Wizard and glass - By Stephen King Page 0,300

ye’d come, my sweeting. Not which way that precious old dead bitch laying yonder on the road would bring ye. And now ye must go to town.” Her grin widened, became something unspeakable. “It’s time for the fair, ye ken.”

“Let me go,” Susan said. “Let me go, if ye’d not answer to Roland of Gilead.”

Rhea ignored her and spoke to Reynolds. “Bind her hands before her and stand her in the back of the cart. There’s people that’ll want to see her. A good look is what they’ll want, and a good look is just what they’ll have. If her aunt’s done a proper job, there’ll be a lot of them in town. Get her up, now, and be smart about it.”

14

Alain had time for one clear thought: We could have gone around them—if what Roland said is true, then only the wizard’s glass matters, and we have that. We could have gone around them.

Except, of course, that was impossible. A hundred generations of gunslinger blood argued against it. Tower or no Tower, the thieves must not be allowed to have their prize. Not if they could be stopped.

Alain leaned forward and spoke directly into his horse’s ear. “Jig or rear when I start shooting, and I’ll knock your fucking brains out.”

Roland led them in, outracing the other two on his stronger horse. The clot of men nearest by—five or six mounted, a dozen or more on foot and examining a pair of the oxen which had dragged the tankers out here—gazed at him stupidly until he began to fire, and then they scattered like quail. He got every one of the riders; their horses fled in a widening fan, trailing their reins (and, in one case, a dead soldier). Somewhere someone was shouting, “Harriers! Harriers! Mount up, you fools!”

“Alain!” Roland screamed as they bore down. In front of the tankers, a double handful of riders and armed men were coming together—milling together—in a clumsy defensive line. “Now! Now!”

Alain raised the machine-gun, seated its rusty wire stock in the hollow of his shoulder, and remembered what little he knew about rapid-fire weapons: aim low, swing fast and smooth.

He touched the trigger and the speed-shooter bellowed into the dusty air, recoiling against his shoulder in a series of rapid thuds, shooting bright fire from the end of its perforated barrel. Alain raked it from left to right, running the sight above the scattering, shouting defenders and across the high steel hides of the tankers.

The third tanker actually blew up on its own. The sound it made was like no explosion Alain had ever heard: a guttural, muscular ripping sound accompanied by a brilliant flash of orange-red fire. The steel shell rose in two halves. One of these spun thirty yards through the air and landed on the desert floor in a furiously burning hulk; the other rose straight up into a column of greasy black smoke. A burning wooden wheel spun across the sky like a plate and came back down trailing sparks and burning splinters.

Men fled, screaming—some on foot, others laid flat along the necks of their nags, their eyes wide and panicky.

When Alain reached the end of the line of tankers, he reversed the track of the muzzle. The machine-gun was hot in his hands now, but he kept his finger pressed to the trigger. In this world, you had to use what you could while it still worked. Beneath him, his horse ran on as if it had understood every word Alain had whispered in its ear.

Another! I want another!

But before he could blow another tanker, the gun ceased its chatter—perhaps jammed, probably empty. Alain threw it aside and drew his revolver. From beside him there came the thuppp of Cuthbert’s slingshot, audible even over the cries of the men, the hoofbeats of the horses, the whoosh of the burning tanker. Alain saw a sputtering big-bang arc into the sky and come down exactly where Cuthbert had aimed: in the oil puddling around the wooden wheels of a tanker marked SUNOCO. For a moment Alain could clearly see the line of nine or a dozen holes in the tanker’s bright side—holes he had put there with sai Lengyll’s speed-shooter—and then there was a crack and a flash as the big-bang exploded. A moment later, the holes running along the bright flank of the tanker began to shimmer. The oil beneath them was on fire.

“Get out!” a man in a faded campaign hat yelled. “She’s gointer blow! They’re all