. Her eyes were bright and shining with determination. “I say we take our chances and live our lives the way we want.”
   “All right. That sounds good to me. That sounds right.”
   “I love you, East Texas.”
   “That goes back to you, ma’am.”
   Peter had begun to cry again.
   “Let’s go see what’s wrong with the emperor,” she said, getting up and brushing grass from her slacks.
   “He tried to crawl and bumped his nose,” Lucy said, handing Peter to Fran. “Poor baby.”
   “Poor baby,” Fran agreed, and put Peter on her shoulder. He laid his head familiarly against her neck, looked at Stu, and smiled. Stu smiled back.
   “Peek, baby,” he said, and Peter laughed.
   Lucy looked from Fran to Stu and back to Fran again. “You’re going, aren’t you? You talked him into it.”
   “I guess she did,” Stu said. “We’ll stick around long enough to see which flavor you get, though.”
   “I’m glad,” Lucy said.
   From far off, a bell began to clang in strong musical notes which seemed to beat themselves into the day.
   “Lunch,” Lucy said, getting up. She patted her gigantic belly. “Hear that, junior? We’re going to eat. Ow, don’t kick, I’m going.”
   Stu and Fran got up, too. “Here, you take the boy,” Fran said.
   Peter had gone to sleep. The three of them walked up the hill to Sunrise Amphitheater together.
   Dusk, of a Summer Evening
   They sat on the porch as the sun went down and watched Peter as he crawled enthusiastically through the dust of the yard. Stu was in a chair with a caned seat; the caning had been belled downward by years of use. Sitting at his left was Fran, in the rocker. In the yard, to Peter’s left, the doughnut-shaped shadow of the tire swing printed its depthless image on the ground in the day’s kind last light.
   “She lived here a long time, didn’t she?” Fran asked softly.
   “Long and long,” Stu agreed, and pointed at Peter. “He’s gettin all dirty.”
   “There’s water. She had a hand-pump. All it takes is priming. All the conveniences, Stuart.”
   He nodded and said no more. He lit his pipe, taking long puffs. Peter turned around to make sure they were still there.
   “Hi, baby,” Stu said, and waved.
   Peter fell over. He got back up on his hands and knees and began to creep around in a large circle again. Standing at the end of the dirt road that cut through the wild corn was a small Winnebago camper with a winch attachment on the front. They were sticking to secondary roads, but the winch had still come in handy again and again.
   “Are you lonely?” Fran asked.
   “No. I may be, in time.”
   “Scared about the baby?” She patted her stomach, which was still perfectly flat.
   “Nope.”
   “It’s going to put a scab on Pete’s nose.”
   “It’ll fall off. And Lucy had twins.” He smiled at the sky. “Can you imagine it?”
   “I saw them. Seeing’s believing, they say. When do you think we’ll be in Maine, Stu?”
   He shrugged. “Near the end of July. In plenty of time to start getting ready for winter, anyhow. You worried?”
   “Nope,” she said, mocking him. She stood up. “Look at him, he’s getting filthy.”
   “Told you.”
   He watched her go down the porch steps and gather up the baby. He sat there, where Mother Abagail had sat often and long, and thought about the life that was ahead of them. He thought it would be all right. In time they would have to go back to Boulder, if only so their children could meet others their own age and court and marry and make more children. Or perhaps part of Boulder would come to them. There had been people who had questioned their plans closely, almost cross-examining them… but the look in their eyes had been one of longing rather than contempt or anger. Stu and Fran weren’t the only ones with a touch of the wanderlust, apparently. Harry Dunbarton, the former spectacles salesman, had talked about Minnesota. And Mark Zellman had spoken of Hawaii, of all places. Learning how to fly a plane and going to Hawaii.
   “Mark, you’d kill yourself!” Fran had scolded indignantly.
   Mark had only smiled slyly and said, “Look who’s talkin, Frannie.”
   And Stan Nogotny had begun to talk thoughtfully about going south, perhaps stopping at Acapulco for a few years, then maybe going on down to Peru. “I tell you what, Stu,” he said. “All these people make me nervous as a one-legged man in an ass-kickin contest. I don’t know one person in a dozen anymore. People lock their houses at night… don’t look at me that way, it’s a fact. Listenin to me, you’d never think I lived in Miami, which I did for sixteen years, and locked the house every night. But damn! That was one habit I liked losing. Anyway, it’s just getting too crowded. I think about Acapulco a lot. Now if I could just convince Janey—”
   It wouldn’t be such a bad thing, Stu thought, watching Fran pump water, if the Free Zone did fall apart. Glen Bateman would think so, he was quite sure. Its purpose has been served, Glen would say. Best to disband before—
   Before what?
   Well, at the last Free Zone Committee meeting before he and Fran had left, Hugh Petrella had asked for and had been given the authorization to arm his deputies. It had been the cause in Boulder during his and Fran’s last few weeks there—everyone had taken a side. In early June a drunk had man-handled one of the deputies and had thrown him through the plate-glass window of The Broken Drum, a bar on Pearl Street. The deputy had needed over thirty stitches and a blood transfusion. Petrella had argued it never would have happened if his man had had a Police Special to point at the drunk. And so the controversy raged. There were plenty of people (and Stu was among them, although he kept his opinions mostly to himself) who believed that, if the deputy had had a gun, the incident might have ended with a dead drunk instead of a wounded deputy.
   What happens after you give guns to the deputies? he asked himself. What’s the logical progression? And it seemed that it was the scholarly, slightly dry voice of Glen Bateman that spoke in answer. You give them bigger guns. And police cars. And when you discover a Free Zone community down in Chile or maybe up in Canada, you make Hugh Petrella the Minister of Defense just in case, and maybe you start sending out search-parties, because after all—
   That stuff is lying around, just waiting to be picked up.
   “Let’s put him to bed,” Fran said, coming up the steps.
   “Okay.”
   “Why are you sitting around in such a blue study, anyhow?”
   “Was I?”
   “You certainly were.”
   He used his fingers to push the corners of his mouth up in a smile. “Better?”
   “Much. Help me put him in.”
   “My pleasure.”
   As he followed her inside Mother Abagail’s house he thought it would be better, much better, if they did break down and spread. Postpone organization as long as possible. It was organization that always seemed to cause the problem. When the cells began to clump together and grow dark. You didn’t have to give the cops guns until the cops couldn’t remember the names… the faces…
   Fran lit a kerosene lamp and it made a soft yellow glow. Peter looked up at them quietly, already sleepy. He had played hard. Fran slipped him into a nightshirt.
   All any of us can buy is time, Stu thought. Peter’s lifetime, his children’s lifetimes, maybe the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren. Until the year 2100, maybe, surely no longer than that. Maybe not that long. Time enough for poor old Mother Earth to recycle herself a little. A season of rest.
   “What?” she asked, and he realized he had murmured it aloud.
   “A season of rest,” he repeated.
   “What does that mean?”
   “Everything,” he said, and took her hand.
   Looking down at Peter he thought: Maybe if we tell him what happened, he’ll tell his own children. Warn them. Dear children, the toys are death—they’re flashburns and radiation sickness and black, choking plague. These toys are dangerous; the devil in men’s brains guided the hands of God when they were made. Don’t play with these toys, dear children, please, not ever. Not ever again. Please… please learn the lesson. Let this empty world be your copybook.
   “Frannie,” he said, and turned her around so he could look into her eyes.
   “What, Stuart?”
   “Do you think… do you think people ever learn anything?”
   She opened her mouth to speak, hesitated, fell silent. The kerosene lamp flickered. Her eyes seemed very blue.
   “I don’t know,” she said at last. She seemed unpleased with her answer; she struggled to say something more; to illuminate her first response; and could only say it again:
   I don’t know.

THE CIRCLE CLOSES

       We need help, the Poet reckoned.

        Edward Dorn



   He woke at dawn.
   He had his boots on.
   He sat up and looked around himself. He was on a beach as white as bone. Above him, a ceramic sky of cloudless blue stood tall and far. Beyond him, a turquoise sea broke far out upon a reef and then came in gently, surging up and between strange boats that were—
   (canoes outrigger canoes)
   He knew that… but how?
   He got to his feet and almost fell. He was shaky. Bad off. Felt hung over.
   He turned around. Green jungle seemed to leap out at his eyes, a dark forested tangle of vines and broad leaves and lush, blooming flowers that were
   (as pink as a chorus girl’s nipple)
   He was bewildered again.
   What was a chorus girl?
   For that matter, what was a nipple?
   A macaw screamed at the sight of him, flew away blindly, crashed into the thick bole of an old banyan tree, and fell dead at the foot of it with its legs sticking up.
   (sat him on the table with his legs stickin up)
   A mongoose looked at his flushed, beard-scruffy face and died of a brain embolism.
   (in come sis with a spoon and a glass)
   A beetle that had been trundling busily up the trunk of a nipa palm turned black and shriveled to a husk with tiny blue bolts of electricity frizzing for a moment between its antennae.
   (and starts dippin gravy from its yass-yass-yass.)
   Who am I?
   He didn’t know.
   Where am I?
   What did it matter?
   He began to walk—stagger—toward the verge of the jungle. He was light-headed with hunger. The sound of the surf boomed hollowly in his ears like the beat of crazy blood. His mind was as empty as the mind of a newborn child.
   He was halfway to the edge of the deep green when it parted and three men came out. Then four. Then there were half a dozen.
   They were brown, smooth-skinned folk.
   They stared at him.
   He stared back.
   Things began to come.
   The six men became eight. The eight became a dozen. They all held spears. They began to raise them threateningly. The man with the beard-stubble on his face looked at them. He was wearing jeans and old sprung cowboy boots; nothing else. His upper body was as white as the belly of a carp and dreadfully wasted.
   The spears came all the way up. Then one of the brown men—the leader—choked out one word over and over again, a word that sounded like Yun-nah!
   Yep, things were coming.
   Righty-O.
   His name, for one thing.
   He smiled.
   That smile was like a red sun breaking through a black cloud. It exposed bright white teeth and amazing blazing eyes. He turned his lineless palms out to face them in the universal gesture of peace.
   Before the force of that grin they were lost. The spears fell to the sand; one of them struck point-down and hung there at an angle, quivering.
   “Do you speak English?”
   They only looked.
   “Habla español? ”
   No they didn’t. They definitely did not habla fucking español.
   What did that mean?
   Where was he?
   Well, it would come in time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor Akron, Ohio, for that matter. And the place didn’t matter.
   The place where you made your stand never mattered. Only that you were there… and still on your feet.
   “Parlez-vous français? ”
   No answer. They stared at him, fascinated.
   He tried them in German, and then bellowed laughter at their stupid, sheepy faces. One of them began to sob helplessly, like a child.
   They are simple folk. Primitive; simple; unlettered. But I can use them. Yes, I can use them perfectly well.
   He advanced toward them, lineless palms still turned outward, still smiling. His eyes sparkled with warm and lunatic joy.
   “My name is Russell Faraday,” he said in a slow, clear voice. “I have a mission.”
   They stared at him, all eyes, all dismay, all fascination.
   “I have come to help you.”
   They began to drop on their knees and bow their heads before him, and as his dark, dark shadow fell among them, his grin widened.
   “I’ve come to teach you how to be civilized!”
   “Yun-nah! ” the chief sobbed in joy and terror. And as he kissed Russell Faraday’s feet, the dark man began to laugh. He laughed and laughed and laughed.
   Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long.
   And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.
   February 1975
   December 1988

Сноски
Note1
   GEORGE WASH BRIDGE TRIBOROUGH BRIDGE BROOKLYN BRIDGE LINCOLN AND HOLLAND TUNNELS PLUS LIMITED ACCESS HIGHWAYS IN THE OUTER BOROUGHS
Note2
   a spasm of coughing
Note3
   a spasm of sneezes
Note4
   a spasm of coughs and sneezes
Note5
   he lectured himself
Note6
   But I’ve written it down myself, just in case he forgets. Who knows? The Shadow do, hee-hee.
Note7
   A note here: We are all fantastically sick of boiled water, which tastes flat and TOTALLY DEVOID of oxygen, but both Mark and Glen say the factories, etc., have not been shut down nearly long enough for the streams & rivers to have purified themselves, especially in the industrial Northeast & what they call the Rust Belt, so we all boil to be safe. We all keep hoping we’ll find a large supply of bottled mineral water sooner or later, and should have already—so Harold says—but a lot of it seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Stu thinks that a lot of people must have decided it was the tapwater that was making them sick and used up a lot of mineral water before they died.
Note8
   General laughter.

The Waste Lands

Stephen King

The Dark Tower III

       This third volume of the tale is gratefully dedicated to my son OWEN PHILIP KING: Khef, Ka, and Ka-tet.


 
   THE ROSE
   
IT BEGAN TO OPEN before his eyes. It disclosed a dark scarlet furnace, petal upon secret petal, each blazing with its own secret fury. Jake had never seen anything so beautiful, so intensely and utterly alive. Now, as he stretched one grime-streaked hand out toward this won­der, the voices began to sing his own name... and a dreadful, deadly fear began to steal in toward the center of his heart. It was as cold as black ice and as heavy as stone.
   There was something wrong here. He could feel it pulsing in dis­cord, like a deep and ugly scratch across some formerly priceless work of art... Then the heart of the rose opened before him, exposing a bright yellow dazzle of light... It was a sun: a vast forge blazing at the center of this rose growing in the alien grass.
   The fear returned, only now it had become outright terror. It's right, he thought incoherently, everything here is right, but it could go wrong...
 
   ILLUSTRATED BY NED DAMERON
 
   CONTENTS
 
   ARGUMENT
   BOOK ONE  JAKE: FEAR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST
   • I • BEAR AND BONE
   • II • KEY AND ROSE
   • III • DOOR AND DEMON
   BOOK TWO  LUD: A HEAP OF BROKEN IMAGES
   • IV • TOWN AND KA-TET
   • V • BRIDGE AND CITY
   • VI • RIDDLE AND WASTE LANDS
   AUTHOR'S NOTE

ARGUMENT
   
The Waste Lands is the third volume of a longer tale inspired by and to some degree dependent upon Robert Browning's narrative poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came."
   The first volume, The Gunslinger, tells how Roland, the last gun-slinger in a world which has "moved on," pursues and finally catches the man in black, a sorcerer named Walter who falsely claimed the friendship of Roland's father in the days when the unity of Mid-World still held. Catching this half-human spell-caster is not Roland's ultimate goal but only another landmark along the road to the powerful and mysterious Dark Tower, which stands at the nexus of time.
   Who, exactly, is Roland? What was his world like before it moved on? What is the Tower and why does he pursue it? We have only frag­mentary answers. Roland is clearly a land of knight, one of those charged with holding (or possibly redeeming) a world Roland remembers as being "filled with love and light." Just how closely Roland's memory resembles the way that world actually was is very much open to question, however.
   We do know that he was forced to an early trial of manhood after discovering that his mother had become the mistress of Marten, a much greater sorcerer than Walter; we know that Marten orchestrated Roland's discovery of his mother's affair, expecting Roland to fail his test of manhood and be "sent West" into the wastes; we know that Roland laid Marten's plans at nines by passing the test.
   We also know that the gunslinger's world is related to our own in some strange but fundamental way, and that passage between the worlds is sometimes possible.
   At a way station on a long-deserted coach-road running through the desert, Roland meets a boy named Jake who died in our world, a boy who was, in fact, pushed from a mid-Manhattan street corner and into the path of an oncoming car. Jake Chambers died with the man in black—Walter—peering down at him, and awoke in Roland's world.
   Before they reach the man in black, Jake dies again... this time because the gunslinger, faced with the second most agonizing choice of his life, elects to sacrifice this symbolic son. Given a choice between the Tower and the child, Roland chooses the Tower. Jake's last words to the gunslinger before plunging into the abyss are: "Go, then—there are other worlds than these."
   The final confrontation between Roland and Walter occurs in a dusty Golgotha of decaying bones. The man in black tells Roland's future with a deck of Tarot cards. Three very strange cards—The Prisoner, The Lady of the Shadows, and Death ("but not for you, gunslinger")—are called especially to Roland's attention.
   The second volume, The Drawing of the Three, begins on the edge of the Western Sea not long after Roland's confrontation with Walter has ended. An exhausted gunslinger awakes in the middle of the night to discover that the incoming tide has brought a horde of crawling, carnivo­rous creatures—"lobstrosities"—with it. Before he can escape their lim­ited range, Roland has been seriously wounded by these creatures, losing the first two fingers of his right hand to them. He is also poisoned by the venom of the lobstrosities, and as the gunslinger resumes his journey north along the edge of the Western Sea, he is sickening... perhaps dying.
   He encounters three doors standing freely upon the beach. Each door opens—for Roland and Roland alone—upon our world; upon the city where Jake lived, in fact. Roland visits New York at three points along our time continuum, both in an effort to save his own life and to draw the three who must accompany him on his road to the Tower.
   Eddie Dean is The Prisoner, a heroin addict from the New York of the late 1980s. Roland steps through the door on the beach of his world and into Eddie Dean's mind as Eddie, serving a man named Enrico Balazar as a cocaine mule, lands at JFK airport. In the course of their harrowing adventures together, Roland is able to obtain a limited quantity of penicillin and to bring Eddie Dean back to his own world. Eddie, a junkie who discovers he has been kidnapped to a world where there is no junk (or Popeye's fried chicken, for that matter), is less than overjoyed to be there.
   The second door leads Roland to The Lady of the Shadows—actually two women in one body. This time Roland finds himself in the New York of the early 1960s and face to face with a young wheelchair-bound civil-rights activist named Odetta Holmes. The woman hidden inside Odetta is the crafty and hate-filled Detta Walker. When this double woman is pulled into Roland's world, the results are volatile for Eddie and the rapidly sickening gunslinger. Odetta believes that what's happening to her is either a dream or a delusion; Detta, a much more brutally direct intellect, simply dedicates herself to the task of killing Roland and Eddie whom she sees as torturing white devils.
   Jack Mort, a serial killer hiding behind the third door (the New York of the mid-1970s), is Death. Mort has twice caused great changes in the life of Odetta Holmes/Detta Walker, although neither of them knows it. Mort, whose modus operandi is to either push his victims or drop some­thing on them from above, has done both to Odetta during the course of his mad (but oh so careful) career. When Odetta was a child, he dropped a brick on her head, sending the little girl into a coma and also occasioning the birth of Detta Walker, Odetta's hidden sister. Years later, in 1959, Mort encounters Odetta again and pushes her into the path of an oncoming subway train in Greenwich Village . Odetta survives Mort again, but at a price: the oncoming train severed both legs at the knee. Only the presence of a heroic young doctor (and, perhaps, the ugly but indomitable spirit of Detta Walker) saves her life … or so it would seem. To Roland's eye, these interrelationships suggest a power greater than mere coincidence; he believes the titanic forces, which surround the Dark Tower, have begun to gather once again.
   Roland learns that Mort may stand at the heart of another mystery as well, one which is also a potentially mind-destroying paradox. For the victim Mort is stalking at the time the gunslinger steps into his life is none other than Jake, the boy Roland met at the way station and lost under the mountains. Roland has never had any cause to doubt Jake's story of how he died in our world, or any cause to question who Jake's murderer was—Walter, of course. Jake saw him dressed as a priest as the crowd gathered around the spot where he lay dying, and Roland has never doubted the description.
   Nor does he doubt it now; Walter was there, oh yes, no doubt about that. But suppose it was Jack Mort, not Walter, who pushed Jake into the path of the oncoming Cadillac? Is such a thing possible? Roland can't say, not for sure, but if that is the case, where is Jake now? Dead? Alive?
   Caught somewhere in time? And if Jake Chambers is still alive and well in his own world of Manhattan in the mid-1970s, how is it that Roland still remembers him?
   Despite this confusing and possibly dangerous development, the test of the doors—and the drawing of the three—ends in success for Roland. Eddie Dean accepts his place in Roland's world because he has fallen in love with The Lady of the Shadows. Detta Walker and Odetta Holmes, the other two of Roland's three, are driven together into one personality combining elements of both Detta and Odetta when the gunslinger is finally able to force the two personalities to acknowledge each other. This hybrid is able to accept and return Eddie's love. Odetta Susannah Holmes and Detta Susannah Walker thus become a new woman, a third woman: Susannah Dean.
   Jack Mort dies beneath the wheels of the same subway—that fabled A-train—which took Odetta's legs fifteen or sixteen years before. No great loss there.
   And for the first time in untold years, Roland of Gilead is no longer alone in his quest for the Dark Tower . Cuthbert and Alain, his lost companions of yore, have been replaced by Eddie and Susannah... but the gunslinger has a way of being bad medicine for his friends. Very bad medicine, indeed.
   The Waste Lands takes up the story of these three pilgrims on the face of Mid-World some months after the confrontation by the final door on the beach. They have moved some fair way inland. The period of rest is ending, and a period of learning has begun. Susannah is learning to shoot... Eddie is learning to carve... and the gunslinger is learning how it feels to lose one's mind, a piece at a time.
   (One further note: My New York readers will know that I have taken certain geographical liberties with the city. For these I hope I may be forgiven.)
 

       A heap of broken images, where the sun heats.
       And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
       And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
       There is shadow under this red rock,
       (Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
       And I will show you something different from either
       Your shadow in the morning striding behind you
       Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
       I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

        — T. S. ELIOT "The Waste Land "

 

       If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk
       Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents
       Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents
       In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to balk
       All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk
       Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents.

        — ROBERT BROWNING "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"

 

       "What river is it?" enquired Millicent idly.
       "It's only a stream. Well, perhaps a little more than that.
       It's called the Waste."
       "Is it really?"
       "Yes," said Winifred, "it is."

        — ROBERT AICKMAN "Hand in Glove"

 BOOK ONE

JAKE: FEAR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST

• I • BEAR AND BONE
   
1
   
IT WAS HER THIRD time with live ammunition... and her first time on the draw from the holster Roland had rigged for her.
   They had plenty of live rounds; Roland had brought back better than three hundred from the world where Eddie and Susannah Dean had lived their lives up until the time of their drawing. But having ammu­nition in plenty did not mean it could be wasted; quite the contrary, in fact. The gods frowned upon wastrels. Roland had been raised, first by his father and then by Cort, his greatest teacher, to believe this, and so he still believed. Those gods might not punish at once, but sooner or later the penance would have to be paid... and the longer the wait, the greater the weight.
   At first there had been no need for live ammunition, anyway. Roland had been shooting for more years than the beautiful brown-skinned woman in the wheelchair would believe. He had corrected her at first simply by watching her aim and dry-fire at the targets he had set up. She learned fast. Both she and Eddie learned fast.
   As he had suspected, both were born gunslingers.
   Today Roland and Susannah had come to a clearing less than a mile from the camp in the woods which had been home to them for almost two months now. The days had passed with their own sweet similarity. The gunslinger's body healed itself while Eddie and Susannah learned the things the gunslinger had to teach them: how to shoot, to hunt, to gut and clean what they had killed; how to first stretch, then tan and cure the hides of those kills; how to use as much as it was possible to use so that no part of the animal was wasted; how to find north by Old Star or south by Old Mother; how to listen to the forest in which they now found themselves, sixty miles or more northeast of the Western Sea. Today Eddie had stayed behind, and the gunslinger was not put out of countenance by this. The lessons which are remembered the longest, Roland knew, are always the ones that are self-taught.
   But what had always been the most important lesson was still most important: how to shoot and how to hit what you shot at every time. How to kill.
   The edges of this clearing had been formed by dark, sweet-smelling fir trees that curved around it in a ragged semicircle. To the south, the ground broke off and dropped three hundred feet in a series of crumbling shale ledges and fractured cliffs, like a giant's set of stairs. A clear stream ran out of the woods and across the center of the clearing, first bubbling through a deep channel in the spongy earth and friable stone, then pour­ing across the splintery rock floor which sloped down to the place where the land dropped away.
   The water descended the steps in a series of waterfalls and made any number of pretty, wavering rainbows. Beyond the edge of the drop-off was a magnificent deep valley, choked with more firs and a few great old elm trees which refused to be crowded out. These latter towered green and lush, trees which might have been old when the land from which Roland had come was yet young; he could see no sign that the valley had ever burned, although he supposed it must have drawn light­ning at some time or other. Nor would lightning have been the only danger. There had been people in this forest in some distant time; Roland had come across their leavings on several occasions over the past weeks. They were primitive artifacts, for the most part, but they included shards of pottery which could only have been cast in fire. And fire was evil stuff that delighted in escaping the hands which created it.
   Above this picturebook scene arched a blameless blue sky in which a few crows circled some miles off, crying in their old, rusty voices. They seemed restless, as if a storm were on the way, but Roland had sniffed the air and there was no rain in it.
   A boulder stood to the left of the stream. Roland had set up six chips of stone on top of it. Each one was heavily flecked with mica, and they glittered like lenses in the warm afternoon light.
   "Last chance," the gunslinger said. "If that holster's uncomfortable—even tin– slightest bit—tell me now. We didn't come here to waste ammunition."
   She cocked a sardonic eye at him, und for a moment he could see Detta Walker in there. It was like ha/y sunlight winking off a bar of steel. "What would you do if it was uncomfortable and I didn't tell you? If I missed all six of those itty bitty things? Whop me upside the head like that old teacher of yours used to do?"
   The gunslinger smiled. He had done more smiling these last five weeks than he had done in the five years which had come before them. "I can't do that, and you know it. We were children, for one thing— children who hadn't been through our rites of manhood yet. You may slap a child to correct him, or her, but—"
   "In my world, whoppin’ the kiddies is also frowned on by the better class of people," Susannah said dryly.
   Roland shrugged. It was hard for him to imagine that sort of world— did not the Great Book say "Spare not the birch so you spoil not the child"?—but he didn't believe Susannah was lying. "Your world has not moved on," he said. "Many things are different there. Did I not see for myself that it is so?"
   "I guess you did."
   "In any case, you and Eddie are not children. It would be wrong for me to treat you as if you were. And if tests were needed, you both passed them."
   Although he did not say so, he was thinking of how it had ended on the beach, when she had blown three of the lumbering lobstrosities to hell before they could peel him and Eddie to the bone. He saw her answering smile and thought she might be remembering the same thing.
   "So what you goan do if I shoot fo' shit?"
   "I'll look at you. I think that's all I'll need to do."
   She thought this over, then nodded. "Might be."
   She tested the gunbelt again. It was slung across her bosom almost like a shoulder-holster (an arrangement Roland thought of as a docker's clutch) and looked simple enough, but it had taken many weeks of trial and error—and a great deal of tailoring—to get it just right. The belt and the revolver which cocked its eroded sandalwood grip out of the ancient oiled holster had once been the gunslinger's; the holster had hung on his right hip. He had spent much of the last five weeks coming to realize it was never going to hang there again. Thanks to the lobstrosi­ties, he was strictly a lefthanded gun now.
   "So how is it?" he asked again.
   This time she laughed up at him. "Roland, this ole gunbelt's as com'fable as it's ever gonna be. Now do. you want me to shoot or are we just going to sit and listen to crowmusic from over yonder?"
   He felt tension worming sharp little fingers under his skin now, and he supposed Cort had felt much the same at times like this under his gruff, bluff exterior. I le wanted her to be good … needed her to be good. But to show how badly he wanted and needed—that could lead to disaster.
   "Tell me your lesson again, Susannah."
   She sighed in mock exasperation... but as she spoke her smile faded and her dark, beautiful face became solemn. And from her lips he heard the old catechism again, made new in her mouth. He had never expected to hear these words from a woman. How natural they sounded... yet how strange and dangerous, as well.
   " 'I do not aim with my hand; she who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.
   " 'I aim with my eye.
   " ‘I do not shoot with my hand; she who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.
   " 'I shoot with my mind.
   " 'I do not kill with my gun—' "
   She broke off and pointed at the mica-shiny stones on the boulder.
   "I'm not going to kill anything anyhow—they're just itty bitty rocks."
   Her expression—a little haughty, a little naughty—suggested that she expected Roland to be exasperated with her, perhaps even angry. Roland, however, had been where she was now; he had not forgotten that apprentice gunslingers were fractious and high-spirited, nervy and apt to bite exactly at the wrong moment... and he had discovered an unexpected capacity in himself. He could teach. More, he liked to teach, and he found himself wondering, from time to time, if that had been true of Cort, as well. He guessed that it had been.
   Now more crows began to call raucously, these from the forest behind them. Some part of Roland's mind registered the fact that the new cries were agitated rather than merely quarrelsome; these birds sounded as if they had been scared up and away from whatever they had been feeding on. He had more important things to think about than whatever it was that had scared a bunch of crows, however, so he simply filed the information away and refocused his concentration on Susannah. To do otherwise with a 'prentice was to ask for a second, less playful bite. And who would be to blame for that? Who but the teacher? For was he not training her to bite? Training both of them to bite? Wasn't that what a gunslinger was, when you stripped off the few stern lines of ritual and stilled the few iron grace-notes of catechism? Wasn't he (or she) only a human hawk, trained to bite on command?
   "No," he said. "They're not rocks."
   She raised her eyebrows a little and began to smile again. Now that she saw he wasn't going to explode at her as he sometimes did when she was slow or fractious (or at least not yet), her eyes again took on the mocking sun-on-steel glint he associated with Detta Walker. "They ain't?" The teasing in her voice was still good – nut u red, but he thought it would turn mean if he let it. She was tense, keyed up, her claws already halfway out of their sheaths.
   "No, they ain't," he said, returning her mockery. His own smile began to return, but it was hard and humorless. "Susannah, do you remember the honk mahfahs?"
   Her smile began to fade.
   "The honk mahfahs in Oxford Town ?"
   Her smile was gone.
   "Do you remember what the honk mahfahs did to you and your friends?"
   "That wasn't me," she said. "That was another woman." Her eyes had taken on a dull, sullen cast. He hated that look, but he also liked it just fine. It was the right look, the one that said the kindling was burning well and soon the bigger logs would start to catch.
   "Yes. It was. Like it or not, it was Odetta Susannah Holmes, daugh­ter of Sarah Walker Holmes. Not you as you are, but you as you were. Remember the fire-hoses, Susannah? Remember the gold teeth, how you saw them when they used the hoses on you and your friends in Oxford ? How you saw them twinkle when they laughed?"
   She had told them these things, and many others, over many long nights as the campfire burned low. The gunslinger hadn't understood everything, but he had listened carefully, just the same. And remem­bered. Pain was a tool, after all. Sometimes it was the best tool.
   "What's wrong with you, Roland? Why you want to go recallin that trash in my mind?"
   Now the sullen eyes glinted at him dangerously; they reminded him of Alain's eyes when good-natured Alain was finally roused.
   "Yonder stones are those men," Roland said softly. "The men who locked you in a cell and left you to foul yourself. The men with the clubs and the dogs. The men who called you a nigger cunt."
   He pointed at them, moving his finger from left to right.
   "There's the one who pinched your breast and laughed. There's the one who said he better check and see if you had something stuffed up your ass. There's the one who called you a chimpanzee in a five-hundred-dollar dress. That's the one that kept running his billyclub over the spokes of your wheelchair until you thought the sound would send you mad. There's the one who called your friend Leon pinko-fag. And the one on the end, Susannah, is Jack Mort.
   "There. Those stones. Those men."
   She was breathing rapidly now, her bosom rising and falling in swift little jerks beneath the gunslinger's gunbelt with its heavy freight of bul­lets. Her eyes had left him; they were looking at the mica-flecked chips of stone. Behind them and at some distance, a tree splintered and fell over. More crows called in the sky. Deep in the game which was no longer a game, neither of them noticed.
   "Oh yeah?" she breathed. "That so?"
   "It is. Now say your lesson, Susannah Dean, and be true." –   This time the words fell from her lips like small chunks of ice. Her right hand trembled lightly on the arm of her wheelchair like an idling engine.
   " ‘I do not aim with my hand; she who aims with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.
   " 'I aim with my eye.' "
   "Good."
   " ‘I do not shoot with my hand; she who shoots with her hand has forgotten the face of her father.
   " ‘I shoot with my mind.' "
   "So it has ever been, Susannah Dean."
   " 'I do not kill with my gun; she who kills with her gun has forgotten the face of her father.
   " 'I kill with my heart.' "
   "Then KILL them, for your father's sake!" Roland shouted. "KILL THEM ALL!"
   Her right hand was a blur between the arm of the chair and the butt of Roland's sixgun. It was out in a second, her left hand descending, fanning at the hammer in flutters almost as swift and delicate as the wing of a hummingbird. Six flat cracks pealed off across the valley, and five of the six chips of stone set atop the boulder blinked out of existence.
   For a moment neither of them spoke—did not even breathe, it seemed—as the echoes rolled back and forth, dimming. Even the crows were silent, at least for the time being.
   The gunslinger broke the silence with four toneless yet oddly emphatic words: "It is very well."
   Susannah looked at the gun in her hand as if she had never seen it before. A tendril of smoke rose from the barrel, perfectly straight in the windless silence. Then, slowly, she returned it to the holster below her bosom.
   "Good, but not perfect," she said at last. "I missed one."
   "Did you?" He walked over to the boulder and picked up the remaining chip of stone. He glanced at it, then tossed it to her.
   She caught it with her left; her right stayed near the bolstered gun, he saw with approval. She shot better and more naturally than Eddie, but had not learned this particular lesson as swiftly as Eddie had done.
   If she had been with them during the shootout at Balazar's nightclub, she might have. Now, Roland saw, she was at last learning that, too. She looked at the stone and saw the notch, barely a sixteenth of an inch deep, in its upper corner.
   "You only clipped it," Roland said, returning to her, "but in a shooting scrape, sometimes that's all you wed. If you clip a fellow, throw his aim off …" He paused. "Why an– you looking at me that way?"
   "You don't know, do you? You really don't?"
   "No. Your mind is often closed to me, Susannah."
   There was no defensiveness in his voice, and Susannah shook her head in exasperation. The rapid turn-and-turn-about dance of her person­ality sometimes unnerved him; his seeming inability to say anything other than exactly what was on his mind never failed to do the same to her. He was the most literal man she had ever met.
   "All right," she said, "I'll tell you why I'm looking at you that way, Roland. Because what you did was a mean trick. You said you wouldn't slap me, couldn't slap me, even if I cut up rough... but either you lied or you're very stupid, and I know you ain't stupid. People don't always slap with their hands, as every man and woman of my race could testify. We have a little rhyme where I come from: 'Sticks and stones will break my bones—' "
   " '—yet taunts shall never wound me,' " Roland finished.
   "Well, that's not exactly the way we say it, but I guess it's close enough. It's bullshit no matter how you say it. They don't call what you did a tongue-lashing for nothing. Your words hurt me, Roland—are you gonna stand there and say you didn't know they would?"
   She sat in her chair, looking up at him with bright, stern curiosity, and Roland thought—not for the first time—that the honk mahfahs of Susannah's land must have been either very brave or very stupid to cross her, wheelchair or no wheelchair. And, having walked among them, he didn't think bravery was the answer.
   "I did not think or care about your hurt," he said patiently. "I saw you show your teeth and knew you meant to bite, so I put a stick in your jaws. And it worked... didn't it?"
   Her expression was now one of hurt astonishment. "You bastardl"
   Instead of replying, he took the gun from her holster, fumbled the cylinder open with the remaining two fingers on his right hand, and began to reload the chambers with his left hand.
   "Of all the high-handed, arrogant—"
   "You needed to bite," he said in that same patient tone. "Had you not, you would have shot all wrong—with your hand and your gun instead of your eye and mind and heart. Was that a trick? Was it arrogant? I think not. I think. Susannah, that you were the one with arrogance in her heart. I think you were the one with a mind to get up to tricks. That doesn't distress me. Quite the opposite. A gunslinger without teeth is no gunslinger."
   "Damn it, I'm not a gunslinger!"
   He ignored that; he could afford to. If she was no gunslinger, then he was a billy-bumbler. "If we were playing a game, I might have behaved differently. But this is no game. It …"
   His good hand went to his forehead for a moment and paused there, fingers tented just above the left temple. The tips of the fingers, she saw, were trembling minutely.
   "Roland, what's ailing you?" she asked quietly.
   The hand lowered slowly. He rolled the cylinder back into place and replaced die revolver in the holster she wore. "Nothing."
   "Yes there is. I've seen it. Eddie has, too. It started almost as soon as we left the beach. It's something wrong, and it's getting worse."
   "There is nothing wrong," he repeated.
   She put her hands out and took his. Her anger was gone, at least for the time being. She looked earnestly up into his eyes. "Eddie and I... this isn't our world, Roland. Without you, we'd die here. We'd have your guns, and we can shoot them, you've taught us to do that well enough, but we'd die just the same. We … we depend on you. So tell me what's wrong. Let me try to help. Let us try to help."
   He had never been a man who understood himself deeply or cared to; the concept of self-consciousness (let alone self-analysis) was alien to him. His way was to act—to quickly consult his own interior, utterly mysterious workings, and then act. Of them all, he had been the most perfectly made, a man whose deeply romantic core was encased in a brutally simple box which consisted of instinct and pragmatism. He took one of those quick looks inside now and decided to tell her everything. There was something wrong with him, oh yes. Yes indeed. Something wrong with his mind, something as simple as his nature and as strange as the weird, wandering life into which that nature had impelled him.
   He opened his mouth to say I'll tell you what's wrong, Susannah, and I'll do it in just three words. I'm going insane. But before he could begin, another tree fell in the forest—it went with a huge, grinding crash. This treefall was closer, and this time they were not deeply engaged in a test of wills masquerading as a lesson. Both heard it, both heard the agitated cawing of the crows which followed it, and both registered the fact that the tree had fallen close to their camp.
   Susannah had looked in the direction of the sound but now her eyes, wide and dismayed, returned to the gunslinger's face. "Eddie!" she said.
   A cry rose from the deep green fastness of the woods in back of them—a vast cry of rage. Another tree went, and then another. They fell in what sounded like a hail of mortar-fin-, Dry wood, the gunslinger thought. Dead trees.
   "Eddie!" This time she screamed it. "Whatever it is, it's near Eddie!" Her hands flew to the wheels of her chair and began the laborious job of turning it around.
   "No time for that." Roland seized her under her arms and pulled her free. He had carried her before when the going was too rough for her wheelchair—both men had—but she was still amazed by his uncanny, ruthless speed. At one moment she was in her wheelchair, an item which had been purchased in New York City 's finest medical supply house in the fall of 1962. At the next she was balanced precariously on Roland's shoulders like a cheerleader, her muscular thighs gripping the sides of his neck, his palms over his head and pressing into the small of her back. He began to run with her, his sprung boots slapping the needle-strewn earth between the ruts left by her wheelchair.
   "Odetta!" he cried, reverting in this moment of stress to the name by which he had first known her. "Don't lose the gun! For your father's sake!"
   He was sprinting between the trees now. Shadow-lace and bright chains of sun-dapple ran across them in moving mosaics as Roland length­ened his stride. They were going downhill now. Susannah raised her left hand to ward off a branch that wanted to slap her from the gunslinger's shoulders. At the same moment she dropped her right hand to the butt of his ancient revolver, cradling it.
   A mile, she thought. How long to run a mile? How long with him going flat-out like this? Not long, if he can keep his feet on these slippery needles... but maybe too long. Let him be all right, Lord—let my Eddie be all right.
   As if in answer, she heard the unseen beast loose its cry again. That vast voice was like thunder. Like doom.

2
   HE WAS THE LARGEST creature in the forest which had once been known as the Great West Woods, and he was the oldest. Many of the huge old elms which Roland had noticed in the valley below had been little more than twigs sprouting from the ground when the bear came out of the dim unknown reaches of Out-World like a brutal, wandering king.
   Once, the Old People had lived in the West Woods (it was their leavings which Roland had found from time to time during the last weeks), and they had gone in fear of the colossal, undying bear. They had tried to kill him when they first discovered they were not alone in the new territory to which they had come, but although their arrows enraged him, they did no serious damage. And he was not confused about the source of his torment, as were the other beasts of the forest— even the predatory bushcats which denned and littered in the sandhills to the west. No; he knew where the arrows came from, this bear. Knew. And for every arrow which found its mark in the flesh below his shaggy pelt, he took three, four, perhaps as many as half a dozen of the Old People. Children if he could get them; women if he could not. Their warriors he disdained, and this was the final humiliation.
   Eventually, as his real nature became clear to them, their efforts to kill him ceased. He was, of course, a demon incarnate—or the shadow of a god. They called him Mir, which to these people meant "the world beneath the world." He stood seventy feet high, and after eighteen or more centuries of undisputed rule in the West Woods, he was dying. Perhaps the instrument of his death had at first been a microscopic organism in something he had eaten or drunk; perhaps it was old age; more likely a combination of both. The cause didn't matter; the ultimate result—a rapidly multiplying colony of parasites foraging within his fabu­lous brain—did. After years of calculating, brutal sanity, Mir had run mad.
   The bear had known men were in his woods again; he ruled the forest and although it was vast, nothing of importance which happened there escaped his attention for long. He had drawn away from the new­comers, not because he was afraid but because he had no business with them, nor they with him. Then the parasites had begun their work, and as his madness increased he became sure that it was the Old People again, that the trap-setters and forest-burners had returned and would soon set about their old, stupid mischief once more. Only as he lay in his final den some thirty miles from the place of the newcomers, sicker with each day's dawning than he had been at sunset the night before, had he come to believe that the Old People had finally found some mischief which worked: poison.
   He came this time not to take revenge for some petty wound but to stamp them out entirely before their poison could finish having its way with him... and as he travelled, all thought ceased. What was left was red rage, the rusty buzz of the thing on top of his head—the turning thing between his ears which had once done its work in smooth silence— and an eerily enhanced sense of smell which led him unerringly toward the camp of the three pilgrims.
   The bear, whose real name was not Mir but something else entirely, made his way through the forest like a moving building, a shaggy tower with reddish-brown eyes. Those eyes glowed with fever and madness.
   His huge head, now wearing a garland of broken brunches and fir­needles, swung ceaselessly from side to side. Every now and then he would sneeze in a muffled explosion of sound—Ali-CHOW!—and clouds of squirming white parasites would be discharged from his dripping nos­trils. His paws, armed with curved talons three feet in length, tore at the trees. He walked upright, sinking deep tracks in the soft black soil under the trees. He reeked of fresh balsam and old, sour shit.
   The thing on top of his head whirred and squealed, squealed and whirred.
   The course of the bear remained almost constant: a straight line which would lead him to the camp of those who had dared return to his forest, who had dared fill his head with dark green agony. Old People or New People, they would die. When he came to a dead tree, he some­times left the straight path long enough to push it down. The dry, explo­sive roar of its fall pleased him; when the tree had finally collapsed its rotten length on the forest floor or come to rest against one of its mates, the bear would push on through slanting bars of sunlight turned misty with floating motes of sawdust.

3
   TWO DAYS BEFORE, EDDIE Dean had begun carving again—the first time he'd tried to carve anything since the age of twelve. He remembered that he had enjoyed doing it, and he believed he must have been good at it, as well. He couldn't remember that part, not for sure, but there was at least one clear indication that it was so: Henry, his older brother, had hated to see him doing it.
   Oh lookit the sissy, Henry would say. Whatcha makin today, sissy? A dollhouse? A pisspot for your itty-bitty teeny peenie? Ohhh... ain't that CUTE?
   Henry would never come right out and tell Eddie not to do some­thing; would never just walk up to him and say, would you mind quitting that, bro? See, it's pretty good, and when you do something that's pretty good, it makes me nervous. Because, you see, I'm the one that's supposed to be pretty good at stuff around here. Me. Henry Dean. So what I think I'll do, brother o' mine, is just sort of rag on you about certain things. I won't come right out and say, "Don't do that, it's makin me nervous," because that might make me sound, you know, a little fucked up in the head. But I can rag on you, because that's part of what big brothers do, right? All part of the image. I'll rag on you and tease you and make fun of you until you just... fucking... QUIT IT! Okay?
   Well, it wasn't okay, not really, but in the Dean household, things usually went the way Henry wanted them to go. And until very recently, that had seemed right—not okay but right. There was a small but crucial difference there, if you could but dig it. There were two reasons why it seemed right. One was an on-top reason; the other was an underneath reason.
   The on-top reason was because Henry had to Watch Out for Eddie when Mrs. Dean was at work. He had to Watch Out all the time, because once there had been a Dean sister, if you could but dig it. She would have been four years older than Eddie and four years younger than Henry if she had lived, but that was the thing, you see, because she hadn't lived. She had been run over by a drunk driver when Eddie was two. She had been watching a game of hopscotch on the sidewalk when it happened.
   As a lad, Eddie had sometimes thought of his sister while listening to Mel Alien doing the play-by-play on The Yankee Baseball Network. Someone would really pound one and Mel would bellow, "Holy cow, he got all of that one! SEEYA LATER!" Well, the drunk had gotten all of Gloria Dean, holy cow, seeya later. Gloria was now in that great upper deck in the sky, and it had not happened because she was unlucky or because the State of New York had decided not to jerk the jerk's license after his third OUI or even because God had bent down to pick up a peanut; it had happened (as Mrs. Dean frequently told her sons) because there had been no one around to Watch Out for Gloria.
   Henry's job was to make sure nothing like that ever happened to Eddie. That was his job and he did it, but it wasn't easy. Henry and Mrs. Dean agreed on that, if nothing else. Both of them frequently reminded Eddie of just how much Henry had sacrificed to keep Eddie safe from drunk drivers and muggers and junkies and possibly even malevolent aliens who might be cruising around in the general vicinity of the upper deck, aliens who might decide to come down from their UFOs on nuclear-powered jet-skis at any time in order to kidnap little kids like Eddie Dean. So it was wrong to make Henry more nervous than this terrible responsibility had already made him. If Eddie was doing something that did make Henry more nervous, Eddie ought to cease doing that thing immediately. It was a way of paying Henry back for all the time Henry had spent Watching Out for Eddie. When you thought about it that way, you saw that doing things better than Henry could do them was very unfair.
   Then there was the underneath reason. That reason (the world beneath the world, one might say) was more powerful, because it could never be stated: Eddie could not allow himself to be better than Henry at much of anything, because Henry was, for the most part, good for nothing... except Watching Out for Eddie, of course.
   Henry taught Eddie how to play basketball in the playground near the apartment building where they lived—this was in a cement suburb where the towers of Manhattan stood against the horizon like a dream and the welfare check was king. Eddie was eight years younger than Henry and much smaller, but he was also much faster. He had a natural feel for the game; once he got on the cracked, hilly cement of the court with the ball in his hands, the moves seemed to sizzle in his nerve-endings. He was faster, but that was no big deal. The big deal was this: he was better than Henry. If he hadn't known it from the results of the pick-up games in which they sometimes played, he would have known it from Henry's thunderous looks and the hard punches to the upper arm Henry often dealt out on their way home afterwards. These punches were supposedly Henry's little jokes—"Two for flinching!" Henry would cry cheerily, and then whap-whap! Into Eddie's bicep with one knuckle extended—but they didn't feel like jokes. They felt like warnings. They felt like Henry's way of saying You better not fake me out and make me look stupid when you drive for the basket, bro; you better remember that I'm Watching Out for You.
   The same was true with reading... baseball... Ring-a-Levio... math... even jump-rope, which was a girl's game. That he was better at these things, or could be better, was a secret that had to be kept at all costs. Because Eddie was the younger brother. Because Henry was Watching Out for him. But the most important part of the underneath reason was also the simplest: these things had to be kept secret because Henry was Eddie's big brother, and Eddie adored him.

4
   TWO DAYS AGO, WHILE Susannah was skinning out a rabbit and Roland was starting supper, Eddie had been in the forest just south of camp. He had seen a funny spur of wood jutting out of a fresh stump. A weird, feeling—he supposed it was the one people called deja vu—swept over him, and he found himself staring fixedly at the spur, which looked like a badly shaped doorknob. He was distantly aware that his mouth had gone dry.
   After several seconds, he realized he was looking at the spur sticking out of the stump but thinking about the courtyard behind the building where he and Henry had lived—thinking about the feel of the warm cement under his ass and the whopping smells of garbage from the dumpster around the corner in the alley. In this memory he had a chunk of wood in his left hand and a paring knife from the drawer by the sink in his right. The chunk of wood jutting from the stump had called up the memory of that brief period when he had fallen violently in love with wood-carving. It was just that the memory was buried so deep he hadn't realized, at first, what it was.
   What he had loved most about carving was the seeing part, which happened even before you began. Sometimes you saw a car or a truck. Sometimes a dog or cat. Once, he remembered, it had been the face of an idol—one of the spooky Easter Island monoliths he had seen in an issue of National Geographic at school. That had turned out to be a good one. The game was to find out how much of that thing you could get out of the wood without breaking it. You could never get it all, but if you were very careful, you could sometimes get quite a lot.
   There was something inside the boss on the side of the stump. He thought he might be able to release quite a lot of it with Roland's knife— it was the sharpest, handiest tool he had ever used.
   Something inside the wood, waiting patiently for someone—someone like him!—to come along and let it out. To set it free.
   Oh lookit the sissy! Whatcha makin today, sissy? A dollhouse? A pisspot for your itty-bitty teeny peenie? A slingshot, so you can pretend to hunt rabbits, just like the big boys? Awwww... ain't that CUTE?
   He felt a burst of shame, a sense of wrongness; that strong sense of secrets that must be kept at any cost, and then he remembered—again— that Henry Dean, who had in his later years become the great sage and eminent junkie, was dead. This realization had still not lost its power to surprise; it kept hitting him in different ways, sometimes with sorrow, sometimes with guilt, sometimes with anger. On this day, two days before the great bear came charging out of the green corridors of the woods, it had hit him in the most surprising way of all. He had felt relief, and a soaring joy.
   He was free.
   Eddie had borrowed Roland's knife. He used it to cut carefully around the jutting boss of wood, then brought it back and sat beneath a tree with it, turning it this way and that. He was not looking at it; he was looking into it.
   Susannah had finished with her rabbit. The meat went into the pot over the fire; the skin she stretched between two sticks, tying it with hanks of rawhide from Roland's purse. Later on, after the evening meal, Eddie would begin scraping it clean. She used her hands and arms, slipping effortlessly over to where Eddie was sitting with his back propped against the tall old pine. At the campfire, Roland was crumbling some arcane—and no doubt delicious—woods-herb into the pot. "What's doing, Eddie?"
   Eddie had found himself restraining an absurd urge to hide the boss of wood behind his back. "Nothing," he said. "Thought I might, you know, curve something." He paused, then added: "I'm not very good, though." He sounded as if he might be trying to reassure her of this fact.
   She had looked at him, puzzled. For a moment she seemed on the verge of saying something, then simply shrugged and left him alone. She had no idea why Eddie seemed ashamed to be passing a little time in whittling—her father had done it all the time—but if it was something that needed to be talked about, she supposed Eddie would get to it in his own time.
   He knew the guilty feelings were stupid and pointless, but he also knew he felt more comfortable doing this work when Roland and Susan­nah were out of camp. Old habits, it seemed, sometimes died hard. Beating heroin was child's play compared to beating your childhood.
   When they were away, hunting or shooting or keeping Roland's peculiar form of school, Eddie found himself able to turn to his piece of wood with surprising skill and increasing pleasure. The shape was in there, all right; he had been right about that. It was a simple one, and Roland's knife was setting it free with an eerie ease. Eddie thought he was going to get almost all of it, and that meant the slingshot might actually turn out to be a practical weapon. Not much compared to Roland's big revolvers, maybe, but something he had made himself, just the same. His. And this idea pleased him very much.
   When the first crows rose in the air, cawing affrightedly, he did not hear. He was already thinking—hoping—that he might see a tree with a bow trapped in it before too long.

5
   HE HEARD THE BEAR approaching before Roland and Susannah did, but not much before—he was lost in that high daze of concentration which accompanies the creative impulse at its sweetest and most powerful. He had suppressed these impulses for most of his life, and now this one held him wholly in its grip. Eddie was a willing prisoner.
   He was pulled from his daze not by the sound of falling trees but by the rapid thunder of a .45 from the south. He looked up, smiling, and brushed hair from his forehead with a sawdusty hand. In that moment, sitting with his back against a tall pine in the clearing which had become home, his face crisscrossed with opposing beams of green-gold forest light, he looked handsome indeed—a young man with unruly dark hair which constantly tried to spill across his high forehead, a young man with a strong, mobile mouth and hazel eyes.
   For a moment his eyes shifted to Roland's other gun, hanging by its belt from a nearby branch, and he found himself wondering how long it had been since Roland had gone anywhere without at least one of his fabulous weapons hanging by his side. That question led to two others.
   How old was he, this man who had plucked Eddie and Susannah from their world and their whens? And, more important, what was wrong with him?
   Susannah had promised to broach that subject … if she shot well and didn't get Roland's back hair up, that was. Eddie didn't think Roland would tell her—not at first—but it was time to let old long tall and ugly know that they knew something was wrong.
   "There'll be water if God wills it," Eddie said. He turned back to his carving with a little smile playing on his lips. They had both begun to pick up Roland's little sayings... and he theirs. It was almost as if they were halves of die same—
   Then a tree fell close by in the forest, and Eddie was on his feet in a second, the half-carved slingshot in one hand, Roland's knife in the other. He stared across the clearing in the direction of die sound, heart thumping, all his senses finally alert. Something was coming. Now he could hear it, trampling its heedless way through the underbrush, and he marvelled bitterly that this realization had come so late. Far back in his mind, a small voice told him this was what he got. This was what he got for doing something better than Henry, for making Henry nervous.
   Another tree fell with a ratcheting, coughing crash. Looking down a ragged aisle between the tall firs, Eddie saw a cloud of sawdust rise in the still air. The creature responsible for that cloud suddenly bellowed— a raging, gut-freezing sound.
   It was one huge motherfucker, whatever it was.
   He dropped the chunk of wood, then flipped Roland's knife at a tree fifteen feet to his left. It somersaulted twice in the air and then stuck halfway to the hilt in the wood, quivering. He grabbed Roland's .45 from the place where it hung and cocked it.
   Stand or run?
   But he discovered he no longer had the luxury of that question. The thing was fast as well as huge, and it was now too late to run. A gigantic shape began to disclose itself in that aisle of trees north of the clearing, a shape which towered above all but the tallest trees. It was lumbering directly toward him, and as its eyes fixed upon Eddie Dean, it gave voice to another of those cries.
   "Oh man, I'm fucked," Eddie whispered as another tree bent, cracked like a mortar, then crashed to the forest floor in a cloud of dust and dead needles. Now it was lumbering straight toward the clearing where he stood, a bear die size of King Kong. Its footfalls made the ground shake.
   What will you do, Eddie? Roland suddenly asked. Think! It's the only advantage you have over yon beast. What will you do?
   He didn't think he could kill it. Maybe with a bazooka, hut probably not with the gunslinger's .45. He could run, but had an idea that the oncoming beast might be pretty fast when it wanted to be. He guessed the chances of ending up as jam between the great bear s toes might be as high as fifty-fifty.
   So which one was it going to be? Stand here and start shooting or run like his hair was on fire and his ass was catching?
   It occurred to him that there was a third choice. He could climb.
   He turned toward the tree against which he had been leaning. It was a huge, hoary pine, easily the tallest tree in this part of the woods. The first branch spread out over the forest floor in a feathery green fan about eight feet up. Eddie dropped the revolver's hammer and then jammed the gun into the waistband of his pants. He leaped for the branch, grabbed it, and did a frantic chin-up. Behind him, the bear gave voice to another bellow as it burst into the clearing.
   The bear would have had him just the same, would have left Eddie Dean's guts hanging in gaudy strings from the lowest branches of the pine, if another of those sneezing fits had not come on it at that moment. It kicked the ashy remains of the campfire into a black cloud and then stood almost doubled over, huge front paws on its huge thighs, looking for a moment like an old man in a fur coat, an old man with a cold. It sneezed again and again—AH-CHOW! AH-CHOW! AH-CHOW!—and clouds of parasites blew out of its muzzle. Hot urine flowed in a stream between its legs and hissed out the campfire's scattered embers.
   Eddie did not waste the few crucial extra moments he had been given. He went up the tree like a monkey on a stick, pausing only once to make sure the gunslinger's revolver was still seated firmly in the waist­band of his pants. He was in terror, already half convinced that he was going to die (what else could he expect, now that Henry wasn't around to Watch Out for him?), but a crazy laughter raved through his head just the same. Been treed, he thought. How bout that, sports fans? Been treed by Bearzilla.
   The creature raised its head again, the thing turning between its ears catching winks and flashes of sunlight as it did so, then charged Eddie's tree. It reached high with one paw and slashed forward, meaning to knock Eddie loose like a pinecone. The paw tore through the branch he was standing on just as he lunged upward to the next. That paw tore through one of his shoes as well, pulling it from his foot and sending it flying in two ragged pieces.
   That's okay, Eddie thought. You can have em both, Br’er Bear, if you want. Goddam things were worn out, anyway.
   The bear roared and lashed at the tree, cutting deep wounds in its ancient bark, wounds which bled clear, resinous sap. Eddie kept on yanking himself up. The branches were thinning now, and when he risked a glance down he stared directly into the bear's muddy eyes. Below its cocked head, the clearing had become a target with the scattered smudge of campfire as its bullseye.
   "Missed me, you hairy motherf—" Eddie began, and then the bear, its head still cocked back to look at him, sneezed. Eddie was immediately drenched in hot snot that was filled with thousands of small white worms. They wriggled frantically on his shirt, his forearms, his throat and face.
   Eddie screamed in mingled surprise and revulsion. He began to brush at his eyes and mouth, lost his balance, and just managed to hook an arm around the branch beside him in time. He held on and raked at his skin, wiping off as much of the wormy phlegm as he could. The bear roared and hit the tree again. The pine rocked like a mast in a gale... but the fresh claw-marks which appeared were at least seven feet below the branch on which Eddie's feet were planted.
   The worms were dying, he realized—must have begun dying as soon as they left the infected swamps inside the monster's body. It made him feel a little better, and he began to climb again. He stopped twelve feet further up, daring to go no higher. The trunk of the pine, easily eight feet in diameter at its base, was now no more than eighteen inches through the middle. He had distributed his weight on two branches, but he could feel both of them bending springily beneath him. He had a crow's nest view of the forest and foothills to the west now, spread out below him in an undulating carpet. Under other circumstances, it would have been a view to relish.
   Top of the world, Ma, he thought. He looked down into the bear's upturned face again, and for a moment all-coherent thought was driven from his mind by simple amazement.
   There was something growing out of the bear's skull, and to Eddie it looked like a small radar-dish.
   The gadget turned jerkily, kicking up flashes of sun as it did, and Eddie could hear it screaming thinly. He had owned a few old cars in his time—the kind that sat in the used-car lots with the words HANDYMAN'S SPECIAL soaped on the windshields—and he thought the sound coming from that gadget was the sound of bearings which will freeze up if they are not replaced soon.
   The bear uttered a long, purring growl. Yellowish foam, thick with worms, squeezed between its paws in curdled gobbets. If he had never looked into the face of utter lunacy (and he supposed he had, having been eyeball to eyeball with that world-class bitch Detta Walker on more than one occasion), Eddie was looking into it now... but that face was, thankfully, a good thirty feet below him, and at their highest reach those killing talons were fifteen feet under the soles of his feet. And, unlike the trees upon which the bear had vented its spleen as it approached the clearing, this one was not dead.
   "Mexican standoff, honey, Eddie panted.  He wiped sweat from his forehead with one sap-sticky hand and flicked the mess down into the bugbear's face.
   Then the creature the Old People had called Mir embraced the tree with its great forepaws and began to shake it. Eddie grabbed the trunk and held on for dear life; eyes squeezed into grim slits, as the pine began to sway back and forth like a pendulum.