The Waste Lands dt-3

by Stephen King

  And in her ears she could hear the voice of authority which had come rolling out of those speakers-could hear it as clearly as she had heard the creak of the wagons passing through River Crossing, as clearly as she had heard the crack of the whip above the backs of the straining oxen.

  Ration centers A and D will be closed today; please proceed to centers B, C, E, and F with proper coupons.

  Militia squads Nine, Ten, and Twelve report to Sendside.

  Aerial bombardment is likely between the hours of eight and ten of the clock. All noncombatant residents should report to their designated shelters. Bring your gas masks. Repeat, bring your gas masks.

  Announcements, yes… and some garbled version of the news-a propagandized, militant version George Orwell would have called doublespeak. And in between the news bulletins and the announcements, squalling military music and exhortations to respect the fallen by sending more men and women into the red throat of the abattoir.

  Then the war had ended and silence had fallen… for a while. But at some point, the speakers had begun broadcasting again. How long ago? A hundred years? Fifty? Did it matter? Susannah thought not. What mattered was that when the speakers were reactivated, the only thing they broadcast was a single tape-loop… the loop with the drum-track on it. And the descendents of the city’s original residents had taken it for… what? The Voice of the Turtle? The Will of the Beam?

  Susannah found herself remembering the time she had asked her father, a quiet hut deeply cynical man, if he believed there was a God in heaven who guided the course of human events. Well, he had said, I think it’s sort of half ’n half, Odetta. I’m sure there’s a God, but I don’t think He has much if anything to do with us these days; I believe that after we killed His son, He finally got it through His head that there wasn’t nothing to be done with the sons of Adam or the daughters of Eve, and He washed His hands of us. Wise fella.

  She had responded to this (which she had fully expected; she was eleven at the time, and knew the turn of her father’s mind quite well) by showing him a squib on the Community Churches page of the local newspaper. It said that Rev. Murdock of the Grace Methodist Church would that Sunday elucidate on the topic “God Speaks to Each of Us Every Day”-with a text from First Corinthians. Her father had laughed over that so hard that tears had squirted from the corners of his eyes. Well, I guess each of us hears someone talking, he had said at last, and you can bet your bottom dollar on one thing, sweetie: each of us-including this here Reverend Murdock-hears that voice say just exactly what he wants to hear. It’s so convenient that way.

  What these people had apparently wanted to hear in the recorded drum-track was an invitation to commit ritual murder. And now, when the drums began to throb through these hundreds or thousands of speakers-a hammering back-beat which was only the percussion to a Z.Z. Top song called “Velcro Fly,” if Eddie was right-it became their signal to unlimber the hangropes and run a few folks up the nearest speaker-posts.

  How many? she wondered as Eddie rolled her along in her wheel-chair, its nicked and dented hard rubber tires crackling over broken glass and whispering through drifts of discarded paper. How many have been killed over the years because some electronic circuit under the city got the hiccups? Did it start because they recognized the essential alienness of the music, which came somehow-like us, and the airplane, and some of the cars along these streets-from another world?

  She didn’t know, but she knew she had come around to her father’s cynical point of view on the subject of God and the chats He might or might not have with the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. These people had been looking for a reason to slaughter each other, that was all, and the drums had been as good a reason as any.

  She found herself thinking of the hive they had found-the misshapen hive of white bees whose honey would have poisoned them if they had been foolish enough to eat of it. Here, on this side of the Send, was another dying hive; more mutated white bees whose sting would be no less deadly for their confusion, loss, and perplexity.

  And how many more will have to die before the tape finally breaks?

  As if her thoughts had caused it to happen, the speakers suddenly began to transmit the relentless, syncopated heartbeat of the drums. Eddie yelled in surprise. Susannah screamed and clapped both hands to her ears-but before she did, she could faintly hear the rest of the music: the track or tracks which had been muted decades ago when someone (probably quite by accident) had bumped the balance control, knocking it all the way to one side and burying both the guitars and the vocal.

  Eddie continued to push her along The Street of the Turtle and the Path of the Beam, trying to look in all directions at once and trying not to smell the odor of putrefaction. Thank God for the wind, he thought.

  He began to push the wheelchair faster, scanning the weedy gaps between the big white buildings for the graceful sweep of an overhead monorail track. He wanted to get out of this endless aisle of the dead. As he took yet another deep breath of that speciously sweet cinnamon smell, it seemed to him that he had never wanted anything so badly in his whole life.

  19

  JAKE’S DAZE WAS BROKEN abruptly when Gasher grabbed him by the collar and yanked with all the force of a cruel rider braking a galloping horse. He stuck one leg out at the same time and Jake went crashing backward over it. His head connected with the pavement and for a moment all the lights went out. Gasher, no humanitarian, brought him around quickly by seizing Jake’s lower lip and yanking it upward and outward.

  Jake screamed and bolted to a sitting position, striking out blindly with his fists. Gasher dodged the blows easily, hooked his other hand into Jake’s armpit, and yanked him to his feet. Jake stood there, rocking drunkenly back and forth. He was beyond protest now; almost beyond understanding. All he knew for sure was that every muscle in his body felt sprung and his wounded hand was howling like an animal caught in a trap.

  Gasher apparently needed a breather, and this time he was slower getting his wind back. He stood bent over with his hands planted on the knees of his green trousers, panting in fast little whistling breaths. His yellow headscarf had slipped askew. His good eye glittered like a trumpery diamond. The white silk eyepatch was now wrinkled, and curds of evil-looking yellow muck oozed onto his cheek from beneath it.

  “Take a look over your head, cully, and you’ll see why I brung you up short. Get an eyeful!”

  Jake tilted his head upward, and in the depths of his shock he was not at all surprised to see a marble fountain as big as a house-trailer dangling eighty feet above them. He and Gasher were almost below it. The fountain was held suspended by two rusty cables which were mostly hidden within huge, unsteady stacks of church pews. Even in his less-than-acute state, Jake saw that these cables were more seriously frayed than the remaining hangers on the bridge had been.

  “See it?” Gasher asked, grinning. He raised his left hand to his covered eye, scooped a mass of the pussy material from beneath it, and flicked it indifferently aside. “Beauty, ain’t it? Oh, the Tick-Tock Man’s a trig cove, all right, and no mistake. (Where’s those goat-fucking drums? They should have started by now-if Copperhead’s forgot em, I’ll ram a stick so far up his arse he’ll taste bark.) Now look ahead of you, my delicious little squint.”

  Jake did, and Gasher immediately clouted him so hard that he staggered backward and almost fell.

  “Not across, idiot child! Down! See them two dark cobblestones?”

  After a moment, Jake did. He nodded apathetically.

  “Yer don’t wanter step on em, for that’d bring the whole works down on your head, cully, and anybody who wanted yer after that’d have to pick yer up with a blotter. Understand?”

  Jake nodded again.

  “Good.” Gasher took a final deep breath and slapped Jake’s shoulder. “Go on, then, whatcher waitin for? Hup!”

  Jake stepped over the first of the discolored stones and saw it wasn’t really a cobblestone at all but a metal plate which had been rounded
to look like one. The second was just ahead of it, cunningly placed so that if an unaware intruder happened to miss the first one, he or she would almost certainly step on the second.

  Go ahead and do it, then, he thought. Why not? The gunslinger’s never going to find you in this maze, so go ahead and bring it down. It’s got to be cleaner than what Gasher and his friends have got planned for you. Quicker, too.

  His dusty moccasin wavered in the air above the booby-trap.

  Gasher hit him with a fist in the middle of the back, but not hard. “Thinkin about takin a ride on the handsome, are you, my little cull?” he asked. The laughing cruelty in his voice had been replaced by simple curiosity. If it was tinged with any other emotion, it wasn’t fear but amusement. “Well, go ahead, if it’s what yer mean to do, for I have my ticket already. Only be quick about it, gods blast your eyes.”

  Jake’s foot came down beyond the trigger of the booby-trap. His decision to live a little longer was not based on any hope that Roland would find him; it was just that this was what Roland would do-go on until someone made him stop, and then a few yards farther still if he could.

  If he did it now, he could take Gasher with him, but Gasher alone wasn’t sufficient-one look was enough to make it clear that he was telling the truth when he said he was dying already. If he went on, he might have a chance to take some of the Gasherman’s friends, too- maybe even the one he called the Tick-Tock Man.

  If I’m going to ride what he calls the handsome, Jake thought, I’d just as soon go with plenty of company.

  Roland would have understood.

  20

  JAKE WAS WRONG IN his assessment of the gunslinger’s ability to follow their path through the maze; Jake’s pack was only the most obvious bit of sign they left behind them, but Roland quickly realized he did not have to pause to look for sign. He only had to follow Oy.

  He paused at several intersecting passages nevertheless, wanting to make sure, and each time he did, Oy looked back and uttered his low, impatient bark that seemed to say, Hurry up! Do you want to lose them? After the signs he saw-a track, a thread from Jake’s shirt, a scrap of bright yellow cloth from Gasher’s scarf-had three times confirmed the bumbler’s choices, Roland simply followed Oy. He did not give up looking for sign, but he quit making stops to hunt for it. Then the drums started up, and it was the drums-plus Gasher’s nosiness about what Jake might be carrying-that saved Roland’s life that afternoon.

  He skidded to a halt in his dusty boots, and his gun was in his hand before he realized what the sound was. When he did realize, he dropped the revolver back into its holster with an impatient grunt. He was about to go on again when his eye happened first on Jake’s pack… and then on a pair of faint, gleaming streaks in midair just to the left of it. Roland narrowed his eyes and made out two thin wires which crisscrossed at knee level not three feet in front of him. Oy, who was built low to the ground, had scurried neatly through the inverted V formed by the wires, but if not for the drums and spotting Jake’s castoff pack, Roland would have run right into them. As his eyes moved upward, tracing the not-quite-random piles of junk poised on either side of the passageway at this point, Roland’s mouth tightened. It had been a close call, and only ka had saved him.

  Oy barked impatiently.

  Roland dropped to his belly and crawled beneath the wires, moving slowly and carefully-he was bigger than either Jake or Gasher, and he realized a really big man wouldn’t be able to get under here at all without triggering the carefully prepared avalanche. The drums pumped and thumped in his ears. I wonder if they’ve all gone mad, he thought. If I had to listen to that every day, I think I would have.

  He got to the far side of the wires, picked up the pack, and looked inside. Jake’s books and a few items of clothing were still in there, so were the treasures he had picked up along the way-a rock which gleamed with yellow flecks that looked like gold but weren’t; an arrowhead, probably the leaving of the old forest folk, which Jake had found in a grove of trees the day after his drawing; some coins from his own world; his father’s sunglasses; a few other things which only a boy not yet in his teens could really love and understand. Things he would want back again… if, that was, Roland got to him before Gasher and his friends could change him, hurt him in ways that would cause him to lose interest in the innocent pursuits and curiosities of pre-adolescent boyhood.

  Gasher’s grinning face swam into Roland’s mind like the face of a demon or a djinni from a bottle: the snaggle teeth, the vacant eyes, the mandrus crawling over the cheeks and spreading beneath the stubbly lines of the jaws. If you hurt him… he thought, and then forced his mind away, because that line of thought was a blind alley. If Gasher hurt the boy (Jake! his mind insisted fiercely-Not just the boy but Jake! Jake!), Roland would kill him, yes. But the act would mean nothing, for Gasher was a dead man already.

  The gunslinger lengthened the straps of the pack, marvelling at the clever buckles which made this possible, slipped it onto his own back, and stood up again. Oy turned to be off, but Roland called his name and the bumbler looked back.

  “To me, Oy.” Roland didn’t know if the bumbler could understand (or if he would obey even if he did), but it would be better-safer-if he stayed close. Where there was one booby-trap, there were apt to be more. Next time Oy might not be so lucky.

  “Ake!” Oy barked, not moving. The bark was assertive, but Roland thought he saw more of the truth about how Oy felt in his eyes: they were dark with fear.

  “Yes, but it’s dangerous,” Roland said. “To me, Oy.”

  Back the way they had come, there was a thud as something heavy fell, probably dislodged by the punishing vibration of the drums. Roland could now see speaker-poles here and there, poking out of the wreckage like strange long-necked animals.

  Oy trotted back to him and looked up, panting.

  “Stay close.”

  “Ake! Ake-Ake!”

  “Yes. Jake.” He began to run again, and Oy ran beside him, heeling as neatly as any dog Roland had ever seen.

  21

  FOR EDDIE, IT WAS, as some wise man had once said, deja vu all over again: he was running with the wheelchair, racing time. The beach had been replaced by The Street of the Turtle, but somehow everything else was the same. Oh, there was one other relevant difference: now it was a railway station (or a cradle) he was looking for, not a free-standing door.

  Susannah was sitting bolt upright with her hair blowing out behind her and Roland’s revolver in her right hand, its barrel pointed up at the cloudy, troubled sky. The drums thudded and pounded, bludgeoning them with sound. A gigantic, dish-shaped object lay in the street just ahead, and Eddie’s overstrained mind, perhaps cued by the classical buildings on either side of them, produced an image of Jove and Thor playing Frisbee. Jove throws one wide and Thor lets it fall through a cloud-what the hell, it’s Miller Time on Olympus, anyway.

  Frisbees of the gods, he thought, swerving Susannah between two crumbling, rusty cars, what a concept.

  He bumped the chair up on the sidewalk to get around the artifact, which looked like some sort of telecommunications dish now that he was really close to it. He was easing the wheelchair over the curb and back into the street again-the sidewalk was too littered with crap to make any real time-when the drums suddenly cut out. The echoes rolled away into a new silence, except it wasn’t really silent at all, Eddie realized. Up ahead, the arched entrance to a marble building stood at the intersection of The Street of the Turtle and another avenue. This building had been overgrown by vines and some straggly green stuff that looked like cypress beards, but it was still magnificent and somehow dignified. Beyond it, around the corner, a crowd was babbling excitedly.

  “Don’t stop!” Susannah snapped. “We haven’t got time to-”

  A hysterical shriek drilled through the babble. It was accompanied by yells of approval, and, incredibly, the sort of applause Eddie had heard in Atlantic City hotel-casinos after some lounge act had finished doing its thing. Th
e shriek was choked into a long, dying gargle that sounded like the buzz of a cicada. Eddie felt the hair on the nape of his neck coming to attention. He glanced at the corpses hanging from the nearest speaker-pole and understood that the fun-loving Pubes of Lud were holding another public execution.

  Marvellous, he thought. Now if they only had Tony Orlando and Dawn to sing “Knock Three Times,” they could all die happy.

  Eddie looked curiously at the stone pile on the corner. This close, the vines which overgrew it had a powerful herbal smell. That smell was eye-wateringly bitter, but he still liked it better than the cinnamon-sweet odor of the mummified corpses. The beards of greenery growing from the vines drooped in ratty sheaves, creating waterfalls of vegetation where once there had been a series of arched entrances. A figure suddenly barrelled out through one of these waterfalls and hurried toward them. It was a kid, Eddie realized, and not that many years out of diapers, judging by the size. He was wearing a weird little Lord Fauntleroy outfit, complete with ruffled white shirt and velveteen short pants. There were ribbons in his hair. Eddie felt a sudden mad urge to wave his hands above his head and scream But-wheat say, “Lud is o-tay!”

  “Come on!” the kid cried in a high, piping voice. Several sprays of the green stuff had gotten caught in his hair; he brushed absently at these with his left hand as he ran. “They’re gonna do Spankers! It’s the Spankerman’s turn to go to the land of the drums! Come on or you’ll miss the whole fakement, gods cuss it!”

  Susannah was equally stunned by the child’s appearance, but as he got closer, it struck her that there was something extremely odd and awkward about the way he was brushing at the crumbles and strands of greenery which had gotten caught in his beribboned hair: he kept using just that one hand. His other had been behind his back when he ran out through the weedy waterfall, and there it remained.