The Drawing of the Three (The Dark Tower #2)(87)

She took the chunks of lobster-meat, wrinkled her nose in a rueful comic expression, and looked up at him.

"Must I?"

"Just give it a shot," he said.

"I never ate scallops again," she said.

"Pardon?"

"I thought I told you."

"You might have," he said, and gave a little nervous laugh. What the gunslinger had said about not letting her know about the other loomed very large inside his mind just then.

"We had them for dinner one night when I was ten or eleven. I hated the way they tasted, like little rubber balls, and later I vomited them up. I never ate them again. But ..." She sighed. "As you say, I'll 'give it a shot.'"

She put a piece in her mouth like a child taking a spoonful of medicine she knows will taste nasty. She chewed slowly at first, then more rapidly. She swallowed. Took another piece. Chewed, swallowed. Another. Now she was nearly wolfing it.

"Whoa, slow down!" Eddie said.

"It must be another kind! That's it, of course it is!" She looked at Eddie shiningly. "We've moved further up the beach and the species has changed! I'm no longer allergic, it seems! It doesn't taste nasty, like it did before ... and I did try to keep it down, didn't I?" She looked at him nakedly. "I tried very hard."

"Yeah." To himself he sounded like a radio broadcasting a very distant signal. She thinks she's been eating every day and then upchucking everything. She thinks that's why she's so weak. Christ Almighty. "Yeah, you tried like hell."

"It tastes - " These words were hard to pick up because her mouth was full. "It tastes so good!" She laughed. The sound was delicate and lovely. "It's going to stay down! I'm going to take nourishment! I know it! I feel it!"

"Just don't overdo it," he cautioned, and gave her one of the water-skins. "You're not used to it. All that - " He swallowed and there was an audible (audible to him, at least) click in his throat. "All that throwing up."

"Yes. Yes."

"I need to talk to Roland for a few minutes."

"All right."

But before he could go she grasped his hand again.

"Thank you, Eddie. Thank you for being so patient. And thank him." She paused gravely. "Thank him, and don't tell him that he scares me."

"I won't," Eddie had said, and went back to the gunslinger.

3

Even when she wasn't pushing, Odetta was a help. She navigated with the prescience of a woman who has spent a long time weaving a wheelchair through a world that would not acknowledge handicapped people such as she for years to come.

"Left," she'd call, and Eddie would gee to the left, gliding past a rock snarling out of the pasty grit like a decayed fang. On his own, he might have seen it ... or maybe not.

"Right," she called, and Eddie hawed right, barely missing one of the increasingly rare sandtraps.

They finally stopped and Eddie lay down, breathing hard.

"Sleep," Odetta said. "An hour. I'll wake you."

Eddie looked at her.

"I'm not lying. I observed your friend's condition, Eddie―"

"He's not exactly my friend, you kn - "

" - and I know how important time is. I won't let you sleep longer than an hour out of a misguided sense of mercy. I can tell the sun quite well. You won't do that man any good by wearing yourself out, will you?"

"No," he said, thinking: But you don't understand. If I sleep and DettaWalker comes back -

"Sleep, Eddie," she said, and since Eddie was too weary (and too much in love) to do other than trust her, he did. He slept and she woke him when she said she would and she was still Odetta, and they went on, and now she was pumping again, helping. They raced up the diminishing beach toward the door Eddie kept frantically looking for and kept not seeing.

4

When he left Odetta eating her first meal in days and went back to the gunslinger, Roland seemed a little better.

"Hunker down," he said to Eddie.

Eddie hunkered.

"Leave me the skin that's half full. All I need. Take her to the door."

"What if I don't - "

"Find it? You'll find it. The first two were there; this one will be, too. If you get there before sundown tonight, wait for dark and then kill double. You'll need to leave her food and make sure she's sheltered as well as she can be. If you don't reach it tonight, kill triple. Here."

He handed over one of his guns.

Eddie took it with respect, surprised as before by how heavy it was.

"I thought the shells were all losers."

"Probably are. But I've loaded with the ones I believe were wetted least - three from the buckle side of the left belt, three from the buckle side of the right. One may fire. Two, if you're lucky. Don't try them on the crawlies." His eyes considered Eddie briefly. "There may be other things out there."

"You heard it too, didn't you?"

"If you mean something yowling in the hills, yes. If you mean the Bugger-Man, as your eyes say, no. I heard a wildcat in the brakes, that's all, maybe with a voice four times the size of its body. It may be nothing you can't drive off with a stick. But there's her to think about. If her other comes back, you may have to - "