9

EDDIE PICKED SUSANNAH UP, held her with his sticky hands locked together at the small of her back, and kissed her deeply. He reeked of sweat and pine-tar. She touched his cheeks, his neck; she ran her hands through his wet hair. She felt an insane urge to touch him everywhere until she was absolutely sure of his reality.

"It almost had me," he said. "It was like being on some crazy carni-val ride. What a shot! Jesus, Suze - what a shot!'

"I hope I never have to do anything like that again," she said...but a small voice at the center of her demurred. That voice suggested that she could not wait to do something like that again. And it was cold, that voice. Cold.

"What was - " he began, turning toward Roland, but Roland was no longer standing there. He was walking slowly toward the bear, which now lay on the ground with its shaggy knees up. From within it came a series of muffled gasps and gurgles as its strange guts continued to slowly run down.

Roland saw his knife planted deep in a tree near the scarred veteran that had saved Eddie's life. He pulled it free and wiped it clean on the soft deerskin shirt which had replaced the tatters he had been wearing when the three of them had left the beach. He stood by the bear, looking down at it with an expression of pity and wonder.

Hello, stranger, he thought. Hello, old friend. I never believed in you, not really. I believe Alain did, and I know that Cuthbert did -  Cuthbert believed in everything - but I was the hardheaded one. I thought you were only a tale for children... another wind which blew around in my old nurse's hollow head before finally escaping her jab-bering mouth. But you were here all along, another refugee of the old times, like the pump at the way station and the old machines under the mountains. Are the Slow Mutants who worshipped those broken remnants the final descendents of the people who once lived in this forest and finally fled your wrath? I don't know, will never know... but it feels right. Yes. And then I came with my friends - my deadly new friends, who are becoming so much like my deadly old friends. We came, weaving our magic circle around us and around everything we touch, strand by poi-sonous strand, and now here you lie, at our feet. The world has moved on again, and this time, old friend, it's you who have been left behind.

The monster's body still radiated a deep, sick heat. Parasites were leaving its mouth and tattered nostrils in hordes, but they died almost at once. Waxy-white piles of them were growing on either side of the bear's head.

Eddie approached slowly. He had shifted Susannah over to one hip, carrying her as a mother might carry a baby. "What was it, Roland? Do you know?"

"He called it a Guardian, I think," Susannah said.

"Yes." Roland's voice was slow with amazement. "I thought they were all gone, must all be gone ... if they ever existed outside of the old wives' tales in the first place."

"Whatever it was, it was one crazy mother," Eddie said.

Roland smiled a little. "If you'd lived two or three thousand years, you'd be one crazy mother, too."

"Two or three thousand... Christ!"

Susannah said, "Is it a bear? Really? And what's that?" She was pointing at what appeared to be a square metal tag set high on one of the bear's thick rear legs. It was almost overgrown with tough tangles of hair, but the afternoon sun had pricked out a single starpoint of light on its stainless steel surface, revealing it.

Eddie knelt and reached hesitantly toward the tag, aware that strange muffled clicks and clacks were still coming from deep inside the fallen giant. He looked at Roland.

"Go ahead," the gunslinger told him. "It's finished."

Eddie pushed a clump of hair aside and leaned closer. Words had been stamped into the metal. They were quite badly eroded, but he found that with a little effort he could read them.

NORTH CENTRAL POSITRONICS, LTD.

Granite City Northeast Corridor

Design 4 GUARDIAN

Serial # AA 24123 CX 755431297 L 14

Type/Species BEAR

SHARDIK

**NR**SUBNUCLEAR CELLS MUST NOT BE REPLACED**NR**

"Holy Jesus, this thing is a robot," Eddie said softly.

"It can't be," Susannah said. "When I shot it, it bled."

"Maybe so, but your ordinary, garden-variety bear doesn't have a radar-dish growing out of its head. And, so far as I know, your ordinary, garden-variety bear doesn't live to be two or three th - " He broke off suddenly, looking at Roland. When he spoke again, his voice was revolted. "Roland, what are you doing?"

Roland did not reply; did not need to reply. What he was doing -  gouging out one of the bear's eyes with his knife - was perfectly obvious. The surgery was quick, neat, and precise. When it was completed he bal-anced an oozing brown ball of jelly on the blade of his knife for a moment and then flicked it aside. A few more worms made their way out of the staring hole, tried to squirm their way down the bear's muzzle, and died.

The gunslinger leaned over the eyesocket of Shardik, the great Guardian bear, and peered inside. "Come and look, both of you," he said. "I'll show you a wonder of the latter days."

"Put me down, Eddie," Susannah said.

He did so, and she moved swiftly on her hands and upper thighs to where the gunslinger was hunkered down over the bear's wide, slack face. Eddie joined them, looking between their shoul-ders. The three of them gazed in rapt silence for nearly a full minute; the only noise came from the crows which still circled and scolded in the sky.

Blood oozed from the socket in a few thick, dying trickles. Yet it was not just blood, Eddie saw. There was also a clear fluid which gave off an identifiable scent - bananas. And, embedded in the delicate criss-cross of tendons which shaped the socket, he saw a webwork of what looked like strings. Beyond them, at the back of the socket, was a red spark, blinking on and off. It illuminated a tiny square board marked with silvery squiggles of what could only be solder.

"It isn't a bear, it's a fucking Sony Walkman," he muttered.

Susannah looked around at him. "What?"

"Nothing." Eddie glanced at Roland. "Do you think it's safe to reach in?"

Roland shrugged. "I think so. If there was a demon in this creature, it's fled."

Eddie reached in with his little finger; nerves set to draw back if he felt even a tickle of electricity. He touched the cooling meat inside the eyesocket, which was nearly the size of a baseball, and then one of those strings. Except it wasn't a string; it was a gossamer-thin strand of steel. He withdrew his finger and saw the tiny red spark blink once more before going out forever.

"Shardik," Eddie murmured. "I know that name, but I can't place it. Does it mean anything to you, Suze?"

She shook her head.

"The thing is..." Eddie laughed helplessly. "I associate it with rabbits. Isn't that nuts?"

Roland stood up. His knees popped like gunshots. "We'll have to move camp," he said. "The ground here is spoiled. The other clearing, the one where we go to shoot, will - "

He took two trembling steps and then collapsed to his knees, palms pressed to the sides of his sagging head.

10

EDDIE AND SUSANNAH EXCHANGED a single frightened glance and then Eddie leaped to Roland's side. "What is it? Roland, what's wrong?"

"There was a boy," the gunslinger said in a distant, muttering voice. And then, in the very next breath, "There wasn't a boy."

"Roland?" Susannah asked. She came to him, slipped an arm around his shoulders, felt him trembling. "Roland, what is it?"

"The boy," Roland said, looking at her with floating, dazed eyes. "It's the boy. Always the boy."

"What boy?" Eddie yelled frantically. "What boy?"

"Go then," Roland said, "there are other worlds than these." And fainted.

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