The creatures falling behind the train flattened out on the ground like snakes. Their heads were doglike, Jack saw, but their bodies had only vestigial hind legs and were, as far as he could see, hairless and tailless. They looked wet—the pink
hairless skin glistened like that of newborn mice. They
snarled, hating to be seen. It had been these awful mutant
dogs that Jack had seen on the banks of the railway cutting.
Exposed, flattened out like reptiles, they hissed and snarled and began creeping away—they, too, feared the fireballs and the trails the fireballs left on the earth. Then Jack caught the odor of the fireball, now moving swiftly, somehow almost angrily, toward the horizon again, igniting an entire row of the stunted trees. Hellfire, corruption.
Another of the fireballs came cruising over the horizon and
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blazed away off to the boys’ left. The stink of missed connections, of blasted hopes and evil desires—Jack, with his heart lodged just under his tongue, imagined he found all this in the foul smell broadcast by the fireball. Mewing, the crowd of
mutant dogs had dispersed into the threat of glinting teeth, a whisper of surreptitious movement, the hushushush of heavy legless bodies dragged through red dust. How many of them
were there? From the base of a burning tree which tried to
hide its head in its trunk two of the deformed dogs bared long teeth at him.
Then another fireball lurched over the wide horizon, spin-
ning off a wide glowing track a distance from the train, and Jack momentarily glimpsed what looked like a ramshackle
little shed set just below the curve of the desert wall. Before it stood a large humanoid figure, male, looking toward him. An impression of size, hairiness, force, malice . . .
Jack was indelibly conscious of the slowness of Anders’s
little train, of his and Richard’s exposure to anything that might want to investigate them a little more closely. The first fireball had dispatched the horrible dog-things, but human
residents of the Blasted Lands might prove more difficult to overcome. Before the light diminished into the glowing trail, Jack saw that the figure before the shed was following his
progress, turning a great shaggy head as the train passed by. If what he had seen were dogs, then what would the people be
like? In the last of the flaring light from the ball of fire, the manlike being scuttled around the side of its dwelling. A thick reptilian tail swung from its hindquarters, and then the thing had slipped around the side of the building, and then it was dark again and nothing—dogs, man-beast, shed—was visible.
Jack could not even be sure that he had really seen it.
Richard jerked in his sleep, and Jack pushed his hand
against the simple gearshift, vainly trying for more speed. The dog-noises gradually faded behind them. Sweating, Jack
raised his left wrist again to the level of his eyes and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed since the last time he’d
checked his watch. He astonished himself by yawning again,
and again regretted eating so much at The Depot.
“NO!” Richard screamed. “NO! I CAN’T GO THERE!”
There? Jack wondered. Where was “there”? California? Or
was it anywhere threatening, anywhere Richard’s precarious
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control, as insecure as an unbroken horse, might slip away
from him?
5
All night Jack stood at the gearshift while Richard slept,
watching the trails of the departed fireballs flicker along the reddish surface of the earth. Their odor, of dead flowers and hidden corruption, filled the air. From time to time he heard the chatter of the mutant dogs, or of other poor creatures, rising from the roots of the stunted, ingrown trees which still dotted the landscape. The ranks of batteries occasionally sent up snapping arcs of blue. Richard was in a state beyond mere sleep, wrapped in an unconsciousness he both required and
had willed. He made no more tortured outcries—in fact he
did nothing but slump into his corner of the cab and breathe shallowly, as if even respiration took more energy than he
had. Jack half-prayed for, half-feared the coming of the light.
When morning came, he would be able to see the animals; but what else might he have to see?
From time to time he glanced over at Richard. His friend’s
skin seemed oddly pale, an almost ghostly shade of gray.
6
Morning came with a relaxation of the darkness. A band of
pink appeared along the bowllike edge of the eastern horizon, and soon a rosy stripe grew up beneath it, pushing the optimistic pinkness higher in the sky. Jack’s eyes felt almost as red as that stripe, and his legs ached. Richard lay across the whole of the cab’s little seat, still breathing in a restricted, almost reluctant way. It was true, Jack saw—Richard’s face did seem peculiarly gray. His eyelids fluttered in a dream, and Jack hoped that his friend was not about to erupt in another of his screams. Richard’s mouth dropped open, but what
emerged was the tip of his tongue, not a loud outcry. Richard passed his tongue along his upper lip, snorted, then fell back into his stupefied coma.
Although Jack wished desperately to sit down and close
his own eyes, he did not disturb Richard. For the more Jack saw as the new light filled in the details of the Blasted Lands,
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the more he hoped Richard’s unconsciousness would endure
as long as he himself could endure the conditions of Anders’s cranky little train. He was anything but eager to witness the response of Richard Sloat to the idiosyncrasies of the Blasted Lands. A small amount of pain, a quantity of exhaustion—
these were a minimal price to pay for what he knew must be a temporary peace.
What he saw through his squinting eyes was a landscape in
which nothing seemed to have escaped withering, crippling
damage. By moonlight, it had seemed a vast desert, though a desert furnished with trees. Now Jack took in that his “desert”
was actually nothing of the sort. What he had taken for a reddish variety of sand was a loose, powdery soil—it looked as though a man would sink in it up to his ankles, if not his
knees. From this starved dry soil grew the wretched trees.
Looked at directly, these were much as they had appeared by night, so stunted they seemed to be straining over in an attempt to flee back under their own coiling roots. This was bad enough—bad enough for Rational Richard, anyhow. But
when you saw one of these trees obliquely, out of the side of your eye, then you saw a living creature in torment—the
straining branches were arms thrown up over an agonized
face caught in a frozen scream. As long as Jack was not looking directly at the trees, he saw their tortured faces in perfect detail, the open O of the mouth, the staring eyes and the
drooping nose, the long, agonized wrinkles running down the cheeks. They were cursing, pleading, howling at him—their
unheard voices hung in the air like smoke. Jack groaned. Like all the Blasted Lands, these trees had been poisoned.
The reddish land stretched out for miles on either side,
dotted here and there with patches of acrid-looking yellow
grass bright as urine or new paint. If it had not been for the hideous coloration of the long grass, these areas would have resembled oases, for each lay beside a small round body of
water. The water was black, and oily patches floated on its skin. Thicker than water, somehow; itself oily, poisonous. The second of these false oases that Jack saw began to ripple sluggishly as the train went past, and at first Jack thought with horror that the black water itself was alive, a being as tormented as the trees he no longer wished to see. Then he mo-
mentarily saw something break the surface of the thick fluid, a
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broad black back or side which rolled over before a wide, ravenous mouth appeared, biting down on nothing. A suggestion
of scales that would have been iridescent if the creature had not been discolored by the pool. Holy cow, Jack thought, was that a fish? It seemed to him to have been nearly twenty feet long, too big to inhabit the little pool. A long tail roiled the water before the entire enormous creature slipped back down into what must have been the pool’s considerable depth.
Jack looked up sharply at the horizon, imagining that he
had momentarily seen the round shape of a head peering over it. And then he had another of those shocks of a sudden displacement, similar to that the Loch Ness monster, or whatever it was, had given him. How could a head peer over the horizon, for God’s sake?