Cibola, fabled of old, searched for by many, found by the Trashcan Man!
Far down in the desert, surrounded by blue mountains, blue itself in the haze of distance, its towers and avenues gleamed in the desert day. There were palm trees... he could see palm trees... and movement... and water!
"Oh, Cibola..." he crooned, and staggered back to the shade of the pickup. It was farther than it looked, he knew that. Tonight, after God's torch had left the sky, he would walk as he never had before. He would reach Cibola and his first act would be to plunge headlong into the first fountain he came to. Then he would find him, the man who had bade him come here. The man who had drawn him across the plains and the mountains and finally into the desert, all in a month's time and despite his horribly burned arm.
He who Is - the dark man, the hardcase. He waited for Trashcan Man in Cibola, and his were the armies of the night, his were the white-faced riders of the dead who would sweep out of the west and into the very face of the rising sun. They would come raving and grinning and stinking of sweat and gunpowder. There would be shrieks, and Trashcan cared very little for shrieks, there would be rape and subjugation, things about which he cared even less, there would be murder, which was immaterial -
-and there would be a Great Burning.
About that he cared very much. In the dreams the dark man came to him and spread out his arms from a high place and showed Trashcan a country in flames. Cities going up like bombs. Cultivated fields drawn in lines of fire. The very rivers of Chicago and Pittsburgh and Detroit and Birmingham ablaze with floating oil. And the dark man had told him a very simple thing in his dreams, a thing which had brought him running: I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want.
He rolled on his side, his cheeks and eyelids chafed and irritated from the blowing sand. He had been losing hope - yes, ever since the wheel had fallen off his bike he had been losing hope. God, the God of father-killing sheriffs, the God of Carley Yates, was stronger than the dark man after all, it seemed. Yet he had kept his faith and had kept on. And at last, when it seemed he was going to burn up in this desert before he ever got to Cibola where the dark man waited, he had seen it far below, dreaming in the sun.
"Cibola!" he whispered, and slept.
The first dream had come to him in Gary, over a month ago, after he had burned his arm. He had gone to sleep that night sure that he was going to die; no one could be burned as badly as he was and live. A refrain had beaten its way into his head: Live by the torch, die by the torch. Live by it, die by it.
His legs had given out in a small city park and he had fallen down, his left arm sprawled out and away from him like a dead thing, the shirtsleeve smoked off. The pain was giant, incredible. He had never dreamed there could be such pain in the world. He had been running gleefully from one set of oil tanks to the next, setting up crude timing devices, each constructed of a steel pipe and a flammable paraffin mixture separated from a little pool of acid by a steel tab. He had been pushing these devices into the outflow pipes on top of the tanks. When the acid ate through the steel the paraffin would ignite, and that would cause the tanks to blow. He had planned to get over to the west side of Gary, near the confusion of interchanges leading various roads toward Chicago or Milwaukee, before any of them blew. He wanted to watch the show as the entire dirty city went up in a firestorm.
But he had misjudged the last device or constructed it badly. It had gone off while he worked at opening the cap on the outflow with a pipewrench. There had been a blinding white flare as burning paraffin belched out of the tube, coating his left arm with fire. This was no painless flameglove of lighter fluid, to be waved in the air and then shaken out like a big match. This was agony, like having your arm in a volcano.
Shrieking, he had run wildly around the top of the oiltank, careering off the waist-high railings like a human pinball. If the railings had not been there, he would have plunged over the side and fallen, turning over and over, like a torch dropped down a well. Only accident saved his life; his feet tangled in each other and he fell with his left arm pinned under him, smothering the flames.
He sat up, still half-crazy with the pain. Later he would think that only blind luck - or the dark man's purpose - had saved him from being burned to death. Most of the paraffin jet had missed him. So he was thankful - but his thankfulness only came later. At the time he could only cry out and rock back and forth, holding his crisped arm out from his body as the skin smoked and crackled and contracted.