Bump . . . ba-bump . . . ba-bump-bumpbump-bump. The idea that he was standing by a deserted road in an almost empty world, standing some one hundred and seventy miles from a city which had been built by some fabulous lost civilization and listening to a rock-and-roll drum-line . . . that was crazy, but was it any crazier than a traffic-light that dinged and dropped a rusty green flag with the word GO printed on it? Any crazier than discovering the wreck of a German plane from the 1930s? Eddie sang the words to the Z.Z. Top song in a whisper: “You need just enough of that sticky stuff To hold the seam on your fine blue-jeans I say yeah, yeah …”
They fit the beat perfectly. It was the disco-pulse percussion of “Velcro Fly.” Eddie was sure of it.
A short time later the sound ceased as suddenly as it had begun, and he could hear only the wind, and, more faintly, the Send River, which had a bed but never slept.
THE NEXT FOUR DAYS were uneventful. They walked; they watched the bridge and the city grow larger and define themselves more clearly; they camped; they ate; they riddled; they kept watch turn and turn about (Jake had pestered Roland into letting him keep a short watch in the two hours just before dawn); they slept. The only remarkable incident had to do with the bees. Around noon on the third day after the discovery of the downed plane, a buzzing sound came to them, growing louder and louder until it dominated the day. At last Roland stopped. “There,” he said, and pointed toward a grove of eucalyptus trees.
“It sounds like bees,” Susannah said.
Roland’s faded blue eyes gleamed. “Could be we’ll have a little dessert tonight.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this, Roland,” Eddie said, “but I have this aversion to being stung.”
“Don’t we all,” Roland agreed, “but the day is windless. I think we can smoke them to sleep and steal their comb right out from under them without setting half the world on fire. Let’s have a look.” He carried Susannah, who was as eager for the adventure as the gunslinger himself, toward the grove. Eddie and Jake lagged behind, and Oy, apparently having decided that discretion was the better part of valor, remained sitting at the edge of the Great Road, panting like a dog and watching them carefully. Roland paused at the edge of the trees. “Stay where you are,” he told Eddie and Jake, speaking softly. “We’re going to have a look. I’ll give you a come-on if all’s well.” He carried Susannah into the dappled shadows of the grove while Eddie and Jake remained in the sunshine, peering after them. It was cooler in the shade. The buzzing of the bees was a steady, hypnotic drone. “There are too many,” Roland murmured. “This is late summer; they should be out working. I don’t—“
He caught sight of the hive, bulging tumorously from the hollow of a tree in the center of the clearing, and broke off.
“What’s the matter with them?” Susannah asked in a soft, horrified voice. “Roland, what’s the matter with them?”
A bee, as plump and slow-moving as a horsefly in October, droned past her head. Susannah flinched away from it.
Roland motioned for the others to join them. They did, and stood looking at the hive without speaking. The chambers weren’t neat hexa-gons but random holes of all shapes and sizes; the beehive itself looked queerly melted, as if someone had turned a blowtorch on it. The bees which crawled sluggishly over it were as white as snow.
“No honey tonight,” Roland said. “What we took from yonder comb might taste sweet, but it would poison us as surely as night follows day.” One of the grotesque white bees lumbered heavily past Jake’s head. He ducked away with an expression of loathing.
“What did it?” Eddie asked. “What did it to them, Roland?” “The same thing that has emptied this whole land; the thing that’s still causing many of the buffalo to be born as sterile freaks. I’ve heard it called the Old War, the Great Fire, the Cataclysm, and the Great Poisoning. Whatever it was, it was the start of all our troubles and it happened long ago, a thousand years before the great-great-grandfathers of the River Crossing folk were born. The physical effects—the two-headed buffalo and the white bees and such—have grown less as time passes. I have seen this for myself. The other changes are greater, if harder to see, and they are still going on.” They watched the white bees crawl, dazed and almost completely helpless, about their hive. Some were apparently trying to work; most simply wandered about, butting heads and crawling over one another. Eddie found himself remembering a newsclip he’d seen once. It had shown a crowd of survivors leaving the area where a gas-main had exploded, flattening almost a whole city block in some California town. These bees reminded him of those dazed, shellshocked survivors. “You had a nuclear war, didn’t you?” he asked—almost accused. “These Great Old Ones you like to talk about . . . they blew their great old asses straight to hell. Didn’t they?”
“I don’t know what happened. No one knows. The records of those times are lost, and the few stories are confused and conflicting.” “Let’s get out of here,” Jake said in a trembling voice. “Looking at those things makes me sick.”
“I’m with you, sugar,” Susannah said.
So they left the bees to their aimless, shattered life in the grove of ancient trees, and there was no honey that night.
“WHEN ARE YOU GOING to tell us what you do know?” Eddie asked the next morning. The day was bright and blue, but there was a bite in the air; their first autumn in this world was almost upon them.