I will set you high in my artillery. You are the man I want.
Then he saw an army of ten thousand raggle-taggle castoff men and women driving east, driving across the desert and into the mountains, a rough beast of an army whose time had come round at last; they loaded down trucks and jeeps and Wagoneers and campers and tanks; each man and woman wore a dark stone about his or her neck, and deep in some of those stones was a red shape that might have been an Eye or might have been a Key. And riding in their van, atop a giant tanker with pillow tires, he saw himself, and knew that the truck was filled with jellied napalm... and behind him, in column, were trucks loaded with pressure bombs and Teller mines and plastic explosive; flame throwers and flares and heat-seeking missiles; grenades and machine guns and rocket launchers. The dance of death was about to begin, and already the strings of the fiddles and guitars were smoking and the stench of brimstone and cordite filled the air.
The dark man lifted his arms again and when he dropped them everything was cold and silent, the fires gone, even the ashes cold, and for just a moment he was only Donald Merwin Elbert again, small and afraid and confused. For just that moment he suspected he was just another pawn in the dark man's huge chess game, that he had been deceived.
Then he saw the dark man's face was no longer entirely hidden; two dark red coals burned in the sunken pits where his eyes should have been, and illuminated a nose as narrow as a blade.
"I'll do whatever you want," Trash said gratefully in the dream. "My life for you! My soul for you!"
"I will set you to burn," the dark man said gravely. "You must come to my city and there all will be made clear."
"Where? Where?" He was in an agony of hope and expectation.
"West," the dark man said, fading. "West. Beyond the mountains."
He woke up then, and it was still night and still bright. The flames were closer. The heat was stifling. Houses were exploding. The stars were gone, shrouded in a thick pall of oilsmoke. A fine rain of soot had begun. The shuffleboard courts were dusted with black snow.
Now that he had a purpose, he found he could walk. He limped west, and from time to time he saw a few others leaving Gary, looking back over their shoulders at the conflagration. Fools, Trash thought, almost affectionately. You'll burn. In good time, you'll burn. They took no notice of him; to them, the Trashcan Man was only another survivor. They disappeared into the smoke and sometime after dawn Trashcan Man limped across the Illinois state line. Chicago was north of him, Joliet to the southwest, the fire lost in its own horizon-blotting smoke behind. That had been the dawn of July 2.
He had forgotten his dreams of burning Chicago to the ground - his dreams of more oiltanks and freightcars full of LP gas tucked away on railroad sidings and the tinder-dry tenements. He didn't care a fig for the Windy City. That afternoon he broke into a Chicago Heights doctor's office and stole a case of morphine syrettes. The morphine drove back the pain a little, but it had a more important side-effect: it made him care less about the pain he did feel.
He took a huge jar of Vaseline from a drugstore that night and packed the burned part of his arm in an inch of the jelly. He was very thirsty; it seemed he wanted to drink all of the time. Fantasies of the dark man buzzed in and out of his mind like blowflies. When he collapsed at dusk, he had already begun to think that the city the dark man was directing him to must be Cibola, Seven-in-One, the City that is Promised.
That night the dark man came to him again in his dreams, and with a sardonic giggle confirmed that this was so.
Trashcan Man awoke from these confused dream-memories of what had been to shivering desert cold. In the desert it was always ice or fire; there was no in-between.
Moaning a little, he stood up, holding himself as close to himself as he could. Overhead a trillion stars gleamed, seeming almost close enough to touch, bathing the desert in their cold witchlight.
He walked back to the road, wincing at his chafed and tender skin, and his many aches and pains. They were little to him now. He paused for a moment looking down at the city, dreaming in the night (there were little sparks of light here and there, like electric campfires). Then he began to walk.