Now there were no more intricate valleys and hollows; now the land seemed a vast red desert. The queerly stunted trees dotted the sloping sides of this great desert. Before Jack, the twin silver rails of the tracks rolled on through darkened reddish emptiness; to his side, empty desert also rolled away through the dark.
The red land seemed empty, anyhow. For several hours Jack never actually caught sight of anything larger than the deformed little animals concealing themselves on the slopes of the railway cuttings - but there were times when he thought he caught a sudden sliding movement in the corner of one eye, turned to see it, and it was gone. At first he thought he was being followed. Then, for a hectic time, no longer than twenty or thirty minutes, he imagined that he was being tracked by the dog-things from Thayer School. Wherever he looked, something had just ceased to move - had nipped behind one of the coiled-up trees or slipped into the sand. During this time the wide desert of the Blasted Lands did not seem empty or dead, but full of slithery, hidden life. Jack pushed forward on the train's gearshift (as if that could help) and urged the little train to go faster, faster. Richard slumped in the ell of his seat, whimpering. Jack imagined all those beings, those things neither canine nor human, rushing toward them, and prayed that Richard's eyes would stay closed.
'NO!' Richard yelled, still sleeping.
Jack nearly fell out of the cab. He could see Etheridge and Mr. Dufrey loping after them. They gained ground, their tongues lolling, their shoulders working. In the next second, he realized that he had seen only shadows travelling beside the train. The loping schoolboys and their headmaster had winked out like birthday candles.
'NOT THERE!' Richard bawled. Jack inhaled carefully. He, they, were safe. The dangers of the Blasted Lands were overrated, mainly literary. In not very many hours the sun would lift itself up again. Jack raised his watch to the level of his eyes and saw that they had been on the train just under two hours. His mouth opened in a huge yawn, and he found himself regretting that he had eaten so much back in The Depot.
A piece of cake, he thought, this is going to be -
And just as he was about to complete his paraphrase of the Burns lines old Anders had rather startlingly quoted, he saw the first of the fireballs, which destroyed his complacency forever.
4
A ball of light at least ten feet in diameter tumbled over the edge of the horizon, sizzling hot, and at first arrowed straight toward the train. 'Holy shit,' Jack muttered to himself, remembering what Anders had said about the balls of fire. If a man gets too close to one of those fireballs, he gets turrible sick . . . loses his hair . . . sores're apt to raise all over his body . . . he begins to vomit . . . vomits and vomits until his stomach ruptures and his throat bursts He swallowed, hard - it was like swallowing a pound of nails. 'Please, God,' he said aloud. The giant ball of light sped straight toward him, as though it owned a mind and had decided to erase Jack Sawyer and Richard Sloat from the earth. Radiation poisoning. Jack's stomach contracted, and his testicles froze up under his body. Radiation poisoning. Vomits and vomits until his stomach ruptures . . .
The excellent dinner Anders had given him nearly leaped out of his stomach. The fireball continued to roll straight toward the train, shooting out sparks and sizzling with its own fiery energy. Behind it lengthened a glowing golden trail which seemed magically to instigate other snapping, burning lines in the red earth. Just when the fireball bounced up off the earth and took a zagging bounce like a giant tennis ball, wandering harmlessly off to the left, Jack had his first clear glimpse of the creatures he had all along thought were following them. The reddish-golden light of the wandering fireball, and the residual glow of the old trails in the earth, illuminated a group of deformed-looking beasts which had evidently been following the train. They were dogs, or once had been dogs, or their ancestors had been dogs, and Jack glanced uneasily at Richard to make sure that he was still sleeping.