“Yes,” Roland said.

“Do you believe me when I say I have nothing to lose?”

“Yes.”

“That’s wery well, then. Move, boy! Hup!”

Gasher’s hold tightened on Jake’s throat until he could hardly breathe. At the same time he was pulled backward. They retreated that way, facing the gap where Roland stood with Susannah on his back and Eddie just behind him, still holding the Ruger which Gasher had called a toy pistol. Jake could feel Gasher’s breath puffing against his ear in hot little blurts. Worse, he could smell it.

“Don’t try a thing,” Gasher whispered, “or I’ll rip off yer sweetmeats and stuff em up your bung. And it would be sad to lose em before you ever got a chance to use em, wouldn’t it? Wery sad indeed.”

They reached the end of the bridge. Jake stiffened, believing Gasher would throw the grenade anyway, but he didn’t... at least not immediately. He backed Jake through a narrow alley between two small cubicles which had probably served as tollbooths, once upon a time. Beyond them, the brick warehouses loomed like prison cellblocks.

“Now, cully, I’m going to let go of your neck, or how would’je ever have wind to run with? But I’ll be holdin yer arm, and if ye don’t run like the wind, I promise I’ll rip it right off and use it for a club to beat you with. Do you understand?”

Jake nodded, and suddenly the terrible, stifling pressure was gone from his windpipe. As soon as it was, he became aware of his hand again—it felt hot and swollen and full of fire. Then Gasher seized his bicep with fingers like bands of iron, and he forgot all about his hand.

“Toodle-doo!” Gasher called in a grotesquely cheery falsetto. He waggled the grenado at the others. “Bye-bye, dears!” Then he growled to Jake: “Now run, you whoring little squint! Run!”

Jake was first whirled and then yanked into a run. The two of them went flying down a curved ramp to street level. Jake’s first confused thought was that this was what the East River Drive would look like two or three hundred years after some weird brain-plague had killed all the sane people in the world.

The ancient, rusty hulks of what had once surely been automobiles stood at intervals along both curbs. Most were bubble-shaped roadsters that looked like no cars Jake had ever seen before (except, maybe, for the ones the white-gloved creations of Walt Disney drove in the comic books), but among them he saw an old Volkswagen Beetle, a car that might have been a Chevrolet Corvair, and something he believed was a Model A Ford. There were no tires on any of these eerie hulks; they either had been stolen or had rotted away to dust long since. And all the glass had been broken, as if the remaining denizens of this city abhorred anything which might show them their own reflections, even accidentally.