The Waste Lands (Page 109)

Some hours after they entered this area— Jake called it The Gauntlet—the concrete embankments ended at a place where half a dozen access roads drew together, like the strands of a spiderweb, and here the land opened out again … a fact which relieved all of them, although none of them said so out loud.

Another traffic-light swung over the junc-tion. This one was more familiar to

Eddie, Susannah, and Jake; it had once had lenses on its four faces, although the glass had been broken out long ago.

“I’ll bet this road was the eighth wonder of the world, once upon a time,” Susannah said, “and look at it now. It’s a minefield.” “Old ways are sometimes the best ways,” Roland agreed. Eddie was pointing west. “Look.”

Now that the high concrete barriers were gone, they could see exactly what old Si had described to them over cups of bitter coffee in River Crossing. “One track only,” he had said, “set up high on a colyum of man-made stone, such as the Old Ones used to make their streets and walls.” The track raced toward them out of the west in a slim, straight line, then flowed across the Send and into the city on a narrow golden trestle. It was a simple, elegant construction—and the only one they had seen so far which was totally without rust—but it was badly marred, all the same. Halfway across, a large piece of the trestle had fallen into the rushing river below. What remained were two long, jutting piers that pointed at each other like accusing fingers. Jutting out of the water below the hole was a streamlined tube of metal. Once it had been bright blue, but now the color had been dimmed by spreading scales of rust. It looked very small from this distance.

“So much for Blaine,” Eddie said. “No wonder they stopped hearing it. The supports finally gave way while it was crossing the river and it fell in the drink. It must have been decelerating when it happened, or it would have carried straight across and all we’d see would be a big hole like a bomb-crater in the far bank. Well, it was a great idea while it lasted.” “Mercy said there was another one,” Susannah reminded him. “Yeah. She also said she hadn’t heard it in seven or eight years, and Aunt Talitha said it was more like ten. What do you think, Jake . . . Jake? Earth to Jake, Earth to Jake, come in, little buddy.” Jake, who had been staring intently at the remains of the train in the river, only shrugged.

“You’re a big help, Jake,” Eddie said. “Valuable input—that’s why I love you. Why we all love you.”

Jake paid no attention. He knew what he was seeing, and it wasn’t Blaine. The remains of the mono sticking out of the river were blue. In his dream, Blaine had been the dusty, sugary pink of the bubblegum you got with baseball trading cards.

Roland, meanwhile, had cinched the straps of Susannah’s carry-har-ness across his chest. “Eddie, boost your lady into this contraption. It’s time we moved on and saw for ourselves.”

Jake now shifted his gaze, looking nervously toward the bridge loom-ing ahead. He could hear a high, ghostly humming noise in the distance— the sound of the wind playing in the decayed steel hangers which con-nected the overhead cables to the concrete deck below.

“Do you think it’ll be safe to cross?” Jake asked. “We’ll find out tomorrow,” Roland replied.

THE NEXT MORNING, ROLAND’S band of travellers stood at the end of the long, rusty bridge, gazing across at Lud. Eddie’s dreams of wise old elves who had preserved a working technology on which the pilgrims could draw were disappearing. Now that they were this close, he could see holes in the city-scape where whole blocks of buildings appeared to have been either burned or blasted. The skyline reminded him of a diseased jaw from which many teeth have already fallen.

It was true that most of the buildings were still standing, but they had a dreary, disused look that filled Eddie with an uncharacteristic gloom, and the bridge between the travellers and that shuttered maze of steel and concrete looked anything but solid and eternal. The vertical hangers on the left sagged slackly; the ones remaining on the right almost screamed with tension. The deck had been constructed of hollow con-crete boxes shaped like trapezoids. Some of these had buckled upward, displaying empty black interiors; others had slipped askew. Many of these latter had merely cracked, but others were badly broken, leaving gaps big enough to drop trucks—big trucks—into. In places where the bottoms of the box-sections as well as the tops had shattered, they could see the muddy riverbank and the gray-green water of the Send beyond it. Eddie put the distance between the deck and the water as three hundred feet at the center of the bridge. And that was probably a conservative estimate. Eddie peered at the huge concrete caissons to which the main cables were anchored and thought the one on the right side of the bridge looked as if it had been pulled partway out of the earth. He decided he might do well not to mention this fact to the others; it was bad enough that the bridge was swaying slowly but perceptibly back and forth. Just looking at it made him feel seasick. “Well?” he asked Roland. “What do you think?” Roland pointed to the right side of the bridge. Here was a canted walkway about five feet wide. It had been constructed atop a series of smaller concrete boxes and was, in effect, a separate deck. This seg-mented deck appeared to be supported by an undercable—or perhaps it was a thick steel rod—anchored to the main support cables by huge bow-clamps. Eddie inspected the closest one with the avid interest of a man who may soon be entrusting his life to the object he is studying. The bow-clamp appeared rusty but still sound. The words LaMERK FOUNDRY had been stamped into its metal. Eddie was fascinated to realize he no longer knew if the words were in the High Speech or in English. “I think we can use that,” Roland said. “There’s only one bad place. Do you see it?”