Стивен Кинг - The Drawing of the Three

For a moment Eddie was incapable of any action more constructive than staring at this perfect marvel of idiocy. Then he saw other men crowding through the door behind Tricks, and raised Roland's revolver.

"Got him!" Tricks was screaming with the joyous hyste­ria of a man who has seen too many movies to be able to distinguish between what the script in his head says should be happening and what really is. "Got him! I got him! I g ― "

Eddie pulled the trigger and vaporized Tricks from the eyebrows up. Judging from the man's behavior, that was not a great deal.

Jesus Christ, when these things do shoot, they really blow holes in things, he thought.

There was a loud KA-BLAM from Eddie's left. Something tore a hot gouge in his underdeveloped left bicep. He saw Balazar pointing the Mag at him from behind the corner of his card-littered desk. His shoulder was a dripping red mass. Eddie ducked as the Magnum crashed again.

Roland managed to get into a crouch, aimed at the first of the new men coming in through the door, and squeezed the trigger. He had rolled the cylinder, dumped the used loads and the duds onto the carpet, and had loaded this one fresh shell. He had done it with his teeth. Balazar had pinned Eddie down; If this one's a dud, I think we're both gone.

It wasn't. The gun roared, recoiled in his hand, and Jimmy Haspio spun aside, the .45 he had been holding falling from his dying fingers.

Roland saw the other man duck back and then he was crawling through the splinters of wood and glass that littered the floor. He dropped his revolver back into its holster. The idea of reloading again with two of his right fingers missing was a joke.

Eddie was doing well. The gunslinger measured just how well by the fact that he was fighting naked. That was hard for a man. Sometimes impossible.

The gunslinger grabbed one of the automatic pistols Claudio Andolini had dropped.

"What are the rest of you guys waiting for?" Balazar screamed. "Jesus! Eat these guys!"

Big George Biondi and the other man from the supply room charged in through the door. The man from the supply room was bawling something in Italian.

Roland crawled to the corner of the desk. Eddie rose, aiming toward the door and the charging men. He knows Balazar's there, waiting, but he thinks he's the only one of us with a gun now, Roland thought. Here is another one ready to die for you, Roland. What great wrong did you ever do that you should inspire such terrible loyalty in so many?

Balazar rose, not seeing the gunslinger was now on his flank. Balazar was thinking of only one thing: finally putting an end to the goddam junkie who had brought this ruin down on his head.

"No," the gunslinger said, and Balazar looked around at him, surprise stamped on his features.

"Fuck y―" Balazar began, bringing the Magnum around. The gunslinger shot him four times with Claudio's automatic. It was a cheap little thing, not much better than a toy, and touching it made his hand feel dirty, but it was perhaps fitting to kill a despicable man with a despicable weapon.

Enrico Balazar died with an expression of terminal sur­prise on what remained of his face.

"Hi, George!" Eddie said, and pulled the trigger of the gunslinger's revolver. That satisfying crash came again. No duds in this baby, Eddie thought crazily. I guess I must have gotten the good one. George got off one shot before Eddie's bullet drove him back into the screaming man, bowling him over like a ninepin, but it went wild. An irrational but utterly persuasive feeling had come over him: a feeling that Roland's gun held some magical, talismanic power of protection. As long as he held it, he couldn't be hurt.

Silence fell then, a silence in which Eddie could hear only the man under Big George moaning (when George landed on Rudy Vechhio, which was this unfortunate fellow's name, he had fractured three of Vechhio's ribs) and the high ringing in his own ears. He wondered if he would ever hear right again. The shooting spree which now seemed to be over made the loudest rock concert Eddie had ever been to sound like a radio playing two blocks over by comparison.

Balazar's office was no longer recognizable as a room of any kind. Its previous function had ceased to matter. Eddie looked around with the wide, wondering eyes of a very young man seeing something like this for the first time, but Roland knew the look, and the look was always the same. Whether it was an open field of battle where thousands had died by cannon, rifle, sword, and halberd or a small room where five or six had shot each other, it was the same place, always the same place in the end: another deadhouse, stinking of gunpowder and raw meat.

The wall between the bathroom and the office was gone except for a few struts. Broken glass twinkled everywhere. Ceiling panels that had been shredded by Tricks Postino's gaudy but useless M-16 fireworks display hung down like pieces of peeled skin.

Eddie coughed dryly. Now he could hear other sounds―a babble of excited conversation, shouted voices outside the bar, and, in the distance, the warble of sirens.

"How many?" the gunslinger asked Eddie. "Can we have gotten all of them?"

"Yes, I think―"

"I got something for you, Eddie," Kevin Blake said from the hallway. "I thought you might want it, like for a souvenir, you know?" What Balazar had not been able to do to the younger Dean brother Kevin had done to the elder. He lobbed Henry Dean's severed head through the doorway.

Eddie saw what it was and screamed. He ran toward the door, heedless of the splinters of glass and wood that punched into his bare feet, screaming, shooting, firing the last live shell in the big revolver as he went.

"No, Eddie!" Roland screamed, but Eddie didn't hear. He was beyond hearing.

He hit a dud in the sixth chamber, but by then he was aware of nothing but the fact that Henry was dead, Henry, they had cut off his head, some miserable son of a bitch had cut off Henry's head, and that son of a bitch was going to pay, oh yes, you could count on that.

So he ran toward the door, pulling the trigger again and again, unaware that nothing was happening, unaware that his feet were red with blood, and Kevin Blake stepped into the doorway to meet him, crouched low, a Llama .38 automatic in his hand. Kevin's red hair stood around his head in coils and springs, and Kevin was smiling.

He'll be low, the gunslinger thought, knowing he could have to be lucky to hit his target with this untrustworthy little toy even if he had guessed right.

When he saw the ruse of Balazar's soldier was going to draw Eddie out, Roland rose to his knees and steadied his left hand on his right fist, grimly ignoring the screech of pain making that fist caused. He would have one chance only. The pain didn't matter.

Then the man with the red hair stepped into the doorway, smiling, and as always Roland's brain was gone; his eye saw, his hand shot, and suddenly the red-head was lying against the wall of the corridor with his eyes open and a small blue hole in his forehead. Eddie was standing over him, screaming and sobbing, dry-firing the big revolver with the sandalwood grips again and again, as if the man with the red hair could never be dead enough.

The gunslinger waited for the deadly crossfire that would cut Eddie in half and when it didn't come he knew it was truly over. If there had been other soldiers, they had taken to their heels.

He got wearily to his feet, reeled, and then walked slowly over to where Eddie Dean stood.

"Stop it," he said.

Eddie ignored him and went on dry-firing Roland's big gun at the dead man.