The Waste Lands (7 page)

With a shattering roar, the bear charged.

The bear came at them in a rumbling lope; it was like watching a runaway factory machine over which someone had thrown a huge, moth-eaten rug.

She saw it ... but it didn’t look like a hat to her. It looked like a radar-dish—a much smaller version of the kind she had seen in MovieTone newsreel stories about how the DEW-line was keeping everyone safe from a Russian sneak attack. It was bigger than the pebbles she had shot off the boulder earlier, but the distance was greater. Sun and shadow ran across it in deceiving dapples.

“Shoot it!” Roland roared. “Susannah,
shoot it
!
”

With the trigger as yet unpulled, she saw the bullet go home, guided from muzzle to target by nothing more or less than her heart’s fierce desire that it should fly true. All fear fell away. What was left was a feeling of deep coldness and she had time to think:
This is what he feels
.
My God—how does he stand it?

“I kill with my heart, motherfucker,” she said, and the gunslinger’s revolver roared in her hand.

THE SILVERY THING SPUN on a steel rod planted in the bear’s skull. Susannah’s bullet struck it dead center and the radar-dish blew into a hundred glittering fragments. The pole itself was suddenly engulfed in a burst of crackling blue fire which reached out in a net and seemed to grasp the sides of the bear’s face for a moment.

It rose on its rear legs with a whistling howl of agony, its front paws boxing aimlessly at the air. It turned in a wide, staggering circle and began to flap its arms, as if it had decided to fly away. It tried to roar again but what came out instead was a weird warbling sound like an air-raid siren.

“It is very well.” Roland sounded exhausted. “A good shot, fair and true.”

“Should I shoot it again?” she asked uncertainly. The bear was still blundering around in its mad circle but now its body had begun to tilt sidewards and inwards. It struck a small tree, rebounded, almost fell over, and then began to circle again.

“No need,” Roland said. She felt his hands grip her waist and lift her. A moment later she was sitting on the ground with her thighs folded beneath her. Eddie was slowly and shakily descending the pine, but she didn’t see him. She could not take her eyes from the bear.

She had seen the whales at the Seaquarium near Mystic, Connecticut, and believed they had been bigger than this—much bigger, probably—but this was certainly the largest land creature she had ever seen. And it was clearly dying. Its roars had become liquid bubbling sounds, and although its eyes were open, it seemed blind. It flailed aimlessly about the camp, knocking over a rack of curing hides, stamping flat the little shelter she shared with Eddie, caroming off trees. She could see the steel post rising from its head. Tendrils of smoke were rising around it, as if her shot had ignited its brains.

Eddie reached the lowest branch of the tree which had saved his life and sat shakily astride it. “Holy Mary Mother of God,” he said. “I’m looking right at it and I still don’t beli—”

The bear wheeled back toward him. Eddie leaped nimbly from the tree and streaked toward Susannah and Roland. The bear took no notice, it marched drunkenly to the pine which had been Eddie’s refuge, tried to grasp it, failed, and sank to its knees. Now they could hear other sounds coming from inside it, sounds that made Eddie think of some huge truck engine stripping its gears.

A spasm convulsed it, bowed its back. Its front claws rose and gored madly at its own face. Worm-infested blood flew and splattered. Then it fell over, making the ground tremble with its fall, and lay still. After all its strange centuries, the bear the Old People had called Mir—the world beneath the world—was dead.

EDDIE PICKED SUSANNAH UP, held her with his sticky hands locked together at the small of her back, and kissed her deeply. He reeked of sweat and pine-tar. She touched his cheeks, his neck; she ran her hands through his wet hair. She felt an insane urge to touch him everywhere until she was absolutely sure of his reality.

“It almost had me,” he said. “It was like being on some crazy carnival ride. What a shot! Jesus, Suze—what a shot!”

“I hope I never have to do anything like that again,” she said . . . but a small voice at the center of her demurred. That voice suggested that she could not
wait
to do something like that again. And it was cold, that voice. Cold.

“What was—” he began, turning toward Roland, but Roland was no longer standing there. He was walking slowly toward the bear, which now lay on the ground with its shaggy knees up. From within it came a series of muffled gasps and gurgles as its strange guts continued to slowly run down.

Roland saw his knife planted deep in a tree near the scarred veteran that had saved Eddie’s life. He pulled it free and wiped it clean on the soft deerskin shirt which had replaced the tatters he had been wearing when the three of them had left the beach. He stood by the bear, looking down at it with an expression of pity and wonder.

Hello, stranger
, he thought.
Hello, old friend. I never believed in you, not really. I believe Alain did, and I know that Cuthbert did—Cuthbert believed in
everything
—but I was the hardheaded one. I thought you were only a tale for children . . . another wind which blew around in my old nurse’s hollow head before finally escaping her jabbering mouth. But you were here all along, another refugee of the old times, like the pump at the way station and the old machines under the mountains. Are the Slow Mutants who worshipped those broken remnants the final descendents of the people who once lived in this forest and finally fled your wrath? I don’t know, will never know . . . but it feels right. Yes. And then I came with my friends—my deadly new friends, who are becoming so much like my deadly old friends. We came, weaving our magic circle around its and around everything we touch, strand by poisonous strand, and now here you lie, at our feet. The world has moved on again, and this time, old friend, it’s you who have been left behind.

The monster’s body still radiated a deep, sick heat. Parasites were leaving its mouth and tattered nostrils in hordes, but they died almost at once. Waxy-white piles of them were growing on either side of the bear’s head.

Eddie approached slowly. He had shifted Susannah over to one hip, carrying her as a mother might carry a baby. “What was it, Roland? Do you know?”

“He called it a Guardian, I think,” Susannah said.

“Yes.” Roland’s voice was slow with amazement. “I thought they were all gone,
must
all be gone . . . if they ever existed outside of the old wives’ tales in the first place.”

“Whatever it was, it was one crazy mother,” Eddie said.

Roland smiled a little. “If you’d lived two or three thousand years, you’d be one crazy mother, too.”

“Two or three thousand . . . Christ!”

Susannah said, “Is it a bear? Really? And what’s that?” She was pointing at what appeared to be a square metal tag set high on one of the bear’s thick rear legs. It was almost overgrown with tough tangles of hair, but the afternoon sun had pricked out a single starpoint of light on its stainless steel surface, revealing it.

Eddie knelt and reached hesitantly toward the tag, aware that strange muffled clicks and clacks were still coming from deep inside the fallen giant. He looked at Roland.

“Go ahead,” the gunslinger told him. “It’s finished.”

Eddie pushed a clump of hair aside and leaned closer. Words had been stamped into the metal. They were quite badly eroded, but he found that with a little effort he could read them.

“Holy Jesus, this thing is a
robot
,” Eddie said softly.

“It can’t be,” Susannah said. “When I shot it, it
bled.”

“Maybe so, but your ordinary, garden-variety bear doesn’t have a radar-dish growing out of its head. And, so far as I know, your ordinary, garden-variety bear doesn’t live to be two or three th—” He broke off suddenly, looking at Roland. When he spoke again, his voice was revolted. “Roland, what are you doing?”

Roland did not reply; did not
need
to reply. What he was doing—gouging out one of the bear’s eyes with his knife—was perfectly obvious. The surgery was quick, neat, and precise. When it was completed he balanced an oozing brown ball of jelly on the blade of his knife for a moment and then flicked it aside. A few more worms made their way out of the staring hole, tried to squirm their way down the bear’s muzzle, and died.

The gunslinger leaned over the eyesocket of Shardik, the great Guardian bear, and peered inside. “Come and look, both of you,” he said. “I’ll show you a wonder of the latter days.”

“Put me down, Eddie,” Susannah said.

He did so, and she moved swiftly on her hands and upper thighs to where the gunslinger was hunkered down over the bear’s wide, slack face. Eddie joined them, looking between their shoulders. The three of them gazed in rapt silence for nearly a full minute; the only noise came from the crows which still circled and scolded in the sky.

Blood oozed from the socket in a few thick, dying trickles. Yet it was not
just
blood, Eddie saw. There was also a clear fluid which gave off an identifiable scent—bananas. And, embedded in the delicate crisscross of tendons which shaped the socket, he saw a webwork of what looked like strings. Beyond them, at the back of then socket, was a red spark, blinking on and off. It illuminated a tiny square board marked with silvery squiggles of what could only be solder.

“It isn’t a bear, it’s a fucking Sony Walkman,” he muttered.

Susannah looked around at him. “What?”

“Nothing.” Eddie glanced at Roland. “Do you think it’s safe to reach in?”

Roland shrugged. “I think so. If there was a demon in this creature, it’s fled.”

Eddie reached in with his little finger, nerves set to draw back if he felt even a tickle of electricity. He touched the cooling meat inside the eyesocket, which was nearly the size of a baseball, and then one of those strings. Except it wasn’t a string; it was a gossamer-thin strand of steel. He withdrew his finger and saw the tiny red spark blink once more before going out forever.

“Shardik,” Eddie murmured. “I
know
that name, but I can’t place it. Does it mean anything to you, Suze?”

She shook her head.

“The thing is . . .” Eddie laughed helplessly. “I associate it with rabbits. Isn’t that nuts?”

Roland stood up. His knees popped like gunshots. “We’ll have to move camp,” he said. “The ground here is spoiled. The other clearing, the one where we go to shoot, will—”

He took two trembling steps and then collapsed to his knees, palms pressed to the sides of his sagging head.

EDDIE AND SUSANNAH EXCHANGED a single frightened glance and then Eddie leaped to Roland’s side. “What is it? Roland, what’s wrong?”

“There
was
a boy,” the gunslinger said in a distant, muttering voice. And then, in the very next breath, “There
wasn’t
a boy.”

“Roland?” Susannah asked. She came to him, slipped an arm around his shoulders, felt him trembling. “Roland, what is it?”

“The boy,” Roland said, looking at her with floating, dazed eyes. “It’s the boy.
Always
the boy.”

“What
boy?” Eddie yelled frantically. “
What
boy?”

“Go then,” Roland said, “there are other worlds than these.” And fainted.

THAT NIGHT THE THREE of them sat around a huge bonfire Eddie and Susannah had built in the clearing Eddie called “the shooting gallery.” It would have been a bad place to camp in the wintertime, open to the valley as it was, but for now it was fine. Eddie guessed that here in Roland’s world it was still late summer.

The black vault of the sky arched overhead, speckled by what seemed to be whole galaxies. Almost straight ahead to the south, across the river of darkness that was the valley, Eddie could see Old Mother rising above the distant, unseen horizon. He glanced at Roland, who sat huddled by the fire with three skins wrapped around his shoulders despite the warmth of the night and the heat of the fire. There was an untouched plate of food by his side and a bone cradled in his hands. Eddie glanced back at the sky and thought of a story the gunslinger had told him and Susannah on one of the long days they had spent moving away from the beach, through the foothills, and finally into these deep woods where they had found a temporary refuge.

Before time began, Roland said, Old Star and Old Mother had been young and passionate newlyweds. Then one day there had been a terrible argument. Old Mother (who in those long-ago days had been known by her real name, which was Lydia) had caught Old Star (whose real name was Apon) hanging about a beautiful young woman named Cassiopeia. They’d had a real bang-up fight, those two, a hair-pulling, eye-gouging, crockery-throwing fight. One of those thrown bits of crockery had become the earth; a smaller shard the moon; a coal from their kitchen stove had become the sun. In the end, the gods had stepped in so Apon and Lydia might not, in their anger, destroy the universe before it was fairly begun. Cassiopeia, the saucy jade who caused the trouble in the first place (“Yeah, right—it’s always the woman,” Susannah had said at this point), had been banished to a rocking-chair made of stars forever and ever. Yet not even this had solved the-problem. Lydia had been willing to try again, but Apon was stiffnecked and full of pride (“Yeah, always blame the man,” Eddie had grunted at this point). So they had parted, and now they look at each other in mingled hatred and longing from across the star-strewn wreckage of their divorce. Apon and Lydia are three billion years gone, the gunslinger told them; they have become Old Star and Old Mother, the north and south, each pining for the other but both now too proud to beg for reconciliation . . . and Cassiopeia sits off to the side in her chair, rocking and laughing at them both.