The Talisman (60 page)

“Well, how do you feel now?” Jack asked. “You’ve been asleep for a long time.”

“I’m still so tired I can hardly hold my head up. I don’t feel very good in general, I’m afraid.”

“Richard, I have to ask you this. Is there some reason why you’d be afraid to go to California?”

Richard looked down and shook his head.

“Have you ever heard of a place called the black hotel?”

Richard continued to shake his head. He was not telling the truth, but as Jack recognized, he was facing as much of it as he could. Anything more—for Jack was suddenly sure that there was more, quite a lot of it—would have to wait. Until they actually reached the black hotel, maybe. Rushton’s Twinner, Jason’s Twinner: yes, together they would reach the Talisman’s home and prison.

“Well, all right,” he said. “Can you walk okay?”

“I guess so.”

“Good, because there’s something I want to do now—since you’re not dying of a brain tumor anymore, I mean. And I need your help.”

“What’s that?” Richard asked. He wiped his face with a trembling hand.

“I want to open up one or two of those cases on the flatcar and see if we can get ourselves some weapons.”

“I hate and detest guns,” Richard said. “You should, too. If nobody had any guns, your father—”

“Yeah, and if pigs had wings they’d fly,” Jack said. “I’m pretty sure somebody’s following us.”

“Well, maybe it’s my dad,” Richard said in a hopeful voice.

Jack grunted, and eased the little gearshift out of the first slot. The train appreciably began to lose power. When it had coasted to a halt, Jack put the shift in neutral. “Can you climb down okay, do you think?”

“Oh sure,” Richard said, and stood up too quickly. His legs bowed out at the knees, and he sat down hard on the bench. His face now seemed even grayer than it had been, and moisture shone on his forehead and upper lip. “Ah, maybe not,” he whispered.

“Just take it easy,” Jack said, and moved beside him and placed one hand on the crook of his elbow, the other on Richard’s damp, warm forehead. “Relax.” Richard closed his eyes briefly, then looked into Jack’s own eyes with an expression of perfect trust.

“I tried to do it too fast,” he said. “I’m all pins and needles from staying in the same position for so long.”

“Nice and easy, then,” Jack said, and helped a hissing Richard get to his feet.

“Hurts.”

“Only for a little while. I need your help, Richard.”

Richard experimentally stepped forward, and hissed in air again. “Ooch.” He moved the other leg forward. Then he leaned forward slightly and slapped his palms against his thighs and calves. As Jack watched, Richard’s face altered, but this time not with pain—a look of almost rubbery astonishment had printed itself there.

Jack followed the direction of his friend’s eyes and saw one of the featherless, monkey-faced birds gliding past the front of the train.

“Yeah, there’re a lot of funny things out here,” Jack said. “I’m going to feel a lot better if we can find some guns under that tarp.”

“What do you suppose is on the other side of those hills?” Richard asked. “More of the same?”

“No, I think there are more people over there,” Jack said. “If you can call them people. I’ve caught somebody watching us twice.”

At the expression of quick panic which flooded into Richard’s face, Jack said, “I don’t think it was anybody from your school. But it could be something just as bad—I’m not trying to scare you, buddy, but I’ve seen a little more of the Blasted Lands than you have.”

“The Blasted Lands,” Richard said dubiously. He squinted out at the red dusty valley with its scabrous patches of piss-colored grass. “Oh—that tree—ah . . .”

“I know,” Jack said. “You have to just sort of learn to ignore it.”

“Who on
earth
would create this kind of devastation?” Richard asked. “This isn’t natural, you know.”

“Maybe we’ll find out someday.” Jack helped Richard leave the cab, so that both stood on a narrow running board that covered the tops of the wheels. “Don’t get down in that dust,” he warned Richard. “We don’t know how deep it is. I don’t want to have to pull you out of it.”

Richard shuddered—but it may have been because he had just noticed out of the side of his eye another of the screaming, anguished trees. Together the two boys edged along the side of the stationary train until they could swing onto the coupling of the empty boxcar. From there a narrow metal ladder led to the roof of the car. On the boxcar’s far end another ladder let them descend to the flatcar.

Jack pulled at the thick hairy rope, trying to remember how Anders had loosened it so easily. “I think it’s here,” Richard said, holding up a twisted loop like a hangman’s noose. “Jack?”

“Give it a try.”

Richard was not strong enough to loosen the knot by himself, but when Jack helped him tug on the protruding cord, the “noose” smoothly disappeared, and the tarpaulin collapsed over the nest of boxes. Jack pulled the edge back over those closest—
MACHINE PARTS
—and over a smaller set of boxes Jack had not seen before, marked
LENSES
. “There they are,” he said. “I just wish we had a crowbar.” He glanced up toward the rim of the valley, and a tortured tree opened its mouth and silently yowled. Was that another head up there, peering over? It might have been one of the enormous worms, sliding toward them. “Come on, let’s try to push the top off one of these boxes,” he said, and Richard meekly came toward him.

After six mighty heaves against the top of one of the crates, Jack finally felt movement and heard the nails creak. Richard continued to strain at his side of the box. “That’s all right,” Jack said to him. Richard seemed even grayer and less healthy than he had before exerting himself. “I’ll get it, next push.” Richard stepped back and almost collapsed over one of the smaller boxes. He straightened himself and began to probe further under the loose tarpaulin.

Jack set himself before the tall box and clamped his jaw shut. He placed his hands on the corner of the lid. After taking in a long breath, he pushed up until his muscles began to shake. Just before he was going to have to ease up, the nails creaked again and began to slide out of the wood. Jack yelled “AAAGH!” and heaved the top off the box.

Stacked inside the carton, slimy with grease, were half a dozen guns of a sort Jack had never seen before—like grease-guns metamorphosing into butterflies, half-mechanical, half-insectile. He pulled one out and looked at it more closely, trying to see if he could figure out how it worked. It was an automatic weapon, so it would need a clip. He bent down and used the barrel of the weapon to pry off the top of one of the
LENSES
cartons. As he had expected, in the second, smaller box stood a little pile of heavily greased clips packed in plastic beads.

“It’s an Uzi,” Richard said behind him. “Israeli machinegun. Pretty fashionable weapon, I gather. The terrorists’ favorite toy.”

“How do you know that?” Jack asked, reaching in for another of the guns.

“I watch television. How do you think?”

Jack experimented with the clip, at first trying to fit it into the cavity upside-down, then finding the correct position. Next he found the safety and clicked it off, then on again.

“Those things are so damn ugly,” Richard said.

“You get one, too, so don’t complain.” Jack took a second clip for Richard, and after a moment’s consideration took all the clips out of the box, put two in his pockets, tossed two to Richard, who managed to catch them both, and slid the remaining clips into his haversack.

“Ugh,” Richard said.

“I guess it’s insurance,” Jack said.

9

Richard collapsed on the seat as soon as they got back to the cab—the trips up and down the two ladders and inching along the narrow strip of metal above the wheels had taken nearly all of his energy. But he made room for Jack to sit down and watched with heavy-lidded eyes while his friend started the train rolling again. Jack picked up his serape and began massaging his gun with it.

“What are you doing?”

“Rubbing the grease off. You’d better do it, too, when I’m done.”

For the rest of the day the two boys sat in the open cab of the train, sweating, trying not to take into account the wailing trees, the corrupt stink of the passing landscape, their hunger. Jack noticed that a little garden of open sores had bloomed around Richard’s mouth. Finally Jack took Richard’s Uzi from his hand, wiped it free of grease, and pushed in the clip. Sweat burned saltily in cracks on his lips.

Jack closed his eyes. Maybe he had not seen those heads peering over the rim of the valley; maybe they were not being followed after all. He heard the batteries sizzle and send off a big snapping spark, and felt Richard jump at it. An instant later he was asleep, dreaming of food.

10

When Richard shook Jack’s shoulder, bringing him up out of a world in which he had been eating a pizza the size of a truck tire, the shadows were just beginning to spread across the valley, softening the agony of the wailing trees. Even they, bending low and spreading their hands across their faces, seemed beautiful in the low, receding light. The deep red dust shimmered and glowed. The shadows printed themselves out along it, almost perceptibly lengthening. The terrible yellow grass was melting toward an almost mellow orange. Fading red sunlight painted itself slantingly along the rocks at the valley’s rim. “I just thought you might want to see this,” Richard said. A few more small sores seemed to have appeared about his mouth. Richard grinned weakly. “It seemed sort of special—the spectrum, I mean.”

Jack feared that Richard was going to launch into a scientific explanation of the color shift at sunset, but his friend was too tired or sick for physics. In silence the two boys watched the twilight deepen all the colors about them, turning the western sky into purple glory.

“You know what else you’re carrying on this thing?” Richard asked.

“What else?” Jack asked. In truth, he hardly cared. It could be nothing good. He hoped he might live to see another sunset as rich as this one, as large with feeling.

“Plastic explosive. All wrapped up in two-pound packages—I think two pounds, anyhow. You’ve got enough to blow up a whole city. If one of these guns goes off accidentally, or if someone else puts a bullet into those bags, this train is going to be nothing but a hole in the ground.”

“I won’t if you won’t,” Jack said. And let himself be taken by the sunset—it seemed oddly premonitory, a dream of accomplishment, and led him into memories of all he had undergone since leaving the Alhambra Inn and Gardens. He saw his mother drinking tea in the little shop, suddenly a tired old woman; Speedy Parker sitting at the base of a tree; Wolf tending his herd; Smokey and Lori from Oatley’s horrible Tap; all the hated faces from the Sunlight Home: Heck Bast, Sonny Singer, and the others. He missed Wolf with a particular and sharp poignancy, for the unfolding and deepening sunset summoned him up wholly, though Jack could not have explained why. He wished he could take Richard’s hand. Then he thought,
Well, why not?
and moved his hand along the bench until he encountered his friend’s rather grubby, clammy paw. He closed his fingers around it.

“I feel so sick,” Richard said. “This isn’t like—before. My stomach feels terrible, and my whole face is tingling.”

“I think you’ll get better once we finally get out of this place,” Jack said.
But what proof do you have of that, doctor?
he wondered.
What proof do you have that you’re not just poisoning him?
He had none. He consoled himself with his newly invented (newly discovered?) idea that Richard was an essential part of whatever was going to happen at the black hotel. He was going to need Richard Sloat, and not just because Richard Sloat could tell plastic explosive from bags of fertilizer.

Had Richard ever been to the black hotel before? Had he actually been in the Talisman’s vicinity? He glanced over at his friend, who was breathing shallowly and laboriously. Richard’s hand lay in his own like a cold waxen sculpture.

“I don’t want this gun anymore,” Richard said, pushing it off his lap. “The smell is making me sick.”

“Okay,” Jack said, taking it onto his own lap with his free hand. One of the trees crept into his peripheral vision and howled soundlessly in torment. Soon the mutant dogs would begin foraging. Jack glanced up toward the hills to his left—Richard’s side—and saw a manlike figure slipping through the rocks.

11

“Hey,” he said, almost not believing. Indifferent to his shock, the lurid sunset continued to beautify the unbeautifiable. “Hey, Richard.”

“What? You sick, too?”

“I think I saw somebody up there. On your side.” He peered up at the tall rocks again, but saw no movement.

“I don’t care,” Richard said.

“You’d better care. See how they’re timing it? They want to get to us just when it’s too dark for us to see them.”

Richard cracked his left eye open and made a half-hearted inspection. “Don’t see anybody.”

“Neither do I, now, but I’m glad we went back and got these guns. Sit up straight and pay attention, Richard, if you want to get out of here alive.”

“You’re such a cornball. Jeez.” But Richard did pull himself up straight and open both his eyes. “I really don’t see anything up there, Jack. It’s getting too dark. You probably imagined—”

“Hush,” Jack said. He thought he had seen another body easing itself between the rocks at the valley’s top. “There’s two. I wonder if there’ll be another one?”

“I wonder if there’ll be anything at all,” Richard said. “Why would anyone want to hurt us, anyhow? I mean, it’s not—”

Jack turned his head and looked down the tracks ahead of the train. Something moved behind the trunk of one of the screaming trees. Something larger than a dog, Jack recorded.

“Uh-oh,” Jack said. “I think another guy is up there waiting for us.” For a moment, fear castrated him—he could not think of what to do to protect himself from the three assailants. His stomach froze. He picked up the Uzi from his lap and looked at it dumbly, wondering if he really would be able to use this weapon. Could Blasted Lands hijackers have guns, too?