The Waste Lands (13 page)

Eddie had just decided they were going to lose the light and would have to camp in these creepy surroundings when they came to a thin skirt of alders. Beyond it, he could hear a stream babbling noisily over a bed of stones. Behind them, the setting sun was radiating spokes of sullen red light across the jumbled ground they had just crossed, turning the fallen trees into crisscrossing black shapes like Chinese ideograms.

Roland called a halt and eased Susannah down. He stretched his back, twisting it this way and that with his hands on his hips.

“That it for the night?” Eddie asked.

Roland shook his head. “Give Eddie your gun, Susannah.”

She did as he said, looking at him questioningly.

“Come on, Eddie. The place we want is on the other side of those trees. We’ll have a look. We might do a little work, as well.”

“What makes you think—”

“Open your ears.”

Eddie listened and realized he heard machinery. He further realized that he had been hearing it for some time now. “I don’t want to leave Susannah.”

“We’re not going far and she has a good loud voice. Besides, if there’s danger, it’s ahead—we’ll be between it and her.”

Eddie looked down at Susannah.

“Go on—just make sure you’re back soon.” She looked back the way they had come with thoughtful eyes. “I don’t know if there’s ha’ants here or not, but it
feels
like there are.”

“We’ll be back before dark,” Roland promised. He started toward the screen of alders, and after a moment, Eddie followed him.

FIFTEEN YARDS INTO THE trees, Eddie realized that they were following a path, one the bear had probably made for itself over the years. The alders bent above them in a tunnel. The sounds were louder now, and he began to sort them out. One was a low, deep, humming noise. He could feel it in his feet—a faint vibration, as if some large piece of machinery was running in the earth. Above it, closer and more urgent, were crisscrossing sounds like bright scratches—squeals, squeaks, chitterings.

Roland placed his mouth against Eddie’s ear and said, “I think there’s little danger if we’re quiet.”

They moved on another five yards and then Roland stopped again. He drew his gun and used the barrel to brush aside a branch which hung heavy with sunset-tinted leaves. Eddie looked through this small opening and into the clearing where the bear had lived for so long—the base of operations from which he had set forth on his many expeditions of pillage and terror.

There was no undergrowth here; the ground had been beaten bald long since. A stream emerged from the base of a rock wall about fifty feet high and ran through the arrowhead-shaped clearing. On their side of the stream, backed up against the wall, was a metal box about nine feet high. Its roof was curved, and it reminded Eddie of a subway entrance. The front was painted in diagonal yellow and black stripes. The earth which floored the clearing was not black, like the topsoil in the forest, but a strange powdery gray. It was littered with bones, and after a moment Eddie realized that what he had taken for gray soil was more bones, bones so old they were crumbling back to dust.

Things were moving in the dirt—the things making the squealing, chittering noises. Four . . . no, five of them. Small metal devices, the largest about the size of a Collie pup. They were robots, Eddie realized, or something
like
robots. They were similar to each other and to the bear they had undoubtedly served in one way only—atop each of them, a tiny radar-dish turned rapidly.

More thinking caps
, Eddie thought.
My God, what kind of world is this, anyway?

The largest of these devices looked a little like the Tonka tractor Eddie had gotten for his sixth or seventh birthday; its treads churned up tiny gray clouds of bone-dust as it rolled along. Another looked like a stainless steel rat. A. third appeared to be a snake constructed of jointed steel segments—it writhed and humped its way along. They formed a rough circle on the far side of the stream, going around and around on a deep course they had carved in the ground. Looking at them made Eddie think of cartoons he had seen in the stacks of old
Saturday Evening
Post
magazines his mother had for some reason saved and stored in the front hall of their apartment. In the cartoons, worried, cigarette-smoking men paced ruts in the carpet while they awaited for their wives to give birth.

As his eyes grew used to the simple geography of the clearing, Eddie saw that there were a great many more than five of these assorted freaks. There were at least a dozen others that he could see and probably more hidden behind the bony remains of the bear’s old kills. The difference was that the others weren’t moving. The members of the bear’s mechanical retinue had died, one by one, over the long years until just this little group of five were left . . . and they did not sound very healthy, with their squeaks and squalls and rusty chitterings. The snake in particular had a hesitant, crippled look as it followed the mechanical rat around and around the circle. Every now and then the device which followed the snake—a steel block that walked on stubby mechanical legs—would catch up with it and give the snake a nudge, as if telling it to hurry the fuck up.

Eddie wondered what their job had been. Surely not protection; the bear had been built to protect itself, and Eddie guessed that if old Shardik had come upon the three of them while still in its prime, it would have chewed them up and spat them out in short order. Perhaps these little robots had been its maintenance crew, or scouts, or messengers. He guessed that they could be dangerous, but only in their own defense . . . or their master’s. They did not seem warlike.

There was, in fact, something pitiful about them. Most of the crew was now defunct, their master was gone, and Eddie believed they knew it somehow. It was not menace they projected but a strange, inhuman sadness. Old and almost worn out, they paced and rolled and wriggled their anxious way around the worry-track they had dug in this godforsaken clearing, and it almost seemed to Eddie that he could read the confused run of their thoughts;
Oh dear, oh dear, what now? What is our purpose, now that He is gone? And who will take care of us, now that He is gone? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear
. . .

Eddie felt a tug on the back of his leg and came very close to screaming in fear and surprise. He wheeled, cocking Roland’s gun, and saw Susannah looking up at him with wide eyes. Eddie let out a long breath and dropped the hammer carefully back to its resting position. He knelt, put his hands on Susannah’s shoulders, kissed her cheek, then whispered in her ear: “I came really close to putting a bullet in your silly head—what are you doing here?”

“Wanted to see,” she whispered back, looking not even slightly abashed. Her eyes shifted to Roland as he also hunkered beside her. “Besides, it was spooky back there by myself.”

She had sustained a number of small scratches crawling after them through the brush, but Roland had to admit to himself that she could be as quiet as a ghost when she wanted to be; he hadn’t heard a thing. He took a rag (the last remnant of his old shirt) from his back pocket and wiped the little trickles of blood from her arms. He examined his work for a moment and then dabbed at a small nick on her forehead as well. “Have your look, then,” he said. His voice was hardly more than the movement of his lips. “I guess you earned it.”

He used one hand to open a sightline at her level in the hock and greenberry bushes, then waited while she stared raptly into the clearing. At last she pulled back and Roland allowed the bushes to close again.

“I feel sorry for them,” she whispered. “Isn’t that crazy?”

“Not at all,” Roland whispered back. “They are creatures of great sadness, I think, in their own strange way. Eddie is going to put them out of their misery.”

Eddie began to shake his head at once.

“Yes, you are . . . unless you want to hunker here in what you call ‘the toolies’ all night. Go for the hats. The little twirling things.”

“What if I
miss
?” Eddie whispered at him furiously.

Roland shrugged.

Eddie stood up and reluctantly cocked the gunslinger’s revolver again. He looked through the bushes at the circling servomechanisms, going around and around in their lonely, useless orbit.
It’ll be like shooting puppies
, he thought glumly. Then he saw one of them—it was the thing that looked like a walking box—extrude an ugly-looking pincer device from its middle and clamp it for a moment on the snake. The snake made a surprised buzzing sound and leaped ahead. The walking box withdrew its pincer.

Well
. . .
maybe not
exactly
like shooting puppies,
Eddie decided. He glanced at Roland again. Roland looked back expressionlessly, arms folded across his chest.

Eddie thought of Susannah, first shooting the bear in the ass, then blowing its sensor device to smithereens as it bore down on her and Roland, and felt a little ashamed of himself. And there was more: part of him wanted to go for it, just as part of him had
wanted
to go up against Balazar and his crew of plug-uglies in The Leaning Tower. The compulsion was probably sick, but that didn’t change its basic attraction:
Let’s see who walks away . . let’s just see
.

Yeah, that was pretty sick, all right.

Pretend it’s just a shooting gallery, and you want to win your honey a stuffed dog
, he thought. Or a
stuffed bear
. He drew a bead on the walking box and then looked around impatiently when Roland touched his shoulder.

“Say your lesson, Eddie. And be true.”

Eddie hissed impatiently through his teeth, angry at the distraction, but Roland’s eyes didn’t flinch and so he drew a deep breath and tried to clear everything from his mind: the squeaks and squalls of equipment that had been running too long, the aches and pains in his body, the knowledge that Susannah was here, propped up on the heels of her hands, watching, the
further
knowledge that she was closest to the ground, and if he missed one of the gadgets out there, she would be the handiest target if it decided to retaliate.

“‘I do not shoot with my hand; he who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.’ ”

That was a joke, he thought; he wouldn’t know his old man if he passed him on the street. But he could feel the words doing their work, clearing his mind and settling his nerves. He didn’t know if he was the stuff of which gunslingers were made—the idea seemed fabulously unlikely to him, even though he knew he had managed to hold up his end pretty well during the shootout at Balazar’s nightclub—but he
did
know that part of him liked the coldness that fell over him when he spoke the words of the old, old catechism the gunslinger had taught them; the coldness and the way things seemed to stand forth with their own breathless clarity. There was another part of him which understood that this was just another deadly drug, not much different from the heroin which had killed Henry and almost killed him, but that did not alter the thin, tight pleasure of the moment. It drummed in him like taut cables vibrating in a high wind.

“ ‘I do not aim with my hand; he who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.

“ ‘I aim with my eye.

“ ‘I do not kill with my gun; he who kills With his gun has forgotten the face of his father.’ ”

Then, without knowing he meant to do it, he stepped out of the trees and spoke to the trundling robots on the far side of the clearing:

They stopped their endless circling. One of them let out a high buzz that might have been alarm or a warning. The radar-dishes, each no bigger than half a Hershey bar, turned toward the sound of his voice.

Eddie began to fire.

The sensors exploded like clay pigeons, one after the other. Pity was gone from Eddie’s heart; there was only that coldness, and the knowledge that he would not stop, could not stop, until the job was done.

Thunder filled the twilit clearing and bounced back from the splintery rock wall at its wide end. The steel snake did two cartwheels and lay twitching in the dust. The biggest mechanism—the one that had reminded Eddie of his childhood Tonka tractor—tried to flee. Eddie blew its radar-dish to kingdom come as it made a herky-jerky run at the side of the rut. It fell on its squarish nose with thin blue flames squirting out of the steel sockets which held its glass eyes.

The only sensor he missed was the one on the stainless steel rat; that shot caromed off its metal back with a high mosquito whine. It surged out of the rut, made a half-circle around the box-shaped thing which had been following the snake, and charged across the clearing at surprising speed. It was making an angry clittering sound, and as it closed the distance, Eddie could see it had a mouth lined with long, sharp points. They did not look like teeth; they looked like sewing-machine needles, blurring up and down. No, he guessed these things were really not much like puppies, after all.

“Take it, Roland!
” he shouted desperately, but when he snatched a quick look around he saw that Roland was still standing with his arms crossed on his chest, his expression serene and distant. He might have been thinking of chess problems or old love-letters.

The dish on the rat’s back suddenly locked down. It changed direction slightly and buzzed straight toward Susannah Dean.

One bullet left,
Eddie thought
. If I miss, it’ll take her face off
.

Instead of shooting, he stepped forward and kicked the rat as hard as he could. He had replaced his shoes with a pair of deerskin moccasins, and he felt the jolt all the way up to his knee. The rat gave a rusty, ratcheting squeal, tumbled over and over in the dirt, and came to rest on its back. Eddie could see what looked like a dozen stubby mechanical legs pistoning up and down. Each was tipped with a sharp steel claw. These claws twirled around and around on gimbals the size of pencil-erasers.