The Talisman (62 page)

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.
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 forward.

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 after 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 DeLoessian, 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.

“TEAR THEM UP!”
Jack Sawyer/Jason DeLoessian bellowed, 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 bunk-house 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.

Some of them looked a bit like medieval paintings of devils and satyrs. Some looked like degenerate human beings—cave-people, almost. And one of the things lurching into the early-morning sunlight had scaly skin and nictitating eyelids . . . it looked to Richard Sloat like an alligator that was somehow walking upright. As he looked, the thing lifted its snout and uttered that cry he and Jack had heard earlier:
Grooo-OOOOO!
He just had time to see that most of these hellish creatures looked totally bewildered, and then Jack’s Uzi split the world with thunder.

On Jack’s side, roughly two dozen Wolfs had been doing callies on the parade ground. Like the guardhouse Wolf, most wore green fatigue pants, boots with cut-off toes, and bandoleer belts. Like the guard, they looked stupid, flatheaded, and essentially evil.

They had paused in the middle of a spastic set of jumping jacks to watch the train come roaring in, the gate and the unfortunate fellow who had been running laps at the wrong place and time plastered to the front. At Jack’s cry they began to move, but by then they were too late.

Most of Morgan’s carefully culled Wolf Brigade, hand-picked over a period of five years for their strength and brutality, their fear of and loyalty to Morgan, were wiped out in one spitting, raking burst of the machine-gun in Jack’s hands. They went stumbling and reeling backward, chests blown open, heads bleeding. There were growls of bewildered anger and howls of pain . . . but not many. Most of them simply died.

Jack popped the clip, grabbed another one, slammed it in. On the left side of the parade ground, four of the Wolfs had escaped; in the center two more had dropped below the line of fire. Both of these had been wounded but now both were coming at him, long-nailed toes digging divots in the packed dust, faces sprouting hair, eyes flaring. As they ran at the engine, Jack saw fangs grow out of their mouths and push through fresh, wiry hair growing from their chins.

He pulled the trigger on the Uzi, now holding the hot barrel down only with an effort; the heavy recoil was trying to force the muzzle up. Both of the attacking Wolfs were thrown back so violently that they flipped through the air head-over-heels like acrobats. The other four Wolfs did not pause; they headed for the place where the gate had been two minutes before.

The assorted creatures which had spilled out of the bunk-house-style barracks building seemed to be finally getting the idea that, although the newcomers were driving Morgan’s train, they were a good deal less than friendly. There was no concentrated charge, but they began to move forward in a muttering clot. Richard laid the Uzi’s barrel on the chest-high side of the engine cab and opened fire. The slugs tore them open, drove them backward. Two of the things which looked like goats dropped to hands and knees—or hooves—and scurried back inside. Richard saw three others spin and drop under the force of the slugs. A joy so savage that it made him feel faint swept through him.

Bullets also tore open the whitish-green belly of the alligator-thing, and a blackish fluid—ichor, not blood—began to pour out of it. It fell backward, but its tail seemed to cushion it. It sprang back up and leaped at Richard’s side of the train. It uttered its rough, powerful cry again . . . and this time it seemed to Richard that there was something hideously feminine in that cry.

He pulled the trigger of the Uzi. Nothing happened. The clip was spent.

The alligator-thing ran with slow, clumsy, thudding determination. Its eyes sparkled with murderous fury . . . and intelligence. The vestiges of breasts bounced on its scaly chest.

He bent, groped, without taking his eyes off the were-alligator, and found one of the grenades.

Seabrook Island,
Richard thought dreamily.
Jack calls this place the Territories, but it’s really Seabrook Island, and there is no need to be afraid, really no need; this is all a dream and if that thing’s scaly claws settle around my neck I will surely wake up, and even if it’s not all a dream, Jack will save me somehow—I know he will, I know it, because over here Jack is some kind of a god.

He pulled the pin on the grenade, restrained the strong urge he felt to simply chuck it in a panicky frenzy, and lobbed it gently, underhand.
“Jack, get down!”

Jack dropped below the level of the engine cab’s sides at once, without looking. Richard did, too, but not before he had seen an incredible, blackly comic thing: the alligator-creature had caught the grenade . . . and was trying to eat it.

The explosion was not the dull crump Richard had expected but a loud, braying roar that drilled into his ears, hurting them badly. He heard a splash, as if someone had thrown a bucket of water against his side of the train.

He looked up and saw that the engine, boxcar and flatcar were covered with hot guts, black blood, and shreds of the alligator-creature’s flesh. The entire front of the barracks building had been blown away. Much of the splintered rubble was bloody. In the midst of it he saw a hairy foot in a boot with a cut-off toe.

The jackstraw blowdown of logs was thrown aside as he watched, and two of the goatlike creatures began to pull themselves out. Richard bent, found a fresh clip, and slammed it into his gun. It was getting hot, just as Jack had said it would.

Whoopee!
Richard thought faintly, and opened fire again.

9

When Jack popped up after the grenade explosion, he saw that the four Wolfs who had escaped his first two fusillades were just running through the hole where the gate had been. They were howling with terror. They were running side by side, and Jack had a clear shot at them. He raised the Uzi—then lowered it again, knowing he would see them later, probably at the black hotel, knowing he was a fool . . . but, fool or not, he was unable to just let them have it in the back.

Now a high, womanish shrieking began from behind the barracks.
“Get out there! Get out there, I say! Move! Move!”
There was the whistling crack of a whip.

Jack knew that sound, and he knew that voice. He had been wrapped up in a strait-jacket when he had last heard it. Jack would have known that voice anywhere.

—If his retarded friend shows up, shoot him.

Well, you managed that, but maybe now it’s payback time—and maybe, from the way your voice sounds, you know it.

“Get them, what’s the matter with you cowards? Get them, do I have to show you how to do everything? Follow us, follow us!”

Three creatures came from behind what remained of the barracks, and only one of them was clearly human—Osmond. He carried his whip in one hand, a Sten gun in the other. He wore a red cloak and black boots and white silk pants with wide, flowing legs. They were splattered with fresh blood. To his left was a shaggy goat-creature wearing jeans and Westernstyle boots. This creature and Jack looked at each other and shared a moment of complete recognition. It was the dreadful barroom cowboy from the Oatley Tap. It was Randolph Scott. It was Elroy. It grinned at Jack; its long tongue snaked out and lapped its wide upper lip.

“Get him!”
Osmond screamed at Elroy.

Jack tried to lift the Uzi, but it suddenly seemed very heavy in his arms. Osmond was bad, the reappearance of Elroy was worse, but the thing between the two of them was a nightmare. It was the Territories version of Reuel Gardener, of course; the son of Osmond, the son of Sunlight. And it did indeed look a bit like a child—a child as drawn by a bright kindergarten student with a cruel turn of mind.

It was curdy-white and skinny; one of its arms ended in a wormy tentacle that somehow reminded Jack of Osmond’s whip. Its eyes, one of them adrift, were on different levels. Fat red sores covered its cheeks.

Some of it’s radiation sickness . . . Jason, I think Osmond’s boy might have gotten a little too close to one of those fireballs . . . but the rest of it . . . Jason . . . Jesus . . . what was its mother? In the name of all the worlds, WHAT WAS ITS MOTHER?

“Get the Pretender!”
Osmond was shrieking.
“Save Morgan’s son but get the Pretender! Get the false Jason! Get out here, you cowards! They’re out of bullets!”

Roars, bellows. In a moment, Jack knew, a fresh contingent of Wolfs, supported by Assorted Geeks and Freaks, was going to appear from the back end of the long barracks, where they would have been shielded from the explosion, where they had probably been cowering with their heads down, and where they would have remained . . . except for Osmond.

“Should have stayed off the road, little chicken,” Elroy grunted, and ran at the train. His tail was swishing through the air. Reuel Gardener—or whatever Reuel was in this world—made a thick mewling sound and attempted to follow. Osmond reached out and hauled him back; his fingers, Jack saw, appeared to slide right into the monster-boy’s slatlike, repulsive neck.