wretched rags of clothing. Roland hurried down the steps-there were nine in this flight-without stopping. Oy ran at his side, ears back against his skull, fur rippling sleekly, almost dancing his way down. Then they were in pure dark.
"Bark, Oy, so we don't run into each other!" Roland snapped. "Bark!"
Oy barked. A thirty-count later, he snapped the same order and Oy barked again.
"Roland, what if we come to another stairway?"
"We will," he said, and a ninety-count after that, they did. She felt him tip forward, feet stuttering. She felt the muscles in his shoulders jump as he put his hands out before him, but they did not fall. Susannah could only marvel at his reflexes. His boots rapped unhesitatingly downward in the dark. Twelve steps this time? Fourteen? They were back on the flat surface of the passageway before she could get a good count. So now she knew he was capable of negotiating stairs even in the dark, even at a dead run. Only what if he stuck his foot in a hole? God knew it was possible, given the way the flooring had rotted. Or suppose they came to a stacked bone-barrier of skeletons? In the flat passageway, at the speed he was now running, that would mean a nasty tumble at the very least. Or suppose they ran into a jumble of bones at the head of one of the little stairways? She tried to block the vision of Roland swooping out into blackness like a crippled high-diver and couldn't quite do it. How many of their bones would be broken when they crash-landed at the bottom?
Shit, sugar, pick a number, Eddie might have said. This flatout run was insanity.
But there was no choice. She could hear the thing behind them all too clearly now, not just its slobbering breath but a sandpapery rasping sound as something slid across one of the passageway walls-or maybe both. Every now and then she'd also hear a clink and a clitter as a tile was torn off. It was impossible not to construct a picture from these sounds, and what Susannah began to see was a great black worm whose segmented body filled the passage from side to side, occasionally ripping off loose ceramic squares and crushing them beneath its gelatinous body as it rushed ever onward, hungry, closing the gap between it and them.
And closing it much more rapidly now. Susannah thought she knew why. Before, they had been running in a moving island of light. Whatever that thing behind them was, it didn't like the light. She thought of the flashlight Roland had added to their gunna, but without fresh batteries, it would be next to useless. Twenty seconds after flicking the switch on its long barrel, the damn thing would be dead.
Except... wait a minute.
Its barrel.
Its long barrel!
Susannah reached into the leather bag bouncing around at Roland's side, finding tins of food, but those weren't the tins she wanted. At last she found one that she did, recognizing it by the circular gutter running around the lid. There was no time to wonder why it should feel so immediately and intimately familiar; Detta had her secrets, and something to do with Sterno was probably one of them. She held die can up to smell and be sure, then promptly bashed herself on the bridge of the nose with it when Roland stumbled over something-maybe a chunk of flooring, maybe another skeleton-and had to batde again for balance. He won diis time, too, but eventually he'd lose and the thing back there might be on them before he could get up.
Susannah felt warm blood begin to course down her face and the thing behind them, perhaps smelling it, let loose an enormous damp cry. She thought of a gigantic alligator in a Florida swamp, raising its scaly head to bay at the moon. And it was so close.
Oh dear God give me time, she thought. I don't want to go like this, getting shot's one thing, but getting eaten alive in the dark-
That was another.
"Go fasterV she snarled at Roland, and thumped at his sides with her thighs, like a rider urging on a weary horse.
Somehow, Roland did. His respiration was now an agonized roar. He had not breathed so even after dancing the commala. If he kept on, his heart would burst in his chest. But-
"Faster, Tex! Let it all out, goddammit! I might have a trick up my sleeve, but in the meantime you give it