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.

“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 balanced 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 shoulders. 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 crisscross 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.