looked as though he were trying to become a circle. Jack
waved to Anders, who waved back, and then they were out of
the lighted shed and were covered only by the vast dark sky.
Anders’s silhouette appeared in the opening through which
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they had gone, as if he had decided to run after them. The
train was not capable of going more than thirty miles an hour, Jack thought, and at present was doing no better than eight or nine. This seemed excruciatingly slow. West, Jack said to
himself, west, west, west. Anders stepped back inside the
shed, and his beard lay against his massive chest like a covering of frost. The train lurched forward—another sizzling blue spark snapped upward—and Jack turned around on the
padded seat to see what was coming.
“NO!” Richard screamed, almost making Jack fall out of
the cab. “I CAN’T! CAN’T GO THERE!” He had drawn his
head up from his knees, but he wasn’t seeing anything—his
eyes were still clamped shut, and his whole face looked like a knuckle.
“Be quiet,” Jack said. Ahead the tracks arrowed through
the endless fields of waving grain; dim mountains, old teeth, floated in the western clouds. Jack glanced one last time over his shoulder and saw the little oasis of warmth and light
which was The Depot and the octagonal shed, slipping slowly backward behind him. Anders was a tall shadow in a lighted
doorway. Jack gave a final wave, and the tall shadow waved, too. Jack turned around again and looked over the immensity of grain, all that lyric distance. If this was what the Blasted Lands were like, the next two days were going to be positively restful.
Of course they were not, not like that at all. Even in the
moonlit dark he could tell that the grain was thinning out, becoming scrubby—about half an hour out of The Depot the
change had begun. Even the color seemed wrong now, almost
artificial, no longer the beautiful organic yellow he had seen before, but the yellow of something left too near a powerful heat source—the yellow of something with most of the life
bleached out of it. Richard now had a similar quality. For a time he had hyperventilated, then he had wept as silently and shamelessly as a jilted girl, then he had fallen into a twitchy sleep. “Can’t go back,” he had muttered in his sleep, or such were the words Jack thought he had heard. In sleep he seemed to dwindle.
The whole character of the landscape had begun to alter.
From the broad sweep of the plains in Ellis-Breaks, the land had mutated to secretive little hollows and dark little valleys
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crowded with black trees. Huge boulders lay everywhere,
skulls, eggs, giant teeth. The ground itself had changed, become much sandier. Twice the walls of the valleys grew up
right alongside the tracks, and all Jack could see on either side were scrubby reddish cliffs covered with low creeping
plants. Now and then he thought he saw an animal scurrying
for cover, but the light was too weak, and the animal too
quick, for him to identify it. But Jack had the eerie feeling that if the animal had frozen absolutely still in the middle of Rodeo Drive at high noon, he would still have been unable to identify it—a suggestion that the head was twice the size it should be, that this animal was better off hiding from human sight.
By the time ninety minutes had elapsed, Richard was
moaning in his sleep and the landscape had passed into utter strangeness. The second time they had emerged from one of
the claustrophobic valleys, Jack had been surprised by a sense of sudden openness—at first it was like being back in the Territories again, the Daydreams-land. Then he had noticed, even in the dark, how the trees were stunted and bent; then he had noticed the smell. Probably this had been slowly growing in his consciousness, but it was only after he had seen how the few trees scattered on the black plain had coiled themselves up like tortured beasts that he finally noticed the faint but unmistakable odor of corruption in the air. Corruption, hellfire.
Here the Territories stank, or nearly.
The odor of long-dead flowers overlaid the land; and be-
neath it, as with Osmond, was a coarser, more potent odor. If Morgan, in either of his roles, had caused this, then he had in some sense brought death to the Territories, or so Jack
thought.
Now there were no more intricate valleys and hollows;
now the land seemed a vast red desert. The queerly stunted
trees dotted the sloping sides of this great desert. Before Jack, the twin silver rails of the tracks rolled on through darkened reddish emptiness; to his side, empty desert also rolled away through the dark.
The red land seemed empty, anyhow. For several hours
Jack never actually caught sight of anything larger than the deformed little animals concealing themselves on the slopes of the railway cuttings—but there were times when he
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thought he caught a sudden sliding movement in the corner of one eye, turned to see it, and it was gone. At first he thought he was being followed. Then, for a hectic time, no longer than twenty or thirty minutes, he imagined that he was being
tracked by the dog-things from Thayer School. Wherever he
looked, something had just ceased to move—had nipped be-
hind one of the coiled-up trees or slipped into the sand. During this time the wide desert of the Blasted Lands did not
seem empty or dead, but full of slithery, hidden life. Jack pushed forward on the train’s gearshift (as if that could help) and urged the little train to go faster, faster. Richard slumped in the ell of his seat, whimpering. Jack imagined all those beings, those things neither canine nor human, rushing toward them, and prayed that Richard’s eyes would stay closed.
“NO!” Richard yelled, still sleeping.
Jack nearly fell out of the cab. He could see Etheridge and Mr. Dufrey loping after them. They gained ground, their
tongues lolling, their shoulders working. In the next second, he realized that he had seen only shadows travelling beside the train. The loping schoolboys and their headmaster had
winked out like birthday candles.
“NOT THERE!” Richard bawled. Jack inhaled carefully.
He, they, were safe. The dangers of the Blasted Lands were
overrated, mainly literary. In not very many hours the sun
would lift itself up again. Jack raised his watch to the level of his eyes and saw that they had been on the train just under two hours. His mouth opened in a huge yawn, and he found himself regretting that he had eaten so much back in The Depot.
A piece of cake, he thought, this is going to be—
And just as he was about to complete his paraphrase of the
Burns lines old Anders had rather startlingly quoted, he saw the first of the fireballs, which destroyed his complacency forever.
4
A ball of light at least ten feet in diameter tumbled over the edge of the horizon, sizzling hot, and at first arrowed straight toward the train. “Holy shit,” Jack muttered to himself, remembering what Anders had said about the balls of fire. If a
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man gets too close to one of those fireballs, he gets turrible sick . . . loses his hair . . . sores’re apt to raise all over his body . . . he begins to vomit . . . vomits and vomits until his stomach ruptures and his throat bursts. . . . He swallowed, hard—it was like swallowing a pound of nails. “Please, God,”
he said aloud. The giant ball of light sped straight toward him, as though it owned a mind and had decided to erase Jack
Sawyer and Richard Sloat from the earth. Radiation poison-
ing. Jack’s stomach contracted, and his testicles froze up under his body. Radiation poisoning. Vomits and vomits until his stomach ruptures . . .
The excellent dinner Anders had given him nearly leaped
out of his stomach. The fireball continued to roll straight toward the train, shooting out sparks and sizzling with its own fiery energy. Behind it lengthened a glowing golden trail
which seemed magically to instigate other snapping, burning lines in the red earth. Just when the fireball bounced up off the earth and took a zagging bounce like a giant tennis ball, wandering harmlessly off to the left, Jack had his first clear glimpse of the creatures he had all along thought were following them. The reddish-golden light of the wandering fireball, and the residual glow of the old trails in the earth, illuminated a group of deformed-looking beasts which had evidently been following the train. They were dogs, or once had been dogs, or their ancestors had been dogs, and Jack glanced uneasily at Richard to make sure that he was still sleeping.