The Talisman

“What?”

“The tr—”

Something whickered over them and both boys ducked. Their heads knocked together.

“The tracks!” Richard shouted, rubbing his skull with one pale hand. “Not the road! Go for the tracks!”

“Gotcha!” Jack was mystified but unquestioning. They had to go somewhere.

The two boys began to crawl along the rusting chain-link fence like soldiers crossing no-man’s-land. Richard was slightly ahead, leading them toward the hole in the fence where the tracks exited the far side of the compound.

Jack looked back over his shoulder as they went—he could see as much as he needed to, or wanted to, through the partially open gates. Most of the train seemed to have been simply vaporized. Twisted chunks of metal, some recognizable, most not, lay in a wide circle around the place where it had come back to America, where it had been built, bought, and paid for. That they had not been killed by flying shrapnel was amazing; that they had not been even so much as scratched seemed well-nigh impossible.

The worst was over now. They were outside the gate, standing up (but ready to duck and run if there were residual explosions).

“My father’s not going to like it that you blew up his train, Jack,” Richard said.

His voice was perfectly calm, but when Jack looked at him, he saw that Richard was weeping.

“Richard—”

“No, he won’t like it at all,” Richard said, as if answering himself.

3

A thick and luxuriant stripe of weeds, knee-high, grew up the center of the railroad tracks leading away from the camp, leading away in a direction Jack believed to be roughly south. The tracks themselves were rusty and long unused; in places they had twisted strangely—rippled.

Earthquakes did that, Jack thought with queasy awe.

Behind them, the plastic explosive continued to explode. Jack would think it was finally over, and then there would be another long, hoarse BREEE-APPP!—it was, he thought, the sound of a giant clearing its throat. Or breaking wind. He glanced back once and saw a black pall of smoke hanging in the sky. He listened for the thick, heavy crackle of fire—like anyone who has lived for any length of time on the California coast, he was afraid of fire —but heard none. Even the woods here seemed New Englandy, thick and heavy with moisture. Certainly it was the antithesis of the pale-brown country around Baja, with its clear, bone-dry air. The woods were almost smug with life; the railway itself was a slowly closing lane between the encroaching trees, shrubs, and ubiquitous ivy (poison ivy, I bet, Jack thought, scratching unconsciously at the bites on his hands), with the faded blue sky an almost matching lane overhead. Even the cinders on the railroad bed were mossy. This place seemed secret, a place for secrets.

He set a hard pace, and not only to get the two of them off his track before the cops or the firemen showed up. The pace also assured Richard’s silence. He was toiling too hard to keep up to talk . . . or ask questions.

They had gone perhaps two miles and Jack was still congratulating himself on this conversion-strangling ploy when Richard called out in a tiny, whistling voice, “Hey Jack—”

Jack turned just in time to see Richard, who had fallen a bit behind, toppling forward. The blemishes stood out on his paper-white skin like birthmarks.

Jack caught him—barely. Richard seemed to weigh no more than a paper bag.

“Oh, Christ, Richard!”

“Felt okay until a second or two ago,” Richard said in that same tiny, whistling voice. His respiration was very fast, very dry. His eyes were half-closed. Jack could only see whites and tiny arcs of blue irises. “Just got . . . faint. Sorry.”

From behind them came another heavy, belching explosion, followed by the rattling sound of train-debris falling on the tin roof of the Quonset hut. Jack glanced that way, then anxiously up the tracks.

“Can you hang on to me? I’ll piggyback you a ways.” Shades of Wolf, he thought.

“I can hang on.”

“If you can’t, say so.”

“Jack,” Richard said with a heartening trace of that old fussy Richard-irritation, “if I couldn’t hang on, I wouldn’t say I could.”

Jack set Richard on his feet. Richard stood there, swaying, looking as if someone could blow once in his face and topple him over backward. Jack turned and squatted, the soles of his sneakers on one of the old rotted ties. He made his arms into thigh-stirrups, and Richard put his own arms around Jack’s neck. Jack got to his feet and started to shag along the crossties at a fast walk that was very nearly a jog. Carrying Richard seemed to be no problem at all, and not just because Richard had lost weight. Jack had been running kegs of beer, carrying cartons, picking apples. He had spent time picking rocks in Sunlight Gardener’s Far Field, can you gimme hallelujah. It had toughened him, all of that. But the toughening went deeper into the fiber of his essential self than something as simple and mindless as physical exercise could go. Nor was all of it a simple function of flipping back and forth between the two worlds like an acrobat, or of that other world—gorgeous as it could be—rubbing off on him like wet paint. Jack recognized in a dim sort of way that he had been trying to do more than simply save his mother’s life; from the very beginning he had been trying to do something greater than that. He had been trying to do a good work, and his dim realization now was that such mad enterprises must always be toughening.

He did begin to jog.

“If you make me seasick,” Richard said, his voice jiggling in time with Jack’s footfalls, “I’ll just vomit on your head.”