Stephen King – The Waste Lands

“Not at all,” Roland whispered back. “They are creatures of great sadness, I think, in their own strange way. Eddie is going to put them out of their misery.”

Eddie began to shake his head at once.

“Yes, you are . . . unless you want to hunker here in what you call ‘the toolies’ all night. Go for the hats. The little twirling things.”

“What if I miss?” Eddie whispered at him furiously.

Roland shrugged.

Eddie stood up and reluctantly cocked the gunslinger’s revolver again. He looked through

the bushes at the circling servomechanisms, going around and around in their lonely,

useless orbit. It’ll be like shoot- ing puppies, he thought glumly. Then he saw one of

them—it was the thing that looked like a walking box—extrude an ugly-looking pincer device from its middle and clamp it for a moment on the snake. The snake made a surprised

buzzing sound and leaped ahead. The walking box withdrew its pincer.

Well . . . maybe not exactly like shooting puppies, Eddie decided. He glanced at Roland

again. Roland looked back expressionlessly, arms folded across his chest.

You pick some goddam strange times to keep school, buddy.

Eddie thought of Susannah, first shooting the bear in the ass, then blowing its sensor

device to smithereens as it bore down on her and Roland, and felt a little ashamed of

himself. And there was more: part of him wanted to go for it, just as part of him had wanted

to go up against Balazar and his crew of plug-uglies in The Leaning Tower. The

compulsion was probably sick, but that didn’t change its basic attraction: Let’s see who

walks away . . let’s just see.

Yeah, that was pretty sick, all right.

Pretend it’s just a shooting gallery, and you want to win your honey a stuffed dog, he

thought. Or a stuffed bear. He drew a bead on the walking box and then looked around

impatiently when Roland touched his shoulder.

“Say your lesson, Eddie. And be true.”

Eddie hissed impatiently through his teeth, angry at the distraction, but Roland’s eyes

didn’t flinch and so he drew a deep breath and tried to clear everything from his mind: the

squeaks and squalls of equipment that had been running too long, the aches and pains in his

body, the knowledge that Susannah was here, propped up on the heels of her hands,

watching, the further knowledge that she was closest to the ground, and if he missed one of

the gadgets out there, she would be the handiest target if it decided to retaliate.

” ‘I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his

father.’ ”

That was a joke, he thought; he wouldn’t know his old man if he passed him on the street.

But he could feel the words doing their work, clearing his mind and settling his nerves. He

didn’t know if he was the stuff of which gunslingers were made—the idea seemed

fabulously unlikely to him, even though he knew he had managed to hold up his end pretty

well during the shootout at Balazar’s nightclub—but he did know that part of him liked the

coldness that fell over him when he spoke the words of the old, old catechism the

gunslinger had taught them; the coldness and the way things seemed to stand forth with

their own breathless clarity. There was another part of him which understood that this was

just another deadly drug, not much different from the heroin which had killed Henry and

almost killed him, but that did not alter the thin, tight pleasure of the moment. It drummed

in him like taut cables vibrating in a high wind.

” ‘I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgot­ten the face of his father.

” ‘I aim with my eye.

” ‘I do not kill with my gun; he who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father.’

”

Then, without knowing he meant to do it, he stepped out of the trees and spoke to the

trundling robots on the far side of the clearing:

” ‘I kill with my heart.•”

They stopped their endless circling. One of them let out a high buzz that might have been

alarm or a warning. The radar-dishes, each no bigger than half a Hershey bar, turned

toward the sound of his voice.

Eddie begun to fire.

The sensors exploded like day pigeons, one after the other. Pity was gone from Eddie’s

heart; there was only that coldness, and the knowledge that he would not stop, could not

stop, until the job was done.

Thunder filled the twilit clearing and bounced back from the splint- ery rock wall at its

wide end. The steel snake did two cartwheels and lay twitching in the dust. The biggest

mechanism—the one that had reminded Eddie of his childhood Tonka tractor—tried to flee.

Eddie blew its radar-dish to kingdom come as it made a herky-jerky run at the side of the

rut. It fell on its squarish nose with thin blue flames squirting out of the steel sockets which held its glass eyes.

The only sensor he missed was the one on the stainless steel rat; that shot caromed off its

metal back with a high mosquito whine. It surged out of the rut, made a half-circle around

the box-shaped thing which had been following the snake, and charged across the clearing

at surprising speed. It was making an angry clittering sound, and as it closed the distance,

Eddie could see it had a mouth lined with long, sharp points. They did not look like teeth;

they looked like sewing-machine needles, blurring up and down. No, he guessed these

things were really not much like puppies, after all.

“Take it, Roland!” he shouted desperately, but when he snatched a quick look around he saw that Roland was still standing with his arms crossed on his chest, his expression serene

and distant. He might have been thinking of chess problems or old love-letters.

The dish on the rat’s back suddenly locked down. It changed direc- tion slightly and buzzed

straight toward Susannah Dean.

One bullet left, Eddie thought. If I miss, it’ll take her face off.

Instead of shooting, he stepped forward and kicked the rat as hard as he could. He had replaced his shoes with a pair of deerskin moccasins, and he felt the jolt all the way up to

his knee. The rat gave a rusty, ratcheting squeal, tumbled over and over in the dirt, and

came to rest on its back. Eddie could see what looked like a dozen stubby mechanical legs

pistoning up and down. Each was tipped with a sharp steel claw. These claws twirled

around and around on gimbals the size of pencil-erasers.

A steel rod poked out of the robot’s midsection and flipped the gadget upright again. Eddie

brought Roland’s revolver down, ignoring a momentary impulse to steady it with his free

hand. That might be the way cops in his own world were taught to shoot, but it wasn’t the

way it was done here. When you forget the gun is there, when it feels like you’re shooting

with your finger, Roland had told them, then you’ll be some- where near home.

Eddie pulled the trigger. The tiny radar-dish, which had begun to turn again in an effort to

find the enemies, disappeared in a blue Hash. The rat made a choked noise—Chop!—and

fell dead on its side.

Eddie turned with his heart jackhammering in his chest. He couldn’t remember being this

furious since he realized that Roland meant to keep him in his world until his goddamned

Tower was won or lost. . . probably until they were all worm-chow, in other words.

He levelled the empty gun at Roland’s heart and spoke in a thick voice he hardly

recognized as his own. “If there was a round left in this, you could stop worrying about

your fucking Tower right now.”

“Stop it, Eddie!” Susannah said sharply.

He looked at her. “It was going for you, Susannah, and it meant to turn you into ground

chuck.”

“But it didn’t get me. You got it, Eddie. You got it.”

“No thanks to him.” Eddie made as if to re-holster the gun and then realized, to his further disgust, that he had nothing to put it in. Susannah was wearing the holster. “Him and his

lessons. Him and his goddam lessons.” He turned to Roland. “I tell you, for two cents—”

Roland’s mildly interested expression suddenly changed. His eyes shifted to a point over

Eddie’s left shoulder. “DOWN!” he shouted.

Eddie didn’t ask questions. His rage and confusion were wiped from his mind immediately.

He dropped, and as he did, he saw the gunslinger’s left hand blur down to his side. My God,

he thought, still falling, he CAN’T be that fast, no one can be that fast, I’m not bad but