The waste lands - Stephen King [219]
Jake had begun to flag badly. Roland swept him into his arms again and chased the steel ball past machines at whose function and intent he could not even guess. Oy ran at his heels. The ball banked left, and the aisle in which they now found themselves ran between banks of TV monitors, thousands of them, stacked in rows like a child’s building blocks.
My dad would love it, Jake thought.
Some sections of this vast video arcade were still dark, but many of the screens were on. They showed a city in chaos, both above and below. Clumps of Pubes surged pointlessly through the streets, eyes wide, mouths moving soundlessly. Many were leaping from the tall buildings. Jake observed with horror that hundreds more had congregated at the Send Bridge and were throwing themselves into the river. Other screens showed large, cot-filled rooms like dormitories. Some of these rooms were on fire, but the panic-stricken Grays seemed to be setting the fires themselves—torching their own mattresses and furniture for God alone knew what reason.
One screen showed a barrel-chested giant tossing men and women into what looked like a blood-spattered stamping press. This was bad enough, but there was something worse: the victims were standing in an unguarded line, docilely waiting their turns. The executioner, his yellow scarf pulled tight over his skull and the knotted ends swinging below his ears like pigtails, seized an old woman and held her up, waiting patiently for the stainless steel block of metal to clear the killing floor so he could toss her in. The old woman did not struggle; seemed, in fact, to be smiling.
“IN THE ROOMS THE PEOPLE COME AND GO,” Blaine said, “BUT I DON’T THINK ANY OF THEM ARE TALKING OF MICHELANGELO.” He suddenly laughed—strange, tittery laughter that sounded like rats scampering over broken glass. The sound sent chills chasing up Jake’s neck. He wanted nothing at all to do with an intelligence that laughed like that . . . but what choice did they have?
He turned his gaze helplessly back to the monitors . . . and Roland at once turned his head away. He did this gently but firmly. “There’s nothing there you need to look at, Jake,” he said.
“But why are they doing it?” Jake asked. He had eaten nothing all day, but he still felt like vomiting. “Why?”
“Because they’re frightened, and Blaine is feeding their fear. But mostly, I think, because they’ve lived too long in the graveyard of their grandfathers and they’re tired of it. And before you pity them, remember how happy they would have been to take you along with them into the clearing where the path ends.”
The steel ball zipped around another corner, leaving the TV screens and electronic monitoring equipment behind. Ahead, a wide ribbon of some synthetic stuff was set into the floor. It gleamed like fresh tar between two narrow strips of chrome steel that dwindled to a point on what was not the far side of this room, but its horizon.
The ball bounced impatiently above the dark strip, and suddenly the belt—for that was what it was—swept into silent motion, trundling along between its steel facings at jogging speed. The ball made small arcs in the air, urging them to climb on.
Roland trotted beside the moving strip until he was roughly matching its speed, then did just that. He set Jake down and the three of them—gunslinger, boy, and golden-eyed bumbler—were carried rapidly across this shadowy underground plain where the ancient machines were awakening. The moving strip carried them into an area of what looked like filing cabinets—row after endless row of them. They were dark . . . but not dead. A low, sleepy humming sound came from within them, and Jake could see hairline cracks of bright yellow light shining between the steel panels.
He suddenly found himself thinking of the Tick-Tock