The Talisman

35

The Blasted Lands

1

“But will ye be safe, my Lord?” Anders asked, kneeling down before Jack with his white-and-red kilt pooled out around him like a skirt.

“Jack?” Richard asked, his voice a whiny, irrelevant skirl of sound.

“Would you be safe yourself?” Jack asked.

Anders twisted his big white head sideways and squinted up at Jack as if he had just asked a riddle. He looked like a huge puzzled dog.

“I mean, I’ll be about as safe as you would be yourself. That’s all I mean.”

“But my Lord . . .”

“Jack?” came Richard’s querulous voice again. “I fell asleep, and now I should be awake, but we’re still in this weird place, so I’m still dreaming . . . but I want to be awake, Jack, I don’t want to have this dream anymore. No. I don’t want to.”

And that’s why you busted your damn glasses, Jack said to himself. Aloud, he said, “This isn’t a dream, Richie-boy. We’re about to hit the road. We’re gonna take a train ride.”

“Huh?” Richard said, rubbing his face and sitting up. If Anders resembled a big white dog in skirts, Richard looked like nothing so much as a newly awakened baby.

“My Lord Jason,” Anders said. Now he seemed as if he might weep—with relief, Jack thought. “It is yer will? It is yer will to drive that devil-machine through the Blasted Lands?”

“It sure is,” Jack said.

“Where are we?” Richard said. “Are you sure they’re not following us?”

Jack turned toward him. Richard was sitting up on the undulating yellow floor, blinking stupidly, terror still drifting about him like a fog. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll answer your question. We’re in a section of the Territories called Ellis-Breaks—”

“My head hurts,” Richard said. He had closed his eyes.

“And,” Jack went on, “we’re going to take this man’s train all the way through the Blasted Lands to the black hotel, or as close to it as we can get. That’s it, Richard. Believe it or not. And the sooner we do it, the sooner we’ll get away from whatever just might be trying to find us.”

“Etheridge,” Richard whispered. “Mr. Dufrey.” He looked around the mellow interior of The Depot as if he expected all their pursuers to suddenly pour through the walls. “It’s a brain tumor, you know,” he said to Jack in a tone of perfect reasonableness. “That’s what it is—my headache.”

“My Lord Jason,” old Anders was saying, bowing so low that his hair settled down on the rippling floorboards. “How good ye are, O High One, how good to yer lowliest servant, how good to those who do not deserve yer blessed presence. . . .” He crawled forward, and Jack saw with horror that he was about to begin that moony foot-kissing all over again.

“Pretty far advanced, too, I’d say,” Richard offered.

“Get up, please, Anders,” Jack said, stepping back. “Get up, come on, that’s enough.” The old man continued to crawl forward, babbling with his relief at not having to endure the Blasted Lands. “ARISE!” Jack bellowed.

Anders looked up, his forehead wrinkled. “Yes, my Lord.” He slowly got up.

“Bring your brain tumor over here, Richard,” Jack said “We’re going to see if we can figure out how to drive this damn train.”

2

Anders had moved over behind the long, rippling counter, and was rooting in a drawer. “I believe it works on devils, my Lord,” he said. “Strange devils, all hurtled down together. They do not appear to live, yet they do. Aye.” He fetched out of the drawer the longest, fattest candle that Jack had ever seen. From a box atop the counter Anders selected a foot-long, narrow softwood strip, then lowered one of its ends into a glowing lamp. The strip of wood ignited, and Anders used it to light his enormous candle. Then he waved the “match” back and forth until the flame expired in a curl of smoke.

“Devils?” Jack asked.

“Strange square things—I believe the devils are contained therein. Sometimes how they spit and spark! I shall show this to ye, Lord Jason.”

Without another word he swept toward the door, the warm glow of the candle momentarily erasing the wrinkles from his face. Jack followed him outside into the sweetness and amplitude of the deep Territories. He remembered a photograph on the wall of Speedy Parker’s office, a photograph even then filled with an inexplicable power, and realized that he was actually near the site of that photograph. Far off rose a familiar-looking mountain. Down the little knoll the fields of grain rolled away in all directions, waving in smooth, wide patterns. Richard Sloat moved hesitantly beside Jack, rubbing his forehead. The silvery bands of metal, out of key with the rest of the landscape, stretched inexorably west.

“The shed is in back, my Lord,” Anders said softly, and almost shyly turned away toward the side of The Depot. Jack took another glance at the far-off mountain. Now it looked less like the mountain in Speedy’s photograph—newer—a western, not an eastern, mountain.

“What’s with that Lord Jason business?” Richard whispered right into his ear. “He thinks he knows you.”

“It’s hard to explain,” Jack said.

Richard tugged at his bandanna, then clamped a hand on Jack’s biceps. The old Kansas City Clutch. “What happened to the school, Jack? What happened to the dogs? Where are we?”

“Just come along,” Jack said. “You’re probably still dreaming.”

“Yes,” Richard said in the tone of purest relief. “Yes, that’s it, isn’t it? I’m still asleep. You told me all that crazy stuff about the Territories, and now I’m dreaming about it.”

“Yeah,” Jack said, and set off after Anders. The old man was holding up the enormous candle like a torch and drifting down the rear side of the knoll toward another, slightly larger, octagonal wooden building. The two boys followed him through the tall yellow grass. Light spilled from another of the transparent globes, revealing that this second building was open at opposite ends, as if two matching faces of the octagon had been neatly sliced away. The silvery train tracks ran through these open ends. Anders reached the large shed and turned around to wait for the boys. With the flaring, sputtering, upheld candle, his long beard and odd clothes, Anders resembled a creature from legend or faery, a sorcerer or wizard.

“It sits here, as it has since it came, and may the demons drive it hence.” Anders scowled at the boys, and all his wrinkles deepened. “Invention of hell. A foul thing, d’ye ken.” He looked over his shoulder when the boys were before him. Jack saw that Anders did not even like being in the shed with the train. “Half its cargo is aboard, and it, too, stinks of hell.”

Jack stepped into the open end of the shed, forcing Anders to follow him. Richard stumbled after, rubbing his eyes. The little train sat pointing west on the tracks—an odd-looking engine, a boxcar, a flatcar covered with a straining tarp. From this last car came the smell Anders so disliked. It was a wrong smell, not of the Territories, both metallic and greasy.

Richard immediately went to one of the interior angles of the shed, sat down on the floor with his back to the wall, and closed his eyes.

“D’ye ken its workings, my Lord?” Anders asked in a low voice.

Jack shook his head and walked up along the tracks to the head of the train. Yes, there were Anders’s “demons.” They were box batteries, just as Jack had supposed. Sixteen of them, in two rows strung together in a metal container supported by the cab’s first four wheels. The entire front part of the train looked like a more sophisticated version of a deliveryboy’s bicycle-cart—but where the bicycle itself should have been was a little cab which reminded Jack of something else . . . something he could not immediately identify.

“The demons talk to the upright stick,” Anders said from behind him.

Jack hoisted himself up into the little cab. The “stick” Anders had mentioned was a gearshift set in a slot with three notches. Then Jack knew what the little cab resembled. The whole train ran on the same principle as a golf cart. Battery-powered, it had only three gears: forward, neutral, and reverse. It was the only sort of train that might possibly work in the Territories, and Morgan Sloat must have had it specially constructed for him.

“The demons in the boxes spit and spark, and talk to the stick, and the stick moves the train, my Lord.” Anders hovered anxiously beside the cab, his face contorting into an astonishing display of wrinkles.

“You were going to leave in the morning?” Jack asked the old man.

“Aye.”

“But the train is ready now?”

“Yes, my Lord.”

Jack nodded, and jumped down. “What’s the cargo?”

“Devil-things,” Anders said grimly. “For the bad Wolfs. To take to the black hotel.”

I’d be a jump ahead of Morgan Sloat if I left now, Jack thought. And looked uneasily over at Richard, who had managed to put himself asleep again. If it weren’t for pig-headed, hypochondriacal Rational Richard, he would never have stumbled onto Sloat’s choo-choo; and Sloat would have been able to use the “devil-things”—weapons of some kind, surely—against him as soon as he got near the black hotel. For the hotel was the end of his quest, he was sure of that now. And all of that seemed to argue that Richard, as helpless and annoying as he now was, was going to be more important to his quest than Jack had ever imagined. The son of Sawyer and the son of Sloat: the son of Prince Philip Sawtelle and the son of Morgan of Orris. For an instant the world wheeled above Jack and he snagged a second’s insight that Richard might just be essential to whatever he was going to have to do in the black hotel. Then Richard snuffled and let his mouth drop open, and the feeling of momentary comprehension slipped away from Jack.

“Let’s have a look at those devil-things,” he said. He whirled around and marched back down the length of the train, along the way noticing for the first time that the floor of the octagonal shed was in two sections—most of it was one round circular mass, like an enormous dinner plate. Then there was a break in the wood, and what was beyond the perimeter of the circle extended to the walls. Jack had never heard of a roundhouse, but he understood the concept: the circular part of the floor could turn a hundred and eighty degrees. Normally, trains or coaches came in from the east, and returned in the same direction.

The tarpaulin had been tied down over the cargo with thick brown cord so hairy it looked like steel wool. Jack strained to lift an edge, peered under, saw only blackness. “Help me,” he said, turning to Anders.

The old man stepped forward, frowning, and with one strong, deft motion released a knot. The tarpaulin loosened and sagged. Now when Jack lifted its edge, he saw that half of the flatcar held a row of wooden boxes stencilled MACHINE PARTS. Guns, he thought: Morgan is arming his rebel Wolfs. The other half of the space beneath the tarp was occupied by bulky rectangular packages of a squashy-looking substance wrapped in layers of clear plastic sheeting. Jack had no idea what this substance might be, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t Wonder Bread. He dropped the tarpaulin and stepped back, and Anders pulled at the thick rope and knotted it again.

“We’re going tonight,” Jack said, having just decided this.

“But my Lord Jason . . . the Blasted Lands . . . at night . . . d’ye ken—”

“I ken, all right,” Jack said. “I ken that I’ll need all the surprise I can whip up. Morgan and that man the Wolfs call He of the Lashes are going to be looking for me, and if I show up twelve hours before anybody is expecting this train, Richard and I might get away alive.”

Anders nodded gloomily, and again looked like an oversize dog accommodating itself to unhappy knowledge.

Jack looked at Richard again—asleep, sitting up with his mouth open. As if he knew what was in Jack’s mind, Anders, too, looked toward sleeping Richard. “Did Morgan of Orris have a son?” Jack asked.

“He did, my Lord. Morgan’s brief marriage had issue—a boy child named Rushton.”

“And what became of Rushton? As if I couldn’t guess.”

“He died,” Anders said simply. “Morgan of Orris was not meant to be a father.”

Jack shuddered, remembering how his enemy had torn his way through the air and nearly killed Wolf’s entire herd.

“We’re going,” he said. “Will you please help me get Richard into the cab, Anders?”

“My Lord . . .” Anders hung his head, then lifted it and gave Jack a look of almost parental concern. “The journey will require at least two days, perhaps three, before ye reach the western shore. Have ye any food? Would ye share my evening meal?”

Jack shook his head, impatient to begin this last leg of his journey to the Talisman, but then his stomach abruptly growled, reminding him of how long it had been since he had eaten anything but the Ring-Dings and stale Famous Amos cookies in Albert the Blob’s room. “Well,” he said, “I suppose another half hour won’t make any difference. Thank you, Anders. Help me get Richard up on his feet, will you?” And maybe, he thought, he wasn’t so eager to cross the Blasted Lands after all.

The two of them jerked Richard to his feet. Like the Dormouse, he opened his eyes, smiled, and sagged back to sleep again. “Food,” Jack said. “Real food. You up for that, chum?”

“I never eat in dreams,” Richard answered with surreal rationality. He yawned, then wiped his eyes. He gradually had found his feet, and no longer leaned against Anders and Jack. “I am pretty hungry, though, to tell you the truth. I’m having a long dream, aren’t I, Jack?” He seemed almost proud of it.

“Yep,” said Jack.

“Say, is that the train we’re going to take? It looks like a cartoon.”

“Yep.”

“Can you drive that thing, Jack? It’s my dream, I know, but—”

“It’s about as hard to operate as my old electric train set,” Jack said. “I can drive it, and so can you.”

“I don’t want to,” Richard said, and that cringing, whining tone came back into his voice again. “I don’t want to get on that train at all. I want to go back to my room.”

“Come and have some food instead,” Jack said, and found himself leading Richard out of the shed. “Then we’re on our way to California.”

And so the Territories showed one of its best faces to the boys immediately before they entered the Blasted Lands. Anders gave them thick sweet slices of bread clearly made from the grain growing around The Depot, kebabs of tender sections of meat and plump juicy unfamiliar vegetables, a spicy pink juice that Jack for some reason thought of as papaya though he knew it was not. Richard chewed in a happy trance, the juice running down his chin until Jack wiped it off for him. “California,” he said once. “I should have known.” Assuming that he was alluding to that state’s reputation for craziness, Jack did not question him. He was more concerned about what the two of them were doing to Anders’s presumably limited stock of food, but the old man kept nipping behind the counter, where he or his father before him had installed a small wood-burning stove, and returning with yet more food. Corn muffins, calf’s-foot jelly, things that looked like chicken legs but tasted of . . . what? Frankincense and myrrh? Flowers? The taste fairly exploded over his tongue, and he thought that he, too, might begin to drool.

The three of them sat around a little table in the warm and mellow room. At the end of the meal Anders almost shyly brought forth a heavy beaker half-filled with red wine. Feeling as if he were following someone else’s script, Jack drank a small glassful.

3

Two hours later, beginning to feel drowsy, Jack wondered if that enormous meal had been an equally enormous error. First of all, there had been the departure from Ellis-Breaks and The Depot, which had not gone easily; secondly, there was Richard, who threatened to go seriously crazy; and thirdly, and above all else, there were the Blasted Lands. Which were far crazier than Richard would ever be, and which absolutely demanded concentrated attention.

After the meal the three of them had returned to the shed, and the trouble had started. Jack knew that he was fearful of whatever might be ahead—and, he now knew, that fear was perfectly justified—and perhaps his trepidation had made him behave less well than he should have. The first difficulty had come when he tried to pay old Anders with the coin Captain Farren had given him. Anders responded as if his beloved Jason had just stabbed him in the back. Sacrilege! Outrage! By offering the coin, Jack had done more than merely insult the old liveryman; he had metaphorically smeared mud on his religion. Supernaturally restored divine beings apparently were not supposed to offer coins to their followers. Anders had been upset enough to smash his hand into the “devil-box,” as he called the metal container for the rank of batteries, and Jack knew that Anders had been mightily tempted to strike another target besides the train. Jack had managed only a semi-truce: Anders did not want his apologies any more than he wanted his money. The old man had finally calmed down once he realized the extent of the boy’s dismay, but he did not really return to his normal behavior until Jack speculated out loud that the Captain Farren coin might have other functions, other roles for him. “Ye’re not Jason entire,” the old man gloomed, “yet the Queen’s coin may aid ye toward yer destiny.” He shook his head heavily. His farewell wave had been distinctly half-hearted.

But a good portion of that had been due to Richard. What had begun as a sort of childish panic had quickly blossomed into full-blown terror. Richard had refused to get in the cab. Up until that moment he had mooned around the shed, not looking at the train, seemingly in an uncaring daze. Then he had realized that Jack was serious about getting him on that thing, and he had freaked—and, strangely, it had been the idea of ending up in California which had disturbed him most. “NO! NO! CAN’T!” Richard had yelled when Jack urged him toward the train. “I WANT TO GO BACK TO MY ROOM!”

“They might be following us, Richard,” Jack said wearily. “We have to get going.” He reached out and took Richard’s arm. “This is all a dream, remember?”

“Oh my Lord, oh my Lord,” Anders had said, moving aimlessly around in the big shed, and Jack understood that for once the liveryman was not addressing him.

“I HAVE TO GO BACK TO MY ROOM!” Richard squalled. His eyes were clamped shut so tightly that a single painful crease ran from temple to temple.

Echoes of Wolf again. Jack had tried to pull Richard toward the train, but Richard had stuck fast, like a mule. “I CAN’T GO THERE!” he yelled.

“Well, you can’t stay here, either,” Jack said. He made another futile effort at yanking Richard toward the train, and this time actually budged him a foot or two. “Richard,” he said, “this is ridiculous. Do you want to be here alone? Do you want to be left alone in the Territories?” Richard shook his head. “Then come with me. It’s time. In two days we’ll be in California.”

“Bad business,” Anders muttered to himself, watching the boys. Richard simply continued to shake his head, offering a single comprehensive negative. “I can’t go there,” he repeated. “I can’t get on that train and I can’t go there.”

“California?”

Richard bit his mouth into a lipless seam and closed his eyes again. “Oh hell,” Jack said. “Can you help me, Anders?” The huge old man gave him a dismayed, almost disgusted look, then marched across the room and scooped up Richard in his arms—as if Richard were the size of a puppy. The boy let out a distinctly puppyish squeal. Anders dropped him onto the padded bench in the cab. “Jack!” Richard called, afraid that he somehow was going to wind up in the Blasted Lands all by himself. “I’m here,” Jack said, and was in fact already climbing into the other side of the cab. “Thank you, Anders,” he said to the old liveryman, who nodded gloomily and retreated back into a corner of the shed. “Take care.” Richard had begun to weep, and Anders looked at him without pity.

Jack pushed the ignition button, and two enormous blue sparks shot out from the “devil-box” just as the engine whirred into life. “Here goes,” Jack said, and eased the lever forward. The train began to glide out of the shed. Richard whimpered and drew up his knees. Saying something like “Nonsense” or “Impossible”—Jack chiefly heard the hiss of the sibilants—he buried his face between his knees. He looked as though he were trying to become a circle. Jack waved to Anders, who waved back, and then they were out of the lighted shed and were covered only by the vast dark sky. Anders’s silhouette appeared in the opening through which they had gone, as if he had decided to run after them. The train was not capable of going more than thirty miles an hour, Jack thought, and at present was doing no better than eight or nine. This seemed excruciatingly slow. West, Jack said to himself, west, west, west. Anders stepped back inside the shed, and his beard lay against his massive chest like a covering of frost. The train lurched forward—another sizzling blue spark snapped upward—and Jack turned around on the padded seat to see what was coming.

“NO!” Richard screamed, almost making Jack fall out of the cab. “I CAN’T! CAN’T GO THERE!” He had drawn his head up from his knees, but he wasn’t seeing anything—his eyes were still clamped shut, and his whole face looked like a knuckle.

“Be quiet,” Jack said. Ahead the tracks arrowed through the endless fields of waving grain; dim mountains, old teeth, floated in the western clouds. Jack glanced one last time over his shoulder and saw the little oasis of warmth and light which was The Depot and the octagonal shed, slipping slowly backward behind him. Anders was a tall shadow in a lighted doorway. Jack gave a final wave, and the tall shadow waved, too. Jack turned around again and looked over the immensity of grain, all that lyric distance. If this was what the Blasted Lands were like, the next two days were going to be positively restful.

Of course they were not, not like that at all. Even in the moonlit dark he could tell that the grain was thinning out, becoming scrubby—about half an hour out of The Depot the change had begun. Even the color seemed wrong now, almost artificial, no longer the beautiful organic yellow he had seen before, but the yellow of something left too near a powerful heat source—the yellow of something with most of the life bleached out of it. Richard now had a similar quality. For a time he had hyperventilated, then he had wept as silently and shamelessly as a jilted girl, then he had fallen into a twitchy sleep. “Can’t go back,” he had muttered in his sleep, or such were the words Jack thought he had heard. In sleep he seemed to dwindle.

The whole character of the landscape had begun to alter. From the broad sweep of the plains in Ellis-Breaks, the land had mutated to secretive little hollows and dark little valleys crowded with black trees. Huge boulders lay everywhere, skulls, eggs, giant teeth. The ground itself had changed, become much sandier. Twice the walls of the valleys grew up right alongside the tracks, and all Jack could see on either side were scrubby reddish cliffs covered with low creeping plants. Now and then he thought he saw an animal scurrying for cover, but the light was too weak, and the animal too quick, for him to identify it. But Jack had the eerie feeling that if the animal had frozen absolutely still in the middle of Rodeo Drive at high noon, he would still have been unable to identify it—a suggestion that the head was twice the size it should be, that this animal was better off hiding from human sight.

By the time ninety minutes had elapsed, Richard was moaning in his sleep and the landscape had passed into utter strangeness. The second time they had emerged from one of the claustrophobic valleys, Jack had been surprised by a sense of sudden openness—at first it was like being back in the Territories again, the Daydreams-land. Then he had noticed, even in the dark, how the trees were stunted and bent; then he had noticed the smell. Probably this had been slowly growing in his consciousness, but it was only after he had seen how the few trees scattered on the black plain had coiled themselves up like tortured beasts that he finally noticed the faint but unmistakable odor of corruption in the air. Corruption, hellfire. Here the Territories stank, or nearly.

The odor of long-dead flowers overlaid the land; and beneath it, as with Osmond, was a coarser, more potent odor. If Morgan, in either of his roles, had caused this, then he had in some sense brought death to the Territories, or so Jack thought.

Now there were no more intricate valleys and hollows; now the land seemed a vast red desert. The queerly stunted trees dotted the sloping sides of this great desert. Before Jack, the twin silver rails of the tracks rolled on through darkened reddish emptiness; to his side, empty desert also rolled away through the dark.

The red land seemed empty, anyhow. For several hours Jack never actually caught sight of anything larger than the deformed little animals concealing themselves on the slopes of the railway cuttings—but there were times when he thought he caught a sudden sliding movement in the corner of one eye, turned to see it, and it was gone. At first he thought he was being followed. Then, for a hectic time, no longer than twenty or thirty minutes, he imagined that he was being tracked by the dog-things from Thayer School. Wherever he looked, something had just ceased to move—had nipped behind one of the coiled-up trees or slipped into the sand. During this time the wide desert of the Blasted Lands did not seem empty or dead, but full of slithery, hidden life. Jack pushed forward on the train’s gearshift (as if that could help) and urged the little train to go faster, faster. Richard slumped in the ell of his seat, whimpering. Jack imagined all those beings, those things neither canine nor human, rushing toward them, and prayed that Richard’s eyes would stay closed.

“NO!” Richard yelled, still sleeping.

Jack nearly fell out of the cab. He could see Etheridge and Mr. Dufrey loping after them. They gained ground, their tongues lolling, their shoulders working. In the next second, he realized that he had seen only shadows travelling beside the train. The loping schoolboys and their headmaster had winked out like birthday candles.

“NOT THERE!” Richard bawled. Jack inhaled carefully. He, they, were safe. The dangers of the Blasted Lands were overrated, mainly literary. In not very many hours the sun would lift itself up again. Jack raised his watch to the level of his eyes and saw that they had been on the train just under two hours. His mouth opened in a huge yawn, and he found himself regretting that he had eaten so much back in The Depot.

A piece of cake, he thought, this is going to be—

And just as he was about to complete his paraphrase of the Burns lines old Anders had rather startlingly quoted, he saw the first of the fireballs, which destroyed his complacency forever.

4

A ball of light at least ten feet in diameter tumbled over the edge of the horizon, sizzling hot, and at first arrowed straight toward the train. “Holy shit,” Jack muttered to himself, remembering what Anders had said about the balls of fire. If a man gets too close to one of those fireballs, he gets turrible sick . . . loses his hair . . . sores’re apt to raise all over his body . . . he begins to vomit . . . vomits and vomits until his stomach ruptures and his throat bursts. . . . He swallowed, hard—it was like swallowing a pound of nails. “Please, God,” he said aloud. The giant ball of light sped straight toward him, as though it owned a mind and had decided to erase Jack Sawyer and Richard Sloat from the earth. Radiation poisoning. Jack’s stomach contracted, and his testicles froze up under his body. Radiation poisoning. Vomits and vomits until his stomach ruptures . . .

The excellent dinner Anders had given him nearly leaped out of his stomach. The fireball continued to roll straight toward the train, shooting out sparks and sizzling with its own fiery energy. Behind it lengthened a glowing golden trail which seemed magically to instigate other snapping, burning lines in the red earth. Just when the fireball bounced up off the earth and took a zagging bounce like a giant tennis ball, wandering harmlessly off to the left, Jack had his first clear glimpse of the creatures he had all along thought were following them. The reddish-golden light of the wandering fireball, and the residual glow of the old trails in the earth, illuminated a group of deformed-looking beasts which had evidently been following the train. They were dogs, or once had been dogs, or their ancestors had been dogs, and Jack glanced uneasily at Richard to make sure that he was still sleeping.

The creatures falling behind the train flattened out on the ground like snakes. Their heads were doglike, Jack saw, but their bodies had only vestigial hind legs and were, as far as he could see, hairless and tailless. They looked wet—the pink hairless skin glistened like that of newborn mice. They snarled, hating to be seen. It had been these awful mutant dogs that Jack had seen on the banks of the railway cutting. Exposed, flattened out like reptiles, they hissed and snarled and began creeping away—they, too, feared the fireballs and the trails the fireballs left on the earth. Then Jack caught the odor of the fireball, now moving swiftly, somehow almost angrily, toward the horizon again, igniting an entire row of the stunted trees. Hellfire, corruption.

Another of the fireballs came cruising over the horizon and blazed away off to the boys’ left. The stink of missed connections, of blasted hopes and evil desires—Jack, with his heart lodged just under his tongue, imagined he found all this in the foul smell broadcast by the fireball. Mewing, the crowd of mutant dogs had dispersed into the threat of glinting teeth, a whisper of surreptitious movement, the hushushush of heavy legless bodies dragged through red dust. How many of them were there? From the base of a burning tree which tried to hide its head in its trunk two of the deformed dogs bared long teeth at him.

Then another fireball lurched over the wide horizon, spinning off a wide glowing track a distance from the train, and Jack momentarily glimpsed what looked like a ramshackle little shed set just below the curve of the desert wall. Before it stood a large humanoid figure, male, looking toward him. An impression of size, hairiness, force, malice . . .

Jack was indelibly conscious of the slowness of Anders’s little train, of his and Richard’s exposure to anything that might want to investigate them a little more closely. The first fireball had dispatched the horrible dog-things, but human residents of the Blasted Lands might prove more difficult to overcome. Before the light diminished into the glowing trail, Jack saw that the figure before the shed was following his progress, turning a great shaggy head as the train passed by. If what he had seen were dogs, then what would the people be like? In the last of the flaring light from the ball of fire, the manlike being scuttled around the side of its dwelling. A thick reptilian tail swung from its hindquarters, and then the thing had slipped around the side of the building, and then it was dark again and nothing—dogs, man-beast, shed—was visible. Jack could not even be sure that he had really seen it.

Richard jerked in his sleep, and Jack pushed his hand against the simple gearshift, vainly trying for more speed. The dog-noises gradually faded behind them. Sweating, Jack raised his left wrist again to the level of his eyes and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed since the last time he’d checked his watch. He astonished himself by yawning again, and again regretted eating so much at The Depot.

“NO!” Richard screamed. “NO! I CAN’T GO THERE!”

There? Jack wondered. Where was “there”? California? Or was it anywhere threatening, anywhere Richard’s precarious control, as insecure as an unbroken horse, might slip away from him?

5

All night Jack stood at the gearshift while Richard slept, watching the trails of the departed fireballs flicker along the reddish surface of the earth. Their odor, of dead flowers and hidden corruption, filled the air. From time to time he heard the chatter of the mutant dogs, or of other poor creatures, rising from the roots of the stunted, ingrown trees which still dotted the landscape. The ranks of batteries occasionally sent up snapping arcs of blue. Richard was in a state beyond mere sleep, wrapped in an unconsciousness he both required and had willed. He made no more tortured outcries—in fact he did nothing but slump into his corner of the cab and breathe shallowly, as if even respiration took more energy than he had. Jack half-prayed for, half-feared the coming of the light. When morning came, he would be able to see the animals; but what else might he have to see?

From time to time he glanced over at Richard. His friend’s skin seemed oddly pale, an almost ghostly shade of gray.

6

Morning came with a relaxation of the darkness. A band of pink appeared along the bowllike edge of the eastern horizon, and soon a rosy stripe grew up beneath it, pushing the optimistic pinkness higher in the sky. Jack’s eyes felt almost as red as that stripe, and his legs ached. Richard lay across the whole of the cab’s little seat, still breathing in a restricted, almost reluctant way. It was true, Jack saw—Richard’s face did seem peculiarly gray. His eyelids fluttered in a dream, and Jack hoped that his friend was not about to erupt in another of his screams. Richard’s mouth dropped open, but what emerged was the tip of his tongue, not a loud outcry. Richard passed his tongue along his upper lip, snorted, then fell back into his stupefied coma.

Although Jack wished desperately to sit down and close his own eyes, he did not disturb Richard. For the more Jack saw as the new light filled in the details of the Blasted Lands, the more he hoped Richard’s unconsciousness would endure as long as he himself could endure the conditions of Anders’s cranky little train. He was anything but eager to witness the response of Richard Sloat to the idiosyncrasies of the Blasted Lands. A small amount of pain, a quantity of exhaustion—these were a minimal price to pay for what he knew must be a temporary peace.

What he saw through his squinting eyes was a landscape in which nothing seemed to have escaped withering, crippling damage. By moonlight, it had seemed a vast desert, though a desert furnished with trees. Now Jack took in that his “desert” was actually nothing of the sort. What he had taken for a reddish variety of sand was a loose, powdery soil—it looked as though a man would sink in it up to his ankles, if not his knees. From this starved dry soil grew the wretched trees. Looked at directly, these were much as they had appeared by night, so stunted they seemed to be straining over in an attempt to flee back under their own coiling roots. This was bad enough—bad enough for Rational Richard, anyhow. But when you saw one of these trees obliquely, out of the side of your eye, then you saw a living creature in torment—the straining branches were arms thrown up over an agonized face caught in a frozen scream. As long as Jack was not looking directly at the trees, he saw their tortured faces in perfect detail, the open O of the mouth, the staring eyes and the drooping nose, the long, agonized wrinkles running down the cheeks. They were cursing, pleading, howling at him—their unheard voices hung in the air like smoke. Jack groaned. Like all the Blasted Lands, these trees had been poisoned.

The reddish land stretched out for miles on either side, dotted here and there with patches of acrid-looking yellow grass bright as urine or new paint. If it had not been for the hideous coloration of the long grass, these areas would have resembled oases, for each lay beside a small round body of water. The water was black, and oily patches floated on its skin. Thicker than water, somehow; itself oily, poisonous. The second of these false oases that Jack saw began to ripple sluggishly as the train went past, and at first Jack thought with horror that the black water itself was alive, a being as tormented as the trees he no longer wished to see. Then he momentarily saw something break the surface of the thick fluid, a broad black back or side which rolled over before a wide, ravenous mouth appeared, biting down on nothing. A suggestion of scales that would have been iridescent if the creature had not been discolored by the pool. Holy cow, Jack thought, was that a fish? It seemed to him to have been nearly twenty feet long, too big to inhabit the little pool. A long tail roiled the water before the entire enormous creature slipped back down into what must have been the pool’s considerable depth.

Jack looked up sharply at the horizon, imagining that he had momentarily seen the round shape of a head peering over it. And then he had another of those shocks of a sudden displacement, similar to that the Loch Ness monster, or whatever it was, had given him. How could a head peer over the horizon, for God’s sake?

Because the horizon wasn’t the real horizon, he finally understood—all night, and for as long as it took him to really see what lay at the end of his vision, he had drastically under-estimated the size of the Blasted Lands. Jack finally understood, as the sun began to force its way up into the world again, that he was in a broad valley, and the rim far off to either side was not the edge of the world but the craggy top of a range of hills. Anybody or anything could be tracking him, keeping just out of sight past the rim of the surrounding hills. He remembered the humanoid being with the crocodile’s tail that had slipped around the side of the little shed. Could he have been following Jack all night, waiting for him to fall asleep?

The train poop-pooped through the lurid valley, moving with a suddenly maddening lack of speed.

He scanned the entire rim of hills about him, seeing nothing but new morning sunlight gild the upright rocks far above him. Jack turned around completely in the cab, fear and tension for the moment completely negating his tiredness. Richard threw one arm over his eyes, and slept on. Anything, anybody might have been keeping pace with them, waiting them out.

A slow, almost hidden movement off to his left made him catch his breath. A movement huge, slithery . . . Jack had a vision of a half-dozen of the crocodile-men crawling over the rim of the hills toward him, and he shielded his eyes with his hands and stared at the place where he thought he had seen them. The rocks were stained the same red as the powdery soil, and between them a deep trail wound its way over the crest of the hills through a cleft in the high-standing rocks. What was moving between two of the standing rocks was a shape not even vaguely human. It was a snake—at least, Jack thought it was . . . It had slipped into a concealed section of the trail, and Jack saw only a huge sleek round reptilian body disappearing behind the rocks. The skin of the creature seemed oddly ridged; burned, too—a suggestion, just before it disappeared, of ragged black holes in its side . . . Jack craned to see the place where it would emerge, and in seconds witnessed the wholly unnerving spectacle of the head of a giant worm, one-quarter buried in the thick red dust, swivelling toward him. It had hooded, filmy eyes, but it was the head of a worm.

Some other animal bolted from under a rock, heavy head and dragging body, and as the worm’s big head darted toward it, Jack saw that the fleeing creature was one of the mutant dogs. The worm opened a mouth like the slot of a corner mailbox and neatly scooped up the frantic dog-thing. Jack clearly heard the snapping of bones. The dog’s wailing ceased. The huge worm swallowed the dog as neatly as if it were a pill. Now, immediately before the worm’s monstrous form, lay one of the black trails left by the fireballs, and as Jack watched, the long creature burrowed into the dust like a cruise ship sinking beneath the surface of the ocean. It apparently understood that the traces of the fireballs could do it damage and, wormlike, it would dig beneath them. Jack watched as the ugly thing completely disappeared into the red powder. And then cast his eyes uneasily over the whole of the long red slope dotted with pubic outpatches of the shiny yellow grass, wondering where it would surface again.

When he could be at least reasonably certain that the worm was not going to try to ingest the train, Jack went back to inspecting the ridge of rocky hills about him.

7

Before Richard woke up late that afternoon, Jack saw:

at least one unmistakable head peering over the rim of the hills;

two more jouncing and deadly fireballs careering down at him;

the headless skeleton of what he at first took to be a large rabbit, then sickeningly knew was a human baby, picked shining clean, lying beside the tracks and closely followed by:

the round babyish gleaming skull of the same baby, half-sunk in the loose soil. And he saw:

a pack of the big-headed dogs, more damaged than the others he had seen, pathetically come crawling after the train, drooling with hunger;

three board shacks, human habitations, propped up over the thick dust on stilts, promising that somewhere out in that stinking poisoned wilderness which was the Blasted Lands other people schemed and hunted for food;

a small leathery bird, featherless, with—this a real Territories touch—a bearded monkeylike face, and clearly delineated fingers protruding from the tips of its wings;

and worst of all (apart from what he thought he saw), two completely unrecognizable animals drinking from one of the black pools—animals with long teeth and human eyes and forequarters like those of pigs, hindquarters like those of big cats. Their faces were matted with hair. As the train pulled past the animals, Jack saw that the testicles of the male had swollen to the size of pillows and sagged onto the ground. What had made such monstrosities? Nuclear damage, Jack supposed, since scarcely anything else had such power to deform nature. The creatures, themselves poisoned from birth, snuffled up the equally poisoned water and snarled at the little train as it passed.

Our world could look like this someday, Jack thought. What a treat.

8

Then there were the things he thought he saw. His skin began to feel hot and itchy—he had already dumped the serapelike overgarment which had replaced Myles P. Kiger’s coat onto the floor of the cab. Before noon he stripped off his homespun shirt, too. There was a terrible taste in his mouth, an acidic combination of rusty metal and rotten fruit. Sweat ran from his hairline into his eyes. He was so tired he began to dream standing up, eyes open and stinging with sweat. He saw great packs of the obscene dogs scuttling over the hills; he saw the reddish clouds overhead open up and reach down for Richard and himself with long flaming arms, devil’s arms. When at last his eyes finally did close, he saw Morgan of Orris, twelve feet tall and dressed in black, shooting thunderbolts all around him, tearing the earth into great dusty spouts and craters.

Richard groaned and muttered, “No, no, no.”

Morgan of Orris blew apart like a wisp of fog, and Jack’s painful eyes flew open.

“Jack?” Richard said.

The red land ahead of the train was empty but for the blackened trails of the fireballs. Jack wiped his eyes and looked at Richard, feebly stretching. “Yeah,” he said. “How are you?”

Richard lay back against the stiff seat, blinking out of his drawn gray face.

“Sorry I asked,” Jack said.

“No,” Richard said, “I’m better, really,” and Jack felt at least a portion of his tension leave him. “I still have a headache, but I’m better.”

“You were making a lot of noise in your . . . um . . .” Jack said, unsure of how much reality his friend could stand.

“In my sleep. Yeah, I guess I probably did.” Richard’s face worked, but for once Jack did not brace himself against a scream. “I know I’m not dreaming now, Jack. And I know I don’t have a brain tumor.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“On that train. That old man’s train. In what he called the Blasted Lands.”

“Well, I’ll be double-damned,” Jack said, smiling.

Richard blushed beneath his gray pallor.

“What brought this on?” Jack asked, still not quite sure that he could trust Richard’s transformation.

“Well, I knew I wasn’t dreaming,” Richard said, and his cheeks grew even redder. “I guess I . . . I guess it was just time to stop fighting it. If we’re in the Territories, then we’re in the Territories, no matter how impossible it is.” His eyes found Jack’s, and the trace of humor in them startled his friend. “You remember that gigantic hourglass back in The Depot?” When Jack nodded, Richard said, “Well, that was it, really . . . when I saw that thing, I knew I wasn’t just making everything up. Because I knew I couldn’t have made up that thing. Couldn’t. Just . . . couldn’t. If I were going to invent a primitive clock, it’d have all sorts of wheels, and big pulleys . . . it wouldn’t be so simple. So I didn’t make it up. Therefore it was real. Therefore everything else was real, too.”

“Well, how do you feel now?” Jack asked. “You’ve been asleep for a long time.”

“I’m still so tired I can hardly hold my head up. I don’t feel very good in general, I’m afraid.”

“Richard, I have to ask you this. Is there some reason why you’d be afraid to go to California?”

Richard looked down and shook his head.

“Have you ever heard of a place called the black hotel?”

Richard continued to shake his head. He was not telling the truth, but as Jack recognized, he was facing as much of it as he could. Anything more—for Jack was suddenly sure that there was more, quite a lot of it—would have to wait. Until they actually reached the black hotel, maybe. Rushton’s Twinner, Jason’s Twinner: yes, together they would reach the Talisman’s home and prison.

“Well, all right,” he said. “Can you walk okay?”

“I guess so.”

“Good, because there’s something I want to do now—since you’re not dying of a brain tumor anymore, I mean. And I need your help.”

“What’s that?” Richard asked. He wiped his face with a trembling hand.

“I want to open up one or two of those cases on the flatcar and see if we can get ourselves some weapons.”

“I hate and detest guns,” Richard said. “You should, too. If nobody had any guns, your father—”

“Yeah, and if pigs had wings they’d fly,” Jack said. “I’m pretty sure somebody’s following us.”

“Well, maybe it’s my dad,” Richard said in a hopeful voice.

Jack grunted, and eased the little gearshift out of the first slot. The train appreciably began to lose power. When it had coasted to a halt, Jack put the shift in neutral. “Can you climb down okay, do you think?”

“Oh sure,” Richard said, and stood up too quickly. His legs bowed out at the knees, and he sat down hard on the bench. His face now seemed even grayer than it had been, and moisture shone on his forehead and upper lip. “Ah, maybe not,” he whispered.

“Just take it easy,” Jack said, and moved beside him and placed one hand on the crook of his elbow, the other on Richard’s damp, warm forehead. “Relax.” Richard closed his eyes briefly, then looked into Jack’s own eyes with an expression of perfect trust.

“I tried to do it too fast,” he said. “I’m all pins and needles from staying in the same position for so long.”

“Nice and easy, then,” Jack said, and helped a hissing Richard get to his feet.

“Hurts.”

“Only for a little while. I need your help, Richard.”

Richard experimentally stepped forward, and hissed in air again. “Ooch.” He moved the other leg forward. Then he leaned forward slightly and slapped his palms against his thighs and calves. As Jack watched, Richard’s face altered, but this time not with pain—a look of almost rubbery astonishment had printed itself there.

Jack followed the direction of his friend’s eyes and saw one of the featherless, monkey-faced birds gliding past the front of the train.

“Yeah, there’re a lot of funny things out here,” Jack said. “I’m going to feel a lot better if we can find some guns under that tarp.”

“What do you suppose is on the other side of those hills?” Richard asked. “More of the same?”

“No, I think there are more people over there,” Jack said. “If you can call them people. I’ve caught somebody watching us twice.”

At the expression of quick panic which flooded into Richard’s face, Jack said, “I don’t think it was anybody from your school. But it could be something just as bad—I’m not trying to scare you, buddy, but I’ve seen a little more of the Blasted Lands than you have.”

“The Blasted Lands,” Richard said dubiously. He squinted out at the red dusty valley with its scabrous patches of piss-colored grass. “Oh—that tree—ah . . .”

“I know,” Jack said. “You have to just sort of learn to ignore it.”

“Who on earth would create this kind of devastation?” Richard asked. “This isn’t natural, you know.”

“Maybe we’ll find out someday.” Jack helped Richard leave the cab, so that both stood on a narrow running board that covered the tops of the wheels. “Don’t get down in that dust,” he warned Richard. “We don’t know how deep it is. I don’t want to have to pull you out of it.”

Richard shuddered—but it may have been because he had just noticed out of the side of his eye another of the screaming, anguished trees. Together the two boys edged along the side of the stationary train until they could swing onto the coupling of the empty boxcar. From there a narrow metal ladder led to the roof of the car. On the boxcar’s far end another ladder let them descend to the flatcar.

Jack pulled at the thick hairy rope, trying to remember how Anders had loosened it so easily. “I think it’s here,” Richard said, holding up a twisted loop like a hangman’s noose. “Jack?”

“Give it a try.”

Richard was not strong enough to loosen the knot by himself, but when Jack helped him tug on the protruding cord, the “noose” smoothly disappeared, and the tarpaulin collapsed over the nest of boxes. Jack pulled the edge back over those closest—MACHINE PARTS—and over a smaller set of boxes Jack had not seen before, marked LENSES. “There they are,” he said. “I just wish we had a crowbar.” He glanced up toward the rim of the valley, and a tortured tree opened its mouth and silently yowled. Was that another head up there, peering over? It might have been one of the enormous worms, sliding toward them. “Come on, let’s try to push the top off one of these boxes,” he said, and Richard meekly came toward him.

After six mighty heaves against the top of one of the crates, Jack finally felt movement and heard the nails creak. Richard continued to strain at his side of the box. “That’s all right,” Jack said to him. Richard seemed even grayer and less healthy than he had before exerting himself. “I’ll get it, next push.” Richard stepped back and almost collapsed over one of the smaller boxes. He straightened himself and began to probe further under the loose tarpaulin.

Jack set himself before the tall box and clamped his jaw shut. He placed his hands on the corner of the lid. After taking in a long breath, he pushed up until his muscles began to shake. Just before he was going to have to ease up, the nails creaked again and began to slide out of the wood. Jack yelled “AAAGH!” and heaved the top off the box.

Stacked inside the carton, slimy with grease, were half a dozen guns of a sort Jack had never seen before—like grease-guns metamorphosing into butterflies, half-mechanical, half-insectile. He pulled one out and looked at it more closely, trying to see if he could figure out how it worked. It was an automatic weapon, so it would need a clip. He bent down and used the barrel of the weapon to pry off the top of one of the LENSES cartons. As he had expected, in the second, smaller box stood a little pile of heavily greased clips packed in plastic beads.

“It’s an Uzi,” Richard said behind him. “Israeli machinegun. Pretty fashionable weapon, I gather. The terrorists’ favorite toy.”

“How do you know that?” Jack asked, reaching in for another of the guns.

“I watch television. How do you think?”

Jack experimented with the clip, at first trying to fit it into the cavity upside-down, then finding the correct position. Next he found the safety and clicked it off, then on again.

“Those things are so damn ugly,” Richard said.

“You get one, too, so don’t complain.” Jack took a second clip for Richard, and after a moment’s consideration took all the clips out of the box, put two in his pockets, tossed two to Richard, who managed to catch them both, and slid the remaining clips into his haversack.

“Ugh,” Richard said.

“I guess it’s insurance,” Jack said.

9

Richard collapsed on the seat as soon as they got back to the cab—the trips up and down the two ladders and inching along the narrow strip of metal above the wheels had taken nearly all of his energy. But he made room for Jack to sit down and watched with heavy-lidded eyes while his friend started the train rolling again. Jack picked up his serape and began massaging his gun with it.

“What are you doing?”

“Rubbing the grease off. You’d better do it, too, when I’m done.”

For the rest of the day the two boys sat in the open cab of the train, sweating, trying not to take into account the wailing trees, the corrupt stink of the passing landscape, their hunger. Jack noticed that a little garden of open sores had bloomed around Richard’s mouth. Finally Jack took Richard’s Uzi from his hand, wiped it free of grease, and pushed in the clip. Sweat burned saltily in cracks on his lips.

Jack closed his eyes. Maybe he had not seen those heads peering over the rim of the valley; maybe they were not being followed after all. He heard the batteries sizzle and send off a big snapping spark, and felt Richard jump at it. An instant later he was asleep, dreaming of food.

10

When Richard shook Jack’s shoulder, bringing him up out of a world in which he had been eating a pizza the size of a truck tire, the shadows were just beginning to spread across the valley, softening the agony of the wailing trees. Even they, bending low and spreading their hands across their faces, seemed beautiful in the low, receding light. The deep red dust shimmered and glowed. The shadows printed themselves out along it, almost perceptibly lengthening. The terrible yellow grass was melting toward an almost mellow orange. Fading red sunlight painted itself slantingly along the rocks at the valley’s rim. “I just thought you might want to see this,” Richard said. A few more small sores seemed to have appeared about his mouth. Richard grinned weakly. “It seemed sort of special—the spectrum, I mean.”

Jack feared that Richard was going to launch into a scientific explanation of the color shift at sunset, but his friend was too tired or sick for physics. In silence the two boys watched the twilight deepen all the colors about them, turning the western sky into purple glory.

“You know what else you’re carrying on this thing?” Richard asked.

“What else?” Jack asked. In truth, he hardly cared. It could be nothing good. He hoped he might live to see another sunset as rich as this one, as large with feeling.

“Plastic explosive. All wrapped up in two-pound packages—I think two pounds, anyhow. You’ve got enough to blow up a whole city. If one of these guns goes off accidentally, or if someone else puts a bullet into those bags, this train is going to be nothing but a hole in the ground.”

“I won’t if you won’t,” Jack said. And let himself be taken by the sunset—it seemed oddly premonitory, a dream of accomplishment, and led him into memories of all he had undergone since leaving the Alhambra Inn and Gardens. He saw his mother drinking tea in the little shop, suddenly a tired old woman; Speedy Parker sitting at the base of a tree; Wolf tending his herd; Smokey and Lori from Oatley’s horrible Tap; all the hated faces from the Sunlight Home: Heck Bast, Sonny Singer, and the others. He missed Wolf with a particular and sharp poignancy, for the unfolding and deepening sunset summoned him up wholly, though Jack could not have explained why. He wished he could take Richard’s hand. Then he thought, Well, why not? and moved his hand along the bench until he encountered his friend’s rather grubby, clammy paw. He closed his fingers around it.

“I feel so sick,” Richard said. “This isn’t like—before. My stomach feels terrible, and my whole face is tingling.”

“I think you’ll get better once we finally get out of this place,” Jack said. But what proof do you have of that, doctor? he wondered. What proof do you have that you’re not just poisoning him? He had none. He consoled himself with his newly invented (newly discovered?) idea that Richard was an essential part of whatever was going to happen at the black hotel. He was going to need Richard Sloat, and not just because Richard Sloat could tell plastic explosive from bags of fertilizer.

Had Richard ever been to the black hotel before? Had he actually been in the Talisman’s vicinity? He glanced over at his friend, who was breathing shallowly and laboriously. Richard’s hand lay in his own like a cold waxen sculpture.

“I don’t want this gun anymore,” Richard said, pushing it off his lap. “The smell is making me sick.”

“Okay,” Jack said, taking it onto his own lap with his free hand. One of the trees crept into his peripheral vision and howled soundlessly in torment. Soon the mutant dogs would begin foraging. Jack glanced up toward the hills to his left—Richard’s side—and saw a manlike figure slipping through the rocks.

11

“Hey,” he said, almost not believing. Indifferent to his shock, the lurid sunset continued to beautify the unbeautifiable. “Hey, Richard.”

“What? You sick, too?”

“I think I saw somebody up there. On your side.” He peered up at the tall rocks again, but saw no movement.

“I don’t care,” Richard said.

“You’d better care. See how they’re timing it? They want to get to us just when it’s too dark for us to see them.”

Richard cracked his left eye open and made a half-hearted inspection. “Don’t see anybody.”

“Neither do I, now, but I’m glad we went back and got these guns. Sit up straight and pay attention, Richard, if you want to get out of here alive.”

“You’re such a cornball. Jeez.” But Richard did pull himself up straight and open both his eyes. “I really don’t see anything up there, Jack. It’s getting too dark. You probably imagined—”

“Hush,” Jack said. He thought he had seen another body easing itself between the rocks at the valley’s top. “There’s two. I wonder if there’ll be another one?”

“I wonder if there’ll be anything at all,” Richard said. “Why would anyone want to hurt us, anyhow? I mean, it’s not—”

Jack turned his head and looked down the tracks ahead of the train. Something moved behind the trunk of one of the screaming trees. Something larger than a dog, Jack recorded.

“Uh-oh,” Jack said. “I think another guy is up there waiting for us.” For a moment, fear castrated him—he could not think of what to do to protect himself from the three assailants. His stomach froze. He picked up the Uzi from his lap and looked at it dumbly, wondering if he really would be able to use this weapon. Could Blasted Lands hijackers have guns, too?

“Richard, I’m sorry,” he said, “but this time I think the shit is really going to hit the fan, and I’m going to need your help.”

“What can I do?” Richard asked, his voice squeaky.

“Take your gun,” Jack said, handing it to him. “And I think we ought to kneel down so we don’t give them so much of a target.”

He got on his knees and Richard imitated him in a slow-moving, underwater fashion. From behind them came a long cry, from above them another. “They know we saw them,” Richard said. “But where are they?”

The question was almost immediately answered. Still visible in the dark purplish twilight, a man—or what looked like a man—burst out of cover and began running down the slope toward the train. Rags fluttered out behind him. He was screaming like an Indian and raising something in his hands. It appeared to be a flexible pole, and Jack was still trying to work out its function when he heard—more than saw—a narrow shape slice through the air beside his head. “Holy mackerel! They’ve got bows and arrows!” he said.

Richard groaned, and Jack feared that he would vomit all over both of them.

“I have to shoot him,” he said.

Richard gulped and made some noise that wasn’t quite a word.

“Oh, hell,” Jack said, and flicked off the safety on his Uzi. He raised his head and saw the ragged being behind him just loosing off another arrow. If the shot had been accurate, he would never have seen another thing, but the arrow whanged harmlessly into the side of the cab. Jack jerked up the Uzi and depressed the trigger.

He expected none of what happened. He had thought that the gun would remain still in his hands and obediently expel a few shells. Instead, the Uzi jumped in his hands like an animal, making a series of noises loud enough to damage his eardrums. The stink of powder burned in his nose. The ragged man behind the train threw out his arms, but in amazement, not because he had been wounded. Jack finally thought to take his finger off the trigger. He had no idea of how many shots he had just wasted, or how many bullets remained in the clip.

“Didja get him, didja get him?” Richard asked.

The man was now running up the side of the valley, huge flat feet flapping. Then Jack saw that they were not feet—the man was walking on huge platelike constructions, the Blasted Lands equivalent of snowshoes. He was trying to make it to one of the trees for cover.

He raised the Uzi with both hands and sighted down the short barrel. Then he gently squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in his hands, but less than the first time. Bullets sprayed out in a wide arc, and at least one of them found its intended target, for the man lurched over sideways as though a truck had just smacked into him. His feet flew out of the snowshoes.

“Give me your gun,” Jack said, and took the second Uzi from Richard. Still kneeling, he fired half a clip into the shadowy dark in front of the train and hoped he had killed the creature waiting up there.

Another arrow rattled against the train, and another thunked solidly into the side of the boxcar.

Richard was shaking and crying in the bottom of the cab. “Load mine,” Jack said, and jammed a clip from his pocket under Richard’s nose. He peered up the side of the valley for the second attacker. In less than a minute it would be too dark to see anything beneath the rim of the valley.

“I see him,” Richard shouted. “I saw him—right there!” He pointed toward a shadow moving silently, urgently, among the rocks, and Jack spent the rest of the second Uzi’s clip noisily blasting at it. When he was done, Richard took the machine-gun from him and placed the other in his hands.

“Nize boyz, goot boyz,” came a voice from the right side—how far ahead of them it was impossible to tell. “You stop now, I stop now, too, geddit? All done now, dis bizness. You nize boys, maybe you zell me dat gun. You kill plenty goot dat way, I zee.”

“Jack!” Richard whispered frantically, warning him.

“Throw away the bow and arrows,” Jack yelled, still crouching beside Richard.

“Jack, you can’t!” Richard whispered.

“I t’row dem ’way now,” the voice came, still ahead of them. Something light puffed into the dust. “You boyz stop going, zell me gun, geddit?”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Come up here where we can see you.”

“Geddit,” the voice said.

Jack pulled back on the gearshift, letting the train coast to a halt. “When I holler,” he whispered to Richard, “jam it forward as fast as you can, okay?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Richard breathed.

Jack checked that the safety was off on the gun Richard had just given him. A trickle of sweat ran from his forehead directly into his right eye.

“All goot now, yaz,” the voice said. “Boyz can siddup, yaz. Siddup, boys.”

Way-gup, way-gup, pleeze, pleeze.

The train coasted toward the speaker. “Put your hand on the shift,” Jack whispered. “It’s coming soon.”

Richard’s trembling hand, looking too small and childlike to accomplish anything even slightly important, touched the gear lever.

Jack had a sudden, vivid memory of old Anders kneeling before him on a rippling wooden floor, asking, But will you be safe, my Lord? He had answered flippantly, hardly taking the question seriously. What were the Blasted Lands to a boy who had humped out kegs for Smokey Updike?

Now he was a lot more afraid that he was going to soil his pants than that Richard was going to lose his lunch all over the Territories version of Myles P. Kiger’s loden coat.

A shout of laughter erupted in the darkness beside the cab, and Jack pulled himself upright, bringing up the gun, and yelled just as a heavy body hit the side of the cab and clung there. Richard shoved the gearshift forward, and the train-jerked forward.

A naked hairy arm clamped itself on the side of the cab. So much for the wild west, Jack thought, and then the man’s entire trunk reared up over them. Richard screeched, and Jack very nearly did evacuate his bowels into his underwear.

The face was nearly all teeth—it was a face as instinctively evil as that of a rattler baring its fangs, and a drop of what Jack as instinctively assumed to be venom fell off one of the long, curved teeth. Except for the tiny nose, the creature looming over the boys looked very like a man with the head of a snake. In one webbed hand he raised a knife. Jack squeezed off an aimless, panicky shot.

Then the creature altered and wavered back for a moment, and it took Jack a fraction of a second to see that the webbed hand and the knife were gone. The creature swung forward a bloody stump and left a smear of red on Jack’s shirt. Jack’s mind conveniently left him, and his fingers were able to point the Uzi straight at the creature’s chest and pull the trigger back.

A great hole opened redly in the middle of the mottled chest, and the dripping teeth snapped together. Jack kept the trigger depressed, and the Uzi raised its barrel by itself and destroyed the creature’s head in a second or two of total carnage. Then it was gone. Only a large bloodstain on the side of the cab, and the smear of blood on Jack’s shirt, showed that the two boys had not dreamed the entire encounter.

“Watch out!” Richard yelled.

“I got him,” Jack breathed.

“Where’d he go?”

“He fell off,” Jack said. “He’s dead.”

“You shot his hand off,” Richard whispered. “How’d you do that?”

Jack held up his hands before him and saw how they shook. The stink of gunpowder encased them. “I just sort of imitated someone with good aim.” He put his hands down and licked his lips.

Twelve hours later, as the sun came up again over the Blasted Lands, neither boy had slept—they had spent the entire night as rigid as soldiers, holding their guns in their laps and straining to hear the smallest of noises. Remembering how much ammunition the train was carrying, every now and then Jack randomly aimed a few rounds at the lip of the valley. And that second entire day, if there were people or monsters in this far sector of the Blasted Lands, they let the boys pass unmolested. Which could mean, Jack tiredly thought, that they knew about the guns. Or that out here, so near to the western shore, nobody wanted to mess with Morgan’s train. He said none of this to Richard, whose eyes were filmy and unfocused, and who seemed feverish much of the time.

12

By evening of that day, Jack began to smell saltwater in the acrid air.