Stephen King – The Waste Lands

examined the street, looking for the trigger. There were two, he saw. Perhaps their

camouflage as cobblestones had once been effective, but that time was long past. Roland

bent down, hands on his knees, and spoke into Oy’s upturned face. “Going to pick you up

for a minute now. Don’t fuss, Oy.”

“Oy!”

Roland put his arms around the bumbler. At first Oy stiffened and attempted to pull away,

and then Roland felt the small animal give in. He wasn’t happy about being this close to

someone who wasn’t Jake, but he clearly intended to put up with it. Roland found himself

wondering again just how intelligent Oy was.

He carried him up the narrow passage and beneath The Hanging Fountain of Lud, stepping

carefully over the mock cobbles. Once they were safely past, he bent to let Oy go. As he did,

the drums stopped.

“Ake!” Oy said impatiently. “Ake-Ake!”

“Yes—but there’s a little piece of business to attend to first.”

He led Oy fifteen yards farther down the alley, then bent and picked up a chunk of

concrete. He tossed it thoughtfully from hand to hand, and as he did, he heard the sound of

a pistol-shot from the east. The amplified thump of the drums had buried the sound of

Eddie and Susan- nah’s battle with the ragged band of Pubes, but he heard this gunshot

clearly and smiled—it almost surely meant that the Deans had reached the cradle, and that

was the first good news of this day, which already seemed at least a week long.

Roland turned and threw the piece of concrete. His aim was as true as it had been when he

had thrown at the ancient traffic signal in River Crossing; the missile struck one of the

discolored triggers dead center, and one of the rusty cables snapped with a harsh twang.

The marble fountain dropped, rolling over as the other cable snubbed it for a moment

longer—long enough so that a man with fast reflexes could have cleared the drop-zone

anyway, Roland reckoned. Then it too let go, and the fountain fell like a pink, misshapen

stone.

Roland dropped behind a pile of rusty steel beams and Oy jumped nimbly into his lap as

the fountain hit the street with a vast, shattery thump. Chunks of pink marble, some as big

as carts, flew through the air. Several small chips stung Roland’s face. He brushed others

out of Oy’s fur. He looked over the makeshift barricade. The fountain had cracked in two

like a vast plate. We won’t be coming back this way, Roland thought. The passageway, narrow to begin with, was now com- pletely blocked.

He wondered if Jake had heard the fall of the fountain, and what he had made of it if he had.

He didn’t waste such speculation on Gasher; Gasher would think he had been crushed to

paste, which was exactly what Roland wanted him to think. Would Jake think the same

thing? The boy should know better than to believe a gunslinger could be killed by such a

simple device, but if Gasher had terrorized him enough, Jake might not be thinking that

clearly. Well, it was too late to worry about it now, and if he had it to do over again, he

would do exactly the same thing. Dying or not, Gasher had displayed both courage and

animal cun- ning. If he was off his guard now, the trick was worth it.

Roland got to his feet. “Oy—find Jake.”

“Ake!” Oy stretched his head forward on his long neck, sniffed around in a semicircle, picked up Jake’s scent, and was off again with Roland running after. Ten minutes later he

came to a stop at a manhole cover in the street, sniffed all the way around it, then looked up

at Roland and barked shrilly.

The gunslinger dropped to one knee and observed both the confu- sion of tracks and a wide

path of scratches on the cobbles. He thought this particular manhole cover had been moved

quite often. His eyes narrowed as he saw the wad of bloody phlegm in a crease between

two nearby cobbles.

“The bastard keeps hitting him,” he murmured.

He pulled the manhole cover back, looked down, then untied the rawhide lacings which

held his shirt closed. He picked the bumbler up and tucked him into his shirt. Oy bared his

teeth, and for a moment Roland felt his claws splayed against the flesh of his chest and

belly like small sharp knives. Then they withdrew and Oy only peered out of Roland’s shirt

with his bright eyes, panting like a steam engine. The gunslinger could feel the rapid beat

of Oy’s heart against his own. He pulled the rawhide lace from the eyelets in his shirt and

found another, longer, lace in his purse.

“I’m going to leash you. I don’t like it and you’re going to like it even less, but it’s going to be very dark down there.”

He tied the two lengths of rawhide together and formed one end into a wide loop which he

slipped over Oy’s head. He expected Oy to bare his teeth again, perhaps even to nip him,

but Oy didn’t. He only looked up at Roland with his gold-ringed eyes and barked “Ake!”

again in his impatient voice.

Roland put the loose end of his makeshift leash in his mouth, then sat down on the edge of

the sewer shaft … if that was what it was. He felt for the top rung of the ladder and found it.

He descended slowly and carefully, more aware than ever that he was missing half a hand

and that the steel rungs were slimy with oil and some thicker stuff that was probably moss.

Oy was a heavy, warm weight between his shirt and belly, panting steadily and harshly.

The gold rings in his eyes gleamed like medallions in the dim light.

At last, the gunslinger’s groping foot splashed into the water at the bottom of the shaft. He

glanced up briefly at the coin of white light far above him. This is where it starts getting

hard, he thought. The tunnel was warm and dank and smelled like an ancient charnel house.

Some- where nearby, water was dripping hollowly and monotonously. Farther off, Roland

could hear the rumble of machinery. He lifted a very grateful Oy out of his shirt and set him

down in the shallow water running sluggishly along the sewer tunnel.

“Now it’s all up to you,” he murmured in the bumbler’s ear. “To Jake, Oy. To Jake!”

“Ake!” the bumbler barked, and splashed rapidly off into the darkness, swinging his head from side to side at the end of his long neck like a pendulum. Roland followed with the end

of the rawhide leash wrapped around his diminished right hand.

24

THE CRADLE—IT WAS easily big enough to have acquired proper-noun status in their

minds—stood in the center of a square five times larger than the one where they had come

upon the blasted statue, and when she got a really good look at it, Susannah realized how

old and gray and fundamentally grungy the rest of Lud really was. The Cradle was so clean

it almost hurt her eyes. No vines overgrew its sides; no graffiti daubed its blinding white

walls and steps and columns. The yellow plains dust which had coated everything else was

absent here. As they drew closer, Susannah saw why: streams of water coursed endlessly

down the sides of the Cradle, issuing from nozzles hidden in the shadows of the

copper-sheathed eaves. Interval sprays created by other hidden nozzles washed the steps,

turning them into off-and-on waterfalls.

“Wow,” Eddie said. “It makes Grand Central look like a Greyhound station in Buttfuck, Nebraska.”

“What a poet you are, dear,” Susannah said dryly.

The steps surrounded the entire building and rose to a great open lobby. There were no

obscuring mats of vegetation here, but Eddie and Susannah found they still couldn’t get a

good look inside; the shadows thrown by the overhanging roof were too deep. The Totems

of the Beam marched all the way around the building, two by two, but the corners were

reserved for creatures Susannah fervently hoped never to meet outside of the occasional

nightmare—hideous stone dragons with scaly bodies, clutching, claw-tipped hands, and

nasty peering eyes.

Eddie touched her shoulder and pointed higher. Susannah looked . . . and felt her breath come to a stop in her throat. Standing astride the peak of the roof, far above The Totems of

the Beam and the dragonish gargoyles, as if given dominion over them, was a golden

warrior at least sixty feet high. A battered cowboy hat was shoved back to reveal his lined

and careworn brow; a bandanna hung askew on his upper chest, as if it had just been pulled

down after serving long, hard duty as a dust-muffle. In one upraised fist he held a revolver;