The waste lands - Stephen King [176]
“Never mind this trash,” she said, and her voice only quivered a little. “It’s the train we want—which way is it, d’you think?”
Eddie glanced up at the darkening sky and easily picked out the path of the Beam in the rushing clouds. He looked back down and wasn’t much surprised to see that the entrance to the street corresponding most closely to the path of the Beam was guarded by a large stone turtle. Its reptilian head peered out from beneath the granite lip of its shell; its deepset eyes seemed to stare curiously at them. Eddie nodded toward it and managed a small dry smile. “See the turtle of enormous girth?”
Susannah took a brief look of her own and nodded. He pushed her across the city square and into The Street of the Turtle. The corpses which lined it gave off a dry, cinnamony smell that made Eddie’s stomach clench . . . not because it was bad but because it was actually rather pleasant—the sugar-spicy aroma of something a kid would enjoy shaking onto his morning toast.
The Street of the Turtle was mercifully broad, and most of the corpses hanging from the speaker-poles were little more than mummies, but Susannah saw a few which were relatively fresh, with flies still crawling busily across the blackening skin of their swollen faces and maggots still squirming out of their decaying eyes.
And below each speaker was a little drift of bones.
“There must be thousands,” Eddie said. “Men, women, and kids.”
“Yes.” Susannah’s calm voice sounded distant and strange to her own ears. “They’ve had a lot of time to kill. And they’ve used it to kill each other.”
“Bring on those wise fuckin elves!” Eddie said, and the laugh that followed sounded suspiciously like a sob. He thought he was at last beginning to fully understand what that innocuous phrase—the world has moved on—really meant. What a breadth of ignorance and evil it covered.
And what a depth.
The speakers were a wartime measure, Susannah thought. Of course they were. God only knows which war, or how long ago, but it must have been a doozy. The rulers of Lud used the speakers to make city-wide announcements from some central, bomb-proof location—a bunker like the one Hitler and his high command retreated to at the end of World War II.
And in her ears she could hear the voice of authority which had come rolling out of those speakers—could hear it as clearly as she had heard the creak of the wagons passing through River Crossing, as clearly as she had heard the crack of the whip above the backs of the straining oxen.
Ration centers A and D will be closed today; please proceed to centers B, C, E, and F with proper coupons.
Militia squads Nine, Ten, and Twelve report to Sendside.
Aerial bombardment is likely between the hours of eight and ten of the clock. All noncombatant residents should report to their designated shelters. Bring your gas masks. Repeat, bring your gas masks.
Announcements, yes . . . and some garbled version of the news—a propagandized, militant version George Orwell would have called double-speak. And in between the news bulletins and the announcements, squalling military music and exhortations to respect the fallen by sending more men and women into the red throat of the abattoir.
Then the war had ended and silence had fallen . . . for a while. But at some point, the speakers had begun broadcasting again. How long ago? A hundred years? Fifty? Did it matter? Susannah thought not. What mattered was that when the speakers were reactivated, the only thing they broadcast was a single tape-loop . . . the loop with the drum-track on it. And the descendents of the city’s original residents had taken it for . . . what? The Voice of the Turtle? The Will of the Beam?
Susannah found herself remembering the time she had asked her father, a quiet but deeply cynical man, if he believed there was a God in heaven who guided the course of human events. Well, he had said, I think it’s sort of half’n half, Odetta. I’m sure