Only Dale Gilbertson—who hasn’t been to the Territories, hasn’t been close to Black House, and who is not Ty Marshall’s father—is unaffected. Yet even he feels something rise in his head, something like an interior shout. The world trembles. All at once there seems to be more color in it, more dimension.
“What was that?” he shouts. “Good or bad? Good or bad?
What the hell is going on here?
”
For a moment none of them answer. They are too dazed to answer.
While a swarm of bees is floating a squeeze bottle of honey along the top of a bar in another world, Burny is telling Ty Marshall to face the wall, goddamnit, just face the wall.
They are in a foul little shack. The sounds of clashing machinery are much closer. Ty can also hear screams and sobs and harsh yells and what can only be the whistling crack of whips. They are very near the Big Combination now. Ty has seen it, a great crisscrossing confusion of metal rising into the clouds from a smoking pit about half a mile east. It looks like a madman’s conception of a skyscraper, a Rube Goldberg collection of chutes and cables and belts and platforms, everything run by the marching, staggering children who roll the belts and pull the great levers. Red-tinged smoke rises from it in stinking fumes.
Twice as the golf cart rolled slowly along, Ty at the wheel and Burny leaning askew in the passenger seat with the Taser pointed, squads of freakish green men passed them. Their features were scrambled, their skin plated and reptilian. They wore half-cured leather tunics from which tufts of fur still started in places. Most carried spears; several had whips.
Overseers,
Burny said.
They keep the wheels of progress turning.
He began to laugh, but the laugh turned into a groan and the groan into a harsh and breathless shriek of pain.
Good,
Ty thought coldly. And then, for the first time employing a favorite word of Ebbie Wexler’s:
Die soon, you motherfucker.
About two miles from the back of Black House, they came to a huge wooden platform on their left. A gantrylike thing jutted up from it. A long post projected out from the top, almost to the road. A number of frayed rope ends dangled from it, twitching in the hot and sulfurous breeze. Under the platform, on dead ground that never felt the sun, were litters of bones and ancient piles of white dust. To one side was a great mound of shoes. Why they’d take the clothes and leave the shoes was a question Ty probably couldn’t have answered even had he not been wearing the cap (
sbecial toyz for sbecial boyz
), but a disjointed phrase popped into his head: custom of the country. He had an idea that was something his father sometimes said, but he couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t even remember his father’s face, not clearly.
The gibbet was surrounded by crows. They jostled one another and turned to follow the humming progress of the E-Z-Go. None was the special crow, the one with the name Ty could no longer remember, but he knew why they were here. They were waiting for fresh flesh to pluck, that’s what they were doing. Waiting for newly dead eyes to gobble. Not to mention the bare toesies of the shoe-deprived dead.
Beyond the pile of discarded, rotting footwear, a broken track led off to the north, over a fuming hill.
“Station House Road,” Burny said. He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Ty at that point, was perhaps edging into delirium. Yet still the Taser pointed at Ty’s neck, never wavering. “That’s where I’m supposed to be taking the special boy.”
Taging the sbecial bouy.
“That’s where the special ones go. Mr. Munshun’s gone to get the mono. The End-World mono. Once there were two others. Patricia . . . and Blaine. They’re gone. Went crazy. Committed suicide.”
Ty drove the cart and remained silent, but he had to believe old Burn-Burn was the one who had gone crazy (crazi
er,
he reminded himself). He knew about monorails, had even ridden one at Disney World in Orlando, but monorails named Blaine and Patricia? That was stupid.
Station House Road fell behind them. Ahead, the rusty red and iron gray of the Big Combination drew closer. Ty could see moving ants on cruelly inclined belts. Children. Some from other worlds, perhaps—worlds adjacent to this one—but many from his own. Kids whose faces appeared for a while on milk cartons and then disappeared forever. Kept a little longer in the hearts of their parents, of course, but eventually growing dusty even there, turning from vivid memories into old photographs. Kids presumed dead, buried somewhere in shallow graves by perverts who had used them and then discarded them. Instead, they were here. Some of them, anyway.
Many
of them. Struggling to yank the levers and turn the wheels and move the belts while the yellow-eyed, green-skinned overseers cracked their whips.
As Ty watched, one of the ant specks fell down the side of the convoluted, steam-wreathed building. He thought he could hear a faint scream. Or perhaps it was a cry of relief?
“Beautiful day,” Burny said faintly. “I’ll enjoy it more when I get something to eat. Having something to eat always . . . always perks me up.” His ancient eyes studied Ty, tightening a little at the corners with sudden warmth. “Baby butt’s the best eatin’, but yours won’t be bad. Nope, won’t be bad at all. He said to take you to the station, but I ain’t sure he’d give me my share. My
.
.
.
commission.
Maybe he’s honest . . . maybe he’s still my friend . . . but I think I’ll just take my share first, and make sure. Most agents take their ten percent off the top.” He reached out and poked Ty just below the belt-line. Even through his jeans, the boy could feel the tough, blunt edge of the old man’s nail. “I think I’ll take mine off the
bottom.
” A wheezy, painful laugh, and Ty was not exactly displeased to see a bright bubble of blood appear between the old man’s cracked lips. “Off the
bottom,
get it?” The nail poked the side of Ty’s buttock again.
“I get it,” Ty said.
“You’ll be able to break just as well,” Burny said. “It’s just that when you fart, you’ll have to do the old one-cheek sneak
every
time!” More wheezing laughter. Yes, he sounded delirious, all right—delirious or on the verge of it—yet still the tip of the Taser remained rock-steady. “Keep on going, boy. ’Nother half a mile up the Conger Road. You’ll see a little shack with a tin roof, down in a draw. It’s on the right. It’s a special place. Special to me. Turn in there.”
Ty, with no other choice, obeyed. And now—
“Do what I tell you! Face the fucking wall! Put your hands up and through those loops!”
Ty couldn’t define the word
euphemism
on a bet, but he knows calling those metal circlets “loops” is bullshit. What’s hanging from the rear wall are shackles.
Panic flutters in his brain like a flock of small birds, threatening to obscure his thoughts. Ty fights to hold on—fights with grim intensity. If he gives in to panic, starts to holler and scream, he’s going to be finished. Either the old man will kill him in the act of carving him up, or the old man’s friend will take him away to some awful place Burny calls Din-tah. In either case, Ty will never see his mother and father again. Or French Landing. But if he can keep his head . . . wait for his chance . . .
Ah, but it’s hard. The cap he’s wearing actually helps a little in this respect—it has a dulling effect that helps hold the panic at bay—but it’s still hard. Because he’s not the first kid the old man has brought here, no more than he was the first to spend long, slow hours in that cell back at the old man’s house. There’s a blackened, grease-caked barbecue set up in the left corner of the shed, underneath a tin-plated smoke hole. The grill is hooked up to a couple of gas bottles with
LA RIVIERE PROPANE
stenciled on the sides. Hung on the wall are oven mitts, spatulas, tongs, basting brushes, and meat forks. There are scissors and tenderizing hammers and at least four keen-bladed carving knives. One of the knives looks almost as long as a ceremonial sword.
Hanging beside that one is a filthy apron with
YOU MAY KISS THE COOK
printed on it.
The smell in the air reminds Ty of the VFW picnic his mom and dad took him to the previous Labor Day. Maui Wowie, it had been called, because the people who went were supposed to feel like they were spending the day in Hawaii. There had been a great big barbecue pit in the center of La Follette Park down by the river, tended by women in grass skirts and men wearing loud shirts covered with birds and tropical foliage. Whole pigs had been roasting over a glaring hole in the ground, and the odor had been like the one in this shed. Except the smell in here is stale . . . and old . . . and . . .
And not quite pork,
Ty thinks.
It’s—
“I should stand here and jaw at you all day, you louse?”
The Taser gives off a crackling sizzle. Tingling, debilitating pain sinks into the side of Ty’s neck. His bladder lets go and he wets his pants. He can’t help it. Is hardly aware of it, in truth. Somewhere (in a galaxy far, far away) a hand that is trembling but still terribly strong thrusts Ty toward the back wall and the shackles that have been welded to steel plates about five and a half feet off the ground.
“There!” Burny cries, and gives a tired, hysterical laugh. “Knew you’d get one for good luck eventually! Smart boy, ain’tcha? Little wisenheimer! Now put your hands through them loops and let’s have no more foolishness about it!”
Ty has put out his hands in order to keep himself from crashing face-first into the shed’s rear wall. His eyes are less than a foot from the wood, and he is getting a very good look at the old layers of blood that coat it. That
plate
it. The blood has an ancient metallic reek. Beneath his feet, the ground feels spongy. Jellylike. Nasty. This may be an illusion in the physical sense, but Ty knows that what he’s feeling is nonetheless quite real. This is corpse ground. The old man may not prepare his terrible meals here every time—may not have that luxury—but this is the place he likes. As he said, it’s special to him.
If I let him lock both of my hands into those shackles,
Ty thinks,
I’ve had it. He’ll cut me up. And once he starts cutting, he may not be able to stop himself—not for this Mr. Munching, not for anyone. So get ready.
That last is not like one of his own thoughts at all. It’s like hearing his mother’s voice in his head. His mother, or someone like her. Ty steadies. The flock of panic birds is suddenly gone, and he is as clearheaded as the cap will allow. He knows what he must do. Or try to do.
He feels the nozzle of the Taser slip between his legs and thinks of the snake wriggling across the overgrown driveway, carrying its mouthful of fangs. “Put your hands through those loops right now, or I’m going to fry your balls like oysters.”
Ersters,
it sounds like.
“Okay,” Ty says. He speaks in a high, whiny voice. He hopes he sounds scared out of his mind. God knows it shouldn’t be hard to sound that way. “Okay, okay, just don’t hurt me, I’m doing it now, see? See?”
He puts his hands through the loops. They are big and loose.
“Higher!” The growling voice is still in his ear, but the Taser is gone from between his legs, at least. “Shove ’em in as far as you can!”
Ty does as he is told. The shackles slide to a point just above his wrists. His hands are like starfish in the gloom. Behind him, he hears that soft clinking noise again as Burny rummages in his bag. Ty understands. The cap may be scrambling his thoughts a little, but this is too obvious to miss. The old bastard’s got handcuffs in there. Handcuffs that have been used many, many times. He’ll cuff Ty’s wrists above the shackles, and here Ty will stand—or dangle, if he passes out—while the old monster carves him up.
“Now listen,” Burny says. He sounds out of breath, but he also sounds
lively
again. The prospect of a meal has refreshed him, brought back a certain amount of his vitality. “I’m pointin’ this shocker at you with one hand. I’m gonna slip a cuff around your left wrist with the other hand. If you move . . . if you so much as
twitch,
boy . . . you get the juice. Understand?”
Ty nods at the bloodstained wall. “I won’t move,” he gibbers. “Honest I won’t.”
“First one hand, then the other. That’s how I do it.” There is a revolting complacency in his voice. The Taser presses between Ty’s shoulder blades hard enough to hurt. Grunting with effort, the old man leans over Ty’s left shoulder. Ty can smell sweat and blood and age. It
is
like “Hansel and Gretel,” he thinks, only he has no oven to push his tormentor into.
You know what to do,
Judy tells him coldly.
He may not give you a chance, and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t. But if he does
.
.
.
A handcuff slips around his left wrist. Burny is grunting softly, repulsively, in Ty’s ear. The old man reaches . . . the Taser shifts . . . but not quite far enough. Ty holds still as Burny snaps the handcuff shut and tightens it down. Now Ty’s left hand is secured to the shed wall. Dangling down from his left wrist by its steel chain is the cuff Burny intends to put on his right wrist.
The old man, still panting effortfully, moves to the right. He reaches around Ty’s front, groping for the dangling cuff. The Taser is once more digging into Ty’s back. If the old man gets hold of the cuff, Ty’s goose is probably cooked (in more ways than one). And he almost does. But the cuff slips out of his grip, and instead of waiting for it to pendulum back to where he can grab it, Burny leans farther forward. The bony side of his face is planted against Ty’s right shoulder.
And when he leans to get the dangling handcuff, Ty feels the touch of the Taser first lighten, then disappear.
Now!
Judy screams inside Ty’s head. Or perhaps it is Sophie. Or maybe it’s both of them together.
Now, Ty! It’s your chance, there won’t be another!
Ty pistons his right arm downward, pulling free of the shackle. It would do him no good to try to shove Burny away from him—the old monster outweighs him by sixty pounds or more—and Ty doesn’t try. He pulls away to his left instead, putting excruciating pressure on his shoulder and on his left wrist, which has been locked into the shackle holding it.