IF: Boundarylands Page 7

  “Jump!” the Stranger cried, grabbing Emma’s hand.

  Cole pictured a small army of mutant Rottweilers straining against rusty chains just around the mountains of trash, and he hesitated.

  “Now!” yelled the cowboy.

  The fence beneath them pitched up and down. Polly was thrown into the air and over into the junkyard. She broke the lintel with a cry that was lost the second she moved beyond their imagining and into the next. The Stranger dove after her, pulling Emma with him. Etherie and Willy tumbled in next.

  Cole took a step toward the edge of the lintel, his heart hammering in his chest. But the fence buckled just as he shifted his weight, and he was thrown backward. He cried out and teetered on the back edge of the fence, his arms whirling like pinwheels. The ground bucked so wildly now that it actually rose up to the top of the fence. The temporary hillock gave Cole’s heels a boost, and he fell forward, his top half hanging over into the junkyard, his bottom half straddling the lintel fence. The Stranger reached up, grabbed his outstretched arms, and pulled. Cole slid over the lintel and tumbled into the junkyard, hitting the rocky ground with a hard thump. Tiny bits of gravel sprayed out from under his hands and knees, cutting his skin and drawing shallow channels of blood from his palms. He rolled over and saw the Japanese garden as it gave one last giant wave. Then the whole scene was gone, flapping away to the horizon like the tail end of a rolling film reel. Only the pure white of complete nothingness remained.

  Chapter 10:

  In Which We Discover That Pranayama is Mightier Than the Sword

  The Stranger pulled off his hat and mopped his forehead with the back of his wrist. “That was close.”

  The junkyard in which they found themselves was more like a junk planet. The children grimaced as they wove their way through the mountains of putrid garbage, and each time they moved around one huge pile, three more rose up to take its place.

  “It smells like throw-up here,” Polly complained, wrinkling her eyes and holding her nose.

  “It smells like my bedroom,” Willy said, confused.

  Eventually they came to a heap of broken cement and larger boulders, and the Stranger deemed it solid enough to climb. Emma and Polly elected to stay behind, but the others picked their way carefully up the rough slope…all but Willy, who bounded up the mountain from one concrete block to the next with absolute abandon, and who reached the top well before the rest of them—and with surprisingly little injury.

  At the summit, they drank in the view of this new world.

  The junkyard stretched on and on as far as the eye could see in every direction. The stack of rubble on which they stood was by no means the largest peak in the junkyard. Several of the trash piles loomed quite a bit higher, some of them leaning over at the tip like some madman’s version of a Dr. Seuss mountain. They looked on the very verge of collapsing in a series of rusty metal avalanches. Down below them, muddy paths wound through countless trash piles, trash pits, and trash compactors.

  Cole shook his head in wonder. “Who would imagine a place like this?”

  Sticking up here and there like candles on the world’s saddest birthday cake were huge iron cylinders. These pipes stood taller than the junk piles, and they belched fire every few seconds. Whatever fueled the flames seem to come from underground, where the pipes disappeared beneath soggy cardboard boxes, banana peels, broken dishwashers, crumpled plastic bottles, rotting turkey carcasses, and stained, crumpled sandwich wrappers.

  “This is a horror,” Etherie whispered. “The horror of inorganic living.”

  “Where’s the next lintel?” Cole asked, squinting against the brightness of the flames shooting out of a nearby pipe.

  The Stranger pulled out the map and unfolded it on a piece of concrete the size of an end table. Their six red circles clustered together near one edge of this particular imagination, the edge from which they’d just come. “There,” he said, pointing off into the distance. He gave a low whistle and shook his head. “Quite a ways.” He sounded weary. Their route through this imagination would draw them farther away from the Pinch.

  “Why don’t we just go back the way we came? Wait for some other imagination to fill in the movie’s place and go that way?” Cole asked.

  The Stranger shook his head. “The Void makes that lintel unstable.” He folded the map and tucked it away.

  “What do you mean unstable?” Etherie asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘the Void’?” Willy said.

  The cowboy sighed. He was ill used to so much conversation. “You saw the film reel go past?” The children nodded their heads. “Behind it was the White. The Void. You saw that too?” More nodding. “The Void is...” He paused, looking for the right word. “...dangerous.”

  “What is it?” Cole asked.

  “It’s what exists behind imaginations. It fills in the gap when one runs out.” The Stranger considered his words carefully. “It’s like…it’s sorta like the driest desert sand on the hottest day. Ever been to the desert?” All three children shook their heads. “Some places, you take a drop of water, let it fall on the ground, the sand sucks it right up into itself and leaves no trace that there was ever any water there at all. The Void is like that sand.”

  “And we’re the ones dropping water,” Willy cried, jumping up and down on the concrete blocks and pretending to spit with the force of a fire hose.

  The Stranger leveled his cold blue eyes on the boy. “No. We are the water.”

  “This Void exists behind all imaginations?” Etherie asked nervously. She lifted one foot gingerly, wondering if stepping too hard on the rubble might cause her foot to punch right through this level of reality and rip a hole into the Void. It was a dizzying thought.

  “Yep—including this one, if that’s what you’re thinking. But the imaginations in the Boundarylands proper are solid enough. They’ve been here a long time, had plenty of minds to help make them real. The newer imaginations, though, the ones on the outskirts, it’s them you gotta worry about. And films,” he added. “Never trust a film.”

  They skidded their way back down the trash pile and rejoined the two girls on the ground below. “What’d you see?” Polly asked, rubbing her hand under her nose.

  “Trash,” Cole said glumly. “Lots and lots of trash.”

  The Stranger led them down the winding path toward the far end of the junkyard, where it disappeared against the horizon and where they would find the lintel.

  They’d gone a few dozen yards when the Stranger threw up a hand. “Stop,” he hissed. He crouched behind a tower of garbage and motioned for the children to do the same.

  “What is it?” Cole asked, but the Stranger shushed him. Cole strained his ears and heard nothing.

  The cowboy signaled for them to flatten themselves against the trash pile. “Stay,” he whispered. He crawled forward and peered around the trash mountain, his gun drawn and cocked. He cursed under his breath. He spun around and crooked a finger at Cole with his free hand. “Come here.” Cole crept up and hunched near the cowboy, who nodded across the alleyway to another path that wound its way deeper into the heart of the landfill. “I need you to lead everyone that way. Got it?”

  “What about you?” Cole asked, alarmed. The tips of his ears burned, and his hands were suddenly damp with sweat.

  “I’ll be right behind. Covering the rear.”

  Cole bit his lip and looked back over his shoulder at the four children huddled nervously against the rubble. “What is it?” he asked, swallowing hard. “What’s out there?”

  The Stranger gritted his teeth. “Nothing good. And it’s almost here. You ready?”

  Cole swallowed hard. “Yeah. I think so,” he nodded.

  The cowboy nodded back.

  Cole turned to the other children. “Listen,” he whispered. “We’re going to make a run for it. Okay?” The others nodded.


  The Stranger hissed. “Go!”

  Cole darted across the path and ran into the junkyard artery, weaving around a rusty, battered unicycle and cutting in behind a pile of soggy Archie comic books. He didn’t need to look back to know that the rest of the group was following close behind; he could hear the raspy shuffle of Polly’s princess slippers on the trash-strewn path and the sound of Willy’s excited breathing not far behind.

  The Stranger crouched, gun in hand, and watched the children disappear into the junkyard. He allowed himself three seconds to curse his fate, then he slipped the gun into its holster and began to climb.

  “Hey, Cole!” Willy said, his voice mercifully muffled by the walls of garbage on either side. “Where we going?”

  “We’re just...going,” Cole replied. He pumped his arms and ran, wishing that his mother had pushed harder for him to join peewee football. His legs felt like jelly, and his lungs were transforming into rapidly expanding and contracting balls of fire. He slowed to a jog, then stopped altogether. He turned to ask the Stranger if they’d gone far enough, then realized with despair that the Stranger wasn’t there at all. He hadn’t followed behind them. “Willy! Where’s the Stranger?” he demanded.

  Willy shrugged. “I dunno. I was following you!”

  “He said he’d be right behind us!”

  “He left us,” Etherie said, bewildered. “Why would he leave us?”

  “What do you mean, he left us?” Polly demanded, folding her arms.

  Emma began to cry, and Willy stuck his fingers in his ears to drown out the sound of her whimpering.

  Cole held a finger to his lips. “Quiet! Listen…something might’ve happened to him. I’m going back to check. You guys stay here. Okay? Stay here.” He didn’t wait for confirmation before turning and plunging back down the path the way they’d come. He was running straight back into what he assumed was some sort of great danger.

  It was an extremely illogical thing to do.

  The Stranger pulled off his hat and set it on a rusty pipe jutting out from the trash. He eased his head around the curve of the mountain and eyed the approaching army below.

  “That ain’t good,” he muttered.

  At the head of the army was a small man in an oversized denim jacket with the sleeves torn off. He wore ragamuffin gloves with the fingers cut out, and every few seconds he used those fingers to adjust the mesh ball cap that sat backwards on his head. The Stranger didn’t know General Squeak, the leader of the Scabs, personally, only by reputation. And if the reputation was anything close to the reality, it was going to be a long day.

  Or maybe a short life.

  There were more Scabs than the cowboy could fathom. It was true that most of the stories told around campfires in the black of night attributed unthinkable numbers to the Scab army, usually describing them as “a plague of locusts descending on the town” or “more numerous than the stars in a prairie sky.” But storytellers are prone to exaggeration, and in all the scrapes and shaves the Stranger had found himself in, he’d never seen an army come close to matching those kinds of numbers.

  Not until today.

  He made a quick estimate of the soldiers he could see using an old Native American trick passed on to him by Chief Winged Foot, an old friend from the Blogadaw Tribe. His eyes fluttered over the swelled ranks of marching bodies, and when he was done, he counted them a second time, and then a third, because the number was just too incredibly high to be accurate. By the Stranger’s count, there were no fewer than 50,000 Scabs marching through the junkyard, and those were just the ones he could see. They continued to spill out into the path from behind a series of trash piles off to his right, with no end of the line in sight.

  The Stranger wasn’t used to feeling panic.

  If he’d had his druthers, the cowboy would have left then and there. He would have crept away in the opposite direction, crossed the first lintel he came to, and never looked back. He wasn’t one to run from a fight, but this wasn’t a fight. This was a massacre-in-waiting.

  This was death.

  But of course, he didn’t have his druthers; he had five other lives strapped to his shoulders instead. He didn’t see a way through the impending doom marching down the path, but he couldn’t exactly abandon the kids, either. Cuss it all, he thought. He was going to have to make a stand.

  There was a good chance it would be his last.

  He fell away back behind the cover of the garbage and bent his head to the side, giving his neck a thick crack. He had a plan that wouldn’t do a whole lot of good, not with that number of Scabs, but it would do some good, and some good was better than no good at all. And it would give him a few precious seconds to hightail it after the children, and that itself was worth something. If they were going to have any chance at survival, they would need every second he could give them.

  He holstered his gun and laced the grip in place with a leather thong that he untied from around the holster. He plucked his hat from the rusty pipe and pulled it down firmly on his head. He pushed up the sleeves of his dusty white shirt and rubbed his hands together, waking up the blood in his fingers. Then he took a few careful steps down on the trash pile until he found solid footing on a broken cinder block. He bounced up and down on his toes a few times to test the block’s strength. It gave a little, but it would hold. The cowboy peeked around the rubble and saw that the Scabs were still a dozen yards from his hiding spot. He willed his nerves to stop jangling and stood as still as stone, waiting for the Scab general to lead his troops into position. They moved with alarming silence, especially considering their great number. They were quick, too; it was only a few seconds before the lead ranks were coming around the base of the Stranger’s trash pile. The cowboy took a deep breath and placed his hands on the enormous mountain of rubble before him. And with all of his strength, he began to push.

  The mountain wouldn’t budge. The garbage was so tightly packed that the shredded candy wrappers under his hands barely fluttered. The pile of trash rose about 50 feet above where the Stranger crouched, and the considerable weight of it all seemed to have cemented the cowboy’s chosen breaking point in place. Sweat streamed down his forehead, and he wiped it on his arm. His eyes flared stubbornly as he reset himself on the cinder block. He cracked his neck again, took three long breaths, and heaved against the trash, pumping his legs like pistons and straining his arms until dark red veins stretched out on his neck in a vicious web.

  The trash creaked. Then it shivered.

  Some small pieces of rubble fell loose on the far side and plinked their way down the junk mountain. The Stranger pulled his hands back and rammed his shoulder into the trash, then he stepped back and rammed it again, then again and again, and with each smashing contact, the pile gave a little more. He stepped back onto the back edge of the cinder block, breathing hard. He crouched down, bobbed his knees, and then dove at the rubble with arms outstretched. He tackled the side of the mountain, and the ragged peak broke away under his weight and toppled down onto the army below, an enormous junkyard icicle that came crashing and shattering against the Scabs below. The soldiers cried out in surprise and pain. A few dozen of them were instantly crushed beneath the weight of the concrete- and glass-strewn rubble; a hundred others caught debris or were trampled in a panicked attempt at flight, but the Stranger barely heard their screams. As soon as the mountain broke, he turned and skidded down the side of the hill, the muscles in his arms and legs on fire, and leapt down onto the littered ground below.

  On the other side of the hill, the front third of the Scab army had dissolved into chaos. The masses of troops still winding their way through the distant rubble piles were completely unaware of the catastrophe that had befallen their front-line brethren, and they marched on, forming a pinched mass of confusion as they moved forward and the front lines tried desperately to move backward. That was good. But the Stranger spied General Sq
ueak among the men who had made it past the collapsing trash pile before it toppled over. He cursed under his breath and spat. He’d allowed himself to believe that if he snuffed out the general, they just might have a chance. But chances, it seemed, were in short supply.

  “Halt!” General Squeak screamed at the legions on the far side of the rubble barrier, raising one gloved fist in the air. “Halt!” He scrambled up the pile of concrete and glass, screaming like a banshee. “Haaaaaaaalt!”

  With the general’s attention occupied elsewhere, the Stranger took his chance and sprinted across the pathway and into the alley down which he’d sent the children. He darted around a corner and smashed into a one of the little soldiers.

  “Oww!” the Scab cried. Before he’d finished moaning, the cowboy had untethered, drawn, and cocked his revolver. He stuck the barrel under the Scab’s chin. The boy gasped up at him with wide, horrified eyes.

  “Cole?” The Stranger released the hammer and twirled the revolver back into its holster. “I thought you were a Scab. What are you doing back here?”

  “I came to get you,” Cole said, his terrified voice little more than a whisper.

  The Stranger grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him to his feet. “Come on. We gotta go.”

  “No. Stay,” came a voice from above. The Stranger moved his right hand to his hip, but the voice tsk-tsked. “I wouldn’t.” The cowboy raised his furious blue eyes to the figure perched on the trash mountain to their right. He was small, like all the Scabs. His scruffy orange hair fell over his eyes and past his shoulders. His stonewashed jeans and White Snake t-shirt were ripped and filthy. Chipped teeth filled his mouth like flea market China when he smiled. And the cowboy figured he had plenty to smile about; the crossbow he held was loaded and nocked with a heavy metal bolt that was pointed directly at the Stranger’s chest.