The Talisman

geddit?’
    ‘Okay,’ Jack said. ‘Come up here where we can see you.’
    ‘Geddit,’ the voice said.
    Jack pulled back on the gearshift, letting the train coast to a halt. ‘When I holler,’ he whispered to Richard, ‘jam it forward as fast as you can, okay?’
    ‘Oh, Jesus,’ Richard breathed.
    Jack checked that the safety was off on the gun Richard had just given him. A trickle of sweat ran from his forehead directly into his right eye.
    ‘All goot now, yaz,’ the voice said. ‘Boyz can siddup, yaz. Siddup, boys.’
    Way-gup, way-gup, pleeze, pleeze.
    The train coasted toward the speaker. ‘Put your hands on the shift,’ Jack whispered. ‘It’s coming soon.’
    Richard’s trembling hand, looking too small and childlike to accomplish anything even slightly important, touched the gear lever.
    Jack had a sudden, vivid memory of old Anders kneeling before him on a rippling wooden floor, asking, But will you be safe, my Lord? He had answered flippantly, hardly taking the question seriously. What were the Blasted Lands to a boy who had humped out kegs for Smokey Updike?
    Now he was a lot more afraid that he was going to soil his pants than that Richard was going to lose his lunch all over the Territories version of Myles P. Kiger’s loden coat.
    A shout of laughter erupted in the darkness beside the cab, and Jack pulled himself upright, bringing up the gun, and yelled just as a heavy body hit the side of the cab and clung there. Richard shoved the gearshift forward, and the train jerked forward.
    A naked hairy arm clamped itself on the side of the cab. So much for the wild west , Jack thought, and then the man’s entire trunk reared up over them. Richard screeched, and Jack very nearly did evacuate his bowels into his underwear.
    The face was nearly all teeth – it was a face as instinctively evil as that of a rattler baring its fangs, and a drop of what Jack as instinctively assumed to be venom fell off one of the long, curved teeth. Except for the tiny nose, the creature looming over the boys looked very like a man with the head of a snake. In one webbed hand he raised a knife. Jack squeezed off an aimless, panicky shot.
    Then the creature altered and wavered back for a moment, and it took Jack a fraction of a second to see that the webbed hand and the knife were gone. The creature swung forward a bloody stump and left a smear of red on Jack’s shirt. Jack’s mind conveniently left him, and his fingers were able to point the Uzi straight at the creature’s chest and pull the trigger back.
    A great hole opened redly in the middle of the mottled chest, and the dripping teeth snapped together. Jack kept the trigger depressed, and the Uzi raised its barrel by itself and destroyed the creature’s head in a second or two of total carnage. Then it was gone. Only a large bloodstain on the side of the cab, and the smear of blood on Jack’s shirt, showed that the two boys had not dreamed the entire encounter.
    ‘Watch out!’ Richard yelled.
    ‘I got him,’ Jack breathed.
    ‘Where’d he go?’
    ‘He fell off,’ Jack said. ‘He’s dead.’
    ‘You shot his hand off,’ Richard whispered. ‘How’d you do that?’
    Jack held up his hands before him and saw how they shook. The stink of gunpowder encased them. ‘I just sort of imitated someone with good aim.’ He put his hands down and licked his lips.
    Twelve hours later, as the sun came up again over the Blasted Lands, neither boy had slept – they had spent the entire night as rigid as soldiers, holding their guns in their laps and straining to hear the smallest of noises. Remembering how much ammunition the train was carrying, every now and then Jack randomly aimed a few rounds at the lip of the valley. And that second entire day, if there were people or monsters in this far sector of the Blasted Lands, they let the boys pass unmolested. Which could mean, Jack tiredly thought, that they knew about the guns. Or that out here, so near to the western shore, nobody wanted to mess with Morgan’s train. He said none of this to Richard, whose eyes were filmy and unfocussed, and who seemed feverish much of the time.
    12
    By evening of that day, Jack began to smell saltwater in the acrid air.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
    JACK AND RICHARD GO TO WAR
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    1
    The sunset that night was wider – the land had begun to open out again as they approached the ocean – but not so spectacular. Jack stopped the train at the top of an eroded hill and climbed back to