Burny is grinning. “Hear ’em, don’tcha? They like you. So do I. We’re all friends here, don’t you see?” The grin becomes a grimace. He clutches his bloody middle again. “Goddamned blind old fool!” he gasps.
Then, suddenly, the trees are gone. The golf cart rolls out onto a sullen, crumbling plain. The bushes dwindle and Ty sees that farther along they give way entirely to a crumbled, rocky scree: hills rise and fall beneath that sullen gray sky. A few birds of enormous size wheel lazily. A shaggy, slump-shouldered creature staggers down a narrow defile and is gone from sight before Ty can see exactly what it is . . . not that he wanted to. The thud and pound of machinery is stronger, shaking the earth. The crump of pile drivers; the clash of ancient gears; the squall of cogs. Tyler can feel the golf cart’s steering wheel thrumming in his hands. Ahead of them the driveway ends in a wide road of beaten earth. Along the far side of it is a wall of round white stones.
“That thing you hear, that’s the Crimson King’s power plant,” Burny says. He speaks with pride, but there is more than a tinge of fear beneath it. “The Big Combination. A million children have died on its belts, and a zillion more to come, for all I know. But that’s not for you, Tyler. You might have a future after all. First, though, I’ll have my piece of you. Yes indeed.”
His blood-streaked hand reaches out and caresses the top of Ty’s buttock.
“A good agent’s entitled to ten percent. Even an old buzzard like me knows that.”
The hand draws back. Good thing. Ty has been on the verge of screaming, holding the sound back only by thinking of sitting at Miller Park with good old George Rathbun. If I’d really entered the Brewer Bash, he thinks, none of this would have happened.
But he thinks that may not actually be true. Some things are meant to be, that’s all. Meant.
He just hopes that what this horrible old creature wants is not one of them.
“Turn left,” Burny grunts, settling back. “Three miles. Give or take.” And, as Tyler makes the turn, he realizes the ribbons of mist rising from the ground aren’t mist at all. They’re ribbons of smoke.
“Sheol,” Burny says, as if reading his mind. “And this is the only way through it—Conger Road. Get off it and there are things out there that’d pull you to pieces just to hear you scream. My friend told me where to take you, but there might be just a leedle change of plan.” His pain-wracked face takes on a sulky cast. Ty thinks it makes him look extraordinarily stupid. “He hurt me. Pulled my guts. I don’t trust him.” And, in a horrible child’s singsong: “Carl Bierstone don’t trust Mr. Munshun! Not no more! Not no more!”
Ty says nothing. He concentrates on keeping the golf cart in the middle of Conger Road. He risks one look back, but the house, in its ephemeral wallow of tropical greenery, is gone, blocked from view by the first of the eroded hills.
“He’ll have what’s his, but I’ll have what’s mine. Do you hear me, boy?” When Ty says nothing, Burny brandishes the Taser. “Do you hear me, you asswipe monkey?”
“Yeah,” Ty says. “Yeah, sure.” Why don’t you die? God, if You’re there, why don’t You just reach down and put Your finger on his rotten heart and stop it from beating?
When Burny speaks again, his voice is sly. “You looked at the wall on t’other side, but I don’t think you looked close enough. Better take another gander.”
Tyler looks past the slumped old man. For a moment he doesn’t understand . . . and then he does. The big white stones stretching endlessly away along the far side of Conger Road aren’t stones at all. They’re skulls.
What is this place? Oh God, how he wants his mother! How he wants to go home!
Beginning to cry again, his brain numbed and buzzing beneath the cap that looks like cloth but isn’t, Ty pilots the golf cart deeper and deeper into the furnace-lands. Into Sheol.
Rescue—help of any kind—has never seemed so far away.
27
WHEN JACK AND Dale step into the air-conditioned cool, the Sand Bar is empty except for three people. Beezer and Doc are at the bar, with soft drinks in front of them—an End Times sign if there ever was one, Jack thinks. Far back in the shadows (any further and he’d be in the dive’s primitive kitchen), Stinky Cheese is lurking. There is a vibe coming off the two bikers, a bad one, and Stinky wants no part of it. For one thing, he’s never seen Beezer and Doc without Mouse, Sonny, and Kaiser Bill. For another . . . oh God, it’s the California detective and the freakin’ chief of police.
The jukebox is dark and dead, but the TV is on and Jack’s not exactly surprised to see that today’s Matinee Movie on AMC features his mother and Woody Strode. He fumbles for the name of the film, and after a moment it comes to him: Execution Express.
“You don’t want to be in on this, Bea,” Woody says—in this film Lily plays a Boston heiress named Beatrice Lodge, who comes west and turns outlaw, mostly to spite her straitlaced father. “This is looking like the gang’s last ride.”
“Good,” Lily says. Her voice is stony, her eyes stonier. The picture is crap, but as always, she is dead on character. Jack has to smile a little.
“What?” Dale asks him. “The whole world’s gone crazy, so what’s to smile about?”
On TV, Woody Strode says: “What do you mean, good? The whole damn world’s gone crazy.”
Jack Sawyer says, very softly: “We’re going to gun down as many as we can. Let them know we were here.”
On the screen, Lily says the same thing to Woody. The two of them are about to step aboard the Execution Express, and heads will roll—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Dale looks at his friend, dazed.
“I know most of her lines,” Jack says, almost apologetically. “She was my mother, you see.”
Before Dale can answer (supposing any answer came to mind), Jack joins Beezer and Doc at the bar. He looks up at the Kingsland Ale clock next to the television: 11:40. It should be high noon—in situations like this, it’s always supposed to be high noon, isn’t it?
“Jack,” Beezer says, and gives him a nod. “How ya doin’, buddy?”
“Not too bad. You boys carrying?”
Doc lifts his vest, disclosing the butt of a pistol. “It’s a Colt 9. Beez has got one of the same. Good iron, all registered and proper.” He glances at Dale. “You along for the ride, are you?”
“It’s my town,” Dale says, “and the Fisherman just murdered my uncle. I don’t understand very much of what Jack’s been telling me, but I know that much. And if he says there’s a chance we can get Judy Marshall’s boy back, I think we’d better try it.” He glances at Jack. “I brought you a service revolver. One of the Ruger automatics. It’s out in the car.”
Jack nods absently. He doesn’t care much about the guns, because once they’re on the other side they’ll almost certainly change into something else. Spears, possibly javelins. Maybe even slingshots. It’s going to be the Execution Express, all right—the Sawyer Gang’s last ride—but he doubts if it’ll be much like the one in this old movie from the sixties. Although he’ll take the Ruger. There might be work for it on this side. One never knows, does one?
“Ready to saddle up?” Beezer asks Jack. His eyes are deep-socketed, haunted. Jack guesses the Beez didn’t get much sleep last night. He glances up at the clock again and decides—for no other reason than pure superstition—that he doesn’t want to start for the Black House just yet, after all. They’ll leave the Sand Bar when the hands on the Kingsland clock stand at straight-up noon, no sooner. The Gary Cooper witching hour.
“Almost,” he says. “Have you got the map, Beez?”
“I got it, but I also got an idea you don’t really need it, do you?”
“Maybe not,” Jack allows, “but I’ll take all the insurance I can get.”
Beezer nods. “I’m down with that. I sent my old lady back to her ma’s in Idaho. After what happened with poor old Mousie, I didn’t have to argue too hard. Never sent her back before, man. Not even the time we had our bad rumble with the Pagans. But I got a terrible feeling about this.” He hesitates, then comes right out with it. “Feel like none of us are coming back.”
Jack puts a hand on Beezer’s meaty forearm. “Not too late to back out. I won’t think any less of you.”