Something's coming...

We went after the White light we saw in our shared vision when we stepped off the Lost Highway. Buried in the remains of the Dixie Pig was a turtle, of course. Just a little figurine, but something important all the same. Important enough to burry there, important enough to guard, and powerful enough that they couldn’t touch it and just destroy it.

We fought hard and well, no less than I expect from my deadly new friends. We came close to it though, and there were moments when I thought I felt the chill of ka-shume settle over us. There wasn’t time to stop and make sure, though, not when a wrecking ball was arcing towards your head. So we just fought and we triumphed.

I’m worried about Eden though, because she doesn’t seem worried about us. It makes sense if you know Eden like we do, as close as khef. She’s always worrying about us, asking us what’s wrong practically before we know that we’ve got a problem most of the time. Part of it’s because she’s telepathic, but the worrying, the caring is all Eden.

But lately she’d been quieter, more withdrawn. I wasn’t sure what was going on yet, though Carrie tried to get it out of her. Eden kept her lips pressed tightly together and her eyes weren’t giving anything away. I probably have the hardest time reading her, and I pick so little up from her mind through khef, maybe because she’s psychic and she can block herself when she wants. I didn’t want to drive her off though. Most times you can ask someone a hundred times and they won’t answer you, then one day they’ll just start talking when you haven’t even opened your mouth. She’ll come to it in her own time, but it’d better be soon. Things aren’t winding down, they ramping up and if our dinh can’t get it together, we’re in for some real hurting.

I surprised myself with how close I came to doing some hurting myself. Carrie mentioned that Ashleigh had taken an interest in Penny’s schooling. Nothing bad about that, though so far he’d only contributed to educating her in the world of Marvel Comics. But she mentioned that she’d chided him about hacking into the tutors database and looking up her grades, downloading her lessons, and reading the tutors comments. About Penny, and about me.

It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that the tutor wanted to bring me up on charges of negligence with Child Protective Services, she misses a damned lot of school after all and we don’t get much time to catch up. But I was enraged that Ashleigh would do that. Go behind my back and interfere in her education. He talked to Penny about her school and told her she could skip grades.

She’s the smartest kid I ever knew, brighter than I was at her age for damned sure. But I don’t want her to end up like me, so fixed on succeeding that she…that she forgets the face of her father…

…I went to Ashleigh’s, the wonderful evening I’d had with Carrie nearly forgotten. I felt like he was trying to take care of Penny, like he thought I wasn’t doing good enough. It’s a damned good thing I didn’t have my guns with me. I wouldn’t have shot him…god help me I’ll never play the betrayer again, but the conversation would have gone a lot worse with one of those hand cannons pointed in his face. Not that it went well anyways.

“You’re not her father!” I screamed at him. “I…”

I was going to say that I was. It was on the tip of my tongue, the tip of my heart. I can’t even tell Penny how much I love her in words, how the hell was I going to make Ashleigh understand? But he knew what I couldn’t say.

“You’re not her father either!” He threw back. He might as well have taken one of his knives and run me through the heart. I haven’t been hurt like that since the thinny, and I don’t know which was worse. It stripped away all of my arguments, all of my reason and jerked the raw, naked truth out of me…

“She’s all I have!”

There. It was out of my mouth, not just hinted at in the waters of khef, but echoing in his shabby apartment and shaking the windows. Everything after that was like talking underwater or something. I didn’t really hear him and he didn’t really hear me. We talked about it the next day, which I think was pretty brave of Ashleigh. I think they all think that I’d do anything for Penny, even kill them.

He fucked up. I overreacted. But the bottom line is that we both want what’s best for Penny. I got him to agree to include me in talking to her about what that means. I think we’ll be okay.

And we’re going to need to stick together. Two other things went on in that short week between returning to New York and the shootout at the Dixie Pig. One was good, and one was bad. Maybe even very bad.

I’d taken Carrie out to dinner. When she got back to New York (her first time in the Big Apple with a clear head), she realized she’d turned twenty a while ago. She told me she isn’t sure of the day, since her mom didn’t know (a prisoner of the needle more than Carrie ever was). I wasn’t sure what to get her, so I asked her what she wanted. Dinner out just to chat and relax, not to talk about Penny. I had to blush a bit… Carrie wasn’t the only one who’d been living for someone else.

“Okay,” I said. “Deal.”

I was looking forward to it, probably more than I let on. I’d been feeling…lonely. Which was funny if you thought about it, because for the first time in more than a decade I had real friends and I had Penny. Aside from Lex, I’d pretty much kept to myself. The best I can figure, and I’m not a deep thinker, is that Penny…all my friends… sorta reminded me of what life is supposed to be like and I started to feel the absence of the things I still didn’t have.

I went out to some Goth club, not one I’d hunted at before, but somewhere where people dressed all in black was the norm. I invited the guys, but Ashleigh begged off. I guess I couldn’t blame him. He was probably thinking of Carrie, and I figured she was thinking about him again now that she was clean. Alistair surprised me by being up for it, though. First karaoke, now clubbing.

The girls came to me, like the always do. I tried to talk up Alistair – I had no idea if he wanted any action, but I wasn’t going to leave him high and dry – but I don’t think he got much attention until I left. We chatted about jobs, the music, politics, all the usual small talk.

I’d already picked out the one I wanted to leave with, a pretty little brunette goth. Short, thin, no tits to speak of. She was about as far from my old long-legged, double-dee, blonde bimbo as you can get. She was wearing a black lace corset and these black wings tied to her back with ribbons. A little over the top. I was doing magic tricks, making my coin disappear and reappear, folding napkins into paper roses and pulling them out of seemingly nowhere. I brushed her cheek as I pulled my coin from behind her ear. I brushed her chest as I took the paper rose out of her scant cleavage.

Her black-painted lips were parted just slightly, her eyes half closed every time I leaned close to speak over the music. She wrapped her arms around my bicep and clung to me at the bar, her hard nipples grazing my shoulder.

I tried about fifteen times to suggest we leave, but I’d have had to fight my way out of the circle of girls surrounding me and Alistair. In the end I showed them another trick. I rolled my coin over my fingers, fast and faster. The strobe lights winked off of the old silver, flashing light into their painted faces. I took the girl’s arm and pulled her out of the circle while everyone was just staring, rapt.

I shook her a little to wake her up. “Hey, you wan to get out of here?” She nodded breathlessly and we called a cab, already kissing and fooling around.

He roommate glared at us sleepily as we came back to her place, but we closed the bedroom door on her and forgot about her instantly. There was something about her that caught hold of me, but I couldn’t place it. I didn’t realize as I undressed her, didn’t realize as I held my hands on her girlish hips and guided her over me, and not when we finally fell exhausted and sweating into the sheets to sleep.

It was when I woke in the morning. I sat up and saw her pale back stretched out next to me, dark hair spilling over her slender shoulders. My penis stiffend so quickly it ached and I was ready for another round. I leaned over and kissed her head and said “Good morning…” and I almost called her Carrie. After a second I remembered that her name was something like Sarah or Sandra or Sasha, but she looked an awful lot like Carrie. My erection went limp like a flag when the wind up and dies. Not because the thought turned me off, but because I realized that’s what had turned me on so much. I got dressed and told her I’d maybe see her later, but I didn’t think I was ever going back to the club again.

So when I picked up Carrie the next night, watched her coming down her front steps in a clinging, strapless dress, my heart started to beat faster. Dinner was nice. The ice-skating was nicer. On the ride back to her place I felt like we were speeding towards something. Or maybe more like we were two spheres of plutonium moving slowly together, nearing the point of reaching critical mass and exploding into…what…?

And then she brought up Ashleigh and the needle moved away from the danger zone, the sexual radiation returned to elevated, but safe, levels. Maybe it was for the best, maybe she’s not ready and maybe I’m not. But I had to wonder if we were ever going to stop fucking up, dancing around, if something was going to happen.

Maybe it’s better that nothing happen. When ka and love get in the same cart it’s a wild ride. You seem love harder than anyone else, but you hurt more too. I’m not sure it’s worth it. But the damned thing is, if ka and love go hand in hand, you have no choice. Ka like a wind.

And I could feel it blowing. Then there was the second thing, the bad thing.

Carrie’d been looking forward to pushing the boundaries of the powers she never knew she had, but she needed help. Help from Bryce. We all knew there was going to be trouble over it, but we weren’t prepared for what happened.

He saw us down at the shooting range. Penny was putting rounds into the center ring at ten yards and Carrie was learning how to handle the shotgun she borrowed back in Mid-World. I didn’t feel the need to get it back now that I had real guns, and Carrie could use a little heavier firepower.

Bryce comes up to us, about to burst into flames, and starts screaming at me when he sees the sandalwoods. I’ve been through that, though. Moses Carver put them into my hands and I rescued them from Jericho Hill. That battle was as much a trial as Cort’s test… and if I haven’t earned them yet, I will.

So, as he’s spewing his bile at us, Carrie asks him how he is. She’d foretold his wounding and we could all see the limp he was sporting. But I wasn’t prepared for the ring of greasy blue light around his neck. He’d been bitten, and recently.

I wish Carrie’d seen the whole story, I might have been more prepared. His tet went out and their mission failed when a tet of harriers got in the way. Apparently…well, it seemed that I was there. Some James, some other me. A vampire. A regulator. He…I…mowed down his friend and put a bullet in his leg. And I was the one that bit him. God, if he never wanted to kill me before, he did then…

I was surprised that he didn’t have a go for it, or at least deck me. Maybe he would have, but I didn’t want to give him the chance. I left as soon as possible, and I almost didn’t show up for Carries training. I kept my damned mouth shut, though. We saw him walk off the next day, leaving the tower with that bloodsucker’s collar around his neck and he was alone. Which is a damned good way to get bitten again. We gave a report to Alice on that and she said she’d handle it.

But I think it’s going to come back to us. Ka is a wheel and I feel it coming around. Things are picking up speed, gaining momentum. Something’s coming…

The Thinny

New York seems like a dream to me now. I don’t necessarily mean that it’s so great that it’s like a dream (c’mon, it’s New York), but I mean that it’s…slightly unreal. I figured it was just that we’d been in Mid-World so long that the other world was starting to feel like home.

Or maybe it was ka. Like we have unfinished business there. Well, if it was ka, we’d found out eventually, no way around it.

Funny that New York should feel like a dream considering the homeward journey from Mid-World. The thinny…the dogan…

I’d run out of blood, though I’d tried to hide it. I knew that it’d be a few weeks yet before I really started to slow down. Until then I could hide the little tremors, and still the shaking. I didn’t even want to entertain the thought of drinking someone’s blood until I absolutely had to.

Carrie tried to force me to it, though. I wasn’t surprised, I should have known better. Carrie used to be a junkie too (ah…used to be…it’s nice to think of it that way), and she could see the signs, even if I was hiding them. Penny might have known too, she has a way of doing that, but I pushed the thought aside. I don’t like thinking that she knows about the blood-drinking, even though I know she does. Like by ignoring it I can pretend it away.

But the cramps in my gut and the tremors in my hands made it real. Carrie asked me step away. I was hoping without much confidence that she just wanted to talk about her struggling attraction to Ashleigh. Or maybe even that she was going to throw herself at me again (a much more pleasant thought than brooding over my starvation).

I wish she had. I had to remember that she was trying to help me but she took a kind of guilt tactic. Maybe not on purpose, but she kept saying that she didn’t want the thinny to get us because I was hungry and weak. She told me that Penny might die if I was too weak to protect her. I guess it really shows how horrified I am at drinking blood that I still refused. Of course, if a thinny was something you could shoot, it might’ve gone differently.

Still, it probably wasn’t a good idea for the ka-tet to be in the dark about my situation. After all, things were bad enough with Carrie on the tail end of withdrawls and Alistair slowly loosing his mind. I let Eden know that we needed to have a talk before we entered the thinn, especially because not everyone had read the books and knew what to expect.

As if that could have prepared us.

It looked about like I expected it to, I’ll give myself that much credit. And I went into it determined. We were mostly worried about Ashleigh, who was still messed up over his fall into the Todash darkness. I don’t know how anyone gets over that.

If the thinny at the Topeka turnpike was a shimmering mass of light and twisted sound, and the one in Eyebolt Canyon was a greenish amoeba of despair, this was something in-between. It crowded the road but allowed us passage. Of course, maybe it was just suckering us in.

The voices started up almost at once. We knew they were coming, we knew that to expect. But when it came, we weren’t ready for it. Of all of us, I’ve seen the most weird shit, I’ve been the most places. I guess you could say I believed the most. And of all of us, only Ashleigh had a harder time with the thinny.

Lex called out to me from the green mist. I knew it wasn’t Lex. I knew it was the thinny playing tricks on me. But that knowledge just sits there up in your brain, it doesn’t reach down into your heart or your guts or your balls where the fear hits you. If it was just a voice making shit up, I could have laughed it off. But it reaches into you and takes something that already there, some fear or doubt, and it hits you with it. So that when you hear it, it’s not fake at all, it’s as real as fear.

It was no secret that I hate being a vampire, or that I’m ashamed of the things I did when I was a Top Hat Cat. Haven’t I learned better? Wasn’t I coming to believe that maybe even a vampire can do some good? But like the voice of the Rose is the voice of yes of it’s alright, the voice of the thinny says nothing will be alright. You will fail again. There’s no hope.

I started walking into the fog, God help me. In a way, it was like the Rose that I longed to see, even though I knew it meant my death. I knew that it would end my existence, end my torment. It was freedom.

I didn’t even realize that I was walking into the mist at first. I heard the shouting, but it didn’t make much sense, I thought it was just more voices in the thinny. I looked down and I could see my toes through my boots. Everything was glowing green like how old x-ray machines at the airports used to look. The green began to creep up my foot, towards my leg and I could see more and more bone.

I took a step back when I realized that’s what was happening. It wasn’t the peace of the Rose. When I was a bit further away I could hear the voices of my friends calling. Telling me that it was wrong, that I was more than a killer. It was like pulling the gun away from my head each night, like trying to separate two very strong magnets.

The thinny called for the guns with the voice of my old Dinh. I didn’t deserve the carry them, I was staining their long and noble history with my touch… Maybe I was no harrier…but I was still a vampire, a blood drinker… I picked up the guns, wrapped in their own gun belts, those ancient killers that had so recently hung from Cuthbert Allgood’s hips. I couldn’t believe later that after all that had happened, that I was just going to toss them into the fog. That I had rescued them from Jericho Hill only to through them into the mouth of madness.

But the voices calling for me to stop, that said I had earned these guns weren’t fake either. Their love was as real as my doubt. I let go of the guns and they fell back into my open backpack and the spell seemed broken. Lex’s voice faded away and the thinny gave up. …but only to move on to a different target.

Not surprisingly it almost got Ashleigh. The look on his face scared the hell out of me. But we grabbed onto him until he got it under control. Or as much under control as he could. I know that Eden has been working with him to get through some of what’s been done to him. I hope she can help.

We thought it had almost got him, but we were wrong. It did get him.

But before all of that, we had to get through the thinny. Alistair and Eden made it through pretty well, thank God. I wasn’t sure about Alistair at first, in his weakened mental state, but his new pet and his love for collecting gave him something to cling to.

I was very proud of Penny too. I’d barely heard her parents voices, just a broken off sentence before Lex hypnotized them, but I recognized them as they blamed Penny for their deaths. I told her that we were her family now, we all did. But I wasn’t quite brave enough to tell her that she’s like a daughter to me. That I wish I was her real dad because if she’d been in my life, I never would have gone wrong. But her wide, dark eyes turned away from the thinny back to us and my heart stopped breaking.

We were almost out, the thinny didn’t seem to be bothering Arthur. I’m sure that if he wandered into it, that it’d reach for him and devour the little furball, but it didn’t seem to have any power of his mind. Or maybe the bumbler’s simple little mind had no weaknesses to exploit.

But Carrie did. I knew that she pretty much thought she was just a walking ball of weaknesses, and the thinny used our voices to tell her that. Of all the tricks and low blows, it pissed me off the most to hear my voice telling Carrie that she was worthless.

Eden and I got in front of her to stop her from walking into the fog, each one of us putting a hand on a slender shoulder. It surprised me how much weight she’s put on since she ran out of her junk. Her collar bone was still a slim line under my palm, but there was more than pale skin stretched over it. Her body was jealously hanging on to whatever sustenance it could get before the heroin could take it away again.

She didn’t seem to be able to hear us, she kept pushing against our hands weakly, trying to get to the thinny. She had just about the same look on her face as she did when I hypnotized her. Eden threw her arms around Carries neck and hugged her.

I looked at her, annoyed and I had to stop and think, why would I be annoyed that Eden would hug Carrie and save her? I eased back off the balls of my feet and realized that I’d been planning on doing that. And more…I think I was going to kiss her.

When Ashleigh kissed her as we left the thinny behind us, I definitely felt a little thrill of jealousy. Well…I suppose that as she leaves her addiction behind and doesn’t need someone to care for her, she won’t let her fear of dependence stop her and Ashleigh from being together. Good for them.

That night, whatever compulsion or essence the thinny had left inside Ashleigh woke up and made its move. He took out his knife and stabbed Eden. I kept trying to shoot the blades out of his hand, but at close range it’s even harder to hit a small moving target. He hurt Eden, he cut Penny… and I couldn’t stop him. I tried to graze him, just knock him down or throw him off balance, but he was moving so fast and Carrie was trying to knock him down her all her ninety pounds. My hands shook…he was hurting them…trying to kill them… But I didn’t want to kill one of my own. I kept thinking of how I shot Lex, and I couldn’t do it.

Thankfully for all of us, especially Ashleigh, Eden wasn’t limited to gunplay.

Alistair led us on, until the Turtle took us home.

New York again. I promised myself to get laid here – I was tired of being alone every night – but there were things to do first. The whole ka-tet stayed to give Alic our debriefing and I was proud. Even Ashleigh stayed, despite what he’d been through. We ordered pizza and chuckled while Alistair fed Arthur one pepperoni at a time.

…And I asked to meet with the Carvers… Marian and Moses came in, one tall and smooth, the other bent and wrinkled, but both infused with a vitality…a presence. I offered them the guns. While the voice of the thinny hurt me, almost lulled me to my death, it didn’t make me believe that I hadn’t changed. But that didn’t mean that these guns that I picked up belonged to me.

The old man handled them gravely, his easy grin gone from his face. His hands traced the scrollwork on the barrels thoughtfully. And he gave them back to me. …Alright. If I’m going to carry these guns, I’ll try to be worthy of them.

Good to the last drop

I told everyone I was going to use the “log of ease,” to borrow one of Roland’s terms. And I’ve found myself doing a lot of that lately. Penny didn’t get it at first, she hasn’t read the books yet, so I had to translate.

“I need to take a shit,” I said. She blushed and giggled in that utterly charming way that stole my heart. But I was lying. It was the only thing I could tell her that’d keep her away, though. I never wanted her to see what I had to do.

I went far enough away for privacy and then opened my backpack. No one questioned why I took it, maybe because Cuthbert’s guns were in there and they figured I just wanted to be armed away from the others. I pulled out a thermos.

It looked pretty normal, just a smooth, stainless steel tube that you might keep coffee in. of course, it was a little more than. There was a layer of insulation and a layer of liquid nitrogen or something to keep it cool. It was my blood.

I opened it and the smell hit me, repulsive and delightful at the same time. My nostrils dilated, drinking in the scent of blood, noting the staleness and noting the warmth as the coolant began to give out, but not caring. I shook the thermos a little and heard the thick sloshing sound come up from the bottom. Not much left.

I drank it down quickly, partly in hungry greed, partly to get it over with quickly. I’ve never savored the taste. I half swallowed, and then my throat closed up. This was the last. After this there was nothing with who knew how much wilderness to go before we could return to New York. I spat a red mouthful back into the thermos and stared down at the blood, turning it so the late afternoon sunlight could reach the bottom.

The jittery, suffocating panic that made me spit out the blood cooled down and hardened into something heavier. Trying to ration myself drop by drop was only going to drive me crazy. This was the last and there was no changing it. I put the thermos to my mouth and tilted my head back and felt the last slide down my throat…

Bumbling

Even billy bumblers know loneliness and the throcken that would soon come to be known as Arthur was lonely. He was on his own now, and had been for a long time as the lives of bumblers go. When he was young there had been other bumblers. And people as well.

There was a place near the forest where lot of people lived in their strange on top of the ground burrows. They never bothered the bumblers and sometimes there was food or a dish of milk left out. The bumbler didn’t know, but he kenned, and the khef of his parents and ka-tet told him that not long ago the bumblers had lived much closer to the people. Maybe even with them. It was a strange thought, but only a little. After all there was sometimes food and stones were never thrown.

The bumbler also kenned that once there had been a great deal more people. That once all of the odd on top of the ground burrows had been full of people. Some had died and some had gone away. When the bumbler was still very small and only beginning to understand these things there was a loud commotion from the people-burrows.

The curious throcken slinked through the forest and watched with their large gold-ringed eyes as the people-burrows burned. There were more people there now, but they looked like they were fighting with each other. It did not look like the fun sort of tussling that the bumbler enjoyed with his ka-tet and some of the people were making pain-barks and whimpering.

One of the people saw the throcken and shot an arrow at them. They scattered into the bushes and hid until the people were gone. The bumblers didn’t understand it in the way that people did, but none-the-less they knew that another piece of the world had moved on.

The ka-tet of bumblers continued to live in the forest, hunting and foraging. Sometimes they even still made people-noises to each other, and they all barked happily.

Three months before the bumbler would follow a band of people to the big hill by the sea at the end of the forest - before he would hide in terror and believe he was going to the clearing at the end of his path, before he would meet another human with a fuzzy face who would give him a new ka-tet – the bumbler was playing in a shaft on sunlight falling through the canopy, chasing a butterfly.

He might catch it and eat it in a little while, but for now, he liked the way the light flashed on the bright colors of its wings and he liked the smell of the grass and the warmth of the sun and he liked to spring and jump and roll. His corkscrew tail twitched back and forth and he compressed his long body, ready to launch himself in a fantastic leap. The butterfly had just slipped between his grasping paws and the bumbler decided to try very hard to catch the bug, not just try a little. But he stopped, and if his body hadn’t already been tensed to spring it would have tensed anyways.

A shadow passed over the bumbler, casting darkness and cold over him, save that the sky was cloudless blue. Striped fur bristled making the small throcken look twice as big. He stretched out his long neck, his head questing right and left. His eyes were wide but it was his nose and ears that he looked with. Even though he neither saw, heard, nor smelled anything amiss, the bumbler broke into a run, the butterfly forgotten, dashing as fast as he could towards the burrow.

Even bumblers can feel ka-shume.

Soon the cries of throcken echoed in the forest, shrill squeals of pain and terror. The young bumbler ran faster, even knowing that he was running into danger. There, below the sharp barks of fear was a lower growling. Closer to the burrow, the bumbler picked up the scent. The familiar smells of his ka-tet, both old and new, and now the fresher scent of a predator. Something big and dangerous, and something sick.

The bumbler began to bark, a staccato beat as he ran. A plea.

He leapt a fallen branch and saw the burrow that had been his home for a long time. The earth around it had been torn open, clods of soil scattered throughout the grass. The smell of blood and fear was thick in the air. Looking closer, he saw that what had looked like just one of the mounds of thrown earth was the crumpled shape of a bumbler. In the middle of the carnage stood a wolf, as dark as the day was bright. It was a mutie, with gaping holes in its head instead of ears. Its fur was tangled and had fallen out in clumps to reveal mottled skin, thick with scabs. Some disease had eaten away its face, leaving patches of glaring white bone. Its lips were gone, freezing the wolf’s face in a permanent snarl.

As the little bumbler watched, the wolf darted its pointed head into the den, fangs clicking together. It lunged again and this time it threw its head back, lifting the writhing body of a throcken. It growled and shook its head in a brisk negative. The snap of tiny bones was loud in the clearing. The bumbler looked around, searching with nose and ears for the rest of the pack, but only briefly. The animal instinctively knew that this wolf would have been driven out of his pack long ago. It was a lone wolf, mad and dying. A healthy wolf may have caught a single bumbler and vanished with its prize. This creature wasn’t interested in killing for hunger.

One of the bumblers cornered in the burrow made a dash for it. The wolf dropped the dead throcken and snapped its head forward, fangs clamping down. But as it did another bumbler, the largest of the pack, leapt out. The larger throcken hit the wolf in the face with his whole body, scratching and biting. The wolf dropped the caught bumbler and shook its great, shaggy head. Spittle and blood flew. Still the bumbler clung fiercely to the wolf. One of its searching claws found the wolf’s eye and clawed, the sharp fingers raked through the soft orb, spilling thick, yellowish fluid.

The little bumbler at the edge of the clearing hopped forward towards his wounded ka-mate. The female bumbler looked up and gave a long, quiet whine of pain. The bumbler that would come to be known as Arthur could see the ring of ragged holes where teeth had sunk in. He could see the white of bone through some of these and he could smell the death-stench.

A snarl of pain caught the little bumbler. He turned, putting himself between his wounded ka-mate and the ravening wolf and saw it shaking its head fiercely. The largest bumbler was no longer biting and scratching, but only trying to hang on. Its back legs had lost purchase and his hindquarters flopped wildly about as the wolf snarled and howled. The wolf twisted its head and managed to catch one of the bumbler’s rear legs in its jaws. The snap was smaller and more brittle than the rapid crunching of broken bones that had crippled the other bumbler. The wolf threw its head and the heavy throcken lost its grip and was thrown off.

The smallest bumbler stood its ground, his whole body shaking, his twisted tail vibrating like a spring. The wolf turned towards him, regarding him with one yellowed eye and one bloody socket. He made small, choking noises. The bark of defiance was caught in his throat and would not come out. The wolf padded closer slowly, moving in to kill. To rend and tear and leave the meat to rot in the sun.

The large bumbler stood, slowly. Its rear left leg was mostly gone, torn free except for one tough tendon dragging the severed paw. The gold rings of its eyes blazed fiercely. It crouched on three legs and sprung, but it succeeded only in tearing out a tuft of mangy fur. The wolf turned and uttered a rough bark of irritation, but turned back towards the young bumbler. It was healthy and not yet hurt at all.

Fear washed over the little bumbler like the wolf’s fetid breath. His muscles trembled but would not otherwise move. He saw himself reflected in the bloodshot orb of the wolf’s good eye and saw his death there. Then he heard a loud, clear bark. He blinked his large gold eyes and saw the large bumbler behind the wolf. The big throcken lifted his snout and barked again. The little bumbler knew he was being told to run. He didn’t want to though, his friends were dead or wounded and a part of him welcomed death rather than a life alone. The big bumbler uttered a last bark, ringing with finality.

The little bumbler turned and ran. The wolf would have caught him regardless, but the dinh of the bumblers leapt forward and sank his teeth to the gums on the beast’s hamstring. The wolf howled as tainted blood welled up around the wound. It turned and bit savagely into the bumbler, but even as bones cracked and organs burst it would not let go.

The youngest bumbler ran and ran, leaving its dead ka-mates behind.

The months after the loss of his ka-tet were terrible for the young bumbler. Without a ka-tet, without a home we wandered to the east through the old forest. He made people-noises to himself, but there was no one to share his laughter. A part of him wanted to lay down and die, but there was a small voice inside that urged him to wait. Some instinct that said not yet.

On the first day that the little throcken smelled the salt of the ocean in the air, he also heard the distant sounds of hooves. He knew the sound of horses, and he knew that they were an animal that, like billy bumblers, liked people. Lonely, he followed the sounds and watched a large group of people riding and walking. He thought it was very odd and unnatural they way the horses let the men sit on their backs, but then, they were very big.

The group was moving east towards the ocean and the bumbler thought he might go to them. But there were no laugh-barks and he could not smell much food. Still… he was alone in the forest and he wanted to hear voices, even if they weren’t his kind.

The people left no food, although the bumbler smelled a little of it cooking. He would sneak close enough to the tall stone burrow and listen to the people talking quietly. He didn’t think they were very happy either.

The night that he met the man with the fuzzy face the bumbler knew what he had been waiting for. The man was in the woods, but the little creature didn’t understand what he was doing to the trees.

The man saw him and the bumbler began to back up. It had been a long time since he had been this close to a person and never by himself. He wanted to make a people-noise, because people liked that and then came food. But the man put food on the ground anyways, and then he left.

The food was strange but delicious and even after it was gone, the bumbler took the strange but good-smelling not-quite-leaf it was on back to the little hole he had scratched into a burrow. He watched the people and he watched the furry man most of all. Of all the people on the hill, they smiled the most. He remembered that when the mouths on their funny flat faces went up, that they were happy. He pulled the corners of his own mouth up and back, showing his teeth.

When the bumbler was thinking about going closer to the people and making some friendly noises, the army came. They were like ants. One, two, three…the bumbler lost count. There were many more than three people. Maybe three threes of people. He thought that this might be closer to the number, but it was hard. He knew that there were a lot of them, and they hard strange, hard blue faces.

The next hours were a nightmare of sound and fury. The bumbler scrambled into its hole, digging deeper as strange thunder shook the ground. Running footsteps shook the hill and the tiny burrow nearly collapsed onto of the throcken. Voices shouted and the smells of blood and sweat and piss and smoke were strong. He buried his burning nostrils in the dirt and squeezed his eyes shut. In his mind the explosions and the screams of the dying mixed with the growling of wolves and the death-cries of his ka-tet.

The bumbler stayed hidden in his collapsed burrow until hunger drove him out. The battle was long over, but it had left its mark on the hill by the sea. Black smoke and the stench of burning flesh rose from a mound near the big stone burrow. Great divots had been gouged out of the earth here and there. Sticks were sticking out of the ground like a carpet of needles. Blood was everywhere.

Most of the bodies had been moved, but some few still lay where they had fallen. The little bumbler began to hop to each of these, watching them carefully for signs of life. But even though some of the faces were fuzzy, all of them were blue. The man who had given him food was not here.

This gave the small throcken some heart and he scampered down the hill. He would find the person with the fuzzy face and maybe he would set down some more food. Then the hunger would end, but more importantly, the loneliness would end.

He stopped at the bottom of the hill and sniffed the air. Which way to go? The bumbler began to move south, but then the breeze shifted, saving his life and leading to his new ka-tet. The salt-scent from the waves below the cliff slacked off and new scents came to him on from the forest. The wind from the south was foul with blood and sweat, and a hint of the blue mud from the faces of the dead people. The bumbler wrinkled his nose and moved off to the east.

White over Red

Cleaning the guns calmed me. So did Penny’s warm presence next to me, solemnly mimicking me as I disassembled and reassembled the ancient revolvers. That they were ancient – weapons handed down through generations of real gunslingers – made routine into ritual, cleaning into ceremony.

It was a miracle that these revolvers hadn’t been snatched up by the blue-painted barbarians. Probably they would have been turned on innocents and used to commit horrible deeds until the bullets ran out and then they might go on as nothing more than ornate clubs, or ended their long lineage rusting in a field, grass growing up through the empty cylinders. Or maybe they might have been destroyed. Just taken apart and flung from the cliff or melted down to scrap out of pure spite for being relics of the White. The guns of Allain Johns and Jamie DeCurry had met that fate.

When Roland first drew Eddie into his world (where we were now. Except that he hasn’t drawn Eddie yet. Fuck it, only Carrie could understand it), he didn’t like Eddie the junkie touching his guns. How then would Cuthbert feel if he knew a vampire was touching his? He probably wouldn’t be thrilled.

For the most part I kept the guns rolled up and in my pack. I strapped one on to hunt with Ashleigh and Alistair and Penny, but I always took it off when we returned. I felt guilty touching them, but also…hungry. The old, old steel and the worn sandalwood was…soothing? Part of me still hated what I was, wanted to put one of those ancient guns against my head and pull the trigger. That is what they were made to do: to send things like me to the clearing in the end of the path – which for us was probably hell.

But another part…a new part of me…resisted. We were called upon to stand and be true. And I had. Wasn’t I a part of a new ka-tet? A real family, bound by ka, but also by friendship. And maybe even love. Rather than betray them, I had saved them and been saved. And more than just standing shoulder to shoulder, gunning down low men… We’d sat around the fire before the battle playing with worn cards, betting nothing, but just enjoying the game and each other. We’d sat around the fire after the battle, laughing and watching the billy bumbler mimicking Alistair with uncanny accuracy.

Ashleigh, the slow talker, always thoughtful. His long-fingered hands, maybe not as fast as mine, but expert at their own tricks. Making taut wire and hollow wood produce music. Forging bits of nothing into art, a gift for everybody, a rose, a drum, a shield.

Alistair, the fast-talker. I could barely understand his accent sometimes, even though I was born and raised in the big apple. As distracted as Ashleigh was thoughtful, his mind working on a higher level than ours. Maybe a higher level of the tower. Quirky and kind.

Eden, lost but found. Maybe she was finding herself now sorta the same way I was. There was definitely a hell of a lot more steel in her than she knew about. But all the same, her thoughts were always on the tet, keeping us patched up, keeping us going. “Thou shalt not harm,” wasn’t her motto – we were gunslingers after all – but it was something like that. An imperative driving her to protect us.

Carrie, the heart of the ka-tet. Sweet and gentle and maybe a little sad. Even more than Eden she lived for the tet. We were her only friends since before we met, all she had to live for. It hurt to watch her suffer, now that she was just beginning to become herself instead of a shadow stretching out below the tet. But was it better to see her hurt now, or to watch her try to stand on her own, only to find herself unable to ditch her crutch? If I had to choose to have Carrie by my side, her own self, or a Carrie with heroin puppet strings pulled by the future, I’d have said fuck the future. It’ll be now soon anyways.

And then there was Penny. There are no words, not even in khef.

Yeah, I’d been a bad guy, nothing more than a regulator, a kidnapper and blood-drinker and murderer. But I served the White now. I felt a bit like an aging actor, trying to shake the type-cast of a long career playing villains. All I needed was one good part, one hit in a role as a hero to turn things around and save myself.

When I touched the cold metal, slowly rolling out the cylinders and cleaning them lovingly, I think I felt a kind of redemption.

A Rose, a Hill, a Horn

Visions. The old James would have said we were following visions like a bunch of hippies chasing rainbows, except it’s real. It’s not unicorns and sunshine but demons and todash darkness. When the turtle showed us the path out of darkness and showed us the vision of the White in the ruins of the Dixie Pig I only felt how right it was. Wasn’t I the one who stopped the tet and said we should look? Wasn’t I the first one off the path?

This must be how Carrie feels all the time. Maybe it’s made me a little more understanding. Or maybe it’s the Rose taking the bite out of a real world-class asshole like James Cain. But when she tells us her vision about a horn dropped on a battlefield I know that’s right too.

The Horn and the White. The horn of Arthur Eld and something else below the Dixie Pig. It’s ka.

Again it’s Carries vision that tells us we need the Horn first. The Horn of Du Lac isn’t powerful enough to win our way through the Dixie Pig. We have a little conference with Haystack and he tells us what he knows about the horn and about the Battle of Jericho Hill. It tickles a memory that makes me shudder.

That faded poster… “See the Battle of Jericho Hill! The outcome has already been written, but it’s still fun for the whole family! See the fall of Cuthbert the Mad! Witness the betrayal of Alain the Slow! Guided tours available!”

It doesn’t help that I know Roland Deschain will survive. He lived to draw Eddie Dean who started the Tet Corporation so he can’t die, can he? Well, I’ll leave that up to Ka. It’s our Ka to get the Horn of Eld when he drops it so that’s what we’ll fucking do.

I sit back, quiet for the most part. I’m listening, but I’m also watching Eden. Since she’s come back, she’s slowly adjusted to the loss of twenty years of time. The cell phone I gave her makes a lump in her front pocket and she hardly glances at the laptop set up on the shiny tabletop. Now she’s in control of herself and I have an idea of what she was like in ‘Nam. Her and a bunch of scared nurses out in the jungle and Eden keeping them all from loosing it. She listens to Haystack carefully, absorbing his story and starting to lay out plans for our part.

I wasn’t quite ready to ask myself if she was our Dinh. Of course, there were other things to think about. Haystack said that the Rose was a doorway. Well not quite, but close enough to send us to Jericho Hill. And I knew that I couldn’t go that way. Penny didn’t want to go without me and I wasn’t crazy about her being in Mid-World without me to look out for her either, but the other way was more dangerous.

Dutch Hill. Dutch Hill to Jericho Hill. But there was the Doorkeeper that almost stopped Jake, and we had no key. We could go, and maybe Haystack could sort of pick the lock on the door and make it take us where we needed to go, but I thought that the Doorkeeper there was like nothing we’d faced yet. Beyond the power of the Horn of Du Lac probably.

That was what decided it in the end. If we used the Rose, it would probably kill me. I’m a creature of the Red. A beast of the Prim. There are nights when I can hear the song of the Rose and I think that it might kill me with that sweet voice even from my room down in the basement. Just snuff me out like a candle. To actually stand in its presence… But going that way risked only my life. Dutch Hill put everyone in danger.

Carrie asked me to stay after the conference. I could tell that she wanted to talk to me how Lex would have called an-tet. Something deep and important. Maybe it was about Ashleigh, she’d come to me about her attempts at a real relationship before. But she wanted to talk about the Rose. She said that she’d seen a vision – not a possibility, not some tangled future memory – that I was going to die in front of the Rose.

I took a deep breath. There are worse ways to die and few better. I slipped my hand into my pocket and I felt the cool silver of my old coin. Wasn’t silver supposed to kill vampires in some myths? It reminded me that Alistair would probably shit himself for just a glance at it. I should show it to him. I pulled it out and started walking it along my fingers like Lex showed me. The eagle spread its wings on one side, the face of Alaric Deschain looked up from the other.

She went under easily, as if she’d been hypnotized before. It alarmed me at first, but there was nothing in her book or what little she’d talked about of her life to hint that she might have been under a trance before. I didn’t think about it long, though not much later I would kick myself for that. I’d pulled out the coin for another reason. Steven King wrote about a memory tower in one of his books. I’d been reading them whenever I could since Tet spared my life and Penny spared my soul. It reminded me of the Dark Tower even though the book didn’t really seem to touch it, so it stuck in my memory.

Carefully I tried to help Carrie file away her memories. This future about an Alistair that hadn’t been beaten into a retard goes here, this memory where he’d been beaten all the way to death goes there. Separating and filing them away so that they didn’t mix and confuse her, but would still be there at her finger tips if she needed to remember. I was astonished at her memory. She never lost a single detail. And I was amazed at how quickly she divided the visions. I didn’t know it then and neither did she, but it was natural for her.

I left quickly. Too quickly maybe, since she was almost still blinking away the trance when I closed the door behind me. But I didn’t have much time left and I had things to do. I promised myself that I’d apologize later, but I knew I’d break that promise. After all, I was going to die tonight.

Penny was right outside the conference room, waiting. I hoped that’d just teleported there, but she’d been listening. We went shopping for tents and canteens and outdoors clothes, things that I didn’t think I was going to need. I got Penny a birthday card. What I was really doing was saying goodbye.

The moment came quickly. I’d tried to say goodbye to my ka-tet, but mostly the words wouldn’t come. Then we were walking towards the Rose and I was at war with myself. A part of me wanted to run forward and only hoped that I’d get close enough to the Rose to actually see it before it ended my damnation. But part of me fought that other side with strength that surprised and frightened me. I wasn’t ready to leave Penny behind. I wasn’t ready to leave these people (friends?) behind.

I was probably hurting her hand, but I couldn’t help it. Penny looked up at me and held my eyes with her own. It was almost too much, but then there was White light, blinding, shining, throwing stark black shadows behind us that leapt and twisted. “Let’s go” I cried and pled at the same time. We jumped.

Mid-World. Fucking-A, we made it.

Haystack was with us, but that didn’t surprise me. He wasn’t a part of our ka-tet and this wasn’t his ka. We weren’t on the path of the beam, but we were on the right track alright. We were spotted by a wounded scout and we got him back to camp with his message.

Jericho Hill reared up above the Clean Sea, just a rocky rise in the land with a broken watchtower silhouetted against the sky. “Two riders were approaching/and the wind began to howl.” Jimi Hendrix wasn’t quite singing about this battle, but it was close enough to send a shiver down my spine.

Roland Deschain stood at the top of the hill in front of the tower looking over maps sprawling over a tabletop like drunks at closing time. A dark-haired man laughed, but by the way no one else smiled the joke was his own and was only funny to him. There was a third gunslinger with a wine stain birthmark on his face, a bow over his shoulder in addition to the Sandalwoods that had to be Jamie DeCurry.

My eyes were on their guns as we approached bearing up the messenger. They hung low and heavy, weighted down with years and blood. They were like swords somehow. As noble as they were deadly. I thought of my own guns with just a touch of shame. Then Roland turned towards us and his faded blue eyes flashed. I’d read the books and I knew more about this man than anyone outside his own ka-tet did. Things that the man didn’t even know about himself yet. But being looked at with those eyes is something that not even Steven King could capture. I honestly almost kneeled.

“Who is your dinh?” He asked us. I wasn’t ready for the question. I don’t think any of us were. I glanced at Eden out of the corner of my eye. Back at our conference I realized I’d been comparing her to Lex, trying to see what she would be like as a dinh. As I learned it, the dinh is the person that everyone else looks to for leadership. The person who looks around to ask people what to do and finds everyone looking back at them. For a second, I had to consider that maybe people were looking at me.

Then Eden spoke up. She didn’t answer his question, probably because she didn’t know what he was asking, but I wasn’t sure if maybe she was answering after all. We were going to have to talk because everyone was going to be looking at her now and she had to be up to it. Or we were all going to die.

We all but fled the gunslinger’s presence. I was worried he’d dig too deep, or question us too closely and find out who we were. If he could somehow sense what I was I wouldn’t last a heartbeat. But they were too preoccupied with the coming battle and grave news we’d helped deliver. Roland bent back over the table. I think he knew that the reinforcements were not going to arrive ahead of the barbarians. But his eyes told the story of his life. He would not stop, would not cry off. The fall of Gilead was coming, but he would go on.

I shivered again.

The sun came up over a hill that was already more battlefield than encampment. Demons had come in the night and taken men. They’d thrown them over the tower and then used their corpses as weapons. The morning stank of gunpowder and blood. But we still lived. Battered but not broken. We still had a chance to win the Horn and go on. I still had a chance to apologize to Carrie and to learn how to say goodbye to everyone…