Stephen King – The Waste Lands

gunslinger’s back in her harness, it became an exercise in aggravation and endurance.

The flattened trees and jumbles of underbrush served to obscure the bear’s backtrail, and

that also worked to slow their speed. Until mid- day they had followed claw-marks as clear

as trail-blazes on the trees. Here, however, near its starting point, the bear’s rage had not

been full-blown, and these handy signs of its passage disappeared. Roland moved slowly,

looking for droppings in the bushes and tufts of hair on the tree-trunks over which the bear

had climbed. It took all afternoon to cross three miles of this decayed jumble.

Eddie had just decided they were going to lose the light and would have to camp in these

creepy surroundings when they came to a thin skirt of alders. Beyond it, he could hear a

stream babbling noisily over a bed of stones. Behind them, the setting sun was radiating

spokes of sullen red light across the jumbled ground they had just crossed, turning the

fallen trees into crisscrossing black shapes like Chinese ideograms.

Roland called a halt and eased Susannah down. He stretched his back, twisting it this way

and that with his hands on his hips.

“That it for the night?” Eddie asked.

Roland shook his head. “Give Eddie your gun, Susannah.”

She did as he said, looking at him questioningly.

“Come on, Eddie. The place we want is on the other side of those trees. We’ll have a look.

We might do a little work, as well.”

“What makes you think—”

“Open your ears.”

Eddie listened and realized he heard machinery. He further realized that he had been

hearing it for some time now. “I don’t want to leave Susannah.”

“We’re not going far and she has a good loud voice. Besides, if there’s danger, it’s

ahead—we’ll be between it and her.”

Eddie looked down at Susannah.

“Go on—just make sure you’re back soon.” She looked back the way they had come with

thoughtful eyes. “I don’t know if there’s ha ants here or not, but it feels like there are.”

“We’ll be back before dark,” Roland promised. He started toward the screen of alders, and after a moment, Eddie followed him.

26

FIFTEEN YARDS INTO THE trees, Eddie realized that they were following a path, one

the bear had probably made for itself over the years. The alders bent above them in a tunnel.

The sounds were louder now, and he began to sort them out. One was a low, deep,

humming noise. He could feel it in his feet—a faint vibration, as if some large piece of

machinery was running in the earth. Above it, closer and more urgent, were crisscrossing

sounds like bright scratches—squeals, squeaks, chitterings.

Roland placed his mouth against Eddie’s ear and said, “I think there’s little danger if we’re quiet.”

They moved on another five yards and then Roland stopped again. He drew his gun and

used the barrel to brush aside a branch which hung heavy with sunset-tinted leaves. Eddie

looked through this small opening and into the clearing where the bear had lived for so

long—the base of operations from which he had set forth on his many expeditions of

pillage and terror.

There was no undergrowth here; the ground had been beaten bald long since. A stream

emerged from the base of a rock wall about fifty feet high and ran through the

arrowhead-shaped clearing. On their side of the stream, backed up against the wall, was a

metal box about nine feet high. Its roof was curved, and it reminded Eddie of a subway

entrance. The front was painted in diagonal yellow and black stripes. The earth which

floored the clearing was not black, like the topsoil in the forest, but a strange powdery gray.

It was littered with bones, and after a moment Eddie realized that what he had taken for

gray soil was more bones, bones so old they were crumbling back to dust.

Things were moving in the dirt—the things making the squealing, chittering noises.

Four . . . no, five of them. Small metal devices, the largest about the size of a Collie pup.

They were robots, Eddie realized, or something like robots. They were similar to each other

and to the bear they had undoubtedly served in one way only—atop each of them, a tiny

radar-dish turned rapidly.

More thinking caps, Eddie thought. My God, what kind of world is this, anyway?

The largest of these devices looked a little like the Tonka tractor Eddie had gotten for his

sixth or seventh birthday; its treads churned up tiny gray clouds of bone-dust as it rolled

along. Another looked like a stainless steel rat. A third appeared to be a snake constructed

of jointed steel segments—it writhed and humped its way along. They formed a rough

circle on the far side of the stream, going around and around on a deep course they had

carved in the ground. Looking at them made Eddie think of cartoons he had seen in the

stacks of old Saturday Evening Post magazines his mother had for some reason saved and

stored in the front hall of their apartment. In the cartoons, worried, cigarette-smoking men

paced ruts in the carpet while they waited for their wives to give birth.

As his eyes grew used to the simple geography of the clearing, Eddie saw that there were a

great many more than five of these assorted freaks. There were at least a dozen others that

he could see and probably more hidden behind the bony remains of the bear’s old kills. The

difference was that the others weren’t moving. The members of the bear’s mechani- cal

retinue had died, one by one, over the long years until just this little group of five were

left .. . and they did not sound very healthy, with their squeaks and squalls and rusty

chitterings. The snake in particular had a hesitant, crippled look as it followed the

mechanical rat around and around the circle. Every now and then the device which

followed the snake—a steel block that walked on stubby mechanical legs—would catch up

with it and give the snake a nudge, as if telling it to hurry the fuck up.

Eddie wondered what their job had been. Surely not protection; the bear had been built to

protect itself, and Eddie guessed that if old Shardik had come upon the three of them while

still in its prime, it would have chewed them up and spat them out in short order. Perhaps

these little robots had been its maintenance crew, or scouts, or messen- gers. He guessed

that they could be dangerous, but only in their own defense … or their master’s. They did

not seem warlike.

There was, in fact, something pitiful about them. Most of the crew was now defunct, their master was gone, and Eddie believed they knew it somehow. It was not menace they

projected but a strange, inhuman sadness. Old and almost worn out, they paced and rolled

and wriggled their anxious way around the worry-track they had dug in this godforsaken

clearing, and it almost seemed to Eddie that he could read the confused run of their

thoughts; Oh dear, oh dear, what now? What is our purpose, now that He is gone? And who

will take care of us, now that He is gone? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear . . .

Eddie felt a tug on the back of his leg and came very close to screaming in fear and surprise.

He wheeled, cocking Roland’s gun, and saw Susannah looking up at him with wide eyes.

Eddie let out a long breath and dropped the hammer carefully back to its resting position.

He knelt, put his hands on Susannah’s shoulders, kissed her cheek, then whispered in her

ear: “I came really close to putting a bullet in your silly head—what are you doing here?”

“Wanted to see,” she whispered back, looking not even slightly abashed. Her eyes shifted to Roland as he also hunkered beside her. “Besides, it was spooky back there by myself.”

She had sustained a number of small scratches crawling after them through the brush, but

Roland had to admit to himself that she could be as quiet as a ghost when she wanted to be;

he hadn’t heard a thing. He took a rag (the last remnant of his old shirt) from his back

pocket and wiped the little trickles of blood from her arms. He examined his work for a

moment and then dabbed at a small nick on her forehead as well. “Have your look, then,”

he said. His voice was hardly more than the movement of his lips. “I guess you earned it.”

He used one hand to open a sightline at her level in the hock and greenberry bushes, then

waited while she stared raptly into the clearing. At last she pulled back and Roland allowed

the bushes to close again.

“I feel sorry for them,” she whispered. “Isn’t that crazy?”