Stephen King - The Dark Tower

“Give you peace,” Roland said. Then he unbuckled his gunbelt and began to roll the weapon into it once more.

“Roland, was that…was it a slow mutant?”

“Aye, I suppose you’d say so, poor old thing. But the Rodericks are from beyond any lands I ever knew, although before the world moved on they gave their grace to Arthur Eld.” He turned to Eddie, his blue eyes burning in his tired face. “Fedic is where Mia has gone to have her baby, I have no doubt. Where she’s taken Susannah. By the last castle. We must backtrack to Thunderclap eventually, but Fedic’s where we need to go first. It’s good to know.”

“He said he felt sad for someone. Who?”

Roland only shook his head, not answering Eddie’s question. A Coca-Cola truck blasted by, and thunder rumbled in the far west.

“Fedic o’ the Discordia,” the gunslinger murmured instead. “Fedic o’ the Red Death. If we can save Susannah — and Jake — we’ll backtrack toward the Callas. But we’ll return when our business there is done. And when we turn southeast again…”

“What?” Eddie asked uneasily. “What then, Roland?”

“Then there’s no stopping until we reach the Tower.” He held out his hands, watched them tremble minutely. Then he looked up at Eddie. His face was tired but unafraid. “I have never been so close. I hear all my lost friends and their lost fathers whispering to me. They whisper on the Tower’s very breath.”

Eddie looked at Roland for a minute, fascinated and frightened, and then broke the mood with an almost physical effort. “Well,” he said, moving back toward the driver’s door of the Ford, “if any of those voices tells you what to say to Cullum — the best way to convince him of what we want — be sure to let me know.”

Eddie got in the car and closed the door before Roland could reply. In his mind’s eye he kept seeing Roland leveling his big revolver. Saw him aiming it at the kneeling figure and pulling the trigger. This was the man he called both dinh and friend. But could he say with any certainty that Roland wouldn’t do the same thing to him…or Suze…or Jake…if his heart told him it would take him closer to his Tower? He could not. And yet he would go on with him. Would have gone on even if he’d been sure in his heart — oh, God forbid! — that Susannah was dead. Because he had to. Because Roland had become a good deal more to him than his dinh or his friend.

“My father,” Eddie murmured under his breath just before Roland opened the passenger door and climbed in.

“Did you speak, Eddie?” Roland asked.

“Yes,” Eddie said. “ ‘Just a little farther.’ My very words.”

Roland nodded. Eddie dropped the transmission back into Drive and got the Ford rolling toward Turtleback Lane. Still in the distance — but a little closer than before — thunder rumbled again.

As the baby’s time neared, Susannah Dean looked around, once more counting her enemies as Roland had taught her. You must never draw, he’d said, until you know how many are against you, or you’ve satisfied yourself that you can never know, or you’ve decided it’s your day to die. She wished she didn’t also have to cope with the terrible thought-invading helmet on her head, but whatever that thing was, it didn’t seem concerned with Susannah’s effort to count those present at the arrival of Mia’s chap. And that was good.

There was Sayre, the man in charge. The low man, with one of those red spots pulsing in the center of his forehead. There was Scowther, the doctor between Mia’s legs, getting ready to officiate at the delivery. Sayre had roughed the doc up when Scowther had displayed a little too much arrogance, but probably not enough to interfere with his efficiency. There were five other low men in addition to Sayre, but she’d only picked out two names. The one with the bulldog jowls and the heavy, sloping gut was Haber. Next to Haber was a bird-thing with the brown feathered head and vicious beebee eyes of a hawk. This creature’s name seemed to be Jey, or possibly Gee. That was seven, all armed with what looked like automatic pistols in docker’s clutches. Scowther’s swung carelessly out from beneath his white coat each time he bent down. Susannah had already marked that one as hers.

There were also three pallid, watchful humanoid things standing beyond Mia. These, buried in dark blue auras, were vampires, Susannah was quite sure. Probably of the sort Callahan had called Type Threes. (The Pere had once referred to them as pilot sharks.) That made ten. Two of the vampires carried bahs, the third some sort of electrical sword now turned down to no more than a guttering core of light. If she managed to get Scowther’s gun ( when you get it, sweetie, she amended — she’d read The Power of Positive Thinking and still believed every word the Rev. Peale had written), she would turn it on the man with the electric sword first. God might know how much damage such a weapon could inflict, but Susannah Dean didn’t want to find out.

Also present was a nurse with the head of a great brown rat. The pulsing red eye in the center of her forehead made Susannah believe that most of the other low folken were wearing humanizing masks, probably so they wouldn’t scare the game while out and about on the sidewalks of New York. They might not all look like rats underneath, but she was pretty sure that none of them looked like Robert Goulet. The rathead nurse was the only one present who wore no weapon that Susannah could see.

Eleven in all. Eleven in this vast and mostly deserted infirmary that wasn’t, she felt quite sure, under the borough of Manhattan. And if she was going to settle their hash, it would have to be while they were occupied with Mia’s baby — her precious chap .

“It’s coming, doctor!” the nurse cried in nervous ecstasy.

It was. Susannah’s counting stopped as the worst pain yet rolled over her. Over both of them. Burying them. They screamed in tandem. Scowther was commanding Mia to push, to push NOW!

Susannah closed her eyes and also bore down, for it was her baby, too…or had been. As she felt the pain flow out of her like water whirlpooling its way down a dark drain, she experienced the deepest sorrow she had ever known. For it was Mia the baby was flowing into; the last few lines of the living message Susannah’s body had somehow been made to transmit. It was ending. Whatever happened next, this part was ending, and Susannah Dean let out a cry of mingled relief and regret; a cry that was itself like a song.

And then, before the horror began — something so terrible she would remember each detail as if in the glare of a brilliant light until the day of her entry into the clearing — she felt a small hot hand grip her wrist. Susannah turned her head, rolling the unpleasant weight of the helmet with it. She could hear herself gasping. Her eyes met Mia’s. Mia opened her lips and spoke a single word. Susannah couldn’t hear it over Scowther’s roaring (he was bending now, peering between Mia’s legs and holding the forceps up and against his brow). Yet she did hear it, and understood that Mia was trying to fulfill her promise.

I’d free you, if chance allows, her kidnapper had said, and the word Susannah now heard in her mind and saw on the laboring woman’s lips was chassit .

Susannah, do you hear me?

I hear you very well, Susannah said.