“It was, actually,” Eddie said. “Even stuffed so full of reds we were as apt to pee on our own shoes as in the bushes, it was excellent.” He paused. “That’s the horrible part, don’t you get it?”
“Tumpikin’,” the gunslinger said. “Let’s do some.”
They left Gage Park and crossed the road to the entrance ramp.
5
Someone had spray-painted over both signs marking the ramp’s ascending curve. On the one reading st. louis 215, someone had slashed in black. On the one marked next rest area 10 mi., had been written in fat red letters. That scarlet was still bright enough to scream even after an entire summer. Each had been decorated with a symbol-
“Do you know what any of that truck means, Roland?” Susannah asked. Roland shook his head, but he looked troubled, and that introspective look never left his own eyes. They went on.
6
At the place where the ramp merged with the turnpike, the two men, the boy, and the bumbler clustered around Susannah in her new wheelchair. All of them looked east.
Eddie didn’t know what the traffic situation would be like once they cleared Topeka, but here all the lanes, those headed west as well as the eastbound ones on their side, were crammed with cars and trucks. Most of the vehicles were piled high with possessions gone rusty with a season’s worth of rain.
But the traffic was the least of their concerns as they stood there, looking silently eastward. For half a mile or so on either side of them, the city continued-they could see church steeples, a strip of fast food places (Arby’s, Wendy’s, McD’s, Pizza Hut, and one Eddie had never heard of called Boing Boing Burgers), car dealerships, the roof of a bowling alley called Heartland Lanes. They could see another turnpike exit ahead, the sign by the ramp reading Topeka State Hospital and S.W. 6th. Beyond the off-ramp there bulked a massive old red brick edifice with tiny windows peering like desperate eyes out of the climbing ivy. Eddie figured a place that looked so much like Attica had to be a hospital, probably the kind of welfare purgatory where poor folks sat in shitty plastic chairs for hours on end, all so some doctor could look at them like they were dogshit.
Beyond the hospital, the city abruptly ended and the thinny began.
To Eddie, it looked like flat water standing in a vast marshland. It crowded up to the raised barrel of 1-70 on both sides, silvery and shimmering, making the signs and guardrails and stalled cars waver like mirages; it gave off that liquidy humming sound like a stench.
Susannah put her hands to her ears, her mouth drawn down. “I don’t know as I can stand it. Really. I don’t mean to be spleeny, but already I feel like vomiting, and I haven’t had anything to eat all day.”
Eddie felt the same way. Yet, sick as he felt he could hardly take his eyes away from the thinny. It was as if unreality had been given… what? A face? No. The vast and humming silver shimmer ahead of them had no face, was the very antithesis of a face, in fact, but it had a body… an aspect… a presence.
Yes; that last was best. It had a presence, as the demon which had come to the circle of stones while they were trying to draw Jake had had a presence.
Roland, meanwhile, was rummaging in the depths of his purse. He appeared to dig all the way to the bottom before finding what he wanted: a fistful of bullets. He plucked Susannah’s right hand off the arm of her chair, and put two of the bullets in her palm. Then he took two more and poked them, slug ends first, into his ears. Susannah looked first amazed, then amused, then doubtful. In the end, she followed his example. Almost at once an expression of blissful relief filled her face.
Eddie unshouldered the pack he wore and pulled out the half-full box of.44s that went with Jake’s Ruger. The gunslinger shook his head and held out his hand. There were still four bullets in it, two for Eddie and two for Jake.
“What’s wrong with these?” Eddie shook a couple of shells from the box that had come from behind the hanging files in Elmer Chambers’s desk drawer.
“They’re from your world and they won’t block out the sound. Don’t ask me how I know that; I just do. Try them if you want, but they won’t work.”
Eddie pointed at the bullets Roland was offering. “Those are from our world, too. The gun-shop on Seventh and Forty-ninth. Clements', wasn’t that the name?”
“These didn’t come from there. These are mine, Eddie, reloaded often but originally brought from the green land. From Gilead.”
“You mean the wets?” Eddie asked incredulously. “The last of the wet shells from the beach? The ones that really got soaked?”
Roland nodded.
“You said those would never fire again! No matter how dry they got! That the powder had been… what did you say? ‘Flattened.’”
Roland nodded again.
“So why’d you save them? Why bring a bunch of useless bullets all this way?”
“What did I teach you to say after a kill, Eddie? In order to focus your mind?”
“Father, guide my hands and heart so that no part of the animal will be wasted.”
Roland nodded a third time. Jake took two shells and put them in his ears. Eddie took the last two, but first he tried the ones he’d shaken from the box. They muffled the sound of the thinny, but it was still there, vibrating in the center of his forehead, making his eyes water the way they did when he had a cold, making the bridge of his nose feel like it was going to explode. He picked them out, and put the bigger slugs-the ones from Roland’s ancient revolvers-in their place. Putting bullets in my ears, he thought. Ma would shit. But that didn’t matter. The sound of the thinny was gone-or at least down to a distant drone-and that was what did. When he turned and spoke to Roland, he expected his own voice to sound muffled, the way it did when you were wearing earplugs, but he found he could hear himself pretty well.
“Is there anything you don’t know?” he asked Roland.
“Yes,” Roland said. “Quite a lot.”
“What about Oy?” Jake asked.
“Oy will be fine, I think,” Roland said. “Come on, let’s make some miles before dark.”
7
Oy didn’t seem bothered by the warble of the thinny, but he stuck close to Jake Chambers all that afternoon, looking mistrustfully at the stalled cars which clogged the eastbound lanes of 1-70. And yet, Susannah saw, those cars did not clog the highway completely. The congestion eased as the travellers left downtown behind them, but even where the traffic had been heavy, some of the dead vehicles had been pulled to one side or the other; a number had been pushed right off the highway and onto the median strip, which was a concrete divider in the metro area and grass outside of town.
Somebody’s been at work with a wrecker, that’s my guess, Susannah thought. The idea made her happy. No one would have bothered clearing a path down the center of the highway while the plague was still raging, and if someone had done it after-if someone had been around to do it after-that meant the plague hadn’t gotten everyone; those crammed-together obituaries weren’t the whole story.
There were corpses in some of the cars, but they, like the ones at the foot of the station steps, were dry, not runny-mummies wearing seat-belts, for the most part. The majority of the cars were empty. A lot of the drivers and passengers caught in the traffic jams had probably tried to walk out of the plague-zone, she supposed, but she guessed that wasn’t the only reason they had taken to their feet.
Susannah knew that she herself would have to be chained to the steering wheel to keep her inside a car once she felt the symptoms of some fatal disease setting in; if she was going to die, she would want to do it in God’s open air. A hill would be best, someplace with a little elevation, but even a wheatfield would do, came it to that. Anything but coughing your last while smelling the air-freshener dangling from the rearview mirror.