The Waste Lands (Page 124)
The bloody woman was standing next to an elderly gent wearing what looked like the world’s oldest bowler hat and a pair of frayed khaki shorts. Now he stepped forward and spoke to her with a patina of good manners that turned his underlying contempt into a dagger with razor-sharp edges. “You are quite wrong, Madam Gunslinger. There are a great many machines under Lud, and there are ghosts in all of them— demonous spirits which bear only ill will to mortal men and women. These demon-ghosts are very capable of raising the dead . . . and in Lud, there are a great many dead to raise.” “Listen,” Eddie said. “Have you ever seen one of these zombies with your own eyes, Jeeves? Have any of you?”
Jeeves curled his lip and said nothing—but that lip-curl really said it all. What else could one expect, it asked, from outlanders who used guns as a substitute for understanding?
Eddie decided it would be best to close off the whole line of discus-sion. He had never been cut out for missionary work, anyway. He wag-gled the Ruger at the bloodstained woman. “You and your friend there— the one who looks like an English butler on his day off—are going to take us to the railroad station. After that, we can all say goodbye, and I’ll tell you the truth: that’s going to make my f**kin day.”
“Railroad station?” the guy who looked like Jeeves the Butler asked. “What is a railroad station?”
“Take us to the cradle,” Susannah said. “Take us to Blaine.” This finally rattled Jeeves; an expression of shocked horror replaced the world-weary contempt with which he had thus far treated them. “You can’t go there!” he cried. “The cradle is forbidden ground, and Blaine is the most dangerous of all Lud’s ghosts!”
Forbidden ground? Eddie thought. Great. If it’s the truth, at least we’ll be able to stop worrying about you ass**les. It was also nice to hear that there still was a Blaine … or that these people thought there was, anyway. The others were staring at Eddie and Susannah with expressions of uncomprehending amazement; it was as if the interlopers had suggested to a bunch of born-again Christians that they hunt up the Ark of the Covenant and turn it into a pay toilet.
Eddie raised the Ruger until the center of Jeeves’s forehead lay in the sight. “We’re going,” he said, “and if you don’t want to join your ancestors right here and now, I suggest you stop pissing and moaning and take us there.” Jeeves and the bloodstained woman exchanged an uncertain glance, but when the man in the bowler hat looked back at Eddie and Susannah, his face was firm and set. “Shoot us if you like,” he said. “We’d sooner die here than there.” “You folks are a bunch of sick motherfuckers with dying on the brain!” Susannah cried at them. “Nobody has to die! Just take us where we want to go, for the love of God!”
The woman said somberly, “But it is death to enter Blaine’s cradle, mum, so it is. For Blaine sleeps, and he who disturbs his rest must pay a high price.” “Come on, beautiful,” Eddie snapped. “You can’t smell the coffee with your head up your ass.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said with an odd and perplexing dignity. “It means you can take us to the cradle and risk the Wrath of Blaine, or you can stand your ground here and experience the Wrath of Eddie. It doesn’t have to be a nice clean head-shot, you know. I can take you a piece at a time, and I’m feeling just mean enough to do it. I’m having a very bad day in your city—the music sucks, everybody has a bad case of b.o., and the first guy we saw threw a grenade at us and kidnapped our friend. So what do you say?” “Why would you go to Blaine in any case?” one of the others asked. “He stirs no more from his berth in the cradle—not for years now. He has even stopped speaking in his many voices and laughing.” Speaking in his many voices and laughing? Eddie thought. He looked at Susannah. She looked back and shrugged.
“Ardis was the last to go nigh Blaine,” the bloodstained woman said. Jeeves nodded somberly. “Ardis always was a fool when he were in drink. Blaine asked him some question. I heard it, hut it made no sense to me—something about the mother of ravens, I think—and when Ardis couldn’t answer what was asked, Blaine slew him with blue fire.”
“Electricity?” Eddie asked.
Jeeves and the bloodstained woman both nodded. “Ay,” the woman said. “Electricity, so it were called in the old days, so it were.” “You don’t have to go in with us,” Susannah proposed suddenly. “Just get us within sight of the place. We’ll go the rest of the way on our own.” The woman looked at her mistrustfully, and then Jeeves pulled her head close to his lips and mumbled in her ear for a while. The other Pubes stood behind them in a ragged line, looking at Eddie and Susannah with the dazed eyes of people who have survived a bad air-raid.
At last the woman looked around. “Ay,” she said. “We’ll take you nigh the cradle, and then it’s good riddance to bad swill.” “My idea exactly,” Eddie said. “You and Jeeves. The rest of you, scatter.” He swept them with his eyes. “But remember this—one spear thrown from ambush, one arrow, one brick, and these two die.” This threat came out sounding so weak and pointless that Eddie wished he hadn’t made it. How could they possibly care for these two, or for any of the individual members of their clan, when they dusted two or more of them each and every day? Well, he thought, watching the others trot off without so much as a backward glance, it was too late to worry about that now.