The Trap

I stood in the street, feet spread apart, sandalwoods heavy on my hips. I felt like I was in a western, which I suppose I was. The fact that the showdown was at midnight and the enemy were vampires didn’t shake the feeling. Call it low noon, maybe. But there was a lot to worry about.

Carrie and Penny weren’t part of it, though. I’d long known that they could take care of themselves. Carrie was almost an entirely different person than the heroin addicted prophet I’d first met. The first time we faced danger together, she could barely stand up on her own, let alone walk straight. Now she could keep up with the rest of us, and her new powers were flowering into something wonderful and deadly. Penny was still a child, but like Jake Chambers she was a Gunslinger. Last night they’d stood their ground against the vampires, and had killed them all. I was proud of both of them.

I wished I could stand with them, but my guns were needed guarding the store. Eden would need my backup again, though Alistair was covering both groups from the rooftop. Ashleigh was with us, but…Ashleigh….

Walter had laid one hell of a trap for us here. I had no idea how he got a Type One vampire here. Or if it had been here all along and the Man in Black just woke it up. Our search through the caves turned up half of the townspeople that had been turned, and even their master. But he was impossible to get to, sleeping beneath the stone where only air could reach. If Walter hadn’t protected Zepath from Carrie’s sight, she could have searched him out and just burned him in his tomb. He laid his trap well.

It was not a good time for the ka-tet to be weakened, but we were. Ashleigh hadn’t spoken any more about whatever issue was weighing on him. He acted normal for the most part, but signs of stress still showed around the edges. Like when he snapped at the priest. Minutes before sundown, when we needed the priests blessing, the southern boy gets into an argument with him. I snapped at him and said that I was beginning to think that it wasn’t such a good idea for him and Penny to be around each other. Every time I trusted him with her it seemed like something bad happened.

Maybe it was too harsh, I was stressed out and worrying about the attacks. I’ll apologize to him later, if we’re alive. And if he gets his head together. If he worked for me, I’d force him to take all his vacation time and relax. Of course, that’s what it might come down to. When we got back to New York, he had to decide if he could handle the knowledge of his own powers, the Dark Tower, and the Todash beneath it, or if he wanted Eden to make it all go away and go on as a desk jockey for the Tet Corporation.

What it basically came down to, was that I no longer trusted Ashleigh. That was a wound in our ka-tet, and it was dangerous. Not ka-shume, but one thing can lead to the other.

But there was nothing I could do about it but wait for Ashleigh to tell us what he needed, or do it himself. I rolled the cylinders on my guns and checked the rounds for the hundredth time and waited for the red haze to fall.

Questions

We rode into Zepath prepared for anything. I think we were all expecting the trouble to come from the train. Al kept glancing down the road in its direction, and he talked about it with a touch of fear in his voice, even though it was an old steam train, not a psychotic mono. Besides, at this point in Mid World’s history, Blaine had yet to go insane and Patricia was still alive. Chances are Blaine would have been very helpful and pleasant company.

I feared a trap like Tull, especially after we met the fire and brimstone preacher of the town. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine him stirring the town into a mob and coming after us. It was bad enough slaughtering slow mutants, I didn’t want to have to face gunning down a town of real people.

The town took notice of us right off. Six mounted people riding into town wearing guns – one of them with the sandalwood grips. But as much attention as we got with our strange appearance and the ancient guns, they also worked well to discourage that attention.

For the time being, though, the town seemed safe, and nothing we could sense or detect told us otherwise. So we had a birthday party.

I think that the ka-tet needed it. Something to celebrate, something to smile about and laugh about. It was the happiest I’ve seen Penny in a long time. The home cooked meal was excellent, somehow better than five star delicacies, and after two months with nothing to drink but water and nothing to eat but dried goods, her lumpy birthday cake seemed like the sweetest thing I’ve ever tasted.

I handed her my gift with a little trepidation. I’d promised to buy her a horse when we got back to New York, and that was the sort of thing I was used to giving to people. This tiny laminated card seemed pathetic and weak. Penny no longer seemed determined to lie about her age, probably because the tet all treated her like an adult, but I hoped it was still important to her. She took the adult library card and her eyes lit up. And they lit my heart up.

Later that night Carrie sat on top of me in the bathtub, still holding me inside of her. Occasionally she would blow flames under the heavy cast iron tub to keep the water warm. She kept her arms around me, but lifted her head from my chest to look me in the eye. Carrie is getting good at “talks.” I swear, when Penny is old enough to date, I’m going to make Carrie talk to her about it.

And that’s what we discussed. Not Penny’s romantic future, but Carrie’s role in it. What was she to Penny? Sister? Mother? Friend? I was tempted to say all of the above. But it was clear to all of us that we were becoming a family, a sort of ka-tet within the Tet of the Turtle. And if Carrie was going to be a part of it, I was going to have to let go of some of my protectiveness. When Carrie started suggesting bed times for Penny, I had to bite back some swift retorts. I’m used to defending Penny from everyone else. Except that I don’t need to protect her from Carrie, she’s not attacking. And she’s right. I’ve given Penny no boundaries. Why should I be surprised that she crosses them so easily? I agreed to talk to Penny (my daughter, I thought), about when was a reasonable time to go to bed.

Satisfied, Carrie heated the water a little more, and began to slide her thighs over mine.

It seemed that the Sheriff’s favorite thing to do was ask questions. In the first two days we were in Zepath, he cornered us three times to “ask us a few questions.” People were going missing in Zepath, and all of us felt the teeth of Walter’s trap closing.

But I wasn’t ready to start going door to door interrogating people and sifting the fields for clues. The people of Zepath thought that I was a real Gunslinger, and more and more I felt like one. Thanks to Lex’s stories – “know your enemies” was the reason he told me – I knew enough to act the part. No…not act. To become the part. The teaching that Lex had begun, the Tet Corporation and the Tet of the Turtle had finished. I was a Gunslinger.

And if I thought of myself as a true Gunslinger, then there were things I had to do. Taking over the missing person’s investigation wasn’t one of them. Not without certain requirements being fulfilled.

Eden, the gentlest woman I’ve ever known, wanted to take it on ourselves to help, so I told her about the questions. Before a Gunslinger committed himself to helping someone they had to be sure that those who wanted help were going to be open. If the people in trouble were hiding something, there would be trouble. Next, the aggrieved party had to recognize the Gunslingers as Gunslingers and acknowledge their job and methods. A lot of people are quick to ask for aid, but then quail at what the Gunslingers do. Lastly, the aggrieved party must request the Gunslinger’s help. They didn’t help where it wasn’t wanted.

I kinda slipped into thinking of it in lawyerly terms, but that’s basically what the questions were. A sort of contract between the Gunslingers and those they swore to help. Lex said that the Gunslingers couldn’t refuse a request for aid since the time of Arthur Eld, so long as those three questions were answered yes.

We asked the questions of the mother of a missing girl. She hesitated in answering them and I had to remember that at this point, the Gunslingers weren’t an old memory, a legend out of brighter days. Gunslingers were real now, they strode In World and had spent the last ten years fighting John Farson (not that this town seemed to know about any of that). But she said yes to each question, knowing what it meant.

After the third time her grief strained voice whispered “yes,” we were loosed. Walter’s trap didn’t matter. Even the ambush waiting for Roland at some indeterminate point in the future didn’t matter. It was no our duty, our ka, as Gunslingers to do this.

While Walter had drawn a curtain over Zepath that Carrie couldn’t see through, she could look in the surrounding woods, though she found no sign of the missing people. Talking to the friends and family of the missing ones didn’t give us any clues as to why they would have left, and there were no signs of them being taken.

Eden decided that it was time for Carrie to test the shroud that was hiding Zepath, but first we did a mounted perimeter check, to see if we could find anything unusual that Carrie might focus her search on. Some Cliffside caves to the north of Zepath seemed a likely enough place and when Carrie, Penny, Eden and I made our way down what might generously be called the path, I felt something from the caves.

Not the itching in the back of my eyes that would warn me that can toi were near. No, that sort of ambush wouldn’t be Walter’s style. He’d have laid something for us more unusual…and ironic. Something funny. What was it, though?

Just beneath the sharp salt tang of the sea air beating the cliffs below us I could have sworn I smelled the salt tang of blood as well. Maybe I hallucinated that part, but there was no mistaking the smell of burnt metal.

…Vampires.