Stephen King – The Waste Lands

by the punishing vibration of the drums. Roland could now see speaker-poles here and

there, poking out of the wreckage like strange long-necked animals.

Oy trotted back to him and looked up, panting.

“Stay close.”

“Ake! Ake-Ake!”

“Yes. Jake.” He began to run again, and Oy ran beside him, heeling as neatly as any dog Roland had ever seen.

21

FOR EDDIE, IT WAS, as some wise man had once said, deja vu all over again: he was

running with the wheelchair, racing time. The beach had been replaced by The Street of the

Turtle, but somehow everything else was the same. Oh, there was one other relevant

difference: now it was a railway station (or a cradle) he was looking for, not a free-standing

door.

Susannah was sitting bolt upright with her hair blowing out behind her and Roland’s

revolver in her right hand, its barrel pointed up at the cloudy, troubled sky. The drums

thudded and pounded, bludgeoning them with sound. A gigantic, dish-shaped object lay in

the street just ahead, and Eddie’s overstrained mind, perhaps cued by the classical buildings

on either side of them, produced an image of Jove and Thor playing Frisbee. Jove throws

one wide and Thor lets it fall through a cloud—what the hell, it’s Miller Time on Olympus,

anyway.

Frisbees of the gods, he thought, swerving Susannah between two crumbling, rusty cars,

what a concept.

He bumped the chair up on the sidewalk to get around the artifact, which looked like some

sort of telecommunications dish now that he was really close to it. He was easing the

wheelchair over the curb and back into the street again—the sidewalk was too littered with

crap to make any real time—when the drums suddenly cut out. The echoes rolled away into

a new silence, except it wasn’t really silent at all, Eddie realized. Up ahead, the arched

entrance to a marble building stood at the intersection of The Street of the Turtle and

another avenue. This building had been overgrown by vines and some straggly green stuff that looked like cypress beards, but it was still magnificent and somehow dignified.

Beyond it, around the corner, a crowd was babbling excitedly.

“Don’t stop!” Susannah snapped. “We haven’t got time to—”

A hysterical shriek drilled through the babble. It was accompanied by yells of approval,

and, incredibly, the sort of applause Eddie had heard in Atlantic City hotel-casinos after

some lounge act had finished doing its thing. The shriek was choked into a long, dying

gargle that sounded like the buzz of a cicada. Eddie felt the hair on the nape of his neck

coming to attention. He glanced at the corpses hanging from the nearest speaker-pole and

understood that the fun-loving Pubes of Lud were hold- ing another public execution.

Marvellous, he thought. Now if they only had Tony Orlando and Dawn to sing “Knock

Three Times,” they could all die happy.

Eddie looked curiously at the stone pile on the corner. This close, the vines which

overgrew it had a powerful herbal smell. That smell was eye-wateringly bitter, but he still

liked it better than the cinnamon-sweet odor of the mummified corpses. The beards of

greenery growing from the vines drooped in ratty sheaves, creating waterfalls of vegetation

where once there had been a series of arched entrances. A figure suddenly barrelled out

through one of these waterfalls and hurried toward them. It was a kid, Eddie realized, and

not that many years out of diapers, judging by the size. He was wearing a weird little Lord

Fauntleroy outfit, complete with ruffled white shirt and velveteen short pants. There were

ribbons in his hair. Eddie felt a sudden mad urge to wave his hands above his head and

scream But-wheat say, “Lud is o-tay!”

“Come on!” the kid cried in a high, piping voice. Several sprays of the green stuff had gotten caught in his hair; he brushed absently at these with his left hand as he ran. “They’re gonna do Spankers! It’s the Spankerman’s turn to go to the land of the drums! Come on or

you’ll miss the whole fakement, gods cuss it!”

Susannah was equally stunned by the child’s appearance, but as he got closer, it struck her

that there was something extremely odd and awkward about the way he was brushing at the

crumbles and strands of greenery which had gotten caught in his beribboned hair: he kept

using just that one hand. His other had been behind his back when he ran out through the

weedy waterfall, and there it remained.

How awkward that must be! she thought, and then a tape-player turned on in her mind and

she heard Roland speaking at the end of the bridge. I knew something like this could

happen . . . if we’d seen the fellow earlier, while we were still beyond the range of his

exploding egg . . . Damn the luck!

She levelled Roland’s gun at the child, who had leaped from the curb and was running

straight for them. “Hold it!” she screamed. “Stand still, you!”

“Suze, what are you doing?” Eddie yelled.

Susannah ignored him. In a very real sense, Susannah Dean was no longer even here; it

was Detta Walker in the chair now, and her eyes were glittering with feverish suspicion.

“Stop or I’ll shoot!”

Little Lord Fauntleroy might have been deaf for all the effect her warning had. “Hoss it!”

he shouted jubilantly. “Yer gointer miss the whole show! Spanker’s gointer—”

His right hand finally began to come out from behind his back. As it did, Eddie realized

they weren’t looking at a kid but at a misshapen dwarf whose childhood was many years

past. The expression Eddie had at first taken for childish glee was actually a chilly mixture

of hate and rage. The dwarf’s cheeks and brow were covered with the oozing, discol- ored

patches Roland called whore’s blossoms.

Susannah never saw his face. Her attention was fixed on the emerg- ing right hand, and the

dull green sphere it held. That was all she needed to see. Roland’s gun crashed. The dwarf

was hammered backward. A shrill cry of pain and rage rose from his tiny mouth as he

landed on the sidewalk. The grenade bounced out of his hand and rolled back into the same

arch through which he had emerged.

Detta was gone like a dream, and Susannah looked from the smoking gun to the tiny,

sprawled figure on the sidewalk with surprise, horror, and dismay. “Oh, my Jesus! I shot

him! Eddie, I shot him!”

“Grays . . . die!”

Little Lord Fauntleroy tried to scream these words defiantly, but they came out in a

bubbling choke of blood that drenched the few remaining white patches on his frilly shirt.

There was a muffled explosion from inside the overgrown plaza of the corner building, and

the shaggy carpets of green stuff hanging in front of the arches billowed outward like flags

in a brisk gale. With them came clouds of choking, acrid smoke. Eddie flung himself on top

of Susannah to shield her, and felt a gritty shower of concrete fragments—all small ones,

luckily—patter down on his back, his neck, and the crown of his head. There was a series

of unpleasantly wet smacking sounds to his left. He opened his eyes a crack, looked in that

direction, and saw Little Lord Fauntleroy’s head just com- ing to a stop in the gutter. The

dwarf’s eyes were still open, his mouth still fixed in its final snarl.

Now there were other voices, some shrieking, some yelling, all furi- ous. Eddie rolled off

Susannah’s chair—it tottered on one wheel before deciding to stay up—and stared in the

direction from which the dwarf had come. A ragged mob of about twenty men and women

had appeared, some coming from around the corner, others pushing through the mats of

foliage which obscured the corner building’s arches, materializing from the smoke of the

dwarf’s grenade like evil spirits. Most were wearing blue headscarves and all were carrying

weapons—a varied (and somehow pitiful) assortment of them which included rusty swords,

dull knives, and splintery clubs. Eddie saw one man defiantly waving a hammer. Pubes,

Eddie thought. We interrupted their necktie party, and they’re pissed as hell about it.

A tangle of shouts—Kill the Grays! Kill them both! They’ve done for Luster, God kill their

eyes!—arose from this charming group as they caught sight of Susannah in her wheelchair

and Eddie, who was now crouched on one knee before it. The man in the forefront was

wearing a kilt-like wrap and waving a cutlass. He brandished this wildly (he would have

decapitated the heavyset woman standing close behind him, had she not ducked) and then

charged. The others followed, yelling happily.

Roland’s gun pounded its bright thunder into the windy, overcast day, and the top of the

kilt-wearing Pube’s head lifted off. The sallow skin of the woman who had almost been

decapitated by his cutlass was suddenly stippled with red rain and she voiced a sound of