The Dark Tower

There was a crate of AR-15 rifles, the barrels packed in grease, the firing mechanisms fragrant with banana oil. Eddie noted the added selector switches, and looked in the crate next to the 15’s. Inside, covered with plastic and also packed in grease, were metal drums. They looked like the ones you saw on tommy-guns in gangster epics like White Heat, only these were bigger. Eddie lifted one of the 15’s, turned it over, and found exactly what he expected: a conversion clip that would allow these drums to be attached to the guns, turning them into rapid-fire rice-cutters. How many shots per drum? A hundred? A hundred and twenty-five? Enough to mow down a whole company of men, that was sure.

There was a box of what looked like rocket shells with the letters STS stenciled on each. In a rack beside them, propped against the cave wall, were half a dozen handheld launchers. Roland pointed at the atom-symbol on them and shook his head. He did not want them shooting off weapons that would release potentially lethal radiation no matter how powerful they might be. He was willing to kill the Breakers if that was what it took to stop their meddling with the Beam, but only as a last resort.

Flanking a metal tray filled with gas-masks (to Jake they looked gruesome, like the severed heads of strange bugs) were two crates of handguns: snub-nosed machine-pistols with the word COYOTE embossed on the butts and heavy automatics called Cobra Stars. Jake was attracted to both weapons (in truth his heart was attracted to all the weapons), but he took one of the Stars because it looked a little bit like the gun he had lost. The clip fed up the handle and held either fifteen or sixteen shots. This was not a matter of counting but only of looking and knowing.

“Hey,” Susannah said. She’d gone back toward the front of the cave. “Come look at this. Sneetches.”

“Check out the crate-lid,” Jake said when they joined her. Susannah had set it aside; Jake picked it up and was studying it with admiration. It showed the face of a smiling boy with a lightning-bolt scar on his forehead. He was wearing round glasses and brandishing what appeared to be a magician’s wand at a floating sneetch. The words stenciled beneath the drawing read:

PROPERTY 449th SQUADRON

24 “SNEETCHES”

HARRY POTTER MODEL

SERIAL #465-17-CC NDJKR

“Don’t Mess with the 449!”

We’ll Kick the “Slytherin” Out of You!

There were two dozen sneetches in the crate, packed like eggs in little nests of plastic excelsior. None of Roland’s band had had the opportunity to study live ones closely during their battle with the Wolves, but now they had a good swatch of time during which they could indulge their most natural interests and curiosities. Each took up a sneetch. They were about the size of tennis balls, but a great deal heavier. Their surfaces had been gridded, making them resemble globes marked with lines of latitude and longitude. Although they looked like steel, the surfaces had a faint giving quality, like very hard rubber.

There was an ID-plate on each sneetch and a button beside it. “That wakes it up,” Eddie murmured, and Jake nodded. There was also a small depressed area in the curved surface, just the right size for a finger. Jake pushed it without the slightest worry that the thing would explode, or maybe extrude a mini-buzzsaw that would cut off his fingers. You used the button at the bottom of the depression to access the programming. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he most certainly did.

A curved section of the sneetch’s surface slid away with a faint Auowwm! sound. Revealed were four tiny lights, three of them dark and one flashing slow amber pulses. There were seven windows, now showing 0 00 00 00. Beneath each was a button so small that you’d need something like the end of a straightened paperclip to push it. “The size of a bug’s asshole,” as Eddie grumbled later on, while trying to program one. To the right of the windows were another two buttons, these marked S and W.

Jake showed it to Roland. “This one’s SET and the other one’s WAIT. Do you think so? I think so.”

Roland nodded. He’d never seen such a weapon before — not close up, at any rate — but, coupled with the windows, he thought the use of the buttons was obvious. And he thought the sneetches might be useful in a way the long-shooters with their atom-shells would not be. SET and WAIT.

SET…and WAIT.

“Did Ted and his two pals leave all this stuff for us here?” Susannah asked.

Roland hardly thought it mattered who’d left it — it was here and that was enough — but he nodded.

“How? And where’d they get it?”

Roland didn’t know. What he did know was that the cave was a ma’sun — a war-chest. Below them, men were making war on the Tower which the line of Eld was sworn to protect. He and his tet would fall upon them by surprise, and with these tools they would smite and smite until their enemies lay with their boots pointed to the sky.

Or until theirs did.