“Richard, I have to ask you this. Is there some reason why
you’d be afraid to go to California?”
Richard looked down and shook his head.
“Have you ever heard of a place called the black hotel?”
Richard continued to shake his head. He was not telling
the truth, but as Jack recognized, he was facing as much of it as he could. Anything more—for Jack was suddenly sure that
there was more, quite a lot of it—would have to wait. Until they actually reached the black hotel, maybe. Rushton’s Twinner, Jason’s Twinner: yes, together they would reach the Talisman’s home and prison.
“Well, all right,” he said. “Can you walk okay?”
“I guess so.”
“Good, because there’s something I want to do now—since
you’re not dying of a brain tumor anymore, I mean. And I
need your help.”
“What’s that?” Richard asked. He wiped his face with a
trembling hand.
“I want to open up one or two of those cases on the flatcar and see if we can get ourselves some weapons.”
“I hate and detest guns,” Richard said. “You should, too. If nobody had any guns, your father—”
“Yeah, and if pigs had wings they’d fly,” Jack said. “I’m
pretty sure somebody’s following us.”
“Well, maybe it’s my dad,” Richard said in a hopeful voice.
Jack grunted, and eased the little gearshift out of the first slot. The train appreciably began to lose power. When it had coasted to a halt, Jack put the shift in neutral. “Can you climb down okay, do you think?”
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“Oh sure,” Richard said, and stood up too quickly. His legs bowed out at the knees, and he sat down hard on the bench.
His face now seemed even grayer than it had been, and mois-
ture shone on his forehead and upper lip. “Ah, maybe not,” he whispered.
“Just take it easy,” Jack said, and moved beside him and
placed one hand on the crook of his elbow, the other on
Richard’s damp, warm forehead. “Relax.” Richard closed his
eyes briefly, then looked into Jack’s own eyes with an expression of perfect trust.
“I tried to do it too fast,” he said. “I’m all pins and needles from staying in the same position for so long.”
“Nice and easy, then,” Jack said, and helped a hissing
Richard get to his feet.
“Hurts.”
“Only for a little while. I need your help, Richard.”
Richard experimentally stepped forward, and hissed in air
again. “Ooch.” He moved the other leg forward. Then he
leaned forward slightly and slapped his palms against his
thighs and calves. As Jack watched, Richard’s face altered, but this time not with pain—a look of almost rubbery astonishment had printed itself there.
Jack followed the direction of his friend’s eyes and saw one of the featherless, monkey-faced birds gliding past the front of the train.
“Yeah, there’re a lot of funny things out here,” Jack said.
“I’m going to feel a lot better if we can find some guns under that tarp.”
“What do you suppose is on the other side of those hills?”
Richard asked. “More of the same?”
“No, I think there are more people over there,” Jack said.
“If you can call them people. I’ve caught somebody watching us twice.”
At the expression of quick panic which flooded into
Richard’s face, Jack said, “I don’t think it was anybody from your school. But it could be something just as bad—I’m not
trying to scare you, buddy, but I’ve seen a little more of the Blasted Lands than you have.”
“The Blasted Lands,” Richard said dubiously. He squinted
out at the red dusty valley with its scabrous patches of piss-colored grass. “Oh—that tree—ah . . .”
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“I know,” Jack said. “You have to just sort of learn to ig-
nore it.”
“Who on earth would create this kind of devastation?”
Richard asked. “This isn’t natural, you know.”
“Maybe we’ll find out someday.” Jack helped Richard
leave the cab, so that both stood on a narrow running board that covered the tops of the wheels. “Don’t get down in that dust,” he warned Richard. “We don’t know how deep it is. I
don’t want to have to pull you out of it.”
Richard shuddered—but it may have been because he had
just noticed out of the side of his eye another of the screaming, anguished trees. Together the two boys edged along the side of the stationary train until they could swing onto the coupling of the empty boxcar. From there a narrow metal ladder led to the roof of the car. On the boxcar’s far end another ladder let them descend to the flatcar.
Jack pulled at the thick hairy rope, trying to remember
how Anders had loosened it so easily. “I think it’s here,”
Richard said, holding up a twisted loop like a hangman’s
noose. “Jack?”
“Give it a try.”
Richard was not strong enough to loosen the knot by him-
self, but when Jack helped him tug on the protruding cord, the
“noose” smoothly disappeared, and the tarpaulin collapsed
over the nest of boxes. Jack pulled the edge back over those closest—MACHINE PARTS—and over a smaller set of boxes
Jack had not seen before, marked LENSES. “There they are,” he said. “I just wish we had a crowbar.” He glanced up toward
the rim of the valley, and a tortured tree opened its mouth and silently yowled. Was that another head up there, peering over?
It might have been one of the enormous worms, sliding to-
ward them. “Come on, let’s try to push the top off one of these boxes,” he said, and Richard meekly came toward him.
After six mighty heaves against the top of one of the
crates, Jack finally felt movement and heard the nails creak.
Richard continued to strain at his side of the box. “That’s all right,” Jack said to him. Richard seemed even grayer and less healthy than he had before exerting himself. “I’ll get it, next push.” Richard stepped back and almost collapsed over one of the smaller boxes. He straightened himself and began to
probe further under the loose tarpaulin.
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Jack set himself before the tall box and clamped his jaw
shut. He placed his hands on the corner of the lid. After taking in a long breath, he pushed up until his muscles began to
shake. Just before he was going to have to ease up, the nails creaked again and began to slide out of the wood. Jack yelled
“AAAGH!” and heaved the top off the box.
Stacked inside the carton, slimy with grease, were half a
dozen guns of a sort Jack had never seen before—like greaseguns metamorphosing into butterflies, half-mechanical, half-insectile. He pulled one out and looked at it more closely, trying to see if he could figure out how it worked. It was an automatic weapon, so it would need a clip. He bent down and used the barrel of the weapon to pry off the top of one of the LENSES cartons. As he had expected, in the second, smaller
box stood a little pile of heavily greased clips packed in plastic beads.
“It’s an Uzi,” Richard said behind him. “Israeli machine-
gun. Pretty fashionable weapon, I gather. The terrorists’ favorite toy.”
“How do you know that?” Jack asked, reaching in for an-
other of the guns.
“I watch television. How do you think?”
Jack experimented with the clip, at first trying to fit it into the cavity upside-down, then finding the correct position.
Next he found the safety and clicked it off, then on again.
“Those things are so damn ugly,” Richard said.
“You get one, too, so don’t complain.” Jack took a second
clip for Richard, and after a moment’s consideration took all the clips out of the box, put two in his pockets, tossed two to Richard, who managed to catch them both, and slid the remaining clips into his haversack.
“Ugh,” Richard said.
“I guess it’s insurance,” Jack said.
9
Richard collapsed on the seat as soon as they got back to the cab—the trips up and down the two ladders and inching along the narrow strip of metal above the wheels had taken nearly all of his energy. But he made room for Jack to sit down and watched with heavy-lidded eyes while his friend started the
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train rolling again. Jack picked up his serape and began massaging his gun with it.
“What are you doing?”
“Rubbing the grease off. You’d better do it, too, when I’m
done.”
For the rest of the day the two boys sat in the open cab of the train, sweating, trying not to take into account the wailing trees, the corrupt stink of the passing landscape, their hunger.
Jack noticed that a little garden of open sores had bloomed around Richard’s mouth. Finally Jack took Richard’s Uzi
from his hand, wiped it free of grease, and pushed in the clip.