Talisman 01 - The Talisman

  “What? You sick, too?”

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

  “I don’t care,” Richard said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I have to shoot him,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Jack!” Richard whispered frantically, warning him.

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

  “Jack, you can’t!” Richard whispered.

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

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

  “Geddit,” the voice said.

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

  “Oh, Jesus,” Richard breathed.

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

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

  Way-gup, way-gup, pleeze, pleeze.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Then the creat
ure 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.