The Waste Lands (Page 114)

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“Roland, he could be bluffing!” Eddie yelled. “That thing could be a dud!” The gunslinger made no reply.

As Jake neared the other side of the hole in the walkway, Oy bared his own teeth and began to snarl at Gasher.

“Toss that talking bag of guts overside,” Gasher said. “Fuck you,” Jake replied in the same calm voice. The pirate looked surprised for a moment, then nodded. “Tender of him, are you? Wery well.” He took two steps backward. “Put him down the second you reach the concrete, then. And if he runs at me, I promise to lack his brains right out his tender little ass**le.”

“Asshole,” Oy said through his bared teeth. “Shut up, Oy,” Jake muttered. He reached the concrete just as the strongest gust of wind yet struck the bridge. This time the twanging sound of parting cable-strands seemed to come from everywhere. Jake glanced back and saw Roland and Eddie clinging to the rail. Susannah was watching him from over Roland’s shoulder, her tight cap of curls rippling and shaking in the wind. Jake raised his hand to them. Roland raised his in return. You won’t let me drop this time? he had asked. No—not ever again, Roland had replied. Jake believed him . . . but he was very much afraid of what might happen before Roland arrived. He put Oy down. Gasher rushed forward the moment he did, kicking out at the small animal. Oy skittered aside, avoiding the booted foot.

“Run!” Jake shouted. Oy did, shooting past them and loping toward the Lud end of the bridge with his head down, swerving to avoid the holes and leaping across the cracks in the pavement. He didn’t look back. A moment later Gasher had his arm around Jake’s neck. He stank of dirt and decaying flesh, the two odors combining to create a single deep stench, crusty and thick. It made Jake’s gorge rise.

He bumped his crotch into Jake’s bu**ocks. “Maybe I ain’t quite s’far gone’s I thought. Don’t they say youth’s the wine what makes old men drunk? We’ll have us a time, won’t we, my sweet little squint? Ay, we’ll have a time such as will make the angels sing.”

Oh Jesus, Jake thought.

Gasher raised his voice again. “We’re leaving now, my hardcase friend—we have grand things to do and grand people to see, so we do, but I keep my word. As for you, you’ll stand right where you are for a good fifteen minutes, if you’re wise. If I see you start to move, we’re all going to ride the handsome. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Roland said.

“Do you believe me when I say I have nothing to lose?” “Yes.”

“That’s wery well, then. Move, boy! Hup!” Gasher’s hold tightened on Jake’s throat until he could hardly breathe. At the same time he was pulled backward. They retreated that way, facing the gap where Roland stood with Susannah on his back and Eddie just behind him, still holding the Ruger which Gasher had called a toy pistol. Jake could feel Gasher’s breath puffing against his ear in hot little blurts. Worse, he could smell it. “Don’t try a thing,” Gasher whispered, “or I’ll rip off yer sweetmeats and stuff em up your bung. And it would be sad to lose em before you ever got a chance to use em, wouldn’t it? Wery sad indeed.”

They reached the end of the bridge. Jake stiffened, believing Gasher would throw the grenade anyway, but he didn’t … at least not immedi-ately. He backed Jake through a narrow alley between two small cubicles which had probably served as tollbooths, once upon a time. Beyond them, the brick warehouses loomed like prison cellblocks.

“Now, cully, I’m going to let go of your neck, or how would’je ever have wind to run with? But I’ll be holdin yer arm, and if ye don’t run like the wind, I promise I’ll rip it right off and use it for a club to beat you with. Do you understand?”

Jake nodded, and suddenly the terrible, stifling pressure was gone from his windpipe. As soon as it was, he became aware of his hand again—it felt hot and swollen and full of fire. Then Gasher seized his bicep with fingers like bands of iron, and he forgot all about his hand. “Toodle-doo!” Gasher called in a grotesquely cheery falsetto. He waggled the grenado at the others. “Bye-bye, dears!” Then he growled to Jake: “Now run, you whoring little squint! Run\”

Jake was first whirled and then yanked into a run. The two of them went flying down a curved ramp to street level. Jake’s first confused thought was that this was what the East River Drive would look like two or three hundred years after some weird brain-plague had killed all the sane people in the world. The ancient, rusty hulks of what had once surely been automobiles stood at intervals along both curbs. Most were bubble-shaped roadsters that looked like no cars Jake had ever seen before (except, maybe, for the ones the white-gloved creations of Walt Disney drove in the comic books), but among them he saw an old Volkswagen Beetle, a car that might have been a Chevrolet Corvair, and something he believed was a Model A Ford. There were no tires on any of these eerie hulks; they either had been stolen or had rotted away to dust long since. And all the glass had been broken, as if the remaining denizens of this city abhorred anything which might show them their own reflections, even accidentally. Beneath and between the abandoned cars, the gutters were filled with drifts of unidentifiable metal junk and bright glints of glass. Trees had been planted at intervals along the sidewalks in some long-gone, happier time, but they were now so emphatically dead that they looked like stark metal sculptures against the cloudy sky. Some of the warehouses had either been bombed or had collapsed on their own, and beyond the jumbled heaps of bricks which was all that remained of them Jake could see the river and the rusty, sagging underpinnings of the Send Bridge. That smell of wet decay—a smell that seemed almost to snarl in the nose—was stronger than ever.

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