Wolves of the Calla (90 page)

“What’s your password, sai Eddie?”

“Think we’ve been down this road before, haven’t we?”

“Password. You have ten seconds. Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . ”

“That password shit’s very convenient for you, isn’t it?”

“Incorrect password, sai Eddie.”

“Kinda like taking the Fifth.”

“Two . . . one . . . zero. You may retry once. Would you retry, Eddie?”

Eddie gave him a sunny smile. “Does the seminon blow in the summertime, old buddy?”

More clicks and clacks. Andy’s head, which had been tilted one way, now tilted the other. “I do not follow you, Eddie of New York.”

“Sorry. I’m just being a silly old human bean, aren’t I? No, I don’t want to retry. At least not right now. Let me tell you what we’d like you to help us with, and you can tell us if your programming will allow you to do it. Does that sound fair?”

“Fair as fresh air, Eddie.”

“Okay.” Eddie reached up and took hold of
Andy’s thin metal arm. The surface was smooth and somehow unpleasant to the touch. Greasy. Oily. Eddie held on nonetheless, and lowered his voice to a confidential level. “I’m only telling you this because you’re clearly good at keeping secrets.”

“Oh, yes, sai Eddie! No one keeps a secret like Andy!” The robot was back on solid ground and back to his old self, smug and complacent.

“Well . . . ” Eddie went up on tiptoe. “Bend down here.”

Servomotors hummed inside Andy’s casing—inside what would have been his heartbox, had he not been a high-tech tin-man. He bent down. Eddie, meanwhile, stretched up even further, feeling absurdly like a small boy telling a secret.

“The Pere’s got some guns from our level of the Tower,” he murmured. “Good ones.”

Andy’s head swiveled around. His eyes glared out with a brilliance that could only have been astonishment. Eddie kept a poker face, but inside he was grinning.

“Say true, Eddie?”

“Say thankya.”

“Pere says they’re powerful,” Tian said. “If they work, we can use em to blow the living bugger out of the Wolves. But we have to get em out north of town . . . and they’re heavy. Can you help us load em in a bucka on Wolf’s Eve, Andy?”

Silence. Clicks and clacks.

“Programming won’t let him, I bet,” Eddie said sadly. “Well, if we get enough strong backs—”

“I can help you,” Andy said. “Where are these guns, sais?”

“Better not say just now,” Eddie replied. “You meet us at the Pere’s rectory early on Wolf’s Eve, all right?”

“What hour would you have me?”

“How does six sound?”

“Six o’ the clock. And how many guns will there be? Tell me that much, at least, so I may calculate the required energy levels.”

My friend, it takes a bullshitter to recognize bullshit,
Eddie thought merrily, but kept a straight face. “There be a dozen. Maybe fifteen. They weigh a couple of hundred pounds each. Do you know pounds, Andy?”

“Aye, say thankya. A pound is roughly four hundred and fifty grams. Sixteen ounces. ‘A pint’s a pound, the world around.’ Those are big guns, sai Eddie, say true! Will they shoot?”

“We’re pretty sure they will,” Eddie said. “Aren’t we, Tian?”

Tian nodded. “And you’ll help us?”

“Aye, happy to. Six o’ the clock, at the rectory.”

“Thank you, Andy,” Eddie said. He started away, then looked back. “You absolutely won’t talk about this, will you?”

“No, sai, not if you tell me not to.”

“That’s just what I’m telling you. The last thing we want is for the Wolves to find out we’ve got some big guns to use against em.”

“Of course not,” Andy said. “What good news this is. Have a wonderful day, sais.”

“And you, Andy,” Eddie replied. “And you.”

Walking back toward Tian’s place—it was only two miles distant from where they’d come upon Andy—Tian said, “Does he believe it?”

“I don’t know,” Eddie said, “but it surprised the shit out of him—did you feel that?”

“Yes,” Tian said. “Yes, I did.”

“He’ll be there to see for himself, I guarantee that much.”

Tian nodded, smiling. “Your dinh is clever.”

“That he is,” Eddie agreed. “That he is.”

Once more Jake lay awake, looking up at the ceiling of Benny’s room. Once more Oy lay on Benny’s bed, curved into a comma with his nose beneath his squiggle of tail. Tomorrow night Jake would be back at Father Callahan’s, back with his ka-tet, and he couldn’t wait. Tomorrow would be Wolf’s Eve, but this was only the
eve
of Wolf’s Eve, and Roland had felt it would be best for Jake to stay this one last night at the Rocking B. “We don’t want to raise suspicions this late in the game,” he’d said. Jake understood, but boy, this was sick. The prospect of standing against the Wolves was bad enough. The thought of how Benny might look at him two days from now was even worse.

Maybe we’ll all get killed,
Jake thought.
Then I won’t have to worry about it.

In his distress, this idea actually had a certain attraction.

“Jake? You asleep?”

For a moment Jake considered faking it, but something inside sneered at such cowardice. “No,” he said. “But I ought to try, Benny. I doubt if I’ll get much tomorrow night.”

“I guess
not,
” Benny whispered back respectfully, and then: “You scared?”

“ ’Course I am,” Jake said. “What do you think I am, crazy?”

Benny got up on one elbow. “How many do you think you’ll kill?”

Jake thought about it. It made him sick to think about it, way down in the pit of his stomach, but he thought about it anyway. “Dunno. If there’s seventy, I guess I’ll have to try to get ten.”

He found himself thinking (with a mild sense of wonder) of Ms. Avery’s English class. The hanging yellow globes with ghostly dead flies lying in their bellies. Lucas Hanson, who always tried to trip him when he was going up the aisle. Sentences diagrammed on the blackboard: beware the misplaced modifier. Petra Jesserling, who always wore A-line jumpers and had a crush on him (or so Mike Yanko claimed). The drone of Ms. Avery’s voice. Outs at noon—what would be plain old lunch in a plain old public school. Sitting at his desk afterward and trying to stay awake. Was that boy, that neat Piper School boy, actually going out to the north of a farming town called Calla Bryn Sturgis to battle child-stealing monsters? Could that boy be lying dead thirty-six hours from now with his guts in a steaming pile behind him, blown out of his back and into the dirt by something called a sneetch? Surely that wasn’t possible, was it? The housekeeper, Mrs. Shaw, had cut the crusts off his sandwiches
and sometimes called him ’Bama. His father had taught him how to calculate a fifteen per cent tip. Such boys surely did not go out to die with guns in their hands. Did they?

“I bet you get
twenty
!” Benny said. “Boy, I wish I could be with you! We’d fight side by side! Pow! Pow! Pow! Then we’d reload!”

Jake sat up and looked at Benny with real curiosity. “
Would
you?” he asked. “If you could?”

Benny thought about it. His face changed, was suddenly older and wiser. He shook his head. “Nah. I’d be scared. Aren’t you really scared? Say true?”

“Scared to death,” Jake said simply.

“Of dying?”

“Yeah, but I’m even more scared of fucking up.”

“You won’t.”

Easy for you to say,
Jake thought.

“If I have to go with the little kids, at least I’m glad my father’s going, too,” Benny said. “He’s taking his bah. You ever seen him shoot?”

“No.”

“Well, he’s good with it. If any of the Wolves get past you guys, he’ll take care of them. He’ll find that gill-place on their chests, and
pow
!”

What if Benny knew the gill-place was a lie? Jake wondered. False information this boy’s father would hopefully pass on? What if he knew—

Eddie spoke up in his head, Eddie with his wise-ass Brooklyn accent in full flower.
Yeah, and if fish had bicycles, every fuckin river’d be the Tour de France.

“Benny, I really have to try to get some sleep.”

Benny lay back down. Jake did the same, and resumed looking up at the ceiling. All at once he
hated it that Oy was on Benny’s bed, that Oy had taken so naturally to the other boy. All at once he hated everything about everything. The hours until morning, when he could pack, mount his borrowed pony, and ride back to town, seemed to stretch out into infinity.

“Jake?”

“What, Benny,
what
?”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to say I’m glad you came here. We had some fun, didn’t we?”

“Yeah,” Jake said, and thought:
No one would believe he’s older than me. He sounds about
. . .
I don’t know
. . .
five, or something
. That was mean, but Jake had an idea that if he wasn’t mean, he might actually start to cry. He hated Roland for sentencing him to this last night at the Rocking B. “Yeah, fun big-big.”

“I’m gonna miss you. But I’ll bet they put up a statue of you guys in the Pavilion, or something.”
Guys
was a word Benny had picked up from Jake, and he used it every chance he got.

“I’ll miss you, too,” Jake said.

“You’re lucky, getting to follow the Beam and travel places. I’ll probably be here in this shitty town the rest of my life.”

No, you won’t. You and your Da’ are going to do plenty of wandering
. . .
if you’re lucky and they let you out of town, that is. What you’re going to do, I think, is spend the rest of your life dreaming about this shitty little town. About a place that was home. And it’s my doing. I saw
. . .
and I told. But what else could I do?

“Jake?”

He could stand no more. It would drive him mad. “Go to sleep, Benny. And let
me
go to sleep.”

“Okay.”

Benny rolled over to face the wall. In a little while his breathing slowed. A little while after that, he began snoring. Jake lay awake until nearly midnight, and then he went to sleep, too. And had a dream. In it Roland was down on his knees in the dust of East Road, facing a great horde of oncoming Wolves that stretched from the bluffs to the river. He was trying to reload, but both of his hands were stiff and one was short two fingers. The bullets fell uselessly in front of him. He was still trying to load his great revolver when the Wolves rode him down.

Dawn of Wolf’s Eve. Eddie and Susannah stood at the window of the Pere’s guest room, looking down the slope of lawn to Rosa’s cottage.

“He’s found something with her,” Susannah said. “I’m glad for him.”

Eddie nodded. “How you feeling?”

She smiled up at him. “I’m fine,” she said, and meant it. “What about you, sugar?”

“I’ll miss sleeping in a real bed with a roof over my head, and I’m anxious to get to it, but otherwise I’m fine, too.”

“Things go wrong, you won’t have to worry about the accommodations.”

“That’s true,” Eddie said, “but I don’t think they’re going to go wrong. Do you?”

Before she could answer, a gust of wind shook the house and whistled beneath the eaves. The seminon saying good day to ya, Eddie guessed.

“I don’t like that wind,” she said. “It’s a wild-card.”

Eddie opened his mouth.

“And if you say anything about ka, I’ll punch you in the nose.”

Eddie closed his mouth again and mimed zipping it shut. Susannah went to his nose anyway, a brief touch of knuckles like a feather. “We’ve got a fine chance to win,” she said. “They’ve had everything their own way for a long time, and it’s made em fat. Like Blaine.”

“Yeah. Like Blaine.”

She put a hand on his hip and turned him to her. “But things
could
go wrong, so I want to tell you something while it’s just the two of us, Eddie. I want to tell you how much I love you.” She spoke simply, with no drama.

“I know you do,” he said, “but I’ll be damned if I know why.”

“Because you make me feel whole,” she said. “When I was younger, I used to vacillate between thinking love was this great and glorious mystery and thinking it was just something a bunch of Hollywood movie producers made up to sell more tickets back in the Depression, when Dish Night kind of played out.”

Eddie laughed.

“Now I think that all of us are born with a hole in our hearts, and we go around looking for the person who can fill it. You . . . Eddie, you fill me up.” She took his hand and began to lead him back to the bed. “And right now I’d like you to fill me up the other way.”

“Suze, is it safe?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “and I don’t care.”

They made love slowly, the pace only building near the end. She cried out softly against his shoulder, and in the instant before his own climax blotted out reflection, Eddie thought:
I’m going to lose her if I’m not careful. I don’t know how I know that
. . .
but I do. She’ll just disappear
.

“I love you, too,” he said when they were finished and lying side by side again.

“Yes.” She took his hand. “I know. I’m glad.”

“It’s good to make someone glad,” he said. “I didn’t use to know that.”

“It’s all right,” Susannah said, and kissed the corner of his mouth. “You learn fast.”

There was a rocker in Rosa’s little living room. The gunslinger sat in it naked, holding a clay saucer in one hand. He was smoking and looking out at the sunrise. He wasn’t sure he would ever again see it rise from this place.

Rosa came out of the bedroom, also naked, and stood in the doorway looking at him. “How’re y’bones, tell me, I beg?”

Roland nodded. “That oil of yours is a wonder.”

“ ’Twon’t last.”

“No,” Roland said. “But there’s another world—my friends’ world—and maybe they have something there that will. I’ve got a feeling we’ll be going there soon.”

“More fighting to do?”

“I think so, yes.”

“You won’t be back this way in any case, will you?”

Roland looked at her. “No.”

“Are you tired, Roland?”