Stephen King – The Waste Lands

the runway at LaGuardia or Idlewild. “PLEASE TAKE YOUR SEATS, MY

INTERESTING NEW FRIENDS.”

Jake dropped into one of the swivel chairs. Oy jumped promptly into his lap. Roland took

the chair nearest him, sparing one glance at the ice-sculpture. The barrel of the revolver

was beginning to drip slowly into the shallow china basin in which the sculpture stood.

Eddie sat down on one of the sofas with Susannah. It was every bit as comfortable as his

hand had told him it would be. “Exactly where are we going, Blaine?”

Blaine replied in the patient voice of someone who realizes he is speaking to a mental

inferior and must make allowances. “ALONG THE PATH OF THE BEAM. AT LEAST,

AS FAR ALONG IT AS MY TRACK GOES.”

“To the Dark Tower?” Roland asked. Susannah realized it was the first time the gunslinger had actually spoken to the loquacious ghost in the machine below Lud.

“Only as far as Topeka,” Jake said in a low voice.

“YES,” Blaine said. “TOPEKA IS THE NAME OF MY TERMI- NATING POINT,

ALTHOUGH I AM SURPRISED YOU KNOW IT.”

With all you know about our world, Jake thought, how come you don’t know that some

lady wrote a book about you, Blaine? Was it the name-change? Was something that simple enough to fool a complicated machine like you into overlooking your own biography? And

what about Beryl Evans, the woman who supposedly wrote Charlie the Choo-Choo? Did

you know her, Blaine? And where is she now?

Good questions . . . but Jake somehow didn’t think this would be a good time to ask them.

The throb of the engines became steadily stronger. A faint thud— not nearly as strong as

the explosion which had shaken the Cradle as they boarded—ran through the floor. An

expression of alarm crossed Susannah’s face. “Oh shit! Eddie! My wheelchair! It’s back

there!”

Eddie put an arm around her shoulders. “Too late now, babe,” he said as Blaine the Mono began to move, sliding toward its slot in the Cradle for the first time in ten years . . . and for the last time in its long, long history.

5

“THE BARONY CABIN HAS A PARTICULARLY FINE VISUAL MODE,” Blaine said.

“WOULD YOU LIKE ME TO ACTIVATE IT?”

Jake glanced at Roland, who shrugged and nodded.

“Yes, please,” Jake said.

What happened then was so spectacular that it stunned all of them to silence…although

Roland, who knew little of technology but who had spent his entire life on comfortable

terms with magic, was the least wonder-struck of the four. It was not a matter of windows

appearing in the compartment’s curved walls; the entire cabin—floor and ceiling as well as

walls—grew milky, grew translucent, grew transparent, and then disappeared completely.

Within a space of five seconds, Blaine the Mono seemed to be gone and the pilgrims

seemed to be zooming through the lanes of the city with no aid or support at all.

Susannah and Eddie clutched each other like small children in the path of a charging

animal. Oy barked and tried to jump down the front of Jake’s shirt. Jake barely noticed; he

was clutching the sides of his seat and looking from side to side, his eyes wide with

amazement. His initial alarm was being replaced by amazed delight.

The furniture groupings were still here, he saw; so was the bar, the piano-harpsichord, and

the ice-sculpture Blaine had created as a party-favor, but now this living-room

configuration appeared to be cruising seventy feet above Lud’s rain-soaked central district.

Five feet to Jake’s left, Eddie and Susannah were floating along on one of the couches;

three feet to his right, Roland was sitting in a powder-blue swivel chair, his dusty, battered boots resting on nothing, flying serenely over the rubble-strewn urban waste land below.

Jake could feel the carpet beneath his moccasins, but his eyes insisted that neither the

carpet nor the floor beneath it was still there. He looked back over his shoulder and saw the

dark slot in the stone flank of the Cradle slowly receding in the distance.

“Eddie! Susannah! Check it out!”

Jake got to his feet, holding Oy inside his shirt, and began to walk slowly through what

looked like empty space. Taking the initial step required a great deal of willpower, because

his eyes told him there was nothing at all between the floating islands of furniture, but once

he began to move, the undeniable feel of the floor beneath him made it easier. To Eddie and

Susannah, the boy appeared to be walking on thin air while the battered, dingy buildings of

the city slid by on either side.

“Don’t do that, kid,” Eddie said feebly. “You’re gonna make me sick up.”

Juke lilted Oy carefully out of his shirt. “It’s okay,’ he said, and set him down. “See?”

“Oy!” the humbler agreed, but after one look between his paws at the city park currently unrolling beneath them, he attempted to crawl onto Jake’s feet and sit on his moccasins.

Jake looked forward and saw the broad gray stroke of the monorail track ahead of them,

rising slowly but steadily through the buildings and disappearing into the rain. He looked

down again and saw nothing but the street and floating membranes of low cloud.

“How come I can’t see the track underneath us, Blaine?”

“THE IMAGES YOU SEE ARE COMPUTER-GENERATED,” Blaine replied. “THE

COMPUTER ERASES THE TRACK FROM THE LOWER-QUADRANT IMAGE IN

ORDER TO PRESENT A MORE PLEASING VIEW, AND ALSO TO REINFORCE

THE ILLU- SION THAT THE PASSENGERS ARE FLYING.”

“It’s incredible,” Susannah murmured. Her initial fear had passed and she was looking

around eagerly. “It’s like being on a flying carpet. I keep expecting the wind to blow back my hair—”

“I CAN PROVIDE THAT SENSATION, IF YOU LIKE,” Blaine said. “ALSO A LITTLE

MOISTURE, WHICH WILL MATCH CUR- RENT OUTSIDE CONDITIONS. IT

MIGHT NECESSITATE A CHANGE OF CLOTHES, HOWEVER.”

“That’s all right, Blaine. There’s such a thing as taking an illusion too far.”

The track slipped through a tall cluster of buildings which reminded Jake a little of the

Wall Street area in New York. When they cleared these, the track dipped to pass under

what looked like an elevated road. That was when they saw the purple cloud, and the crowd of people fleeing before it.

6

“BLAINE, WHAT’S THAT?” JAKE asked, but he already knew.

Blaine laughed . . . but made no other reply.

The purple vapor drifted from gratings in the sidewalk and the smashed windows of

deserted buildings, but most of it seemed to be coming from manholes like the one Gasher

had used to get into the tunnels below the streets. Their iron covers had been blown clear by

the explosion they had felt as they were boarding the mono. They watched in silent horror

as the bruise-colored gas crept down the avenues and spread into the debris-lit- tered

side-streets. It drove those inhabitants of Lud still interested in survival before it like cattle.

Most were Pubes, judging from their scarves, but Jake could see a few splashes of bright

yellow, as well. Old animosities had been forgotten now that the end was finally upon

them.

The purple cloud began to catch up with the stragglers—mostly old people who were

unable to run. They fell down, clawing at their throats and screaming soundlessly, the

instant the gas touched them. Jake saw an agonized face staring up at him in disbelief as

they passed over, saw the eyesockets suddenly fill up with blood, and closed his eyes.

Ahead, the monorail track disappeared into the oncoming purple fog. Eddie winced and

held his breath as they plunged in, but of course it parted around them, and no whiff of the

death engulfing the city came to them. Looking into the streets below was like looking

through a stained-glass window into hell.

Susannah put her face against his chest.

“Make the walls come back, Blaine,” Eddie said. “We don’t want to see that.”

Blaine made no reply, and the transparency around and below them remained. The cloud

was already disintegrating into ragged purple streamers. Beyond it, the buildings of the city

grew smaller and closer together. The streets of this section were tangled alleyways,

seemingly without order or coherence. In some places, whole blocks appeared to have

burned flat . . . and a long time ago, for the plains were reclaiming these areas, burying the

rubble in the grasses which would some day swallow all of Lud. The way the jungle

swallowed the great civilizations of the Incas and Mayas, Eddie thought. The wheel of ka

turns and the world moves on,

Beyond the slums—that, Eddie felt sure, was what they had been even before the evil days

came—was a gleaming wall. Blaine was moving slowly in that direction. They could see a

deep square notch cut in the white stone. The monorail track passed through it.

“LOOK TOWARD THE FRONT OF THE CABIN, PLEASE,” Blaine invited.