The Waste Lands (Page 146)

“Can you stand?”

Jake nodded. “I think so.”

Roland set the boy on his feet, ready to catch him if he looked too wobbly, but Jake hung onto the sink, then ducked his head beneath the flowing water. Roland picked Oy up and looked at his wounds. They were already clotting. You got off very lucky, my furry friend, Roland thought, then reached past Jake to cup a

palmful of water for the animal. Oy drank it eagerly.

Jake drew back from the faucet with his hair plastered to the sides of his face. His skin was still too pale and the signs that he had been badly beaten were clearly visible, but he looked better than he had when Roland had first bent over him. For one terrible moment, the gunslinger had been positive Jake was dead.

He found himself wishing he could go back and kill Gasher again, and that led him to another thought.

“What about the one Gasher called the Tick-Tock Man? Did you see him, Jake?” “Yes. Oy ambushed him. Tore up his face. Then I shot him.” “Dead?”

Jake’s lips began to tremble. He pressed them firmly together. “Yes. In his . . .” He tapped his forehead high above his right eyebrow. “I was l-l- … I was lucky.”

Roland looked at him appraisingly, then slowly shook his head. “You know, I doubt that. But never mind now. Come on.” “Where are we going?” Jake’s voice was still little more than a husky murmur, and he kept looking past Roland’s shoulder toward the room where he had almost died.

Roland pointed across the kitchen. Beyond another hatchway, the corridor continued. “That’ll do for a start.”

“GUNSLINGER,” a voice boomed from everywhere. Roland wheeled around, one arm cradling Oy and the other around Jake’s shoulders, but there was no one to see.

“Who speaks to me?” he shouted.

“NAME YOURSELF, GUNSLINGER.”

“Roland of Gilead, son of Steven. Who speaks to me?” “GILEAD IS NO MORE,” the voice mused, ignoring the question. Roland looked up and saw patterns of concentric rings in the ceiling. The voice was coming from those.

“NO GUNSLINGER HAS WALKED IN-WORLD OR MID-WORLD FOR ALMOST THREE HUNDRED YEARS.” “I and my friends are the last.”

Jake took Oy from Roland. The bumbler at once began to lick the boy’s swollen face; his gold-ringed eyes were full of adoration and happiness. “It’s Blaine,” Jake whispered to Roland. “Isn’t it?” Roland nodded. Of course it was—but he had an idea that there was a great deal more to Blaine than just a monorail train. “BOY! ARE YOU JAKE OF NEW YORK?”

Jake pressed closer to Roland and looked up at the speakers. “Yes,” he said. “That’s me. Jake of New York. Uh . . . son of Elmer.” “DO YOU STILL HAVE THE BOOK OF RIDDLES? THE ONE OF WHICH I HAVE BEEN TOLD?” Jake reached over his shoulder, and an expression of dismayed recol-lection filled his face as his fingers touched nothing but his own back. When he looked at Roland again, the gunslinger was holding his pack out toward him, and although the man’s narrow, finely carved face was as expressionless as ever, Jake sensed the ghost of a smile lurking at die corners of his mouth. “You’ll have to fix die straps,” Roland said as Jake took the pack. “I made them longer.”

“But Riddle-De-Dum!—?”

Roland nodded. “Both books are still in there.” “WHAT YOU GOT, LITTLE PILGRIM?” the voice inquired in a leisurely drawl. “Gripes!” Jake said.

It can see us as well as hear us, Roland thought, and a moment later he spotted a small glass eye in one corner, far above a man’s normal line of sight. He felt a chill slip over his skin, and knew from both the troubled look on Jake’s face and the way the boy’s arms had tightened around Oy that he wasn’t alone in his unease. That voice belonged to a machine, an incredibly smart machine, a playful machine, but there was something very wrong with it, all the same. “The book,” Jake said. “I’ve got the riddle book.”

“GOOD.” There was an almost human satisfaction in the voice. “REALLY EXCELLENT.”

A scruffy, bearded fellow suddenly appeared in the doorway on the far side of the kitchen. A bloodstained, dirt-streaked yellow scarf flapped from the newcomer’s upper arm. “Fires in the walls!” he screamed. In his panic, he seemed not to realize that Roland and Jake were not part of his miserable subterranean ka-tet. “Smoke on the lower levels! People killin theirselves! Somepin’s gone wrong! Hell, everythin’s gone wrong! We gotta—” The door of the oven suddenly dropped open like an unhinged jaw. A thick beam of blue-white fire shot out and engulfed the scruffy man’s head. He was driven backward with his clothes in flames and his skin boiling on his face. Jake stared up at Roland, stunned and horrified. Roland put an arm about the boy’s shoulders.

“HE INTERRUPTED ME,” the voice said. “THAT WAS RUDE, WASN’T IT?” “Yes,” Roland said calmly. “Extremely rude.” “SUSANNAH OF NEW YORK SAYS YOU HAVE A GREAT MANY RIDDLES BY HEART, ROLAND OF GILEAD. IS THIS TRUE?”

“Yes.”

There was an explosion in one of the rooms opening off this arm of the corridor; the floor shuddered beneath their feet and voices screamed in a jagged chorus. The pulsing lights and the endless, blatting siren faded momentarily, then came back strong. A little skein of bitter, acrid smoke drifted from the ventilators. Oy got a whiff and sneezed.

“TELL ME ONE OF YOUR RIDDLES, GUNSLINGER,” the voice invited. It was serene and untroubled, as if they were all sitting together in a peaceful village square somewhere instead of beneath a city that seemed on the verge of ripping itself apart.