Free Song of Susannah by Stephen King Page A

memory had become distressingly spotty, unreliable, like the half-stripped transmission of an old car. She remembered the battle with the Wolves, and Mia waiting patiently while it went on . . .
    No, that wasn’t right. Wasn’t fair. Mia had been doing a lot more than waiting patiently. She had been cheering Susannah (and the others) on with her own warrior’s heart. Holding the labor in abeyance while her chap’s surrogate mother dealt death with her plates. Only the Wolves had turned out to be robots, so could you really say . . .
    Yes. Yes, you can. Because they were more than robots, much more, and we killed them. Rose up righteous and killed their asses.
    But that was neither here nor there, because it was over. And once it was, she had felt the labor coming back, and strong. She was going to have the kid at the side of the damn road if she didn’t look out; and there it would die, because it was hungry, Mia’s chap was hongry, and . . .
    You got to help me!
    Mia. And impossible not to respond to that cry. Even while she felt Mia pushing her aside (as Roland had once pushed Detta Walker aside), it was impossible not to respond to that wild mother’s cry. Partly, Susannah supposed, because it was her body they shared, and the body had declared itself on behalf of the baby. Probably could not do otherwise. And so she had helped. She had done what Mia herself no longer could do, had stopped the labor a bit longer. Although that in itself would become dangerous to the chap (funny how that word insinuated itself into her thoughts, became her word as well as Mia’s word) if it was allowed to go on too long. She remembered a story some girl had told during a late-night hen party in the dorm at Columbia, half a dozen of them sitting around in their pj’s, smoking cigarettes and passing a bottle of Wild Irish Rose—absolutely verboten and therefore twice as sweet. The story had been about a girl their age on a long car-trip, a girl who’d been too embarrassed to tell her friends she needed a pee-stop. According to the story, the girl had suffered a ruptured bladder and died. It was the kind of tale you simultaneously thought was bullshit and believed absolutely. And this thing with the chap . . . the baby . . .
    But whatever the danger, she’d been able to stop the labor. Because there were switches that could do that. Somewhere.
    ( in the Dogan )
    Only the machinery in the Dogan had never been meant to do what she—they—
    ( us we )
    were making it do. Eventually it would overload and
    ( rupture )
    all the machines would catch fire, burn out. Alarms going off. Control panels and TV screens going dark. How long before that happened? Susannah didn’t know.
    She had a vague memory of taking her wheelchair out of a bucka-waggon while the rest of them were distracted, celebrating their victory and mourning their dead. Climbing and lifting weren’t easy when you were legless from the knees down, but they weren’t as hard as some folks might believe, either. Certainly she was used to mundane obstacles—everything from getting on and off the toilet to getting books off a shelf that had once been easily accessible to her (there had been a step-stool for such chores in every room of her New York apartment). In any case, Mia had been insisting—had actually been driving her, as a cowboy might drive a stray dogie. And so Susannah had hoisted herself into the bucka, had lowered the wheelchair down, and then had lowered herself neatly into it. Not quite as easy as rolling off a log, but far from the hardest chore she’d ever done since losing her last sixteen inches or so.
    The chair had taken her one last mile, maybe a little more (no legs for Mia, daughter of none, not in the Calla). Then it smashed into a spur of granite, spilling her out. Luckily, she had been able to break her fall with her arms, sparing her turbulent and unhappy belly.
    She remembered picking herself up—correction, she remembered Mia picking up