win your honey a stuffed dog, he thought. Or a stuffed bear. He drew a bead on the walking box and then looked around impatiently when Roland touched his shoulder.
“Say your lesson, Eddie. And be true.”
Eddie hissed impatiently through his teeth, angry at the distraction, but Roland’s eyes didn’t flinch and so he drew a deep breath and tried to clear everything from his mind: the squeaks and squalls of equipment that had been running too long, the aches and pains in his body, the knowledge that Susannah was here, propped up on the heels of her hands, watching, the further knowledge that she was closest to the ground, and if he missed one of the gadgets out there, she would be the handiest target if it decided to retaliate.
“ ‘I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.’ ”
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 forgotten 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 began to fire.
The sensors exploded like clay 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 splintery 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 direction 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