Wolves of the Calla - Stephen King [294]
“Is maybe the best we can do?” Callahan asked.
“Yeah,” Eddie said. “For the time being, I guess it is.”
Nine
The following morning, a badly frightened Susannah Dean sat in the privy at the foot of the hill, bent over, waiting for her current cycle of contractions to pass. She’d been having them for a little over a week now, but these were by far the strongest. She put her hands on her lower belly. The flesh there was alarmingly hard.
Oh dear God, what if I’m having it right now? What if this is it?
She tried to tell herself this couldn’t be it, her water hadn’t broken and you couldn’t go into genuine labor until that happened. But what did she actually know about having babies? Very little. Even Rosalita Munoz, a midwife of great experience, wouldn’t be able to help her much, because Rosa’s career had been delivering human babies, of mothers who actually looked pregnant. Susannah looked less pregnant now than when they’d first arrived in the Calla. And if Roland was right about this baby—
It’s not a baby. It’s a chap, and it doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to Mia, whoever she is. Mia, daughter of none.
The cramps ceased. Her lower belly relaxed, losing that stony feel. She laid a finger along the cleft of her vagina. It felt the same as ever. Surely she was going to be all right for another few days. She had to be. And while she’d agreed with Roland that there should be no more secrets in their ka-tet, she felt she had to keep this one. When the fighting finally started, it would be seven against forty or fifty. Maybe as many as seventy, if the Wolves stuck together in a single pack. They would have to be at their very best, their most fiercely concentrated. That meant no distractions. It also meant that she must be there to take her place.
She yanked up her jeans, did the buttons, and went out into the bright sunshine, absently rubbing at her left temple. She saw the new lock on the privy—just as Roland had asked—and began to smile. Then she looked down at her shadow and the smile froze. When she’d gone into the privy, her Dark Lady had stretched out nine-in-the-morning long. Now she was saying that if noon wasn’t here, it would be shortly.
That’s impossible. I was only in there a few minutes. Long enough to pee.
Perhaps that was true. Perhaps it was Mia who had been in there the rest of the time.
“No,” she said. “That can’t be so.”
But Susannah thought it was. Mia wasn’t ascendant—not yet—but she was rising. Getting ready to take over, if she could.
Please, she prayed, putting one hand out against the privy wall to brace herself. Just three more days, God. Give me three more days as myself, let us do our duty to the children of this place, and then what You will. Whatever You will. But please—
“Just three more,” she murmured. “And if they do us down out there, it won’t matter noway. Three more days, God. Hear me, I beg.”
Ten
A day later, Eddie and Tian Jaffords went looking for Andy and came upon him standing by himself at the wide and dusty junction of East and River Roads, singing at the top of his…
“Nope,” Eddie said as he and Tian approached, “can’t say lungs, he doesn’t have lungs.”
“Cry pardon?” Tian asked.
“Nothing,” Eddie said. “Doesn’t matter.” But, by the process of association—lungs to general anatomy—a question had occurred to him. “Tian, is there a doctor in the Calla?”
Tian looked at him with surprise and some amusement. “Not us, Eddie. Gut-tossers might do well for rich folks who have the time to go and the money to pay, but when us gets sick, we go to one of the Sisters.”
“The Sisters of Oriza.”
“Yar. If the medicine’s good—it usually be—we get better. If it ain’t, we get worse. In the end the ground cures all, d’ye see?”
“Yes,” Eddie said, thinking how difficult it must be for them to fit roont children into such a view of things. Those who came back roont died eventually, but for years they just…lingered.
“There’s only