The Waste Lands (The Dark Tower #3)(25)
That was a joke, he thought; he wouldn’t know his old man if he passed him on the street. But he could feel the words doing their work, clearing his mind and settling his nerves. He didn’t know if he was the stuff of which gunslingers were made—the idea seemed fabulously unlikely to him, even though he knew he had managed to hold up his end pretty well during the shootout at Balazar’s nightclub—but he did know that part of him liked the coldness that fell over him when he spoke the words of the old, old catechism the gunslinger had taught them; the coldness and the way things seemed to stand forth with their own breathless clarity. There was another part of him which understood that this was just another deadly drug, not much different from the heroin which had killed Henry and almost killed him, but that did not alter the thin, tight pleasure of the moment. It drummed in him like taut cables vibrating in a high wind. ” ‘I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgot-ten the face of his father.
” ‘I aim with my eye.
” ‘I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.’ “
Then, without knowing he meant to do it, he stepped out of the trees and spoke to the trundling robots on the far side of the clearing: ” ‘I kill with my heart.’”
They stopped their endless circling. One of them let out a high buzz that might have been alarm or a warning. The radar-dishes, each no bigger than half a Hershey bar, turned toward the sound of his voice. Eddie begun to fire.
The sensors exploded like day pigeons, one after the other. Pity was gone from Eddie’s heart; there was only that coldness, and the knowledge that he would not stop, could not stop, until the job was done. Thunder filled the twilit clearing and bounced back from the splint-ery rock wall at its wide end. The steel snake did two cartwheels and lay twitching in the dust. The biggest mechanism—the one that had reminded Eddie of his childhood Tonka tractor—tried to flee. Eddie blew its radar-dish to kingdom come as it made a herky-jerky run at the side of the rut. It fell on its squarish nose with thin blue flames squirting out of the steel sockets which held its glass eyes.
The only sensor he missed was the one on the stainless steel rat; that shot caromed off its metal back with a high mosquito whine. It surged out of the rut, made a half-circle around the box-shaped thing which had been following the snake, and charged across the clearing at surprising speed. It was making an angry clittering sound, and as it closed the distance, Eddie could see it had a mouth lined with long, sharp points. They did not look like teeth; they looked like sewing-machine needles, blurring up and down. No, he guessed these things were really not much like puppies, after all. “Take it, Roland!” he shouted desperately, but when he snatched a quick look around he saw that Roland was still standing with his arms crossed on his chest, his expression serene and distant. He might have been thinking of chess problems or old love-letters.
The dish on the rat’s back suddenly locked down. It changed direc-tion slightly and buzzed straight toward Susannah Dean. One bullet left, Eddie thought. If I miss, it’ll take her face off. Instead of shooting, he stepped forward and kicked the rat as hard as he could. He had replaced his shoes with a pair of deerskin moccasins, and he felt the jolt all the way up to his knee. The rat gave a rusty, ratcheting squeal, tumbled over and over in the dirt, and came to rest on its back. Eddie could see what looked like a dozen stubby mechanical legs pistoning up and down. Each was tipped with a sharp steel claw. These claws twirled around and around on gimbals the size of pencil-erasers.
A steel rod poked out of the robot’s midsection and flipped the gadget upright again. Eddie brought Roland’s revolver down, ignoring a momentary impulse to steady it with his free hand. That might be the way cops in his own world were taught to shoot, but it wasn’t the way it was done here. When you forget the gun is there, when it feels like you’re shooting with your finger, Roland had told them, then you’ll be some-where near home. Eddie pulled the trigger. The tiny radar-dish, which had begun to turn again in an effort to find the enemies, disappeared in a blue Hash. The rat made a choked noise—Chop!—and fell dead on its side.
Eddie turned with his heart jackhammering in his chest. He couldn’t remember being this furious since he realized that Roland meant to keep him in his world until his goddamned Tower was won or lost. . . probably until they were all worm-chow, in other words.
He levelled the empty gun at Roland’s heart and spoke in a thick voice he hardly recognized as his own. “If there was a round left in this, you could stop worrying about your f**king Tower right now.” “Stop it, Eddie!” Susannah said sharply. He looked at her. “It was going for you, Susannah, and it meant to turn you into ground chuck.”
“But it didn’t get me. You got it, Eddie. You got it.” “No thanks to him.” Eddie made as if to re-holster the gun and then realized, to his further disgust, that he had nothing to put it in. Susannah was wearing the holster. “Him and his lessons. Him and his goddam lessons.” He turned to Roland. “I tell you, for two cents—“
Roland’s mildly interested expression suddenly changed. His eyes shifted to a point over Eddie’s left shoulder. “DOWN!” he shouted. Eddie didn’t ask questions. His rage and confusion were wiped from his mind immediately. He dropped, and as he did, he saw the gunslinger’s left hand blur down to his side. My God, he thought, still falling, he CAN’T be that fast, no one can be that fast, I’m not bad but Susannah makes me look slow and he makes Susannah look like a turtle trying to walk uphill on a piece of glass— Something passed just over his head, something that squealed at him in mechanical rage and pulled out a tuft of his hair. Then the gunslinger was shooting from the hip, three fast shots like thunder-cracks, and the squealing stopped. A creature which looked to Eddie like a large mechan-ical bat thudded to earth between the place where Eddie now lay and the one where Susannah knelt beside Roland. One of its jointed, rust-speckled wings thumped the ground once, weakly, as if angry at the missed chance, and then became still. Roland crossed to Eddie, walking easy in his old sprung boots. He extended a hand. Eddie took it and let Roland help him to his feet. The wind had been knocked out of him and he found he couldn’t talk. Proba-bly just as well . . . seems like every time I open my mouth I stick my goddam foot into it. “Eddie! You all right?” Susannah was crossing the clearing to where he stood with his head bent and his hands planted on his upper thighs, trying to breathe. “Yeah.” The word came out in a croak. He straightened up with an effort. “Just got a little haircut.”