Two
Eddie grabbed the storekeeper just as Roland had grabbed the other man, but Chip showed none of his customer's awareness or instinct for survival. He merely went on staring through the jagged hole where his windows had been, eyes wide with shock and awe as the pulp-truck out there entered the final phase of its self-destructive ballet, the cab twisting free of the overloaded carrier and bouncing down the hill beyond the store and into the woods. The load itself went sliding up the right side of the road, creating a huge bow-wave of dirt and leaving behind a deep groove, a flattened Chevrolet, and two more flattened harriers.
There were plenty more where those came from, though. Or so it seemed. The gunfire continued.
"Come on, Chip, time to split," Eddie said, and this time when he tugged the shopkeeper toward the back of the store Chip came, still looking back over his shoulder and wiping blood from the side of his face.
At the rear of the market, on the left, was an added-on lunchroom with a counter, a few patched stools, three or four tables, and an old lobster-pot over a newsstand which seemed to contain mostly out-of-date girlie magazines. As they reached this part of the building, the gunfire from outside intensified. Then it was dwarfed again, this time by an explosion. The pulper's fuel-tank, Eddie assumed. He felt the droning passage of a bullet and saw a round black hole appear in the picture of a lighthouse mounted on the wall.
"Whoare those guys?" Chip asked in a perfectly conversational voice. "Who are you? Am I hit? My son was in Viet Nam, you know. Did you see that truck?"
Eddie answered none of his questions, just smiled and nodded and hustled Chip along in Roland's wake. He had absolutely no idea where they were going or how they were going to get out of this f**karee. The only thing he was completely sure of was that Calvin Tower wasn't here. Which was probably good. Tower might or might not have brought down this particular batch of hellfire and brimstone, but the hellfire and brimstone wasabout old Cal, of that Eddie had no doubt. If old Cal had only -
A darning-needle of heat suddenly tore through his arm and Eddie shouted in surprise and pain. A moment later another punched him in the calf. His lower right leg exploded intoserious pain, and he cried out again.
"Eddie!" Roland chanced a look back. "Are you - "
"Yeah, fine, go, go!"
Ahead of them now was a cheap fiberboard back wall with three doors in it. One was marked BUOYS, one GULLS, one EMPLOYEES ONLY.
"E MPLOYEES ONLY! " Eddie shouted. He looked down and saw a blood-ringed hole in his bluejeans about three inches below his right knee. The bullet hadn't exploded the knee itself, which was to the good, but oh Mama, it hurt like the veriest motherfucker of creation.
Over his head, a light-globe exploded. Glass showered down on Eddie's head and shoulders.
"I'm insured, but God knows if it covers somethin likethis, " Chip said in his perfectly conversational voice. He wiped more blood from his face, then slatted it off his fingertips and onto the floor, where it made a Rorschach inkblot. Bullets buzzed around them. Eddie saw one flip up Chip's collar. Somewhere behind them, Jack Andolini - old Double-Ugly - was hollering in Italian. Eddie somehow didn't think he was calling retreat.
Roland and the customer in the flannel shirt went through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door. Eddie followed, pumped up on the wine of adrenaline and still dragging Chip. This was a storeroom, and of quite a good size. Eddie could smell different kinds of grain, some sort of minty tang, and, most of all, coffee.
Now Mr. Flannel Shirt had taken the lead. Roland followed him quickly down the storeroom's center aisle and between pallets stacked high with canned goods. Eddie limped gamely along after, still hauling the shopkeeper. Old Chip had lost a lot of blood from the wound on the side of his head and Eddie kept expecting him to pass out, but Chip actually seemed...well, chipper. He was currently asking Eddie what had happened to Ruth Beemer and her sister. If he meant the two women who'd been in the store (Eddie was pretty sure he did), Eddie hoped that Chip wouldn't suddenly regain his memory.
There was another door at the back. Mr. Flannel Shirt opened it and started out. Roland hauled him back by the shirt, then went out himself, low. Eddie stood Chip beside Mr. Flannel Shirt and himself just in front of them. Behind them, bullets smacked through the EMPLOYEES ONLY door, creating startled white eyes of daylight.
"Eddie!" Roland grunted. "To me!"
Eddie limped out. There was a loading dock here, and beyond it about an acre of unlovely, churned-up ground. Trash barrels had been stacked haphazardly to the right of the dock and there were two Dumpsters to the left, but it didn't look to Eddie Dean as if anyone had worried too much about putting litter in its place. There were also several piles of beercans almost big enough to qualify as archaeological middens.Nothing like relaxing on the back porch after a hard day at the store, Eddie thought.
Roland was pointing his gun at another oil-pump, this one rustier and older than the ones out front. On it was a single word. "Diesel," Roland said. "Does that mean fuel? It does, doesn't it?"
"Yeah," Eddie said. "Chip, does the diesel pump work?"
"Sure, sure," Chip said in a disinterested tone of voice. "Lotsa guys fill up back here."
"I can run it, mister," said Flannel Shirt. "You better let me, too - it's tetchy. Can you and your buddy cover me?"
"Yes," Roland said. "Pour it in there." And jerked a thumb at the storeroom.
"Hey, no!" Chip said, startled.
How long did all these things take? Eddie could not have said, not for sure. All he was aware of was a clarity he had known only once before: while riddling Blaine the Mono. It overwhelmed everything with its brilliance, even the pain in his lower leg, where the tibia might or might not have been chipped by a bullet. He was aware of how funky it smelled back here - rotted meat and moldy produce, the yeasty scent of a thousand departed brewskis, the odors of don't-care laziness - and the divinely sweet fir-perfume of the woods just beyond the perimeter of this dirty little roadside store. He could hear the drone of a plane in some distant quadrant of the sky. He knew he loved Mr. Flannel Shirt because Mr. Flannel Shirt washere, waswith them, linked to Roland and Eddie by the strongest of bonds for these few minutes. But time? No, he had no true sense of that. But it couldn't have been much more than ninety seconds since Roland had begun their retreat, or surely they would have been overwhelmed, crashed truck or no crashed truck.