The Waste Lands by Stephen King Read Free Book Online

and increasing pleasure. The shape was in there, all right; he had been right about that. It was a simple one, and Roland’s knife was setting it free with an eerie ease. Eddie thought he was going to get almost all of it, and that meant the slingshot might actually turn out to be a practical weapon. Not much compared to Roland’s big revolvers, maybe, but something he had made himself, just the same. His . And this idea pleased him very much.
    When the first crows rose in the air, cawing affrightedly, he did not hear. He was already thinking—hoping—that he might see a tree with a bow trapped in it before too long.

5
    HE HEARD THE BEAR approaching before Roland and Susannah did, but not much before—he was lost in that high daze of concentration which accompanies the creative impulse at its sweetest and most powerful. He had suppressed these impulses for most of his life, and now this one held him wholly in its grip. Eddie was a willing prisoner.
    He was pulled from his daze not by the sound of falling trees but by the rapid thunder of a .45 from the south. He looked up, smiling, and brushed hair from his forehead with a sawdusty hand. In that moment, sitting with his back against a tall pine in the clearing which had become home, his face crisscrossed with opposing beams of green-gold forest light, he looked handsome indeed—a young man with unruly dark hair which constantly tried to spill across his high forehead, a young man with a strong, mobile mouth and hazel eyes.
    For a moment his eyes shifted to Roland’s other gun, hanging by its belt from a nearby branch, and he found himself wondering how long it had been since Roland had gone anywhere without at least one of his fabulous weapons hanging by his side. That question led to two others.
    How old was he, this man who had plucked Eddie and Susannah from their world and their whens ? And, more important, what was wrong with him?
    Susannah had promised to broach that subject . . . if she shot well and didn’t get Roland’s back hair up, that was. Eddie didn’t think Roland would tell her—not at first—but it was time to let old long tall and ugly know that they knew something was wrong.
    “There’ll be water if God wills it,” Eddie said. He turned back to his carving with a little smile playing on his lips. They had both begun to pick up Roland’s little sayings . . . and he theirs. It was almost as if they were halves of the same—
    Then a tree fell close by in the forest, and Eddie was on his feet in a second, the half-carved slingshot in one hand, Roland’s knife in the other. He stared across the clearing in the direction of the sound, heart thumping, all his senses finally alert. Something was coming. Now he could hear it, trampling its heedless way through the underbrush, and he marvelled bitterly that this realization had come so late. Far back in his mind, a small voice told him this was what he got. This was what he got for doing something better than Henry, for making Henry nervous.
    Another tree fell with a ratcheting, coughing crash. Looking down a ragged aisle between the tall firs, Eddie saw a cloud of sawdust rise in the still air. The creature responsible for that cloud suddenly bellowed—a raging, gut-freezing sound.
    It was one huge motherfucker, whatever it was.
    He dropped the chunk of wood, then flipped Roland’s knife at a tree fifteen feet to his left. It somersaulted twice in the air and then stuck halfway to the hilt in the wood, quivering. He grabbed Roland’s .45 from the place where it hung and cocked it.
    Stand or run?
    But he discovered he no longer had the luxury of that question. The thing was fast as well as huge, and it was now too late to run. A gigantic shape began to disclose itself in that aisle of trees north of the clearing, a shape which towered above all but the tallest trees. It was lumbering directly toward him, and as its eyes fixed upon Eddie Dean, it gave voice to another of those cries.
    “Oh man,