Lamla ordered three low men and one of the vamps forward, put two on each side, and talked to them rapidly in another language. Flaherty gathered that a couple of them had already been down here and, like Lam, remembered about where the projectors lay hidden in the walls.
Meanwhile, Flaherty’s dragon—or, more properly speaking, his da’s dragon—continued to rampage in the deep dark forest (the jungle was completely gone now) and set things on fire.
At last—although it seemed a very long time to Flaherty, it was probably less than thirty seconds—the sharpshooters began to fire. Almost immediately both forest and dragon paled before Flaherty’s eyes, turned into something that looked like overexposed movie footage.
“That’s one of em, cullies!” Lamla yelled in a voice that became unfortunately ovine when it was raised. “Pour it on! Pour it on for the love of your fathers!”
Half this crew probably never had such a thing, Flaherty thought morosely. Then came the clearly audible shatter-sound of breaking glass and the dragon froze in place with billows of flame issuing from its mouth and nostrils, as well as from the gills on the sides of its armored throat.
Encouraged, the sharpshooters began firing faster, and a few moments later the clearing and the frozen dragon both disappeared. Where they had been was only more tiled hallway, with the tracks of those who had recently passed this way marking the dust. On either side were the shattered projector portals.
“All right!” Flaherty yelled after giving Lamla an approving nod. “Now we’re going after the kid, and we’re going to double-time it, and we’re going to catch him, and we’re going to bring him back with his head on a stick! Are you with me?”
They roared savage agreement, none louder than Lamla, whose eyes glowed the same baleful yellow-orange as the dragon’s breath.
“Good, then!” Flaherty set off, roaring a tune any Marine drill-corps would have recognized: “We don’t care how far you run—”
“WE DON’T CARE HOW FAR YOU RUN!” they bawled back as they trotted four abreast through the place where Jake’s jungle had been. Their feet crunched in the shattered glass.
“We’ll bring you back before we’re done!”
“WE’LL BRING YOU BACK BEFORE WE’RE DONE!”
“You can run to Cain or Lud—”
“YOU CAN RUN TO CAIN OR LUD!”
“We’ll eat your balls and drink your blood!”
They called it in return, and Flaherty picked up the pace yet a little more.
Eleven
Jake heard them coming again, come-come-commala. Heard them promising to eat his balls and drink his blood.
Brag, brag, brag, he thought, but tried to run faster, anyway. He was alarmed to find he couldn’t. Doing the mindswap with Oy had tired him out quite a little b—
No.
Roland had taught him that self-deception was nothing but pride in disguise, an indulgence to be denied. Jake had done his best to heed this advice, and as a result admitted that “being tired” no longer described his situation. The stitch in his side had grown fangs that had sunk deep into his armpit. He knew he had gained on his pursuers; he also knew from the shouted cadence-chant that they were making up the distance they’d lost. Soon they would be shooting at him and Oy again, and while men didn’t shoot for shit while they were running, someone could always get lucky.
Now he saw something up ahead, blocking the corridor. A door. As he approached it, Jake allowed himself to wonder what he’d do if Susannah wasn’t on the other side. Or if she was there but didn’t know how to help him.
Well, he and Oy would make a stand, that was all. No cover, no way to reenact Thermopylae Pass this time, but he’d throw plates and take heads until they brought him down.
If he needed to, that was.
Maybe he would not.
Jake pounded toward the door, his breath now hot in his throat—close to burning—and thought, It’s just as well. I couldn’t have run much further, anyway.
Oy got there first. He put his front paws on the ghostwood and looked up as if reading the words stamped into the door and the message flashing below them. Then he looked back at Jake, who came panting up with one hand pressed against his armpit and the remaining Orizas clanging loudly back and forth in their bag.
NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.
New York/Fedic
Maximum Security
VERBAL ENTRY CODE REQUIRED
#9 FINAL DEFAULT
He tried the doorknob, but that was only a formality. When the chilly metal refused to turn in his grip, he didn’t bother trying again but hammered the heels of both hands against the wood, instead. “Susannah!” he shouted. “If you’re there, let me in!”
Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin he heard his father say, and his mother, much more gravely, as if she knew storytelling was serious business: I heard a fly buzz… when I died.
From behind the door there was nothing. From behind Jake, the chanting voices of the Crimson King’s posse swept closer.
“Susannah!” he bawled, and when there was no answer this time he turned, put his back to the door (hadn’t he always known it would end just this way, with his back to a locked door?), and seized an Oriza in each hand. Oy stood between his feet, and now his fur was bushed out, now the velvety-soft skin of his muzzle wrinkled back to show his teeth.
Jake crossed his arms, assuming “the load.”
“Come on then, you bastards,” he said. “For Gilead and the Eld. For Roland, son of Steven. For me and Oy.”
At first he was too fiercely concentrated on dying well, of taking at least one of them with him (the fellow who’d told him the Faddah was dinnah would be his personal preference) and more if he could, to realize the voice he was hearing had come from the other side of the door rather than from his own mind.
“Jake! Is it really you, sugarpie?”
His eyes widened. Oh please let it not be a trick. If it was, Jake reckoned that he would never be played another.
“Susannah, they’re coming! Do you know how—”
“Yes! Should still be chassit, do you hear me? If Nigel’s right, the word should still be cha—”
Jake didn’t give her a chance to finish saying it again. Now he could see them sweeping toward him, running full-out. Some waving guns and already shooting into the air.
“Chassit!” he yelled. “Chassit for the Tower! Open! Open, you son of a bitch!”
Behind his pressing back the door between New York and Fedic clicked open. At the head of the charging posse, Flaherty saw it happen, uttered the bitterest curse in his lexicon, and fired a single bullet. He was a good shot, and all the force of his not inconsiderable will went with that particular slug, guiding it. No doubt it would have punched through Jake’s forehead above the left eye, entering his brain and ending his life, had not a strong, brown-fingered hand seized Jake by the collar at that very moment and yanked him backward through the shrill elevator-shaft whistle that sounds endlessly between the levels of the Dark Tower. The bullet buzzed by his head instead of entering it.
Oy came with him, barking his friend’s name shrilly—Ake-Ake, Ake-Ake!—and the door slammed shut behind them. Flaherty reached it twenty seconds later and hammered on it until his fists bled (when Lamla tried to restrain him, Flaherty thrust him back with such ferocity that the taheen went a-sprawl), but there was nothing he could do. Hammering did not work; cursing did not work; nothing worked.
At the very last minute, the boy and the bumbler had eluded them. For yet a little while longer the core of Roland’s ka-tet remained unbroken.