This was not a game.
It had never been a game.
Pushing, then relaxing, pushing, then relaxing, keeping a hard, fast rhythm, Roy rocked the truck until suddenly he overcame inertia. The pickup moved.
“No!” Colin said.
Gravity helped again. The truck’s wheels turned slowly, reluctantly. They squealed and squeaked. The metal rims ground harshly against the heavy corrugated tracks. But they turned.
Colin raced around the pickup, grabbed Roy, and pulled him away from the truck.
“You little creep!”
“Roy, you can‘t!”
“Let me alone!”
Roy wrenched loose, shoved Colin backward, and returned to the truck.
The pickup had ceased all movement the instant Roy had been dragged from it. The slope was not steep enough to encourage the Ford to run away.
Roy rocked it again.
“You can’t kill all those people.”
“Just watch me.”
The truck needed considerably less coaxing this time than it had the last. Or perhaps Roy had found even greater strength in his madness. In a few seconds the Ford began to roll.
Colin leaped at him and wrestled him away from the truck.
Furious, cursing, Roy turned and punched him twice in the stomach.
Colin collapsed around the blows. He let go of Roy, gagged, bent forward, caved in, staggered back, and fell. The pain was terrible. He felt as if Roy’s fists had gone all the way through him leaving two big holes. He couldn’t get his breath.
His glasses had been knocked off. He could see only blurry outlines of the junkyard. Coughing, gagging, still struggling to breathe, he felt the grass around him, anxious to regain his sight.
Roy grunted and mumbled to himself as he tried to move the pickup.
Suddenly Colin was aware of another sound: a steady chuka-chuka-chuka-chuka-chuka-chuka.
The train.
In the distance. But not too far.
Coming closer.
Colin found his glasses and put them on. Through tears, he saw that the truck was still more than twenty feet from the brink, and that Roy had only just begun to get it moving again.
Colin attempted to stand. He got as far as his knees when a wave of excruciating pain washed through his guts, immobilizing him.
The truck was no more than twenty feet from the edge of the hill, gaining inches slowly, slowly but relentlessly.
By the sound of it, the train had reached the curve in the glen below.
The truck was eighteen feet from the brink.
Sixteen.
Fourteen.
Twelve.
Then it ran off the corrugated track; its wheels bit into the dry earth; and it would not move. If they had been pushing from both sides, if the force had been applied evenly, the truck would not have deviated from the twin ribbons of metal. But because all the effort was being exerted on the left side, the Ford turned inexorably to the right, and Roy didn’t use the steering wheel fast enough to correct the truck’s course.
Colin clutched the door handle of a dilapidated Dodge beside him and drew himself to his feet. His legs were shaky.
The thunderous clatter of the rails filled the night: a cacophonous roar like an orchestra of machinery tuning itself.
Roy ran to the edge of the hill. He looked down at the train that Colin couldn’t see.
In less than a minute, the sound of the passenger express diminished. The last car was around the curve; it was speeding away, toward San Francisco.
The small noises of the oncoming night crept back across the hilltop. For a while, Colin was too stunned to hear anything at all. Gradually, he began once more to perceive the crickets, the toads, the breeze in the trees, and the pounding of his own heart.
Roy screamed. He looked down at the tracks that were now empty, and he raised his fists toward the sky, and he cried out like an animal in agony. He turned and started toward Colin.
Only thirty feet of open ground separated them.
“Roy, I had to do it.”
“I hate you.”
“You don’t really.”
“You’re like all the rest.”
“Roy, you’d have gone to jail.”
“I’ll kill you.”
“But Roy-”
“You fucking traitor!”
Colin ran.
23
As Colin ran for his life, he was acutely aware that he had never won a race. His legs were thin; Roy’s legs were muscular. His reserves of strength were pathetically shallow; Roy’s energy and power were awesome. Colin did not dare look back.
The automobile graveyard was an elaborate maze. He ran in a crouch through the twisting, crisscrossing passages, taking full advantage of the cover provided by the junkers. He turned right, between the gutted shells of two Buicks. He ran past huge stacks of tires, past bent and rusted Plymouths, past smashed and corroded Fords, Dodges, Toyotas, Olds-mobiles, and Volkswagens. He jumped over a disconnected transmission, did broken-field running through scattered tires, darted east toward Hermit Hobson’s shack, which lay impossibly far away, at least six hundred feet, and then he swung sharply south through a narrow alley dotted with mufflers and headlamp assemblies that were like land mines in the tall grass. Ten yards farther along, he turned west, expecting to be tackled from behind at any second, but nevertheless determined to put walls of wreckage between himself and Roy.
After what seemed like an hour but was probably no more than two minutes, Colin realized that he could not keep running forever, and that he might quickly become confused about directions and dash headlong into Roy at a turn or an intersection. In fact, Colin was no longer certain whether he was rushing toward or away from the point at which the chase had begun. He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that he was miraculously alone. He stopped at a crumpled Cadillac and huddled in the darkness along its ruined flank.
The last few minutes of murky copper-colored sunlight did little to illuminate the open spaces between the cars. Purple-black velvet shadows lay everywhere; and as he watched they grew with incredible speed, like a nightmare fungus intent upon blanketing the entire planet. Colin was terrified of being trapped in the dark with Roy. But he was equally frightened of the threatening creatures that might lurk in the junkyard at night: strange beasts; monsters; blood-sucking things; perhaps even the ghosts of people who had died in those broken cars.
Stop it! he thought angrily. That’s stupid. It’s childish.
He had to concentrate on the danger he knew was out there. Roy. He had to save himself from Roy. Then he could worry about the other things.
Think, damnit!
He became aware of his noisy breathing. His panting would carry quite a distance in the crisp night air, and Roy would be able to home in on it. In view of his precarious position, Colin could not be calm, but with a bit of effort he managed to breathe quietly.
He listened for Roy.
Nothing.
Colin began to notice the minutiae of the little world in which he cowered. The Cadillac was hard and warm against his back. The grass was dry and stiff and smelled like hay. Heat radiated upward as the earth gave off its stored sun to the cooler night. As the final light seeped out of the sky, the shadows on the land appeared to sway and shiver like dark masses of kelp at the bottom of the sea. There were noises, too: the shrill cry of a bird; the furtive scampering of a field mouse; the omnipresent toads; and the wind soughing through the eucalyptus trees that lined three sides of the property.