The Waste Lands (Page 23)

“Has it left us any surprises?” Eddie asked. “He may have done so.” Roland smiled a little and touched Eddie on the shoulder. “But there’s this—they’ll be old surprises.” Their progress through this zone of destruction was slow. Most of the fallen trees were very old—many had almost rejoined the soil from which they had sprung—but they still made enough of a tangle to create a formidable obstacle course. It would have been difficult enough if all three of them had been able-bodied; with Susannah strapped to the gunslinger’s back in her harness, it became an exercise in aggravation and endurance. The flattened trees and jumbles of underbrush served to obscure the bear’s backtrail, and that also worked to slow their speed. Until mid-day they had followed claw-marks as clear as trail-blazes on the trees. Here, however, near its starting point, the bear’s rage had not been full-blown, and these handy signs of its passage disappeared. Roland moved slowly, looking for droppings in the bushes and tufts of hair on the tree-trunks over which the bear had climbed. It took all afternoon to cross three miles of this decayed jumble. Eddie had just decided they were going to lose the light and would have to camp in these creepy surroundings when they came to a thin skirt of alders. Beyond it, he could hear a stream babbling noisily over a bed of stones. Behind them, the setting sun was radiating spokes of sullen red light across the jumbled ground they had just crossed, turning the fallen trees into crisscrossing black shapes like Chinese ideograms.

Roland called a halt and eased Susannah down. He stretched his back, twisting it this way and that with his hands on his hips.

“That it for the night?” Eddie asked.

Roland shook his head. “Give Eddie your gun, Susannah.” She did as he said, looking at him questioningly. “Come on, Eddie. The place we want is on the other side of those trees. We’ll have a look. We might do a little work, as well.” “What makes you think—“

“Open your ears.”

Eddie listened and realized he heard machinery. He further realized that he had been hearing it for some time now. “I don’t want to leave Susannah.” “We’re not going far and she has a good loud voice. Besides, if there’s danger, it’s ahead—we’ll be between it and her.” Eddie looked down at Susannah.

“Go on—just make sure you’re back soon.” She looked back the way they had come with thoughtful eyes. “I don’t know if there’s ha ants here or not, but it feels like there are.”

“We’ll be back before dark,” Roland promised. He started toward the screen of alders, and after a moment, Eddie followed him.

FIFTEEN YARDS INTO THE trees, Eddie realized that they were following a path, one the bear had probably made for itself over the years. The alders bent above them in a tunnel. The sounds were louder now, and he began to sort them out. One was a low, deep, humming noise. He could feel it in his feet—a faint vibration, as if some large piece of machinery was running in the earth. Above it, closer and more urgent, were crisscrossing sounds like bright scratches—squeals, squeaks, chitterings.

Roland placed his mouth against Eddie’s ear and said, “I think there’s little danger if we’re quiet.”

They moved on another five yards and then Roland stopped again. He drew his gun and used the barrel to brush aside a branch which hung heavy with sunset-tinted leaves. Eddie looked through this small opening and into the clearing where the bear had lived for so long—the base of operations from which he had set forth on his many expeditions of pillage and terror. There was no undergrowth here; the ground had been beaten bald long since. A stream emerged from the base of a rock wall about fifty feet high and ran through the arrowhead-shaped clearing. On their side of the stream, backed up against the wall, was a metal box about nine feet high. Its roof was curved, and it reminded Eddie of a subway entrance. The front was painted in diagonal yellow and black stripes. The earth which floored the clearing was not black, like the topsoil in the forest, but a strange powdery gray. It was littered with bones, and after a moment Eddie realized that what he had taken for gray soil was more bones, bones so old they were crumbling back to dust. Things were moving in the dirt—the things making the squealing, chittering noises. Four . . . no, five of them. Small metal devices, the largest about the size of a Collie pup. They were robots, Eddie realized, or something like robots. They were similar to each other and to the bear they had undoubtedly served in one way only—atop each of them, a tiny radar-dish turned rapidly. More thinking caps, Eddie thought. My God, what kind of world is this, anyway? The largest of these devices looked a little like the Tonka tractor Eddie had gotten for his sixth or seventh birthday; its treads churned up tiny gray clouds of bone-dust as it rolled along. Another looked like a stainless steel rat. A third appeared to be a snake constructed of jointed steel segments—it writhed and humped its way along. They formed a rough circle on the far side of the stream, going around and around on a deep course they had carved in the ground. Looking at them made Eddie think of cartoons he had seen in the stacks of old Saturday Evening Post magazines his mother had for some reason saved and stored in the front hall of their apartment. In the cartoons, worried, cigarette-smoking men paced ruts in the carpet while they waited for their wives to give birth.

As his eyes grew used to the simple geography of the clearing, Eddie saw that there were a great many more than five of these assorted freaks. There were at least a dozen others that he could see and probably more hidden behind the bony remains of the bear’s old kills. The difference was that the others weren’t moving. The members of the bear’s mechani-cal retinue had died, one by one, over the long years until just this little group of five were left .. . and they did not sound very healthy, with their squeaks and squalls and rusty chitterings. The snake in particular had a hesitant, crippled look as it followed the mechanical rat around and around the circle. Every now and then the device which followed the snake—a steel block that walked on stubby mechanical legs—would catch up with it and give the snake a nudge, as if telling it to hurry the f**k up.