Bill had winced and walked around to the front of the building. He had observed Mrs Moran, one of the fourth-grade teachers, already hurrying over to break things up, but he knew they would get Richie hard before then, and by the time she actually arrived, Richie would be crying. Bawl-baby, bawl-baby, lookit-the –baby-bawl.

Bill had only had minor problems with them. They made fun of his stutter, of course. An occasional random cruelty came with the jibes; one rainy day as they were going to lunch in the gym, Belch Huggins had knocked Bill's lunchbag out of his hand and had stomped it flat with one engineer boot, squishing everything inside.

'Oh, juh-juh –gee!' Belch cried in mock horror, raising his hands and fluttering them about his face. 'Suh-suh –sorry about your l-l-lunch, fuh-huh-huck-face!' And he had strolled off down the hall toward where Victor Criss was leaning against the drinking fountain outside the boys'-room door, just about laughing himself into a hernia. That hadn't been so bad, though; Bill had cadged half a PB & J off Eddie Kaspbrak, and Richie was happy to give him his devilled egg, one of which his mother packed in his lunch about every second day and which made him want to puke, he claimed.

But you had to stay out of their way, and if you couldn't do that you had to try and be invisible.

Eddie forgot the rules, so they creamed him.

He hadn't been too bad until the big boys went downstream and splashed across to the other side, even though his nose was bleeding like a fountain. When Eddie's snotrag was soaked through, Bill had given him his own and made him put a hand on the nape of his neck and lean his head back. Bill could remember his mother getting Georgie to do that, because Georgie sometimes got nosebleeds —

Oh but it hurt to think about George.

It wasn't until the sound of the big boys' buffalolike progress through the Barrens had died away completely, and Eddie's nose-bleed had actually stopped, that his asthma got bad. He started heaving for air, his hands opening and then snapping shut like weak traps, his respiration a fluting whistle in his throat.

'Shit!' Eddie gasped. 'Asthma! Gripes!'

He scrambled for hi s aspirator and finally got it out of his pocket. It looked almost like a bottle of Windex, the kind with the sprayer attachment on top. He jammed it into his mouth and punched the trigger.

'Better?' Bill asked anxiously.

'No. It's empty.' Eddie looked at Bill with panicked eyes that said I'm caught, Bill! I'mcaught!

The empty aspirator rolled away from his hand. The stream chuckled on, not caring in the least that Eddie Kaspbrak could barely breathe. Bill thought randomly that the big boys had been right about one thing: it had been a real baby dam. But they had been having fun, dammit, and he felt a sudden dull fury that it should have come to this.

Tuh-tuh –take it easy, Eh-Eddie,' he said.

For the next forty minutes or so Bill sat next to him, his expectation that Eddie's asthma attack would at any moment let up gradually fading into unease. By the time Ben Hanscom appeared, the unease had become real fear. It not only wasn't letting up; it was getting worse. And the Center Street Drug, where Eddie got his refills, was three miles away, almost. What il he went to get Eddie's stuff and came back to rind Eddie unconscious? Unconscious or

(don't shit please don't think that)

or even dead, his mind insisted implacably.

(like Georgie dead like Georgie]

Don't be such an asshole! He's not going to die!

No, probably not. But what if he came back and found Eddie in a comber? Bill knew all about combers; he had even deduced they were named after those great big waves guys surfed on in Hawaii, and that seemed right enough — after all, what was a comber but a wave that drowned your brain? On doctor shows like Ben Casey, people were always going into combers, and sometimes they stayed there in spite of all Ben Casey's ill-tempered shouting.

So he sat there, knowing he ought to go, he couldn't do Eddie any good staying here, but not wanting to leave him alone. An irrational, superstitious part of him felt sure Eddie would slip into a comber the minute he, Bill, turned his back. Then he looked upstream and saw Ben Hanscom standing there. He knew who Ben was, of course; the fattest kid in any school has his or her own sort of unhappy notoriety. Ben was in the other fifth grade. Bill sometimes saw him at recess, standing by himself — usually in a corner — looking at a book and eating his lunch out of a bag about the size of a laundry sack.

Looking at Ben now, Bill thought he looked even worse than Henry Bowers. It was hard to believe, but true. Bill could not begin to imagine the cataclysmic fight these two must have been in. Ben's hair stood up in wild, dirt-clotted spikes. His sweater or sweat-shirt — it was hard to tell which it had started the day as and it sure as shit didn't matter now — was a matted ruin, smeared with a sic ko mixture of blood and grass. His pants were out at the knees.

He saw Bill looking at him and recoiled a bit, eyes going wary.

'Duh-duh –duh-hon't g-g-go!' Bill cried. He put his empty hands up in the air, palms out, to show he was harmless. 'W-W-We need some huh-huh –help.'

Ben came closer, eyes still wary. He walked as if one or both of his legs was killing him. 'Are they gone? Bowers and those guys?'

'Yuh-Yes,' Bill said. 'Listen, cuh-han y-y-you stay with my fruhhend while I go get his muh-medicine? He's got a-a-a-a — '

'Asthma?'

Bill nodded.

Ben came all the way down to the remains of the dam and dropped painfully to one knee beside Eddie, who was lying back with his eyes mostly closed and his chest heaving.

'Which one hit him?' Ben asked finally. He looked up, and Bill saw the same frustrated anger he had been feeling himself on the fat kid's face. 'Was it Henry Bowers?'

Bill nodded.

'It figures. Sure, go on. I'll stay with him.'

Thuh-thuh-hanks.'

'Oh, don't thank me,' Ben said. 'I'm the reason they landed on you in the first place. Go on. Hurry it up. I have to be home for supper.'

Bill went without saying anything else. It would have been good to tell Ben not to take it to heart — what had happened hadn't been Ben's fault any more than it had been Eddie's for stupidly opening his mouth. Guys like Henry and his buddies were an accident waiting to happen; the little kids' version of floods or tornadoes or gallstones. It would have been good to say that, but he was so tightly wound right now it would have taken him about twenty minutes or so, and by then Eddie might have slipped into a comber (that was another thing Bill had learned from Drs Casey and Kildare; you never went into a comber; you always slipped into one).

He trotted downstream, glancing back once. He saw Ben Hanscom grimly collecting rocks from the edge of the water. For a moment Bill couldn't figure out what he was doing, and then he understood. It was an ammo dump. Just in case they came back.

4

The Barrens were no mystery to Bill. He had played here a lot this spring, sometimes with Richie, more frequently with Eddie, sometimes all by himself. He had by no means explored the whole area, but he could find his way back to Kansas Street from the Kenduskeag with no trouble, and now did. He came out at a wooden bridge where Kansas Street crossed one of the little no –name streams that flowed out of the Derry drainage system and into the Kenduskeag down below. Silver was stashed under this bridge, his handlebars tied to one of the bridge supports with a hank of rope to keep his wheels out of the water.

Bill untied the rope, stuck it in his shirt, and hauled Silver up to the sidewalk by main force, panting and sweating, losing his balance a couple of times and landing on his tail.