The Dark Tower (Page 81)

Back for him?

That idea broke his paralysis. Chip turned and ran. He got no more than three steps along the inside of the counter before a shot rang out, loud as thunder in the store-the place was bigger and fancier than it had been in ’77, thank God for his father’s insistence on extravagant insurance coverage-and Mrs. Tassenbaum uttered a piercing scream. Three or four people who had been browsing the aisles turned with expressions of astonishment, and one of them hit the floor in a dead faint. Chip had time to register that it was Rhoda Beemer, eldest daughter of one of the two women who’d been killed in here on That Day. Then it seemed to him that time had folded back on itself and it was Ruth herself lying there with a can of creamed corn rolling free of one relaxing hand. He heard a bullet buzz over his head like an angry bee and skidded to a stop, hands raised.

"Don’t shoot, mister!" he heard himself bawl in the thin, wavering voice of an old man. "Take whatever’s in the register but don’t shoot me!"

"Turn around," said the voice of the man who had turned Chip’s world turtle on That Day, the man who’d almost gotten him killed (he’d been in the hospital over in Bridgton for two weeks, by the living Jesus) and had now reappeared like an old monster from some child’s closet. "The rest of you on the floor, but you turn around, shopkeeper. Turn around and see me.

"See me very well."

THREE

The man swayed from side to side, and for a moment Roland thought he would faint instead of turning. Perhaps some survival-

oriented part of his brain suggested that fainting was more likely to get him killed, for the shopkeeper managed to keep his feet and did finally turn and face the gunslinger. His dress was eerily similar to what he’d been wearing the last time Roland was here; it could have been the same black tie and butcher’s apron, tied up high on his midriff. His hair was still slicked back along his skull, but now it was wholly white instead of salt-andpepper.

Roland remembered the way blood had dashed back from the left side of the shopkeeper’s temple as a bullet-one fired by Andolini himself, for all the gunslinger knew-grooved him. Now there was a grayish knot of scar-tissue there. Roland guessed the man combed his hair in a way that would display that mark rather than hide it. He’d either had a fool’s luck that day or been saved by ka. Roland thought ka the more likely.

Judging from the sick look of recognition in the shopkeeper’s eyes, he thought so, too.

"Do you have a cartomobile, a truckomobile, or a tacksee?"

Roland asked, holding the barrel of his gun on the shopkeeper’s middle.

Jake stepped up beside Roland. "What are you driving?" he asked the shopkeeper. "That’s what he means."

"Truck!" the shopkeeper managed. "International Harvester pickup! It’s outside in the lot!" He reached under his apron so suddenly that Roland came within an ace of shooting him. The shopkeeper-mercifully-didn’t seem to notice. All of the store’s customers were now lying prone, including the woman who’d been at the counter. Roland could smell the meat she had been in the process of trading for, and his stomach rumbled. He was tired, hungry, overloaded with grief, and there were too many things to think about, too many by far. His mind couldn’t keep up. Jake would have said he needed to "take a time-out," but he didn’t see any time-outs in their immediate future.

The shopkeeper was holding out a set of keys. His fingers were trembling, and the keys jingled. The late-afternoon sun slanting in the windows struck them and bounced complicated reflections into the gunslinger’s eyes. First the man in the white apron had plunged a hand out of sight without asking permission (and not slowly); now this, holding up a bunch of reflective metal objects as if to blind his adversary. It was as if he were trying to get killed. But it had been that way on the day of the ambush, too, hadn’t it? The storekeeper (quicker on his feet then, and without that widower’s hump in his back) had followed him and Eddie from place to place like a cat who won’t stop getting under your feet, seemingly oblivious to the bullets flying all around them (just as he’d seemed oblivious of the one that grooved the side of his head). At one point, Roland remembered, he had talked about his son, almost like a man in a barbershop making conversation while he waits his turn to sit under the scissors. A ka-mai, then, and such were often safe from harm. At least until ka tired of their antics and swatted them out of the world.

"Take the truck, take it and go!" the shopkeeper was telling him. "It’s yours! I’m giving it to you! Really!"

"If you don’t stop flashing those damned keys in my eyes, sai, what I’ll take is your breath," Roland said. There was another clock behind the counter. He had already noticed that this world was full of clocks, as if the people who lived here thought that by having so many they could cage time. Ten minutes of four, which meant they’d been America-side for nine minutes already. Time was racing, racing. Somewhere nearby Stephen King was almost certainly on his afternoon walk, and in desperate danger, although he didn’t know it. Or had it happened already? They-Roland, anyway-had always assumed that the writer’s death would hit them hard, like another Beamquake, but maybe not. Maybe the impact of his death would be more gradual.

"How far from here to Turtleback Lane?" Roland rapped at the storekeeper.

The elderly sai only stared, eyes huge and liquid with terror.

Never in his life had Roland felt more like shooting a man…

or at least pistol-whipping him. He looked as foolish as a goat with its foot stuck in a crevice.

Then the woman lying in front of the meat-counter spoke.

She was looking up at Roland and Jake, her hands clasped together at the small of her back. "That’s in Lovell, mister. It’s about five miles from here."

One look in her eyes-large and brown, fearful but not panicky-and Roland decided this was the one he wanted, not the storekeeper. Unless, that was-

He turned to Jake. "Can you drive the shopkeeper’s truck five miles?"

Roland saw the boy wanting to say yes, then realizing he couldn’t afford to risk ultimate failure by trying to do a thing he-city boy that he was-had never done in his life.

"No," Jake said. "I don’t think so. What about you?"

Roland had watched Eddie drive John Cullum’s car. It didn’t look that hard… but there was his hip to consider.

Rosa had told him diat dry twist moved fast-like a fire driven by strong winds, she’d said-and now he knew what she’d meant. On the trail into Calla Bryn Sturgis, the pain in his hip had been no more than an occasional twinge. Now it was as if the socket had been injected with red-hot lead, then wrapped in strands of barbed wire. The pain radiated all the way down his leg to the right ankle. He’d watched how Eddie manipulated the pedals, going back and forth between the one that made the car speed up and the one that made it slow down, always using the right foot. Which meant the ball of the right hip was always lolling in its socket.

He didn’t think he could do that. Not with any degree of safety.

"I think not," he said. He took the keys from the shopkeeper, then looked at the woman lying in front of the meatcounter.

"Stand up, sai," he said.

Mrs. Tassenbaum did as she was told, and when she was on her feet, Roland gave her the keys. I keep meeting useful people in here, he thought. If this one’s as good as Cullum turned out to be, we might still be all right.

"You’re going to drive my young friend and me to Lovell,"

Roland said.

"To Turtleback Lane," she said.

"You say true, I say thankya."

"Are you going to kill me after you get to where you want to go?"

"Not unless you dawdle," Roland said.

She considered this, then nodded. "Then I won’t. Let’s go."

"Good luck, Mrs. Tassenbaum," the shopkeeper told her faintly as she started for the door.

"If I don’t come back," she said, "you just remember one thing: it was my husband who invented the Internet-him and his friends, partly at CalTech and partly in their own garages. Not Albert Gore."

Roland’s stomach rumbled again. He reached over the counter (the shopkeeper cringed away from him as if he suspected Roland of carrying the red plague), grabbed the woman’s pile of turkey, and folded three slices into his mouth.

The rest he handed to Jake, who ate two slices and then looked down at Oy, who was looking up at the meat with great interest.

"I’ll give you your share when we get in the truck," Jake promised.

"Ruck," Oy said; then, with much greater emphasis:

"Share!"

"Holy jumping Jesus Christ," the shopkeeper said.

FOUR

The Yankee shopkeeper’s accent might have been cute, but his truck wasn’t. It was a standard shift, for one thing. Irene Tassenbaum of Manhattan hadn’t driven a standard since she had been Irene Cantora of Staten Island. It was also a stick shift, and she had never driven one of those.

Jake was sitting beside her with his feet placed around said stick and Oy (still chewing turkey) on his lap. Roland swung into the passenger seat, trying not to snarl at the pain in his leg.

Irene forgot to depress the clutch when she keyed the ignition.

The I-H lurched forward, then stalled. Luckily it had been rolling the roads of western Maine since the mid-sixties and it was the sedate jump of an elderly mare rather than the spirited buck of a colt; otherwise Chip McAvoy would once more have lost at least one of his plate-glass windows. Oy scrabbled for balance on Jake’s lap and sprayed out a mouthful of turkey along with a word he had learned from Eddie.