“Stop it, Eddie, he’s dead. They’re all dead. Your feet are bleeding.”
Eddie ignored him and went on pulling the revolver’s trigger. The babble of excited voices outside was closer. So were the sirens.
The gunslinger reached for the gun and pulled on it. Eddie turned on him, and before Roland was entirely sure what was happening, Eddie struck him on the side of the head with his own gun. Roland felt a warm gush of blood and collapsed against the wall. He struggled to stay on his feet—they had to get out of here, quick. But he could feel himself sliding down the wall in spite of his every effort, and then the world was gone for a little while in a drift of grayness.
25
He was out for no more than two minutes, and then he managed to get things back into focus and make it to his feet. Eddie was no longer in the hallway. Roland’s gun lay on the chest of the dead man with the red hair. The gunslinger bent, fighting off a wave of dizziness, picked it up, and dropped it into its holster with an awkward, cross-body movement.
I want my damned fingers back, he thought tiredly, and sighed.
He tried to walk back into the ruins of the office, but the best he could manage was an educated stagger. He stopped, bent, and picked up all of Eddie’s clothes that he could hold in the crook of his left arm. The howlers had almost arrived. Roland believed the men winding them were probably militia, a marshall’s posse, something of that sort . . . but there was always the possibility they might be more of Balazar’s men.
“Eddie,” he croaked. His throat was sore and throbbing again, worse even than the swollen place on the side of his head where Eddie had struck him with the revolver.
Eddie didn’t notice. Eddie was sitting on the floor with his brother’s head cradled against his belly. He was shuddering all over and crying. The gunslinger looked for the door, didn’t see it, and felt a nasty jolt that was nearly terror. Then he remembered. With both of them on this side, the only way to create the door was for him to make physical contact with Eddie.
He reached for him but Eddie shrank away, still weeping. “Don’t touch me,” he said.
“Eddie, it’s over. They’re all dead, and your brother’s dead, too.”
“Leave my brother out of this!” Eddie shrieked childishly, and another fit of shuddering went through him. He cradled the severed head to his chest and rocked it. He lifted his streaming eyes to the gunslinger’s face.
“All the times he took care of me, man,” he said, sobbing so hard the gunslinger could barely understand him. “All the times. Why couldn’t I have taken care of him, just this once, after all the times he took care of me?”
He took care of you, all right, Roland thought grimly. Look at you, sitting there and shaking like a man who’s eaten an apple from the fever-tree. He took care of you just fine.
“We have to go.”
“Go?” For the first time some vague understanding came into Eddie’s face, and it was followed immediately by alarm. “I ain’t going nowhere. Especially not back to that other place, where those big crabs or whatever they are ate Jack.”
Someone was hammering on the door, yelling to open up.
“Do you want to stay here and explain all these bodies?” the gunslinger asked.
“I don’t care,” Eddie said. “Without Henry, it doesn’t matter. Nothing does.”
“Maybe it doesn’t matter to you,” Roland said, “but there are others involved, prisoner.”
“Don’t call me that!” Eddie shouted.
“I’ll call you that until you show me you can walk out of the cell you’re in!” Roland shouted back. It hurt his throat to yell, but he yelled just the same. “Throw that rotten piece of meat away and stop puling!”