The Talisman by Stephen King

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The Wolf was wearing something like a mercenary’s

uniform—or what he imagined a mercenary’s uniform would

look like. Baggy green pants were bloused out over black

boots—but the toes of the boots had been cut off, Jack saw, to allow the Wolf ’s long-nailed, hairy toes to protrude.

“Train!” he bark-growled as the engine closed the last fifty yards. He began to jump up and down, grinning savagely.

He was snapping his fingers like Cab Calloway. Foam flew

from his jaws in unlovely clots. “Train! Train! Fuckin train RIGHT HERE AND NOW!” His mouth yawned open in a

great and alarming grin, showing a mouthful of broken yel-

low spears. “You guys some kinda fuckin early, okay, okay!”

“Jack, what is it?” Richard asked. His hand was clutching

Jack’s shoulder with panicky tightness, but to his credit, his voice was fairly even.

“It’s a Wolf. One of Morgan’s.”

There, Jack, you said his name. Asshole!

But there was no time to worry about that now. They were

coming abreast of the guardhouse, and the Wolf obviously

meant to swing aboard. As Jack watched, he cut a clumsy ca-

per in the dust, cut-off boots thumping. He had a knife in the leather belt he wore across his naked chest like a bandoleer, but no gun.

Jack flicked the control on the Uzi to single-fire.

“Morgan? Who’s Morgan? Which Morgan?”

“Not now,” Jack said.

His concentration narrowed down to a fine point—the

Wolf. He manufactured a big, plastic grin for his benefit,

holding the Uzi down and well out of sight.

“Anders-train! All-fuckin-right! Here and now!”

A handle like a big staple stuck off from the right side of the engine, above a wide step like a running board. Grinning wildly, drizzling foam over his chin and obviously insane, the Wolf grabbed the handle and leaped lightly up onto the step.

“Hey, where’s the old man? Wolf! Where’s—”

Jack raised the Uzi and put a bullet into the Wolf ’s left eye.

The glaring orange light puffed out like a candle-flame in a strong gust of wind. The Wolf fell backward off the step like a man doing a rather stupid dive. He thudded loosely on the

ground.

“Jack!” Richard pulled him around. His face looked as

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wild as the Wolf ’s face had been—only it was terror, not joy, that distorted it. “Did you mean my father? Is my father involved in this?”

“Richard, do you trust me?”

“Yes, but—”

“Then let it go. Let it go. This is not the time.”

“But—”

“Get a gun.”

“Jack—”

“Richard, get a gun! ”

Richard bent over and got one of the Uzis. “I hate guns,”

he said again.

“Yeah, I know. I’m not particularly keen on them myself,

Richie-boy. But it’s payback time.”

6

The tracks were now approaching a high stockade wall. From

behind it came grunts and yells, cheers, rhythmic clapping, the sound of bootheels punching down on bare earth in steady rhythms. There were other, less identifiable sounds as well, but all of them fell into a vague set for Jack— military training operation. The area between the guardhouse and the approaching stockade wall was half a mile wide, and with all

this other stuff going on, Jack doubted that anyone had heard his single shot. The train, being electric, was almost silent.

The advantage of surprise should still be on their side.

The tracks disappeared beneath a closed double gate in the

side of the stockade wall. Jack could see chinks of daylight between the rough-peeled logs.

“Jack, you better slow down.” They were now a hundred

and fifty yards from the gate. From behind it, bellowing

voices chanted, “Sound-HOFF! Hun-too! Hree-FO! Sound-

HOFF!” Jack thought again of H. G. Wells’s manimals and shivered.

“No way, chum. We’re through the gate. You got just about

time to do the Fish Cheer.”

“Jack, you’re crazy!”

“I know.”

A hundred yards. The batteries hummed. A blue spark

jumped, sizzling. Bare earth flowed past them on either side.

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No grain here, Jack thought. If Noël Coward had written a play about Morgan Sloat, I guess he would have called it Blight Spirit.

“Jack, what if this creepy little train jumps its tracks?”

“Well, it might, I guess,” Jack said.

“Or what if it breaks through the gate and the tracks just

end? ”

“That’d be one on us, wouldn’t it?”

Fifty yards.

“Jack, you really have lost your mind, haven’t you?”

“I guess so. Take your gun off safety, Richard.”

Richard flicked the safety.

Thuds . . . grunts . . . marching men . . . the creak of

leather . . . yells . . . an inhuman, laughing shriek that made Richard cringe. And yet Jack saw a clear resolution in

Richard’s face that made Jack grin with pride. He means to stick by me—old Rational Richard or not, he really means to stick by me.

Twenty-five yards.

Shrieks . . . squeals . . . shouted commands . . . and a thick, reptilian cry— Groooo-OOOO! —that made the hair stand up on the back of Jack’s neck.

“If we get out of this,” Jack said, “I’ll buy you a chili-dog at Dairy Queen.”

“Barf me out!” Richard yelled, and, incredibly, he began to laugh. In that instant the unhealthy yellow seemed to fade a bit from his face.

Five yards—and the peeled posts which made up the gate

looked solid, yes, very solid, and Jack just had time to wonder if he hadn’t made a great big fat mistake.

“Get down, chum!”

“Don’t call m—”

The train hit the stockade gate, throwing them both for-

ward.

7

The gate was really quite strong, and in addition it was

double-barred across the inside with two large logs. Morgan’s train was not terribly big, and the batteries were nearly flat af-

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ter its long run across the Blasted Lands. The collision surely would have derailed it, and both boys might well have been

killed in the wreck, but the gate had an Achilles’ heel. New hinges, forged according to modern American processes,

were on order. They had not yet arrived, however, and the old iron hinges snapped when the engine hit the gate.

The train came rolling into the stockade at twenty-five

miles an hour, pushing the amputated gate in front of it. An obstacle course had been built around the stockade’s perimeter, and the gate, acting like a snowplow, began shoving

makeshift wooden hurdles in front of it, turning them, rolling them, snapping them into splinters.

It also struck a Wolf who had been doing punishment laps.

His feet disappeared under the bottom of the moving gate and were chewed off, customized boots and all. Shrieking and

growling, his Change beginning, the Wolf began to claw-

climb his way up the gate with fingernails which were

growing rapidly to the length and sharpness of a telephone-

lineman’s spikes. The gate was now forty feet inside the

stockade. Amazingly, he got almost to the top before Jack

dropped the gear-lever into neutral. The train stopped. The gate fell over, puffing up big dust and crushing the unfortunate Wolf beneath it. Underneath the last car of the train, the Wolf ’s severed feet continued to grow hair, and would for

several more minutes.

The situation inside the camp was better than Jack had

dared hope. The place apparently woke up early, as military installations have a way of doing, and most of the troops

seemed to be out, going through a bizarre menu of drills and body-building exercises.

“On the right!” he shouted at Richard.

“Do what?” Richard shouted back.

Jack opened his mouth and cried out: for Uncle Tommy

Woodbine, run down in the street; for an unknown carter,

whipped to death in a muddy courtyard; for Ferd Janklow; for Wolf, dead in Sunlight Gardener’s filthy office; for his

mother; but most of all, he discovered, for Queen Laura De-

Loessian, who was also his mother, and for the crime that was being carried out on the body of the Territories. He cried out as Jason, and his voice was thunder.

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“TEAR THEM UP!” Jack Sawyer/Jason DeLoessian bel-

lowed, and opened fire on the left.

8

There was a rough parade ground on Jack’s side, a long log

building on Richard’s. The log building looked like the bunkhouse in a Roy Rogers movie, but Richard guessed that it was a barracks. In fact, this whole place looked more familiar to Richard than anything he had seen so far in this weird world Jack had taken him into. He had seen places like it on the TV

news. CIA-supported rebels training for takeovers of South

and Central American countries trained in places like this.

Only, the training camps were usually in Florida, and those weren’t cubanos pouring out of the barracks—Richard didn’t know what they were.