“Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham?”
The gunslinger staggered to his feet. The thing tore open his dripping jeans, tore through a boot whose old leather was soft but as tough as iron, and took a chunk of meat from Roland’s lower calf.
He drew with his right hand, and realized two of the fingers needed to perform this ancient killing operation were gone only when the revolver thumped to the sand.
The monstrosity snapped at it greedily.
“No, bastard!” Roland snarled, and kicked it. It was like kicking a block of rock . . . one that bit. It tore away the end of Roland’s right boot, tore away most of his great toe, tore the boot itself from his foot.
The gunslinger bent, picked up his revolver, dropped it, cursed, and finally managed. What had once been a thing so easy it didn’t even bear thinking about had suddenly become a trick akin to juggling.
The creature was crouched on the gunslinger’s boot, tearing at it as it asked its garbled questions. A wave rolled toward the beach, the foam which curdled its top looking pallid and dead in the netted light of the half-moon. The lobstrosity stopped working on the boot and raised its claws in that boxer’s pose.
Roland drew with his left hand and pulled the trigger three times.
Click, click, click.
Now he knew about the shells in the chambers, at least.
He holstered the left gun. To holster the right he had to turn its barrel downward with his left hand and then let it drop into its place. Blood slimed the worn ironwood handgrips; blood spotted the holster and the old jeans to which the holster was thong-tied. It poured from the stumps where his fingers used to be.
His mangled right foot was still too numb to hurt, but his right hand was a bellowing fire. The ghosts of talented and long-trained fingers which were already decomposing in the digestive juices of that thing’s guts screamed that they were still there, that they were burning.
I see serious problems ahead, the gunslinger thought remotely.
The wave retreated. The monstrosity lowered its claws, tore a fresh hole in the gunslinger’s boot, and then decided the wearer had been a good deal more tasty than this bit of skin it had somehow sloughed off.
“Dud-a-chum?” it asked, and scurried toward him with ghastly speed. The gunslinger retreated on legs he could barely feel, realizing that the creature must have some intelligence; it had approached him cautiously, perhaps from a long way down the strand, not sure what he was or of what he might be capable. If the dousing wave hadn’t wakened him, the thing would have torn off his face while he was still deep in his dream. Now it had decided he was not only tasty but vulnerable; easy prey.
It was almost upon him, a thing four feet long and a foot high, a creature which might weigh as much as seventy pounds and which was as single-mindedly carnivorous as David, the hawk he had had as a boy—but without David’s dim vestige of loyalty.
The gunslinger’s left bootheel struck a rock jutting from the sand and he tottered on the edge of falling.
“Dod-a-chock?” the thing asked, solicitously it seemed, and peered at the gunslinger from its stalky, waving eyes as its claws reached . . . and then a wave came, and the claws went up again in the Honor Stance. Yet now they wavered the slightest bit, and the gunslinger realized that it responded to the sound of the wave, and now the sound was—for it, at least—fading a bit.
He stepped backward over the rock, then bent down as the wave broke upon the shingle with its grinding roar. His head was inches from the insectile face of the creature. One of its claws might easily have slashed the eyes from his face, but its trembling claws, so like clenched fists, remained raised to either side of its parrotlike beak.
The gunslinger reached for the stone over which he had nearly fallen. It was large, half-buried in the sand, and his mutilated right hand howled as bits of dirt and sharp edges of pebble ground into the open bleeding flesh, but he yanked the rock free and raised it, his lips pulled away from his teeth.