The Talisman

uneasily at Richard to make sure that he was still sleeping.
    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 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, spinning 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 precious 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