Stephen King – The Waste Lands

Jesus, Suze—what a shot!’

“I hope I never have to do anything like that again,” she said . . .but a small voice at the center of her demurred. That voice suggested that she could not wait to do something like

that again. And it was cold, that voice. Cold.

“What was—” he began, turning toward Roland, but Roland was no longer standing there.

He was walking slowly toward the bear, which now lay on the ground with its shaggy

knees up. From within it came a series of muffled gasps and gurgles as its strange guts

continued to slowly run down.

Roland saw his knife planted deep in a tree near the scarred veteran that had saved Eddie’s life. He pulled it free and wiped it clean on the soft deerskin shirt which had replaced the

tatters he had been wearing when the three of them had left the beach. He stood by the bear,

looking down at it with an expression of pity and wonder.

Hello, stranger, he thought. Hello, old friend. I never believed in you, not really. I believe

Alain did, and I know that Cuthbert did— Cuthbert believed in everything—but I was the

hardheaded one. I thought you were only a tale for children . . . another wind which blew

around in my old nurse’s hollow head before finally escaping her jab- bering mouth. But

you were here all along, another refugee of the old times, like the pump at the way station

and the old machines under the mountains. Are the Slow Mutants who worshipped those

broken remnants the final descendents of the people who once lived in this forest and

finally fled your wrath? I don’t know, will never know . . . but it feels right. Yes. And then

I came with my friends—my deadly new friends, who are becoming so much like my

deadly old friends. We came, weaving our magic circle around us and around everything

we touch, strand by poi- sonous strand, and now here you lie, at our feet. The world has

moved on again, and this time, old friend, it’s you who have been left behind.

The monster’s body still radiated a deep, sick heat. Parasites were leaving its mouth and

tattered nostrils in hordes, but they died almost at once. Waxy-white piles of them were

growing on either side of the bear’s head.

Eddie approached slowly. He had shifted Susannah over to one hip, carrying her as a

mother might carry a baby. “What was it, Roland? Do you know?”

“He called it a Guardian, I think,” Susannah said.

“Yes.” Roland’s voice was slow with amazement. “I thought they were all gone, must all be gone … if they ever existed outside of the old wives’ tales in the first place.”

“Whatever it was, it was one crazy mother,” Eddie said.

Roland smiled a little. “If you’d lived two or three thousand years, you’d be one crazy

mother, too.”

“Two or three thousand . . . Christ!”

Susannah said, “Is it a bear? Really? And what’s that?” She was pointing at what appeared to be a square metal tag set high on one of the bear’s thick rear legs. It was almost

overgrown with tough tangles of hair, but the afternoon sun had pricked out a single

starpoint of light on its stainless steel surface, revealing it.

Eddie knelt and reached hesitantly toward the tag, aware that strange muffled clicks and

clacks were still coming from deep inside the fallen giant. He looked at Roland.

“Go ahead,” the gunslinger told him. “It’s finished.”

Eddie pushed a clump of hair aside and leaned closer. Words had been stamped into the

metal. They were quite badly eroded, but he found that with a little effort he could read

them.

NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.

Granite City Northeast Corridor

Design 4 GUARDIAN

Serial # AA 24123 CX 755431297 L 14

Type/Species BEAR

SHARDIK

**NR**SUBNUCLEAR CELLS MUST NOT BE REPLACED**NR**

“Holy Jesus, this thing is a robot,” Eddie said softly.

“It can’t be,” Susannah said. “When I shot it, it bled.”

“Maybe so, but your ordinary, garden-variety bear doesn’t have a radar-dish growing out

of its head. And, so far as I know, your ordinary, garden-variety bear doesn’t live to be two

or three th—” He broke off suddenly, looking at Roland. When he spoke again, his voice

was revolted. “Roland, what are you doing?”

Roland did not reply; did not need to reply. What he was doing— gouging out one of the

bear’s eyes with his knife—was perfectly obvious. The surgery was quick, neat, and precise.

When it was completed he bal- anced an oozing brown ball of jelly on the blade of his knife

for a moment and then flicked it aside. A few more worms made their way out of the

staring hole, tried to squirm their way down the bear’s muzzle, and died.

The gunslinger leaned over the eyesocket of Shardik, the great Guardian bear, and peered

inside. “Come and look, both of you,” he said. “I’ll show you a wonder of the latter days.”

“Put me down, Eddie,” Susannah said.

He did so, and she moved swiftly on her hands and upper thighs to where the gunslinger

was hunkered down over the bear’s wide, slack face. Eddie joined them, looking between

their shoul- ders. The three of them gazed in rapt silence for nearly a full minute; the only noise came from the crows which still circled and scolded in the sky.

Blood oozed from the socket in a few thick, dying trickles. Yet it was not just blood, Eddie

saw. There was also a clear fluid which gave off an identifiable scent—bananas. And,

embedded in the delicate criss- cross of tendons which shaped the socket, he saw a

webwork of what looked like strings. Beyond them, at the back of the socket, was a red

spark, blinking on and off. It illuminated a tiny square board marked with silvery squiggles

of what could only be solder.

“It isn’t a bear, it’s a fucking Sony Walkman,” he muttered.

Susannah looked around at him. “What?”

“Nothing.” Eddie glanced at Roland. “Do you think it’s safe to reach in?”

Roland shrugged. “I think so. If there was a demon in this creature, it’s fled.”

Eddie reached in with his little finger; nerves set to draw back if he felt even a tickle of

electricity. He touched the cooling meat inside the eyesocket, which was nearly the size of

a baseball, and then one of those strings. Except it wasn’t a string; it was a gossamer-thin

strand of steel. He withdrew his finger and saw the tiny red spark blink once more before

going out forever.

“Shardik,” Eddie murmured. “I know that name, but I can’t place it. Does it mean anything to you, Suze?”

She shook her head.

“The thing is . . .” Eddie laughed helplessly. “I associate it with rabbits. Isn’t that nuts?”

Roland stood up. His knees popped like gunshots. “We’ll have to move camp,” he said.

“The ground here is spoiled. The other clearing, the one where we go to shoot, will—”

He took two trembling steps and then collapsed to his knees, palms pressed to the sides of

his sagging head.

10

EDDIE AND SUSANNAH EXCHANGED a single frightened glance and then Eddie

leaped to Roland’s side. “What is it? Roland, what’s wrong?”

“There was a boy,” the gunslinger said in a distant, muttering voice. And then, in the very next breath, “There wasn’t a boy.”

“Roland?” Susannah asked. She came to him, slipped an arm around his shoulders, felt

him trembling. “Roland, what is it?”

“The boy,” Roland said, looking at her with floating, dazed eyes. “It’s the boy. Always the boy.”

“What boy?” Eddie yelled frantically. “What boy?”

“Go then,” Roland said, “there are other worlds than these.” And fainted.

11

THAT NIGHT THE THREE of them sat around a huge bonfire Eddie and Susannah had

built in the clearing Eddie called “the shooting gallery.” It would have been a bad place to camp in the wintertime, open to the valley as it was, but for now it was fine. Eddie guessed

that here in Roland’s world it was still late summer.

The black vault of the sky arched overhead, speckled by what seemed to be whole galaxies.

Almost straight ahead to the south, across the river of darkness that was the valley, Eddie

could see Old Mother rising above the distant, unseen horizon. He glanced at Roland, who

sat huddled by the fire with three skins wrapped around his shoulders despite the warmth of

the night and the heat of the fire. There was an untouched plate of food by his side and a

bone cradled in his hands. Eddie glanced back at the sky and thought of a story the

gunslinger had told him and Susannah on one of the long days they had spent moving away

from the beach, through the foothills, and finally into these deep woods where they had