The Waste Lands (Page 112)

He let go of Jake’s hair and tightened his grip on the packstrap, praying the lad hadn’t bought the pack at one of the cheap discount outlets. He flailed above his head for the handrail with his free hand. After an interminable moment in which their combined outward slide continued, he found it and seized it. “ROLAND!” he bawled. “I COULD USE A LITTLE HELP HERE!” But Roland was already there, with Susannah still perched on his back. When he bent, she locked her arms around his neck so she wouldn’t drop headfirst from the sling. The gunslinger wrapped an arm around Jake’s chest and pulled him up. When his feet were on the support rod again, Jake put his right arm around Oy’s trembling body. His left hand was an agony of fire and ice. “Let go, Oy,” he gasped. “You can let go now we’re—safe.” For a terrible moment he didn’t think the billy-bumbler would. Then, slowly, Oy’s jaws relaxed and Jake was able to pull his hand free. It was covered with blood and dotted with a ring of dark holes. “Oy,” the bumbler said feebly, and Eddie saw with wonder that the animal’s strange eyes were full of tears. He stretched his neck and licked Jake’s face with his bloody tongue.

“That’s okay,” Jake said, pressing his face into the warm fur. He was crying himself, his face a mask of shock and pain. “Don’t worry, that’s okay. You couldn’t help it and I don’t mind.”

Eddie was getting slowly to his feet. His face was dirty gray, and he felt as if someone had driven a bowling ball into his guts. His left hand stole slowly to his crotch and investigated the damage there. “Cheap f**king vasectomy,” he said hoarsely. “Are you going to faint, Eddie?” Roland asked. A fresh gust of wind flipped his hat from his head and into Susannah’s face. She grabbed it and jammed it down all the way to his ears, giving Roland the look of a half-crazed hillbilly. “No,” Eddie said. “I almost wish I could, but—” “Take a look at Jake,” Susannah said. “He’s really bleeding.”

“I’m fine,” Jake said, and tried to hide his hand. Roland took it gently in his own hands before he could. Jake had sustained at least a dozen puncture-wounds in the back of his hand, his palm, and his fingers. Most of them were deep. It would be impossible to tell if bones had been broken or tendons severed until Jake tried to flex the hand, and this wasn’t the time or place for such experiments.

Roland looked at Oy. The billy-bumbler looked back, his expressive eyes sad and frightened. He had made no effort to lick Jake’s blood from his chops, although it would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to have done so. “Leave him alone,” Jake said, and wrapped the encircling arm more tightly about Oy’s body. “It wasn’t his fault. It was my fault for forgetting him. The wind blew him off.”

“I’m not going to hurt him,” Roland said. He was positive the billy-bumbler wasn’t rabid, but he still did not intend for Oy to taste any more of Jake’s blood than he already had. As for any other diseases Oy might be carrying in his blood . . . well, ka would decide, as, in the end, it always did. Roland pulled his neckerchief free and wiped Oy’s lips and muzzle. “There,” he said. “Good fellow. Good boy.”

“Oy,” the billy-bumbler said feebly, and Susannah, who was watch-ing over Roland’s shoulder, could have sworn she heard gratitude in that voice. Another gust of wind struck them. The weather was turning dirty, and fast. “Eddie, we have to get off the bridge. Can you walk?” “No, massa; I’sa gwinter shuffle.” The pain in his groin and the pit of his stomach was still bad, but not quite so bad as it had been a minute ago. “All right. Let’s move. Fast as we can.” Roland turned, began to take a step, and stopped. A man was now standing on the far side of the gap, watching them expressionlessly. The newcomer had approached while their attention was focused on Jake and Oy. A crossbow was slung across his back. He wore a bright yellow scarf around his head; the ends streamed out like banners in the freshening wind. Gold hoops with crosses in their centers dangled from his ears. One eye was covered with a white silk patch. His face was blotched with purple sores, some of them open and festering. He might have been thirty, forty, or sixty. He held one hand high over his head. In it was something Roland could not make out, except that its shape was too regular to be a stone.

Behind this apparition, the city loomed with a kind of weird clarity in the darkening day. As Eddie looked past the huddles of brick buildings on the other shore—warehouses long since scooped empty by looters, he had no doubt—and into those shadowy canyons and stone mazes, he understood for the first time how terribly mistaken, how terribly foolish, his dreams of hope and help had been. Now he saw the shattered facades and broken roofs; now he saw the shaggy birds’ nests on cornices and in glassless, gaping windows; now hr allowed himself to actually smell the city, and that odor was not of fabulous spices and savory foods of the sort his mother had sometimes brought home from Zabar’s but rather the stink of a mattress that has caught fire, smoldered awhile, and then been put out with sewer-water. He suddenly understood Lud, understood it completely. The grinning pirate who had appeared while their attention was elsewhere was probably as close to a wise old elf as this broken, dying place could provide. Roland pulled his revolver.

“Put it away, my cully,” the man in the yellow scarf said in an accent so thick that the sense of his words was almost lost. “Put it away, my dear heart. Ye’re a fierce trim, ay, that’s clear, but this time you’re outmatched.”