Stephen King – The Waste Lands

went together as clearly as she had understood that the heavy-laden wagons passing

through River Crossing on their way to Jimtown had been pulled by oxen rather than mules

or horses.

“Never mind this trash,” she said, and her voice only quivered a little. “It’s the train we want—which way is it, d’you think?”

Eddie glanced up at the darkening sky and easily picked out the path of the Beam in the

rushing clouds. He looked back down and wasn’t much surprised to see that the entrance to

the street corresponding most closely to the path of the Beam was guarded by a large stone

turtle. Its reptilian head peered out from beneath the granite lip of its shell; its deepset eyes seemed to stare curiously at them. Eddie nodded toward it and managed a small dry smile.

“See the turtle of enormous girth?”

Susannah took a brief look of her own and nodded. He pushed her across the city square

and into The Street of the Turtle. The corpses which lined it gave off a dry, cinnamony

smell that made Eddie’s stomach clench . . . not because it was bad but because it was

actually rather pleasant—the sugar-spicy aroma of something a kid would enjoy shaking

onto his morning toast.

The Street of the Turtle was mercifully broad, and most of the corpses hanging from the

speaker-poles were little more than mummies, but Susannah saw a few which were

relatively fresh, with flies still crawl- ing busily across the blackening skin of their swollen faces and maggots still squirming out of their decaying eyes.

And below each speaker was a little drift of bones.

“There must be thousands,” Eddie said. “Men, women, and kids.”

“Yes.” Susannah’s calm voice sounded distant and strange to her own ears. “They’ve had a lot of time to kill. And they’ve used it to kill each other.”

“Bring on those wise fuckin elves!” Eddie said, and the laugh that followed sounded suspiciously like a sob. He thought he was at last begin- ning to fully understand what that

innocuous phrase—the world has moved on—really meant. What a breadth of ignorance

and evil it covered.

And what a depth.

The speakers were a wartime measure, Susannah thought. Of course they were. God only

knows which war, or how long ago, but it must have been a doozy. The rulers of Lud used

the speakers to make city-wide announcements from some central, bomb-proof

location—a bunker like the one Hitler and his high command retreated to at the end of

World War II.

And in her ears she could hear the voice of authority which had come rolling out of those

speakers—could hear it as clearly as she had heard the creak of the wagons passing through

River Crossing, as clearly as she had heard the crack of the whip above the backs of the

straining oxen.

Ration centers A and D will be closed today; please proceed to cen- ters B, C, E, and F with

proper coupons.

Militia squads Nine, Ten, and Twelve report to Sendside.

Aerial bombardment is likely between the hours of eight and ten of the clock. All

noncombatant residents should report to their designated shelters. Bring your gas masks.

Repeat, bring your gas masks.

Announcements, yes . . . and some garbled version of the news—a propagandized, militant

version George Orwell would have called double- speak. And in between the news bulletins

and the announcements, squall- ing military music and exhortations to respect the fallen by

sending more men and women into the red throat of the abattoir.

Then the war had ended and silence had fallen … for a while. But at some point, the

speakers had begun broadcasting again. How long ago? A hundred years? Fifty? Did it

matter? Susannah thought not. What mattered was that when the speakers were reactivated,

the only thing they broadcast was a single tape-loop . . . the loop with the drum-track on it.

And the descendents of the city’s original residents had taken it for … what? The Voice of

the Turtle? The Will of the Beam?

Susannah found herself remembering the time she had asked her father, a quiet hut deeply

cynical man, if he believed there was a God in heaven who guided the course of human

events. Well, he had said, I think it’s sort of half ‘n half, Odetta. I’m sure there’s a God, but I don’t think He has much if anything to do with us these days; I believe that after we killed

His son, He finally got it through His head that there wasn’t nothing to be done with the

sons of Adam or the daughters of Eve, and He washed His hands of us. Wise fella.

She had responded to this (which she had fully expected; she was eleven at the time, and knew the turn of her father’s mind quite well) by showing him a squib on the Community

Churches page of the local newspaper. It said that Rev. Murdock of the Grace Methodist

Church would that Sunday elucidate on the topic “God Speaks to Each of Us Every

Day”—with a text from First Corinthians. Her father had laughed over that so hard that

tears had squirted from the corners of his eyes. Well, I guess each of us hears someone

talking, he had said at last, and you can bet your bottom dollar on one thing, sweetie: each

of us—includ- ing this here Reverend Murdock—hears that voice say just exactly what he

wants to hear. It’s so convenient that way.

What these people had apparently wanted to hear in the recorded drum-track was an

invitation to commit ritual murder. And now, when the drums began to throb through these

hundreds or thousands of speak- ers—a hammering back-beat which was only the

percussion to a Z.Z. Top song called “Velcro Fly,” if Eddie was right—it became their

signal to unlimber the hangropes and run a few folks up the nearest speaker-posts.

How many? she wondered as Eddie rolled her along in her wheel-chair, its nicked and

dented hard rubber tires crackling over broken glass and whispering through drifts of

discarded paper. How many have been killed over the years because some electronic

circuit under the city got the hiccups? Did it start because they recognized the essential

alienness of the music, which came somehow—like us, and the airplane, and some of the

cars along these streets—-from another world?

She didn’t know, but she knew she had come around to her father’s cynical point of view

on the subject of God and the chats He might or might not have with the sons of Adam and

the daughters of Eve. These people had been looking for a reason to slaughter each other,

that was all, and the drums had been as good a reason as any.

She found herself thinking of the hive they had found—the mis- shapen hive of white bees

whose honey would have poisoned them if they had been foolish enough to eat of it. Here,

on this side of the Send, was another dying hive; more mutated white bees whose sting

would be no less deadly for their confusion, loss, and perplexity.

And how many more will have to die before the tape finally breaks?

As if her thoughts had caused it to happen, the speakers suddenly began to transmit the

relentless, syncopated heartbeat of the drums. Eddie yelled in surprise. Susannah screamed

and clapped both hands to her ears—but before she did, she could faintly hear the rest of

the music: the track or tracks which had been muted decades ago when someone (probably

quite by accident) had bumped the balance control, knocking it all the way to one side and

burying both the guitars and the vocal.

Eddie continued to push her along The Street of the Turtle and the Path of the Beam, trying

to look in all directions at once and trying not to smell the odor of putrefaction. Thank God

for the wind, he thought.

He began to push the wheelchair faster, scanning the weedy gaps between the big white

buildings for the graceful sweep of an overhead monorail track. He wanted to get out of

this endless aisle of the dead. As he took yet another deep breath of that speciously sweet

cinnamon smell, it seemed to him that he had never wanted anything so badly in his whole

life.

19

JAKE’S DAZE WAS BROKEN abruptly when Gasher grabbed him by the collar and

yanked with all the force of a cruel rider braking a galloping horse. He stuck one leg out at

the same time and Jake went crashing backward over it. His head connected with the

pavement and for a moment all the lights went out. Gasher, no humanitarian, brought him

around quickly by seizing Jake’s lower lip and yanking it upward and outward.

Jake screamed and bolted to a sitting position, striking out blindly with his fists. Gasher

dodged the blows easily, hooked his other hand into Jake’s armpit, and yanked him to his