Stephen King – The Waste Lands

bitterly that this realization had come so late. Far back in his mind, a small voice told him this was what he got. This was what he got for doing something better than Henry, for

making Henry nervous.

Another tree fell with a ratcheting, coughing crash. Looking down a ragged aisle between

the tall firs, Eddie saw a cloud of sawdust rise in the still air. The creature responsible for

that cloud suddenly bellowed— a raging, gut-freezing sound.

It was one huge motherfucker, whatever it was.

He dropped the chunk of wood, then flipped Roland’s knife at a tree fifteen feet to his left.

It somersaulted twice in the air and then stuck halfway to the hilt in the wood, quivering.

He grabbed Roland’s .45 from the place where it hung and cocked it.

Stand or run?

But he discovered he no longer had the luxury of that question. The thing was fast as well

as huge, and it was now too late to run. A gigantic shape began to disclose itself in that aisle of trees north of the clearing, a shape which towered above all but the tallest trees. It was

lumbering directly toward him, and as its eyes fixed upon Eddie Dean, it gave voice to

another of those cries.

“Oh man, I’m fucked,” Eddie whispered as another tree bent, cracked like a mortar, then crashed to the forest floor in a cloud of dust and dead needles. Now it was lumbering

straight toward the clearing where he stood, a bear die size of King Kong. Its footfalls made

the ground shake.

What will you do, Eddie? Roland suddenly asked. Think! It’s the only advantage you have

over yon beast. What will you do?

He didn’t think he could kill it. Maybe with a bazooka, hut probably not with the

gunslinger’s .45. He could run, but had an idea that the oncoming beast might be pretty fast

when it wanted to be. He guessed the chances of ending up as jam between the great bear s

toes might be as high as fifty-fifty.

So which one was it going to be? Stand here and start shooting or run like his hair was on

fire and his ass was catching?

It occurred to him that there was a third choice. He could climb.

He turned toward the tree against which he had been leaning. It was a huge, hoary pine,

easily the tallest tree in this part of the woods. The first branch spread out over the forest

floor in a feathery green fan about eight feet up. Eddie dropped the revolver’s hammer and

then jammed the gun into the waistband of his pants. He leaped for the branch, grabbed it,

and did a frantic chin-up. Behind him, the bear gave voice to another bellow as it burst into

the clearing.

The bear would have had him just the same, would have left Eddie Dean’s guts hanging in gaudy strings from the lowest branches of the pine, if another of those sneezing fits had not

come on it at that moment. It kicked the ashy remains of the campfire into a black cloud

and then stood almost doubled over, huge front paws on its huge thighs, looking for a

moment like an old man in a fur coat, an old man with a cold. It sneezed again and

again—AH-CHOW! AH-CHOW! AH-CHOW!—and clouds of parasites blew out of its

muzzle. Hot urine flowed in a stream between its legs and hissed out the campfire’s

scattered embers.

Eddie did not waste the few crucial extra moments he had been given. He went up the tree

like a monkey on a stick, pausing only once to make sure the gunslinger’s revolver was still

seated firmly in the waist- band of his pants. He was in terror, already half convinced that he

was going to die (what else could he expect, now that Henry wasn’t around to Watch Out

for him?), but a crazy laughter raved through his head just the same. Been treed, he thought.

How bout that, sports fans? Been treed by Bearzilla.

The creature raised its head again, the thing turning between its ears catching winks and

flashes of sunlight as it did so, then charged Eddie’s tree. It reached high with one paw and

slashed forward, meaning to knock Eddie loose like a pinecone. The paw tore through the

branch he was standing on just as he lunged upward to the next. That paw tore through one

of his shoes as well, pulling it from his foot and sending it flying in two ragged pieces.

That’s okay, Eddie thought. You can have em both, Br•er Bear, if you want. Goddam

things were worn out, anyway.

The bear roared and lashed at the tree, cutting deep wounds in its ancient bark, wounds

which bled clear, resinous sap. Eddie kept on yanking himself up. The branches were

thinning now, and when he risked a glance down he stared directly into the bear’s muddy

eyes. Below its cocked head, the clearing had become a target with the scattered smudge of

campfire as its bullseye.

“Missed me, you hairy motherf—” Eddie began, and then the bear, its head still cocked

back to look at him, sneezed. Eddie was immediately drenched in hot snot that was filled

with thousands of small white worms. They wriggled frantically on his shirt, his forearms,

his throat and face.

Eddie screamed in mingled surprise and revulsion. He began to brush at his eyes and

mouth, lost his balance, and just managed to hook an arm around the branch beside him in

time. He held on and raked at his skin, wiping off as much of the wormy phlegm as he

could. The bear roared and hit the tree again. The pine rocked like a mast in a gale . . . but

the fresh claw-marks which appeared were at least seven feet below the branch on which

Eddie’s feet were planted.

The worms were dying, he realized—must have begun dying as soon as they left the

infected swamps inside the monster’s body. It made him feel a little better, and he began to

climb again. He stopped twelve feet further up, daring to go no higher. The trunk of the pine, easily eight feet in diameter at its base, was now no more than eighteen inches

through the middle. He had distributed his weight on two branches, but he could feel both

of them bending springily beneath him. He had a crow’s nest view of the forest and

foothills to the west now, spread out below him in an undulating carpet. Under other

circumstances, it would have been a view to relish.

Top of the world, Ma, he thought. He looked down into the bear’s upturned face again, and

for a moment all-coherent thought was driven from his mind by simple amazement.

There was something growing out of the bear’s skull, and to Eddie it looked like a small

radar-dish.

The gadget turned jerkily, kicking up flashes of sun as it did, and Eddie could hear it

screaming thinly. He had owned a few old cars in his time—the kind that sat in the used-car

lots with the words HANDYMAN’S SPECIAL soaped on the windshields—and he

thought the sound coming from that gadget was the sound of bearings which will freeze up

if they are not replaced soon.

The bear uttered a long, purring growl. Yellowish foam, thick with worms, squeezed

between its paws in curdled gobbets. If he had never looked into the face of utter lunacy

(and he supposed he had, having been eyeball to eyeball with that world-class bitch Detta

Walker on more than one occasion), Eddie was looking into it now . . . but that face was,

thankfully, a good thirty feet below him, and at their highest reach those killing talons were

fifteen feet under the soles of his feet. And, unlike the trees upon which the bear had vented

its spleen as it approached the clearing, this one was not dead.

“Mexican standoff, honey, Eddie panted. He wiped sweat from his forehead with one

sap-sticky hand and flicked the mess down into the bugbear’s face.

Then the creature the Old People had called Mir embraced the tree with its great forepaws

and began to shake it. Eddie grabbed the trunk and held on for dear life; eyes squeezed into

grim slits, as the pine began to sway back and forth like a pendulum.

6

ROLAND HALTED AT THE EDGE of the clearing. Susannah, perched on his shoulders,

stared unbelievingly across the open space. The creature stood at the base of the tree where

Eddie had been when the two of them left the clearing forty-five minutes ago. She could

see only chunks and sections of its body through the screen of branches and dark green

needles. Roland’s other gunbelt lay beside one of the monster’s feet. The holster, she saw,

was empty.

“My God,” she murmured.

The bear screamed like a distraught woman and began shaking the tree. The branches lashed as if in a high wind. Her eyes skated upward and she saw a dark form near the top.