He could feel the
Wolf struggled up again, his hair plastered against his face, his dazed eyes peering through a curtain of it like the eyes of an English sheepdog. He was coughing and staggering, seemingly no longer aware of where he was.
Wolf bent over and retched up a great muddy sheet of water. A moment later another of the terrified cow- sheep struck him and bore him under again.
But he struggled on toward Wolf, pushing a dying, weakly convulsing cow-sheep out of his way to get there.
The wet, sizzling zap of electricity again, seeming almost to part his hair. Again it struck the other bank, this time vaporizing one of Wolf’s cattle. No, Jack saw, at least not utterly. The animal’s legs were still there, mired in the mud like shake-poles. As he watched, they began to sag tiredly outward in four different directions.
Then his fifth-grade science came back to him. Once electricity went to water, it could go anywhere . . . including back to the generator of the current.
Wolf’s dazed face, floating underwater, drove these thoughts from Jack’s flying mind. Wolf was still alive, but partially pinned under a cow-sheep, which, although apparently unhurt, had frozen in panic. Wolf’s hands waved with pathetic, flagging energy. As Jack closed the last of the distance, one of those hands dropped and simply floated, limp as a water-lily.
Without slowing, Jack lowered his left shoulder and hit the cow-sheep like Jack Armstrong in a boy’s sports story.
If it had been a full-sized cow instead of a Territories compact model, Jack would probably not have budged it, not with the stream’s fairly stiff current working against him. But it was smaller than a cow, and Jack was pumped up. It bawled when Jack hit it, floundered backward, sat briefly on its haunches, and then lunged for the far bank. Jack grabbed Wolf’s hands and pulled with all of his might.
Wolf came up as reluctantly as a waterlogged tree-trunk, his eyes now glazed and half-closed, water streaming from his ears and nose and mouth. His lips were blue.
Twin forks of lightning blazed to the right and left of where Jack stood holding Wolf, the two of them looking like a pair of drunks trying to waltz in a swimming pool. On the far bank, another cow-sheep flew in all directions, its severed head still bawling. Hot rips of fire zigzagged through the marshy area, lighting the reeds on the tussocks and then finding the drier grass of the field where the land began to rise again.
“Auh,” Wolf moaned, and vomited warm muddy water over Jack’s shoulder.
Now Jack saw Morgan standing on the other bank, a tall, Puritanical figure in his black cloak. His hood framed his pallid, vampirelike face with a kind of cheerless romance. Jack had time to think that the Territories had worked their magic even here, on behalf of his dreadful uncle. Over here, Morgan was not an overweight, hypertensive actuarial toad with piracy in his heart and murder in his mind; over here, his face had narrowed and found a frigid masculine beauty. He pointed the silver rod like a toy magic wand, and blue fire tore the air open.
Wolf screamed and jerked in Jack’s aching arms. He was staring at Morgan, his eyes orange and bulging with hate and fear.
Jack pulled the bottle out of his jerkin. There was a single swallow left anyway. He couldn’t hold Wolf up with his one arm; he was losing him, and Wolf seemed unable to support himself. Didn’t matter. Couldn’t take him back through into the other world anyway . . . or could he?
Smell of burning grass and burning animals.
Thunder, exploding.
This time the river of fire in the air rushed by Jack so close that the hairs in his nostrils singed and curled.
“Wolf, hold on!” Jack yelled. He gave up his effort to hold Wolf up; instead, he snatched Wolf’s hand in his own and held it as tightly as he could. “Hold on to me, do you hear?”
