Jake turned his head, meaning to tell Rolandthat now he understood why they sent robot raiders through their damneddoor, and then he vomited again. The remains of his last meal ran steamingacross cracked concrete.
All at once Susannah was crying “No! No!”in a distraught voice. Then “Put me down! Eddie, put me down before I—”Her voice was interrupted by harsh yarking sounds. Eddie managed to deposit heron the cracked concrete before turning his head and joining the Upchuck Chorus.
Oy fell on his side, hacked hoarsely, thengot back on his feet. He looked dazed and disoriented… or maybe Jake was onlyattributing to the bumbler the way he felt himself.
The nausea was beginning to fade a littlewhen he heard clacking, echoing footfalls. Three men were hurrying toward them,all dressed in jeans, blue chambray shirts, and odd, homemade-looking footwear.One of them, an elderly gent with a mop of untidy white hair, was ahead of theother two. All three had their hands in the air.
“Gunslingers!” cried the man with the whitehair. “Are you gunslingers? If you are, don’t shoot! We’re on yourside!”
Roland, who looked in no condition to shootanyone (Not that I’d want to test that, Jake thought), tried to get up,almost made it, then went back to one knee and made another strangled retchingsound. The man with the white hair seized one of his wrists and hauled him upwithout ceremony.
“The sickness is bad,” the old man said,“no one knows it any better than I. Fortunately it passes rapidly. You have tocome with us right away. I know how little you feel like it but you see,there’s an alarm in the ki’-dam’s study and—”
He stopped. His eyes, almost as blue asRoland’s, were widening. Even in the gloom Jake could see the old guy’s facelosing its color. His friends had caught up with him, but he seemed not tonotice. It was Jake Chambers he was looking at.
“Bobby?” he said in a voice that was notmuch more than a whisper. “My God, is it Bobby Garfield?”
Chapter V:
Steek-Tete
One
The white-haired gent’s companions were agood deal younger (one looked to Roland hardly out of his teens), and bothseemed absolutely terrified. Afraid of being shot by mistake, ofcourse—that was why they’d come hurrying out of the gloom with theirhands raised—but of something else, as well, because it must be clear tothem now that they weren’t going to be assassinated out of hand.
The older man gave an almost spastic jerk,pulling himself out of some private place. “Of course you’re not Bobby,” hemurmured. “Hair’s the wrong color, for one thing… and—”
“Ted, we have to get out of here,”the youngest of the three said urgently. “And I mean inmediatamento.”
“Yes,” the older man said, but his gazeremained on Jake. He put a hand over his eyes (to Eddie he looked like a carnymentalist getting ready to go into his big thought-reading routine), thenlowered it again. “Yes, of course.” He looked at Roland. “Are you the dinh?Roland of Gilead? Roland of the Eld?”
“Yes, I—” Roland began, then bentover and retched again. Nothing came out but a long silver string of spittle;he’d already lost his share of Nigel’s soup and sandwiches. Then he raised aslightly trembling fist to his forehead in greeting and said, “Yes. You havethe advantage of me, sai.”
“That doesn’t matter,” the white-haired manreplied. “Will you come with us? You and your ka-tet?”
“To be sure,” Roland said.
Behind him, Eddie bent over and vomitedagain. “Goddamn!” he cried in a choked voice. “And I thought goingGreyhound was bad! That thing makes the bus look like a… a…”
“Like a first-class stateroom on the QueenMary,” Susannah said in a weak voice.
“Come… on!” the youngest man said inan urgent voice. “If The Weasel’s on the way with his taheen posse, he’ll behere in five minutes! That cat can scramble!”
“Yes,” the man with the white hair agreed.“We really must go, Mr. Deschain.”
“Lead,” Roland said. “We’ll follow.”
Two
They hadn’t come out in a train station butrather in some sort of colossal roofed switching-yard. The silvery lines Jakehad seen were crisscrossing rail-lines, perhaps as many as seventy different setsof tracks. On a couple of them, stubby, automated engines went back and forthon errands that had to be centuries outdated. One was pushing a flatcar filledwith rusty I-beams. The other began to cry in an automated voice: “Will aCamka-A please go to Portway 9. Camka-A to Portway 9, if you please.”
Pogo-sticking up and down on Eddie’s hipbegan to make Susannah feel sick to her stomach all over again, but she’dcaught the white-haired man’s urgency like a cold. Also, she now knew what thetaheen were: monstrous creatures with the bodies of human beings and the headsof either birds or beasts. They reminded her of the things in that Boschpainting, The Garden of Earthly Delights.
“I may have to puke again, sugarbunch,” shesaid. “Don’t you dare slow down if I do.”
Eddie made a grunting sound she took for anaffirmative. She could see sweat pouring down his pale skin and felt sorry forhim. He was as sick as she was. So now she knew what it was like to go througha scientific teleportation device that was clearly no longer working very well.She wondered if she would ever be able to bring herself to go through anotherone.
Jake looked up and saw a roof made of amillion panes of different shapes and sizes; it was like looking at a tilemosaic painted a uniform dark gray. Then a bird flew through one of them, andhe realized those weren’t tiles up there but panels of glass, some of thembroken. That dark gray was apparently just how the outside world looked inThunderclap. Like a constant eclipse, he thought, and shivered. Besidehim, Oy made another series of those hoarse hacking sounds and then trotted on,shaking his head.
Three
They passed a clutter of beachedmachinery—generators, maybe—then entered a maze of helter-skeltertraincars that were very different from those hauled by Blaine the Mono. Somelooked to Susannah like the sort of New York Central commuter cars she mighthave seen in Grand Central Station in her own when of 1964. As if to underlinethis notion, she noticed one with BAR CAR printed on the side. Yet therewere others that appeared much older than that; made of dark riveted tin orsteel instead of brushed chrome, they looked like the sort of passenger carsyou’d see in an old Western movie, or a TV show like Maverick. Besideone of these stood a robot with wires sprouting crazily from its neck. It washolding its head—which wore a hat with a badge reading CLASS A CONDUCTORon it—beneath one arm.
At first Susannah tried to keep count ofthe lefts and rights they were making in this maze, then gave it up as a badjob. They finally emerged about fifty yards from a clapboard-sided hut with thealliterative message LADING/LOST LUGGAGE over the door. The interveningdistance was an apron of cracked concrete scattered with abandoned luggage-carts,stacks of crates, and two dead Wolves. No, Susannah thought, makethat three. The third one was leaning against the wall in the deepershadows just around the corner from LADING/LOST LUGGAGE.
“Come on,” said the old man with the mop ofwhite hair, “not much further, now. But we have to hurry, because if the taheenfrom Heartbreak House catch us, they’ll kill you.”
“They’d kill us, too,” said the youngest ofthe three. He brushed his hair out of his eyes. “All except for Ted. Ted’s theonly one of us who’s indispensable. He’s just too modest to say so.”