“All Amtrak rail travel has been suspended, not just in Topeka but across all of Kansas. The Gage Boulevard Amtrak station has been closed until further notice.

“All Topeka schools have also been closed until further notice. This includes Districts 437, 345, 450 (Shawnee Heights), 372, and 501 (metro Topeka). Topeka Lutheran and Topeka Technical College are also closed, as is KU at Lawrence.

“Topekans must expect brownouts and perhaps blackouts in the days and weeks ahead. Kansas Power and Light has announced a ‘slow shutdown’ of the Kaw River Nuclear Plant in Wamego. Although no one in KawNuke’s Office of Public Relations answered this newspaper’s calls, a recorded announcement cautions that there is no plant emergency, that this is a safety measure only. KawNuke will return to on-line status, the announcement concludes, ‘when the current crisis is past.’ Any comfort afforded by this statement is in large part negated by the recorded statement’s final words, which are not ‘Goodbye’ or ‘Thank you for calling’ but ‘God will help us through our time of trial.’”

Jake paused, following the story to the next page, where there were more pictures: a burned-out panel truck overturned on the steps of the Kansas Museum of Natural History; traffic on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge stalled bumper to bumper; piles of corpses in Times Square. One body, Susannah saw, had been hung from a lamppost, and that brought back nightmarish memories of the run for the Cradle of Lud she and Eddie had made after parting from the gunslinger; memories of Luster and Winston and Jeeves and Maud. When the god-drums started up this time, it was Spanker’s stone what came out of the hat, Maud had said. We set him to dance. Except, of course, what she’d meant was that they had set him to hang. As they had hung some folks, it seemed, back home in little old New York. When things got weird enough, someone always found a lynchrope, it seemed.

Echoes. Everything echoed now. They bounced back and forth from one world to the other, not fading as ordinary echoes did but growing and becoming more terrible. Like the god-drums, Susannah thought, and shuddered.

“In national developments,” Jake read, “conviction continues to grow that, after denying the superflu’s existence during its early days, when quarantine measures might still have had some effect, national leaders have fled to underground retreats which were created as brain-trust shelters in case of nuclear war. Vice-President Bush and key members of the Reagan cabinet have not been seen during the last forty-eight hours. Reagan himself has not been seen since Sunday morning, when he attended prayer services at Green Valley Methodist Church in San Simeon.”

“They have gone to the bunkers like Hitler and the rest of the Nazi sewer-rats at the end of World War II,” said Rep. Steve Sloan. When asked if he had any objection to being quoted by name, Kansas’s first-term representative, a Republican, laughed and said: “Why should I? I’ve got a real fine case myself. I’ll be so much dust in the wind come this time next week.”

“Fires, most likely set, continue to ravage Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Terre Haute.

“A gigantic explosion centered near Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium was apparently not nuclear in nature, as was first feared, but occurred as the result of a natural gas buildup caused by unsupervised…”

Jake let the paper drop from his hands. A gust of wind caught it and blew it the length of the platform, the few folded sheets separating as they went. Oy stretched his neck and snagged one of these as it went by. He trotted toward Jake with it in his mouth, as obedient as a dog with a stick.

“No, Oy, I don’t want it,” Jake said. He sounded ill and very young.

“At least we know where all the folks are,” Susannah said, bending and taking the paper from Oy. It was the last two pages. They were crammed with obituaries printed in the tiniest type she had ever seen. No pictures, no causes of death, no announcement of burial services. Just this one died, beloved of so-and-so, that one died, beloved of Jill-n-Joe, t'other one died, beloved of them-and-those. All in that tiny, not-quite-even type. It was the jaggedness of the type which convinced her it was all real.

But how hard they tried to honor their dead, even at the end, she thought, and a lump rose in her throat. How hard they tried.

She folded the quarto together and looked on the back-the last page of the Capital-Journal. It showed a picture of Jesus Christ, eyes sad, hands outstretched, forehead marked from his crown of thorns. Below it, three stark words in huge type:

She looked up at Eddie, eyes accusing. Then she handed him the newspaper, one brown finger tapping the date at the top. It was June 24, 1986. Eddie had been drawn into the gunslinger’s world a year later.

He held it for a long time, fingers slipping back and forth across the date, as if the passage of his finger would somehow cause it to change. Then he looked up at them and shook his head. “No. I can’t explain this town, this paper, or the dead people in that station, but I can set you straight about one thing-everything was fine in New York when I left. Wasn’t it, Roland?”

The gunslinger looked a trifle sour. “Nothing in your city seemed very fine to me, but the people who lived there did not seem to be survivors of such a plague as this, no.”

“There was something called Legionnaires’ disease,” Eddie said. “And AIDS, of course-”

“That’s the sex one, right?” Susannah asked. “Transmitted by fruits and drug addicts?”

“Yes, but calling gays fruits isn’t the done thing in my when,” Eddie said. He tried a smile, but it felt stiff and unnatural on his face and he put it away again.

“So this… this never happened,” Jake said, tentatively touching the face of Christ on the back page of the paper.

“But it did,” Roland said. “It happened in June-sowing of the year one thousand nine hundred and eighty-six. And here we are, in the aftermath of that plague. If Eddie’s right about the length of time that has gone by, the plague of this ’superflu' was this past June-sowing. We’re in Topeka, Kansas, in the Reap of eighty-six. That’s the when of it. As to the where, all we know is that it’s not Eddie’s. It might be yours, Susannah, or yours, Jake, because you left your world before this arrived.” He tapped the date on the paper, then looked at Jake. “You said something to me once. I doubt if you remember, but I do; it’s one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me: 'Go, then, there are other worlds than these.'”

“More riddles,” Eddie said, scowling.

“Is it not a fact that Jake Chambers died once and now stands before us, alive and well? Or do you doubt my story of his death under the mountains? That you have doubted my honesty from time to time is something I know. And I suppose you have your reasons.”

Eddie thought it over, then shook his head. “You lie when it suits your purpose, but I think that when you told us about Jake, you were too fucked up to manage anything but the truth.”

Roland was startled to find himself hurt by what Eddie had said-You lie when it suits your purpose-but he went on. After all, it was essentially true.

“We went back to time’s pool,” the gunslinger said, “and pulled him out before he could drown.”

“You pulled him out,” Eddie corrected.

“You helped, though,” Roland said, “if only by keeping me alive, you helped, but let that go for now. It’s beside the point. What’s more to it is that there are many possible worlds, and an infinity of doors leading into them. This is one of those worlds; the thinny we can hear is one of those doors… only one much bigger than the ones we found on the beach.”

“How big?” Eddie asked. “As big as a warehouse loading door, or as big as the warehouse?”