The Talisman by Stephen King

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

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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 com-

pletely 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

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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 feel-

ing 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 inexpress-ibly 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

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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 En-

gland 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 explo-

sive, grenades. The devil-things were here. The bad Wolfs

were not. The boxcar, however, was empty, and Jack found

that fact terribly persuasive.

Here’s a story for you, Richie-boy, and I’m very glad you’re asleep so I don’t have to tell it to you. Morgan knows I’m coming, and he’s planning a surprise party. Only it’s werewolves instead of naked girls who are going to jump out of the cake, and they’re supposed to have Uzi machine-guns and grenades as party-favors. Well, we sort of hijacked his train, and we’re running ten or twelve hours ahead of schedule, but if we’re heading into an encampment full of Wolfs waiting to catch the Territories choo-choo—and I think that’s just what we’re doing—we’re going to need all the surprise we can get.

Jack ran a hand up the side of his face.

It would be easier to stop the train well away from wher-

ever Morgan’s hit-squad was, and make a big circle around

the encampment. Easier and safer, too.

But that would leave the bad Wolfs around, Richie, can you dig it?

He looked down at the arsenal on the floor of the cab and

wondered if he could really be planning a commando raid on

Morgan’s Wolf Brigade. Some commandos. Good old Jack

Sawyer, King of the Vagabond Dishwashers, and His Co-

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matose Sidekick, Richard. Jack wondered if he had gone

crazy. He supposed he had, because that was exactly what he was planning—it would be the last thing any of them would

expect . . . and there had been too much, too much, too goddam much. He had been whipped; Wolf had been killed. They

had destroyed Richard’s school and most of Richard’s sanity, and, for all he knew, Morgan Sloat was back in New Hampshire, harrying his mother.

Crazy or not, payback time had come.

Jack bent over, picked up one of the loaded Uzis, and held

it over his arm as the tracks unrolled in front of him and the smell of salt grew steadily stronger.

5

During the small hours of the morning Jack slept awhile,

leaning against the accelerator bar. It would not have com-

forted him much to know such a device was called a dead-

man’s switch. When dawn came, it was Richard who woke

him up.

“Something up ahead.”

Before looking at that, Jack took a good look at Richard.

He had hoped that Richard would look better in daylight, but not even the cosmetic of dawn could disguise the fact that

Richard was sick. The color of the new day had changed the

dominant color in his skin-tone from gray to yellow . . . that was all.

“Hey! Train! Hello you big fuckin train!” This shout was guttural, little more than an animal roar. Jack looked forward again.

They were closing in on a narrow little pillbox of a build-

ing.

Standing outside the guardhouse was a Wolf—but any re-

semblance to Jack’s Wolf ended with the flaring orange eyes.

This Wolf ’s head looked dreadfully flattened, as if a great hand had scythed off the curve of skull at the top. His face seemed to jut over his underslung jaw like a boulder teetering over a long drop. Even the present surprised joy on that face could not conceal its thick, brutal stupidity. Braided pigtails of hair hung from his cheeks. A scar in the shape of an X rode his forehead.