The Talisman

  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 machinegun 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.

  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.