The Talisman

36

Jack and Richard Go to War

1

The sunset that night was wider—the land had begun to open out again as they approached the ocean—but not so spectacular. Jack stopped the train at the top of an eroded hill and climbed back to the flatcar again. He poked about for nearly an hour—until the sullen colors had faded from the sky and a quarter moon had risen in the east—and brought back six boxes, all marked LENSES.

“Open those,” he told Richard. “Get a count. You’re appointed Keeper of the Clips.”

“Marvelous,” Richard said in a wan voice. “I knew I was getting all that education for something.”

Jack went back to the flatcar again and pried up the lid of one of the crates marked MACHINE PARTS. While he was doing this he heard a harsh, hoarse cry somewhere off in the darkness, followed by a shrill scream of pain.

“Jack? Jack, you back there?”

“Right here!” Jack called. He thought it very unwise for the two of them to be yelling back and forth like a couple of washerwomen over a back fence, but Richard’s voice suggested that he was close to panicking.

“You coming back pretty soon?”

“Be right there!” Jack called, levering faster and harder with the Uzi’s barrel. They were leaving the Blasted Lands behind, but Jack still didn’t want to stand at a stop for too long. It would have been simpler if he could have just carried the box of machine-guns back to the engine, but it was too heavy.

They ain’t heavy, they’re my Uzis, Jack thought, and giggled a little in the dark.

“Jack?” Richard’s voice was high-pitched, frantic.

“Hold your water, chum,” he said.

“Don’t call me chum,” Richard said.

Nails shrieked out of the crate’s lid, and it came up enough for Jack to be able to pull it off. He grabbed two of the grease-guns and was starting back when he saw another box—it was about the size of a portable-TV carton. A fold of the tarp had covered it previously.

Jack went skittering across the top of the boxcar under the faint moonlight, feeling the breeze blow into his face. It was clean—no taint of rotted perfume, no feeling of corruption, just clean dampness and the unmistakable scent of salt.

“What were you doing?” Richard scolded. “Jack, we have guns! And we have bullets! Why did you want to go back and get more? Something could have climbed up here while you were playing around!”

“More guns because machine-guns have a tendency to overheat,” Jack said. “More bullets because we may have to shoot a lot. I watch TV, too, you see.” He started back toward the flatcar again. He wanted to see what was in that square box.

Richard grabbed him. Panic turned his hand into a birdlike talon.

“Richard, it’s going to be all right—”

“Something might grab you off!”

“I think we’re almost out of the Bl—”

“Something might grab me off! Jack, don’t leave me alone!”

Richard burst into tears. He did not turn away from Jack or put his hands to his face; he only stood there, his face twisted, his eyes spouting tears. He looked cruelly naked to Jack just then. Jack folded him into his arms and held him.

“If something gets you and kills you, what happens to me?” Richard sobbed. “How would I ever, ever, get out of this place?”

I don’t know, Jack thought. I really don’t know.

2

So Richard came with him on Jack’s last trip to the travelling ammo dump on the flatcar. This meant boosting him up the ladder and then supporting him along the top of the boxcar and helping him carefully down, as one might help a crippled old lady across a street. Rational Richard was making a mental comeback—but physically he was growing steadily worse.

Although preservative grease was bleeding out between its boards, the square box was marked FRUIT. Nor was that completely inaccurate, Jack discovered when they got it open. The box was full of pineapples. The exploding kind.

“Holy Hannah,” Richard whispered.

“Whoever she is,” Jack agreed. “Help me. I think we can each get four or five down our shirts.”

“Why do you want all this firepower?” Richard asked. “Are you expecting to fight an army?”

“Something like that.”

3

Richard looked up into the sky as he and Jack were recrossing the top of the boxcar, and a wave of faintness overtook him. Richard tottered and Jack had to grab him to keep him from toppling over the side. He had realized that he could recognize constellations of neither the Northern Hemisphere nor the Southern. Those were alien stars up there . . . but there were patterns, and somewhere in this unknown, unbelievable world, sailors might be navigating by them. It was that thought which brought the reality of all this home to Richard—brought it home with a final, undeniable thud.

Then Jack’s voice was calling him back from far away: “Hey, Richie! Jason! You almost fell over the side!”

Finally they were in the cab again.

Jack pushed the lever into the forward gear, pressed down on the accelerator bar, and Morgan of Orris’s oversized flashlight started to move forward again. Jack glanced down at the floor of the cab: four Uzi machine-guns, almost twenty piles of clips, ten to a pile, and ten hand grenades with pull-pins that looked like the pop-tops of beercans.

“If we haven’t got enough stuff now,” Jack said, “we might as well forget it.”

“What are you expecting, Jack?”

Jack only shook his head.

“Guess you must think I’m a real jerk, huh?” Richard asked.

Jack grinned. “Always have, chum.”

“Don’t call me chum!”

“Chum-chum-chum!”

This time the old joke raised a small smile. Not much, and it rather highlighted the growing line of lip-blisters on Richard’s mouth . . . but better than nothing.

“Will you be okay if I go back to sleep?” Richard asked, brushing machine-gun clips aside and settling in a corner of the cab with Jack’s serape over him. “All that climbing and carrying . . . I think I really must be sick because I feel really bushed.”

“I’ll be fine,” Jack said. Indeed, he seemed to be getting a second wind. He supposed he would need it before long.

“I can smell the ocean,” Richard said, and in his voice Jack heard an amazing mixture of love, loathing, nostalgia, and fear. Richard’s eyes slipped closed.

Jack pushed the accelerator bar all the way down. His feeling that the end—some sort of end—was now close had never been stronger.

4

The last mean and miserable vestiges of the Blasted Lands were gone before the moon set. The grain had reappeared. It was coarser here than it had been in Ellis-Breaks, but it still radiated a feeling of cleanness and health. Jack heard the faint calling of birds which sounded like gulls. It was an inexpressibly lonely sound, in these great open rolling fields which smelled faintly of fruit and more pervasively of ocean salt.

After midnight the train began to hum through stands of trees—most of them were evergreens, and their piney scent, mixed with the salty tang in the air, seemed to cement the connection between this place he was coming to and the place from which he had set out. He and his mother had never spent a great deal of time in northern California—perhaps because Bloat vacationed there often—but he remembered Lily’s telling him that the land around Mendocino and Sausalito looked very much like New England, right down to the salt-boxes and Cape Cods. Film companies in need of New England settings usually just went upstate rather than travelling all the way across the country, and most audiences never knew the difference.

This is how it should be. In a weird way, I’m coming back to the place I left behind.

Richard: Are you expecting to fight an army?

He was glad Richard had gone to sleep, so he wouldn’t have to answer that question—at least, not yet.

Anders: Devil-things. For the bad Wolfs. To take to the black hotel.

The devil-things were Uzi machine-guns, plastic explosive, grenades. The devil-things were here. The bad Wolfs were not. The boxcar, however, was empty, and Jack found that fact terribly persuasive.

Here’s a story for you, Richie-boy, and I’m very glad you’re asleep so I don’t have to tell it to you. Morgan knows I’m coming, and he’s planning a surprise party. Only it’s werewolves instead of naked girls who are going to jump out of the cake, and they’re supposed to have Uzi machine-guns and grenades as party-favors. Well, we sort of hijacked his train, and we’re running ten or twelve hours ahead of schedule, but if we’re heading into an encampment full of Wolfs waiting to catch the Territories choo-choo—and I think that’s just what we’re doing—we’re going to need all the surprise we can get.

Jack ran a hand up the side of his face.

It would be easier to stop the train well away from wherever Morgan’s hit-squad was, and make a big circle around the encampment. Easier and safer, too.

But that would leave the bad Wolfs around, Richie, can you dig it?

He looked down at the arsenal on the floor of the cab and wondered if he could really be planning a commando raid on Morgan’s Wolf Brigade. Some commandos. Good old Jack Sawyer, King of the Vagabond Dishwashers, and His Comatose Sidekick, Richard. Jack wondered if he had gone crazy. He supposed he had, because that was exactly what he was planning—it would be the last thing any of them would expect . . . and there had been too much, too much, too goddam much. He had been whipped; Wolf had been killed. They had destroyed Richard’s school and most of Richard’s sanity, and, for all he knew, Morgan Sloat was back in New Hampshire, harrying his mother.

Crazy or not, payback time had come.

Jack bent over, picked up one of the loaded Uzis, and held it over his arm as the tracks unrolled in front of him and the smell of salt grew steadily stronger.

5

During the small hours of the morning Jack slept awhile, leaning against the accelerator bar. It would not have comforted him much to know such a device was called a dead-man’s switch. When dawn came, it was Richard who woke him up.

“Something up ahead.”

Before looking at that, Jack took a good look at Richard. He had hoped that Richard would look better in daylight, but not even the cosmetic of dawn could disguise the fact that Richard was sick. The color of the new day had changed the dominant color in his skin-tone from gray to yellow . . . that was all.

“Hey! Train! Hello you big fuckin train!” This shout was guttural, little more than an animal roar. Jack looked forward again.

They were closing in on a narrow little pillbox of a building.

Standing outside the guardhouse was a Wolf—but any resemblance to Jack’s Wolf ended with the flaring orange eyes. This Wolf’s head looked dreadfully flattened, as if a great hand had scythed off the curve of skull at the top. His face seemed to jut over his underslung jaw like a boulder teetering over a long drop. Even the present surprised joy on that face could not conceal its thick, brutal stupidity. Braided pigtails of hair hung from his cheeks. A scar in the shape of an X rode his forehead.

The Wolf was wearing something like a mercenary’s uniform—or what he imagined a mercenary’s uniform would look like. Baggy green pants were bloused out over black boots—but the toes of the boots had been cut off, Jack saw, to allow the Wolf’s long-nailed, hairy toes to protrude.

“Train!” he bark-growled as the engine closed the last fifty yards. He began to jump up and down, grinning savagely. He was snapping his fingers like Cab Calloway. Foam flew from his jaws in unlovely clots. “Train! Train! Fuckin train RIGHT HERE AND NOW!” His mouth yawned open in a great and alarming grin, showing a mouthful of broken yellow spears. “You guys some kinda fuckin early, okay, okay!”

“Jack, what is it?” Richard asked. His hand was clutching Jack’s shoulder with panicky tightness, but to his credit, his voice was fairly even.

“It’s a Wolf. One of Morgan’s.”

There, Jack, you said his name. Asshole!

But there was no time to worry about that now. They were coming abreast of the guardhouse, and the Wolf obviously meant to swing aboard. As Jack watched, he cut a clumsy caper in the dust, cut-off boots thumping. He had a knife in the leather belt he wore across his naked chest like a bandoleer, but no gun.

Jack flicked the control on the Uzi to single-fire.

“Morgan? Who’s Morgan? Which Morgan?”

“Not now,” Jack said.

His concentration narrowed down to a fine point—the Wolf. He manufactured a big, plastic grin for his benefit, holding the Uzi down and well out of sight.

“Anders-train! All-fuckin-right! Here and now!”

A handle like a big staple stuck off from the right side of the engine, above a wide step like a running board. Grinning wildly, drizzling foam over his chin and obviously insane, the Wolf grabbed the handle and leaped lightly up onto the step.

“Hey, where’s the old man? Wolf! Where’s—”

Jack raised the Uzi and put a bullet into the Wolf’s left eye.

The glaring orange light puffed out like a candle-flame in a strong gust of wind. The Wolf fell backward off the step like a man doing a rather stupid dive. He thudded loosely on the ground.

“Jack!” Richard pulled him around. His face looked as wild as the Wolf’s face had been—only it was terror, not joy, that distorted it. “Did you mean my father? Is my father involved in this?”

“Richard, do you trust me?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then let it go. Let it go. This is not the time.”

“But—”

“Get a gun.”

“Jack—”

“Richard, get a gun!”

Richard bent over and got one of the Uzis. “I hate guns,” he said again.

“Yeah, I know. I’m not particularly keen on them myself, Richie-boy. But it’s payback time.”

6

The tracks were now approaching a high stockade wall. From behind it came grunts and yells, cheers, rhythmic clapping, the sound of bootheels punching down on bare earth in steady rhythms. There were other, less identifiable sounds as well, but all of them fell into a vague set for Jack—military training operation. The area between the guardhouse and the approaching stockade wall was half a mile wide, and with all this other stuff going on, Jack doubted that anyone had heard his single shot. The train, being electric, was almost silent. The advantage of surprise should still be on their side.

The tracks disappeared beneath a closed double gate in the side of the stockade wall. Jack could see chinks of daylight between the rough-peeled logs.

“Jack, you better slow down.” They were now a hundred and fifty yards from the gate. From behind it, bellowing voices chanted, “Sound-HOFF! Hun-too! Hree-FO! Sound-HOFF!” Jack thought again of H. G. Wells’s manimals and shivered.

“No way, chum. We’re through the gate. You got just about time to do the Fish Cheer.”

“Jack, you’re crazy!”

“I know.”

A hundred yards. The batteries hummed. A blue spark jumped, sizzling. Bare earth flowed past them on either side. No grain here, Jack thought. If Noël Coward had written a play about Morgan Sloat, I guess he would have called it Blight Spirit.

“Jack, what if this creepy little train jumps its tracks?”

“Well, it might, I guess,” Jack said.

“Or what if it breaks through the gate and the tracks just end?”

“That’d be one on us, wouldn’t it?”

Fifty yards.

“Jack, you really have lost your mind, haven’t you?”

“I guess so. Take your gun off safety, Richard.”

Richard flicked the safety.

Thuds . . . grunts . . . marching men . . . the creak of leather . . . yells . . . an inhuman, laughing shriek that made Richard cringe. And yet Jack saw a clear resolution in Richard’s face that made Jack grin with pride. He means to stick by me—old Rational Richard or not, he really means to stick by me.

Twenty-five yards.

Shrieks . . . squeals . . . shouted commands . . . and a thick, reptilian cry—Groooo-OOOO!—that made the hair stand up on the back of Jack’s neck.

“If we get out of this,” Jack said, “I’ll buy you a chili-dog at Dairy Queen.”

“Barf me out!” Richard yelled, and, incredibly, he began to laugh. In that instant the unhealthy yellow seemed to fade a bit from his face.

Five yards—and the peeled posts which made up the gate looked solid, yes, very solid, and Jack just had time to wonder if he hadn’t made a great big fat mistake.

“Get down, chum!”

“Don’t call m—”

The train hit the stockade gate, throwing them both forward.

7

The gate was really quite strong, and in addition it was double-barred across the inside with two large logs. Morgan’s train was not terribly big, and the batteries were nearly flat after its long run across the Blasted Lands. The collision surely would have derailed it, and both boys might well have been killed in the wreck, but the gate had an Achilles’ heel. New hinges, forged according to modern American processes, were on order. They had not yet arrived, however, and the old iron hinges snapped when the engine hit the gate.

The train came rolling into the stockade at twenty-five miles an hour, pushing the amputated gate in front of it. An obstacle course had been built around the stockade’s perimeter, and the gate, acting like a snowplow, began shoving makeshift wooden hurdles in front of it, turning them, rolling them, snapping them into splinters.

It also struck a Wolf who had been doing punishment laps. His feet disappeared under the bottom of the moving gate and were chewed off, customized boots and all. Shrieking and growling, his Change beginning, the Wolf began to claw-climb his way up the gate with fingernails which were growing rapidly to the length and sharpness of a telephone-lineman’s spikes. The gate was now forty feet inside the stockade. Amazingly, he got almost to the top before Jack dropped the gear-lever into neutral. The train stopped. The gate fell over, puffing up big dust and crushing the unfortunate Wolf beneath it. Underneath the last car of the train, the Wolf’s severed feet continued to grow hair, and would for several more minutes.

The situation inside the camp was better than Jack had dared hope. The place apparently woke up early, as military installations have a way of doing, and most of the troops seemed to be out, going through a bizarre menu of drills and body-building exercises.

“On the right!” he shouted at Richard.

“Do what?” Richard shouted back.

Jack opened his mouth and cried out: for Uncle Tommy Woodbine, run down in the street; for an unknown carter, whipped to death in a muddy courtyard; for Ferd Janklow; for Wolf, dead in Sunlight Gardener’s filthy office; for his mother; but most of all, he discovered, for Queen Laura DeLoessian, who was also his mother, and for the crime that was being carried out on the body of the Territories. He cried out as Jason, and his voice was thunder.

“TEAR THEM UP!” Jack Sawyer/Jason DeLoessian bellowed, and opened fire on the left.

8

There was a rough parade ground on Jack’s side, a long log building on Richard’s. The log building looked like the bunk-house in a Roy Rogers movie, but Richard guessed that it was a barracks. In fact, this whole place looked more familiar to Richard than anything he had seen so far in this weird world Jack had taken him into. He had seen places like it on the TV news. CIA-supported rebels training for takeovers of South and Central American countries trained in places like this. Only, the training camps were usually in Florida, and those weren’t cubanos pouring out of the barracks—Richard didn’t know what they were.

Some of them looked a bit like medieval paintings of devils and satyrs. Some looked like degenerate human beings—cave-people, almost. And one of the things lurching into the early-morning sunlight had scaly skin and nictitating eyelids . . . it looked to Richard Sloat like an alligator that was somehow walking upright. As he looked, the thing lifted its snout and uttered that cry he and Jack had heard earlier: Grooo-OOOOO! He just had time to see that most of these hellish creatures looked totally bewildered, and then Jack’s Uzi split the world with thunder.

On Jack’s side, roughly two dozen Wolfs had been doing callies on the parade ground. Like the guardhouse Wolf, most wore green fatigue pants, boots with cut-off toes, and bandoleer belts. Like the guard, they looked stupid, flatheaded, and essentially evil.

They had paused in the middle of a spastic set of jumping jacks to watch the train come roaring in, the gate and the unfortunate fellow who had been running laps at the wrong place and time plastered to the front. At Jack’s cry they began to move, but by then they were too late.

Most of Morgan’s carefully culled Wolf Brigade, hand-picked over a period of five years for their strength and brutality, their fear of and loyalty to Morgan, were wiped out in one spitting, raking burst of the machine-gun in Jack’s hands. They went stumbling and reeling backward, chests blown open, heads bleeding. There were growls of bewildered anger and howls of pain . . . but not many. Most of them simply died.

Jack popped the clip, grabbed another one, slammed it in. On the left side of the parade ground, four of the Wolfs had escaped; in the center two more had dropped below the line of fire. Both of these had been wounded but now both were coming at him, long-nailed toes digging divots in the packed dust, faces sprouting hair, eyes flaring. As they ran at the engine, Jack saw fangs grow out of their mouths and push through fresh, wiry hair growing from their chins.

He pulled the trigger on the Uzi, now holding the hot barrel down only with an effort; the heavy recoil was trying to force the muzzle up. Both of the attacking Wolfs were thrown back so violently that they flipped through the air head-over-heels like acrobats. The other four Wolfs did not pause; they headed for the place where the gate had been two minutes before.

The assorted creatures which had spilled out of the bunk-house-style barracks building seemed to be finally getting the idea that, although the newcomers were driving Morgan’s train, they were a good deal less than friendly. There was no concentrated charge, but they began to move forward in a muttering clot. Richard laid the Uzi’s barrel on the chest-high side of the engine cab and opened fire. The slugs tore them open, drove them backward. Two of the things which looked like goats dropped to hands and knees—or hooves—and scurried back inside. Richard saw three others spin and drop under the force of the slugs. A joy so savage that it made him feel faint swept through him.

Bullets also tore open the whitish-green belly of the alligator-thing, and a blackish fluid—ichor, not blood—began to pour out of it. It fell backward, but its tail seemed to cushion it. It sprang back up and leaped at Richard’s side of the train. It uttered its rough, powerful cry again . . . and this time it seemed to Richard that there was something hideously feminine in that cry.

He pulled the trigger of the Uzi. Nothing happened. The clip was spent.

The alligator-thing ran with slow, clumsy, thudding determination. Its eyes sparkled with murderous fury . . . and intelligence. The vestiges of breasts bounced on its scaly chest.

He bent, groped, without taking his eyes off the were-alligator, and found one of the grenades.

Seabrook Island, Richard thought dreamily. Jack calls this place the Territories, but it’s really Seabrook Island, and there is no need to be afraid, really no need; this is all a dream and if that thing’s scaly claws settle around my neck I will surely wake up, and even if it’s not all a dream, Jack will save me somehow—I know he will, I know it, because over here Jack is some kind of a god.

He pulled the pin on the grenade, restrained the strong urge he felt to simply chuck it in a panicky frenzy, and lobbed it gently, underhand. “Jack, get down!”

Jack dropped below the level of the engine cab’s sides at once, without looking. Richard did, too, but not before he had seen an incredible, blackly comic thing: the alligator-creature had caught the grenade . . . and was trying to eat it.

The explosion was not the dull crump Richard had expected but a loud, braying roar that drilled into his ears, hurting them badly. He heard a splash, as if someone had thrown a bucket of water against his side of the train.

He looked up and saw that the engine, boxcar and flatcar were covered with hot guts, black blood, and shreds of the alligator-creature’s flesh. The entire front of the barracks building had been blown away. Much of the splintered rubble was bloody. In the midst of it he saw a hairy foot in a boot with a cut-off toe.

The jackstraw blowdown of logs was thrown aside as he watched, and two of the goatlike creatures began to pull themselves out. Richard bent, found a fresh clip, and slammed it into his gun. It was getting hot, just as Jack had said it would.

Whoopee! Richard thought faintly, and opened fire again.

9

When Jack popped up after the grenade explosion, he saw that the four Wolfs who had escaped his first two fusillades were just running through the hole where the gate had been. They were howling with terror. They were running side by side, and Jack had a clear shot at them. He raised the Uzi—then lowered it again, knowing he would see them later, probably at the black hotel, knowing he was a fool . . . but, fool or not, he was unable to just let them have it in the back.

Now a high, womanish shrieking began from behind the barracks. “Get out there! Get out there, I say! Move! Move!” There was the whistling crack of a whip.

Jack knew that sound, and he knew that voice. He had been wrapped up in a strait-jacket when he had last heard it. Jack would have known that voice anywhere.

—If his retarded friend shows up, shoot him.

Well, you managed that, but maybe now it’s payback time—and maybe, from the way your voice sounds, you know it.

“Get them, what’s the matter with you cowards? Get them, do I have to show you how to do everything? Follow us, follow us!”

Three creatures came from behind what remained of the barracks, and only one of them was clearly human—Osmond. He carried his whip in one hand, a Sten gun in the other. He wore a red cloak and black boots and white silk pants with wide, flowing legs. They were splattered with fresh blood. To his left was a shaggy goat-creature wearing jeans and Westernstyle boots. This creature and Jack looked at each other and shared a moment of complete recognition. It was the dreadful barroom cowboy from the Oatley Tap. It was Randolph Scott. It was Elroy. It grinned at Jack; its long tongue snaked out and lapped its wide upper lip.

“Get him!” Osmond screamed at Elroy.

Jack tried to lift the Uzi, but it suddenly seemed very heavy in his arms. Osmond was bad, the reappearance of Elroy was worse, but the thing between the two of them was a nightmare. It was the Territories version of Reuel Gardener, of course; the son of Osmond, the son of Sunlight. And it did indeed look a bit like a child—a child as drawn by a bright kindergarten student with a cruel turn of mind.

It was curdy-white and skinny; one of its arms ended in a wormy tentacle that somehow reminded Jack of Osmond’s whip. Its eyes, one of them adrift, were on different levels. Fat red sores covered its cheeks.

Some of it’s radiation sickness . . . Jason, I think Osmond’s boy might have gotten a little too close to one of those fireballs . . . but the rest of it . . . Jason . . . Jesus . . . what was its mother? In the name of all the worlds, WHAT WAS ITS MOTHER?

“Get the Pretender!” Osmond was shrieking. “Save Morgan’s son but get the Pretender! Get the false Jason! Get out here, you cowards! They’re out of bullets!”

Roars, bellows. In a moment, Jack knew, a fresh contingent of Wolfs, supported by Assorted Geeks and Freaks, was going to appear from the back end of the long barracks, where they would have been shielded from the explosion, where they had probably been cowering with their heads down, and where they would have remained . . . except for Osmond.

“Should have stayed off the road, little chicken,” Elroy grunted, and ran at the train. His tail was swishing through the air. Reuel Gardener—or whatever Reuel was in this world—made a thick mewling sound and attempted to follow. Osmond reached out and hauled him back; his fingers, Jack saw, appeared to slide right into the monster-boy’s slatlike, repulsive neck.

Then he raised the Uzi and fired an entire clip, point-blank, into Elroy’s face. It tore the goat-thing’s entire head off, and yet Elroy, headless, continued to climb for a moment, and one of his hands, the fingers melted together in two clumps to make a parody of a cloven hoof, pawed blindly for Jack’s head before it tumbled backward.

Jack stared at it, stunned—he had dreamed that final night-marish confrontation at the Oatley Tap over and over again, trying to stumble away from the monster through what seemed to be a dark jungle filled with bedsprings and broken glass. Now here was that creature, and he had somehow killed it. It was hard to get his mind around the fact. It was as if he had killed childhood’s bogeyman.

Richard was screaming—and his machine-gun roared, nearly deafening Jack.

“It’s Reuel! Oh Jack oh my God oh Jason it’s Reuel, it’s Reuel—”

The Uzi in Richard’s hands coughed out another short burst before falling silent, its clip spent. Reuel shook free of his father. He lurched and hopped toward the train, mewling. His upper lip curled back, revealing long teeth that looked false and flimsy, like the wax teeth children don at Halloween.

Richard’s final burst took him in the chest and neck, punching holes in the brown kilt-cum-jumper he wore, ripping open flesh in long, ragged furrows. Sluggish rills of dark blood flowed from these wounds, but no more. Reuel might once have been human—Jack supposed it was just possible. If so, he was not human now; the bullets did not even slow him down. The thing which leaped clumsily over Elroy’s body was a demon. It smelled like a wet toadstool.

Something was growing warm against Jack’s leg. Just warm at first . . . then hot. What was it? Felt like he had a teakettle in his pocket. But he didn’t have time to think. Things were unfolding in front of him. In Technicolor.

Richard dropped his Uzi and staggered back, clapping his hands to his face. His horrified eyes stared out at the Reuel-thing through the bars of his fingers.

“Don’t let him get me, Jack! Don’t let him get meeeee. . . .”

Reuel bubbled and mewled. His hands slapped against the side of the engine and the sound was like large fins slapping down on thick mud.

Jack saw there were indeed thick, yellowish webs between the fingers.

“Come back!” Osmond was yelling at his son, and the fear in his voice was unmistakable. “Come back, he’s bad, he’ll hurt you, all boys are bad, it’s axiomatic, come back, come back!”

Reuel burbled and grunted enthusiastically. He pulled himself up and Richard screamed insanely, backing into the far corner of the cab.

“DON’T LET HIM GET MEEEEEEE—”

More Wolfs, more strange freaks charging around the corner. One of them, a creature with curly ram’s horns jutting from the sides of its head and wearing only a pair of patched L’il Abner britches, fell down and was trampled by the others.

Heat against Jack’s leg in a circle.

Reuel, now throwing one reedy leg over the side of the cab. It was slobbering, reaching for him, and the leg was writhing, it wasn’t a leg at all, it was a tentacle. Jack raised the Uzi and fired.

Half of the Reuel-thing’s face sheered away like pudding. A flood of worms began to fall out of what was left.

Reuel was still coming.

Reaching for him with those webbed fingers.

Richard’s shrieks, Osmond’s shrieks merging, melting together into one.

Heat like a branding iron against his leg and suddenly he knew what it was, even as Reuel’s hands squashed down on his shoulders he knew—it was the coin Captain Farren had given him, the coin Anders had refused to take.

He drove his hand into his pocket. The coin was like a chunk of ore in his hand—he made a fist around it, and felt power ram through him in big volts. Reuel felt it, too. His triumphant slobberings and grunts became mewlings of fear. He tried to back away, his one remaining eye rolling wildly.

Jack brought the coin out. It glowed red-hot in his hand. He felt the heat clearly—but it was not burning him.

The profile of the Queen glowed like the sun.

“In her name, you filthy, aborted thing!” Jack shouted. “Get you off the skin of this world!” He opened his fist and slammed his hand into Reuel’s forehead.

Reuel and his father shrieked in harmony—Osmond a tenor-verging-on-soprano, Reuel a buzzing, insectile bass. The coin slid into Reuel’s forehead like the tip of a hot poker into a tub of butter. A vile dark fluid, the color of overbrewed tea, ran out of Reuel’s head and over Jack’s wrist. The fluid was hot. There were tiny worms in it. They twisted and writhed on Jack’s skin. He felt them biting. Nevertheless, he pressed the first two fingers of his right hand harder, driving the coin farther into the monster’s head.

“Get you off the skin of this world, vileness! In the name of the Queen and in the name of her son, get you off the skin of this world!”

It shrieked and wailed; Osmond shrieked and wailed with it. The reinforcements had stopped and were milling behind Osmond, their faces full of superstitious terror. To them Jack seemed to have grown; he seemed to be giving off a bright light.

Reuel jerked. Uttered one more bubbling screech. The black stuff running out of his head turned yellow. A final worm, long and thickly white, wriggled out of the hole the coin had made. It fell to the floor of the engine compartment. Jack stepped on it. It broke open under his heel and splattered. Reuel fell in a wet heap.

Now such a screaming wail of grief and fury arose in the dusty stockade yard that Jack thought his skull might actually split open with it. Richard had curled into a fetal ball with his arms wrapped around his head.

Osmond was wailing. He had dropped his whip and the machine-pistol.

“Oh, filthy!” he cried, shaking his fists at Jack. “Look what you’ve done! Oh, you filthy, bad boy! I hate you, hate you forever and beyond forever! Oh, filthy Pretender! I’ll kill you! Morgan will kill you! Oh my darling only son! FILTHY! MORGAN WILL KILL YOU FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE! MORGAN—”

The others took up the cry in a whispering voice, reminding Jack of the boys in the Sunlight Home: can you gimme hallelujah. And then they fell silent, because there was the other sound.

Jack was tumbled back instantly to the pleasant afternoon he had spent with Wolf, the two of them sitting by the stream, watching the herd graze and drink as Wolf talked about his family. It had been pleasant enough . . . pleasant enough, that is, until Morgan came.

And now Morgan was coming again—not flipping over but bludgeoning his way through, raping his way in.

“Morgan! It’s—”

“—Morgan, Lord—”

“Lord of Orris—”

“Morgan . . . Morgan . . . Morgan . . .”

The ripping sound grew louder and louder. The Wolfs were abasing themselves in the dust. Osmond danced a shuffling jig, his black boots trampling the steel-tipped rawhide thongs woven into his whip.

“Bad boy! Filthy boy! Now you’ll pay! Morgan’s coming! Morgan’s coming!”

The air about twenty feet to Osmond’s right began to blur and shimmer, like the air over a burning incinerator.

Jack looked around, saw Richard curled up in the litter of machine-guns and ammunition and grenades like a very small boy who has fallen asleep while playing war. Only Richard wasn’t asleep, he knew, and this was no game, and if Richard saw his father stepping through a hole between the worlds, he feared, Richard would go insane.

Jack sprawled beside his friend and wrapped his arms tightly around him. That ripping-bedsheet sound grew louder, and suddenly he heard Morgan’s voice bellow in terrible rage:

“What is the train doing here NOW, you fools?”

He heard Osmond wail, “The filthy Pretender has killed my son!”

“Here we go, Richie,” Jack muttered, and tightened his grip around Richard’s wasted upper body. “Time to jump ship.”

He closed his eyes, concentrated . . . and there was that brief moment of spinning vertigo as the two of them flipped.