Osmond was wailing. He had dropped his whip and the machine-pistol.
'Oh, filthy!' he cried, shaking his fists at Jack. 'Look what you've done! Oh, you filthy, bad boy! I hate you, hate you forever and beyond forever! Oh, filthy Pretender! I'll kill you! Morgan will kill you! Oh my darling only son! FILTHY! MORGAN WILL KILL YOU FOR WHAT YOU'VE DONE! MORGAN - '
The others took up the cry in a whispering voice, reminding Jack of the boys in the Sunlight Home: can you gimme hallelujah. And then they fell silent, because there was the other sound.
Jack was tumbled back instantly to the pleasant afternoon he had spent with Wolf, the two of them sitting by the stream, watching the herd graze and drink as Wolf talked about his family. It had been pleasant enough . . . pleasant enough, that is, until Morgan came.
And now Morgan was coming again - not flipping over but bludgeoning his way through, raping his way in.
'Morgan! It's - '
' - Morgan, Lord - '
'Lord of Orris - '
'Morgan . . . Morgan . . . Morgan . . .'
The ripping sound grew louder and louder. The Wolfs were abasing themselves in the dust. Osmond danced a shuffling jig, his black boots trampling the steel-tipped rawhide thongs woven into his whip.
'Bad boy! Filthy boy! Now you'll pay! Morgan's coming! Morgan's coming!'
The air about twenty feet to Osmond's right began to blur and shimmer, like the air over a burning incinerator.
Jack looked around, saw Richard curled up in the litter of machine-guns and ammunition and grenades like a very small boy who has fallen asleep while playing war. Only Richard wasn't asleep, he knew, and this was no game, and if Richard saw his father stepping through a hole between the worlds, he feared, Richard would go insane.
Jack sprawled beside his friend and wrapped his arms tightly around him. That ripping-bedsheet sound grew louder, and suddenly he heard Morgan's voice bellow in terrible rage:
'What is the train doing here NOW, you fools?'
He heard Osmond wail, 'The filthy Pretender has killed my son!'
'Here we go, Richie,' Jack muttered, and tightened his grip around Richard's wasted upper body. 'Time to jump ship.'
He closed his eyes, concentrated . . . and there was that brief moment of spinning vertigo as the two of them flipped.
CHAPTER 37 Richard Remembers
1
There was a sensation of rolling sideways and down, as if there were a short ramp between the two worlds. Dimly, fading, at last wavering into nothingness, Jack heard Osmond screaming, 'Bad! All boys! Axiomatic! All boys! Filthy! Filthy!'
For a moment they were in thin air. Richard cried out. Then Jack thudded to the ground on one shoulder. Richard's head bounced against his chest. Jack did not open his eyes but only lay there on the ground hugging Richard, listening, smelling.
Silence. Not utter and complete, but large - its size counterpointed by two or three singing birds.
The smell was cool and salty. A good smell . . . but not as good as the world could smell in the Territories. Even here - wherever here was - Jack could smell a faint underodor, like the smell of old oil ground into the concrete floors of gas-station garage bays. It was the smell of too many people running too many motors, and it had polluted the entire atmosphere. His nose had been sensitized to it and he could smell it even here, in a place where he could hear no cars.
'Jack? Are we okay?'
'Sure,' Jack said, and opened his eyes to see whether he was telling the truth.
His first glance brought a terrifying idea: somehow, in his frantic need to get out of there, to get away before Morgan could arrive, he had not flipped them into the American Territories but pushed them somehow forward in time. This seemed to be the same place, but older, now abandoned, as if a century or two had gone by. The train still sat on the tracks, and the train looked just as it had. Nothing else did. The tracks, which crossed the weedy exercise yard they were standing in and went on to God knew where, were old and thick with rust. The crossties looked spongy and rotted. High weeds grew up between them.
He tightened his hold on Richard, who squirmed weakly in his grasp and opened his eyes.
'Where are we?' he asked Jack, looking around. There was a long Quonset hut with a rust-splotched corrugated-tin roof where the bunkhouse-style barracks had been. The roof was all either of them could see clearly; the rest was buried in rambling woods ivy and wild weeds. There were a couple of poles in front of it which had perhaps once supported a sign. If so, it was long gone now.
'I don't know,' Jack said, and then, looking at where the obstacle course had been - it was now a barely glimpsed dirt rut overgrown with the remains of wild phlox and goldenrod - he brought out his worst fear: 'I may have pushed us forward in time.'
To his amazement, Richard laughed. 'It's good to know nothing much is going to change in the future, then,' he said, and pointed to a sheet of paper nailed to one of the posts standing in front of the Quonset/barracks. It was somewhat weather-faded but still perfectly readable: