Black House

skeletal skyscraper behind him, trying to bite, trying to end the life of Judy Marshall’s gifted son.

Dale leaps forward, grabs the boy around the waist and the shoulders, and yanks him away, reeling toward the side of the road. His honest face is pale and grim and set. “Finish him, Jack!” Dale bawls. “Finish the sonofabitch!”

Jack steps forward to where the blinded, howling, charred thing reels back and forth in the Conger Road, his bony vest smoking, his long white hands groping. Jack cocks the bat back on his right shoulder and sets his grip all the way down to the knob. No choking up this afternoon; this afternoon he’s wielding a bat that blazes with glowing white fire, and he’d be a fool not to swing for the fences.

“Batter up, sweetheart,” he says, and uncoils a swing that would have done credit to Richie Sexson himself. Or Big Mac. There is a punky, fleshy sound as the bat, still accelerating, connects with the side of Lord Malshun’s huge head. It caves in like the rind of a rotted watermelon, and a spray of bright crimson flies out. A moment later the head simply explodes, spattering them all with its gore.

“Looks like the King’s gonna have to find a new boy,” Beezer says softly. He wipes his face, looks at a handful of blood and shriveling tissue, then wipes it casually on his faded jeans. “Home run, Jack. Even a blind man could see that.”

Dale, cradling Tyler, says: “Game over, case closed, zip up your fly.”

French Landing’s police chief sets Ty carefully on his feet. The boy looks up at him, then at Jack. A bleary sort of light is dawning in his eyes. It might be relief; it might be actual comprehension.

“Bat,” he says. His voice is husky and hoarse, almost impossible for them to understand. He clears his throat and tries again. “Bat. Dreamed about it.”

“Did you?” Jack kneels in front of the boy and holds the bat out. Ty shows no inclination to actually take possession of the Richie Sexson wonder bat, but he touches it with one hand. Strokes the bat’s gore-spattered barrel. His eyes look only at Jack. It’s as if he’s trying to get the sense of him. The truth of him. To understand that he has, after all, been rescued.

“George,” the boy says. “George. Rathbun. Really is blind.”

“Yes,” Jack says. “But sometimes blind isn’t blind. Do you know that, Tyler?”

The boy nods. Jack has never in his life seen anyone who looks so fundamentally exhausted, so shocked and lost, so completely worn out.

“Want,” the boy says. He licks his lips and clears his throat again. “Want . . . drink. Water. Want mother. See my mother.”

“Sounds like a plan to me, ” Doc'says. He is looking unea{ily at the splattered remains of the creature they still think of as Mr. Munshun. “Let’s get this young fellow back to Wisconsin before some of Old One Eye’s friends show up.”

“Right,” Beezer says. “Burning Black House to the groune is also o~ my personal agenda. I’ll throw the first match. Or maybe I can shoot fire out of my ring again. I’d like that. First thing, though, is to make tracks.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Dale says. “I don’t think Ty’s going to be able to walk either very far or very fast, but we can take turns giving him piggyb—”

“No,” Jack says.

They look at him with varying degrees of surprise and consternation.

“Jack,” Beezer says. He speaks with an odd gentleness. “There’s such a thing as overstaying your welcome, man.”

“We aren’t finished,” Jack tells him. Then he shakes his head and corrects himself. “Ty’s not finished.”

Jack Sawyer kneels in Conger Road, thinking: I wasn’t much older than this kid when I took off across America—and the Territories—to save my mother’s life. He knows this is true and at the same time absolutely can’t believe it. Can’t remember what it was to be twelve and never anything else, to be small and terrified, mostly below the world’s notice and running just ahead of all the world’s shadows. It should be over; Ty has been through nine kinds of hell, and he deserves to go home.

Unfortunately, it’s not over. There’s one more thing to do.

“Ty.”

“Want. Home.”

If there was light in the boy’s eyes, it has gone out now. He wears the dull shockface of refugees at border checkpoints and the gates of deathcamps. His is the emptied visage of someone who has spent too long in the slippery opopanax landscape of slippage. And he is a child, damnit, only a child. He deserves better than what Jack Sawyer is about to serve out. But then, Jack Sawyer once deserved better than what he got and lived to tell the tale. That justifies nothing, of course, but it does give him the courage to be a bastard.

“Ty.” He grasps the boy’s shoulder.

“Water. Mother. Home.”

“No,” Jack says. “Not yet.” He pivots the boy. The spatters of Lord Malshun’s blood on his face are very bright. Jack can sense the men he came with—men who have risked their lives and sanity for him—beginning to frown. Never mind. He has a job to do. He is a coppiceman, and there’s still a crime in progress here.

“Ty.”

Nothing. The boy stands slumped. He’s trying to turn himself into meat that does nothing but breathe.

Jack points at the ugly complication of struts and belts and girders and smoking chimneys. He points at the straining ants. The Big Combination disappears up into the clouds and down into the dead ground. How far in each direction? A mile? Two? Are there children above the clouds, shivering in oxygen masks as they trudge the treadmills and yank the levers and turn the cranks? Children below who bake in the heat of underground fires? Down there in the foxholes and the ratholes where the sun never shines?