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 thun-
ked 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.
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“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
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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 unmo-lested. 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
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none of this to Richard, whose eyes were filmy and unfo-
cused, 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 spectacu-
lar. 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 ap-
pointed 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
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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