The Waste Lands

by Stephen King

  The door. He had to open the door and let the gunslinger in.

  Focusing on that and nothing but, Jake let the pearl-handled revolver clatter to the iron grating and pushed himself out of the chair. He was reaching again for the button he thought he had seen Tick-Tock push when a pair of hands settled around his throat and dragged him backward, away from the podium.

  "I said I'd kill you for it, my narsty little pal," a voice whispered in his ear, "and the Gasherman always keeps his promises."

  Jake flailed behind him with both hands and found nothing but thin air. Gasher's fingers sank into his throat, choking relentlessly. The world started to turn gray in front of his eyes. Gray quickly deepened to purple, and purple to black.

  34

  A PUMP STARTED UP, and the valve-wheel in the center of the hatch spun rapidly. Gods be thanked! Roland thought. He seized the wheel with his right hand almost before it had stopped moving and yanked it open. The other door was ajar; from beyond it came the sounds of men fighting and Oy's bark, now shrill with pain and fury.

  Roland kicked the door open with his boot and saw Gasher throttling Jake. Oy had left Copperhead and was now trying to make Gasher let go of Jake, but Gasher's boot was doing double duty: protecting its owner from the bumbler's teeth, and protecting Oy from the virulent infection which ran in Gasher's blood. Brandon stabbed Oy in the flank again in an effort to make him stop worrying Gasher's ankle, but Oy paid no heed. Jake hung from his captor's dirty hands like a puppet whose strings have been cut. His face was bluish-white, his swollen lips a delicate shade of lavender.

  Gasher looked up. "You," he snarled.

  "Me," Roland agreed. He fired once and the left side of Gasher's head disintegrated. The man went flying backward, bloodstained yellow scarf unravelling, and landed on top of the Tick-Tock Man. His feet drummed spastically on the iron grillework for a moment and then fell still.

  The gunslinger shot Brandon twice, fanning the hammer of his revolver with the flat of his right hand. Brandon, who had been bent over Oy for another stroke, spun around, struck the wall, and slid slowly down it, clutching at one of the tubes. Green swamp-light spilled out from between his loosening fingers,

  Oy limped to where Jake lay and began licking his pale, still face.

  Copperhead and Hoots had seen enough. They ran side by side for the small door through which Tilly had gone to get the dipper of water. It was the wrong time for chivalry; Roland shot them both in the back. He would have to move fast now, very fast indeed, and he would not risk being waylaid by these two if they should chance to rediscover their guts.

  A cluster of bright orange lights came on at the top of the capsule-shaped enclosure, and an alarm began to go off: in broad, hoarse blats that battered the walls. After a moment or two, the emergency lights began to pulse in sync with the alarm.

  35

  EDDIE WAS RETURNING TO Susannah when the alarm began to wail. He yelled in surprise and raised the Ruger, pointing it at nothing. "What's happening?"

  Susannah shook her head--she had no idea. The alarm was scary, but that was only part of the problem; it was also loud enough to be physically painful. Those amplified jags of sound made Eddie think of a tractor-trailer horn raised to the tenth power.

  At that moment, the orange arc-sodiums began to pulse. When he reached Susannah's chair, Eddie saw that the COMMAND and ENTER buttons were also pulsing in bright red beats. They looked like winking eyes.

  "Blaine, what's happening?" he shouted. He looked around but saw only wildly jumping shadows. "Are you doing this?"

  Blaine's only response was laughter--terrible mechanical laughter that made Eddie think of the clockwork clown that had stood outside the House of Horrors at Coney Island when he was a little kid.

  "Blaine, stop it!" Susannah shrieked. "How can we think of an answer to your riddle with that air-raid siren going off?"

  The laughter stopped as suddenly as it began, but Blaine made no reply. Or perhaps he did; from beyond the bars that separated them from the platform, huge engines powered by frictionless slo-trans turbines awoke at the command of the dipolar computers the Tick-Tock Man had so lusted after. For the first time in a decade, Blaine the Mono was awake and cycling up toward running speed.

  36

  THE ALARM, WHICH HAD indeed been built to warn Lud's long-dead residents of an impending air attack (and which had not even been tested in almost a thousand years), blanketed the city with sound. All the lights which still operated came on and began to pulse in sync. Pubes above the streets and Grays below them were alike convinced that the end they had always feared was finally upon them. The Grays suspected some cataclysmic mechanical breakdown was occurring. The Pubes, who had always believed that the ghosts lurking in the machines below the city would some day rise up to take their long-delayed vengeance on the still living, were probably closer to the actual truth of what was happening.

  Certainly there had been an intelligence left in the ancient computers below the city, a single living organism which had long ago ceased to exist sanely under conditions that, within its merciless dipolar circuits, could only be absolute reality. It had held its increasingly alien logic within its banks of memory for eight hundred years and might have held them so for eight hundred more, if not for the arrival of Roland and his friends; yet this mens non corpus had brooded and grown ever more insane with each passing year; even in its increasing periods of sleep it could be said to dream, and these dreams grew steadily more abnormal as the world moved on. Now, although the unthinkable machinery which maintained the Beams had weakened, this insane and inhuman intelligence had awakened in the rooms of ruin and had begun once more, although as bodiless as any ghost, to stumble through the halls of the dead.

  In other words, Blaine the Mono was preparing to get out of Dodge.

  37

  ROLAND HEARD A FOOTSTEP behind him as he knelt by Jake and turned, raising his gun. Tilly, her dough-colored face a mask of confusion and superstitious fear, raised her hands and shrieked: "Don't kill me, sai! Please! Don't kill me!"

  "Run, then," Roland said curtly, and as Tilly began to move, he struck her calf with the barrel of his revolver. "Not that way--through the door I came in. And if you ever see me again, I'll be the last thing you ever see. Now go!"

  She disappeared into the leaping, circling shadows.

  Roland dropped his head to Jake's chest, slamming his palm against his other ear to deaden the pulse of the alarm. He heard the boy's heartbeat, slow but strong. He slipped his arms around the boy, and as he did, Jakes's eyes fluttered open. "You didn't let me fall this time." His voice was no more than a hoarse whisper.

  "No. Not this time, and not ever again. Don't try your voice."

  "Where's Oy?"

  "Oy!" the bumbler barked. "Oy!"

  Brandon had slashed Oy several times, but none of the wounds seemed mortal or even serious. It was clear that he was in some pain, but it was equally clear he was transported with joy. He regarded Jake with sparkling eyes, his pink tongue lolling out. "Ake, Ake, Ake!"

  Jake burst into tears and reached for him; Oy limped into the circle of his arms and allowed himself to be hugged for a moment.

  Roland got up and looked around. His gaze fixed on the door on the far side of the room. The two men he'd backshot had been heading in that direction, and the woman had also wanted to go that way. The gunslinger went toward the door with Jake in his arms and Oy at his heel. He kicked one of the dead Grays aside, and ducked through. The room beyond was a kitchen. It managed to look like a hog-wallow in spite of the built-in appliances and the stainless steel walls; the Grays were apparently not much interested in housekeeping.

  "Drink," Jake whispered. "Please . . . so thirsty."

  Roland felt a queer doubling, as if time had folded backward on itself. He remembered lurching out of the desert, crazy with the heat and the emptiness. He remembered passing out in the stable of the way station, half-dead from thirst, and waking at the taste of cool water trickli
ng down his throat. The boy had taken off his shirt, soaked it under the flow from the pump, and given him to drink. Now it was his turn to do for Jake what Jake had already done for him.

  Roland glanced around and saw a sink. He went over to it and turned on the faucet. Cold, clear water rushed out. Over them, around them, under them, the alarm roared on and on.

  "Can you stand?"

  Jake nodded. "I think so."

  Roland set the boy on his feet, ready to catch him if he looked too wobbly, but Jake hung onto the sink, then ducked his head beneath the flowing water. Roland picked Oy up and looked at his wounds. They were already clotting. You got off very lucky, my furry friend, Roland thought, then reached past Jake to cup a palmful of water for the animal. Oy drank it eagerly.

  Jake drew back from the faucet with his hair plastered to the sides of his face. His skin was still too pale and the signs that he had been badly beaten were clearly visible, but he looked better than he had when Roland had first bent over him. For one terrible moment, the gunslinger had been positive Jake was dead.

  He found himself wishing he could go back and kill Gasher again, and that led him to another thought.

  "What about the one Gasher called the Tick-Tock Man? Did you see him, Jake?"

  "Yes. Oy ambushed him. Tore up his face. Then I shot him."

  "Dead?"

  Jake's lips began to tremble. He pressed them firmly together. "Yes. In his . . ." He tapped his forehead high above his right eyebrow. "I was l-l- . . . I was lucky."

  Roland looked at him appraisingly, then slowly shook his head. "You know, I doubt that. But never mind now. Come on."

  "Where are we going?" Jake's voice was still little more than a husky murmur, and he kept looking past Roland's shoulder toward the room where he had almost died.

  Roland pointed across the kitchen. Beyond another hatchway, the corridor continued. "That'll do for a start."

  "GUNSLINGER," a voice boomed from everywhere.

  Roland wheeled around, one arm cradling Oy and the other around Jake's shoulders, but there was no one to see.

  "Who speaks to me?" he shouted.

  "NAME YOURSELF, GUNSLINGER."

  "Roland of Gilead, son of Steven. Who speaks to me?"

  "GILEAD IS NO MORE," the voice mused, ignoring the question.

  Roland looked up and saw patterns of concentric rings in the ceiling. The voice was coming from those.

  "NO GUNSLINGER HAS WALKED IN-WORLD OR MID-WORLD FOR ALMOST THREE HUNDRED YEARS."

  "I and my friends are the last."

  Jake took Oy from Roland. The bumbler at once began to lick the boy's swollen face; his gold-ringed eyes were full of adoration and happiness.

  "It's Blaine," Jake whispered to Roland. "Isn't it?"

  Roland nodded. Of course it was--but he had an idea that there was a great deal more to Blaine than just a monorail train.

  "BOY! ARE YOU JAKE OF NEW YORK?"

  Jake pressed closer to Roland and looked up at the speakers. "Yes," he said. "That's me. Jake of New York. Uh . . . son of Elmer."

  "DO YOU STILL HAVE THE BOOK OF RIDDLES? THE ONE OF WHICH I HAVE BEEN TOLD?"

  Jake reached over his shoulder, and an expression of dismayed recollection filled his face as his fingers touched nothing but his own back. When he looked at Roland again, the gunslinger was holding his pack out toward him, and although the man's narrow, finely carved face was as expressionless as ever, Jake sensed the ghost of a smile lurking at the corners of his mouth.

  "You'll have to fix the straps," Roland said as Jake took the pack. "I made them longer."

  "But Riddle-De-Dum!--?"

  Roland nodded. "Both books are still in there."

  "WHAT YOU GOT, LITTLE PILGRIM?" the voice inquired in a leisurely drawl.

  "Cripes!" Jake said.

  It can see us as well as hear us, Roland thought, and a moment later he spotted a small glass eye in one corner, far above a man's normal line of sight. He felt a chill slip over his skin, and knew from both the troubled look on Jake's face and the way the boy's arms had tightened around Oy that he wasn't alone in his unease. That voice belonged to a machine, an incredibly smart machine, a playful machine, but there was something very wrong with it, all the same.

  "The book," Jake said. "I've got the riddle book."

  "GOOD." There was an almost human satisfaction in the voice. "REALLY EXCELLENT."

  A scruffy, bearded fellow suddenly appeared in the doorway on the far side of the kitchen. A bloodstained, dirt-streaked yellow scarf flapped from the newcomer's upper arm. "Fires in the walls!" he screamed. In his panic, he seemed not to realize that Roland and Jake were not part of his miserable subterranean ka-tet. "Smoke on the lower levels! People killin theirselves! Somepin's gone wrong! Hell, everythin's gone wrong! We gotta--"

  The door of the oven suddenly dropped open like an unhinged jaw. A thick beam of blue-white fire shot out and engulfed the scruffy man's head. He was driven backward with his clothes in flames and his skin boiling on his face.

  Jake stared up at Roland, stunned and horrified. Roland put an arm about the boy's shoulders.

  "HE INTERRUPTED ME," the voice said. "THAT WAS RUDE, WASN'T IT?"

  "Yes," Roland said calmly. "Extremely rude."

  "SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK SAYS YOU HAVE A GREAT MANY RIDDLES BY HEART, ROLAND OF GILEAD. IS THIS TRUE?"

  "Yes."

  There was an explosion in one of the rooms opening off this arm of the corridor; the floor shuddered beneath their feet and voices screamed in a jagged chorus. The pulsing lights and the endless, blatting siren faded momentarily, then came back strong. A little skein of bitter, acrid smoke drifted from the ventilators. Oy got a whiff and sneezed.

  "TELL ME ONE OF YOUR RIDDLES, GUNSLINGER," the voice invited. It was serene and untroubled, as if they were all sitting together in a peaceful village square somewhere instead of beneath a city that seemed on the verge of ripping itself apart.

  Roland thought for a moment, and what came to mind was Cuthbert's favorite riddle. "All right, Blaine," he said, "I will. What's better than all the gods and worse than Old Man Splitfoot? Dead people eat it always; live people who eat it die slow."

  There was a long pause. Jake put his face in Oy's fur to try to get away from the stink of the roasted Gray.

  "Be careful, gunslinger." The voice was as small as a cool puff of breeze on summer's hottest day. The voice of the machine had come from all the speakers, but this one came only from the speaker directly overhead. "Be careful, Jake of New York. Remember that these are The Drawers. Go slow and be very careful."

  Jake looked at the gunslinger with widening eyes. Roland gave his head a small, faint shake and raised one finger. He looked as if he was scratching the side of his nose, but that finger also lay across his lips, and Jake had an idea Roland was actually telling him to keep his mouth shut.

  "A CLEVER RIDDLE," Blaine said at last. There seemed to be real admiration in its voice. "THE ANSWER IS NOTHING, IS IT NOT?"

  "That's right," Roland said. "You're pretty clever yourself, Blaine."

  When the voice spoke again, Roland heard what Eddie had heard already: a deep and ungovernable greed. "ASK ME ANOTHER."

  Roland drew a deep breath. "Not just now."

  "I HOPE YOU ARE NOT REFUSING ME, ROLAND, SON OF STEVEN, FOR THAT IS ALSO RUDE. EXTREMELY RUDE."

  "Take us to our friends and help us get out of Lud," Roland said. "Then there may be time for riddling."

  "I COULD KILL YOU WHERE YOU STAND," the voice said, and now it was as cold as winter's darkest day.

  "Yes," Roland said. "I'm sure you could. But the riddles would die with us."

  "I COULD TAKE THE BOY'S BOOK."

  "Thieving is ruder than either refusal or interruption," Roland remarked. He spoke as if merely passing the time of day, but the remaining fingers of his right hand were tight on Jake's shoulder.

  "Besides," Jake said, looking up at the speaker in the ceiling, "the answers aren't in the book. Those pag
es were torn out." In a flash of inspiration, he tapped his temple. "They're up here, though."

  "YOU FELLOWS WANT TO REMEMBER THAT NOBODY LOVES A SMARTASS," Blaine said. There was another explosion, this one louder and closer. One of the ventilator grilles blew off and shot across the kitchen like a projectile. A moment later two men and a woman emerged through the door which led to the rest of the Grays' warren. The gunslinger levelled his revolver at them, then lowered it as they stumbled across the kitchen and into the silo beyond without so much as a look at Roland and Jake. To Roland they looked like animals fleeing before a forest fire.

  A stainless steel panel in the ceiling slid open, revealing a square of darkness. Something silvery flashed within it, and a few moments later a steel sphere, perhaps a foot in diameter, dropped from the hole and hung in the air of the kitchen.

  "FOLLOW," Blaine said flatly.

  "Will it take us to Eddie and Susannah?" Jake asked hopefully.

  Blaine replied only with silence . . . but when the sphere began floating down the corridor, Roland and Jake followed it.

  38

  JAKE HAD NO CLEAR memory of the time which followed, and that was probably merciful. He had left his world over a year before nine hundred people would commit suicide together in a small South American country called Guyana, but he knew about the periodic death-rushes of the lemmings, and what was happening in the disintegrating undercity of the Grays was like that.

  There were explosions, some on their level but most far below them; acrid smoke occasionally drifted from the ventilator grilles, but most of the air-purifiers were still working and they whipped the worst of it away before it could gather in choking clouds. They saw no fires. Yet the Grays were reacting as if the time of the apocalypse had come. Most only fled, their faces blank O's of panic, but many had committed suicide in the halls and interconnected rooms through which the steel sphere led Roland and Jake. Some had shot themselves; many more had slashed their throats or wrists; a few appeared to have swallowed poison. On all the faces of the dead was the same expression of overmastering terror. Jake could only vaguely understand what had driven them to this. Roland had a better idea of what had happened to them--to their minds--when the long-dead city first came to life around them and then seemed to commence tearing itself apart. And it was Roland who understood that Blaine was doing it on purpose. That Blaine was driving them to it.