The Talisman (61 page)

“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.

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.