Stephen King – The Waste Lands

barking dismay. The others came on past the woman and the dead man, raving and

wild-eyed.

“Eddie!” Susannah screamed, and fired again. A man wearing a silk-lined cape and

knee-boots collapsed into the street.

Eddie groped for the’ Ruger and had one panicky moment when he thought he had lost it.

The butt of the gun had somehow slipped down inside the waistband of his pants. He

wrapped his hand around it and yanked hard. The fucking thing wouldn’t come. The sight

at the end of the barrel had somehow gotten stuck in his underwear.

Susannah fired three closely spaced shots. Each found a target, but the oncoming Pubes

didn’t slow.

“Eddie, help me!”

Eddie tore his pants open, feeling like some cut-rate version of Superman, and finally

managed to free the Ruger. He hit the safety with the heel of his left palm, placed his elbow

on his leg just above the knee, and began to fire. There was no need to think—no need to

even aim. Roland had told them that in battle a gunslinger’s hands worked on their own,

and Eddie now discovered it was true. It would have been hard for a blind man to miss at

this range, anyway. Susannah had cut the numbers of the charging Pubes to no more than

fifteen; Eddie went through the remainder like a storm wind in a wheatfield, dropping four

in less than two seconds.

Now the single face of the mob, that look of glazed and mindless eagerness, began to

break apart. The man with the hammer abruptly tossed his weapon aside and ran for it,

limping extravagantly on a pair of arthritis-twisted legs. He was followed by two others.

The rest of them milled uncertainly in the street.

“Come on, you deucies!” a relatively young man snarled. He wore his blue scarf around

his throat like a rally-racer’s ascot. He was bald except for two fluffs of frizzy red hair, one on each side of his head. To Susannah, this fellow looked like Clarabell the Clown; to

Eddie he looked like Ronald McDonald; to both of them he looked like trouble. He threw a

home-made spear that might have started life as a steel tableleg. It clattered harmlessly into the street to Eddie and Susannah’s right. “Come on, I say! We can get em if we all stick

togeth—”

“Sorry, guy,” Eddie murmured, and shot him in the chest.

Clarabell/Ronald staggered backward, one hand going to his shirt.

He stared at Eddie with huge eyes that told his tale with heartbreaking clarity: this wasn’t

supposed to happen. The hand dropped heavily to the young man’s side. A single runlet of

blood, incredibly bright in the gray day, slipped from the comer of his mouth. The few

remaining Pubes stared at him mutely as he slipped to his knees, and one of them turned to

run.

“Not at all,” Eddie said. “Stay put, my retarded friend, or you’re going to get a good look at the clearing where your path ends.” He raised his voice. “Drop em, boys and girls! All of em! Now!”

“You …” the dying man whispered. “You . . . gunslinger?”

“That’s right,” Eddie said. His eyes surveyed the remaining Pubes grimly.

“Cry your . . . pardon,” the man with the frizzy red hair gasped, and then he fell forward onto his face.

“Gunslingers?” one of the others asked. His tone was one of dawning horror and

realization.

“Well, you’re stupid, but you ain’t deaf,” Susannah said, “and that’s somethin, anyway.”

She waggled the barrel of the gun, which Eddie was quite sure was empty. For that matter,

how many rounds could be left in the Ruger? He realized he didn’t have any idea how many

rounds the clip held, and cursed himself for a fool . . . but had he really believed it could

come to something like this? He didn’t think so. “You heard him, folks. Drop em. Recess is

over.”

One by one, they complied. The woman who was wearing a pint or so of Mr.

Sword-and-Kilt’s blood on her face said, “You shouldn’t’ve killed Winston, missus—’twas

his birthday, so it was.”

“Well, I guess he should have stayed home and eaten some more birthday cake,” Eddie

said. Given the overall quality of this experience, he didn’t find either the woman’s

comment or his own response at all surreal.

There was one other woman among the remaining Pubes, a scrawny thing whose long

blonde hair was coming out in big patches, as if she had the mange. Eddie observed her

sidling toward the dead dwarf—and the potential safety of the overgrown arches beyond

him—and put a bullet into the cracked cement close by her foot. He had no idea what he wanted with her, but what he didn’t want was one of them giving the rest of them ideas. For

one thing, he was afraid of what his hands might do if the sickly, sullen people before him

tried to run. Whatever his head thought about this gunslinging business, his hands had

discovered they liked it just fine.

“Stand where you are, beautiful. Officer Friendly says play it safe.” He glanced at

Susannah and was disturbed by the grayish quality of her complexion. “Suze, you all

right?” he asked in a lower voice.

“Yes.”

“You’re not going to faint or anything, are you? Because—”

“No.” She looked at him with eyes so dark they were like caves. “It’s just that I never shot anyone before . . . okay?”

Well, you better get used to it rose to his lips. He bit it back and returned his gaze to the

five people who remained before them. They were looking at him and Susannah with a

species of sullen fear which nevertheless stopped well short of terror.

Shit, most of them have forgotten what terror is, he thought. Joy, sadness, love . . . same

thing. I don’t think they feel much of anything, anymore. They’ve been living in this

purgatory too long.

Then he remembered the laughter, the excited cries, the lounge-act applause, and revised

his thinking. There was at least one thing that still got their motors running, one thing that

still pushed their buttons. Spanker could have testified to that.

“Who’s in charge here?” Eddie asked. He was watching the intersec- tion behind the little group very carefully in case the others should get their courage back. So far he saw and

heard nothing alarming from that direction. He thought that the others had probably left

this ragged crew to its fate.

They looked at each other uncertainly, and finally the woman with the blood-spattered

face spoke up. “Spanker was, but when the god-drums started up this time, it was Spanker’s

stone what come out of the hat and we set him to dance. I guess Winston would have come

next, but you did for him with your god-rotted guns, so you did.” She wiped blood

deliberately from her cheek, looked at it, and then returned her sullen glance to Eddie.

“Well, what do you think Winston was trying to do to me with his god-rotted spear?”

Eddie asked. He was disgusted to find the woman had actually made him feel guilty about

what he had done. “Trim my sideburns?”

“Killed Frank ‘n Luster, too,” she went on doggedly, “and what are you? Either Grays, which is bad, or a couple of god-rotted outlanders, which is worse. Who’s left for the Pubes

in City North? Topsy, I sup- pose—Topsy the Sailor—but he ain’t here, is he? Took his boat and went off downriver, ay, so he did, and god rot him, too, says I!”

Susannah had ceased listening; her mind had fixed with horrified fascination on something

the woman had said earlier. It was Spanker’s stone what come out of the hat and we set him

to dance. She remembered reading Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” in college and

understood that these people, the degenerate descendents of the original Pubes, were living

Jackson’s nightmare. No wonder they weren’t capable of any strong emotion when they

knew they would have to participate in such a grisly drawing not once a year, as in the story,

but two or three times each day.

“Why?” she asked the bloody woman in a harsh, horrified voice. “Why do you do it?”

The woman looked at Susannah as if she was the world’s biggest fool. “Why? So the

ghosts what live in the machines won’t take over the bodies of those who have died

here—Pubes and Grays alike—and send them up through the holes in the streets to eat us.

Any fool knows that.”

“There are no such things as ghosts,” Susannah said, and her voice sounded like so much meaningless quacking to her own ears. Of course there were. In this world, there were

ghosts everywhere. Nevertheless, she pushed ahead. “What you call the god-drums is only

a tape stuck in a machine. That’s really all it is.” Sudden inspiration struck her and she