The Talisman

his head. “Holy mackerel! They’ve got bows and arrows!” he said.

Richard groaned, and Jack feared that he would vomit all over both of them.

“I have to shoot him,” he said.

Richard gulped and made some noise that wasn’t quite a word.

“Oh, hell,” Jack said, and flicked off the safety on his Uzi. He raised his head and saw the ragged being behind him just loosing off another arrow. If the shot had been accurate, he would never have seen another thing, but the arrow whanged harmlessly into the side of the cab. Jack jerked up the Uzi and depressed the trigger.

He expected none of what happened. He had thought that the gun would remain still in his hands and obediently expel a few shells. Instead, the Uzi jumped in his hands like an animal, making a series of noises loud enough to damage his eardrums. The stink of powder burned in his nose. The ragged man behind the train threw out his arms, but in amazement, not because he had been wounded. Jack finally thought to take his finger off the trigger. He had no idea of how many shots he had just wasted, or how many bullets remained in the clip.

“Didja get him, didja get him?” Richard asked.

The man was now running up the side of the valley, huge flat feet flapping. Then Jack saw that they were not feet—the man was walking on huge platelike constructions, the Blasted Lands equivalent of snowshoes. He was trying to make it to one of the trees for cover.

He raised the Uzi with both hands and sighted down the short barrel. Then he gently squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in his hands, but less than the first time. Bullets sprayed out in a wide arc, and at least one of them found its intended target, for the man lurched over sideways as though a truck had just smacked into him. His feet flew out of the snowshoes.

“Give me your gun,” Jack said, and took the second Uzi from Richard. Still kneeling, he fired half a clip into the shadowy dark in front of the train and hoped he had killed the creature waiting up there.

Another arrow rattled against the train, and another thunked solidly into the side of the boxcar.

Richard was shaking and crying in the bottom of the cab. “Load mine,” Jack said, and jammed a clip from his pocket under Richard’s nose. He peered up the side of the valley for the second attacker. In less than a minute it would be too dark to see anything beneath the rim of the valley.

“I see him,” Richard shouted. “I saw him—right there!” He pointed toward a shadow moving silently, urgently, among the rocks, and Jack spent the rest of the second Uzi’s clip noisily blasting at it. When he was done, Richard took the machine-gun from him and placed the other in his hands.

“Nize boyz, goot boyz,” came a voice from the right side—how far ahead of them it was impossible to tell. “You stop now, I stop now, too, geddit? All done now, dis bizness. You nize boys, maybe you zell me dat gun. You kill plenty goot dat way, I zee.”

“Jack!” Richard whispered frantically, warning him.

“Throw away the bow and arrows,” Jack yelled, still crouching beside Richard.

“Jack, you can’t!” Richard whispered.

“I t’row dem ’way now,” the voice came, still ahead of them. Something light puffed into the dust. “You boyz stop going, zell me gun, 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 hand 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