The Talisman

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?

“Richard, I’m sorry,” he said, “but this time I think the shit is really going to hit the fan, and I’m going to need your help.”

“What can I do?” Richard asked, his voice squeaky.

“Take your gun,” Jack said, handing it to him. “And I think we ought to kneel down so we don’t give them so much of a target.”

He got on his knees and Richard imitated him in a slow-moving, underwater fashion. From behind them came a long cry, from above them another. “They know we saw them,” Richard said. “But where are they?”

The question was almost immediately answered. Still visible in the dark purplish twilight, a man—or what looked like a man—burst out of cover and began running down the slope toward the train. Rags fluttered out behind him. He was screaming like an Indian and raising something in his hands. It appeared to be a flexible pole, and Jack was still trying to work out its function when he heard—more than saw—a narrow shape slice through the air beside