More. Had been waiting for them.

“Move in!” someone was screaming. “Move in, move in, don’t give em a chance to find their peckers, move in, you catzarros!”

“Eddie!” Roland roared. “Eddie, you have to help me now!”

“Hizz …?” Faint. Bemused. Eddie looking at him with only one eye, the right. The left was temporarily drowned in blood from his scalp-wound.

Roland reached out and slapped him hard enough to make blood fly from his hair. “Harriers! Coming to kill us! Kill all here!”

Eddie’s visible eye cleared. It happened fast. Roland saw the effort that took—not to regain his wits but to regain them at such speed, and despite a head that must be pounding monstrously—and took a moment to be proud of Eddie. He was Cuthbert Allgood all over again, Cuthbert to the life.

“What the hell’s this?” someone called in a cracked, excited voice. “Just what in the blue hell is this?”

“Down,” Roland said, without looking around. “If you want to live, get on the floor.”

“Do what he says, Chip,” someone else replied—probably, Roland thought, the man who’d been holding the can with the tomato on it.

Roland crawled through litters of broken glass from the door, feeling pricks and prinks of pain as some cut his knees and knuckles, not caring. A bullet buzzed past his temple. Roland ignored that, too. Outside was a brilliant summer day. In the foreground were the two oil-pumps with MOBIL printed on them. To one side was an old car, probably belonging to either the women shoppers (who’d never need it again) or to Mr. Flannel Shirt. Beyond the pumps and the oiled dirt of the parking area was a paved country road, and on the other side of that a little cluster of buildings painted a uniform gray. One was marked TOWN OFFICE, one STONEHAM FIRE AND RESCUE. The third and largest was the TOWN GARAGE. The parking area in front of these buildings was also paved (metaled was Roland’s word for it), and a number of vehicles had been parked there, one the size of a large bucka-waggon. From behind them came more than half a dozen men at full charge. One hung back and Roland recognized him: Enrico Balazar’s ugly lieutenant, Jack Andolini. The gunslinger had seen this man die, gunshot and then eaten alive by the carnivorous lobstrosities which lived in the shallow waters of the Western Sea, but here he was again. Because infinite worlds spun on the axle which was the Dark Tower, and here was another of them. Yet only one world was true; only one where, when things were finished, they stayed finished. It might be this one; it might not be. In either case, this was no time to worry about it.

Up on his knees, Roland opened fire, fanning the trigger of his revolver with the hard ridge of his right hand, aiming first at the boys with the speed-shooters. One of them dropped dead on the country road’s white centerline with blood boiling out of his throat. The second was flung backward all the way to the road’s dirt shoulder with a hole between his eyes.