The Dark Tower - Stephen King [85]
Oy sat before the closed door, which was the kind that swung both ways, with his cartoon squiggle of tail tight against his hindquarters, and barked. “Ake, ope-ope! Ope, Ake!”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jake said, “in a minute. Hold your water.”
“STAGING AREA,” Eddie said. “That sounds at least moderately hopeful.”
They were still pushing Susannah on the stainless-steel table, having negotiated the only stairway they’d come to (a fairly short one) without too much trouble. Susannah had gone down first on her butt—her usual mode of descent—while Roland and Eddie carried the table along behind her. Jake went between the woman and the men with Eddie’s gun raised, the long scrolled barrel laid into the hollow of his left shoulder, a position known as “the guard.”
Roland now drew his own gun, laid it in the hollow of his right shoulder, and pushed the door open. He went through in a slight crouch, ready to dive either way or jump backward if the situation demanded it.
The situation did not. Had Eddie been first, he might have believed (if only momentarily) that he was being attacked by flying Wolves sort of like the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz. Roland, however, was not overburdened with imagination, and even though a good many of the overhead fluorescent light strips in this huge, barnlike space had gone out, he wasted no time—or adrenaline—in mistaking the suspended objects for anything but what they actually were: broken robot raiders awaiting repair.
“Come on in,” he said, and his words came echoing back to him. Somewhere, high in the shadows, came a flutter of wings. Swallows, or perhaps barn-rusties that had found their way in from outside. “I think all’s well.”
They came, and stood looking up with silent awe. Only Jake’s four-footed friend was unimpressed. Oy was taking advantage of the break to groom himself, first the left side and then the right. At last Susannah, still sitting on the rolling steel table, said: “Tell you what, I’ve seen a lot, but I haven’t ever seen anything quite like this.”
Neither had the others. The huge room was thick with Wolves that seemed suspended in flight. Some wore their green Dr. Doom hoods and capes; others hung naked save for their steel suits. Some were headless, some armless, and a few were missing either one leg or the other. Their gray metal faces seemed to snarl or grin, depending on how the light hit them. Lying on the floor was a litter of green capes and discarded green gauntlets. And about forty yards away (the room itself had to stretch at least two hundred yards from end to end) was a single gray horse, lying on its back with its legs sticking stiffly up into the air. Its head was gone. From its neck there emerged tangles of yellow-, green-, and red-coated wires.
They walked slowly after Oy, who was trotting with brisk unconcern across the room. The sound of the rolling table was loud in here, the returning echo a sinister rumble. Susannah kept looking up. At first—and only because there was now so little light in what must once have been a place of brilliance—she thought the Wolves were floating, held up by some sort of anti-gravity device. Then they came to a place where most of the fluorescents were still working, and she saw the guy-wires.
“They must have repaired em in here,” she said. “If there was anyone left to do it, that is.”
“And I think over there’s where they powered em up,” Eddie said, and pointed. Along the far wall, which they could just now begin to see clearly, was a line of bays. Wolves were standing stiffly in some of them. Other bays were empty, and in these they could see a number of plug-in points.