Стивен Кинг: The Drawing of the Three

Kill her, Odetta thought, and knew she could not.

She could no more kill the hag and survive than the hag could kill her and walk away. They could choke each other to death while Eddie and the

(Roland)/(Really Bad Man)

one who had called them were eaten alive down there by the edge of the water. That would finish all of them. Or she could

(love)/(hate)

let go.

Odetta let go of Detta's throat, ignored the fierce hands throttling her, crushing her windpipe. Instead of using her own hands to choke, she used them to embrace the other.

“ No , you bitch!" Detta screamed, but that scream was infinitely complex, both hateful and grateful. “ N o, you leave me lone, you jes leave me—"

Odetta had no voice with which to reply. As Roland kicked the first attacking lobstrosity away and as the second moved in to lunch on a chunk of Eddie's arm, she could only whisper in the witch-woman's ear: "I love you."

For a moment the hands tightened into a killing noose … and then loosened.

Were gone.

She was being turned inside out again … and then, suddenly, blessedly, she was whole. For the first time since a man named Jack Mort had dropped a brick on the head of a child who was only there to be hit because a white taxi driver had taken one look and driven away (and had not her father, in his pride, refused to try again for fear of a second refusal), she was whole. She was Odetta Holmes, but the other—?

Hurry up, bitch! Detta yelled … but it was still her own voice; she and Detta had merged. She had been one; she had been two; now the gunslinger had drawn a third from her. Hurry up or they gonna be dinner!

She looked at the shells. There was no time to use them; by the time she had his guns reloaded it would be over. She could only hope.

But is there anything else? she asked herself, and drew.

And suddenly her brown hands were full of thunder.

Eddie saw one of the lobstrosities loom over his face, its rugose eyes dead yet hideously sparkling with hideous life. Its claws descended toward his face.

Dod-a—, it began, and then it was smashed backward in chunks and splatters.

Roland saw one skitter toward his flailing left hand and thought There goes the other hand … and then the lobstrosity was a splatter of shell and green guts flying into the dark air.

He twisted around and saw a woman whose beauty was heart stopping, whose fury was heart-freezing. "COME ON, MAHFAHS!" she screamed. "YOU JUST COME ON! YOU JUST COME FOR EM! I'M GONNA BLOW YO EYES RIGHT BACK THROUGH YO FUCKIN ASSHOLES!"

She blasted a third one that was crawling rapidly between Eddie's spraddled legs, meaning to eat on him and neuter him at the same time. It flew like a tiddly-wink.

Roland had suspected they had some rudimentary intel­ligence; now he saw the proof.

The others were retreating.

The hammer of one revolver fell on a dud, and then she blew one of the retreating monsters into gobbets.

The others ran back toward the water even faster. It seemed they had lost their appetite.

Meanwhile, Eddie was strangling.

Roland fumbled at the rope digging a deep furrow into his neck. He could see Eddie's face melting slowly from purple to black. Eddie's strugglings were weakening.

Then his hands were pushed away by stronger ones.

"I'll take care of it. "There was a knife in her hand … his knife.

Take care of what? he thought as his consciousness faded. What is it you'll take care of, now that we're both at your mercy?

"Who are you?" he husked, as darkness deeper than night began to take him down.

''I am three women,'' he heard her say, and it was as if she were speaking to him from the top of a deep well into which he was falling. "I who was; I who had no right to be but was; I am the woman who you have saved.

"I thank you, gunslinger."

She kissed him, he knew that, but for a long time after, Roland knew only darkness.

For the first time in what seemed like a thousand years, the gunslinger was not thinking about the Dark Tower . He thought only about the deer which had come down to the pool in the woodland clearing.

He sighted over the fallen log with his left hand.

Meat, he thought, and fired as saliva squirted warmly into his mouth.

Missed, he thought in the millisecond following the shot. It's gone. All my skill … gone.

The deer fell dead at the edge of the pool.

Soon the Tower would fill him again, but now he only blessed what gods there were that his aim was still true, and thought of meat, and meat, and meat. He reholstered the gun—the only one he wore now—and climbed over the log behind which he had patiently lain as late afternoon drew down to dusk, waiting for something big enough to eat to come to the pool.

Iam getting well, he thought with some amazement as he drew his knife. Iam really getting well.

He didn't see the woman standing behind him, watching with assessing brown eyes.

They had eaten nothing but lobster-meat and had drunk nothing but brackish stream water for six days following the confrontation at the end of the beach. Roland remembered very little of that time; he had been raving, delirious. He sometimes called Eddie Alain, sometimes Cuthbert, and always he called the woman Susan.

His fever had abated little by little, and they began the laborious trek into the hills. Eddie pushed the woman in the chair some of the time, and sometimes Roland rode in it while Eddie carried her piggyback, her arms locked loosely around his neck. Most of the time the way made it impossible for either to ride, and that made the going slow. Roland knew how exhausted Eddie was. The woman knew, too, but Eddie never complained.

They had food; during the days when Roland lay between life and death, smoking with fever, reeling and railing of times long past and people long dead, Eddie and the woman killed again and again and again. Bye and bye the lobstrosities began staying away from their part of the beach, but by then they had plenty of meat, and when they at last got into an area where weeds and slutgrass grew, all three of them ate compulsively of it. They were starved for greens, any greens. And, little by little, the sores on their skins began to fade. Some of the grass was bitter, some sweet, but they ate no matter what the taste … except once.

The gunslinger had wakened from a tired doze and seen the woman yanking at a handful of grass he recognized all too well.

"No! Not that!" he croaked. "Never that! Mark it, and remember it! Never that!"

She looked at him for a long moment and put it aside without asking for an explanation.

The gunslinger lay back, cold with the closeness of it. Some of the other grasses might kill them, but what the woman had pulled would damn her. It had been devil-weed.

The Keflex had brought on explosions in his bowels, and he knew Eddie had been worried about that, but eating the grasses had controlled it.

Eventually they had reached real woods, and the sound of the Western Sea diminished to a dull drone they heard only when the wind was right.

And now … meat.

The gunslinger reached the deer and tried to gut it with the knife held between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand. No good. His fingers weren't strong enough. He switched the knife to his stupid hand, and managed a clumsy cut from the deer's groin to its chest. The knife let out the steaming blood before it could congeal in the meat and spoil it … but it was still a bad cut. A puking child could have done better.