“They’re Slow Mutants,” the gunslinger said. “I don’t think they’ll bother us. They’re probably just as frightened of us as we are of — “
One of the forms broke free and shambled toward them, glowing and changing. The face was that of a starving idiot. The faint naked body had been transformed into a knotted mess of tentacular limbs with suckers.
The boy screamed again and crowded against the gunslinger’s leg like an affrighted dog.
One of the tentacles pawed across the flat platform of the handcar. It reeked of the wet and the dark and of strangeness. The gunslinger let loose of the handle and drew. He put a bullet through the forehead of the starving idiot face. It fell away, its faint swampfire glow fading, an eclipsed moon. The gunflash lay bright and branded on their dark retinas, fading only reluctantly. The smell of expended powder was hot and savage and alien in this buried place.
There were others, more of them. None moved against them overtly, but they were closing in on the tracks, a silent, hideous party of rubberneckers.
“You may have to pump for me,” the gunslinger said. “Can you?”
“Yes.”
“Then be ready.”
The boy stood close to him, his body poised. His eyes took in the Slow Mutants only as they passed, not traversing, not seeing more than they had to. The boy assumed a psychic bulge of terror, as if his very id had somehow sprung out through his pores to form a telepathic shield.
The gunslinger pumped steadily but did not increase his speed. The Slow Mutants could smell their terror, he knew that, but he doubted if terror would be enough for them. He and the boy were, after all, creatures of the light, and whole. How they must hate us, he thought, and wondered if they had hated the man in black in the same way.
He thought not, or perhaps he had passed among them and through their pitiful hive colony unknown, only the shadow of a dark wing.
The boy made a noise in his throat and the gunslinger turned his head almost casually. Four of them were charging the handcar in a stumbling way — one of them in the process of finding a handgrip.
The gunslinger let go of the handle and drew again, with the same sleepy casual motion. He shot the lead mutant in the head. The mutant made a sighing, sobbing noise and began to grin. Its hands were limp and fishlike, dead; the fingers clove to one another like the fingers of a glove long immersed in drying mud. One of these corpsehands found the boy’s foot and began to pull.
The boy shrieked aloud in the granite womb.
The gunslinger shot the mutant in the chest. It began to slobber through the grin. Jake was going off the side.
The gunslinger caught one of his arms and was almost pulled off balance himself. The thing was amazingly strong. The gunslinger put another bullet in the mutant’s head. One eye went out like a candle. Still it pulled.
They engaged in a silent tug of war for Jake’s jerking, wriggling body. They yanked on him like a wishbone.
The handcar was slowing down. The others began to close in — the lame, the halt, the blind. Perhaps they only looked for a Jesus to heal them, to raise them Lazaruslike from the darkness.
It’s the end for the boy, the gunslinger thought with perfect coldness. This is the end he meant. Let go and pump or hold on and be buried. The end for the boy.
He gave a tremendous yank on the boy’s arm and shot the mutant in the belly. For one frozen moment its grip grew even tighter and Jake began to slide off the edge again. Then the dead mudhands loosened, and the Slow Mutie fell on its face between the tracks behind the slowing handcar, still grinning.
“I thought you’d leave me,” the boy was sobbing. “I thought . . . I thought. …“
“Hold onto my belt,” the gunslinger said. “Hold on just as tight as you can.”
The hand worked into his belt and clutched there; the boy was breathing in great convulsive, silent gasps.
The gunslinger began to pump steadily again, and the handcar picked up speed. The Slow Mutants fell back a step and watched them go with faces hardly human (or pathetically so), faces that generated the weak phosphorescence common to those weird deepsea fishes that live under incredible black pressure, faces that held no anger or hate on their senseless orbs, but only what seemed to be a semiconscious, idiot regret.
“They’re thinning,” the gunslinger said. The drawnup muscles of his lower belly and privates relaxed the smallest bit. “They’re —“
The Slow Mutants had put rocks across the track. The way was blocked. It had been a quick, poor job, perhaps the work of only a minute to clear, but they were stopped. And someone would have to get down and move them. The boy moaned and shuddered closer to the gunslinger. The gunslinger let go of the handle and the handcar coasted noiselessly to the rocks, where it thumped to rest.
The Slow Mutants began to close in again, almost casually, almost as if they had been passing by, lost in a dream of darkness, and had found someone of whom to ask directions. A streetcorner congregation of the damned beneath the ancient rock.
“Are they going to get us?” The boy asked calmly.
“No. Be quiet a second.”
He looked at the rocks. The mutants were weak, of course, and had not been able to drag any of the boulders to block their way. Only small rocks. Only enough to stop them, to make someone get down.
“Get down,” the gunslinger said. “You’ll have to move them. I’ll cover you.
“No,” the boy whispered. “Please.”
“I can’t give you a gun and I can’t move the rocks and shoot too. You have to get down.”
Jake’s eyes rolled terribly; for a moment his body shuddered in tune with the turnings of his mind, and then he wriggled over the side and began to throw rocks to the right and the left madly, not looking.
The gunslinger drew and waited.
Two of them, lurching rather than walking, went for the boy with arms like dough. The guns did their work, stitching the darkness with redwhite lances of light that pushed needles of pain into the gunslinger’s eyes.
The boy screamed and continued to throw away rocks. Witchglow leaped and danced. Hard to see, now, that was the worst. Everything had gone to shadows.
One of them, glowing hardly at all, suddenly reached for the boy with rubber boogeyman arms. Eyes that ate up half the mutie’s head rolled wetly.
Jake screamed again and turned to struggle.
The gunslinger fired without allowing himself to think, before his spotty vision could betray his hands into a terrible quiver; the two heads were only inches apart. It was the mutie who fell, slitheringly.
Jake threw rocks wildly. The mutants milled just outside the invisible line of trespass, closing a little at a time, now very close. Others had caught up, swelling their number.
“All right,” the gunslinger said. “Get on. Quick.”
When the boy moved, the mutants came at them. Jake
was over the side and scrambling to his feet; the gunslinger was already pumping again, all out. Both guns were holstered now. They must run.
Strange hands slapped the metal plane of the car’s surface. The boy was holding his belt with both hands now, his face pressed tightly into the small of the gunslinger’s back.
A group of them ran onto the tracks, their faces full of that mindless, casual anticipation. The gunslinger was pumped full of adrenalin; the car was flying along the tracks into the darkness. They struck the four or five pitiful hulks full force. They flew like rotten bananas struck from the stem.
On and on, into the soundless, flying, banshee darkness.
After an age, the boy raised his face into the made wind, dreading and yet needing to know. The ghost of gunflashes still lingered on his retinas. There was nothing to see but the darkness and nothing to hear but the rumble of the river.
“They’re gone,” the boy said, suddenly fearing an end to the tracks in the darkness, and the wounding crash
as they jumped the rails and plunged to twisted ruin. He had ridden in cars; once his humorless father had driven at ninety on the New Jersey Turnpike and had been stopped. But he had never ridden like this, with the wind and the blindness and the terrors behind and ahead, with the sound of the river like a chuckling voice —
the voice of the man in black. The gunslinger’s arms were pistons in a lunatic human factory.
“They’re gone,” the boy said timidly, the words ripped from his mouth by the wind. “You can slow down now. We left them behind.”