come from everywhere. Jake glanced back and saw Roland and Eddie clinging to the rail.
Susannah was watching him from over Roland’s shoulder, her tight cap of curls rippling
and shaking in the wind. Jake raised his hand to them. Roland raised his in return.
You won’t let me drop this time? he had asked. No—not ever again, Roland had replied.
Jake believed him . . . but he was very much afraid of what might happen before Roland
arrived. He put Oy down. Gasher rushed forward the moment he did, kicking out at the
small animal. Oy skittered aside, avoiding the booted foot.
“Run!” Jake shouted. Oy did, shooting past them and loping toward the Lud end of the
bridge with his head down, swerving to avoid the holes and leaping across the cracks in the
pavement. He didn’t look back. A moment later Gasher had his arm around Jake’s neck. He
stank of dirt and decaying flesh, the two odors combining to create a single deep stench,
crusty and thick. It made Jake’s gorge rise.
He bumped his crotch into Jake’s buttocks. “Maybe I ain’t quite s’far gone’s I thought.
Don’t they say youth’s the wine what makes old men drunk? We’ll have us a time, won’t we,
my sweet little squint? Ay, we’ll have a time such as will make the angels sing.”
Oh Jesus, Jake thought.
Gasher raised his voice again. “We’re leaving now, my hardcase friend—we have grand
things to do and grand people to see, so we do, but I keep my word. As for you, you’ll stand
right where you are for a good fifteen minutes, if you’re wise. If I see you start to move,
we’re all going to ride the handsome. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” Roland said.
“Do you believe me when I say I have nothing to lose?”
“Yes.”
“That’s wery well, then. Move, boy! Hup!”
Gasher’s hold tightened on Jake’s throat until he could hardly breathe. At the same time he
was pulled backward. They retreated that way, facing the gap where Roland stood with
Susannah on his back and Eddie just behind him, still holding the Ruger which Gasher had
called a toy pistol. Jake could feel Gasher’s breath puffing against his ear in hot little blurts.
Worse, he could smell it.
“Don’t try a thing,” Gasher whispered, “or I’ll rip off yer sweetmeats and stuff em up your bung. And it would be sad to lose em before you ever got a chance to use em, wouldn’t it?
Wery sad indeed.”
They reached the end of the bridge. Jake stiffened, believing Gasher would throw the
grenade anyway, but he didn’t … at least not immedi- ately. He backed Jake through a
narrow alley between two small cubicles which had probably served as tollbooths, once
upon a time. Beyond them, the brick warehouses loomed like prison cellblocks.
“Now, cully, I’m going to let go of your neck, or how would•je ever have wind to run with?
But I’ll be holdin yer arm, and if ye don’t run like the wind, I promise I’ll rip it right off and use it for a club to beat you with. Do you understand?”
Jake nodded, and suddenly the terrible, stifling pressure was gone from his windpipe. As soon as it was, he became aware of his hand again—it felt hot and swollen and full of fire.
Then Gasher seized his bicep with fingers like bands of iron, and he forgot all about his
hand.
“Toodle-doo!” Gasher called in a grotesquely cheery falsetto. He waggled the grenado at the others. “Bye-bye, dears!” Then he growled to Jake: “Now run, you whoring little squint!
Run\”
Jake was first whirled and then yanked into a run. The two of them went flying down a
curved ramp to street level. Jake’s first confused thought was that this was what the East
River Drive would look like two or three hundred years after some weird brain-plague had
killed all the sane people in the world.
The ancient, rusty hulks of what had once surely been automobiles stood at intervals along
both curbs. Most were bubble-shaped roadsters that looked like no cars Jake had ever seen
before (except, maybe, for the ones the white-gloved creations of Walt Disney drove in the
comic books), but among them he saw an old Volkswagen Beetle, a car that might have
been a Chevrolet Corvair, and something he believed was a Model A Ford. There were no
tires on any of these eerie hulks; they either had been stolen or had rotted away to dust long
since. And all the glass had been broken, as if the remaining denizens of this city abhorred
anything which might show them their own reflections, even accidentally.
Beneath and between the abandoned cars, the gutters were filled with drifts of
unidentifiable metal junk and bright glints of glass. Trees had been planted at intervals
along the sidewalks in some long-gone, happier time, but they were now so emphatically
dead that they looked like stark metal sculptures against the cloudy sky. Some of the
warehouses had either been bombed or had collapsed on their own, and beyond the
jumbled heaps of bricks which was all that remained of them Jake could see the river and
the rusty, sagging underpinnings of the Send Bridge. That smell of wet decay—a smell that
seemed almost to snarl in the nose—was stronger than ever.
The street headed due east, diverging from the path of the Beam, and Jake could see it
became more and more choked with rubble and rickrack as it went. Six or seven blocks
down it appeared to be entirely plugged, but it was in this direction that Gasher pulled him.
At first he kept up, but Gasher was setting a fearsome pace. Jake began to pant and fell a
step behind. Gasher almost jerked him off his feet as he dragged Jake toward the barrier of
junk and concrete and rusty steel beams which lay ahead. The plug—which looked like a
deliberate construction to Jake—lay between two broad buildings with dusty marble
facades. In front of the one on the left was a statue Jake recognized at once: it was the
woman called Blind Justice, and that almost surely made the building she guarded a
courthouse. But he only had a moment to look; Gasher was dragging him relentlessly
toward the barricade, and he wasn’t slowing down.
He’ll kill us if he tries to take us through there! Jake thought, but Gasher—who ran like the
wind in spite of the disease which advertised itself on his face—simply buried his fingers
deeper in Jake’s upper arm and swept him along. And now Jake saw a narrow alley in the not-quite-haphazard pile of concrete, splintered furniture, rusted plumbing fixtures, and
chunks of trucks and automobiles. He suddenly understood. This maze would hold Roland
up for hours . . . but it was Gasher’s back yard, and he knew exactly where he was going.
The small dark opening to the alley was on the left side of the tottery pile of junk. As they
reached it, Gasher tossed the green object back over his shoulder. “Better duck, dearie!” he cried, and voiced a series of shrill, hysterical giggles. A moment later a huge, crumping
explo- sion shook the street. One of the bubble-shaped cars jumped twenty feet into the air
and then came down on its roof. A hail of bricks whistled over Jake’s head, and something
thumped him hard on the left shoulder-blade. He stumbled and would have fallen if Gasher
hadn’t yanked him upright and pulled him into the narrow opening in the rubble. Once they
were in the passageway which lay beyond, gloomy shadows reached out eagerly and
enfolded them.
When they were gone, a small, furry shape crept out from behind a concrete boulder. It
was Oy. He stood at the mouth of the passage for a moment, neck stretched forward, eyes
gleaming. Then he followed after, nose low to the ground and sniffing carefully.
15
“COME ON,” ROLAND SAID as soon as Gasher had turned tail.
“How could you do it?” Eddie asked. “How could you let that freak have him?”
“Because I had no choice. Bring the wheelchair. We’re going to need it.”
They had reached the concrete on the far side of the gap when an explosion shook the
bridge, spraying rubble into the darkening sky.
“Christ!” Eddie said, and turned his white, dismayed face to Roland.
“Don’t worry yet,” Roland said calmly. “Fellows like Gasher rarely get careless with their high-explosive toys.” They reached the tollbooths at the end of the bridge. Roland stopped
just beyond, at the top of the curving ramp.
“You knew the guy wasn’t just bluffing, didn’t you?” Eddie said. “I mean, you weren’t guessing—you knew.”
“He’s a walking dead man, and such men don’t need to bluff.” Roland’s voice was calm
enough, but there was a deep undertone of bitterness and pain in it. “I knew something like this could happen, and if we’d seen the fellow earlier, while we were still beyond the range