bitterly that this realization had come so late. Far back in his mind, a small voice told him this was what he got. This was what he got for doing something better than Henry, for
making Henry nervous.
Another tree fell with a ratcheting, coughing crash. Looking down a ragged aisle between
the tall firs, Eddie saw a cloud of sawdust rise in the still air. The creature responsible for
that cloud suddenly bellowed— a raging, gut-freezing sound.
It was one huge motherfucker, whatever it was.
He dropped the chunk of wood, then flipped Roland’s knife at a tree fifteen feet to his left.
It somersaulted twice in the air and then stuck halfway to the hilt in the wood, quivering.
He grabbed Roland’s .45 from the place where it hung and cocked it.
Stand or run?
But he discovered he no longer had the luxury of that question. The thing was fast as well
as huge, and it was now too late to run. A gigantic shape began to disclose itself in that aisle of trees north of the clearing, a shape which towered above all but the tallest trees. It was
lumbering directly toward him, and as its eyes fixed upon Eddie Dean, it gave voice to
another of those cries.
“Oh man, I’m fucked,” Eddie whispered as another tree bent, cracked like a mortar, then crashed to the forest floor in a cloud of dust and dead needles. Now it was lumbering
straight toward the clearing where he stood, a bear die size of King Kong. Its footfalls made
the ground shake.
What will you do, Eddie? Roland suddenly asked. Think! It’s the only advantage you have
over yon beast. What will you do?
He didn’t think he could kill it. Maybe with a bazooka, hut probably not with the
gunslinger’s .45. He could run, but had an idea that the oncoming beast might be pretty fast
when it wanted to be. He guessed the chances of ending up as jam between the great bear s
toes might be as high as fifty-fifty.
So which one was it going to be? Stand here and start shooting or run like his hair was on
fire and his ass was catching?
It occurred to him that there was a third choice. He could climb.
He turned toward the tree against which he had been leaning. It was a huge, hoary pine,
easily the tallest tree in this part of the woods. The first branch spread out over the forest
floor in a feathery green fan about eight feet up. Eddie dropped the revolver’s hammer and
then jammed the gun into the waistband of his pants. He leaped for the branch, grabbed it,
and did a frantic chin-up. Behind him, the bear gave voice to another bellow as it burst into
the clearing.
The bear would have had him just the same, would have left Eddie Dean’s guts hanging in gaudy strings from the lowest branches of the pine, if another of those sneezing fits had not
come on it at that moment. It kicked the ashy remains of the campfire into a black cloud
and then stood almost doubled over, huge front paws on its huge thighs, looking for a
moment like an old man in a fur coat, an old man with a cold. It sneezed again and
again—AH-CHOW! AH-CHOW! AH-CHOW!—and clouds of parasites blew out of its
muzzle. Hot urine flowed in a stream between its legs and hissed out the campfire’s
scattered embers.
Eddie did not waste the few crucial extra moments he had been given. He went up the tree
like a monkey on a stick, pausing only once to make sure the gunslinger’s revolver was still
seated firmly in the waist- band of his pants. He was in terror, already half convinced that he
was going to die (what else could he expect, now that Henry wasn’t around to Watch Out
for him?), but a crazy laughter raved through his head just the same. Been treed, he thought.
How bout that, sports fans? Been treed by Bearzilla.
The creature raised its head again, the thing turning between its ears catching winks and
flashes of sunlight as it did so, then charged Eddie’s tree. It reached high with one paw and
slashed forward, meaning to knock Eddie loose like a pinecone. The paw tore through the
branch he was standing on just as he lunged upward to the next. That paw tore through one
of his shoes as well, pulling it from his foot and sending it flying in two ragged pieces.
That’s okay, Eddie thought. You can have em both, Br•er Bear, if you want. Goddam
things were worn out, anyway.
The bear roared and lashed at the tree, cutting deep wounds in its ancient bark, wounds
which bled clear, resinous sap. Eddie kept on yanking himself up. The branches were
thinning now, and when he risked a glance down he stared directly into the bear’s muddy
eyes. Below its cocked head, the clearing had become a target with the scattered smudge of
campfire as its bullseye.
“Missed me, you hairy motherf—” Eddie began, and then the bear, its head still cocked
back to look at him, sneezed. Eddie was immediately drenched in hot snot that was filled
with thousands of small white worms. They wriggled frantically on his shirt, his forearms,
his throat and face.
Eddie screamed in mingled surprise and revulsion. He began to brush at his eyes and
mouth, lost his balance, and just managed to hook an arm around the branch beside him in
time. He held on and raked at his skin, wiping off as much of the wormy phlegm as he
could. The bear roared and hit the tree again. The pine rocked like a mast in a gale . . . but
the fresh claw-marks which appeared were at least seven feet below the branch on which
Eddie’s feet were planted.
The worms were dying, he realized—must have begun dying as soon as they left the
infected swamps inside the monster’s body. It made him feel a little better, and he began to
climb again. He stopped twelve feet further up, daring to go no higher. The trunk of the pine, easily eight feet in diameter at its base, was now no more than eighteen inches
through the middle. He had distributed his weight on two branches, but he could feel both
of them bending springily beneath him. He had a crow’s nest view of the forest and
foothills to the west now, spread out below him in an undulating carpet. Under other
circumstances, it would have been a view to relish.
Top of the world, Ma, he thought. He looked down into the bear’s upturned face again, and
for a moment all-coherent thought was driven from his mind by simple amazement.
There was something growing out of the bear’s skull, and to Eddie it looked like a small
radar-dish.
The gadget turned jerkily, kicking up flashes of sun as it did, and Eddie could hear it
screaming thinly. He had owned a few old cars in his time—the kind that sat in the used-car
lots with the words HANDYMAN’S SPECIAL soaped on the windshields—and he
thought the sound coming from that gadget was the sound of bearings which will freeze up
if they are not replaced soon.
The bear uttered a long, purring growl. Yellowish foam, thick with worms, squeezed
between its paws in curdled gobbets. If he had never looked into the face of utter lunacy
(and he supposed he had, having been eyeball to eyeball with that world-class bitch Detta
Walker on more than one occasion), Eddie was looking into it now . . . but that face was,
thankfully, a good thirty feet below him, and at their highest reach those killing talons were
fifteen feet under the soles of his feet. And, unlike the trees upon which the bear had vented
its spleen as it approached the clearing, this one was not dead.
“Mexican standoff, honey, Eddie panted. He wiped sweat from his forehead with one
sap-sticky hand and flicked the mess down into the bugbear’s face.
Then the creature the Old People had called Mir embraced the tree with its great forepaws
and began to shake it. Eddie grabbed the trunk and held on for dear life; eyes squeezed into
grim slits, as the pine began to sway back and forth like a pendulum.
6
ROLAND HALTED AT THE EDGE of the clearing. Susannah, perched on his shoulders,
stared unbelievingly across the open space. The creature stood at the base of the tree where
Eddie had been when the two of them left the clearing forty-five minutes ago. She could
see only chunks and sections of its body through the screen of branches and dark green
needles. Roland’s other gunbelt lay beside one of the monster’s feet. The holster, she saw,
was empty.
“My God,” she murmured.
The bear screamed like a distraught woman and began shaking the tree. The branches lashed as if in a high wind. Her eyes skated upward and she saw a dark form near the top.