The Waste Lands (51 page)

He wasn’t comforted, however. For all Eddie knew, they might be the first people to attempt the crossing in
decades
. And the bridge, after all, would have to collapse
sometime
, and from the look of things, it was going to be soon. Their combined weight might be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

His moccasin struck a chunk of concrete and Eddie watched, sickened but helpless to look away, as the chunk fell down and down and down, turning over as it went. There was a small—
very
small-splash when it hit the river. The freshening wind gusted and stuck his shirt against his sweaty skin. The bridge groaned and swayed. Eddie tried to remove his hands from the side-rail, but they seemed frozen to the pitted metal in a deathgrip.

He closed his eyes for a moment.
You’re not going to freeze. You’re not. I . . . I forbid it. If you need something to look at, make it long tall and ugly
. Eddie opened his eyes again, fixed them on the gunslinger, forced his hands to open, and began to move forward again.

ROLAND REACHED THE GAP and looked back. Jake was five feet behind him. Oy was at his heels. The bumbler was crouched down with his neck stretched forward. The wind was much stronger over the river-cut, and Roland could see it rippling Oy’s silky fur. Eddie was about twenty-five feet behind Jake. His face was tightly drawn, but he was still shuffling grimly along with Susannah’s collapsed wheelchair in his left hand. His right was clutching the rail like grim death.

“Susannah?”

“Yes,” she responded at once. “Fine.”

“Jake?”

Jake looked up. He was still grinning, and the gunslinger saw there was going to be no problem there. The boy was having the time of his life. His hair blew back from his finely made brow in waves, and his eyes sparkled. He jerked one thumb up. Roland smiled and returned the gesture.

“Eddie?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

Eddie appeared to be looking at Roland, but the gunslinger decided he was really looking past him, at the windowless brick buildings which crowded the riverbank at the far end of the bridge. That was all right; given his obvious fear of heights, it was probably the best thing he could do to keep his head.

“All right, I won’t,” Roland murmured. “We’re going to cross the hole now, Susannah. Sit easy. No quick movements. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“If you want to adjust your position, do it now.”

“I’m fine, Roland,” she said calmly. “I just hope Eddie will be all right.”

“Eddie’s a gunslinger now. He’ll behave like one.”

Roland turned to the right, so he was facing directly downriver, and grasped the handrail. Then he began to edge out across the hole, shuffling his boots along the rusty cable.

JAKE WAITED UNTIL ROLAND and Susannah were part of the way across the gap and then started himself. The wind gusted and the bridge swayed back and forth, but he felt no alarm at all. He was, in fact, totally buzzed. Unlike Eddie, he’d never had any fear of heights; he liked being up here where he could see the river spread out like a steel ribbon under a sky which was beginning to cloud over.

Halfway across the hole in the bridge (Roland and Susannah had reached the place where the uneven walkway resumed and were watching the others), Jake looked back and his heart sank. They had forgotten one member of the party when they were discussing how to cross. Oy was crouched, frozen and clearly terrified, on the far side of the hole in the walkway. He was sniffing at the place where the concrete ended and the rusty, curved support took over.

“Come on, Oy!” Jake called.

“Oy!” the bumbler called back, and the tremble in his hoarse voice was almost human. He stretched his long neck forward toward Jake but didn’t move. His gold-ringed eyes were huge and dismayed.

Another gust of wind struck the bridge, making it sway and squall. Something twanged beside Jake’s head—the sound of a guitar string which has been tightened until it snaps. A steel thread had popped out of the nearest vertical hanger, almost scratching his cheek. Ten feet away, Oy crouched miserably with his eyes fixed on Jake.

“Come on!” Roland shouted. “Wind’s freshening! Come on, Jake!”

“Not without Oy!”

Jake began to shuffle back the way he had come. Before he had gone more than two steps, Oy stepped gingerly onto the support rod. The claws at the ends of his stiffly braced legs scratched at the rounded metal surface. Eddie stood behind the bumbler now, feeling helpless and scared to death.

“That’s it, Oy!” Jake encouraged. “Come to me!”

“Oy-Oy! Ake-Ake!” the bumbler cried, and trotted rapidly along the rod. He had almost reached Jake when the traitorous wind gusted again. The bridge swung. Oy’s claws scratched madly at the support rod for purchase, but there was none. His hindquarters slued off the edge and into space. He tried to cling with his forepaws, but there was nothing to cling to. His rear legs ran wildly in midair.

Jake let go of the rail and dived for him, aware of nothing but Oy’s gold-ringed eyes.

“No, Jake!
” Roland and Eddie bellowed together, each from his own side of the gap, each too far away to do anything but watch.

Jake hit the cable on his chest and belly. His pack bounced against his shoulderblades and he heard his teeth click together in his head with the sound of a cueball breaking a tight rack. The wind gusted again. He went with it, looping his right hand around the support rod and reaching for Oy with his left as he swayed out into space. The bumbler began to fall, and clamped his jaws on Jake’s reaching hand as he did. The pain was immediate and excruciating. Jake screamed but held on, head down, right arm clasping the rod, knees pressing hard against its wretchedly smooth surface. Oy dangled from his left hand like a circus acrobat, staring up with his gold-ringed eyes, and Jake could now see his own blood flowing along the sides of the bumbler’s head in thin streams.

Then the wind gusted again and Jake began to slip outward.

EDDIE’S FEAR LEFT HIM. In, its place came that strange yet welcome coldness. He dropped Susannah’s wheelchair to the cracked cement with a clatter and raced nimbly out along the support cable, not even bothering with the handrail. Jake hung head-down over the gap with Oy swinging at the end of his left hand like a furry pendulum. And the boy’s right hand was slipping.

Eddie opened his legs and seat-dropped to a sitting position. His undefended balls smashed painfully up into his crotch, but for the moment even this exquisite pain was news from a distant country. He seized Jake by the hair with one hand and one strap of his pack with the other. He felt himself beginning to tilt outward, and for a nightmarish moment he thought all three of them were going to go over in a daisy-chain.

He let go of Jake’s hair and tightened his grip on the packstrap, praying the kid hadn’t bought the pack at one of the cheap discount outlets. He flailed above his head for the handrail with his free hand. After an interminable moment in which their combined outward slide continued, he found it and seized it.

“ROLAND!
” he bawled.
“I COULD USE A LITTLE HELP HERE!
”

But Roland was already there, with Susannah still perched on his back. When he bent, she locked her arms around his neck so she wouldn’t drop headfirst from the sling. The gunslinger wrapped an arm around Jake’s chest and pulled him up. When his feet were on the support rod again, Jake put his right arm around Oy’s trembling body. His left hand was an agony of fire and ice.

“Let go, Oy,” he gasped. “You can let go now we’re—safe.”

For a terrible moment he didn’t think the billy-bumbler would. Then, slowly, Oy’s jaws relaxed and Jake was able to pull his hand free. It was covered with blood and dotted with a ring of dark holes.

“Oy,” the bumbler said feebly, and Eddie saw with wonder that the animal’s strange eyes were full of tears. He stretched his neck and licked Jake’s face with his bloody tongue.

“That’s okay,” Jake said, pressing his face into the warm fur. He was crying himself, his face a mask of shock and pain. “Don’t worry, that’s okay. You couldn’t help it and I don’t mind.”

Eddie was getting slowly to his feet. His face was dirty gray, and he felt as if someone had driven a bowling ball into his guts. His left hand stole slowly to his crotch and investigated the damage there.

“Cheap fucking vasectomy,” he said hoarsely.

“Are you going to faint, Eddie?” Roland asked. A fresh gust of wind flipped his hat from his head and into Susannah’s face. She grabbed it and jammed it down all the way to his ears, giving Roland the look of a half-crazed hillbilly.

“No,” Eddie said. “I almost wish I could, but—”

“Take a look at Jake,” Susannah said. “He’s really bleeding.”

“I’m fine,” Jake said, and tried to hide his hand. Roland took it gently in his own hands before he could. Jake had sustained at least a dozen puncture-wounds in the back of his hand, his palm, and his fingers. Most of them were deep. It would be impossible to tell if bones had been broken or tendons severed until Jake tried to flex the hand, and this wasn’t the time or place for such experiments.

Roland looked at Oy. The billy-bumbler looked back, his expressive eyes sad and frightened. He had made no effort to lick Jake’s blood from his chops, although it would have been the most natural thing in the world for him to have done so.

“Leave him alone,” Jake said, and wrapped the encircling arm more tightly about Oy’s body. “It wasn’t his fault. It was my fault for forgetting him. The wind blew him off.”

“I’m not going to hurt him,” Roland said. He was positive the billy-bumbler wasn’t rabid, but he still did not intend for Oy to taste any more of Jake’s blood than he already had. As for any other diseases Oy might be carrying in his blood . . . well,
ka
would decide, as, in the end, it always did. Roland pulled his neckerchief free and wiped Oy’s lips and muzzle. “There,” he said. “Good fellow. Good boy.”

“Oy,” the billy-bumbler said feebly, and Susannah, who was watching over Roland’s shoulder, could have sworn she heard gratitude in that voice.

Another gust of wind struck them. The weather was turning dirty, and fast. “Eddie, we have to get off the bridge. Can you walk?”

“No, massa; I’sa gwinter shuffle.” The pain in his groin and the pit of his stomach was still bad, but not quite so bad as it had been a minute ago.

“All right. Let’s move. Fast as we can.”

Roland turned, began to take a step, and stopped. A man was now standing on the far side of the gap, watching them expressionlessly.

The newcomer had approached while their attention was focused on Jake and Oy. A crossbow was slung across his back. He wore a bright yellow scarf around his head; the ends streamed out like banners in the freshening wind. Gold hoops with crosses in their centers dangled from his ears. One eye was covered with a white silk patch. His face was blotched with purple sores, some of them open and festering. He might have been thirty, forty, or sixty. He held one hand high over his head. In it was something Roland could not make out, except that its shape was too regular to be a stone.

Behind this apparition, the city loomed with a kind of weird clarity in the darkening day. As Eddie looked past the huddles of brick buildings on the other shore—warehouses long since scooped empty by looters, he had no doubt—and into those shadowy canyons and stone mazes, he understood for the first time how terribly mistaken, how terribly foolish, his dreams of hope and help had been. Now he saw the shattered facades and broken roofs; now he saw the shaggy birds’ nests on cornices and in glassless, gaping windows; now he allowed himself to actually
smell
the city, and that odor was not of fabulous spices and savory foods of the sort his mother had sometimes brought home from Zabar’s but rather the stink of a mattress that has caught fire, smouldered awhile, and then been put out with sewer-water. He suddenly understood Lud, understood it completely. The grinning pirate who had appeared while their attention was elsewhere was probably as close to a wise old elf as this broken, dying place could provide.

Roland pulled his revolver.

“Put it away, my cully,” the man in the yellow scarf said in an accent so thick that the sense of his words was almost lost. “Put it away, my dear heart. Ye’re a fierce trim, ay, that’s clear, but this time you’re outmatched.”

THE NEWCOMER’S PANTS WERE patched green velvet, and as he stood on the edge of the hole in the bridge, he looked like a buccaneer at the end of his days of plunder: sick, ragged, and still dangerous.

“Suppose I choose not to?” Roland asked. “Suppose I choose to simply put a bullet through your scrofulous head?”

“Then I’ll get to hell just enough ahead of ye to hold the door,” the man in the yellow scarf said, and chuckled chummily. He wiggled the hand he held in the air. “It’s all the same jolly fakement to me, one way or t’other.”

Roland guessed that was the truth. The man looked as if he might have a year to live at most . . . and the last few months of that year would probably be very unpleasant. The oozing sores on his face had nothing to do with radiation; unless Roland was badly deceived, this man was in the late stages of what the doctors called mandrus and everyone else called whore’s blossoms. Facing a dangerous man was always a bad business, but at least one could calculate the odds in such an encounter. When you were facing the dead, however, everything changed.

“Do yer know what I’ve got here, my dear ones?” the pirate asked. “Do yer ken whatcher old friend Gasher just happens to have laid his hands on? It’s a grenado, something pretty the Old Folks left behind, and I’ve already tipped its cap—for to wear one’s cap before the introductin’ is complete would be wery bad manners, so it would!”