Stephen King – The Waste Lands

THREE HUNDRED YEARS.”

“I and my friends are the last.”

Jake took Oy from Roland. The bumbler at once began to lick the boy’s swollen face; his

gold-ringed eyes were full of adoration and happiness.

“It’s Blaine,” Jake whispered to Roland. “Isn’t it?”

Roland nodded. Of course it was—but he had an idea that there was a great deal more to

Blaine than just a monorail train.

“BOY! ARE YOU JAKE OF NEW YORK?”

Jake pressed closer to Roland and looked up at the speakers. “Yes,” he said. “That’s me.

Jake of New York. Uh . . . son of Elmer.”

“DO YOU STILL HAVE THE BOOK OF RIDDLES? THE ONE OF WHICH I HAVE

BEEN TOLD?”

Jake reached over his shoulder, and an expression of dismayed recol- lection filled his face

as his fingers touched nothing but his own back. When he looked at Roland again, the

gunslinger was holding his pack out toward him, and although the man’s narrow, finely

carved face was as expressionless as ever, Jake sensed the ghost of a smile lurking at die

corners of his mouth.

“You’ll have to fix die straps,” Roland said as Jake took the pack. “I made them longer.”

“But Riddle-De-Dum!—?”

Roland nodded. “Both books are still in there.”

“WHAT YOU GOT, LITTLE PILGRIM?” the voice inquired in a leisurely drawl.

“Gripes!” Jake said.

It can see us as well as hear us, Roland thought, and a moment later he spotted a small

glass eye in one corner, far above a man’s normal line of sight. He felt a chill slip over his

skin, and knew from both the troubled look on Jake’s face and the way the boy’s arms had

tightened around Oy that he wasn’t alone in his unease. That voice belonged to a machine,

an incredibly smart machine, a playful machine, but there was something very wrong with

it, all the same.

“The book,” Jake said. “I’ve got the riddle book.”

“GOOD.” There was an almost human satisfaction in the voice. “REALLY

EXCELLENT.”

A scruffy, bearded fellow suddenly appeared in the doorway on the far side of the kitchen.

A bloodstained, dirt-streaked yellow scarf flapped from the newcomer’s upper arm. “Fires

in the walls!” he screamed. In his panic, he seemed not to realize that Roland and Jake were not part of his miserable subterranean ka-tet. “Smoke on the lower levels! People killin

theirselves! Somepin’s gone wrong! Hell, everythin’s gone wrong! We gotta—”

The door of the oven suddenly dropped open like an unhinged jaw. A thick beam of

blue-white fire shot out and engulfed the scruffy man’s head. He was driven backward with

his clothes in flames and his skin boiling on his face.

Jake stared up at Roland, stunned and horrified. Roland put an arm about the boy’s

shoulders.

“HE INTERRUPTED ME,” the voice said. “THAT WAS RUDE, WASN’T IT?”

“Yes,” Roland said calmly. “Extremely rude.”

“SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK SAYS YOU HAVE A GREAT MANY RIDDLES BY

HEART, ROLAND OF GILEAD. IS THIS TRUE?”

“Yes.”

There was an explosion in one of the rooms opening off this arm of the corridor; the floor

shuddered beneath their feet and voices screamed in a jagged chorus. The pulsing lights

and the endless, blatting siren faded momentarily, then came back strong. A little skein of

bitter, acrid smoke drifted from the ventilators. Oy got a whiff and sneezed.

“TELL ME ONE OF YOUR RIDDLES, GUNSLINGER,” the voice invited. It was serene

and untroubled, as if they were all sitting together in a peaceful village square somewhere

instead of beneath a city that seemed on the verge of ripping itself apart.

Roland thought for a moment, and what came to mind was Cuthbert’s favorite riddle. “All

right, Blaine,” he said, “I will. What’s better than all the gods and worse than Old Man Splitfoot? Dead people eat it always; live people who eat it die slow.”

There was a long pause. Jake put his face in Oy’s fur to try to get away from the stink of the

roasted Gray.

“Be careful, gunslinger.” The voice was as small as a cool puff of breeze on summer’s

hottest day. The voice of the machine had come from all the speakers, but this one came

only from the speaker directly overhead. “Be careful, Jake of New York. Remember that

these are The Drawers. Go slow and be very careful.”

Jake looked at the gunslinger with widening eyes. Roland gave his head a small, faint

shake and raised one finger. He looked as if he was scratching the side of his nose, but that

finger also lay across his lips, and Jake had an idea Roland was actually telling him to keep

his mouth shut.

“A CLEVER RIDDLE,” Blaine said at last. There seemed to be real admiration in its voice.

“THE ANSWER IS NOTHING, IS IT NOT?”

“That’s right,” Roland said. “You’re pretty clever yourself, Blaine.”

When the voice spoke again, Roland heard what Eddie had heard already: a deep and

ungovernable greed. “ASK ME ANOTHER.”

Roland drew a deep breath. “Not just now.”

“I HOPE YOU ARE NOT REFUSING ME, ROLAND, SON OF STEVEN, FOR THAT

IS ALSO RUDE. EXTREMELY RUDE.”

“Take us to our friends and help us get out of Lud,” Roland said. “Then there may be time

for riddling.”

“I COULD KILL YOU WHERE YOU STAND,” the voice said, and now it was as cold as

winter’s darkest day.

“Yes,” Roland said. “I’m sure you could. But the riddles would die with us.”

“I COULD TAKE THE BOY’S BOOK.”

“Thieving is ruder than either refusal or interruption,” Roland remarked. He spoke as if merely passing the time of day, but the remaining fingers of his right hand were tight on

Jake’s shoulder.

“Besides,” Jake said, looking up at the speaker in the ceiling, “the answers aren’t in the book. Those pages were torn out.” In a flash of inspiration, he tapped his temple. “They’re up here, though.”

“YOU FELLOWS WANT TO REMEMBER THAT NOBODY LOVES A

SMARTASS,” Blaine said. There was another explosion, this one louder and closer. One

of the ventilator grilles blew off and shot across the kitchen like a projectile. A moment

later two men and a woman emerged through the door which led to the rest of the Grays’

warren. The gunslinger levelled his revolver at them, then lowered it as they stumbled

across the kitchen and into the silo beyond without so much as a look at Roland and Jake.

To Roland they looked like animals fleeing before a forest fire.

A stainless steel panel in the ceiling slid open, revealing a square of darkness. Something

silvery flashed within it, and a few moments later a steel sphere, perhaps a foot in diameter,

dropped from the hole and hung in the air of the kitchen.

“FOLLOW,” Blaine said flatly.

“Will it take us to Eddie and Susannah?” Jake asked hopefully.

Blaine replied only with silence . . . but when the sphere began floating down the corridor,

Roland and Jake followed it.

38

JAKE HAD NO CLEAR memory of the time which followed, and that was probably

merciful. He had left his world over a year before nine hundred people would commit

suicide together in a small South American country called Gyana, but he knew about the

periodic death-rushes of the lem- mings, and what was happening in the disintegrating

undercity of the Grays was like that.

There were explosions, some on their level but most far below them; acrid smoke

occasionally drifted from the ventilator grilles, but most of the air-purifiers were still

working and they whipped the worst of it away before it could gather in choking clouds.

They saw no fires. Yet the Grays were reacting as if the time of the apocalypse had come.

Most only fled, their faces blank O’s of panic, but many had committed suicide in the halls

and interconnected rooms through which the steel sphere led Roland and Jake. Some had

shot themselves; many more had slashed their throats or wrists; a few appeared to have

swallowed poison. On all the faces of the dead was the same expression of overmastering

terror. Jake could only vaguely understand what had driven them to this. Roland had a

better idea of what had happened to them—to their minds—when the long-dead city first

came to life around them and then seemed to commence tearing itself apart. And it was

Roland who understood that Blaine was doing it on purpose. That Blaine was driving them

to it.

They ducked around a man hanging from an overhead heating-duct and pounded down a flight of steel stairs behind the floating steel ball.

“Jake!” Roland shouted. “You never let me in at all, did you?”

Jake shook his head.

“I didn’t think so. It was Blaine.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs and hurried along a narrow corridor toward a hatch

with the words ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE printed on it in the spiked letters of

the High Speech.

“Is it Blaine?” Jake asked.