“Because of the train?”
Jake nodded and singsonged: “Blaine is a pain, but we have to take the train. And the city’s the only place where we can get on.” Roland looked thoughtfully at Jake. “Why do you say we have to? Is it ka? Because, Jake, you have to understand that you don’t know much about ka yet—it’s the sort of subject men study all their lives.” “I don’t know if it’s ka or not, but I do know that we can’t go into the waste lands unless we’re protected, and that means Blaine. Without him we’ll die, like those bees we saw are going to die when winter comes. We have to be protected. Because the waste lands are poison.”
“How do you know these things?”
“I don’t know!” Jake said, almost angrily. “I just do.”
“All right,” Roland said mildly. He looked toward Lud again. “But we’ll have to be damned careful. It’s unlucky that they still have gunpow-der. If they have that, they may have things that are even more powerful. I doubt if they know how to use them, but that only increases the danger. They could get excited and blow us all to hell.”
“Ell,” a grave voice said from behind them. They glanced around and saw Oy sitting by the side of the road, watching them.
LATER THAT DAY THEY came to a new road which swept toward them out of the west and joined their own way. Beyond this point, the Great Road—now much wider and split down the middle by a median divider of some polished dark stone—began to sink, and the crumbling concrete embankments which rose on either side of them gave the pilgrims a claustrophobic trapped feeling. They stopped at a point where one of these concrete dikes had born broken open, affording a comforting line of sight to the open land beyond, and ate a light, unsatisfying meal. “Why do you think they dropped the road down like this, Eddie?” Jake asked. “I mean, someone did do it this way on purpose, didn’t they?” Eddie looked through the break in the concrete, where the flatlands stretched on as smoothly as ever, and nodded.
“Then why?”
“Dunno, champ,” Eddie said, but he thought he did. He glanced at Roland and guessed that he knew, too. The sunken road leading to the bridge had been a defensive measure. Troops placed atop the concrete slopes were in control of two carefully engineered redoubts. If the defenders didn’t like the look of the folks approaching Lud along the Great Road, they could rain destruction down on them.
“You sure you don’t know?” Jake asked.
Eddie smiled at Jake and tried to stop imagining that there was some nut up there right now, getting ready to roll a large, rusty bomb down one of those decayed concrete ramps. “No idea,” he said. Susannah whistled disgustedly between her teeth. “This road’s goin to hell, Roland. I was hoping we were done with that damn harness, but you better get it out again.” He nodded and rummaged in his purse for it without a word. The condition of the Great Road deteriorated as other, smaller roads joined it like tributaries joining a great river. As they neared the bridge, the cobbles were replaced with a surface Roland thought of as metal and the rest of them thought of as asphalt or hot-top. It had not held up as well as the cobbles. Time had done some damage; the passage of count-less horses and wagons since the last repairs were made had done more. The surface had been chewed into treacherous rubble. Foot travel would be difficult, and the idea of pushing Susannah’s wheelchair over that crumbled surface was ridiculous. The banks oh either side had grown steadily steeper, and now, at their tops, they could see slim, pointed shapes looming against the sky. Roland thought of arrowheads—huge ones, weapons made by a tribe of giants. To his companions, they looked like rockets or guided missiles. Susannah thought of Redstones fired from Cape Canaveral; Eddie thought about SAMs, some built to be fired from the backs of flatbed trucks, stored all over Europe; Jake thought of ICBMs hiding in rein-forced concrete silos under the plains of Kansas and the unpopulated mountains of Nevada, programmed to hit back at China or the USSR in the event of nuclear armageddon. All of them felt as if they had passed into a dark and woeful zone of shadow, or into a countryside laboring under some old but still powerful curse.
Some hours after they entered this area— Jake called it The Gauntlet—the concrete embankments ended at a place where half a dozen access roads drew together, like the strands of a spiderweb, and here the land opened out again … a fact which relieved all of them, although none of them said so out loud.
Another traffic-light swung over the junc-tion. This one was more familiar to
Eddie, Susannah, and Jake; it had once had lenses on its four faces, although the glass had been broken out long ago.