Wolves of the Calla (98 page)

Pere Callahan stepped out of the field with Lia Jaffords cradled in his arms. In spite of the noise, the little girl was asleep. Callahan looked at the heaps of dead Wolves, took one hand from beneath the little girl’s bottom, and drew a slow, trembling cross in the air.

“God be thanked,” he said.

Roland went to him and took the hand that had made the cross. “Put one on me,” he said.

Callahan looked at him, uncomprehending.

Roland nodded to Vaughn Eisenhart. “That one promised I’d leave town with his curse on me if harm came to his wife.”

He could have said more, but there was no need. Callahan understood, and signed the cross on Roland’s brow. The fingernail trailed a warmth behind it that Roland felt a long time. And although Eisenhart never kept his promise, the gunslinger was never sorry that he’d asked the Pere for that extra bit of protection.

What followed was a confused jubilee there on the East Road, mingled with grief for the two who had fallen. Yet even the grief had a joyful light shining through it. No one seemed to feel that the losses were in any way equal to the gains. And Eddie supposed that was true. If it wasn’t your wife or your son who had fallen, that was.

The singing from town drew closer. Now they could see rising dust. In the road, men and women embraced. Someone tried to take Margaret Eisenhart’s head away from her husband, who for the time being refused to let it go.

Eddie drifted over to Jake.

“Never saw
Star Wars,
did you?” he asked.

“No, told you. I was
going
to, but—”

“You left too soon. I know. Those things they were swinging—Jake, they were from that movie.”

“You sure?”

“
Yes
. And the Wolves . . . Jake, the Wolves themselves . . . ”

Jake was nodding, very slowly. Now they could see the people from town. The newcomers saw the children—
all
the children, still here and still safe—and raised a cheer. Those in the forefront began to run. “I know.”

“
Do
you?” Eddie asked. His eyes were almost pleading. “Do you really? Because . . . man, it’s so
crazy
—”

Jake looked at the heaped Wolves. The green hoods. The gray leggings. The black boots. The snarling, decomposing faces. Eddie had already pulled one of those rotting metal faces away and looked at what was beneath it. Nothing but smooth metal, plus lenses that served as eyes, a round mesh grille that doubtless served as a nose, two sprouted microphones at the temples for ears. No, all the personality these things had was in the masks and clothing they wore.

“Crazy or not, I know what they are, Eddie. Or where they come from, at least. Marvel Comics.”

A look of sublime relief filled Eddie’s face. He bent and kissed Jake on the cheek. A ghost of a smile touched the boy’s mouth. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

“The
Spider-Man
books,” Eddie said. “When I was a kid I couldn’t get enough of those things.”

“I didn’t buy em myself,” Jake said, “but Timmy Mucci down at Mid-Town Lanes used to have a terrible jones for the Marvel mags.
Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America,
all of em. These guys . . . ”

“They look like Dr. Doom,” Eddie said.

“Yeah,” Jake said. “It’s not exact, I’m sure the masks were modified to make them look a little more like wolves, but otherwise . . . same green hoods, same green cloaks. Yeah, Dr. Doom.”

“And the sneetches,” Eddie said. “Have you ever heard of Harry Potter?”

“I don’t think so. Have you?”

“No, and I’ll tell you why. Because the sneetches are from the future. Maybe from some Marvel comic book that’ll come out in 1990 or 1995. Do you see what I’m saying?”

Jake nodded.

“It’s all nineteen, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jake said. “Nineteen, ninety-nine, and nineteen-ninety-nine.”

Eddie glanced around. “Where’s Suze?”

“Probably went after her chair,” Jake said. But before either of them could explore the question of Susannah Dean’s whereabouts any further (and by then it was probably too late, anyway), the first of the
folken
from town arrived. Eddie and Jake were swept into a wild, impromptu celebration—hugged, kissed, shaken by the hand, laughed over, wept over, thanked and thanked and thanked.

Ten minutes after the main body of the townsfolk arrived, Rosalita reluctantly approached Roland. The gunslinger was extremely glad to see her. Eben Took had taken him by the arms and was telling him—over and over again, endlessly, it seemed—
how wrong he and Telford had been, how utterly and completely wrong, and how when Roland and his ka-tet were ready to move on, Eben Took would outfit them from stem to stern and not a penny would they pay.

“Roland!” Rosa said.

Roland excused himself and took her by the arm, leading her a little way up the road. The Wolves had been scattered everywhere and were now being mercilessly looted of their possessions by the laughing, deliriously happy
folken
. Stragglers were arriving every minute.

“Rosa, what is it?”

“It’s your lady,” Rosa said. “Susannah.”

“What of her?” Roland asked. Frowning, he looked around. He didn’t see Susannah, couldn’t remember when he
had
last seen her. When he’d given Jake the cigarette? That long ago? He thought so. “Where is she?”

“That’s just it,” Rosa said. “I don’t know. So I peeked into the waggon she came in, thinking that perhaps she’d gone in there to rest. That perhaps she felt faint or gut-sick, do ya. But she’s not there. And Roland . . . her chair is gone.”

“Gods!” Roland snarled, and slammed his fist against his leg. “Oh,
gods
!”

Rosalita took a step back from him, alarmed.

“Where’s Eddie?” Roland asked.

She pointed. Eddie was so deep in a cluster of admiring men and women that Roland didn’t think he would have seen him, but for the child riding on his shoulders; it was Heddon Jaffords, an enormous grin on his face.

“Are you sure you want to disturb him?” Rosa
asked timidly. “May be she’s just gone off a bit, to pull herself back together.”

Gone off a bit,
Roland thought. He could feel a blackness filling his heart. His sinking heart. She’d gone off a bit, all right. And he knew who had stepped in to take her place. Their attention had wandered in the aftermath of the fight . . . Jake’s grief . . . the congratulations of the
folken
. . . the confusion and the joy and the singing . . . but that was no excuse.

“Gunslingers!”
he roared, and the jubilant crowd quieted at once. Had he cared to look, he could have seen the fear that lay just beneath their relief and adulation. It would not have been new to him; they were always afraid of those who came wearing the hard calibers. What they wanted of such when the shooting was done was to give them a final meal, perhaps a final gratitude-fuck, then send them on their way and pick up their own peaceful farming-tools once more.

Well,
Roland thought,
we’ll be going soon enough. In fact, one of us has gone already. Gods!

“Gunslingers, to me! To me!”

Eddie reached Roland first. He looked around. “Where’s Susannah?” he asked.

Roland pointed into the stony wasteland of bluffs and arroyos, then elevated his finger until it was pointing at a black hole just below the skyline. “I think there,” he said.

All the color had drained out of Eddie Dean’s face. “That’s Doorway Cave you’re pointing at,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

Roland nodded.

“But the ball . . . Black Thirteen . . . she wouldn’t
even go
near
it when it was in Callahan’s church—”

“No,” Roland said. “
Susannah
wouldn’t. But she’s not in charge anymore.”

“Mia?” Jake asked.

“Yes.” Roland studied the high hole with his faded eyes. “Mia’s gone to have her baby. She’s gone to have her chap.”

“No,” Eddie said. His hands wandered out and took hold of Roland’s shirt. Around them, the
folken
stood silently, watching. “Roland, say no.”

“We’ll go after her and hope we’re not too late,” Roland said.

But in his heart, he knew they already were.

They moved fast, but Mia moved faster. A mile beyond the place where the arroyo path divided, they found her wheelchair. She had pushed it hard, using her strong arms to give it a savage beating against the unforgiving terrain. Finally it had struck a jutting rock hard enough to bend the lefthand wheel out of true and render the chair useless. It was a wonder, really, that she had gotten as far in it as she had.

“Fuck-commala,” Eddie murmured, looking at the chair. At the dents and dings and scratches. Then he raised his head, cupped his hands around his mouth, and shouted.
“Fight her, Susannah! Fight her! We’re coming!”
He pushed past the chair and headed on up the path, not looking to see if the others were following.

“She can’t make it up the path to the cave, can she?” Jake asked. “I mean, her
legs
are gone.”

“Wouldn’t think so, would you?” Roland asked, but his face was dark. And he was limping. Jake started to say something about this, then thought better of it.

“What would she want up there, anyway?” Callahan asked.

Roland turned a singularly cold eye on him.
“To go somewhere else,” he said. “Surely you see that much. Come on.”

As they neared the place where the path began to climb, Roland caught up to Eddie. The first time he put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder, Eddie shook it off. The second time he turned—reluctantly—to look at his dinh. Roland saw there was blood spattered across the front of Eddie’s shirt. He wondered if it was Benny’s, Margaret’s, or both.

“Mayhap it’d be better to let her alone awhile, if it’s Mia,” Roland said.

“Are you crazy? Did fighting the Wolves loosen your
screws
?”

“If we let her alone, she may finish her business and be gone.” Even as he spoke the words, Roland doubted them.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, studying him with burning eyes, “she’ll finish her business, all right. First piece, have the kid. Second piece, kill my wife.”

“That would be suicide.”

“But she might do it. We have to go after her.”

Surrender was an art Roland practiced rarely but with some skill on the few occasions in his life when it had been necessary. He took another look at Eddie Dean’s pale, set face and practiced it now. “All right,” he said, “but we’ll have to be careful. She’ll fight to keep from being taken. She’ll kill, if it comes to that. You before any of us, mayhap.”

“I know,” Eddie said. His face was bleak. He looked up the path, but a quarter of a mile up, it
hooked around to the south side of the bluff and out of sight. The path zigged back to their side just below the mouth of the cave. That stretch of the climb was deserted, but what did that prove? She could be anywhere. It crossed Eddie’s mind that she might not even be up there at all, that the crashed chair might have been as much a red herring as the children’s possessions Roland had had scattered along the arroyo path.

I won’t believe that. There’s a million ratholes in this part of the Calla, and if I believe that she could be in any of them
. . .

Callahan and Jake had caught up and stood there looking at Eddie.

“Come on,” he said. “I don’t care who she is, Roland. If four able-bodied men can’t catch one no-legs lady, we ought to turn in our guns and call it a day.”

Jake smiled wanly. “I’m touched. You just called me a man.”

“Don’t let it go to your head, Sunshine. Come on.”

Eddie and Susannah spoke and thought of each other as man and wife, but he hadn’t exactly been able to take a cab over to Cartier’s and buy her a diamond and a wedding band. He’d once had a pretty nice high school class ring, but that he’d lost in the sand at Coney Island during the summer he turned seventeen, the summer of Mary Jean Sobieski. Yet on their journeyings from the Western Sea, Eddie had rediscovered his talent as a wood-carver (“wittle baby-ass whittler,” the great sage and
eminent junkie would have said), and Eddie had carved his beloved a beautiful ring of willowgreen, light as foam but strong. This Susannah had worn between her breasts, hung on a length of rawhide.

They found it at the foot of the path, still on its rawhide loop. Eddie picked it up, looked at it grimly for a moment, then slipped it over his own head, inside his own shirt.

“Look,” Jake said.

They turned to a place just off the path. Here, in a patch of scant grass, was a track. Not human, not animal. Three wheels in a configuration that made Eddie think of a child’s tricycle. What the hell?

“Come on,” he said, and wondered how many times he’d said it since realizing she was gone. He also wondered how long they’d keep following him if he kept on saying it. Not that it mattered. He’d go on until he had her again, or until he was dead. Simple as that. What frightened him most was the baby . . . what she called the chap. Suppose it turned on her? And he had an idea it might do just that.