Black House (Page 221)

"Ty."

"Want. Home."

If there was light in the boy’s eyes, it has gone out now. He wears the dull shockface of refugees at border checkpoints and the gates of death-camps. His is the emptied visage of someone who has spent too long in the slippery opopanax landscape of slippage. And he is a child, damnit, only a child. He deserves better than what Jack Sawyer is about to serve out. But then, Jack Sawyer once deserved better than what he got and lived to tell the tale. That justifies nothing, of course, but it does give him the courage to be a bastard.

"Ty." He grasps the boy’s shoulder.

"Water. Mother. Home."

"No," Jack says. "Not yet." He pivots the boy. The spatters of Lord Malshun’s blood on his face are very bright. Jack can sense the men he came with — men who have risked their lives and sanity for him — beginning to frown. Never mind. He has a job to do. He is a coppice-man, and there’s still a crime in progress here.

"Ty."

Nothing. The boy stands slumped. He’s trying to turn himself into meat that does nothing but breathe.

Jack points at the ugly complication of struts and belts and girders and smoking chimneys. He points at the straining ants. The Big Combination disappears up into the clouds and down into the dead ground. How far in each direction? A mile? Two? Are there children above the clouds, shivering in oxygen masks as they trudge the treadmills and yank the levers and turn the cranks? Children below who bake in the heat of underground fires? Down there in the foxholes and the ratholes where the sun never shines?

"What is it?" Jack asks him. "What do you call it? What did Burny call it?"

Nothing from Ty.

Jack gives the boy a shake. Not a gentle one, either. "What do you call it?"

"Hey, man," Doc says. His voice is heavy with disapproval. "There’s no need of that."

"Shut up," Jack says without looking at him. He’s looking at Ty. Trying to see anything in those blue eyes but shocked vacancy. He needs for Ty to see the gigantic, groaning machine that stands yonder. To really see it. For until he does, how can he abominate it? "What is it?"

After a long pause, Ty says: "Big. The Big. The Big Combination." The words come out slowly and dreamily, as if he’s talking in his sleep.

"The Big Combination, yes," Jack says. "Now stop it."

Beezer gasps. Dale says, "Jack, have you gone — " and then falls silent.

"I. Can’t." Ty gives him a wounded look, as if to say Jack should know that.

"You can," Jack says. "You can and you will. What do you think, Ty? That we’re going to just turn our backs on them and take you back to your mother and she’ll make you Ovaltine and put you to bed and everyone will live happily ever after?" His voice is rising, and he makes no attempt to stop it, even when he sees that Tyler is crying. He shakes the boy again. Tyler cringes, but makes no actual attempt to get away. "Do you think there’s going to be any happily ever after for you while those children go on and on, until they drop and get replaced with new ones? You’ll see their faces in your dreams, Tyler. You’ll see their faces and their dirty little hands and their bleeding feet in your f**king dreams."

"Stop it!" Beezer says sharply. "Stop it right now or I’ll kick your ass."

Jack turns, and Beezer steps back from the ferocious blaze in his eyes. Looking at Jack Sawyer in this state is like looking into din-tah itself.

"Tyler."

Tyler’s mouth trembles. Tears roll down his dirty, bloody cheeks. "Stop it. I want to go home!"

"Once you make the Big Combination quit. Then you go home. Not before."

"I can’t!"

"Yes, Tyler. You can."

Tyler looks at the Big Combination, and Jack can feel the boy making some puny, faltering effort. Nothing happens. The belts continue to run; the whips continue to pop; the occasional screaming dot tumbles (or jumps) from the rust-ragged south side of the building.

Tyler looks back at him, and Jack hates the vacant stupidity in the kid’s eyes, loathes it. "I caann’t," Tyler whines, and Jack wonders how such a puler ever managed to survive over here in the first place. Did he use up all his ability in one mad, willful effort to escape? Is that it? He won’t accept it. Anger blazes up in him and he slaps Tyler. Hard. Dale gasps. Ty’s head rocks to the side, his eyes widening in surprise.

And the cap flies off his head.

Jack has been kneeling in front of the boy. Now he is knocked back, sprawling on his ass in the middle of Conger Road. The kid has . . . what?

Pushed me. Pushed me with his mind.

Yes. And Jack is suddenly aware of a new bright force in this dull place, a blazing bundle of light to rival the one that illuminated the Richie Sexson bat.

"Whoa, shit, what happened?" Doc cries.

The bees feel it too, perhaps more than the men. Their sleepy drone rises to a strident cry, and the cloud darkens as they pull together. Now it looks like a gigantic dark fist below the pendulous, swag-bellied clouds.

"Why did you hit me?" Ty shouts at Jack, and Jack is suddenly aware that the boy could kill him at a stroke, if he wanted to. In Wisconsin, this power has been hidden (except from eyes trained to see it). Here, though . . . here . . .

"To wake you up!" Jack shouts back. He pushes himself up. "Was it that?" he points at the cap.

Ty looks at it, then nods. Yes. The cap. But you didn’t know, couldn’t know, how much the cap was stealing from you until you took it off. Or someone knocked it off your forgetful head. He returns his gaze to Jack. His eyes are wide and level. There is no shock in them now, no dullness. He doesn’t glow, exactly, but he blazes with an inner light they all feel — with a power that dwarfs Lord Malshun’s.