Stephen King – The Waste Lands

“Then it’d come—Blaine the Mono, twinkling in the sun, with a nose like one of the bullets

in your revolver, gunslinger. Maybe two wheels long. I know that sounds like it couldn’t be,

and maybe it wasn’t (we were green, ye must remember, and that makes a difference), but I

still think it was, for when it came, it seemed to run along the whole horizon. Fast, low, and

gone before you could even see it proper!

“Sometimes, on days when the weather were foul and the air low, it’d shriek like a harpy as it came out of the west. Sometimes it’d come in the night with a long white light spread out

before it, and that shriek would wake all of us. It were like the trumpet they say will raise

the dead from their graves at the end of the world, so it was.”

“Tell em about the bang, Si!” Bill or Till said in a voice which trembled with awe. “Tell em about the godless bang what always came after!”

“Ay, I was just getting to that,” Si answered with a touch of annoy- ance. “After it passed by, there would be quiet for a few seconds . . . sometimes as long as a minute, maybe . . .

and then there’d come an explosion that rattled die boards and knocked cups off the shelves

and sometimes even broke the glass in the window-panes. But never did anyone see ary

flash nor fire. It was like an explosion in the world of spirits.”

Eddie tapped Susannah on the shoulder, and when she turned to him he mouthed two

words: Sonic boom. It was nuts—no train he had ever heard of travelled faster than the

speed of sound—but it was also the only thing that made sense.

She nodded and turned back to Si.

“It’s the only one of the machines the Great Old Ones made that I’ve ever seen running

with my own eyes,” he said in a soft voice, “and if it weren’t the devil’s work, there be no devil. The last time I saw it was the spring I married Mercy, and that must have been sixty

year agone.”

“Seventy,” Aunt Talitha said with authority.

“And this train went into the city,” Rolund said. “From back the way we came . . . from the west . . . from the forest.”

“Ay,” a new voice said unexpectedly, “but there was another . . . one that went out from the city .. . and mayhap that one still runs.”

12

THEY TURNED. MERCY STOOD by a bed of flowers between the back of the church

and the table where they sat. She was walking slowly toward the sound of their voices, with

her hands spread out before her.

Si got clumsily to his feet, hurried to her as best he could, and took her hand. She slipped

an arm about his waist and they stood there looking like the world’s oldest wedding couple.

“Auntie told you to take your coffee inside!” he said.

“Finished my coffee long ago,” Mercy said. “It’s a bitter brew and I hate it. Besides—I wanted to hear the palaver.” She raised a trembling finger and pointed it in Roland’s

direction. “I wanted to hear his voice. It’s fair and light, so it is.”

“I cry your pardon, Auntie,” Si said, looking at the ancient woman a little fearfully. “She was never one to mind, and the years have made her no better.”

Aunt Talitha glanced at Roland. He nodded, almost imperceptibly. “Let her come forward and join us,” she said.

Si led her over to the table, scolding all the while. Mercy only looked over his shoulder

with her sightless eyes, her mouth set in an intractable line.

When Si had gotten her seated, Aunt Talitha leaned forward on her forearms and said,

“Now do you have something to say, old sister-sai, or were you just beating your gums?”

“I hear what I hear. My ears are as sharp as they ever were, Tali- tha—sharper!”

Roland’s hand dropped to his belt for a moment. When he brought it back to the table, he

was holding a cartridge in his fingers. He tossed it to Susannah, who caught it. “Do you,

sai?” he asked.

“Well enough,” she said, turning in his direction, “to know that you just threw something.

To your woman, I think—the one with the brown skin. Something small. What was it,

gunslinger? A biscuit?”

“Close enough,” he said, smiling. “You hear as well as you say. Now tell us what you meant.”

“There is another mono,” she said, “unless ’tis the same one, running a different course.

Either way, a different course was run by some mono . . . until seven or eight year ago,

anyways. I used to hear it leaving the city and going out into the waste lands beyond.”

“Dungheap!” one of the albino twins ejaculated. “Nothing goes to the waste lands!

Nothing can live there!”

She turned her face to him. “Is a train alive, Till Tudbury?” she asked. “Does a machine fall sick with sores and puking?”

Well, Eddie thought of saying, there was this bear . . .

He thought it over a little more and decided it might be better to keep his silence.

“We would have heard it,” the other twin was insisting hotly. “A noise like the one Si always tells of—”

“This one didn’t make no bang,” she admitted, “but I heard that other sound, that humming noise like the one you hear sometimes after lightning has struck somewhere close. When

the wind was strong, blowing out from the city, I heard it.” She thrust out her chin and

added: “I did hear the bang once, too. From far, far out. The night Big Charlie Wind came

and almost blew the steeple off the church. Must have been two hundred wheels from here.

Maybe two hundred and fifty.”

“Bulldink!” the twin cried. “You been chewing the weed!”

“I’ll chew on you, Bill Tudbury, if you don’t shut up your honkin. You’ve no business sayin bulldink to a lady, either. Why—”

“Stop it, Mercy!” Si hissed, but Eddie was barely listening to this exchange of rural

pleasantries. What the blind woman had said made sense to him. Of course there would be

no sonic boom, not from a train which started its run in Lud; he couldn’t remember exactly

what the speed of sound was, but he thought it was somewhere in the neighbor- hood of six

hundred and fifty miles an hour. A train starting from a dead stop would take some time

getting up to that speed, and by the time it reached it, it would be out of earshot . . . unless the listening conditions happened to be just right, as Mercy claimed they had been on the

night when the Big Charlie Wind—whatever that was—had come.

And there were possibilities here. Blaine the Mono was no Land Rover, but maybe . . .

maybe …

“You haven’t heard the sound of this other train for seven or eight years, sai?” Roland asked. “Are you sure it wasn’t much longer?”

“Couldn’t have been,” she said, “for the last time was the year old Bill Muffin took blood-sick. Poor Bill!”

“That’s almost ten year agone,” Aunt Talitha said, and her voice was queerly gentle.

“Why did you never say you heard such a thing?” Si asked. He looked at the gunslinger.

“You can’t believe everything she says, lord— always longing to be in the middle of the

stage is my Mercy.”

“Why, you old slumgullion!” she cried, and slapped his arm. “I didn’t say because I didn’t want to o’ertop the story you’re so proud of, but now that it matters what I heard, I’m bound

to tell!”

“I believe you, sai,” Roland said, “but are you sure you haven’t heard the sounds of the mono since then?”

“Nay, not since then. I imagine it’s finally reached the end of its path.”

“I wonder,” Roland said. “Indeed, I wonder very much.” He looked down at the table, brooding, suddenly far away from all of them,

Choo-choo, Jake thought, and shivered.

13

HALF AN HOUR LATER they were in the town square again, Susannah in her

wheelchair, Jake adjusting the straps of his pack while Oy sat at his heel, watching him

attentively. Only the town elders had attended the dinner-party in the little Eden behind the

Church of the Blood Everlast- ing, it seemed, because when they returned to the square,

another dozen people were waiting. They glanced at Susannah and looked a bit longer at

Jake (his youth apparently more interesting to them than her dark skin), but it was clearly

Roland they had come to see; their wondering eyes were full of ancient awe.

He’s a living remnant of a past they only know from stories, Susan- nah thought. They look

at him the way religious people would look at one of the saints—Peter or Paul or