The Waste Lands (Page 103)

“It looks like a dead bird,” Roland said. “A big one.” “That’s no bird,” Eddie said. “That’s an airplane. I’m pretty sure the glare is sunlight bouncing off the canopy.”

An hour later they stood silently at the edge of the road, looking at the ancient wreck. Three plump crows stood on the tattered skin of the fuselage, staring insolently at the newcomers. Jake pried a cobble from the edge of the road and shied it at them. The crows lumbered into the air, cawing indignantly. One wing had broken off in the crash and lay thirty yards away, a shadow like a diving board in the tall grass. The rest of the plane was pretty much intact. The canopy had cracked in a starburst pattern where the pilot’s head had struck it. There was a large, rust-colored stain there. Oy trotted over to where three rusty propeller blades rose from the grass, sniffed at them, then returned hastily to Jake. The man in the cockpit was u dust-dry mummy wearing a padded leather vest and a helmet with a spike on top. His lips were gone, his teeth exposed in a final desperate grimace. Fingers which had once been as large as sausages but were now only skin-covered bones clutched the wheel. His skull was caved in where it had hit the canopy, and Roland guessed that the greenish-gray scales which coated the left side of his face were all that remained of his brains. The dead man’s head was tilted back, as if he had been sure, even at the moment of his death, that he could regain the sky again. The plane’s remaining wing still jutted from the encroaching grass. On it was a fading insignia which depicted a fist holding a thunderbolt.

“Looks like Aunt Talitha was wrong and the old albino man had the right of it, after all,” Susannah said in an awed voice. “That must be David Quick, the outlaw prince. Look at the size of him, Roland—they must have had to grease him to get him into the cockpit!”

Roland nodded. The heat and the years had wasted the man in the mechanical bird to no more than a skeleton wrapped in dry hide, but he could still see how broad the shoulders had been, and the misshapen head was massive. “So fell Lord Perth,” he said, “and the countryside did shake with that thunder.” Jake looked at him questioningly.

“It’s from an old poem. Lord Perth was a giant who went forth to war with a thousand men, but he was still in his own country when a little boy threw a stone at him and hit him in the knee. He stumbled, the weight of his armor bore him down, and he broke his neck in the fall.” Jake said, “Like our story of David and Goliath.” “There was no fire,” Eddie said. “I bet he just ran out of gas and tried a dead-stick landing on the road. He might have been an outlaw and a barbarian, but he had a yard of guts.”

Roland nodded, and looked at Jake. “You all right with this?” “Yes. If the guy was still, you know, runny, I might not be.” Jake looked from the dead man in the airplane to the city. Lud was much closer and clearer now, and although they could see many broken win-dows in the towers, he, like Eddie, had not entirely given up hope of finding some sort of help there. “I bet things sort of fell apart in the city once he was gone.”

“I think you’d win that bet,” Roland said. “You know something?” Jake was studying the plane again. “The people who built that city might have made their own airplanes, but I’m pretty sure this is one of ours. I did a school paper on air combat when I was in the fifth grade, and I think I recognize it. Roland, can I take a closer look?” Roland nodded. “I’ll go with you.”

Together they walked over to the plane with the high grass swishing at their pants. “Look,” Jake said. “See the machine-gun under the wing? That’s an air-cooled German model, and this is a Focke-Wulf from just before World War II. I’m sure it is. So what’s it doing here?” “Lots of planes disappear,” Eddie said. “Take the Bermuda Triangle, for instance. That’s a place over one of our oceans, Roland. It’s supposed to be jinxed. Maybe it’s a great big doorway between our worlds—one that’s almost always open.” Eddie hunched his shoulders and essayed a bad Rod Serling imitation. “Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for turbu-lence: you’re flying into . . . the Roland Zone!”

Jake and Roland, who were now standing beneath the plane’s remaining wing, ignored him.

“Boost me up, Roland.”

Roland shook his head. “That wing looks solid, but it’s not—this thing has been here a long time, Jake. You’d fall.”

“Make a step, then.”

Eddie said, “I’ll do it, Roland.”

Roland studied his diminished right hand for a moment, shrugged, then laced his hands together. “This’ll do. He’s light.” Jake shook off his moccasin and then stepped lightly into the stirrup Roland had made. Oy began to bark shrilly, though whether in excitement or alarm, Roland couldn’t tell.

Jake’s chest was now pressing against one of the airplane’s rusty flaps, and he was looking right at the fist-and-thunderbolt design. It had peeled up a little from the surface of the wing along one edge. He seized this flap and pulled. It came off the wing so easily that he would have fallen backward if Eddie, standing directly behind him, hadn’t steadied him with a hand on the butt. “I knew it,” Jake said. There was another symbol beneath the fist-and-thunderbolt, and now it was almost totally revealed. It was a swastika. “I just wanted to see it. You can put me down now.” They started out again, but they could see the tail of the plane every time they looked back that afternoon, looming out of the high grass like Lord Perth’s burial monument.