The Waste Lands

13

EDDIE'S FEAR LEFT HIM in its place came that strange yet welcome coldness. He dropped Susannah's wheelchair to the cracked cement with a clatter and raced nimbly out along the support cable, not even both-ering with the handrail. Jake hung head-down over the gap with Oy swinging at the end of his left hand like a furry pendulum. And the boy's right hand was slipping.

Eddie opened his legs and seat-dropped to a sitting position. His undefended balls smashed painfully up into his crotch, but for the moment even this exquisite pain was news from a distant country. He seized Jake by the hair with one hand and one strap of his pack with the other. He felt himself beginning to tilt outward, and for a nightmarish moment he thought all three of them were going to go over in a daisy-chain.

He let go of Jake's hair and tightened his grip on the packstrap, praying the lad hadn't bought the pack at one of the cheap discount outlets. He flailed above his head for the handrail with his free hand. After an interminable moment in which their combined outward slide continued, he found it and seized it.

"ROLAND!" he bawled. "I COULD USE A LITTLE HELP HERE!"

But Roland was already there, with Susannah still perched on his back. When he bent, she locked her arms around his neck so she wouldn't drop headfirst from the sling. The gunslinger wrapped an arm around Jake's chest and pulled him up. When his feet were on the support rod again, Jake put his right arm around Oy's trembling body. His left hand was an agony of fire and ice.

"Let go, Oy," he gasped. "You can let go now we're - safe."

For a terrible moment he didn't think the billy-bumbler would. Then, slowly, Oy's jaws relaxed and Jake was able to pull his hand free. It was covered with blood and dotted with a ring of dark holes.

"Oy," the bumbler said feebly, and Eddie saw with wonder that the animal's strange eyes were full of tears. He stretched his neck and licked Jake's face with his bloody tongue.

"That's okay," Jake said, pressing his face into the warm fur. He was crying himself, his face a mask of shock and pain. "Don't worry, that's okay. You couldn't help it and I don't mind."

Eddie was getting slowly to his feet. His face was dirty gray, and he felt as if someone had driven a bowling ball into his guts. His left hand stole slowly to his crotch and investigated the damage there.

"Cheap fucking vasectomy," he said hoarsely.

"Are you going to faint, Eddie?" Roland asked. A fresh gust of wind flipped his hat from his head and into Susannah's face. She grabbed it and jammed it down all the way to his ears, giving Roland the look of a half-crazed hillbilly.

"No," Eddie said. "I almost wish I could, but - "

"Take a look at Jake," Susannah said. "He's really bleeding."

"I'm fine," Jake said, and tried to hide his hand. Roland took it gently in his own hands before he could. Jake had sustained at least a dozen puncture-wounds in the back of his hand, his palm, and his fingers.

Most of them were deep. It would be impossible to tell if bones had been broken or tendons severed until Jake tried to flex the hand, and this wasn't the time or place for such experiments.

Roland looked at Oy. The billy-bumbler looked back, his expressive eyes sad and frightened. He had made no effort to lick Jake's blood from his chops, although it would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to have done so.

"Leave him alone," Jake said, and wrapped the encircling arm more tightly about Oy's body. "It wasn't his fault. It was my fault for forgetting him. The wind blew him off."

"I'm not going to hurt him," Roland said. He was positive the billy-bumbler wasn't rabid, but he still did not intend for Oy to taste any more of Jake's blood than he already had. As for any other diseases Oy might be carrying in his blood... well, ka would decide, as, in the end, it always did. Roland pulled his neckerchief free and wiped Oy's lips and muzzle. "There," he said. "Good fellow. Good boy."

"Oy," the billy-bumbler said feebly, and Susannah, who was watch-ing over Roland's shoulder, could have sworn she heard gratitude in that voice.

Another gust of wind struck them. The weather was turning dirty, and fast. "Eddie, we have to get off the bridge. Can you walk?"

"No, massa ; I'sa gwinter shuffle." The pain in his groin and the pit of his stomach was still bad, but not quite so bad as it had been a minute ago.

"All right. Let's move. Fast as we can."

Roland turned, began to take a step, and stopped. A man was now standing on the far side of the gap, watching them expressionlessly.

The newcomer had approached while their attention was focused on Jake and Oy. A crossbow was slung across his back. He wore a bright yellow scarf around his head; the ends streamed out like banners in the freshening wind. Gold hoops with crosses in their centers dangled from his ears. One eye was covered with a white silk patch. His face was blotched with purple sores, some of them open and festering. He might have been thirty, forty, or sixty. He held one hand high over his head. In it was something Roland could not make out, except that its shape was too regular to be a stone.

Behind this apparition, the city loomed with a kind of weird clarity in the darkening day. As Eddie looked past the huddles of brick buildings on the other shore - warehouses long since scooped empty by looters, he had no doubt - and into those shadowy canyons and stone mazes, he understood for the first time how terribly mistaken, how terribly foolish, his dreams of hope and help had been. Now he saw the shattered facades and broken roofs; now he saw the shaggy birds' nests on cornices and in glassless, gaping windows; now hr allowed himself to actually smell the city, and that odor was not of fabulous spices and savory foods of the sort his mother had sometimes brought home from Zabar's but rather the stink of a mattress that has caught fire, smoldered awhile, and then been put out with sewer-water. He suddenly understood Lud, understood it completely. The grinning pirate who had appeared while their attention was elsewhere was probably as close to a wise old elf as this broken, dying place could provide.

Roland pulled his revolver.

"Put it away, my cully," the man in the yellow scarf said in an accent so thick that the sense of his words was almost lost. "Put it away, my dear heart. Ye're a fierce trim, ay, that's clear, but this time you're outmatched."

14

THE NEWCOMER'S PANTS WERE patched green velvet, and as he stood on the edge of the hole in the bridge, he looked like a buccaneer at the end of his days of plunder: sick, ragged, and still dangerous.

"Suppose I choose not to?" Roland asked. "Suppose I choose to simply put a bullet through your scrofulous head?"

"Then I'll get to hell just enough ahead of ye to hold the door," the man in the yellow scarf said, and chuckled chummily. He wiggled the hand he held in the air. "It's all the same jolly fakement to me, one way or t'other."

Roland guessed that was the truth. The man looked as if he might have a year to live at most... and the last few months of that year would probably be very unpleasant. The oozing sores on his face had nothing to do with radiation; unless Roland was badly deceived, this man was in the late stages of what the doctors called mandrus and everyone else called whore's blossoms. Facing a dangerous man was always a bad busi-ness, but at least one could calculate the odds in such an encounter. When you were facing the dead, however, everything changed.

"Do yer know what I've got here, my dear ones?" the pirate asked. "Do yer ken whatcher old friend Gasher just happens to have laid his hands on? It's a grenado, something pretty the Old Folks left behind, and I've already tipped its cap - for to wear one's cap before the introductin' is complete would be wery bad manners, so it would!"

He cackled happily for a moment, and then his face grew still and grave once more. All humor left it, as if a switch had been turned some-where in his degenerating brains.

"My finger is all that's holdin the pin now, dearie. If you shoot me, there's going to be a wery big bang. You and the cunt-monkey on yer back will be vaporized. The squint, too, I reckon. The young buck stand-ing behind you and pointing that toy pistol in my face might live, but only until he hits the water... and hit it he would, because this bridge has been hangin by a thread these last forty year, and all it'd take to finish it is one little push. So do ye want to put away your iron, or shall we all toddle off to hell on the same handcart?"

Roland briefly considered trying to shoot the object Gasher called a grenado out of his hand, saw how tightly the man was gripping it, and bolstered his gun.

"Ah, good!" Gasher cried, cheerful once more. "I knew ye was a trig cove, just lookin at yer! Oh yes! So I did!"

"What do you want?" Roland asked, although he thought he already knew this, too.

Gasher raised his free hand and pointed a dirty finger at Jake. "The squint. Gimme the squint and the rest of you go free."

"Go fuck yourself," Susannah said at once.

"Why not?" the pirate cackled. "Gimme a chunk of mirror and I'll rip it right off and stick it right in - why not, for all the good it's a-doin me these days? Why, I can't even run water through it without it burns me all the way to the top of my gullywash!" His eyes, which were a strange calm shade of gray, never left Roland's face. "What do you say, my good old mate?"

"What happens to the rest of us if I hand over the boy?"

"Why, you go on yer way without no trouble from us!" the man in the yellow headscarf returned promptly. "You have the Tick-Tock Man's word on that. It comes from his lips to my lips to your ears, so it does, and Tick-Tock's a trig cove, too, what don't break his word once it's been given. I can't say ary word nor watch about any Pubies you might run into, but you'll have no trouble with the Tick-Tock Man's Grays."

"What the fuck are you saying, Roland?" Eddie roared. "You're not really thinking about doing it, are you?"

Roland didn't look down at Jake, and his lips didn't move as he murmured: "I'll keep my promise."

"Yes - I know you will." Then Jake raised his voice and said: "Put the gun away, Eddie. I'll decide."

"Jake, you're out of your mind!"

The pirate cackled cheerily. "Not at all, cully! You're the one who's lost his mind if you disbelieve me. At the wery least, he'll be safe from the drums with us, won't he? And just think - if I didn't mean what I say, I would have told you to toss your guns overside first thing! Easiest thing in the world! But did I? Nay!"

Susannah had heard the exchange between Jake and Roland. She had also had a chance to realize how bleak their options were as things now stood. "Put it away, Eddie."

"How do we know you won't toss the grenade at us once you have the lad?" Eddie called.

"I'll shoot it out of the air if he tries," Roland said. "I can do it, and he knows I can do it."

"Mayhap I do. You've got a cosy look about you, indeed ye do."

"If he's telling the truth," Roland went on, "he'd be burned even if I missed his toy, because the bridge would collapse and we'd all go down together."

"Wery clever, my dear old son!" Gasher said. "You are a cosy one, ain't you?" He cawed laughter, then grew serious and confiding. "The talking's done, old mate of mine. Decide. Will you give me the boy, or do we all march to the end of the path together?"

Before Roland could say a word, Jake had slipped past him on the support rod. He still held Oy curled in his right arm. He held his bloody left hand stiffly out in front of him.

"Jake, no!" Eddie shouted desperately.

"I'll come for you," Roland said in the same low voice.

"I know," Jake repeated. The wind gusted again. The bridge swayed and groaned. The Send was now speckled with whitecaps, and water boiled whitely around the wreck of the blue mono jutting from the river on the upstream side.

"Ay, my cully!" Gasher crooned. His lips spread wide, revealing a few remaining teeth that jutted from his white gums like decayed tomb-stones. "Ay, my fine young squint! Just keep coming."

"Roland, he could be bluffing!" Eddie yelled. "That thing could be a dud!"

The gunslinger made no reply.

As Jake neared the other side of the hole in the walkway, Oy bared his own teeth and began to snarl at Gasher.

"Toss that talking bag of guts overside," Gasher said.

"Fuck you," Jake replied in the same calm voice.

The pirate looked surprised for a moment, then nodded. "Tender of him, are you? Wery well." He took two steps backward. "Put him down the second you reach the concrete, then. And if he runs at me, I promise to lack his brains right out his tender little asshole."

"Asshole," Oy said through his bared teeth.

"Shut up, Oy," Jake muttered. He reached the concrete just as the strongest gust of wind yet struck the bridge. This time the twanging sound of parting cable-strands seemed to come from everywhere. Jake glanced back and saw Roland and Eddie clinging to the rail. Susannah was watching him from over Roland's shoulder, her tight cap of curls rippling and shaking in the wind. Jake raised his hand to them. Roland raised his in return.

You won't let me drop this time? he had asked. No - not ever again, Roland had replied. Jake believed him... but he was very much afraid of what might happen before Roland arrived. He put Oy down. Gasher rushed forward the moment he did, kicking out at the small animal. Oy skittered aside, avoiding the booted foot.

"Run!" Jake shouted. Oy did, shooting past them and loping toward the Lud end of the bridge with his head down, swerving to avoid the holes and leaping across the cracks in the pavement. He didn't look back. A moment later Gasher had his arm around Jake's neck. He stank of dirt and decaying flesh, the two odors combining to create a single deep stench, crusty and thick. It made Jake's gorge rise.

He bumped his crotch into Jake's buttocks. "Maybe I ain't quite s'far gone's I thought. Don't they say youth's the wine what makes old men drunk? We'll have us a time, won't we, my sweet little squint? Ay, we'll have a time such as will make the angels sing."

Oh Jesus, Jake thought.

Gasher raised his voice again. "We're leaving now, my hardcase friend - we have grand things to do and grand people to see, so we do, but I keep my word. As for you, you'll stand right where you are for a good fifteen minutes, if you're wise. If I see you start to move, we're all going to ride the handsome. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," Roland said.

"Do you believe me when I say I have nothing to lose?"

"Yes."

"That's wery well, then. Move, boy! Hup!"

Gasher's hold tightened on Jake's throat until he could hardly breathe. At the same time he was pulled backward. They retreated that way, facing the gap where Roland stood with Susannah on his back and Eddie just behind him, still holding the Ruger which Gasher had called a toy pistol. Jake could feel Gasher's breath puffing against his ear in hot little blurts. Worse, he could smell it.

"Don't try a thing," Gasher whispered, "or I'll rip off yer sweetmeats and stuff em up your bung. And it would be sad to lose em before you ever got a chance to use em, wouldn't it? Wery sad indeed."

They reached the end of the bridge. Jake stiffened, believing Gasher would throw the grenade anyway, but he didn't ... at least not immedi-ately. He backed Jake through a narrow alley between two small cubicles which had probably served as tollbooths, once upon a time. Beyond them, the brick warehouses loomed like prison cellblocks.

"Now, cully, I'm going to let go of your neck, or how would'je ever have wind to run with? But I'll be holdin yer arm, and if ye don't run like the wind, I promise I'll rip it right off and use it for a club to beat you with. Do you understand?"

Jake nodded, and suddenly the terrible, stifling pressure was gone from his windpipe. As soon as it was, he became aware of his hand again - it felt hot and swollen and full of fire. Then Gasher seized his bicep with fingers like bands of iron, and he forgot all about his hand.

"Toodle-doo!" Gasher called in a grotesquely cheery falsetto. He waggled the grenado at the others. "Bye-bye, dears!" Then he growled to Jake: "Now run, you whoring little squint! Run\"

Jake was first whirled and then yanked into a run. The two of them went flying down a curved ramp to street level. Jake's first confused thought was that this was what the East River Drive would look like two or three hundred years after some weird brain-plague had killed all the sane people in the world.

The ancient, rusty hulks of what had once surely been automobiles stood at intervals along both curbs. Most were bubble-shaped roadsters that looked like no cars Jake had ever seen before (except, maybe, for the ones the white-gloved creations of Walt Disney drove in the comic books), but among them he saw an old Volkswagen Beetle, a car that might have been a Chevrolet Corvair, and something he believed was a Model A Ford. There were no tires on any of these eerie hulks; they either had been stolen or had rotted away to dust long since. And all the glass had been broken, as if the remaining denizens of this city abhorred anything which might show them their own reflections, even accidentally.

Beneath and between the abandoned cars, the gutters were filled with drifts of unidentifiable metal junk and bright glints of glass. Trees had been planted at intervals along the sidewalks in some long-gone, happier time, but they were now so emphatically dead that they looked like stark metal sculptures against the cloudy sky. Some of the warehouses had either been bombed or had collapsed on their own, and beyond the jumbled heaps of bricks which was all that remained of them Jake could see the river and the rusty, sagging underpinnings of the Send Bridge . That smell of wet decay - a smell that seemed almost to snarl in the nose - was stronger than ever.

The street headed due east, diverging from the path of the Beam, and Jake could see it became more and more choked with rubble and rickrack as it went. Six or seven blocks down it appeared to be entirely plugged, but it was in this direction that Gasher pulled him. At first he kept up, but Gasher was setting a fearsome pace. Jake began to pant and fell a step behind. Gasher almost jerked him off his feet as he dragged Jake toward the barrier of junk and concrete and rusty steel beams which lay ahead. The plug - which looked like a deliberate construction to Jake - lay between two broad buildings with dusty marble facades. In front of the one on the left was a statue Jake recognized at once: it was the woman called Blind Justice, and that almost surely made the building she guarded a courthouse. But he only had a moment to look; Gasher was dragging him relentlessly toward the barricade, and he wasn't slowing down.

He'll kill us if he tries to take us through there! Jake thought, but Gasher - who ran like the wind in spite of the disease which advertised itself on his face - simply buried his fingers deeper in Jake's upper arm and swept him along. And now Jake saw a narrow alley in the not-quite-haphazard pile of concrete, splintered furniture, rusted plumbing fixtures, and chunks of trucks and automobiles. He suddenly understood. This maze would hold Roland up for hours... but it was Gasher's back yard, and he knew exactly where he was going.

The small dark opening to the alley was on the left side of the tottery pile of junk. As they reached it, Gasher tossed the green object back over his shoulder. "Better duck, dearie!" he cried, and voiced a series of shrill, hysterical giggles. A moment later a huge, crumping explo-sion shook the street. One of the bubble-shaped cars jumped twenty feet into the air and then came down on its roof. A hail of bricks whistled over Jake's head, and something thumped him hard on the left shoulder-blade. He stumbled and would have fallen if Gasher hadn't yanked him upright and pulled him into the narrow opening in the rubble. Once they were in the passageway which lay beyond, gloomy shadows reached out eagerly and enfolded them.

When they were gone, a small, furry shape crept out from behind a concrete boulder. It was Oy. He stood at the mouth of the passage for a moment, neck stretched forward, eyes gleaming. Then he followed after, nose low to the ground and sniffing carefully.