The Waste Lands dt-3

by Stephen King

  A GRASSY DITCH RAN along the side of the road and Eddie sat on the far side of it with his blanket around his shoulders. A thin scud of clouds had veiled the sky tonight, dimming the starshow. A strong west wind was blowing. When Eddie turned his face in that direction, he could clearly smell the buffalo which now owned these plains-a mixed perfume of hot fur and fresh dung. The clarity which had returned to his senses in these last few months was amazing,.. and, at times like these, a little spooky, as well.

  Very faintly, he could hear a buffalo calf bawling.

  He turned toward the city, and after a while he began to think he might be seeing distant sparks of light there-the electric candles of the twins’ story-but he was well aware that he might be seeing nothing more than his own wishful thinking.

  You’re a long way from Forty-second Street, sweetheart-hope is a great thing, no matter what anyone says, but don’t hope so hard you lose sight of that one thought: you’re a long way from Forty-second Street. That’s not New York up ahead, no matter how much you might wish it was. That’s Lud, and it’ll be whatever it is. And if you keep that in mind, maybe you’ll be okay.

  He passed his time on watch trying to think of an answer to the last riddle of the evening. The scolding Roland had given him about his dead-baby joke had left him feeling disgruntled, and it would please him to be able to start off the morning by giving them a good answer. Of course they wouldn’t be able to check any answer against the back of the book, but he had an idea that with good riddles a good answer was usually self-evident.

  Sometimes tall and sometimes short. He thought that was the key and all the rest was probably just misdirection. What was sometimes tall and sometimes short? Pants? No. Pants were sometimes short and sometimes long, but he had never heard of tall pants. Tales? Like pants, it only fit snugly one way. Drinks were sometimes both tall and short-

  “Order,” he murmured, and thought for a moment that he must have stumbled across the solution-both adjectives fit the noun glove-tight. A tall order was a big job; a short order was something you got on the quick in a restaurant-a hamburger or a tuna melt. Except that tall orders and tuna melts didn’t join our talk or play at every game.

  He felt a rush of frustration and had to smile at himself, getting all wound up about a harmless word-game in a kid’s book. All the same, he found it a little easier to believe that people might really kill each other over riddles… if the stakes were high enough and cheating was involved.

  Let it go-you’re doing exactly what Roland said, thinking right past it.

  Still, what else did he have to think about?

  Then the drumming from the city began again, and he did have something else. There was no build-up; at one moment it wasn’t there, and at the next it was going full force, as if a switch had been turned. Eddie walked to the edge of the road, turned toward the city, and listened. After a few moments he looked around to see if the drums had awakened the others, but he was still alone. He turned toward Lud again and cupped his ears forward with the sides of his hands.

  Bump… ba-bump… ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.

  Bump… ba-bump… ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.

  Eddie became more and more sure that he had been right about what it was; that he had, at least, solved this riddle.

  Bump… ba-bump… ba-bump-bumpbump-bump.

  The idea that he was standing by a deserted road in an almost empty world, standing some one hundred and seventy miles from a city which had been built by some fabulous lost civilization and listening to a rock-and-roll drum-line… that was crazy, but was it any crazier than a traffic-light that dinged and dropped a rusty green flag with the word GO printed on it? Any crazier than discovering the wreck of a German plane from the 1930s?

  Eddie sang the words to the Z.Z. Top song in a whisper:

  “You need just enough of that sticky stuff

  To hold the seam on your fine blue-jeans

  I say yeah, yeah…”

  They fit the beat perfectly. It was the disco-pulse percussion of “Velcro Fly.” Eddie was sure of it.

  A short time later the sound ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and he could hear only the wind, and, more faintly, the Send River, which had a bed but never slept.

  5

  THE NEXT FOUR DAYS were uneventful. They walked; they watched the bridge and the city grow larger and define themselves more clearly; they camped; they ate; they riddled; they kept watch turn and turn about (Jake had pestered Roland into letting him keep a short watch in the two hours just before dawn); they slept. The only remarkable incident had to do with the bees.

  Around noon on the third day after the discovery of the downed plane, a buzzing sound came to them, growing louder and louder until it dominated the day. At last Roland stopped. “There,” he said, and pointed toward a grove of eucalyptus trees.

  “It sounds like bees,” Susannah said.

  Roland’s faded blue eyes gleamed. “Could be we’ll have a little dessert tonight.”

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, Roland,” Eddie said, “but I have this aversion to being stung.”

  “Don’t we all,” Roland agreed, “but the day is windless. I think we can smoke them to sleep and steal their comb right out from under them without setting half the world on fire. Let’s have a look.”

  He carried Susannah, who was as eager for the adventure as the gunslinger himself, toward the grove. Eddie and Jake lagged behind, and Oy, apparently having decided that discretion was the better part of valor, remained sitting at the edge of the Great Road, panting like a dog and watching them carefully.

  Roland paused at the edge of the trees. “Stay where you are,” he told Eddie and Jake, speaking softly. “We’re going to have a look. I’ll give you a come-on if all’s well.” He carried Susannah into the dappled shadows of the grove while Eddie and Jake remained in the sunshine, peering after them.

  It was cooler in the shade. The buzzing of the bees was a steady, hypnotic drone. “There are too many,” Roland murmured. “This is late summer; they should be out working. I don’t-”

  He caught sight of the hive, bulging tumorously from the hollow of a tree in the center of the clearing, and broke off.

  “What’s the matter with them?” Susannah asked in a soft, horrified voice. “Roland, what’s the matter with them?”

  A bee, as plump and slow-moving as a horsefly in October, droned past her head. Susannah flinched away from it.

  Roland motioned for the others to join them. They did, and stood looking at the hive without speaking. The chambers weren’t neat hexagons but random holes of all shapes and sizes; the beehive itself looked queerly melted, as if someone had turned a blowtorch on it. The bees which crawled sluggishly over it were as white as snow.

  “No honey tonight,” Roland said. “What we took from yonder comb might taste sweet, but it would poison us as surely as night follows day.”

  One of the grotesque white bees lumbered heavily past Jake’s head. He ducked away with an expression of loathing.

  “What did it?” Eddie asked. “What did it to them, Roland?”

  “The same thing that has emptied this whole land; the thing that’s still causing many of the buffalo to be born as sterile freaks. I’ve heard it called the Old War, the Great Fire, the Cataclysm, and the Great Poisoning. Whatever it was, it was the start of all our troubles and it happened long ago, a thousand years before the great-great-grandfathers of the River Crossing folk were born. The physical effects-the two-headed buffalo and the white bees and such-have grown less as time passes. I have seen this for myself. The other changes are greater, if harder to see, and they are still going on.”

  They watched the white bees crawl, dazed and almost completely helpless, about their hive. Some were apparently trying to work; most simply wandered about, butting heads and crawling over one another. Eddie found himself remembering a newsclip he’d seen once. It had shown a crowd of survivors leaving the area where a gas-main had exploded, flattening almost a who
le city block in some California town. These bees reminded him of those dazed, shellshocked survivors.

  “You had a nuclear war, didn’t you?” he asked-almost accused. “These Great Old Ones you like to talk about… they blew their great old asses straight to hell. Didn’t they?”

  “I don’t know what happened. No one knows. The records of those times are lost, and the few stories are confused and conflicting.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jake said in a trembling voice. “Looking at those things makes me sick.”

  “I’m with you, sugar,” Susannah said.

  So they left the bees to their aimless, shattered life in the grove of ancient trees, and there was no honey that night.

  6

  “WHEN ARE YOU GOING to tell us what you do know?” Eddie asked the next morning. The day was bright and blue, but there was a bite in the air; their first autumn in this world was almost upon them.

  Roland glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

  “I’d like to hear your whole story, from beginning to end, starting with Gilead. How you grew up there and what happened to end it all. I want to know how you found out about the Dark Tower and why you started chasing after it in the first place. I want to know about your first bunch of friends, too. And what happened to them.”

  Roland removed his hat, armed sweat from his brow, then replaced it. “You have the right to know all those things, I suppose, and I’ll tell them to you… but not now. It’s a very long story. I never expected to tell it to anyone, and I’ll only tell it once.”

  “When?” Eddie persisted.

  “When the time is right,” Roland said, and with that they had to be content.

  7

  ROLAND CAME AWAKE THE moment before Jake began to shake him. He sat up and looked around, but Eddie and Susannah were still fast asleep and in the first faint light of morning, he could see nothing amiss.

  “What is it?” he asked Jake in a low voice.

  “I don’t know. Fighting, maybe. Come and listen.”

  Roland threw his blanket aside and followed Jake out to the road. He reckoned they were now only three days’ walk from the place where the Send passed in front of the city, and the bridge-built squarely along the path of the Beam-dominated the horizon. Its pronounced tilt was more clearly visible than ever, and he could see at least a dozen gaps where over-stressed cables had snapped like the strings of a lyre.

  Tonight the wind blew directly into their faces as they looked toward the city, and the sounds it carried to them were faint but clear.

  “Is it fighting?” Jake asked.

  Roland nodded and held a finger to his lips.

  He heard faint shouts, a crash that sounded like some huge object falling, and-of course-the drums. Now there was another crash, this one more musical: the sound of breaking glass.

  “Jeepers,” Jake whispered, and moved closer to the gunslinger.

  Then came the sounds which Roland had hoped not to hear: a fast, sandy rattle of small-arms fire followed by a loud hollow bang-clearly an explosion of some land. It rolled across the flatlands toward them like an invisible bowling ball. After that, the shouts, thuds, and sounds of breakage quickly sank below the level of the drums, and when the drums quit a few minutes later with their usual unsettling suddenness, the city was silent again. But now that silence had an unpleasant waiting quality.

  Roland put an arm around Jake’s shoulders. “Still not too late to detour around,” he said.

  Jake glanced up at him. “We can’t.”

  “Because of the train?”

  Jake nodded and singsonged: “Blaine is a pain, but we have to take the train. And the city’s the only place where we can get on.”

  Roland looked thoughtfully at Jake. “Why do you say we have to? Is it ka? Because, Jake, you have to understand that you don’t know much about ka yet-it’s the sort of subject men study all their lives.”

  “I don’t know if it’s ka or not, but I do know that we can’t go into the waste lands unless we’re protected, and that means Blaine. Without him we’ll die, like those bees we saw are going to die when winter comes. We have to be protected. Because the waste lands are poison.”

  “How do you know these things?”

  “I don’t know!” Jake said, almost angrily. “I just do.”

  “All right,” Roland said mildly. He looked toward Lud again. “But we’ll have to be damned careful. It’s unlucky that they still have gunpowder. If they have that, they may have things that are even more powerful. I doubt if they know how to use them, but that only increases the danger. They could get excited and blow us all to hell.”

  “Ell,” a grave voice said from behind them. They glanced around and saw Oy sitting by the side of the road, watching them.

  8

  LATER THAT DAY THEY came to a new road which swept toward them out of the west and joined their own way. Beyond this point, the Great Road-now much wider and split down the middle by a median divider of some polished dark stone-began to sink, and the crumbling concrete embankments which rose on either side of them gave the pilgrims a claustrophobic trapped feeling. They stopped at a point where one of these concrete dikes had born broken open, affording a comforting line of sight to the open land beyond, and ate a light, unsatisfying meal.

  “Why do you think they dropped the road down like this, Eddie?” Jake asked. “I mean, someone did do it this way on purpose, didn’t they?”

  Eddie looked through the break in the concrete, where the flatlands stretched on as smoothly as ever, and nodded.

  “Then why?”

  “Dunno, champ,” Eddie said, but he thought he did. He glanced at Roland and guessed that he knew, too. The sunken road leading to the bridge had been a defensive measure. Troops placed atop the concrete slopes were in control of two carefully engineered redoubts. If the defenders didn’t like the look of the folks approaching Lud along the Great Road, they could rain destruction down on them.

  “You sure you don’t know?” Jake asked.

  Eddie smiled at Jake and tried to stop imagining that there was some nut up there right now, getting ready to roll a large, rusty bomb down one of those decayed concrete ramps. “No idea,” he said.

  Susannah whistled disgustedly between her teeth. “This road’s goin to hell, Roland. I was hoping we were done with that damn harness, but you better get it out again.” He nodded and rummaged in his purse for it without a word.

  The condition of the Great Road deteriorated as other, smaller roads joined it like tributaries joining a great river. As they neared the bridge, the cobbles were replaced with a surface Roland thought of as metal and the rest of them thought of as asphalt or hot-top. It had not held up as well as the cobbles. Time had done some damage; the passage of countless horses and wagons since the last repairs were made had done more. The surface had been chewed into treacherous rubble. Foot travel would be difficult, and the idea of pushing Susannah’s wheelchair over that crumbled surface was ridiculous.

  The banks oh either side had grown steadily steeper, and now, at their tops, they could see slim, pointed shapes looming against the sky. Roland thought of arrowheads-huge ones, weapons made by a tribe of giants. To his companions, they looked like rockets or guided missiles. Susannah thought of Redstones fired from Cape Canaveral; Eddie thought about SAMs, some built to be fired from the backs of flatbed trucks, stored all over Europe; Jake thought of ICBMs hiding in reinforced concrete silos under the plains of Kansas and the unpopulated mountains of Nevada, programmed to hit back at China or the USSR in the event of nuclear armageddon. All of them felt as if they had passed into a dark and woeful zone of shadow, or into a countryside laboring under some old but still powerful curse.

  Some hours after they entered this area- Jake called it The Gauntlet-the concrete embankments ended at a place where half a dozen access roads drew together, like the strands of a spiderweb, and here the land opened out again… a fact which relieved all of them, although none of them said so out
loud. Another traffic-light swung over the junction. This one was more familiar to Eddie, Susannah, and Jake; it had once had lenses on its four faces, although the glass had been broken out long ago.

  “I’ll bet this road was the eighth wonder of the world, once upon a time,” Susannah said, “and look at it now. It’s a minefield.”

  “Old ways are sometimes the best ways,” Roland agreed.

  Eddie was pointing west. “Look.”

  Now that the high concrete barriers were gone, they could see exactly what old Si had described to them over cups of bitter coffee in River Crossing. “One track only,” he had said, “set up high on a colyum of man-made stone, such as the Old Ones used to make their streets and walls.” The track raced toward them out of the west in a slim, straight line, then flowed across the Send and into the city on a narrow golden trestle. It was a simple, elegant construction-and the only one they had seen so far which was totally without rust-but it was badly marred, all the same. Halfway across, a large piece of the trestle had fallen into the rushing river below. What remained were two long, jutting piers that pointed at each other like accusing fingers. Jutting out of the water below the hole was a streamlined tube of metal. Once it had been bright blue, but now the color had been dimmed by spreading scales of rust. It looked very small from this distance.

  “So much for Blaine,” Eddie said. “No wonder they stopped hearing it. The supports finally gave way while it was crossing the river and it fell in the drink. It must have been decelerating when it happened, or it would have carried straight across and all we’d see would be a big hole like a bomb-crater in the far bank. Well, it was a great idea while it lasted.”

  “Mercy said there was another one,” Susannah reminded him.

  “Yeah. She also said she hadn’t heard it in seven or eight years, and Aunt Talitha said it was more like ten. What do you think, Jake… Jake? Earth to Jake, Earth to Jake, come in, little buddy.”