The Dark Tower (Page 48)

The clip fed up the handle and held either fifteen or sixteen shots. This was not a matter of counting but only of lookingand knowing.

"Hey," Susannah said. She’d gone back toward the front of the cave. "Come look at this. Sneetches."

"Check out the crate-lid," Jake said when they joined her.

Susannah had set it aside; Jake picked it up and was studying it with admiration. It showed the face of a smiling boy with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. He was wearing round glasses and brandishing what appeared to be a magician’s wand at a floating sneetch. The words stenciled beneath the drawing read:

PROPERTY 449th SQUADRON

24 "SNEETCHES"

HARRY POTTER MODEL

SERIAL #465-17-CCNDJKR

"Don’t Mess with the449!"

We’ll Kick the "Slvtnerin" out of You!

There were two dozen sneetches in the crate, packed like eggs in little nests of plastic excelsior. None of Roland’s band had had the opportunity to study live ones closely during their battle with the Wolves, but now they had a good swatch of time during which they could indulge their most natural interests and curiosities. Each took up a sneetch. They were about the size of tennis balls, but a great deal heavier. Their surfaces had been gridded, making them resemble globes marked with lines of latitude and longitude. Although they looked like steel, the surfaces had a faint giving quality, like very hard rubber.

There was an ID-plate on each sneetch and a button beside it. "That wakes it up," Eddie murmured, and Jake nodded.

There was also a small depressed area in die curved surface, just the right size for a finger. Jake pushed it without the slightest worry that the thing would explode, or maybe extrude a minibuzzsaw that would cut off his fingers. You used the button at the bottom of the depression to access the programming. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he most certainly did.

A curved section of the sneetch’s surface slid away with a faint Auowwm! sound. Revealed were four tiny lights, three of them dark and one flashing slow amber pulses. There were seven windows, now showing 0 00 (Ml 00. Beneath each was a button so small that you’d need something like the end of a straightened paperclip to push it. "The size of a bug’s ass**le," as Eddie grumbled later on, while trying to program one. To die right of the windows were another two buttons, these marked SandW.

Jake showed it to Roland. "This one’s SET and the other one’s WAIT. Do you think so? I think so."

Roland nodded. He’d never seen such a weapon before-not close up, at any rate-but, coupled with the windows, he thought the use of the buttons was obvious. And he thought die sneetches might be useful in a way the long-shooters with their atom-shells would not be. SET and WAIT.

SET… and WAIT.

"Did Ted and his two pals leave all this stuff for us here?"

Susannah asked.

Roland hardly thought it mattered who’d left it-it was here and that was enough-but he nodded.

"How? And where’d they get it?"

Roland didn’t know. What he did know was that die cave was a ma’sun-a war-chest. Below them, men were making war on the Tower which the line of Eld was sworn to protect. He and his tet would fall upon them by surprise, and with these tools they would smite and smite until their enemies lay with their boots pointed to the sky.

Or until theirs did.

"Maybe he explains on one of the tapes he left us," Jake said.

He had engaged the safety of his new Cobra automatic and tucked it away in the shoulder-bag with the remaining Orizas.

Susannah had also helped herself to one of the Cobras, after twirling it around her finger a time or two, like Annie Oakley.

"Maybe he does," she said, and gave Jake a smile. It had been a long time since Susannah had felt so physically well. So not-preg.

Yet her mind was troubled. Or perhaps it was her spirit.

Eddie was holding up a piece of cloth that had been rolled into a tube and tied with three hanks of string. "That guy Ted said he was leaving us a map of the prison-camp. Bet this is it.

Anyone ‘sides me want a look?"

They all did. Jake helped Eddie to unroll the map. Brautigan had warned them it was rough, and it surely was: really no more than a series of circles and squares. Susannah saw the name of the litde town-Pleasantville-and thought again of Ray Bradbury. Jake was tickled by the crude compass, where the map-maker had added a question mark beside the letter N.

While they were studying this hastily rendered example of cartography, a long and wavering cry rose in the murk outside.

Eddie, Susannah, and Jake looked around nervously. Oy raised his head from his paws, gave a low, brief growl, then put his head back down again and appeared to go to sleep: Hell wit’choo, bad boy, I’m wit’ my homies and I ain’t ascairt.

"What is it?" Eddie asked. "A coyote? A jackal?"

"Some kind of desert dog," Roland agreed absently. He was squatted on his hunkers (which suggested his hip was better, at least temporarily) with his arms wrapped around his shins. He never took his eyes from the crude circles and squares drawn on the cloth. "Can-toi-tete."

"Is that like Dan-Tete?" Jake asked.

Roland ignored him. He scooped up the map and left the cave with it, not looking back. The others shared a glance and then followed him, once more wrapping their blankets about them like shawls.

THREE

Roland returned to where Sheemie (with a litde help from his friends) had brought them through. This time the gunslinger used the binoculars, looking down at Blue Heaven long and long. Somewhere behind them, die desert dog howled again, a lonely sound in die gloom.

And, Jake diought, the gloom was gloomier now. Your eyes adjusted as the day dialed itself down, but that brilliant spodight of sun seemed brighter than ever by contrast. He was pretty sure die deal widi die sun-machine was diat you got your full-on, your full-off, and nodiing in between. Maybe diey even let it shine all night, but Jake doubted it. People’s nervous systems were set up for an orderly progression of dark and day, he’d learned that in science class. You could make do with long periods of low light-people did it every year in the Arctic countries-but it could really mess with your head. Jake didn’t think the guys in charge down diere would want to goof up their Breakers if they could help it. Also, they’d want to save their "sun" for as long as they could; everything here was old and prone to breakdowns.

At last Roland gave die binoculars to Susannah. "Do look ya especially at die buildings on eidier end of die grassy rectangle."

He unrolled the map like a character about to read a scroll in a stage-play, glanced at it briefly, and then said, "They’re numbered

2 and 3 on the map."

Susannah studied them carefully. The one marked 2, the Warden’s House, was a small Cape Cod painted electric blue widi white trim. It was what her modier might have called a fairytale house, because of the bright colors and the gingerbread scalloping around the eaves.

Damli House was much bigger, and as she looked, she saw several people going in and out. Some had die carefree look of civilians. Odiers seemed much more-oh, call it watchful. And she saw two or three slumping along under loads of stuff. She handed the glasses to Eddie and asked him if those were Children of Roderick.

"I think so," he said, "but I can’t be completely-"

"Never mind the Rods," Roland said, "not now. What do you think of those two buildings, Susannah?"

"Well," she said, proceeding carefully (she did not, in fact, have the slightest idea what it was he wanted from her), "they’re both beautifully maintained, especially compared to some of the falling-down wrecks we’ve seen on our travels. The one they call Damli House is especially handsome. It’s a style we call Queen Anne, and-"

"Are they of wood, do you think, or just made to look that way? I’m particularly interested in the one called Damli."

Susannah redirected the binoculars there, then handed them to Eddie. He looked, then handed them to Jake. While Jake was looking, there was an audible CLICK! sound that rolled to them across the miles… and the Cecil B. DeMille sunbeam which had been shining down on the Devar-Toi like a spotlight went out, leaving them in a thick purple dusk which would soon be complete and utter dark.

In it, the desert-dog began to howl again, raising the skin on Jake’s arms into gooseflesh. The sound rose… rose… and suddenly cut off with one final choked syllable. It sounded like some final cry of surprise, and Jake had no doubt that the desert-dog was dead. Something had crept up behind it, and when the big overhead light went out-

There were still lights on down there, he saw: a double white row that might have been streetlights in "Pleasantville," yellow circles that were probably arc-sodiums along the various paths of what Susannah was calling Breaker U… and spotlights running random patterns across the dark.

No, Jake thought, not spotlights. Searchlights. Like in a prison movie. "Let’s go back," he said. "There’s nothing to see anymore, and I don’t like it out here in the dark."

Roland agreed. They followed him in single file, with Eddie carrying Susannah and Jake walking behind them with Oy at his heel. He kept expecting a second desert-dog to take up the cry of the first, but none did.

FOUR

"They were wood," Jake said. He was sitting cross-legged beneath one of the gas lanterns, letting its welcome white glow shine down on his face.

"Wood," Eddie agreed.