doesn’t start right away, or they get busted for illegal guns or dope, or something. My . . . my father told me that.”
Jack said nothing.
“What are you going to do with the gun, Jack?”
“I’m going to try and get rid of that train. Any objections?”
Richard shuddered; his mouth pulled down in a grimace of
distaste. “None whatever.”
“Will the Uzi do it, do you think? If I shoot into that plastic junk?”
“One bullet wouldn’t. A whole clip might.”
“Let’s see.” Jack pushed off the safety.
Richard grabbed his arm. “It might be wise to remove our-
selves to the fence before making the experiment,” he said.
“Okay.”
At the ivy-covered fence, Jack trained the Uzi on the flat
and squashy packages of plastique. He pulled the trigger, and the Uzi bellowed the silence into rags. Fire hung mystically from the end of the barrel for a moment. The gunfire was
shockingly loud in the chapellike silence of the deserted camp.
Birds squawked in surprised fear and headed out for quieter parts of the forest. Richard winced and pressed his palms
against his ears. The tarpaulin flirted and danced. Then, although he was still pulling the trigger, the gun stopped firing.
The clip was exhausted, and the train just sat there on the track.
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“Well,” Jack said, “that was great. Have you got any other
i—”
The flatcar erupted in a sheet of blue fire and a bellowing roar. Jack saw the flatcar actually starting to rise from the track, as if it were taking off. He grabbed Richard around the neck, shoved him down.
The explosions went on for a long time. Metal whistled
and flew overhead. It made a steady metallic rain-shower on the roof of the Quonset hut. Occasionally a larger piece made a sound like a Chinese gong, or a crunch as something really big just punched on through. Then something slammed
through the fence just above Jack’s head, leaving a hole bigger than both of his fists laced together, and Jack decided it was time to cut out. He grabbed Richard and started pulling him toward the gates.
“No!” Richard shouted. “The tracks!”
“What?”
“The tr—”
Something whickered over them and both boys ducked.
Their heads knocked together.
“The tracks!” Richard shouted, rubbing his skull with one pale hand. “Not the road! Go for the tracks!”
“Gotcha!” Jack was mystified but unquestioning. They had to go somewhere.
The two boys began to crawl along the rusting chain-link
fence like soldiers crossing no-man’s-land. Richard was
slightly ahead, leading them toward the hole in the fence
where the tracks exited the far side of the compound.
Jack looked back over his shoulder as they went—he could
see as much as he needed to, or wanted to, through the par-
tially open gates. Most of the train seemed to have been simply vaporized. Twisted chunks of metal, some recognizable,
most not, lay in a wide circle around the place where it had come back to America, where it had been built, bought, and
paid for. That they had not been killed by flying shrapnel was amazing; that they had not been even so much as scratched
seemed well-nigh impossible.
The worst was over now. They were outside the gate,
standing up (but ready to duck and run if there were residual explosions).
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“My father’s not going to like it that you blew up his train, Jack,” Richard said.
His voice was perfectly calm, but when Jack looked at
him, he saw that Richard was weeping.
“Richard—”
“No, he won’t like it at all,” Richard said, as if answering himself.
3
A thick and luxuriant stripe of weeds, knee-high, grew up the center of the railroad tracks leading away from the camp,
leading away in a direction Jack believed to be roughly south.
The tracks themselves were rusty and long unused; in places they had twisted strangely—rippled.
Earthquakes did that, Jack thought with queasy awe.
Behind them, the plastic explosive continued to explode.
Jack would think it was finally over, and then there would be another long, hoarse BREEE-APPP!—it was, he thought,
the sound of a giant clearing its throat. Or breaking wind. He glanced back once and saw a black pall of smoke hanging in
the sky. He listened for the thick, heavy crackle of fire—like anyone who has lived for any length of time on the California coast, he was afraid of fire—but heard none. Even the woods here seemed New Englandy, thick and heavy with moisture.
Certainly it was the antithesis of the pale-brown country
around Baja, with its clear, bone-dry air. The woods were almost smug with life; the railway itself was a slowly closing lane between the encroaching trees, shrubs, and ubiquitous
ivy ( poison ivy, I bet, Jack thought, scratching unconsciously at the bites on his hands), with the faded blue sky an almost matching lane overhead. Even the cinders on the railroad bed were mossy. This place seemed secret, a place for secrets.
He set a hard pace, and not only to get the two of them off his track before the cops or the firemen showed up. The pace also assured Richard’s silence. He was toiling too hard to
keep up to talk . . . or ask questions.
They had gone perhaps two miles and Jack was still con-
gratulating himself on this conversion-strangling ploy when Richard called out in a tiny, whistling voice, “Hey Jack—”
Jack turned just in time to see Richard, who had fallen a bit
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behind, toppling forward. The blemishes stood out on his
paper-white skin like birthmarks.
Jack caught him—barely. Richard seemed to weigh no
more than a paper bag.
“Oh, Christ, Richard!”
“Felt okay until a second or two ago,” Richard said in that same tiny, whistling voice. His respiration was very fast, very dry. His eyes were half-closed. Jack could only see whites and tiny arcs of blue irises. “Just got . . . faint. Sorry.”
From behind them came another heavy, belching explo-
sion, followed by the rattling sound of train-debris falling on the tin roof of the Quonset hut. Jack glanced that way, then anxiously up the tracks.
“Can you hang on to me? I’ll piggyback you a ways.”
Shades of Wolf, he thought.
“I can hang on.”
“If you can’t, say so.”
“Jack,” Richard said with a heartening trace of that old
fussy Richard-irritation, “if I couldn’t hang on, I wouldn’t say I could.”
Jack set Richard on his feet. Richard stood there, swaying, looking as if someone could blow once in his face and topple him over backward. Jack turned and squatted, the soles of his sneakers on one of the old rotted ties. He made his arms into thigh-stirrups, and Richard put his own arms around Jack’s
neck. Jack got to his feet and started to shag along the
crossties at a fast walk that was very nearly a jog. Carrying Richard seemed to be no problem at all, and not just because Richard had lost weight. Jack had been running kegs of beer, carrying cartons, picking apples. He had spent time picking rocks in Sunlight Gardener’s Far Field, can you gimme hallelujah. It had toughened him, all of that. But the toughening went deeper into the fiber of his essential self than something as simple and mindless as physical exercise could go. Nor
was all of it a simple function of flipping back and forth between the two worlds like an acrobat, or of that other world—
gorgeous as it could be—rubbing off on him like wet paint.
Jack recognized in a dim sort of way that he had been trying to do more than simply save his mother’s life; from the very beginning he had been trying to do something greater than
that. He had been trying to do a good work, and his dim real-
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ization now was that such mad enterprises must always be
toughening.
He did begin to jog.
“If you make me seasick,” Richard said, his voice jiggling
in time with Jack’s footfalls, “I’ll just vomit on your head.”
“I knew I could count on you, Richie-boy,” Jack panted,
grinning.
“I feel . . . extremely foolish up here. Like a human pogo stick.”
“Probably just how you look, chum.”
“Don’t . . . call me chum,” Richard whispered, and Jack’s
grin widened. He thought, Oh Richard, you bastard, live forever.
4
“I knew that man,” Richard whispered from above Jack.
It startled him, as if out of a doze. He had picked Richard up ten minutes ago, they had covered another mile, and there was still no sign of civilization of any kind. Just the tracks, and that smell of salt in the air.
The tracks, Jack wondered. Do they go where I think they go?
“What man?”
“The man with the whip and the machine-pistol. I knew