Wizard and glass - Stephen King [45]
“I think,” Roland said, “we need to find the Beam again.”
“I’m convinced,” Eddie said. “Come on, let’s get going.” He took a couple of steps, then turned back to Roland with one eyebrow raised. “Where?”
“The way we were going,” Roland said, as if that should have been obvious, and walked past Eddie in his dusty, broken boots, headed for the park across the way.
CHAPTER V
TURNPIKIN’
1
Roland walked to the end of the platform, kicking bits of pink metal out of his way as he went. At the stairs, he paused and looked back at them somberly. “More dead. Be ready.”
“They’re not . . . um . . . runny, are they?” Jake asked.
Roland frowned, then his face cleared as he understood what Jake meant. “No. Not runny. Dry.”
“That’s all right, then,” Jake said, but he held his hand out to Susannah, who was being carried by Eddie for the time being. She gave him a smile and folded her fingers around his.
At the foot of the stairs leading down to the commuter parking lot at the side of the station, half a dozen corpses lay together like a collapsed cornshock. Two were women, three were men. The sixth was a child in a stroller. A summer spent dead in the sun and rain and heat (not to mention at the mercy of any stray cats, coons, or woodchucks that might be passing) had given the toddler a look of ancient wisdom and mystery, like a child mummy discovered in an Incan pyramid. Jake supposed from the faded blue outfit it was wearing that it had been a boy, but it was impossible to tell for sure. Eyeless, lipless, its skin faded to dusky gray, it made a joke of gender—why did the dead baby cross the road? Because it was stapled to the superflu.
Even so, the toddler seemed to have voyaged through Topeka’s empty post-plague months better than the adults around it. They were little more than skeletons with hair. In a scrawny bunch of skin-wrapped bones that had once been fingers, one of the men clutched the handle of a suitcase that looked like the Samsonites Jake’s parents owned. As with the baby (as with all of them), his eyes were gone; huge dark sockets stared at Jake. Below them, a ring of discolored teeth jutted in a pugnacious grin. What took you so long, kid? the dead man who was still clutching his suitcase seemed to be asking. Been waiting for you, and it’s been a long hot summer!
Where were you guys hoping to go? Jake wondered. Just where in the crispy crap did you think might be safe enough? Des Moines? Sioux City? Fargo? The moon?
They went down the stairs, Roland first, the others behind him, Jake still holding Susannah’s hand with Oy at his heels. The long-bodied bumbler seemed to descend each step in two stages, like a double trailer taking speed-bumps.
“Slow down, Roland,” Eddie said. “I want to check the crip spaces before we go on. We might get lucky.”
“Crip spaces?” Susannah said. “What’re those?”
Jake shrugged. He didn’t know. Neither did Roland.
Susannah switched her attention to Eddie. “I only ask, sugarpie, because it sounds a little on-pleasant. You know, like calling Negroes ‘blacks’ or gay folks ‘fruits.’ I know I’m just a poor ignorant pickaninny from the dark ages of 1964, but—”
“There.” Eddie pointed at a rank of signs marking the parking-row closest to the station. There were actually two signs to a post, the top of each pair blue and white, the bottom red and white. When they drew a little closer, Jake saw the one on top was a wheelchair symbol. The one on the bottom was a warning: $200 FINE FOR IMPROPER USE OF HANDICAPPED PARKING SPACE. STRICTLY ENFORCED BY TOPEKA P.D.
“See there!” Susannah said triumphantly. “They shoulda done that a long time ago! Why, back in my when, you’re lucky if you can get your damn wheelchair through the doors of anything smaller than the Shop ’n Save. Hell, lucky if you can get it up over the curbs! And special parking? Forget it, sugar!”
The lot was jammed almost to capacity, but even with the end of the