"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 Te
rritories 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 Noel 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-ba
rred 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.