The Waste Lands (Page 145)
A cluster of bright orange lights came on at the top of the capsule-shaped enclosure, and an alarm began to go off: in broad, hoarse blats that bartered the walls. After a moment or two, the emergency lights began to pulse in sync with the alarm.
EDDIE WAS RETURNING TO Susannah when the alarm began to wail. He yelled in surprise and raised the Ruger, pointing it at nothing. “What’s happening?” Susannah shook her head—she had no idea. The alarm was scary, but that was only part of the problem; it was also loud enough to be physically painful. Those amplified jags of sound made Eddie think of a tractor-trailer horn raised to the tenth power.
At that moment, the orange arc-sodiums began to pulse. When he reached Susannah’s chair, Eddie saw that the COMMAND and ENTER buttons were also pulsing in bright red beats. They looked like winking eyes. “Blaine, what’s happening?” he shouted. He looked around but saw only wildly jumping shadows. “Are you doing this?”
Blaine’s only response was laughter—terrible mechanical laughter that made Eddie think of the clockwork clown that had stood outside the House of Horrors at Coney Island when he was a little kid.
“Blaine, stop it!” Susannah shrieked. “How can we think of an answer to your riddle with that air-raid siren going off?” The laughter stopped us suddenly as it began, but Blaine made no reply. Or perhaps he did; from beyond the bars that separated them from the platform, huge engines powered by frictionless slo-trans turbines awoke at the command of the dipolar computers the Tick-Tock Man had so lusted after. For the first time in a decade, Blaine the Mono was awake and cycling up toward running speed.
THE ALARM, WHICH HAD indeed been built to warn Lud’s long-dead residents of an impending air attack (and which had not even been tested in almost a thousand years), blanketed the city with sound. All the lights which still operated came on and began to pulse in sync. Pubes above the streets and Grays below them were alike convinced that the end they had always feared was finally upon them. The Grays suspected some cataclysmic mechanical breakdown was occurring. The Pubes, who had always believed that the ghosts lurking in the machines below the city would some day rise up to take their long-delayed vengeance on the still living, were probably closer to the actual truth of what was happening.
Certainly there had been an intelligence left in the ancient comput-ers below the city, a single living organism which had long ago ceased to exist sanely under conditions that, within its merciless dipolar circuits, could only be absolute reality. It had held its increasingly alien logic within its banks of memory for eight hundred years and might have held them so for eight hundred more, if not for the arrival of Roland and his friends; yet this mens non corpus had brooded and grown ever more insane with each passing year; even in its increasing periods of sleep it could be said to dream, and these dreams grew steadily more abnormal as the world moved on. Now, although the unthinkable machinery which maintained the Beams had weakened, this insane and inhuman intelli-gence had awakened in the rooms of ruin and had begun once more, although as bodiless as any ghost, to stumble through the halls of the dead. In other words, Blaine the Mono was preparing to get out of Dodge.
ROLAND HEARD A FOOTSTEP behind him as he knelt by Jake and turned, raising his gun. Tilly, her dough-colored face a mask of confusion and superstitious fear, raised her hands and shrieked: “Don’t kill me, sai! Please! Don’t kill me!” “Run, then,” Roland said curtly, and as Tilly began to move, he struck her calf with the barrel of his revolver. “Not that way—through the door I came in. And if you ever see me again, I’ll be the last thing you ever see. Now go!” She disappeared into the leaping, circling shadows. Roland dropped his head to Jake’s chest, slamming his palm against his other ear to deaden the pulse of the alarm. He heard the boy’s heartbeat, slow but strong. He slipped his arms around the boy, and as he did, Jakes’s eyes fluttered open. “You didn’t let me fall this time.” His voice was no more than a hoarse whisper. “No. Not this time, and not ever again. Don’t try your voice.” “Where’s Oy?”
“Oy!” the bumbler barked. “Oy!”
Brandon had slashed Oy several times, but none of the wounds seemed mortal or even serious. It was clear that he was in some pain, but it was equally clear he was transported with joy. He regarded Jake with sparkling eyes, his pink tongue lolling out. “Ake, Ake, Ake!”
Jake burst into tears and reached for him; Oy limped into the circle of his arms and allowed himself to be hugged for a moment. Roland got up and looked around. His gaze fixed on the door on the far side of the room. The two men he’d backshot had been heading in that direction, and the woman had also wanted to go that way. The gunslinger went toward the door with Jake in his arms and Oy at his heel. He kicked one of the dead Grays aside, and ducked through. The room beyond was a kitchen. It managed to look like a hog-wallow in spite of the built-in appliances and the stainless steel walls; the Grays were apparently not much interested in housekeeping. “Drink,” Jake whispered. “Please … so thirsty.” Roland felt a queer doubling, as if time had folded backward on itself. He remembered lurching out of the desert, crazy with the heat and the emptiness. He remembered passing out in the stable of the way station, half-dead from thirst, and waking at the taste of cool water trick-ling down his throat. The boy had taken off his shirt, soaked it under the flow from the pump, and given him to drink. Now it was his turn to do for Jake what Jake had already done for him. Roland glanced around and saw a sink. He went over to it and turned on the faucet. Cold, clear water rushed out. Over them, around them, under them, the alarm roared on and on.