Stephen King – The Waste Lands

going to die when winter comes. We have to be protected. Because the waste lands are

poison.”

“How do you know these things?”

“I don’t know!” Jake said, almost angrily. “I just do.”

“All right,” Roland said mildly. He looked toward Lud again. “But we’ll have to be damned careful. It’s unlucky that they still have gunpow- der. If they have that, they may

have things that are even more powerful. I doubt if they know how to use them, but that

only increases the danger. They could get excited and blow us all to hell.”

“Ell,” a grave voice said from behind them. They glanced around and saw Oy sitting by the side of the road, watching them.

8

LATER THAT DAY THEY came to a new road which swept toward them out of the west

and joined their own way. Beyond this point, the Great Road—now much wider and split

down the middle by a median divider of some polished dark stone—began to sink, and the

crumbling concrete embankments which rose on either side of them gave the pilgrims a

claustrophobic trapped feeling. They stopped at a point where one of these concrete dikes

had born broken open, affording a comforting line of sight to the open land beyond, and ate

a light, unsatisfying meal.

“Why do you think they dropped the road down like this, Eddie?” Jake asked. “I mean, someone did do it this way on purpose, didn’t they?”

Eddie looked through the break in the concrete, where the flatlands stretched on as

smoothly as ever, and nodded.

“Then why?”

“Dunno, champ,” Eddie said, but he thought he did. He glanced at Roland and guessed that he knew, too. The sunken road leading to the bridge had been a defensive measure. Troops

placed atop the concrete slopes were in control of two carefully engineered redoubts. If the

defenders didn’t like the look of the folks approaching Lud along the Great Road, they

could rain destruction down on them.

“You sure you don’t know?” Jake asked.

Eddie smiled at Jake and tried to stop imagining that there was some nut up there right now,

getting ready to roll a large, rusty bomb down one of those decayed concrete ramps. “No

idea,” he said.

Susannah whistled disgustedly between her teeth. “This road’s goin to hell, Roland. I was hoping we were done with that damn harness, but you better get it out again.” He nodded

and rummaged in his purse for it without a word.

The condition of the Great Road deteriorated as other, smaller roads joined it like

tributaries joining a great river. As they neared the bridge, the cobbles were replaced with a

surface Roland thought of as metal and the rest of them thought of as asphalt or hot-top. It

had not held up as well as the cobbles. Time had done some damage; the passage of

count- less horses and wagons since the last repairs were made had done more. The surface

had been chewed into treacherous rubble. Foot travel would be difficult, and the idea of

pushing Susannah’s wheelchair over that crumbled surface was ridiculous.

The banks oh either side had grown steadily steeper, and now, at their tops, they could see

slim, pointed shapes looming against the sky. Roland thought of arrowheads—huge ones,

weapons made by a tribe of giants. To his companions, they looked like rockets or guided

missiles. Susannah thought of Redstones fired from Cape Canaveral; Eddie thought about

SAMs, some built to be fired from the backs of flatbed trucks, stored all over Europe; Jake

thought of ICBMs hiding in rein- forced concrete silos under the plains of Kansas and the

unpopulated mountains of Nevada, programmed to hit back at China or the USSR in the

event of nuclear armageddon. All of them felt as if they had passed into a dark and woeful

zone of shadow, or into a countryside laboring under some old but still powerful curse.

Some hours after they entered this area— Jake called it The Gauntlet—the concrete

embankments ended at a place where half a dozen access roads drew together, like the

strands of a spiderweb, and here the land opened out again … a fact which relieved all of

them, although none of them said so out loud. Another traffic-light swung over the

junc- tion. This one was more familiar to Eddie, Susannah, and Jake; it had once had lenses

on its four faces, although the glass had been broken out long ago.

“I’ll bet this road was the eighth wonder of the world, once upon a time,” Susannah said,

“and look at it now. It’s a minefield.”

“Old ways are sometimes the best ways,” Roland agreed.

Eddie was pointing west. “Look.”

Now that the high concrete barriers were gone, they could see exactly what old Si had

described to them over cups of bitter coffee in River Crossing. “One track only,” he had said, “set up high on a colyum of man-made stone, such as the Old Ones used to make their

streets and walls.” The track raced toward them out of the west in a slim, straight line, then flowed across the Send and into the city on a narrow golden trestle. It was a simple, elegant

construction—and the only one they had seen so far which was totally without rust—but it

was badly marred, all the same. Halfway across, a large piece of the trestle had fallen into

the rushing river below. What remained were two long, jutting piers that pointed at each

other like accusing fingers. Jutting out of the water below the hole was a streamlined tube

of metal. Once it had been bright blue, but now the color had been dimmed by spreading scales of rust. It looked very small from this distance.

“So much for Blaine,” Eddie said. “No wonder they stopped hearing it. The supports finally gave way while it was crossing the river and it fell in the drink. It must have been

decelerating when it happened, or it would have carried straight across and all we’d see

would be a big hole like a bomb-crater in the far bank. Well, it was a great idea while it

lasted.”

“Mercy said there was another one,” Susannah reminded him.

“Yeah. She also said she hadn’t heard it in seven or eight years, and Aunt Talitha said it

was more like ten. What do you think, Jake . . . Jake? Earth to Jake, Earth to Jake, come in,

little buddy.”

Jake, who had been staring intently at the remains of the train in the river, only shrugged.

“You’re a big help, Jake,” Eddie said. “Valuable input—that’s why I love you. Why we all love you.”

Jake paid no attention. He knew what he was seeing, and it wasn’t Blaine. The remains of

the mono sticking out of the river were blue. In his dream, Blaine had been the dusty,

sugary pink of the bubblegum you got with baseball trading cards.

Roland, meanwhile, had cinched the straps of Susannah’s carry-har- ness across his chest.

“Eddie, boost your lady into this contraption. It’s time we moved on and saw for ourselves.”

Jake now shifted his gaze, looking nervously toward the bridge loom- ing ahead. He could

hear a high, ghostly humming noise in the distance— the sound of the wind playing in the

decayed steel hangers which con- nected the overhead cables to the concrete deck below.

“Do you think it’ll be safe to cross?” Jake asked.

“We’ll find out tomorrow,” Roland replied.

9

THE NEXT MORNING, ROLAND’S band of travellers stood at the end of the long, rusty

bridge, gazing across at Lud. Eddie’s dreams of wise old elves who had preserved a

working technology on which the pilgrims could draw were disappearing. Now that they

were this close, he could see holes in the city-scape where whole blocks of buildings

appeared to have been either burned or blasted. The skyline reminded him of a diseased

jaw from which many teeth have already fallen.

It was true that most of the buildings were still standing, but they had a dreary, disused

look that filled Eddie with an uncharacteristic gloom, and the bridge between the travellers

and that shuttered maze of steel and concrete looked anything but solid and eternal. The

vertical hangers on the left sagged slackly; the ones remaining on the right almost

screamed with tension. The deck had been constructed of hollow con- crete boxes shaped

like trapezoids. Some of these had buckled upward, displaying empty black interiors;

others had slipped askew. Many of these latter had merely cracked, but others were badly

broken, leaving gaps big enough to drop trucks—big trucks—into. In places where the

bottoms of the box-sections as well as the tops had shattered, they could see the muddy

riverbank and the gray-green water of the Send beyond it. Eddie put the distance between

the deck and the water as three hundred feet at the center of the bridge. And that was